by Ayisha Malik
Before Vaseem Bhai could finish the Punjabi expletive of the your mum variety, he hung up. Despite having spent most of his childhood in a headlock with Vaseem Bhai, he often managed to allay Bilal’s anxieties. They weren’t family by blood, but his and Bilal’s mum had been friends since they arrived in the UK in 1982 and there was nothing like feelings thrown up by diaspora to bond people.
Bilal tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. He’d have liked to call Mariam again but he knew she’d only ask why. Every now and then, when he thought about the people in his life, they seemed so far removed that he felt untethered. His mum’s words would echo in his head: ‘We belong to no-one, and no-one belongs to us.’
‘Don’t I belong to you?’ he’d asked her when he was only eight years old and heard her say it for the first time. She’d tucked his hair behind his ear, kissed his forehead and hugged him tight so that he was enveloped in sweet musk mingled with the smell of fried onions.
‘No, my beta. We only belong to God,’ she had said.
‘The light’s fucking green,’ someone shouted as they beeped their car horn at him.
Bilal waved his sorry to the man, who stuck his finger up at him. Soon enough he pulled up in front of what used to be his mum’s two-bedroom house and knocked on the door. A robust woman with honey-blonde hair appeared.
‘Auntie Shagufta,’ he said.
The hot pink of her lipstick in the midst of Birmingham’s faded bricks and mortar took him aback.
She looked over her shoulder and shouted, ‘He’s here!’ so loud he started.
Now that his mum was gone, he covered the cost of Khala Rukhsana living in the familiar home with its unfamiliar air, and paid Auntie Shagufta across the street to look after her. After thirty-four years of being in the country, Khala never had got the hang of shopping alone or the transport system. She had flown almost five-thousand miles from Rawalpindi, only to confine herself to within a two-mile radius of their home in Birmingham. And she had seemed content with it, no matter how much his mum urged her otherwise.
‘Your khala’s like a tortoise always in its shell,’ his mum had once whispered to him.
‘They always win the race,’ he’d replied, itching his head as he considered his next backgammon move.
‘Le,’ she said. ‘How can you win a race you’ve never entered?’
The only thing Khala Rukhsana raced towards was praying. What exactly she prayed for he never knew.
He walked into the brown carpeted hallway, feeling too big for the space. Had the passage always been so narrow? Or had present life – in his light and modern detached home in Babbel’s End – detached him from his past one? Bilal noticed the corners of the busy wallpaper had curled.
‘I keep telling Rukhsana to replace the paper, beta,’ said Auntie Shagufta, shaking her head. ‘Paint the walls – wallpaper is so old-style – but she always says she is old and alone and doesn’t need fancy things.’
Bilal gave a weak smile and made a mental note to get an estimate from a decorator. He noticed small cracks in the ceiling, the faux-crystal and brass chandelier dusty from neglect. His mum would not have been pleased.
‘Salam,’ he said, entering the living room to see his khala laid on what looked like a gurney placed in the middle. ‘What … what are you doing there?’
Auntie Gulfashan, Vaseem Bhai’s mum, looked up at him from the sofa.
‘My nephew has come,’ replied Khala.
She looked so absurd on the gurney, her bulk barely supported by it, he felt embarrassed for her. A faded brown leather suitcase and another navy hand trolley were resting against the wall. The helpless look on Khala Rukhsana’s face irritated Bilal, so naturally he moved forward and took her hand.
‘Can you move?’
‘Yes, I’m fine. It was a silly fall coming down the stairs. We’ve always had such narrow steps. Shagufta shouldn’t have called you.’
She gripped her gold necklace. It had been given to her as a wedding present from her late husband and Bilal was sure she’d never taken it off. He then noticed a whistle also strung around Khala’s neck.
‘In case she needs help,’ explained Auntie Gulfashan.
He assumed she was referring to the whistle, but he never could tell with these aunts.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ Auntie Gulfashan continued, putting her hand over his head as he bent down. ‘Is Mariam not feeding you?’
‘Have I?’ He was still distracted by the gurney. ‘Why are you on a gurney?’
