by Anniqua Rana
Mortar and Pestle
I had always imagined myself wearing a fiery red flowing kameez over a wide-bottomed gharara, like a princess. It would trail behind me. Maria and Hamida would help keep it straight when I walked toward the bridal stage and sat beside my groom. The groom would be dressed in a straight gold coat with a garland of five-rupee notes around his neck. On his head, he would wear a turban wrapped around a gold skullcap with the starched point reaching the heavens. The village women would sing wedding songs to the beat of the drum:
“Your tall and handsome groom / The envy of all the girls / May he be delivered from the evil eye.”
I could never picture his face because it would be hidden behind a garland of roses and chameli and a few sparkles of tinsel. My own face would be hidden under my red veil, covered with fine gold embroidery. I would sit myself beside him and place my paisley-hennaed hands tidily on my lap, and the guests would crowd around us in admiration, giving us our wedding gifts of money. They would joke about what we were expected to do that night, without saying anything that would offend the older guests.
After the marriage dinner, Maria would bring a mirror for our first glimpse of each other as husband and wife. We would glance shyly in the mirror without looking directly at each other, in case, unintentionally, of course, we cast an evil eye on our happiness.
Then Hamida’s mother, a happily married woman with healthy children, would bring a sweet to my lips for me to taste and receive the same blessings. And then my groom would be expected to take a bite from the same section that I had bitten into, indicating our eternal love for each other. The people around us would laugh knowingly, and in embarrassment I would bend my head even lower.
When it was time to leave, my handsome groom’s best friend would sit beside him. Hamida would sit at our feet to straighten my gown and would steal my groom’s shoe to stall our departure. If he wanted to leave with me, he would have to pay her money. The crowd would join in the argument over how much money to pay before he could take his bride and leave.
I would smile under my dopatta, knowing that his friend had already decided on an amount but would give a few rupees while the crowd around us shouted their disagreement at such a small sum. The bargaining would continue until Bhaggan or Hamida’s mother said, “That’s enough, now. It’s getting late. Let them go.”
Unfortunately, Saffiya’s plans for my wedding did not match my fantasy. And no one thought of including me in any of the wedding plans. It was like me organizing my dolls’ wedding.
“I will give her my earrings and a forehead pendant. And maybe even a nose ring. You can give her your gold bangle, the one your husband gave you. I have it in my closet. That’s it, Bhaggan. Spend the next two weeks in preparation, and then we will cook a feast for the whole village.”
Was she going to be looking for the earrings that I had already taken? What an uproar there would be when she realized they were no longer in the packet on top of the Quran. But I would worry about that later. I had no intention of putting them back where I’d found them.
Saffiya was planning to spend more than I had anticipated. She intended to open her purse strings, like a loving mother. A buffalo was a tremendous cost. I knew because when one of the villagers’ buffalo had been attacked by a boar and died without time for it to be slaughtered to eat, the whole village had mourned. The wailing women who had enticed Bhaggan to wail when Sultan had died had been brought in to mourn for the family. They had been inconsolable. Even Saffiya had sent her condolences.
Then Saffiya added, “Bhaggan, do you want me to take some of the expenses out of your pay? He is your son.”
Bhaggan sat silent and then said, “Whatever you think is appropriate.”
I could see that she was now dejected, but they continued their planning without consulting me. Tired of standing, and not wanting to massage Saffiya that morning, I sat on the floor next to Bhaggan. I pulled at my toenails, half listening to what would happen on my special day.
I was glad that I was being ignored, because I could focus on the circumstances that had brought me here: my actions of the day before, and how they would change what was to come.
Maalik had his strange ways. He could never hold back the truth, even at the expense of others’ displeasure. I didn’t doubt what he had told his mother about Zakia’s nephew. Despite his truth saying, he was never able to look anyone in the eye, even if the other person was the only one in the room. And he never reacted to a situation in the expected way. But I also knew he cared. He cared for his mother. He had cared for Sultan. And everyone knew that he cared for the buffalo more than anything else.
