The Sweetness of Tears

by Nafisa Haji

  I had to tell her where I was going, because this time I was on my own, with no one to back me up, to knock on her and Dad’s door to tell them if anything happened to me. I also had to tell her who I was going with. That was a shock for her. I’d never told her. About meeting Sadiq. And, now, Deena, too. It was a shock. She didn’t mean the things she said, the anger she expressed in fierce, careful whispers of words so that Chris wouldn’t overhear. When he came in the room, a few minutes later, the anger on her face receded back behind the mask of motherly smiles she offered him, the kind that didn’t come from inside, the kind that confirmed my need to get away. She couldn’t understand the reason I had to go there, to Pakistan, because it wasn’t something I could explain. Not yet.

  Most of all, I knew, she was scared. Of losing me. In a way that was different from how she’d nearly lost Chris.

  She said as much, when I told her that I regretted not having told Chris the truth. About his eyes. That I didn’t know how long I’d be able to wait before telling him now. That it was just a matter of time before the fort she’d built around my brother would come under siege, from the inside, by his own memories. And that when it did, I was going to tell him everything.

  “Please, Jo. You can’t tell him. I couldn’t bear the thought of it—of him looking at me that way.”

  “What way, Mom?”

  “The way you do, Jo. The way you have. Ever since.”

  Part Four

  Sadiq

  Again, in my heart, crying has caused an uproar,

  As the unshed teardrop escaped instead as a storm.

  Ghalib

  I waited outside the airport, in the middle of the night, secure in knowing that the formalities of their arrival—immigration, baggage claim, and customs—would be smooth. I had made sure of that, greasing the right palms, those of my friend, and his friend, and, finally, his, who was a customs officer with clout. He would send a man to greet them the moment they passed through the concourse. This man—perhaps dressed in uniform, or, perhaps, in a suit and tie—would escort them through the official structures of bureaucracy, weakened at the foundation by the feasting of termites like himself, funded through the who-do-you-know network that is the real basis of Pakistani civil society and of which I freely partake. Bypassing the long queues, he would take their passports straight to the immigration desk, newly equipped with the latest technology, computers and webcams, gifts from the American taxpayer, courtesy of the War on Terror. Finally, the termite would snap his fingers, in a great show of power, summoning a porter to collect their bags from the baggage carousel and then load them onto a trolley, which the porter would push through customs without pausing, until my driver—now waiting with me at a respectful distance of four or five paces to my rear—took it over from him. If I’d paid enough, I could have met them at the door of the plane myself.

  So, I was surprised to see them come out of the airport unescorted. And then resigned, realizing my own mistake.

  “What do you mean, Sadiq? To hire a man to escort us through the airport? As if we were children!” my mother said, giving me a kiss on the cheek as she did.

  I returned her embrace like an adult, instead of an awkwardly resistant adolescent, which was how I had greeted her on another occasion, at another airport, a lifetime ago. “What did you do? Whack him away with your purse?”

  “No! I just told him—oh, I see—you’re joking. No. I just told him, very politely, that his services were unnecessary. I hope you paid him a lot of money, Sadiq. Money you wasted and which you don’t deserve to recover.”

  I looked from one face to the other, finding it difficult to reconcile the fact that they were here. Together. Ever since my mother’s phone call, telling me she was coming and who she was bringing with her, I had wondered. How they had connected. What they had shared with each other, these two very different women.

  I turned to Jo. “Welcome to Pakistan.”

  “Thank you.”

  “She’s been here before, Sadiq,” my mother said.

  I lifted my eyebrows, not really hearing my mother, my eyes still on Jo’s face. She looked different from the girl who had come to see me in Chicago, years before. She was older, of course. But there was more to it than that.

  With a wave of my hand, I called the driver over. He came, taking over the trolley that Jo had pushed out of the terminal. She looked at him with such curiosity, that I had the strange urge to introduce her to him.

