The Sweetness of Tears

by Nafisa Haji

  “Is that a monkey up there? Trying to catch the attention of this poor, weary crocodile?”

  This irresistible invitation, one I had sought, made me laugh and say, still crouched at the base of the wall, “Yes. A monkey.”

  “A lonely monkey, it would seem. Who doesn’t know that tempting a crocodile with fruit is not a good idea.”

  “Why? Will you want to eat my heart?”

  “Not today. Today, I have had a big lunch.”

  I laughed again. And then heard my mother calling from below. He heard her voice, too.

  “Is that the monkey’s mother’s voice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’d better go to her. She’s calling.”

  One day, before I turned six, the car from my grandparents’ fortress came for me alone. When the driver honked the horn, my mother kissed me and held me close for a moment. Then she walked me out of the house to the car. Over her shoulder, I saw Macee purse her lips. She looked at the driver, her brother, Sharif Muhammad, who had not come in the house for a visit this time, and shook her head at him angrily. Sharif Muhammad Chacha looked down at his hands, muttering something under his breath.

  My mother, her hands on my shoulders, said, “Sadee, this is not the way I want things to be.”

  “Why are you crying, Amee?” I asked.

  “Because, Sadee, now life will be backward for you and me. They are taking you away from me, my darling. Macee will take you to your dada’s house today instead of me. When you get there, Macee will come home. But you will stay there. With them.”

  “No!” I started to cry, louder than she, blocking out the words she offered to explain the unexplainable.

  “From now on, the car will bring you to visit me for a few hours. Every week, the way we used to go and visit them. But at the end of your visit, you will return to your dada and dadi. Their home will be yours, too. It always has been, I suppose. But now, I have been told, our time is up. I have tried and tried to avoid this moment. To delay it at least. Never doubt that. But I have failed, Sadee.” She tried to wipe the tears from my face, using her dupatta, but she couldn’t keep up with the fountain that flowed. “This isn’t my wish, Sadee. It is the way things will be. Not the way I want them to be. If I could, I would do anything to change it. But it’s not in my power.” Her voice was hard now, her hands on my shoulders tightening. She pulled me to her again and then pushed me away from her, toward the driver who handed me over to Macee, already seated in the car. Sharif Muhammad Chacha, avoiding his sister’s angry glare, took the bag I had not noticed from my mother’s hand.

  I tried to get back out of the car, now howling, but Macee held me back, her face wet, too, her voice trying to soothe. Through the grip of her arms, I barely heard her brother, Sharif Muhammad Chacha, say to my mother, “Deena Bibi, forgive me.”

  “Forgive you? Sharif Muhammad Chacha, you, of all people, have nothing to ask forgiveness for. This is all the result of my own hastiness. If I had listened to you—” Her voice, muffled by the tears she was trying to contain, broke off. Then she shook her head vigorously. “No. That won’t do. If I had listened to you, Sharif Muhammad Chacha, then there would be no reason for these tears, which I would not trade for anything. Whatever bitterness is in them is outweighed by their sweetness.” She kneeled down and reached into the car to take my hand. With it, she stroked her own face, letting me feel the wetness of her tears. “These tears that we are shedding, Sadee, let them fall. Can you taste them, Sadee, these tears of love?” I frowned, my howls subsiding into sobs, not understanding what she meant, opening my mouth to test the salty wetness with my tongue. “No, Sadee, not with your tongue. Close your eyes, my son, close them as I close mine, so that you can taste the tears with your heart.” I watched her close her eyes and then felt my own fall shut. “Go beyond the bitterness and the pain of this moment, Sadee.” Her hand was on my chest, rubbing it and patting. “Shh— stay still as you shed these tears.” There was a long moment of silence. Even my sobbing had stopped. “Do you feel it, Sadee? Do you feel what I feel? The sweetness? Hiding under the bitter? That’s the sweetness of my love for you—of your love for me. Can you taste it? In the fullness of your heart?”

