by Amjed Qamar
For the next two hours Nazia worked harder than she ever had in her entire life. She scrubbed the bathrooms, dusted all the furniture, then hand washed three baskets of laundry and hung it out to dry on the lines behind the house. Her back ached in a strange way, and she felt as though ten-kilo bags of rice were strapped to her shoulders. Her clothes were soaked with sweat and dirty soap water.
As Nazia hung up the last of the laundry, all around her microphones came to life and charged the air with the call to prayer. As one mosque after another joined the Azan, the call to prayer became a rolling echo reverberating over the city.
Nazia’s hands stilled and she lifted her eyes heavenward. Please forgive me, Allah, she prayed silently. Right now Maleeha and everyone else at the Gizri School for Girls would be rushing off to perform the ritual cleansing of wazu before standing up for Zohar, the afternoon prayer. She glanced down at her own clothes and wondered if Allah would even accept her wazu. Feeling too dirty and tired to pray, Nazia made the painstaking choice to forgo the mandatory prayer.
Maybe I could make it up when I’m finished, Nazia thought hopefully, and went back inside. She shook off her remorse and tried to distract herself as she moved through the house. While she cleaned, Nazia marveled at the teakwood furniture and ornate chandeliers. The dining table was enormous, with matching teakwood chairs, and she wondered what it would be like to live in that house, eating at that table, under the sparkling light of colored-glass raindrops. A cabinet held dishes made of delicate china, so different from the aluminum plates her family ate on, the ones with the bottoms so warped that they no longer rested flat.
Despite her exhaustion, Nazia finished up the last of the cleaning as quickly as possible. She took one final run through the house, satisfied that even a prince would have been impressed with her work. She stopped at the mogul-style mirror in the main entryway and untied her dupatta from her waist. As she wiped the sweat from her honey-colored face, Nazia noticed the deeper hollows of her cheekbones. She was still hungry and wondered if the memsahib would offer her a meal.
Just then Fatima stepped into the entryway and motioned her to the kitchen, where Shenaz and Amma waited.
“Your daughter is a hard worker,” Fatima said to Amma, smiling. “She works harder than you.” She filled a plastic bag with rice and lentils, then pulled out some stale bread from the hot pot and handed them to Amma.
“Take this. You can come back tomorrow, but only if you bring the girl. You can’t do this job alone.”
Amma started to protest, but Fatima held up her hand. “The pay will be eight hundred rupees a month for the two of you. Take it or leave it.”
Alarmed, Nazia moved closer to Amma and nudged her. Eight hundred rupees! You couldn’t even buy a decent dress from Zainab Market with that. Not for her jahez, anyway. Nazia pleaded with her eyes, but when Amma wouldn’t even look her way, her calves began to shake. “No!” she blurted out. It was one thing for Amma to drag her out here for one day, but to make her quit school? Abbu would be furious with them both!
She tugged at her mother’s shoulder, but Amma turned only long enough to give her a reprimanding glare. Don’t spoil this, her eyes commanded.
Nazia loosed her grip and lowered her voice to barely a whisper so only Amma could hear. “Please, Amma! I can’t fall behind. Abbu would never allow me to miss school. Why are you trying to make things worse for us?”
Amma brushed Nazia away with an impatient hand and proceeded to negotiate with Fatima. Nazia stood behind her in silence as she willed her mother to say no and walk away, but it was no use.
Amma’s protests were lame, and Shenaz was only halfhearted in her attempts to convince Fatima to raise the pay. In the end Amma accepted the deal. To make matters worse, an advance was out of the question, and there would be no payment until the month’s end. When the deal was sealed, Nazia picked up Mateen and followed Amma and Shenaz to the gate. With her eyes downcast, and her body limp with exhaustion, Nazia reluctantly ignored Isha’s plaintive cries to be carried too.
What had Shenaz gotten them into?
Later they sat in the shade of a neem tree and ate the meal straight out of the plastic bag. The break was painfully short, and they moved on to the next house, where Nazia again helped her mother clean, this time moving faster since their hunger was sated and the house was smaller. When they reached the third house, the sun had dipped farther toward the horizon and long shadows fell on the ground.