He would care for me, too. He hadn’t gotten me in trouble, as he could have. In fact, he was the only one who was helping me escape. I felt the warmth inside me grow. It felt good.
Maalik might have been considered different, but who wouldn’t have been if he had had to wash his dead brother’s body for burial rites? So what if he didn’t talk too much? A silent house was a happy house.
I smiled to myself and then realized the room around me was now quiet. I sensed tension but didn’t know why, as I hadn’t been following the conversation. I wondered what the disagreement between the two women had been.
Amman Bhaggan was pulling herself off the floor with the door handle, and Saffiya had picked up the spittoon again. I looked at both of them, but they were not going to share their thoughts with me.
I followed Bhaggan to the kitchen, where she had already started preparing the afternoon meal. She didn’t ask me to peel the onions or wash the meat, but I knew what had to be done, so I started preparing the garlic and added the spices to the mortar and ground them silently to make paste for the curry, softening the aroma of garlic with coriander.
Bhaggan started the fire with kindling left over from the previous night, and, without her having to tell me, I went outside and filled my dopatta with dung cakes to build the fire in both stoves. She placed the dung cakes in each stove and then balanced a pot on each.
I waited for her to say something, to ask me to pass the kitchen cloth, to chastise me for leaving large pieces of garlic in the paste, but she said nothing. She began frying the onions in Bibi Saffiya’s pot in preparation for the meat. And for the servants’ pot, I poured in a jug of water to boil for lentils.
We sat in silence in front of the stove. I cleaned the lentils of small stones and debris, throwing them into the fire, while she stirred the meat into the now-browned onions. The smell of burning dung and roasting meat filled the kitchen.
As she stirred the pot, the bluish blood vessel in her right hand protruded through her leathered skin, and her knuckles whitened around the spoon. The scar from an ancient burn resurfaced as her skin tightened.
It was early fall, so the flies had returned. They seemed to disappear when it got extremely hot, but when the weather was pleasant, they were ever present. With her left hand, Bhaggan took the flyswatter from behind her stool and batted a fly that sat on a slice of onion lying on the floor. She missed it.
She continued to stir the pot with meat and mumbled, “Why did you do it?”
“What?” I feigned innocence.
Her lack of anger scared me. If she had shouted, I might have felt more comfortable.
“You know what. Maalik told me.”
I remained silent, and she maintained her monotone.
“You know what she would do if she knew it was my son. My Taaj. You have cut off my nose and left me nothing. What can I say to her? ‘After all my years of being a loyal servant to you, my son, the son who keeps disappearing, has slept with your daughter. She might have gotten pregnant, but even if she hasn’t, who will want to marry her now?’ The household with such a respectable reputation for miles is really a house of sin and debauchery. The only consolation for me is that Maalik has decided to take you in. Even my very simple-minded son knows the extent of the damage you have done to the reputation of this house. Even he knows what you did was so e
vil, so wrong. Even he knows that as a woman you should have protected yourself, but you instead chose to lead my son on. The poor boy must have left in disgust at being enticed to do what only comes naturally to boys of his age. And, to top it all off, I lied to Saffiya about Zakia’s nephew because of you.”
This part surprised me. Bhaggan never lied intentionally.
“I have incurred the double sin of maligning an innocent man and outright lying. If I’m found out, it will be the end of me in this house. But what do you care?”
I dared not look up.
“And, as a woman, you should have known better. You don’t have the urges like boys. You could have controlled yourself. But you didn’t, did you? Maalik told me he saw everything from a distance. He saw you pull Taaj toward you, like a bitch in heat.”
I shut my eyes tightly and held in my tears. Her anger wounded me deeply, but she wasn’t finished. She continued, “I treated you like a daughter. I took care of you. I washed you. I fed you. And this is what you do in return?”