  I understood what she said without understanding the words. My heart full, tears streaming down my own face, I nodded.

  “These tears are the proof, Sadee, that there is love in the world. Tears are only bitter when we cry selfishly for ourselves. When we deny and forget the sweet love that tears are made of. When we let our sorrow turn to anger. When people cry for each other, it is a good thing. Always remember that and never try to suppress the tears that flow from the love in your heart. Let them fall, these sweet tears, and remember that you are a human being, connected to all other human beings. When you cry for others—remember how we cry in Muharram?—you are opening your heart to God, who must see what we do and weep for us, too, for the suffering we cause to one another and to ourselves. Do you understand, Sadee?”

  I nodded.

  “Whether or not you do now, you will someday. That is the secret we are born to learn. The secret of the sweetness of tears.” My mother let go of my hand and stepped back to shut the door of the car.

  Sharif Muhammad Chacha took his place at the wheel. I felt the driver’s door slam shut, the engine coming to life at the turn of his key, and then we pulled away, my face turned backward, eyes fixed on my mother, already turning to go into the house, the corner of her dupatta raised to blot her cheeks.

  On the day I became a part of his household, I remember my grandfather saying, “You are where you belong, Sadiq. You are a big boy, now. A man. You don’t need your mother anymore. There is nothing to cry about.”

  That day, my grandparents initiated a strategy of distraction—calling on a servant to go out and buy me ice cream—that would form the foundation of my new identity, a rich little boy surrounded by a rich little boy’s toys and indulgences. This was who I learned to be, which was different from who I had been before. My weekly visits to my mother were a source of agony for me and for her—a repetition of that first wrenching away. So, I became complicit in my grandparents’ efforts to distract me, allowing them to devise excuses—special treats and outings carefully timed to interfere with those appointments with my mother—which made the time between those visits stretch until I hardly saw her at all.

  Until, one day, my mother came to see me. I was struck by the difference in the way we sat, she on one of the giant sofas in the living room and I on another. She was still a visitor to this mansion, while I had grown to be one of its most important residents. She’d come to say that she was getting married. To the crocodile next door. She told me that she was leaving Pakistan to go with him to America. There were a few more tears then. Bitter, not sweet, shed only in passing. Luckily, my grandparents had many diversions planned to distract me from the pain of that final parting.

  Instead of the old school close to the house that I had lived in with my mother, I began to attend the best school in Karachi. And realized that my family name—a name that could be found on billboards for various businesses and products around the city—was like what Kennedy might mean here. Or Rockefeller. The kind of name that evokes admiration, envy, respect, and resentment. I began to understand who my grandfather was—a man of humble beginnings, who had arrived in Pakistan after Partition, with his wife and son and daughter, with barely the clothes on their backs. Within a few years, he had created an empire of wealth.

  But he still tried to be humble—as humble as his wealth allowed him to be. He was a philanthropist, opening schools for the poor, and hospitals. He prayed all of his five prayers, three times a day, as Shias do. And fasted in Ramzan. In Muharram, he slept on the floor and ate no meat, so strong was his love for the House of the Prophet. Wealth and piety—impossible, they say, to reconcile the two—my grandfather worked hard to balance both.

  I never went to women’s majlises in Muharram anymore—the one at my grandpar
ents’ house took place in the mornings, when I was at school. Instead, I went to men’s majlises at night with my grandfather—to gatherings of men, some of whom cried as loudly and unashamedly as the women did by day. We would sit right in front of the zakir’s chair—not because we arrived early. Rather, because when my grandfather’s figure appeared at the entry to the hall, men cleared a path for him, waving him forward, fawningly, until he was seated in the favored position, which, because of his wealth, he had grown accustomed to expecting. On Ashura, every year, my uncle, Jaffer’s father, took us to the juloos, where I was now able to participate without fainting. I wasn’t afraid anymore. Of anything.