Black paint peeled from the sheet-metal gate, and there were cracks in the concrete driveway. Shenaz rang the buzzer, and a boy about Isha’s age swung open the gate.
“Look who’s here!” The boy pranced around on bare feet. “You’re late.” He ushered them inside, bolted the gate, and then ran back toward the house, hollering, “Baji! Seema baji! The masis are here!”
With Mateen on her hip and Isha holding on to her dupatta, Nazia trudged behind her mother up to the house. The bougainvillea grew wildly over the low wall, the magenta-colored flowers withered and dry. Patches of dry earth were visible between the thatches of brown grass, and a large coconut tree offered the only shade.
The wrought-iron grilles that covered the windows were rusted a deep bronze. Nazia stood with Mateen asleep against her as she listened to the new memsahib go over their duties. The pay was two hundred less than the other two houses, but the work was much lighter. She breathed a sigh of relief when Seema said the house needed only sweeping and mopping since the day was almost done. Nazia laid Mateen on the grass in the shade of the palm tree and ordered Isha to keep an eye on him. Isha collapsed beside her brother and closed her eyes. A wave of pity flushed through Nazia at the sight of her sister’s exhaustion, but she turned away before the tears could spring.
The boy who had opened the gate watched them, his head cocked to one side, his brows furrowed together. “She’s not going to help?”
“Of course not.” Nazia removed her dupatta from her shoulders and tied it tightly at her hip. “She’s only ten years old.”
“Ten.” The boy’s mouth twisted in a quizzical expression. “So I must be ten, right?”
Nazia looked at the boy. He was barely taller than Isha. His hair was jet black, but coarse from lack of washing. He wore a common kurta and pajama, pale blue, too big. His eyes were large, and he flashed a toothy grin and wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Don’t you know your own age?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“I’d say you’re ten. Is the memsahib — I mean Seema baji — your mother?”
The boy grabbed his belly, doubling over in hysterical laughter.
“Why is that so funny?” Nazia snapped.
“Baji is baji. My mother lives near the railway station. I live here with baji and help her take care of the house. I can’t do everything — that’s why she told Shenaz baji to bring your amma.”
Nazia tried to imagine this reed-thin boy doing all the cleaning. “What do you do?”
“I open the gate, take out the trash, run to the market, tend to the garden, make tea, rub baji’s feet. Whatever she wants, I can do it.” He puffed out his chest and thumped it. “Sherzad can do anything.”
“Sherzad, eh? I’m Nazia.” She waved a hand behind her. “Mateen and Isha, my brother and sister. So, you live here?”
He pointed to a small room built into the wall by the gate. “See over there? That’s mine. I guard the house from thieves and killers every night.”
Nazia snorted. “You’re so small; they’d probably mistake you for a mouse.”
Sherzad giggled and punched the air with his fist. “A killer mouse! A weasel! Even the cobras can’t catch me.” He bounced around and pretended to throw punches at her.
“Nazia!” Shenaz’s shrill voice erupted from behind the front window. The screen was gray with dust, and her face was barely visible. “Get in here and help your mother. Sherzad! Leave her alone. They didn’t come here to entertain you.”
Sherzad stuck out his tongue at the sooty wi
ndow and mimicked Shenaz. He giggled again when she hollered at him. “Go on,” he said, still smiling as he walked away. “I have to finish hanging the laundry.”
In less than an hour Nazia and her mother finished up and headed home. The baji didn’t offer any food, and Amma didn’t ask. They were simply grateful that the memsahib only needed the floor cleaned.
When they got home, they found Abbu lying on the mattress watching television. He started to get up, then fell back against the cushions. “Where have you been?”
Isha went to her father and collapsed on his chest. “Amma took us with her. She cleaned houses all day long, and I had to take care of Mateen.”
Nazia splashed water on her face. She listened to her parents, waiting for Abbu’s fury. Cleaning houses was something only the poor did. It was work that only the transient people would agree to do, the ones who left their villages up north to find some semblance of prosperity in the big city. Cleaning houses was something you did when no one else would hire you. Abbu would never tolerate the shame of his family’s lowering themselves to this. He would make sure she stayed in school.
