An Unrestored Woman (23 page)

He'd looked away, and said nothing. After a moment he'd turned to her and said, “My cousins are waiting.”

She knew she would take him there. He refused to take another train, and she was not keen on it, either, so they traveled slowly, overland by road. Mostly lorries and bullock carts, a passing car if they were fortunate. She had silver anklets she'd pushed up her calves, so that Ahmed wouldn't see, and she traded these for money. It ran out well before they got to East Pakistan. In the presence of other people, the two were often silent, letting them assume they were mother and son. That seemed easiest.

Sitting for these long stretches of quiet, Kavitha was surprised by how often she thought of Vinod. She knew he was gone, that she was now a widow. The awareness was not startling. Not even frightening. I was widowed long ago, she thought. And she knew that on the train, when she'd laid her head on his shoulder, and had felt the roundness and knobbiness of a bone so funny, so irreverent, so unlike him, she had said her good-bye.

*   *   *

They were on a horse cart, nearing East Pakistan. Maybe a day, no more. It was late afternoon. It was a covered, two-wheeled cart, and Kavitha lay in its shade, dozing. Mustafa lay beside her. The motion of the cart woke her (or was it a dream) and she said to Mustafa, “What happened to us, it's ours. Yours and mine. Don't speak of it.”

And in his half sleep, perhaps also dreaming, Mustafa heard, “You are mine. Don't speak.” And so he never did.

 

C
URFEW

Safia's earliest memory of her grandfather was of being on a boat with him. Or a ferry. If the rickety, inelegant, swaying raft they were on could be called a ferry. Safia was four years old. She and her grandfather were crossing the Ravi River, northwest of Lahore, and her grandfather, earlier, in a fit of something Safia could not understand, decided to take her on a river excursion. The two sat in one corner of the raft; when Safia looked down she could see the brown of the water between the wooden slats. Every now and then, a small twig or a discarded wrapper would float by and Safia would try to squeeze her tiny hand through the slats to reach for it, but her grandfather slapped her arm away every time. Safia looked around. Also piled onto the raft were a motorbike, numerous bicycles, and bushel after bushel of vegetables, belonging to vendors going back to their homes after coming to Lahore to sell their wares. There was also a watermelon in the middle of the raft. From what Safia could tell, it was positioned in the exact center of it, almost as if the watermelon was the talisman keeping the raft afloat.

Safia studied the faces of the other occupants. There was another child, but only a baby, and it was crying while the mother tried to shush it by pointing out the river and the tiny island of silt rising out of it and the far shore. Why would a baby be interested in any of that? Safia wondered. Then she looked at the vendors, each in turn; they all looked miserable. They clung to their bushel of vegetables as if they would be lost without them, as if they had left behind, on the retreating shore, all doubt as to what they loved most in the world. The oarsman, a dark man, short but muscular, maneuvered across the current with a long pole, lifting and pushing, lifting and pushing. He looked like a nice man but mostly he looked bored. Safia turned away and climbed onto her grandfather's lap. She reached her hand into the pocket of her grandfather's kurta and felt something. She pulled it out. It was a pebble, round and black and shiny. Pretty. “Is this yours?” Safia asked.

Her grandfather nodded.

Safia stared at it some more then she licked it. She liked how it felt against her tongue, cool and rough, salty even. “Can I have it?”

Her grandfather—his gray beard long enough to curl in the breeze—shook his head no.

“But why?”

Just then, just as Safia was shifting it from one hand to the other, the pebble slipped away and plopped between the slats into the water. Safia gasped. She bent her head all the way down to the opening between the boards and watched the pebble disappear. It sank so fast it was as if a hand had snatched it and pulled it down. She waited for it to come back up, but it never did. When she looked up again they were nearing the shore, and when she looked again at her grandfather, there were tears in his eyes.

*   *   *

Her family had warned her. Her mother, when Safia had turned twenty-five and had announced she was marrying Ethan, shook her head and said, “Grief. It will only come to grief.” Even her ailing grandfather—who'd moved to London to live with them only a year ago—sighed loudly and Safia could've sworn he mumbled the word
fool
under his breath. She swung around in amazement to look at him but he was looking away, out of the garden window.

