MY MOTHER TOOK me to the OB by Roshan’s house, finally heeding the blind
alim
’s advice to get me healed.
On the way, she kept herself pressed against the car’s side door, face turned out the window Only her eyes showed from behind the chador, her most expressive feature gone flat.
The Fiat, after winding its way out of the dead-end road, had not taken a left, toward the Old City but a right, toward the outskirts of Vijayanagar Colony, and that was how I knew where we were headed. Amme had not directed Ahmed, nor had he asked where to go. He simply drove, the whole thing planned beforehand.
The farther we moved away from the center of town, the wider the road became, though there were fewer cars and buses. Even the puttering of auto-rickshaws was soon replaced by the creaking wheels of oxcarts, stacked high with long grasses, the farmer resting on top, a whip perched in a hand. Buildings fell away, opening to wild, uncultivated fields. Small ponds free of birds shimmered like sheets of glass under the noonday sun. The air stank of dung. I was aware of Ahmed’s eyes on me, through the rearview mirror, nervous and blinking. He told no tales this time as he had of Elephant Alley to provide a moral for what was happening.
Off in the distance, new buildings had sprouted up from the infertile ground, the walls painted the harsh yellow of the sun. Ahmed stuck his arm out the window, wiggling his fingers to indicate that we were pulling over. He stopped before a two-story structure, apartments on top, storefronts below A vegetable market, a pharmacy, the OB clinic, all a woman’s needs in one place.
Over the entrance to the clinic was a rectangular board, the doctor’s name written in clean block letters painted blue. It stated that she had been trained both here and in England, and this somehow made me feel I’d come to the right place: at last a healer who could understand me and my position. The front door was left open to catch whatever breeze was out here, and I glimpsed other patients on aluminum folding chairs, all hidden behind burkhas, making it hard to tell who was pregnant and who not. Another door led to the private exam area, covered by a thick curtain.
Amme made no move to get out of the car. She kept the chador pressed against her lips, and on her thigh, underneath the veil, her knuckles were rolling.
I glanced at Ahmed, wondering what I should—could—say, when Amme spoke with the frankness she had on my wedding day.
“If you had to do something, child, why didn’t you come to me? You know better than to believe in
jadu
.
Ar’re,
if it worked, wouldn’t I be dead by now? Don’t you think Sabana has tried numerous times to kill me?” She grunted. “Stealing my husband was not enough for that woman.”
“I told you about the bleeding, Amme, and you brought me to the blind
alim
…”
She glared at me. “How could I have guessed about your … internal problems? My daughter,” she said, looking me up and down with what appeared contempt. She pushed herself closer to the door, farther away from me, and gathered the loose folds of her chador onto her lap. “When Nafiza told me what you …” she stopped in midsentence, her lips still parted, unable to speak the unimaginable. She shook her head and said, “No matter what I did, you still turned out to be like your father.”
“I didn’t tell Zeba Auntie about the divorce,” I said, careful, before Amme, not to refer to Zeba as my mother.
Her gaze flitted to Ahmed’s back then out the window. He had lowered his tall figure as far as he could, hanging his head between his shoulders, level with the steering wheel.
Outside Amme’s window, a cycle-rickshaw was passing, overloaded with schoolchildren in blue uniforms, girls with two braids each, looped around to look like nooses.
I said, “When you locked yourself into your room, there was no one to look after me. I went to school and pretended you weren’t crying at home and pretended Dad wasn’t going to the hospital, as though he’d done nothing, changed nothing. Every night, I ordered pizza. When you finally came out. you carried on as before; you never asked me how I’d survived the month nor once expressed pride that I did. Amme, I was only ten.”
Her knuckles suddenly went still, but she said nothing.
I went on, still speaking to her averted face, “It’s been a month since I’ve been at my husband’s, don’t you want to know what it’s been like for me? Don’t you want to hear how I’ve managed …”
“You manage as we all manage,” she said, turning to meet my eyes, and there was an emptiness in hers that I had first seen when she’d emerged from her locked room. “What choice do any of us have but to make do?” Her gaze fell to my belly before she closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, the veil sucked into her nostrils. “If I made a mistake by forcing you into this marriage, I did so believing it was the best for you. Layla, at least one of my two children should have a life, at least to one I could give a home … my poor son, Abbas. You can’t imagine what it was like. Feeling him kicking inside me, feeling him hiccuping after I ate curry And when I could finally hold him … no movement at all.” Her eyes filled with tears as I had not seen since Dad divorced her, and I reached out to my mother, but she drew away and wrapped the chador more fully about her.