But Abbu asked Amma in a mild voice, “How much are they paying you?”
Nazia’s hand slowed as she wiped the water from her face with her sweaty dupatta. It will come, she thought. Abbu’s indignation will come and rescue me.
Amma put a pot of water on the stove for tea. “Two houses are eight hundred rupees apiece, and one house is paying six hundred.” She moved out of the kitchen — which was nothing more than a corner of the small house, with no wall to muffle the sounds of clattering pans and running water.
There was a moment of silence. “Two thousand, two hundred rupees?” Abbu said, shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s what I made at the construction site.”
Amma made a small sound when she bent to sit on the floor on the other side of the room, far from her husband. She leaned against the wall and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment as she massaged her knees. Slowly she opened them and stared vacantly at the TV screen.
Nazia stayed in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil. Why wasn’t Abbu upset? Yes, it was a lot of money — well, not a whole lot, but still. It was from cleaning rich people’s toilets! Mateen waddled up with his hands outstretched and wrapped himself around Nazia’s legs, begging to be lifted. She smoothed his hair and clucked at him, trying to silence him so she could hear her father.
“Naseem, you know I’ll find work when I get better.” His voice was cheery. “Can you imagine? If only Bilal wasn’t such a duffer. I bet he could make at least as much, and then we’d have almost five thousand rupees a month. Five thousand rupees.”
“Don’t say that about my son,” Amma snapped. “You know he left to find work. Bilal is a boy with a degree. He’ll find something and make me proud.”
Nazia handed a stale piece of bread to Mateen. He grabbed the roti and wriggled away to sit on Abbu’s stomach, bouncing gleefully. Isha moved aside to rest her head in the crook of Abbu’s arm.
So that’s it? Nazia thought. Bilal’s disappearance weighed so heavily on Abbu’s mind that he wasn’t grasping what Amma was saying. Maybe he would realize the horror of it when he understood that Amma intended to pull her out of school.
She made the chai and offered the tray of cups to her father first. He slid Mateen off his stomach and nudged Isha away before taking the good teacup. He looked at Nazia.
“Beta, you helped your mother?”
Although she was bent over with the tray outstretched, Nazia ignored the dull pain in her back while her father’s eyes held hers. He was finally asking the right questions! She nodded eagerly.
“Good girl. Cleaning houses is hard work. Amma cannot do it alone. She needs you.”
Nazia blinked at her father. Didn’t he realize what that meant?
But he seemed oblivious to her shock and went on stirring sugar into his chai. “Bilal should be the one coming home telling me he found work.” He settled back against the pillow and shook his head. “Only God knows where that lazy boy could be.”
She wondered where Bilal could have gone. He disappeared for days on end with his friends, but he’d never been gone this long before. She offered the tray to her mother, who refused to meet her gaze. Without a word Nazia handed Amma the cracked cup, then returned to the kitchen to make dinner.
She filled a pan of orange lentils with water and skimmed away the gritty foam with her fingers. After putting the lentils on the stove to boil, she put on another pot of water for the rice. As she waited for the second pot to boil, she sifted through the rice and picked out tiny stones, discarding them in the sink. Amma’s voice carried over the drama on PTV, the national channel.
“Nazia will have to leave the school.”
Nazia’s hand stilled.
Her father clicked his tongue. “What about Isha and Mateen?”
“Isha can still take the bus to school, if Mateen stays home with you.”
“How would I care for him? It hurts for me to move around.”
Amma was silent. Nazia turned the faucet on and rinsed the rice.
Abbu shifted his weight on the foam mattress and groaned. “You’ll have to take them with you. Isha can go to school later. Nazia will be getting married soon anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Let her husband send her to school if he wants.”
It doesn’t matter? If her husband wants? The second pot began to boil, and Nazia let the grains of rice fall in. But they fell too quickly, and boiling water splattered onto her hand, scalding her. “Ouch!” She slammed the pan on the counter.
“What is wrong?” her father called out.
