by Nawaaz Ahmed
Seema leads the way up, you follow, Tahera behind you with the bags. The stairs require grim determination—the pain intensifies with each flight, especially the last, and you proceed slowly, sustained by the sliver of the luminescent sky visible through the door.
San Francisco, lit by a thousand lamps, including a giant one in the sky, lies twinkling before your eyes: the sky a deep peacock blue, the moon saffron, the bay glistening with silver reflections, the city crisscrossed with garlands of light like strings of jasmine. Everything gleams—rooftops, railings, leaves, walls, roads—polished by the rain. And though this is not Chennai, it is a city under the moon, and cities under the moon everywhere have the same ethereal loveliness.
Tahera unpacks the bags while Seema points out the various landmarks: the Christmas-tree-shaped Transamerica building, the double necklace of the Bay Bridge, the blazing Market Street, and across the bay, as though on another continent, the faint shimmering lights of Oakland and Berkeley.
Having served the food, Tahera calls you to dinner. You recognize the mother she has become: she could be you from years earlier. You and Seema return to the table. You take your seats, and then wait, without touching your food.
“Bismillah,” she says. “Let’s eat.”
With that, Tahera transforms again, as though having taken care of everything, she can now shed the pretense of adulthood. She’s a daughter again, asking you anxiously how the food tastes—is everything cooked through and adequately spiced and salted?
Everything needs to be perfect tonight. You assure her: everything is as it should be.
Seema goes into raptures: “I forgot how great these simple dishes can be. The grated carrot and ginger in the curd rice. The peanuts in the lemon rice. The potatoes—spicy and blackened just the right amount. And the moonlight makes everything more delicious.”
How your daughters’ faces glow, their eyes shining! How they scrunch at their papads like they used to as girls, the papads initially round as their faces, and then slowly waning like the moon! How they laugh, how they call on each other to supply missing details to reminiscences!
A light breeze blows this way and that, playing with their voices, now bearing them away, now drawing them nearer, so you can’t quite hear everything your daughters say. They’re too quick for you, anyway, leapfrogging from one topic to another like they used to. You’re content to sit back and let their voices wash over you like the breeze and the moonlight. Everything is a balm on the pain throbbing through your body until it feels distant, like it belongs to someone else.
“Ammi’s become very quiet,” Seema remarks.
You’d taken advantage of a cloud curtaining the moon to close your eyes. When you open them again, everything seems dazzlingly bright—across the table, your daughters’ faces flare at you, and you can’t distinguish between them. Who’s sitting where? Who’s pregnant, who’s wearing a hijab? Your eyes take a moment to readjust.
“Are you in pain, Ammi?” Tahera asks. “Do you want to lie down?”
“No, I was just enjoying listening to you both. I was trying to remember the lines Tahera used to recite during our rooftop dinners at home. About the moon—do you still remember?”
“I was reading it just this morning, in the book Seema got me,” Tahera says. “What is there in thee, Moon! That thou shouldst move my heart so potently?”
When yet a child I oft have dried my tears when thou hast smiled.
Thou seem’dst my sister. Hand in hand we went from eve to morn across the firmament . . .
You haven’t heard Tahera recite in two decades. Her voice rings out, silvery and sparkling. Listening to Tahera reminds you of her father. How like him she sounds now. But you don’t want to be reminded of his absence tonight.
When Tahera finishes, she says, in her normal voice, but still addressing the sky, “Seema asked me to be Ishraaq’s legal guardian.” She glances at Seema briefly.
“In case something happens—” Seema fiddles with her plate. “And Tahera agreed.”
Both sisters look at you, waiting for you to say something. You recognize that your daughters are offering you this as a consolation. You’re moved, but also vexed: Why must the gesture of reconciliation include an allusion to calamity?
“Nothing will happen,” you manage to say gruffly, not knowing which emotion to give expression to. Your eyes fill up; you shiver. To cover your reaction you pull the shawl tightly around yourself, surreptitiously swiping it across your eyes.
“Are you feeling cold, Ammi?” Seema asks.
“Just a little breeze.” Seema suggests you drape your shawl around your head to cover your ears, and Tahera leans over to help you.
You don’t want to leave this place: the air rinsed clean by the rain, the city flickering solicitously, the luminous sky soft like a shawl, the benevolent moon presiding. And Tahera and Seema—in the telescoping moonlight, it’s as if you’re seeing all visions of them superimposed, not only as they are, but also as they were, and as they will be—daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers. Their hair black like the new-moon night, their hair silvered by the full moon; their faces unlined and smooth, their faces creased by shadows. You realize that the Tahera and Seema you want to continue seeing are not the Tahera and Seema of the past anymore but the ones before you now. You want more than the glimpses you’ve been afforded so far.
You want more. You want more! But what to do? The only way is through Time, and Time has already forsaken you.
How the moon smiles, Grandmother, so serenely, as though it were making you a promise or offering you a reprieve.
4
What is this tightness in my chest as I consider my three foremothers together on the rooftop? I have no words for it—I can’t even say that I must be out of breath, for I haven’t taken a single breath yet. I’m struggling with feelings I cannot describe; they seem to change and elude me even as I seek to comprehend them.
