by Nafisa Haji
“ ‘Your friend!’ they all guffawed, following the eldest brother’s lead. ‘That is unnatural,’ they told him.
“The poor crocodile was very hurt for his friend. He decided not to talk of her anymore. But it was too late. Every day, when he would return from his visits with his friend, they teased him.
“His older brother bragged to him of having eaten a monkey once. ‘Oh— their flesh is so tender and tasty— it makes my mouth water just to think of it! And your monkey, who spends all day eating that delicious fruit, must be especially tasty.’
“The crocodile would turn away from his brother and try not to hear. But his brother would not stop. ‘You know what the best part of the monkey is? The very tastiest part? It is the heart—mmm, oh, so delicious! And your monkey’s heart,’ the crocodile’s brother smacked his sharp teeth, ‘oh, yes, your monkey’s heart must be the most delicious in the world! But what does it matter? You are too cowardly to ever know that what I tell you is true. Only brave crocodiles can ever know the taste of monkey flesh. I wonder whether you are really a crocodile at all.’
“What his brother told him bothered the crocodile. His sense of honor was offended. He was torn. On the one hand, the monkey was his friend. Surely, all of her kindness to him required him to honor that friendship. But he was a crocodile after all. And every day, his brothers and sisters reminded him that crocodiles and monkeys cannot and should not be friends—that he was a cowardly kind of croc for not even trying to eat the monkey. In the end, what his brother told him was too much to bear. His mouth would water whenever he heard of the tastiness of monkey flesh, of the great delicacy of monkey heart. And his greed won out over his sense of honor as a friend.
“The next day, when he visited the monkey, he said, ‘My friend! My family has made me realize that while you have been a good friend to me, sharing your fruit and sending gifts home for them, I have not been such a good friend to you. They have asked me to invite you to the other side of the river in order that they might meet my friend who has been so generous.’
“The monkey was happy. ‘Oh, Crocodile! You and your family are too kind. But how can I visit them? I am a monkey. I live on the land.’
“ ‘Oh, that is no obstacle,’ said the crocodile. ‘Climb onto my back and I will take you to my family.’
“The lonely monkey was tempted out of her tree. ‘Why not?’ she said, and climbed down to mount the crocodile’s back.
“The crocodile could hardly contain himself. Now that the monkey was on his back, he thought of all that his brother had said. His mouth watered at the prospect of eating his friend’s heart. He swam out to the middle of the river and stopped.
“ ‘Why have you stopped here, my friend?’
“ ‘I have stopped, Monkey, because I am a crocodile. You are a monkey. And real crocodiles eat monkeys. I have been thinking about how especially tasty you will be—you, who eat delicious jamuns all the day long. I am very sorry, Monkey, but I have decided to eat your heart.’
“The monkey was silent for only a moment. Then, thinking quickly, she said, ‘Oh, my friend! I wish you had told me your intent! I would have happily shared my heart with you. But I have left it back in the tree for safekeeping. Take me back to the tree, so that I can share my heart with you.’
“The crocodile’s greed impaired his judgment. Without thinking, he swam back to the bank of the river, where the monkey’s jamun tree was. His mouth was watering so that he could hardly wait to eat her heart. When they reached the bank, the monkey flew off the crocodile’s back and ran up the tree.
“The crocodile said, ‘Well, my friend, be quick, for I can hardly wait to taste your heart.’
“ ‘Foolish crocodile! My heart was with me all the time. You have betrayed our friendship and I lied to you in order to save myself. Now, I will no longer be your friend and will never share my fruit with you again!’
“The crocodile was shocked. ‘So, you tricked me, my friend?’
“The monkey said, ‘Yes, I did. Just as you tricked me. But your deception was out of greed. And mine was to save myself.’
“The crocodile thought about what his greed had cost him. His friendship was lost, and because of it he would no longer receive the fruits he loved and craved. He began to cry and ask for forgiveness. But the monkey refused to ever forgive and never trusted him again. She was lonely once more. But at least she was safe.”