With a corner, she dabbed her eyes as she said, “Your
saas
is right. No one will marry you now, not here, not from the Old City. That man who married your father’s sister, he was some old Saudi, and she became his fourth wife. Allah only knows what kind of life she’ll have with him. But that’s not for you, Layla. Nor is coming back with me to your father’s home. I’ve gotten you out, I’ve given you a life—don’t you see how lucky you are? Nafiza says your husband knows what
you’ve done, and still he let you stay in his home. He gave you dignity. If he was anything like your father, he would have killed you on the wedding night, and no one would have stopped him or thrown him in jail, not here. They would have said he was justified.” She stared at me until I lowered my head, assenting to what she’d said. “When your uncle confronted him about the leg, he came out with it. The boy has shown no intention to deceive. And I don’t believe he’s hiding anything now, do you?”
“No,” I said, thinking about Nate’s letters and the articles. “Not anymore.”
“If anything,” she said, speaking over me, “the boy has acted with utmost honor, saving us all our shame.” With that, she drew from her purse a bundle of rupees still stapled from the bank, three inches thick. A payoff like I’d tried to give to Nafiza before throwing her out. It seemed I wouldn’t be seeing my mother again.
“What about you?” I asked. “What’s going to become of you now that I’m finally gone? Are you really returning to the U.S. with Dad?”
She sighed, long and exhausted, as though the last breath of life was moving out of her … or was she just now embarking on a new existence? “Your father asked me to go home with him,” she said, studying her palms. “Sabana is staying here till her eighth month. She wants to be with her mother. The children have to return to school. They need someone to watch them. Your father is busy at the hospital.”
And so revealed, the life she had accepted for herself, the role of wife and mother dissolving into its most basic form, the role of caregiver. She had become no better than my nanny, this, the daughter of a nawab. If I had failed as a daughter, maybe even as a woman, so, in the end, had she.
“
Chalu
,” she said, reaching forward to tap Ahmed’s shoulder. He bounded out of the Fiat and opened her door.
I joined my mother at the steps to the clinic and grasped her hand a last time. She squeezed mine briefly before letting go.
Aysh
HE WAS SITTING on the bunk across from mine, smoking, appearing to be staring out the window, though I could sense his eyes on me through the reflection of the glass. We were in the air-conditioned compartment of the Madras Express, winding our way through rice paddies stretched flat under the darkening sky. Not even four yet, but we’d had to turn on the overhead lights, and the window cast back our image in such a way that the landscape of our bodies appeared more clearly than the one passing outside. In the AC car, which was a class above first, all the windows were bolted shut to trap the cold, artificial air, and with the dimming natural light, if I moved just a bit this way or that, I could see the external world mapped across my face, making me feel even more cut off from it. Indeed, the sensation I’d had riding on the back of Sameer’s motorcycle, merging with the chaos and life about me, had retreated once more, and I felt as I had in the backseat of the Fiat, watching it all from a distance. India was my father, the two of us made of the same clay and pulsings of blood, yet severed.
And severed, at last, was Nate, the form he had taken up inside me, the blood, the bloated, cramping belly. The doctor had asked no questions, though I had gone to her prepared to confess it all. After a swift internal exam, she’d performed a D & C, which had been less
painful, less invasive than I’d imagined. Still, I left the clinic feeling clean and dirty at once, as though she’d turned me inside out.
At home, I kept my distance from Sameer. What I had once believed would bring me closer to him, a purified body, had, in the end, become yet another betrayal. Draw away, draw closed, I was doing it this time.
Just like your father
, Amme had said, dropping me off at my husband’s house, her last words to me,
just like your father
.
In the glass, his face looked like the demon’s who continued to visit me in dreams, a charcoal sketch with features not fully drawn in. Except the dark eyes, ever watchful in that way of his, trying to pierce my skull to see what I was thinking. I stared past them to the green paddies, dotted here and there by grazing water buffaloes. The outlying trees were short and scrubby, the hills in the distance like low-lying clouds. At the center of one field, there was a group of farmers and workers with lungis folded up to midthigh, knee-deep in mud. They were harvesting, long shoots of rice stalk tied into small bundles and set behind them as they moved from the center out, in no particular order. One shirtless worker was entirely covered in muck, his chest and arms, his neck and face, only the whites of his eyeballs showing clear. He was leading a water buffalo by a short rope. No one looked up when the train hissed past, just another snake stirring in these parts.