O dearth of human words! Roughness of mortal speech!
Even that lament isn’t mine, but courtesy of my could-be mother, from her favorite Endymion. I hear the words in her voice, passionate and declamatory, the way she’d recited to the moon other lines from the same poem.
Woe! Woe! Is grief contained in the very deeps of pleasure, my sole life?
The way my grandfather Naeemullah had taught her, the words saturating the mind and lungs till every nook and recess echoes with them, shocking the body into resonance before they break free of its confines.
I clutch at the words, trying to hold them inside me the same way, to suffuse my body with them so they can become my own. For I have lived but only vicariously until now, and I have nothing else to turn to.
5
Maybe there’s something to be grateful to my grandfather for, after all.
“Why poetry?” Naeemullah had argued one afternoon in the presence of his two daughters, and set their lives on the track that has led to this moment. “We may as well ask: Why life?”
I see him facing his reluctant audience of white blouses and blue pinafores, hemmed in by the line of white habits and gray wimples. He’s looking into the distance. To whom is he speaking? For surely most of what he says goes over the heads of anyone paying attention, including his daughters, the elder listening to him disinterestedly, concerned more with what his speech implies about her performance and whether she has executed well enough to win, the younger seeking clues to help gain her father’s favor. Sister Josephine is perhaps the only one following him, and she too wears a perplexed smile at times, paused in the act of running the beads of her rosary through her fingers.
Maybe he was really speaking to me all that time ago.
If life is a picture, then poetry is the faint flickering light that illuminates it, he says. If life is a lamp, then the stirring overlapping shadows it casts all around us are poems. We cannot apprehend the one without the other.
And the poet is life’s prophet.
Look around you: we are gathered her
e now in this bounded space, enclosed by these walls, but we are in reality in a city, in a country, on a continent, on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe that is so vast we can scarcely imagine its limits. We can never comprehend the full extent of the world and the life that surrounds us, even with the most powerful telescopes and microscopes that science can invent.
Adding to the enormity of this task is an additional complication: even with the things that we can perceive readily, we have become so accustomed to them that we can no longer see them clearly. The best we can hope for is that someone lifts from our eyes—at least for a moment—the fog of familiarity that obscures from us the wonder of our being, to create anew for us the universe we have become indifferent to.
No, science is not the answer. The scientist looks at the rainbow and thinks: raindrops, electromagnetic radiation, refraction, reflection, dispersion. We need something different, something that will re-create for us the thrill we felt when we first witnessed a rainbow. And failing that, something that will point out to us what we are missing or have misplaced, and how, if possible, to recover it.
This is where poetry, and poets—prophets!—come in.
“My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,” Wordsworth writes. “So was it when my life began, so is it now I’m a man.”
How important is it that he continues to experience the rainbow this way? He can’t imagine a life without it. So be it when I shall grow old, or let me die!
And what is it that allows Wordsworth to always feel such thrill on seeing a rainbow? The child is father of the man; and I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety.
It is the purity of childhood that makes it possible. The thrill that children—you children—experience on first witnessing a rainbow is pure joy and wonder, simple, instinctual. In much the same way a bird sings to greet the sun each morning. We have to hold on to this purity of nature if we are to continue experiencing such joy, such wonder, in our lives.
So Wordsworth says, and I agree with him. But the poem enacts a larger, more complex truth as well. Wordsworth’s heart may leap up, for sure—but is the joy he feels now the same joy he felt the first time he saw the rainbow? Isn’t his current experience of the rainbow already different from his experience as a child, including as it does the memory of other times in his past when he has witnessed one, the hope that he will continue to experience a similar thrill in the future, the fear that he may not?
Wordsworth the man can only wish he is able to maintain that same simplicity and purity he possessed as a child. The very act of writing this poem proves to him—and us—that his wish cannot come true.
Wordsworth is a prophet. Like all prophets, he describes what should be, while at the same time admitting to what is, what cannot be, and what is beyond his understanding. Like all prophets, he has been blessed not with the whole truth but with that part of the truth he can grasp and convey. Like all prophets he is beset with self-doubt.
But even speaking half-truths, he points us toward the whole. The light he casts flickers, illuminating some part of the picture of life for one moment, only to cast it into shadows and doubt the next. But that flickering gives us a glimpse of the truths that mark our lives.
This is the best any human being can do in the face of the complexity of the universe, and most of us will do much worse.
6
So this is what it is, that feeling, almost akin to helplessness: my being so happy in my foremothers’ happinesses that my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. As though of hemlock I had drunk, or drained some opiate one minute past, and toward unconsciousness had sunk . . .
Keats again to the rescue, his ode to the diminutive nightingale that transfixed him one night—as if my could-be mother’s influence is growing in me, my future already decided.
Or am I merely dizzy, running out of the oxygen that has so far maintained my link to my mother? Am I to be forced to take a breath soon, to breathe in this world before I’m ready to enter it, before I’ve had my fill of this moment, my mothers together in momentary happiness?
