by Anniqua Rana
Entranced
We, the flies, witness to Tara’s death, protected Shahida, her daughter, until sunrise. Tara lay on the canal bank where she had given birth to her baby, and the baby lay beside her, covered by her mother’s dopatta. One after another, we flies joined to protect the baby.
The dawn sunlight reflected in the dead mother’s eyes, searching for the song of lost love.
Love will survive, but I will drown.
It came from a radio hanging from the handle of the milkman’s bicycle. The unoiled bike’s squeals competed with the blaring music. The bicycle was barely balanced between two large milk cans that wobbled as the milkman tried to avoid the last of the night’s hyenas crossing the road and disappearing into the cane fields.
On the road that Tara had walked the night before, two figures traveled in opposite directions. The milkman, on his bicycle, rode toward the village. The maulvi, after making the call for the early-morning prayers, was walking hurriedly toward the main road. He would take the bus to the shrine. The morning sun shone directly into the maulvi’s eyes, blinding him in the moment when he turned the corner to face the milkman.
From our perch, we could see the road, but to protect her, we flew over to Baby Shahida, her hand still covered in fluids of her afterbirth, her eyes blinking at the morning star as it faded in the sunlight. She called out to it.
“Who’s there?” the milkman shouted.
The milkman and the maulvi heard the baby’s cry at the point where their paths met.
The milkman swerved left and then right to balance the two sloshing milk cans. He wobbled for a second and then landed on his right knee, tearing his shalwar and losing the top layer of knee skin. He was too distracted to notice the watery milk turning a light shade of pink and then a sloshy brown as it mixed with the blood and then with the surrounding mud.
“Son of an owl! Bastard! Sister fucker!” the milkman shouted.
But the maulvi was already climbing up the canal bank, following the sound, a whimper—a baby?
And then there was silence.
The milkman followed the maulvi up the embankment. He was a crude man made cruder in his pain. He shouted to the maulvi, “Your mother’s milk is all over the road. Will she replace it, or will your wife?”
The sun lifted itself from behind the mist-laden canal just enough for both of them to see the bloodied bodies.
We, the flies, disentangled ourselves from the bodies and disappeared behind the bushes.
Both men looked disbelievingly at what lay before them: Tara dead, and her baby still sucking at her mother, while we protected them both.
For that moment, the milkman forgot his pain and cussed as he exulted in what he saw: “Your mother—it’s a miracle! The baby was born of a dead woman.”
The maulvi, seeing the truth of what lay before him, shouted back, “Son of an owl! Run to the village and call for help. Tell Bibi Saffiya that Tara is dead and the baby is alive! Go now!”
The milkman nearly rolled down the embankment and rode in the direction of the village.
The maulvi sat down next to Tara and placed his hand on her face. His body shuddered with mournful, soundless sobs.
After a while, we flew toward him and landed on his hand. He looked up at us and thrust us away, so we flew back onto the baby, who had now begun to whimper.
The maulvi then turned around to pick up the baby. He had seen new babies before, but only those who’d been cleaned and wrapped tightly in a sheet. How he’d longed for a baby all these years, and Zakia had had only miscarriage after miscarriage.
The fifth time she got pregnant, the baby stayed for eight months in the comfort of the mother’s womb, and then he took his wife, Zakia, to the hospital for a cesarean. The baby never returned home with Zakia.
To Zakia, the maulvi said, “It’s the will of Allah.”
After that, the maulvi’s mother tried to find him another wife. But each time she mentioned it, he looked at her in disgust, and, knowing her eldest son, she backed off.
Then Zakia, broken, suggested another wife, too, and he threw the dinner tray across the room, not caring that the aloo baingan splattered everywhere. He left and didn’t return for two weeks.
Zakia cleaned the bits of potato and eggplant strewn all over the floor after he left, but the stain remained on the wall and she lay staring at it in the afternoons, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. If she looked at it from a distance, it looked like a mustache, but if she looked more closely, it looked like the name of Allah. It even had the small connector on top, which in the loneliness of the afternoon was a stronger message that she was not alone. A more powerful being was giving her peace, telling her to stay silent during this ordeal. To keep praying five times a day, and then to add more time during each prayer, and then to wake up before the morning prayer to pray before the prayers of others could be heard.
For two weeks, Zakia prayed for her husband to return, and she made a deal that if he returned, she would stay silent and would not ask for more.
For those two weeks, we witnessed the maulvi sitting at the shrine, praying for peace. Praying for patience. Most of all, he prayed for a baby, in whatever form that might come in. It needn’t be his own. It could be a child of the village. He would no longer settle for a child of his own but would become a father to all children. Even if they had their own fathers, he would care for them and then add a layer of comfort to protect them further. He slept on the prayer mats and ate the free food from those who needed to reward the people who prayed for them.
He listened to the holy men sing:
My beloved has returned.
Allah has united us.
And the supplicants moved their heads to the beat of the dhol. Some came with boxes of sweets, chicken, and goats covered with henna; others came with garlands of hundreds of rupee notes, a whole year’s income. Anything to get their prayers heard. The maulvi sat and prayed for two long weeks, not wanting to return to the comfort of his wife until his own prayer was acknowledged.