I hadn’t thought of her. I had thought only of myself. But how could I think of her and myself at the same time? She was a woman who had lived her life, made her choices. I had to take care of myself. If I didn’t, no one else would. Didn’t everyone do that? My throat began to tighten, and then I whispered, “I had no choice.”
“Choice? It’s all already written.” Her voice became shrill. “You do what is expected. You take what is given and make the most of it. Who are you to think you will get more than the rest of us? You already have more than your own birth mother could have given you. You think she would have done more than what I or Saffiya has done for you? She left you at your most helpless. Maybe she thought it better that you die than live a life of false hope.”
I had cleaned every last stone from the orange lentils. My hands were steady as I placed the dish under the streaming water from the faucet. The lentils, agitated by the water, circled in the dish, creating a foam that I scooped off and threw down the drain.
We continued our work in silence, conscious of each other but choosing to stay disengaged, until she caught my eye and, in a low voice, touched my soul. “You have left me nothing. Nothing. My husband is gone. My son is dead. You took one yesterday, and you’re taking the other today.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. I had seen her cry, but I had never seen her tears.
What kind of daughter had I been to the only woman who had ever been a true mother to me? I had thought she would be happy that I was marrying her son. Maybe, under different circumstances, but in freeing myself, I had tightened the noose around Bhaggan.
She continued stirring the pot. I got up to get some water to add to the meat.
“And now she wants me to pay for the buffalo. It’ll take me years to pay her back. I will be in the kitchen till I die.”
Sacrificial Buffalo
The night before my wedding day, Maria and Hamida came to prepare me. Maria rubbed a slimy but fragrant paste of chickpea flour, turmeric, mustard oil, and rosewater on my arms and legs and then on my face to soften my skin. Then Hamida decorated my palms and soles with henna. She covered my nails with henna, too.
They did all this sitting on the charpoy on which we both slept, and sang wedding songs to add to the festivity: “An idiot groom has been bequeathed me.”
Hamida sang a traditional wedding song that mocked the groom. She giggled as she applied the cooling henna to my palms. She sang through all the verses, including the one about the groom who brought cauliflower, instead of flowers, and lay under the bed, instead of on top of it. Maria laughed, too, but I couldn’t join in. The song that was sung in jest at weddings sounded too close to home. I felt raw with sensitivity. I had never felt so vulnerable, so unsure of myself.
Sultan, Taaj, Maalik—weren’t they all the sons of the same father? Wouldn’t I find as much happiness, as much love, as much respect with any one of them? Who else would have asked for my hand? The other village boys were all the same.
And Bhaggan was like a mother to me. More than a mother. She hadn’t deserted me. But she wasn’t happy with what I had done. How dare she? Wasn’t I doing her a favor? I knew how she liked to keep her kitchen. I made her tea the way she liked it, with an extra lump of sugar and the cream off the milk. No one else could serve her better as a daughter-in-law than I could. Her disappointment about my marriage to Maalik was presumptuous. She should be glad that I had agreed.
My shoulders stiffened, and Maria rubbed harder to soften the twitching muscle in my arm. Sensing my stress, she started to sing the mournful tune of one of the more beautiful songs.
“I never argued or quarreled with you, Mother / Hold the palanquin that tears me away from you, Mother.”
Tears trailed down their shiny cheeks as Maria sang, but I sat stone-faced, smelling of mustard and roses laced with henna. There would be no bridal palanquin, and I had no brothers to carry me to my husband’s home. And now my mother had become my mother-in-law and I wasn’t sure that she loved me anymore.
“You’re not going to cry tomorrow?” Hamida joked with me. “What kind of bride are you? One who is ready to leave her home as soon as she finds a groom.”
I gave a halfhearted smile, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to even pretend to cry as I left to be with Maalik in his hovel near the canal in the middle of the cane fields. I didn’t feel like talking to either of them.
After the bridal preparations, Hamida left for her parents’ home and Maria cuddled up to me. It was the last time my friend would spend the night with me.