  Even he looked surprised when I gave in to the urge and said, cheerfully, “This is Usama. Usama the driver, not Usama the terrorist. Usama,” I said, switching to Urdu, “this is my mother. Deena Bibi. And this is—? this is—?” I hadn’t thought before speaking.

  Jo picked up my sentence, saying, simply, “My name is Jo.”

  She spoke in Urdu. I stared at her. A phrase she had memorized? Yes, she was different.

  On the way home, my mother said, “Is that the azaan?” She rolled down the window, letting the heat in. Jo rolled hers down as well.

  “For the dawn prayer?” Jo asked, both she and my mother leaning out to listen.

  My mother said, “Yes.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Jo.

  “For one second only,” I said. “Before the other mosques chime in and all their calls overlap. Every mosque has a loudspeaker of its own, blocks away from the next one. And they never start at the same time, each one managing to be just enough seconds off from the next to clash with each other, making an unbearable racket.”

  Neither one of them answered, still focused on the calls of the muezzins, unbothered as the echoing clamor I’d described began.

  When we arrived home, the sky was beginning to lighten. I showed them in, Usama carrying the bags behind us, with the chowkidar’s help. I took them each to their rooms. My mother hesitated, for some reason, outside of hers. She looked into Jo’s smaller room and then whispered something to her. Jo whispered back. They nodded at each other.

  With a smile and a hand on my mother’s shoulder, a caress, Jo turned to me and said, “I’ll share the room with your mom. If that’s okay?”

  “Of course,” I said, completely mystified. The connection between these two women, related only because of me, seemed to have sprouted out of nowhere, outside of my presence, around my existence rather than through it. I felt a little besieged by their bond. A little jealous, too, like a child, wondering why they were here, if there was space for me between them, and, if there was, whether I wanted to occupy it or run from it.

  I left them, then, still whispering to each other.

  A few hours later, I met them in the dining room. We had breakfast in silence, broken only occasionally by a few attempts on my part to play the host.

  Cradling a cup of tea, my mother said, looking around, “The room hasn’t changed at all,” putting me in my place. I had forgotten. This had been her home, too, once upon a very brief time.

  Before we rose from the table, the nurse came to tell me that we were running out of one of Dada’s medicines. I told her I would call for more.

  When the nurse left the room, my mother asked, “How is he?”

  “Not so well. It was a bad stroke. He is bedridden, a prisoner in a body that no longer serves him. His mind is all right. But his words are very slurred, sounding like groans and grunts, making it very difficult—impossible, really—to understand him.”

  “Does he know I’m here?”

  I nodded.

  “May I see him?”

  “Of course.”

  “What about Jo? Does he know about Jo?” my mother asked, protectively, on Jo’s behalf.

  “Yes. I told him. Years ago.”

  I saw my mother’s brows shoot up, and I looked away, down at my plate.

  Jo asked, “So—he knows I’m here, too? With Deena?”

  I looked at Jo from behind my cup of tea, swallowed a sip, and said, “Yes.”

  “Can I see him, too?”

  “He would like that, I
think.”

  Later, I led them into Dada’s room. My mother went right up to him, taking a seat on his bed, picking up his hand. “Asalaam alaikum, Abbas Uncle. It’s me. Deena.”

  Dada tried to speak. But his effort merely sounded like a moan.

  “I was so sorry to hear of Sajida Auntie’s passing. I hope you got my letter?”

  Another moan. Dada’s eyes were wide and sharp on my mother’s face. They shifted from hers to mine.

  I said, for him, “He was very happy to receive your letter. He planned to write back— but . . .” I ended the sentence with a shrug.

  Dada tried to speak again, to my mother.

  She looked at me with a puzzled frown. I shook my head, unable to help. Dada’s slurs were not getting better.

  “Should I go, Abbas Uncle? I don’t want to disturb you. Or cause you discomfort.”

  He moaned again, unintelligibly. But I saw my mother smile. I could see why. His eyes, now on her again, had softened. His hand, quite deliberately, squeezed hers.