Now, miracle of miracles, his prayers from those twenty years earlier had been answered that morning. With both hands, he picked up the baby. Covered with afterbirth, she was still connected to Tara, and he held her close to his heart. He dipped his right hand in the canal and very gently wiped her face. He took his turban off his head with the same damp hand and struggled to wrap it around the baby. He could see her heart pumping in her tiny body. He would make sure she survived.
Enraptured, he spoke to Shahida. “You’re late, but you’re here. You should have told us you were coming. I would have done some preparation. I’ll get you a doll, a plastic one from the stalls at the shrine, one that looks just like you.”
She no longer called to the disappearing star as he continued to talk to her.
“I’ll cook two cauldrons of goat meat for the whole village. I’ll announce to everyone that my princess has arrived. Your mother is waiting for you at home. You’re a sly one, aren’t you? Coming without an announcement.”
The baby started to whimper again as they sat waiting for help to arrive. Her tiny hand reached out to us, asking us to continue to protect her, as we had done all that night. We were assured she would live.
Communal Obligation
We, the flies, hovered over the maulvi and Baby Shahida for three hours before the milkman returned with a horse-cart owner and a woman sitting in the back seat. It was midmorning, and the heat covered us like a shroud.
The maulvi saw his neighbor Hamida’s mother alight from the cart. Overcome by the sight of Tara and the maulvi holding the baby still attached to her dead mother, she steadied herself and then threw up. It took her some time to separate the mother from her child, and then the cart driver and the milkman wrapped Tara’s body in a bedsheet that Hamida’s mother had brought with her and placed her on the cart.
Hamida’s mother took the baby from the maulvi, and the pallbearing cart returned to the village, leaving the maulvi walking slowly
behind, not yet knowing that he would be leading not only Tara’s funeral prayers that day, but also Bhaggan’s.
Maria had found Bhaggan’s body that morning when she had arrived to help with the housework. She ran to tell Saffiya about it, and as she returned with Saffiya to Bhaggan’s room, she saw the wretchedly slow horse-cart procession enter the front yard.
“Call your father, daughter!” said the maulvi, now breathless from the morning’s exertion. “He needs to go to the cane field. Tara is no longer with us, and Maalik needs to be told.”
We, the flies, lingered above the cart and the maulvi, and we saw Maria’s already swollen eyes overcome with the sorrow that would cause her to implode if she spent a moment more standing there. We flew toward her, and she blew us away as she walked toward her home, choosing not to share her own devastating news about Bhaggan with the maulvi. He would soon find out.
We had seen Maria as a baby, cared for by Tara and Bhaggan. Now she walked with strength that we could never have imagined as she left the house to tell her father what the maulvi needed him to do.
When Maria left, Saffiya stood at the front door, leaning on the handle, while the milkman lifted Tara’s body off the cart and placed her carefully on the charpoy at the entrance.
Saffiya barely glanced at Tara, concealing her devastation by busying herself with arranging for the three-day prayer session to ensure the ascent to paradise of the souls of the two women who had been closer to her than anyone else in the village.
She looked at the baby with tearless sorrow. Her legs trembled, and she reached for a chair to steady herself.
“Allah will care for this one,” she said mournfully, and then, more practically, “Take her to Zakia. Her lap has been empty for so long. She will care for her.”
Hamida’s mother held the baby, wrapped in a threadbare towel, close to her. Reluctantly, she walked toward the maul-vi’s house.
We, the flies, hovered over Maria and Isaac, sitting on the back seat of the horse cart as they drove to the cane field, where they found Maalik lying, staring into the fields, waiting for the boar to reappear. Maria let out a wail, which ended abruptly as her father wrapped his arm around her.
The cart driver turned to Isaac. “Help me lift him, brother, or he’ll not live much longer.”
Isaac had already sat Maria down and reached for his shoulder cloth to wipe Maalik’s face. The cart driver pulled the cotton blanket from the charpoy to lift Maalik without causing more harm.
Instead of taking him back to Saffiya’s, they took Maalik to the hospital, where Stella assisted the nurses. Maalik’s external wounds would take a year to heal, but the scars they left went deep inside him and were permanent.
IN THE FIRST few years of Maalik’s horror, Maria made many attempts to crack the hard shell he had grown to protect himself, but she was unable to break through his tortured mantle. As if his armor protected him from his horrendous past and his unknown future. As hard as Maria tried, Maalik would never be able to comprehend what had happened to Bhaggan and Tara. And he would never know that his daughter, Shahida, had been born and was being cared for by the maulvi and his wife, Zakia.
Unfortunately for Shahida, Zakia had replaced her thirst for motherhood with a passion for the prayer rug and the Quran. For twenty years, the rhythms and rituals of prayer had soothed the anxiety of childlessness and helped her get through the long, empty days. Now, when she was gifted with Baby Shahida, she couldn’t find the love that had dissipated with the death of her own babies. And so Shahida began her young life with an aging mother who had no understanding of how to care for the infant she had been waiting for all those years.
