Authors: Monica Ali
'Ah,' said Chanu. 'The search for knowledge. Is there any journey more satisfying? Call your sister.' But he called her himself. 'Bibi. Come quick.' She came running and stood behind Shahana. Chanu took the book in his own hands, sat up and chewed over some knowledge that he planned to share with them.
'I will tell you something. All these people who look down onto us do not know what I am going to tell you. I have it here in black and white.' He waved the book. 'Who was it who saved the work of Plato and Aristotle for the West during the Dark Ages? Us. It was us. Muslims. We saved the work so that your so-called St Thomas could claim it for his own discovery. That is the standard of our scholarship and that is the standard of their gratitude.' He held up a finger and it trembled with emotion.
Bibi took the end of one plait and tucked it into her mouth.
'Dark Ages,' said Chanu, and his face flinched from the insult. 'This is what they are calling it in these damn Christian books. Is this what they teach you in school?' He threw the book on the floor. 'It was the Golden Age of Islam, the height of civilization. Don't forget it. Take pride, or all is lost.' He lay down again, exhausted by the slander, and the girls began to back away.
He called after them. 'Do you know what Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western civilization?'
The girls hovered at the end of the sofa.
'He said he thought it would be a good idea.' Chanu laughed and Bibi smiled. 'I'll teach you,' he said, 'more about our religion. And we will study Hindu philosophy. After that, Buddhist thought.' And he put a cushion beneath his head and began to hum.
Nazneen was helping the girls to tidy their room. A piece of wallpaper had begun to peel away from the wall above Bibi's bed and was turning itself into a scroll. She picked up a doll from the floor and put it on the end of the bed. There was a man doll under the chair, eyeless now and one-armed, naked and imprinted with dirt. Nazneen looked at it but did not pick it up.
'I'm not going,' said Shahana. 'I'll run away.' She opened a cupboard and pulled out a bag. Inside she had put a nightdress, a pair of shoes, jeans and a T-shirt. 'I'm ready to run.'
Bibi rubbed her fists into her cheeks. Her eyes went red. 'I want to stay with her.'
'Shush,' said Nazneen. 'No silly talk.'
'It's not silly,' shouted Shahana. 'I'm not going.'
Nazneen straightened up the desk. She picked up a small pile of dirty clothes and held it to her chest. Bibi tested the thin carpet with her toes and Shahana was busy scratching her arms.
'We just have to wait and see.' Nazneen sat down on Bibi's bed with the dirty clothes on her lap. 'We do not know what God has in His mind.'
It was not enough and Nazneen looked for something else. For one dizzying moment she was flushed with power: she would make it right for the girls. It strained her insides, as if she would vomit. And then, just as quickly, it left her.
Bibi came and sat next to her so that she felt the heat from her body. There was an ink stain on her school blouse and a white sheen of dry skin across her shins.
'Do you want to go?' Bibi turned her broad face to look up at her mother, as if she would catch the reply between her own lips.
Nazneen told the girls a story. The story of How You Were Left To Your Fate. It was not the first time they had heard it but they both listened well. She began with the words
I was a stillborn child,
and she ended with
that was God's will.
It was the way she always told it.
Bibi discovered a scab on her knee and played with it. Nazneen began to fold the clothes on her lap, remembered they were dirty, balled them and stood up. As she reached the door, Shahana called to her.
'You didn't answer. It wasn't an answer.'
'It was my answer,' said Nazneen.
The village was leaving her. Sometimes a picture would come. Vivid; so strong she could smell it. More often, she tried to see and could not. It was as if the village was caught up in a giant fisherman's net and she was pulling at the fine mesh with bleeding fingers, squinting into the sun, vision mottled with netting and eyelashes. As the years passed the layers of netting multiplied and she began to rely on a different kind of memory. The memory of things she knew but no longer saw.
It was only in her sleep that the village came whole again. She dreamed of Mumtaz that night, and her mynah bird. The bird lying on its back in Mumtaz's palm while she stroked its shining black chest. The clatter of its feet across the top of an oil can and the collar of white around its throat. 'You make me laugh. Ha, ha, ha.' It put back its head and ducked it, ducked again. 'You make me laugh.'