  At the side of those processions, I saw another way that people remembered Karbala—those who believed that the shedding of blood through self-inflicted grief was a waste, who organized blood drives every year. As we grew older, Jaffer and the other boys and I scoffed at those who donated blood at these stations, thinking them weak and afraid of the manly rituals of matham that those who we considered to be real men, brave and bold, practiced.

  Abbas Ali Mubarak, Dada, rarely spoke of my mother and never about his son. His wife, my grandmother, was less reticent. “Your father was the sweetest boy—just like you, Sadiq. Losing him was like losing my heart. Until you came to live with us, I was only half-alive. Your mother kept you away from us, from your rightful place in your father’s home, making you live in that hovel of a house that she came from. So we waited, Sadiq. I prayed and I prayed. And now, your mother has gone. To build a new life for herself. Over there,” she waved her hand, “in America. With that new husband of hers, Umar, that Sunni man with his Sunni name. Ah, well, that doesn’t matter. Your life is here, now. With us, in your father’s home. The way it was meant to be. How happy I am, that the son of my son, my very own, is back where he should be. You are happy here, aren’t you, Sadiq?”

  “Are we going shopping, Dadi? You said you would buy me a bicycle. And that Sharif Muhammad would teach me how to ride.”

  “Yes, of course. Anything, Sadiq. It makes me happy to see you happy.”

  Already I had stopped calling Sharif Muhammad, the driver, chacha—a title of respect that means “uncle.” I had no need to. I was the master of the house, above having to give respect to mere servants.

  At first, Sharif Muhammad chided me, “You have stopped calling me chacha, Sadiq Baba. The way your mother taught you. The way she addressed me.”

  I ignored him and his references to my mother. I had to. To remember her, with him, was also to remember how he took me away from her.

  Almost every day, Jaffer would come to visit. I had not realized before that he lived just across the street, in a mansion that was a smaller version of the one I now lived in. Together, we would take over our grandparents’ garden, shouting and running wildly in a way I had been too timid to do before—building forts and holding battles, sometimes as brothers in arms and sometimes as mortal enemies, using flower petals for weapons and unripe mangoes, jungle jalebis, and badaams for booty as we waged war, against each other and also against other children, whose parents dropped by to visit my grandfather and pay their respects—supplicants who came to curry favor, to ask for advice, jobs, guidance, references.

  The first time my mother came back to Pakistan, a year and a half after she had left, she came to see me at my grandparents’ house. She didn’t come alone; she was carrying a baby with her, who she said was my sister. The baby cooed at me and cuddled up to my mother, tugging on her dupatta for a game of peekaboo. I was filled with rage and refused to speak. She came again the next year, this time without the baby, Sabah. But the same rage filled the room and she cried when she left. I refused to see her after that, refused to speak to her when she phoned from America.

  In my grandparents’ home, I had the world at my feet—quite literally. Every day, a different hawker was invited into the gates of our compound. Jaffer and I would inspect the wares they laid out for us, taste of their goods, or avail ourselves of their services, with no worries about who would pay—this was a house where the adults set no limits on the children, and all accounts, the hawkers knew well, were settled with no questions asked. There was the kilona-walla on Monday, the toy man who sold old-fashioned string tops; squirt guns; paddle balls; ugly little baby dolls with blond, plastic, painted-on hair; cap-guns; balloons; and little pieces of junk that would pass no safety regulations that any sane person would have ever subjected them to. We bought slingshots from him, which we practiced at every chance we got, aiming for a line of old cans that Jaffer ordered the servants—a full retinue of them, assigned to follow us around and see to our needs and wants—to set up in the driveway, hoping to perfect our skill enough to shoot at something live one day.

  Jaffer even managed to do it once, killing a bird—a sparrow, I think it was, a small, undistinguished specimen—which the driver, Sharif Muhammad, lectured Jaffer against killing, telling him that hunting was only allowed in Islam if you ate what you killed, because life was sacred and even the lives of the lowliest of God’s creatures could not be taken lightly. So, I remember with disgust, Jaffer asked the cook to marinate and grill the dead little bird and managed to swallow a couple of bites before throwing up all over the new shoes his mother had sent for from London.