‘We call it the journey gurney,’ said Auntie Gulfashan.
‘Sorry?’
‘Journey gurney,’ Auntie Shagufta interjected, beaming. ‘Every time someone is ill or takes a fall, they get the gurney. Your Auntie Gulfashan thought of the name. She’s the clever one.’
‘Right,’ replied Bilal. ‘Well, are we ready to go?’
Auntie Gulfashan squinted at Bilal, her chiffon dupatta draped over her grey, set curls, her glasses dangling on a chain around her neck, walking stick by her side. For a moment Bilal felt sorry for Uncle Gulfashan (so-named on account of their marital power structure).
Khala Rukhsana tried to get up. She winced with a move here, changing direction there. Bilal went to help her, feeling her doughy arms in his grip.
‘No, no, beta. You must stay for lunch,’ said Auntie Shagufta. She went out and came back with a glass of juice. ‘I cancelled a lunch with Ambreen Beghum. O-ho, you know the one who’s running to be an MP?’
‘Ah,’ he said, taking the juice and remembering that Auntie Shagufta had always been quite taken by politics – she had canvassed in the last election with his mum, who’d always been a persuasive canvassing buddy. The whole thing made Auntie Shagufta an optimist, at least.
He looked at the dark pink guava, brimming with sugar and e-numbers, wishing he’d brought Gaviscon with him. Mariam would’ve made an excuse and said no to it. Bilal had never been good with excuses.
‘Thank you.’
‘I have missed you, beta,’ said Khala Rukhsana as he took a seat between Auntie Shagufta and Auntie Gulfashan.
A tortoise always in her shell. The genuine warmth in her tone brought an unexpected sense of guilt. Maybe it was because if he closed his eyes it could be his mum speaking – they had such similar voices.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, pretending he needed the bathroom.
Instead, Bilal walked out into the garden.
The flower beds were now bare, save for a few stalks and weeds, white pots dotted around with nothing but earth in them, and the fence that his mum had painted red was chipped and worn. What did Khala do all day? Why hadn’t she told him that the house needed work? How could she be so indifferent to life? He would’ve ripped out the weeds if he hadn’t seen what he’d come out for. The heat clung to Bilal as he undid the top button of his shirt, letting out a small laugh at the huge hole by the flower bed that used to bloom with roses.
He looked into the depth of the earth where his mum used to lie. What was he hoping to find? His mother looking up at him from her makeshift grave? Bilal looked over his shoulder to check if any of the aunts were watching. He took the stepladder his mum would use to climb in and out of the grave, easing it into the ground before he climbed down and looked around the enclosed space. Even in the summer heat it felt damp and cool, the world carrying on over his head. It took a steely sense of logic to prevent him from climbing right back out. Empty or not, a grave was a grave.
When his mum had first told him what she was going to do, he’d laughed. It had to be a joke. There was eccentric and then there was unhinged.
‘I thought I’d brought you up better than that, Bilal.’
‘But—’
Before he could finish his sentence she’d already stood up from the kitchen table and made her way outside.
‘Who exactly is brought up to understand a person digging their own grave? It’s mad,’ he’d called after her, following her into the garden.
Back then forg
et-me-nots and daffodils still blossomed on one side, turnips and rosemary grew in the pots. The garden had been small but alive with his mum’s handiwork. And here was another lasting example – only this was more gloom than bloom.
‘What on earth has brought this on?’
His mum had looked at him, disappointed, as if he were just another prosaic product of material living.
‘Bilal, everyone is mad, some people just hide it better. You should never trust those people.’
He stared at her as she shovelled earth to one side, the strength in her arms surprising him.
‘No, Ammi. Not everyone,’ Bilal insisted. ‘Khala. She’s many things, but she’s not mad.’
Never had his mum’s eccentricity felt so trying. Sakeena laughed and leaned on the shovel, her face not yet lined with wrinkles around her mouth, her red dupatta flapping in the breeze, her figure poised as if she was ready to conquer the land.