He snubbed out the cigarette under the thick heel of a boot and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes locking onto my face. He owned no warm clothes and was still dressed in a white T-shirt, the round muscles of his arms flexing as he brought his hands together, fingers pressed to his lips. What was intended to be luxurious comfort was really just frigid, and I had wrapped myself in the chador he didn’t like me wearing, not offering, as I’d done that day we’d been caught in the rain, to enfold him inside. The lines across his forehead appeared carved into his flesh.
He said, “I have been looking forward to our going to Madras for some time now, Layla. I had never imagined I would be … so distressed. Nothing has been right since you found those letters. What is it you are keeping from me? Mum says you threw Nafiza out because
she …” his gaze faltered, “ … because she knew about … not consummating … yet, not yet.” His boot tapped the floor, twice, stressing how it was just a matter of time, nothing more. He met my eyes again. “When I came home that day and you were gone—you’d never been gone before, you’ve always been there, waiting for me—I realized how much I need you, Layla! Then Mum told me you’d left with your
amme,
and I thought you wouldn’t come back to me, but you did … in a way. Now you won’t let me touch you. Is it those letters? Are you thinking about him, him touching you … ?”
“No, I told you, I don’t want him. I came to India, I married you. I could have run away with him, I could have stayed there. You read yourself what he wrote. He was surprised I’d left him. He thought I’d stay.”
He pushed himself back on the bunk and rested his head against the cool metal wall, the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple. Exactly a week before I had found him like this in the courtyard, sprawled out in a chair under the warm sun. I’d gone to him then, gone and kissed the pulse in his neck. “
I am closer to you than your own jugular vein.
” That was what I had read in the Qur’an that same morning, Allah speaking to us, his faithful, and that was how I had felt with my husband, more intimate with him than I’d ever been with anyone else. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t had sex …
yet
.
Still, what seemed not to have mattered in the beginning, our betrayals—his lying to his mother about the white cloth, my lying to him about the bleeding—were now like cracks that might appear in the great dam Taqi Mamu grumbled about, the one built by our ancestral land in distant NagarJuna Sagar. Each one caused another to erupt and appear, weakening the whole structure. The truth was, the past could not so easily be left behind. But would my husband be able to understand that when I confessed the truth to him?
“Are you trying to purposely hurt me, bringing up what your …
lover
said?” He kept his eyes closed, face turned up to the ceiling, the fluorescent lights. “Do you think the words don’t echo in my own
ears?” With the movement of the train, his head bounced against the wall, a dull thudding sound.
He was right, I was punishing him, not liking the image I was seeing of my own self in the glass, the round features that belonged to my father. I rose and went to him, cradling his head in my arms. He stretched my leg across his lap so that I was straddling him. I pressed my face into his neck. I was crying.
“You told your mother about my parents’ divorce. I told you not to do that. How could you betray me? I thought we wouldn’t do that to each other. I thought we wouldn’t be like them.”
“What are you talking about, we’re not like them, baby …”
“We are if we do things behind each other’s backs. Don’t you see? I don’t care about those damn letters. I don’t care what he says. What matters to me is you, you are my husband; don’t speak to me anymore about wanting to become like my dad. My dad abandoned my mother and me, he went on to build a life on lies. Do you really want to be like him?”
“Oh God, Layla, no! You must understand how that is the very thing I do not want. It’s so I don’t have to continue living a lie that I want so desperately to go with you to the U.S.” He gripped my face in both of his hands. “Listen to me, Layla, listen carefully. I cannot be who I am, here. In India, in Hyderabad, I am the firstborn son, I am a Muslim man even if I don’t believe, and now I am a husband and am expected to one day be a father. I have responsibilities to everyone but myself. Each face I look into reminds me of who I should be, and who I can never be, here. And that is the lie, to me, that is the lie. Sometimes I think I worked so hard and accomplished so much at college because I never felt good enough. Baby, I don’t think I have it in me to be what everyone else wants.”
Roles that were too big and awkward, like oversized garments. Who else to better understand than me? I wrapped my arms about him, saying, “You can be yourself with me, Sameer. I’m not expecting anything from you as my husband but honesty Please, we’re going to
Madras, we’re going to be leaving soon for the U.S., let’s come out to each other about what we’ve done and start fresh …”
“Yes, start fresh in the U.S., it’s all I want. It’ll be like … like resetting my image. You have given me that, Layla. You have freed me.” He grabbed my face and began kissing me. “I’m not your father, Layla, I’ll never abandon you.” He flipped me over, onto the bunk, crouching on the ground before me. He was trying to peel away the chador. The train began jerking as it came to yet another stop. Out the window, I could see the front cars curving round a bend, arms and heads sticking out of open windows, and what looked to be a man sitting on top of the engine, wrapped in a wool shawl. It had started to rain, light drops sliding down the window. I pulled away and walked over to the door. He looked at me, surprised, even hurt.