  The horse handler passed through our neighborhood on Tuesday afternoons, giving us slow, plodding horses to ride slowly, ploddingly around the neighborhood, while the servants followed us on foot to make sure that no one stole us away to sell to a beggar-master who would maim us in order to increase the return on his investment—this was more Jaffer’s worry than mine. Jaffer had never been anywhere on foot, nor commuted by rickshaw, like I had with my mother. Without the glass windows of chauffeur-driven cars to keep him safely separate, he was afraid of the evidence of poverty that was everywhere in Karachi’s streets.

  On Wednesdays, we’d wait for another hawker, who would sell us buddhi ka baal, old-lady hair—a wonderfully disgusting name for cotton candy. On Thursdays, it was the kulfi man, who sold a heavenly sort of ice cream on a stick, set and frozen in aluminum molds, sold from a pushcart loaded with wooden barrels that smoked when he opened them. The monkey-man came on Saturdays—twirling a handheld drum and jerking on the poor monkey’s leash to make him dance, bow, scrape, and gesture to accompany the silly story his master narrated. Whatever pity rose up in my heart for the monkey, I smothered, trying hard not to remember the favorite old story and the voice—my mother’s—that had told it.

  Those vendors and what they had to offer were merely the daily, routine indulgences that now defined life. My grandparents also took me to Europe every summer. We shopped at Hamleys, in London, for remote-control cars and train sets and racetracks, watched movies in Leicester Square, and fed pigeons in Trafalgar. In Paris, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, I looked down at the world and wondered at how small it was.

  One year, Jaffer and his family went to America, a place I longed to see and yet hated the thought of at the same time—its whole population, in my mind, reduced to one woman, my mother, and one man, the crocodile. Jaffer told me about the buildings, the big cars, the roads, the freeways, and the bridges. Once, he made the mistake of telling me about the toll roads and booths he’d gone through. I was intrigued with the idea of charging money for the use of roads. One lazy afternoon, when there were only servants around to stop us—which was no impediment at all—I suggested that we build a barricade in the road in front of the house that no one would be able to pass through without paying the requisite toll—money we had no need for at all, but that was beside the point.

  We used big, heavy rocks, which we found a few houses down, in the plot where construction for a new house had begun and been abandoned, and spent quite a bit of time and energy lugging those rocks, boulders really, closer to the house, drafting the labor of the servants in our effort, directing them to line the rocks up, effectively blocking passage for any car that might drive by. It’s amazing, now, to think tha
t no car actually did pass through during the whole time it took us to complete our ragged blockade. After we were finished, we sat down at the side of the road and waited.

  Some minutes later, a car came by—most private cars in the area that I lived in were driven, during the day, by chauffeurs rather than by their owners, and this, we could tell by the shabby and traditional clothing of the man behind the wheel—was one of them. The driver of the car stopped abruptly upon seeing the barricade of rather treacherous rocks in his way, as well as the little boys—Jaffer and me—who flagged him down using an old piece of red cloth that Sharif Muhammad used to polish the car. Jaffer explained the situation, speaking with an authority that comes with class and privilege—throwing in enough English words to make everything sound official—and the poor, old, bearded driver moved his skull cap around on his head for a few seconds, scratching, before pulling out a wad of notes from the dirty side pocket of his kurtha and peeling a paan-stained one-rupee note to hand over to Jaffer, who took it and scratched his head, as he realized it would take some time to clear the way, since it was blocked with rocks instead of the striped hydraulic arm that he had described to me. The poor old driver waited patiently while Jaffer and I made the servants earn the rupee we had just extorted, lugging a portion of those rocks out of the way with heavy breaths—just enough for the skilled old driver to wave his hand cheerfully and shout: “Bas. Teek heh,” before pulling through with a screech into first gear.