After the story was done, my mother and I would be silent—listening together to the sounds of the neighbors’ houses on either side of us: a mother calling out to the young girls who lived on one side of us, the lady of the house shouting for the servant on the other. Before sunset, the last of the street hawkers would roll down the street, calling out the merits of their wares in a song they sang from morning till sundown, pushing carts filled with everything from toys and sweets to fruits and vegetables.
We never purchased any of the latter. Instead, several mornings each week, my mother would take me with her in a rickshaw to Sabzi Mandi, the vegetable market, drawing her chiffon dupatta over her head as we left the house. We walked to the nearest intersection to hail the putt-putting motorized tricycles that are everywhere in Karachi. There, venturing out of the small world of our home, I sensed how happy she was to be out and about in the hustle and bustle of a major metropolis. At the market, she would touch and smell the fruits and vegetables, as I clung to the hem of her kameez, answering the salaams of the vendors who recognized her and who laughed heartily when she shook her head at the prices they quoted, saying to me, in a voice they could hear, that she would have to make ek pyaza instead of dho if the cost of onions continued to rise, using half the number of onions for the recipe that called for an abundance of them. They called her “sister” or “daughter,” and she called them “brother” or “uncle,” and I saw how my mother enjoyed these interactions, anonymous acquaintanceships that must have felt safe to someone who spent most of her life in a state of social seclusion that I was oblivious to. I don’t think my mother had any friends apart from these gentle men and Macee.
I was an extremely shy child and rarely spoke to anyone outside the walls of our home. When a favored vendor, the one whose prices my mother trusted the most, tried to talk to me on occasion, “Eh, Baba, what vegetable will you help your mother prepare today?” I remember pulling on my mother’s dupatta, sharing the veil so that it shaded my head as well as hers, stretching the long scarf over my face, looking out through a grainy lens of chiffon—gray, dark blues and greens, brown, or white, depending on the colors of the shalwar kameez suit that my mother had donned that day, cotton lawns in summer and linens in winter, tailored from
sober-colored and subtly printed fabrics, widow’s colors of mourning, dull but not black, which was a ceremonious color reserved for only one season for Shia Muslims, which we were. I would cautiously assess the man’s friendly eyes against the fearsome growth of hair above his lips—a thick, dark mustache, curled villainously at its ends. The vendor would laugh at me, revealing brown, betel nut–stained teeth and smile at my mother, who would turn away, also smiling, and earnestly resume the task of lifting and turning tomatoes, checking their ripeness, always careful to regulate these familiarities according to unspoken rules of engagement between men and women, between lower and upper classes.
When we came home, after cooking and showering the smell of spices and onions out of her hair and skin, my mother prayed, putting aside her chiffon scarf to don the thicker white chadar of prayer that veiled her hair and the shape of her body. When she bowed for sajda, I would sometimes climb up onto her back, my arms encircling her neck tightly, a passenger on the journey of her prayers. She would stay prone, her forehead pressed to the prayer rug, waiting for something else to distract me off my perch, before rising back to the sitting position of her namaz. Her patience was boundless—I was everything to her, I knew.
The only other outings we had were visits we paid, every week, to a giant fortress of a house—
the home of Abbas Ali Mubarak and his wife, Sajida, my paternal grandparents, who sent their car for the ride every Friday. Their driver, Sharif Muhammad Chacha, who was also the brother of our servant, Macee, would announce his arrival with the honk of his horn before knocking at the door to visit with his sister while my mother combed my hair and washed my face in preparation for our departure. When we were ready, I would eagerly climb into the backseat with my mother, my hand tucked in hers, my eyes drinking in the sights of the city streets that lay between the house that I called home and the mansion to which the car belonged. Once there, we would sit, my mother and I, close together on one of four sofas—ornately carved, all of them, upholstered in blue velvet, in a grand living room lit with chandeliers that sparkled and gleamed. There, my grandmother—Dadi is what I called her—would have special food laid out for me, along with toys and candies, gift-wrapped, like it was my birthday, every week. Dada, my grandfather, would speak to me. But I spent most of the visit stuck close to my mother, hiding my face in her lap whenever anyone tried to coax me away.