Tell him, she shouted to herself. Tell him everything’s all wrong! Instead she turned on the faucet and held her hand under the running water. “Nothing, Abbu. Nothing’s wrong.”
How could she make a fuss about her own selfish needs when Abbu was so overwhelmed by other, more pressing problems? Like a leg that didn’t work or a son who’d been missing for weeks? He needed her to be strong. That was what he was trying to tell her. And so she would be, whether she wanted to or not.
That was it, then. There would be no more discussion about school. She wondered what Maleeha and Saira would say when she didn’t show up tomorrow or the next day or the weeks after that. Would they still come to play with her? Or would she always come home too tired to see them? Would they even want to be her friends when they found out she was a masi? A servant to the wealthy? She stuck out her tongue to lick away salty tears. Outside, the call to namaz sounded again. Would she ever stand in prayer with her class fellows? Would she ever hear the tales of Ms. Haroon and her adventurous travels around the country? Would she ever go back to school again?
Nazia was on her knees mopping the kitchen floor at the last house of the day. Her pace had improved as the days passed, and she was able to be home by late afternoon, leaving time for Amma to keep up with her sewing. It was already mid September, and Amma was still working hard to build up the jahez for her daughter’s wedding.
Nazia wiped the concrete floor with a dirty rag, occasionally dipping it in a bucket of murky soap water.
Sherzad swung open the screen door. “Where’s Seema baji?”
Nazia shrugged and kept working.
Sherzad rattled the door. “Could you just get her? I’m going to die if she doesn’t feed me soon.”
Nazia’s own stomach growled at the thought of food. She’d learned quickly that the bajis gave food on their own whims and were rarely considerate enough to ask if they were ever hungry.
Just then Seema lumbered into the kitchen, her hair mussed and her eyes heavy, as though she’d just woken from a fitful nap. Sherzad immediately perked up. “Baji, I’ve finished weeding the kayari. Can I have lunch now?”
“Coming, coming,” she grumbled. She pulled his steel plate from the cabinet and filled it with day-old roti and soupy green lentils. She held it out, but Sherzad shook his head.
“Baji, please. Do I look
like a bird? Even a bird would eat this and still be hungry.”
“Don’t be insolent.” She frowned and shoved the plate closer to Sherzad. “Take it.”
He crossed his arms, locking his hands under his armpits. “I’ve been cooking in the sun since morning to clean your garden, and this is all I get?” He glanced at the stove and took a deep, exaggerated whiff. “There’s gosht salan over there. The fragrance from the beef curry is too strong to ignore. Baji, please. All you gave me for breakfast was chai and roti. I’m a growing boy.” He stood on tiptoes. “I need meat.”
Nazia suppressed a smile and ran the wet rag over Sherzad’s foot. He didn’t move.
Baji set the plate on the center island and placed her hands on her bulky hips. Lentils sloshed onto the chipped marble top. “What do you take me for? Your private cook?” Suddenly she grabbed Sherzad by the front of his shirt and cuffed him on the head. Sherzad brought his arms to his head. Stunned, Nazia shrank back against the cabinets, partly hidden from view by the center island.
At that moment the sahib entered the kitchen, his cane slipping on the wet floor. “What’s going on here?”
Nazia stood up, yanking her dupatta from her waist and draping it over her hair. “Sahib, be careful. The floor is wet.”
He stopped, taking in Sherzad’s hunched stance. He glared at his wife. “Seema, what is the matter with you? Why must you always hit the servants for no reason at all?”
“Stay out of it, Rashid. The servants are my problem, not yours.”
Seema grabbed a rag and wiped up the green spill on the marble. She picked up the plate and thrust it at Sherzad, motioning for him to go outside. Sherzad took the plate gingerly and tried to slink out, but Rashid stopped him.
“Did you want more food?” he asked Sherzad.
“Nahi, sahib.” Sherzad shook his head. “Baji gave me plenty.”
The sahib walked stiffly to the stove, his worn shoes squeaking on the damp floor. He lifted the lid on the pot. “Beef curry.” He gave his wife a sideways look. “Would it kill you to share the good stuff with the servants every now and then?”