Zakia took Shahida in her arms, but Shahida cried for the first six months without stopping. The maulvi picked her up and carried her around, but still she found no peace. They tried all kinds of herbal remedies, but nothing worked. They barely slept in all those months, and then, as if sensing her adoptive parents’ exhaustion, six-month-old Shahida stopped crying and started to stare. She looked at everyone who passed by her cloth swing hanging from the side of Zakia’s charpoy. She never cried, but nor did she laugh.
When the wheat was being harvested again, the following year, she started to walk. Shahida was now a year old, and we, the flies, stayed with her, as we were beholden. She just stood up one day from her crawl and began to run toward the maulvi when he entered at night. He was so pleased to see her walk that he took her to the shrine.
We, the flies, flew around her while, on her first visit to the shrine, she began to dance to the drumbeats. She danced so long that the maulvi had to pick her up, and then she started to cry again. The maulvi, seeing Shahida’s joy at the shrine, kept returning with her. Soon he realized that this was the only place where she seemed content, and so, as she grew older, he took her there weekly.
Zakia never came to the shrine. She had decided that her prayers were heard directly from the prayer mat, which was now worn out where she stood, and on the domes of the mosque where she placed her forehead in supplication, and in wanting the zebibah mark of piety from having been in constant supplication.
The shrine, with its beggars at the gate and its drummers and qawals on Thursdays, was not a place for women. The women who went to the shrine were of ill repute, and Zakia never wanted to be associated with them.
She also couldn’t understand her husband’s obsession with the place. She had plenty to do at home now that Hamida had gotten married and left the village, and Nafissa came only some days to help her old teacher, but she would also be married soon. Zakia would have to find someone else to help her with the chores.
“Why do you take her there?” Zakia asked her husband while he combed Shahida’s hair, parting it on one side. He placed a hat on her head as if she were a little boy. Then he carried her to the shrine on his shoulders.
Zakia couldn’t have known that Shahida was happiest there. “I’ll bring her back by evening prayers,” he responded, with no further explanation. And Zakia continued preparing the dough for that night’s meal, covering her head with her chador to avoid white hairs in the bread.
Shahida perched silently on her father’s shoulders, looking at the world from her new height. “Take my shoulder cloth and cover your head to avoid the heat and the flies,” the maulvi would tell her when she started to understand what he said. But we, the flies who hovered around them, were her friends, and we danced with her when she danced to the music at the shrine.
My beloved has come home. Tell the clock keeper to stop keeping time, the supplicants sang at the shrine.
And in the tender times at night when the maulvi lay down with his wife as Shahida slept in the room next door, he would say to Zakia, “I want the clock to stop now. I want to carry Shahida to the shrine on my shoulders forever. I want to see her dance forever. I want to hear her laugh.”
Not knowing how Shahida changed in her happiness at the shrine, Zakia would turn over and go to sleep, oblivious to how the future would unfold for them.
AS SHAHIDA GREW older, she and the maulvi continued to visit the shrine, holding hands down the noisy path. She would stare at the sputtering motorcycle slowed down by a family of six perched precariously on top, leaving an exhausting trail of dust behind. The growls of starving dogs fighting over a bone thrown out by the butcher distracted her, but the maulvi tugged at her tiny arm, leading her toward the shrine. And we, the flies, danced around them as they approached their destination.
Whenever the maulvi had a few extra coins, Shahida got to distribute them among the beggars at the entrance to the shrine. She would place the paisa in each child’s bowl. When she looked up at her father for more, he would tell her, “Next time. Now we should find our place near the drummers and singers.”
Shahida held his hand tightly, and he held it even more tightly, saving her from the crush of supplicants. We had seen children older than she bundled away and mutilated or blinded to stand with the beggars and gather coins. The maulvi protected her
from such a fate.
The maulvi and Zakia pulled her in opposite directions. When she was old enough to read, Zakia tried to teach her the Qaida, as she had done for Tara and all the other village children. But Shahida would rather play with us, the flies. This infuriated Zakia, and, to save Shahida from her ire, the maulvi took her to the shrine even more often.
Shahida continued to grow into her own during this tug-of-war between her parents. The chaotic world of the shrine became the space that she made her own. Her mother, Tara, whom we, the flies, had protected all those years, had not found such belonging in her short life. Shahida had found her Self and her home by the time she was twelve.
For twelve years, the maulvi and Shahida continued this way, until Shahida asked her father if they could stay the night at the shrine. He knew he had no other choice but to consent. He also knew he’d have to deal with Zakia’s anger about this development when he returned.
Once they had crossed that boundary, Shahida was able to convince her old father that she could stay at the shrine without him, first one night, and then another, until she had no reason to return to her home in the village. Over time, she would make the shrine her home, never to leave it again.
By the time she was twelve, the devotees at the shrine venerated her for the blessings she brought with her. They, in return, brought her gifts, and as she sang and danced to the drumbeat, they begged her to pray for them, and she did, and they kept returning to the shrine, bringing gifts of goats to slaughter.
Atonement