  “Yes. I’ll stay,” she responded, understanding him completely.

  I stepped forward. “Dada. This is Jo.” She was standing next to me, waiting for an introduction.

  In perfect, complete Urdu sentences, more than just a memorized phrase, she said she was happy to meet him, and spoke to him for a few moments. She called him Dada.

  After visiting with my grandfather, Jo was overwhelmed with jet lag, no longer able to keep her eyes open. My mother sent her off to bed, but stayed with me in the lounge.

  “Why is she here?” I asked my mother, as soon as the door shut behind Jo, wanting to ask the same question of her.

  “She’ll tell you herself, soon enough.”

  “You seem very close.”

  “Mmm. We’ve gotten to know each other a little. On the way here.”

  “She speaks Urdu,” I said, still bemused by the fact.

  “Better than Sabah does.”

  “How is Sabah?” I was ashamed for not having asked after my sister before.

  “She’s well. She’s getting married.”

  “Oh? Anyone I know?” I was joking.

  My mother laughed, heartily, surprising me with her answer. “Yes, actually, you probably do. After grazing around a buffet of different flavors and ethnicities, Sabah has found herself a Pakistani man to marry. You know the Farookh family? Hasan Farookh?”

  “The insurance people?”

  “Yes. She’s marrying Hasan Farookh’s grandson.”

  “Which one? Habib?”

  “Yes. I didn’t believe her when she told me. She brought him home last Thanksgiving. As a surprise. Such a small world it is.”

  “I know him. I know the whole family. Very well. How did they meet?”

  “Who knows? Through friends, she says. Probably at some thoroughly disreputable place. A bar. Or a club.”

  “They’re Shia.”

  “So?”

  “So? That’s all right with your— with— Sabah’s father?” I heard myself stumble, as I always had, when referring to the man my mother had married. The man who, in my mind, would always be just “the crocodile.”

  “Umar has never let himself get caught up in such nonsense, Sadiq. Besides, he’s just happily surprised that the boy is a Muslim. A Pakistani. We had long ago prepared ourselves to welcome whoever Sabah decided on. It’s you, Sadiq, who cares for such things.”

  I didn’t answer her for a while. Then I said, “Well. He’s a good man.”

  “I hope so.”

  “From a good, respectable family.” My mother didn’t answer me with words, merely laughed, the way she always laughed, infectiously, making me smile, too, struck by the echo of my own stodgy words running through the thread of her wordless amusement. Then it was my turn to surprise her. “As it happens, I am also getting married.”

  “But that’s wonderful news, Sadiq! Who is she?”

  “Her name is Akeela. She’s a widow with two daughters.”

  “How—fitting. A widow. And she has been allowed to keep her children?” There was no bitterness in her tone.

  “What happened with you was unusual,” I said.

  “Hmm,” she said. And then let it go. “Do they like you? Her children?”

  “They seem to. I haven’t asked them.”

  “You didn’t like Umar. When you came to stay with us.”

  “I’m not sure I liked anyone then.”

  “You liked Angela well enough.”

  “Yes. I suppose I did. And look where that got me. A lifetime of ignorance. About matters I had every right to know.”

  My mother didn’t say anything, merely looked at me with a disgusting amount of sympathy oozing out of her eyes.

  Then I said, “I wasn’t very nice to him, was I?”

  “To who?”

  “To the croc—to Umar.”

  “You were going to call him what you always called him. The crocodile!”

  “It’s a term of endearment. It’s how he referred to himself when I first met him. You told me the story. You told it to him, too, I suppose.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Is it true, what they told me? That you knew him—that you loved him—before you married my father?”

  “I knew him, yes. He was my friend. Before. And then, again, later. At a time when I most needed a friend.”

  Very slowly and carefully, I tried to air the thoughts and feelings that had taken many years to develop. “I realize now. The whole truth. All that I didn’t know before and which I couldn’t understand. About how they—Dada—my family—the Mubarak family—about how you were treated.”