Mumtaz fed it with her own hand. It slept on the roof of her hut and she swept up its droppings each morning. For a couple of years they were inseparable.
Amma sucked on her large curved teeth. 'Treat it like a baby, but it will fly away. Waste your love on a bird, but it cannot love you back. It will fly away.'
'You're bad,' Mumtaz told the bird. 'Go away.' But she smiled at Amma. 'If it is God's will, he will fly.'
'It's a terrible thing,' Amma told Nazneen. 'A widow and childless and she had to return to her brother. Giving her love to a bird. Depending on a man like that.'
'Terrible thing,' said Nazneen.
But Mumtaz did not seem to know how terrible it was. She sang to the bird and the bird made her laugh. 'You make me laugh,' she told it and the bird laughed back. They played a game with a small rubber ball. Mumtaz threw it and the bird caught it in its beak.
'It will fly away,' said Amma, grinding the spices and testing her teeth against her lip. Her toes curled into the soft mud floor of the yard. From the shade of the pomegranate tree she withstood a few minutes more of her luckless life. She shouted at the servant boy because the yard was not properly swept and she shouted at the new widow (a relative taken in but a lesser relative who was suffered as long as she served) because the fire was not properly set. Groaning, she continued to grind.
'You're bad,' the bird told Nazneen one day. 'Go away.' Obedient, she went.
Everyone laughed and Nazneen made up her mind to return and join the laughter but her legs still carried her forward. She went to the edge of the village and looked across the fields, the river; watched a sampan with its ragged sail lazy in the still air, the boatman unconcerned on his haunches. When the smoke began to rise from the mound of the furthest village, the thought of dinner pulled her home. Mumtaz said, 'Well, my serious friend. Still glad you came back to life?'
The bird did not fly away. Someone taught it a bad word. Amma was furious. Abba laughed and said, 'Naturally she is upset. She comes from a family of saints.' He went away for a few days and when he returned there was a bounce in his step. The bird learned another bad word. It called out to everyone that passed and it had a new laugh, a chuckle at the back of its throat, and when Abba laughed as well they sounded like brothers.
A table had been brought out into the big yard. Stools set around. The women kept to their quarters and the men chewed their pipes. Nazneen and Hasina watched the elders arrive and take their seats. Hasina pulled on her imaginary beard and coughed and spat. Nazneen thumped her on the arm. Abba began to speak and the men sucked with all their strength on the hookahs and cups of steaming tea. Abba finished and another man began to speak, another joined in and another until soon they all struggled to be heard. A scream from the women's quarters scattered their words like a handful of seed; they fell and were lost and if anything grew from them it would be later. For now it was quiet, and Abba rose and walked quickly across the yard and Nazneen and Hasina darted around the back so that from different directions they reached Mumtaz at the same time. She held the bird, on its back, in the palm of her hand and she stroked its black chest. They went closer and they saw the way the head hung down. It was certain now. It would not fly away.
She woke from the dream and looked at her husband's face, squashed against the pillow. Her legs were involved with his and she reclaimed them. Then she went to the sitting room and began to sew. After a short time the machine was idle and she only sat.
A heap of sequined vests lay to the side. She had put zips in three of them. She picked one up and held it out. The little plastic discs caught the light, wavering between pink and white. She took it to the bathroom and locked the door, unbuttoned her nightdress and removed her arms from the sleeves, tied the sleeves around her waist. The zip went at the back and it was difficult to do it up, but she managed. She looked in the mirror and looked away quickly. In the cabinet she found a band for her hair and piled it on top of her head. Facing her reflection once again she saw that her breasts looked flat. She put her hand inside the top and pulled her left breast up and then the right one so that they sat together at the sequined neckline and made a deep valley between them. She looked in the mirror but she did not see herself, only the flare of the sequins, and then she closed her eyes and the ice smelled of limes and she moved without weight and there was someone at her side, her hand in another, and they turned together, arms around waists, and through her half-closed lashes she saw him. The fine gold chain about his neck. And then she opened her eyes and took off the top. She held it out again and she saw that the sequins were cheap. She turned it over in her hands. The sequins looked like fish scales.