As if Time is ready to forsake me too. I must press on, if I am to learn the full truth of my journey.
7
Tuesday morning, Seema wakes to an abdominal pain. But since her organs are squeezed to the back to accommodate me, the pulsing cramps feel more like her back is seizing up. She assumes her earlier backache has intensified.
Nafeesa blames herself: “I shouldn’t have let you climb all those stairs last night.”
Seema must stay in bed this morning—Nafeesa will not hear of anything else. Seema drinks her chai, brewed strong and milky and sweet, sitting in bed with the pillows piled up behind her. Breakfast, too, is served to her: toast and an omelet, despite protests that she’s not hungry.
Later Nafeesa and Tahera discuss the menu for dinner the next day, for Fiaz and Leigh. Seema lies back against the pillows, languid in the soft hum of their voices. They are planning an elaborate meal: mutton biryani, chicken curry, brinjals fried in oil, onion raita, a vegetable salad, perhaps kheer or halva for dessert—all contingent of course on finding halal meat and the other ingredients.
“What if I go into labor by then?” Seema objects but is brushed off. Her mother and sister have taken over her kitchen, and her house, and her life, as she’d feared. But they seem so taken with their plans—debating which recipes to use, recalling past feasts—that she admits to knowing a good Middle Eastern butcher in the Tenderloin, where Bill used to buy goat, and a Pakistani store near it that usually stocks the small round baby eggplants.
The next point of discussion is how to do the grocery shopping. Nafeesa and Tahera both agree that Seema should rest, even as she complains, “I can’t stay in bed all day.”
A decision is made: Tahera will do the shopping, taking a cab. But Seema, guessing how uneasy the sketchy Tenderloin would make her, suggests Fiaz accompany her.
“He won’t mind,” she assures Nafeesa, who balks at inviting someone to dinner only to set them to work. Fiaz is promptly requisitioned: he’ll come pick Tahera up in the afternoon.
Although Seema rebels against it all morning, lethargy slowly seeps into her body. As if now that the finish line is visible, her body has decided to slack off.
“Sleep as much as you can,” Nafeesa advises. “Once the baby’s born, he won’t let you rest.”
So Seema half closes her eyes and lets the house fall away to a gauzy haze. From the kitchen float Nafeesa’s and Tahera’s voices, engaged in making a shopping list, her mother specifying quantities. Sometimes they argue over the amounts, to Seema’s amusement. She can picture her mother gesticulating gracefully like a dancer, palm cupped, thumb traversing the length of the fingers to indicate various amounts, as she does in Chennai, giving instructions to their maid.
By the bed, Leigh’s lilies droop more than yesterday, the cream a shade duller. Seema idly wonders what Leigh is doing at that moment. It will be a while before they’re able to snatch some time alone again, after the delivery. But she doesn’t want to think about it now. The future will have to take care of itself.
8
Tahera’s period has arrived earlier than expected. She discovers the spotting while preparing for her morning shower. In the past, her cycle has always been very regular, always preceded by a slight discharge and a soreness of breasts, but here it is a few days early, unannounced.
Perhaps this explains the lassitude she’d woken up to. In the cold pale gray of the morning, the elation of the previous night’s moonlit escapade had seemed remote and improbable. And her call to Irvine tested her patience: Ismail agitated, unable to find the clothes Amina was adamant about wearing to school; Amina extra clingy and whiny; and even Arshad peevish, dissatisfied with the lunch Ismail had packed, his father having forgotten to thaw the food she’d left in the freezer. Life seemed to be unraveling without her, and she’d ended the call feeling guilty of deserting her family, and
dejected.
The malaise intensifies without the solace of namaz or the Quran; she cannot bring herself to pray, or even read the Quran, during her period, even though she knows that the injunction to refrain from doing so during menstruation is disputed by some scholars.
Forgoing namaz for any reason leaves her feeling lost and rootless. But it’s perhaps because she’s aware of her attachment to the act of praying that she’s willing to give it up on the days of her period—giving up namaz resembles fasting during Ramadan, and the pangs of loss she feels are almost like the pangs of hunger. Her streak of austerity welcomes these deprivations. But at least in Irvine, she can draw strength from the frenzied structure of her days, both at the clinic and at home, a sufficient distraction from the unsettling void that the absence of namaz opens up in her.
The planning for the feast gives her something to focus on. She enters into it with a determined enthusiasm. This is the most animated she’s seen her mother so far, and Tahera finds comfort in that, submitting tolerantly to Nafeesa’s varied and often conflicting suggestions. A marked change from Ammi’s state during yesterday’s trip for Seema’s checkup, Alhamdullilah, a small miracle. Almost as if her mother has somehow been restored in spirit, revived perhaps by the rooftop celebration. She is happy to indulge her mother so that the effect endures, accepting with only slight misgiving all the extra work to cater to her sister’s friends.
Her equanimity restored, despite going without the zuhr namaz, she checks in with her clinic, to discuss with Khadija the patients left in her partner’s care. She dips into the book of Keats’s poems as she waits for Ismail’s call after he’s brought the children home from school, hoping to rectify her disaffection from the morning.