  “Oh, Sadiq. I can hear how torn you still are, by the way your tongue gets all twisted. Between sides. In a tug of war that, for you, never ended. Don’t you know, Sadiq, that the game is over? Long over. If you must see the past in terms of sides, then think of it as a coin. Two sides of one coin. It’s all the same, in the end. Heads or tails. The winning and the losing only a matter of perspective. And the result of the toss, the way the coin landed, it’s done and gone and finished, now. Isn’t it?”

  “But in this case it was a trick coin. The toss was rigged.”

  “Perhaps. But the game is still over.”

  “Have you forgiven him?”

  The length of time it took for her to answer was an answer in itself, I thought. Until she spoke. “If you are asking, Sadiq, whether I’m still angry, then the answer is no. I stopped being angry long ago. For me, forgiveness is a silly question. The consequences of your grandfather’s actions were ones we all had to suffer. He and I. And you, most of all. The question, Sadiq, is whether you have forgiven him. When you answer that question, I will. Besides, he isn’t the only one you have to forgive.”

  I frowned.

  “I could have fought him. I should have. No matter how hard it would have been.”

  I laughed. “You think you could have won?”

  “Maybe not. But at least I could have tried.” She paused. “Instead of leaving you behind, moving on to a life that has been a happy one. Despite the pain of having lost you. So, you see, I know how it is. That you have me to forgive as well as him.”

  Hearing her, I fought the sting in my eyes, acknowledging the resentment that might have melted long ago if I had allowed the tears to fall before now—tears that I believed I had outgrown. She moved from the chair where she sat to the sofa where I was, offering a hand and a choice. I took them both, squeezing like Dada had done, giving her a wordless answer that she acknowledged with tears that she was not—had never been—afraid to shed.

  After a long, quiet while, she said, “Beyond the question of forgiveness, there’s something even more important to ask—whether the burden of all that has been done to you, and all that you have done to others as a result, is one you still carry? Because if you do, then you are bound to go on sharing that burden with everyone you meet, everyone you love, everyone who loves you.”

  I closed my eyes. And
then opened them to the sight of the woman before me, to the fact of the girl sleeping one room away. Between them, these women were the beginning and the end of my childhood. My mother and my daughter, two poles of a world from which I had been shut out. In response to that exile, I had pretended not to want what I’d lost. Now, I knew. That being a man meant returning to that world—embracing it. I had begun that journey before they’d come. Their presence, together, would help me complete it.

  Again, I asked, “You won’t tell me why she’s come?”

  “No. Why? Are you worried? That she’s come to make a claim on all of your fabulous wealth?” That my mother was teasing was clear by the light dancing in her eyes.

  But this was a subject I took very seriously. Without a smile, I said, “Not at all. Everything that is mine, I have already willed to her. As soon as I learned of her existence.”

  “Really? Does she know?”

  “No. Of course not. When I met her before, she made it clear. That she wanted nothing to do with me. But I had to do what was right. She is mine. Legitimately. By God’s law, anyway.”

  “By God’s law? Forgive me, Sadiq. But I have an aversion to that phrase. Especially when it comes from the mouth of a man. Even if it is my own son.”

  “Yes. Her mother and I— it wasn’t merely a casual encounter. We made an intention. Of mut’a.”

  “Of what?! Oh, Sadiq!”

  “What? Would you have preferred it if I had— well— enjoyed Angela’s company, without any sense of responsibility?”

  “I would have preferred it if you hadn’t enjoyed her company at all!”

  “But I did. And I made a commitment. With a promise to be responsible for any unexpected consequences. I think that’s a good thing.”

  “All right, granted—that your perspective is one way of looking at it. When two adults are single, what happens between them is their business. But you were only a child, making commitments which were above your head. And, Sadiq, you know that the institution you’re defending—mut’a—is not fair to women. It’s one-sided.”