*   *   *

Grief, grief, grief, Safia chanted softly.

*   *   *

She and Ethan were waiting in a square called Piazza della Passera. It was quaint, cobblestoned, with an island of trees at its center and restaurants along its edges. Patio umbrellas clustered over groups of two and three and four, laughing and toasting and eating, the evening sky peeking through the gaps among the umbrellas.

Safia closed her eyes. She saw the pebble again, disappearing into the water. “I feel like a pebble,” she said aloud.

Ethan gave her a look of incomprehension; his eyes squinted and he opened his mouth, but then he corrected it into a strained smile, as if he'd reminded himself—as he seemed to be doing every few minutes—that they were in Florence, that they were on holiday, and what a joy it was: to be here with his wife on their third anniversary. The strongest number, he'd mentioned, as they were packing. “You can't knock over something with three legs,” he'd said. Yes, she hoped it was true, the bit about the three legs.

“It won't be long now,” he said cheerily. “We've been here over an hour.” Safia passed her gaze over the diners. Most of them were chattering away in Italian. There were a few American couples, and one group of Germans. They were the only mixed couple. She noted that, and then she turned away from the diners. A little light remained in the sky, but that too soon crumbled. The hostess, a lithe Italian woman with curly hair, brushed past them.

Safia heard approaching laughter, and when she looked across the square, a cadre of young men was crossing it. They seemed about the same age as them, Safia and Ethan, hardly much younger, but they walked and laughed with such ease, such brazenness. She steadied her voice, told herself she couldn't scream, that she wouldn't. “Oxford, do you think, or Cambridge?” she asked.

Ethan, who'd been reading the menu for the past ten minutes, whipped around to look at her. “How do mean?”

“Where do you think she would've gone? Oxford or Cambridge?”

Ethan's eyes widened then narrowed. He was quiet. Safia thought how very different he was just a few months ago. Before Minoo died. His eyes, back then, would not have blazed so blue. They would've been serene, like sea glass, and he would've winked and said, “Harvard, you goose.”

But now, after a long moment—during which it seemed to Safia that all the voices and clinking and laughter in the square died, as if a curtain were lifted and a sudden hush had fallen over an audience—did he say, softly, “Safia, she's gone. She's gone.”

Her eyes grew warm. She wished he hadn't said them so softly, those words, she wished he had screamed them. Their softness made them so true. “I'm just asking, is all,” she managed to say. It wasn't long before the hostess motioned for them to follow her and led them to a table on the outer ring of the umbrellas. Ethan seated himself with a sigh. He looked at her and fiddled with a fork that was set on a white folded napkin. “We can get through this,” he said. Safia nodded. She tried to smile. It was just like him these days to say such a thing. To say something so bland, so thin, so rustic. And so utterly untrue.

*   *   *

Grief, she repeated to herself.

*   *   *

Ethan ordered melanzane alla parmigiana, insalata caprese, a plate of pasta stuffed with taleggio cheese and pear, and a bottle of Chianti. The waiter said, “
Perfetto, signore. Mille grazie
,” and went away. There was a little boy at another table, fussing and dropping spoons. Safia tried hard not to look at him. She could see the mother, bending to pick them up, losing her patience. She turned away.

The wine arrived. It was poured into two of those squat glasses they used on the Continent, as if to say they were past the stem, past all the secrets of wine, and into its wild and crimson heart. Ethan raised his glass. “To us,” he said. Safia smiled and looked through the gap in the umbrellas. None of it was even his fault (was it?), but she could hardly look at him. Even with her eyes closed she could see the striations on his neck, the reddish blond hair spiking out of his skin like desert thorns, weeds that you pluck and pluck against a dry desert sky and they spring up again and again as though they had a will of their own, a will so endless and untamed she thought it might choke her in the night.

“Your granddad Mustafa,” he was saying, holding his glass against the lantern on the table. “Eight, did you say?”