“Layla, what … ? Is this about your mother still? Are you still holding a grudge? Listen, baby,” he stood and walked over to where I was standing and set his arms on either side of me, locking me in place. The train hollered. A little boy sat beside the tracks, his back turned to the train, defecating. He bowed his head before me in shame. “I felt exposed when you found those letters,” he whispered. “I felt … you hated me. But it was me, Layla, I hated myself for what I’d done.” He flattened himself against me, lifting up my kurta.
Yet another stop at some unknown village, its name scrawled in black lettering across the back cement wall of what served as the rail station. The Hindi letters that I was used to seeing now replaced by an unfamiliar Tamil. People were jumping off to stretch and smoke, drink chai from a seller who handed it out in small earthenware cups, passed from this person to the next. A tall woman in a black burkha that was much too short for her, face covered entirely by its netting, was walking about alone, ducking behind this person and the next, as though searching for somebody, a lost child, an old lover. Things that could not be left behind.
“My mother took me to the doctor,” I whispered. “An OB. The bleeding, on the wedding night, all these days I’ve been putting you in my mouth … I’m telling you so we can start over, so there are no lies
between us … I went there behind your back, and now I’m filled with shame. I should have come to you, I should have told you, right then, on the wedding night, but I was too scared. And now, now it’s gone so far …”
He pulled back, trying to read my face even as he was shaking his head. He knew what I had to tell him. “What are you talking about? Layla, what are you …
talking about
?”
“I should have been on the pill a month … it had only been a couple of weeks, maybe less …”
“Don’t tell me any more, I don’t want to hear any more …”
“I had started them planning for the wedding night, not …”
“I’m telling you to stop!”
“I got pregnant, Sameer, oh God, I got pregnant.”
He closed his eyes and his body went limp and still. After a moment, he spoke so quietly I could hardly hear him over the laughter and chaos outside. “All this time you’ve known, living in my house, sleeping in my bed?”
“Yes, yes.”
There was nothing left to say.
THAT NIGHT, HE slept alone on the bunk across from mine, refusing my touches, any gestures of reconciliation, even apologies. What else could I provide?
At daybreak, when the train pulled into Central Station, the rain was thick and the sky still so dark there appeared to be no change between the night we had passed so uncomfortably and the new day, which brought no promises of relief. No calls to prayer here, at least none I could hear beyond the shrieking metal of the train, its final wheeze as it came to a full stop, an animal hunkering down on its belly to rest.
He had dressed himself sometime during the night, while I’d been asleep. Yell at me, curse me, even hit me, I was used to it all, had gotten used to it from Dad, who had started to beat me when I was two
and only stopped the day of my wedding. Though Sameer did not know it, he had himself freed me.
Nevertheless, it was the beatings I preferred to the silence. The beatings were like the stretches between the train’s village stops; I never knew when the next would suddenly be upon me, I was never able to fully be at ease. And this: when he was beating me, at least I knew he saw me, at least I knew I was alive. Submission, not to Allah, but to Dad, and the only way he knew how to touch me. Love, in my mind, at that time, could express itself from the visage of hate.
When I pulled out a fresh outfit to wear, Sameer stood before the window, gazing out, as though to hide me from view, though I knew he was really turning away from the body that had for this long deceived him. He had been right: on the wedding night, without intending to, I had made a fool of my husband.
The train had burrowed underground, and we had to make our way out by pushing through the crush of passengers then filing up the steep steps. Sameer carried our bags, the small one with his immigration papers and our passports strapped over his shoulder, the suitcase passed from one hand to the other as he strode through the crowd, plowing through in a way I had not yet learned to do. Too polite, always too scared. Before long, he was half a yard before me, easily spotted in his American clothes and fair skin, his height. Tamils appeared generally darker, their skin tight and smooth around their faces, the women’s exposed bellies not the flapping flesh I was used to seeing on the women in the Old City, on my own Asma Kala, cloistered women whose only physical exertion was to get to and from the kitchen. And there she was, that tall woman in the burkha that was too short, shiny loose
shalwar
-pajamas exposed from shin down, masculine sandals. She was alone, as I had not known women could travel here, that child or lover she’d been searching for at the village stop never recovered. She kept pace with Sameer, as though she were his wife and not I. In his effort to flee the train station, flee me, he didn’t notice her.