This would annoy Dadi, so the purse of her lips would tighten further than it had at first sight of my mother, her eyes narrowing as she gazed at this woman, the mother of her grandchild, who she clearly disliked, and said, “Surely he’s old enough, now, to get to know us outside of your presence, Deena. It is not healthy, the way he clings to you.”
Dada would interrupt, saying, “He’s only a little child, Sajida. Leave them be.” My shyness never abated, no matter how hard my grandmother smiled at me, no matter how many gifts she tried to bribe me with. Many times, my cousin Jaffer would be there with his mother—my father’s sister, Asma, who I called Phupijan—and they would join in Dadi’s effort to entice me away from my mother. I would watch him play with the toys laid out for me and tug at my mother to come join me on the floor. She always obliged, so that I made friends with Jaffer, silently, in the shade of my mother’s shelter. I would talk about him all of the next day, but I was too shy to ever speak to him myself.
Every night, my mother would lie down beside me on the bed we shared and sing me to sleep—Urdu songs and English—in a voice that I knew was the most piercingly beautiful in the world. I would struggle to keep awake to hear it, her fingers running through my hair, my body cradled in the curve of hers, a nightly battle where defeat was sweet, a total surrender to sleep that only small children enjoy.
I was amazed to hear one of those favorite nighttime battle hymns on the radio one day—“Love Me Tender”—in my grandparents’ car, on the way home from one of our weekly visits to the big house.
“Amee, that’s your song,” I whispered, too shy to let Sharif Muhammad Chacha, the driver, hear me.
My mother laughed and put her hand on my cheek. “My song? No, Sadee. That’s Elvis Presley’s song.”
I shook my head and frowned, because this didn’t seem right and the song sounded strange in the baritone of the man whose peculiar name my mother knew.
There were two months of the year when my mother would not sing the usual songs to me at night. And what she did sing, I had to share with others by day. Suddenly, the boundaries of our sober world would become porous as the social life of all of Karachi’s Shias—a life I didn’t know, of dinner parties and wedding functions, of beach picnics and the constant flow of spontaneous, unannounced visiting, which I would probably not have enjoyed in any case—shifted into a period of ritual grieving so immediate and intimate that it was hard to believe that the deaths being mourned had occurred many centuries ago. Radios and televisions in Shia homes were mute and dark, for the first ten days of those two months at least. Solid black clothing was aired out of closets and donned for those days, giving way to black prints patterned with whites and grays for the rest of those two months. Jewelry was shed, makeup eschewed. During Muharram and Safar, the tales my mother told me in those afternoons on the terrace were different, her words weaving into the rituals and symbols and chanting of those strangely sensual days—the names and stories so tied into the sounds, scents, tastes, and textures that they blend together in my memory.
We wear black, Sadee, every year, for two months, my mother said. We don’t listen to music. We mourn what happened in this month, almost fourteen hundred years ago. As if it were today. We grieve for the family of our beloved Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, crying and mourning for them more than we mourn for our own troubles and problems. The family of the Prophet, who brought the Quran—a message of unity and justice. With it, he united the savage Arabs who used to fight and feud and kill one another, who worshipped stones and statues and buried their baby daughters alive. They were ignorant people, uncivilized. And while the Prophet lived, under his leadership, they had become one people, one community.
I remember perfumed wisps of smoke that drifted through the living rooms of people’s homes, where women of the community gathered—my paternal grandparents’ house among them—emanating from the incense sticks that were lit daily during those ten days of Muharram. And the scent of roses gathered and arranged in vases set upon makeshift altars, peculiarly enhanced in the hot, humid climate of Karachi and later, a signal of the end of those gatherings, from the rosewater that was sprinkled on frenzied crowds of women from ornate, long- and thin-necked silver bottles, ready and at hand.