“Nine.”

He let out a low whistle. “Imagine. Nine,” Ethan said, his voice rising with interest.

Safia thought of Minoo. Lying there in her crib, the day before she'd died, as if for all the world she would learn to walk, and to talk, and to whirl through life with the same laughter and glory that was in this square, and that she would be protected, always, as if by these umbrellas.

“Not a word?”

Safia shook her head. She took a sip of her wine. Her grandfather's story was something of family lore, gathered in bits and pieces: he'd been on a train, crossing from Pakistan into India. He was already an orphan, his parents having been killed by a Hindu mob months earlier. And as if that were not enough, the train he was on had been looted then torched. He had been the only person to survive, and had not spoken a word since.

*   *   *

The insalata arrived. Ethan heaped the mozzarella and cubes of tomato onto his plate. The olive oil, in the lantern light, slipped and glowed like gold. Safia thought of him—she thought of his efficiency. It was terrifying, it was maddening, this efficiency of his. At the hospital, afterward, he'd been the one to call both sets of parents, to call work, to call the mortuary, to call, call, call. Safia had watched him. At first she hadn't understood, she couldn't even
hear
, and so she'd asked him, “Who are you calling?” She didn't hear his response but she remembered searching her mind. So suddenly airy and weightless. Who was there to call? Her baby daughter was dead. Who should she call? All of that hospital, all of London was empty. All the world, really. She could pass a hand through the steel and concrete pillars in the waiting room of the hospital, she could topple with a flick of her fingers the coarse, useless bodies, bloated with life that squirmed past her. Call? On their way out of the hospital they passed the chapel and she said aloud, into the dim of its open door, “You? Not you.
You
died when she did.”

*   *   *

Two years after Safia's excursion on the ferry with her grandfather, she and her parents moved to London from Lahore. They moved in with an uncle who lived in Croydon, and Safia started school at the Coloma Convent Girls' School. She didn't know more than three words of English when she arrived but by the end of the year she had forgotten nearly all her Urdu, having replaced it with a gleaming new language that she tossed around as easily as a ball. “Do you want to go back to Lahore?” her mother asked her toward the end of their second year. Safia knew why she was asking: her father was nearly finished with his graduate degree and in order to remain in England he'd have to apply for a post-study work visa. Otherwise they'd have to return to Lahore. She'd heard her mother and father talking deep into the night about whether to stay or go. The money was better, of course, and life was easier in London, but occasionally her mother would whisper, with a small and plaintive voice, “But Jannu, Lahore is home.”

It had been raining all morning, but by the time her mother posed the question to Safia it had stopped, though the clouds still clung low and dark. Safia was watching Noddy and Big Ears on television. Her mother pulled her onto her lap, but Safia continued watching, peeking at the screen through her mother's sheer chunni. She brushed a strand of hair from Safia's face; her fingers smelled of garlic and mutton and ghee, and faintly sweet like cinnamon. “What do you think?” she asked. “Do you want to go back to Lahore?” Safia lowered her head and pretended to think. She concentrated on the voices coming from the television, and tried to recall all the things she remembered about Lahore. She saw the peepal tree in their old garden, and she remembered that her socks used to slip down her calves during morning exercises. The teacher had once rapped her on the wrist with a ruler for stopping to pull them up. She remembered her grandfather, the rickety old ferry, and the strangeness of that day. She remembered the distant shore that couldn't even keep a baby from crying, let alone her grandfather. “I want to stay,” she finally said and knew immediately that it was the wrong answer: her mother's face swung as dark and low as the clouds, and even at that age—even at the age when every beginning has a rightness to it—Safia knew
this
was the wrong way to begin.

*   *   *

Maybe it was the white of his skin that disgusted her.

She leaned in to have a closer look. My god, why had she never noticed? That field of pink pores, grotesque how they swayed and shivered like jelly when he chewed. Like uncooked flesh. Uncooked flesh: that was the true horror. That it was unfinished, unmade. Sitting on a counter. The white like runny tapioca, like maggots.