For brides in the village, the preparation would last a week, but for me, one night sufficed. Bibi Saffiya didn’t care too much for the noise of singing and dancing around the house, so the village women kept their distance.
It had been a few years since Maria and I had last slept on the same charpoy, and I wasn’t used to her kicking at night. My sleep was restless, but hers was peaceful. My neck felt stiff from trying to share the pillow with my friend.
I woke to the sound of the maulvi’s call for the morning prayer dueling with the wailing of a buffalo. It was my wedding day, and the buffalo would be slaughtered to celebrate my union with Maalik. I lay motionless on the charpoy in the room I shared with Bhaggan, staring at the cobweb on the wooden rafters.
The buffalo had been brought closer to the house, separated from the small herd that belonged to Bibi Saffiya. It had been tied to a stump close to the kitchen and to our bedroom. Maybe it was the separation from the rest or a premonition of its untimely end, but the animal wailed again, and this time Maria woke up and turned over. She looked at me.
“You stay here. I’ll bring you your breakfast,” she said.
“I’m not hungry,” I responded, though I appreciated her concern. But she didn’t listen to me and left the room to find some food for me on the morning of my wedding to Maalik.
I lay on my charpoy a little while longer, but, feeling suffocated inside the room, I covered myself with my chador and left to witness the slaughter.
As I walked toward it, the buffalo sensed my company and turned its head in my direction, its deep, almond-shaped eyes looking directly at me. It blinked and swished its tail.
Maalik took great pride in the appearance of all his buffalo, but this one chosen for our wedding, he said, was the most beautiful he had seen. It was one that Saffiya had brought from a seller from the mountains two years before. Since the day it had arrived after its long trip in a truck, Maalik had cared for it as a child, better than a child.
Now, on the day of our wedding, I stood staring at the glorious animal, his blinding albino skin now covered in bright patches of henna and garlands of tinsel and roses to celebrate his glorious end, standing in a fresh pile of dung.
Inside the kitchen, a few steps away, Bhaggan and Maria were preparing breakfast, and here I stood, staring at a living being that would be dead within the hour. It would be sacrificed for a happiness that I didn’t believe was mine.
I looked away
from the buffalo and noticed Maalik and Hamida’s father with a few other village men walking toward me. I pulled the chador more tightly around me, hiding my face. Mesmerized by the buffalo, I turned toward it again.
If my presence had calmed the animal, the sound of the men walking toward him made him bellow again. He began wailing loudly. Maalik sped up and reached the buffalo and began stroking it. The dancing bells that he had tied to its hooves jangled as the buffalo darted frantically. Maalik pulled at the rope with one hand and stroked the animal with the other, making soothing sounds as he did so. The animal’s eyes darted as it was led to the sacrificial site near the stream.
Maalik walked with the buffalo, calming it, stroking it with his right hand and feeding it lumps of raw sugar with the left. It was not appeased. And when Hamida’s father arrived with the knife, it bellowed in a half-human scream. I stood hypnotized by the terror that my wedding celebration was creating, wanting to look away but not finding the power to do so.
The cow’s head bent backward with the first slit, and Hamida’s father’s face was drenched with blood.
“Bring the towels!” he shouted.
Flies whirled around the fountain of blood. One flew toward me. It landed on my cheek, and I stood motionless. The fly crept up my cheek and looked into my eye. My eyelids half-shut, I stared into the fly’s eye. Maintaining visual contact, I thought I saw it wipe the blood splatters from its wing. Both of us blinked, and then the fly ascended.
The blood the fly had brought with it felt warm against my cold skin. I heard Maria call for me, but the slaughtered animal still transfixed me. I stared into its maddened, dying eyes, reminding myself that a slaughtered animal is not a dead animal.
Zakia had taught us this during our lessons about religion. A dead animal cannot be eaten, but the blood of a slaughtered animal is drained, which means it’s not really dead. It has served a higher purpose. It has been selfless—a gift for humans, the supreme creation.