I remember hushed, whispered greetings exchanged between women as they arrived, dressed fully in black, slipping off their shoes, shuffling them carefully to the side with a gentle clatter before stepping onto the crisply laundered white sheets that covered carpets in rooms cleared away of furniture. Older women were usually the first to arrive, adjusting their dupattas, or the pallos of their saris, to cover their heads before sitting down on the floor—most of them with an audible crack of joints—to take up the coveted space along the walls, which would give their backs rest, admitting the passage of their youth in order to claim one of the few privileges of that loss. Prayer beads clicked softly, accompanying the nearly silent movement of lips as the piety of old age sought expression in the idle moments that came with being punctual in a community that had never submitted to the tyranny of timepieces.
Within a few years of the death of the Prophet, my mother told me, the Muslims were beginning to forget what he’d taught them. A very bad man, Yazid, was the leader now. The people were afraid of him because he was a tyrant. He was power-hungry and greedy. Cruel and unjust. But he was also a coward with no honor. And there was one thing he was very afraid of . . . he was afraid of the righteous voice of Imam Husain—grandson of the Prophet, son of Fatima and Ali, who is our first Imam—who lived in Medina. There were some people who remembered the Prophet, still, and who remembered the goodness that he had taught them—to feed the poor, to take care of widows and orphans, to remember that this life is but a journey of return. That when it is done, we will be held accountable for the harm we cause to others and ourselves. Those who remembered these lessons were loyal to Imam Husain. And Yazid considered this loyalty a threat to his power. He demanded that Imam Husain pay allegiance to him as ruler, but Imam Husain, who knew what a corrupt man Yazid was, refused.
Later, louder voices intruded on the quiet scenes of anticipation that the older women had set, as younger women, for whom the call of piety was a less immediate concern than the social need to be seen as pious, and wealthier women, whose day-to-day lives had little to do with the deprivation and sacrifice the gatherings were intended to honor, greeted one another warmly, lowering their voices only to exchange the latest news of community misfortune and scandal, which the congregation surreptitiously served the purpose of spreading.
The people of the city of Kufa, who like so many others had begun to forget, invited Imam Husain to their city as a spiritual teacher. He accepted their invitation, leaving Medina to make a pilgrimage to Mecca on his way there.
Husain knew that his life was in danger because he had refused to bow down to the will of the tyrant Yazid, but he traveled only with his family and friends, no
t with an army. Imam Husain’s caravan, after leaving Mecca and on its way to Kufa, was forcibly stopped in its path by Yazid’s army. They were made to camp at Karbala, near the banks of the River Furat—the Euphrates. There, Imam Husain told Yazid’s forces that he had no wish to fight them, no desire for blood to be shed. He asked them to let him go home. Peacefully. They refused.
Three days before the tenth of Muharram, their access to the banks of the river was cut off by Yazid’s forces, and they had no water to drink and no food supplies left. On the night before Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram, Imam Husain urged his friends to leave him to his fate, not to sacrifice their lives for his. Not one of them listened. Instead, one of Yazid’s military commanders, Hurr, the very one who had arrested Husain’s journey in the first place, forcing him to stop at Karbala, came over to the Imam’s side, knowing full well what this decision meant—certain death. The next day, one by one, the men from among Imam Husain’s companions battled forth, hungry and thirsty, in his defense.
A small group of women then gathered near the pillow placed in front of the carefully tended altar, a table dressed in black, which was set up at one end of the room—the back wall of which was lined with long poles, draped in rich fabrics and topped with hand-shaped sculptures made of silver and gold—around one of them, its fabric adorned with the figure of a lion, hung a mushk, a water bag, which everyone knew was for Abbas.
Husain’s brother, Abbas, the standard-bearer, could not stand to see the plight of the thirsty, innocent children in the camp. When they came to petition him for help—their brave uncle who never denied them anything—led by Sakina, his beloved niece, he agreed to venture out, alone, to the banks of the river, to gather water for them in his mushk.
A preliminary rustling of yellowed pages from a worn school composition notebook, whose thread and glue binding had often long since retired from service, would be followed by an exaggerated throat-clearing signal from the usually middle-aged woman in the center, who, by now, would have soberly donned a thickly rimmed pair of reading glasses.