‘Rukhsana is the maddest,’ Sakeena exclaimed. ‘She can’t even forget the man she was married to for only a week before he died. One week,’ Sakeena repeated. ‘He wasn’t even good-looking. Your abba was a haramzaada, but at least he was handsome.’
Bilal always balked when his mum swore. She’d begun digging again as Bilal marched back into the house and into Khala Rukhsana’s room, informing her of her sister’s mental unravelling. Rukhsana had shaken her head fondly.
‘Beta, since when did your ammi ever do anything that was normal?’ she’d said.
Khala was sitting on a wooden chair, Qur’an in hand. There was no use asking her about rational behaviour.
Now he was standing in the same spot his mum had laid night after night.
‘Beta!’ came Auntie Shagufta’s voice. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing,’ Bilal said, scrambling up the stepladder and brushing down his trousers. ‘Just wondering if I should get rid of … this.’
‘Oh no, beta. Your khala likes to rest here and look at it.’
Bilal imagined Khala Rukhsana sitting by the grave, alone.
In that moment he understood how sometimes spaces could connect a person to another, even when time couldn’t.
Rukhsana glanced at Bilal as he drove them out of the city and south west, towards his home. He’d always been kind-looking and she felt proud of the man her sister’s little boy had become: tall, maybe too thin, his hairline receding a little, but with the air of someone like that man in the hadith – sayings and stories of the prophet’s time – who went to heaven for picking up the skin of a banana in case someone slipped. Still, people whispered about Bilal moving so far away (not even a halal butcher close by) from his single mother and widowed aunt. If she’d had a son she wondered what he’d have looked like. Rukhsana recalled the stoutness of her late husband, Jahangir, his rugged face and thick brows. Perhaps it was just as well those genes were laid to rest, along with his body. He had been as kind a husband as he had been brief. Sometimes she’d think about her wedding night and the lightness with which his rough hands had touched her. She had kept her eyes closed the whole time, embarrassed to look at the man who was doing things to her she’d never imagined. She blushed even now to remember how her body had reacted, as if she was free-falling all the way to that end. Next time, she had thought as he’d kissed the top of her head and left the house to go to work, I will open my eyes. I will touch him, too. She would have to speak to her sister about it. But Sakeena was all the way in England and it wouldn’t be right to ask her, not when her own husband had left her and little Bilal. Rukhsana had been mortified to think of her sister having shared such moments with a man, only to be abandoned by him. She would write Sakeena a long letter, leaving out details of her happiness. She had, after all, a lifetime of it ahead of her.
Then her husband had died.
‘Good time to visit,’ said Bilal now in broken Punjabi.
Rukhsana looked out of the window, shifting the pillow supporting her back and aching hip. She’d been so preoccupied with the thoughts in her head, she’d missed what was going on outside it. Bilal had turned off the busy A-road into a road lined with pine trees, the sun dappling the ground with its rays.
‘If you peek through there, you can see the small church – St Swithun’s. The bell’s broken. We’re raising money to get it fixed.’
‘Beta, you go to church?’ asked Rukhsana, alarmed.
‘Oh no. But it’s important, you know. To the village. There’s a bigger church too, but on the other side,’ said Bilal.
A fearful fascination took hold of Rukhsana as she leaned forward, whispering alhamdolila on a loop. She was now staring at high grey, stone walls. What was behind them, she wondered. Enclosed spaces reminded her too much of her sister’s grave, which led to thoughts of isolation. And, naturally, death. There was just no escaping it. Rukhsana shuddered. The road seemed to last for ever. If Sakeena were here she’d know exactly what Rukhsana was thinking, would have made a joke and Rukhsana would’ve laughed. How would she ever get used to life without her older sister? Just as Rukhsana began to feel the beginnings of motion sickness to complement her grief, they drove up a hill and the view opened up to land bathed in a sunlight that intensified the shades of green and yellow.
‘Subhanallah,’ she whispered.
Bilal smiled. ‘Not quite Birmingham, is it?’
It hadn’t occurred to Rukhsana that the country could be anything different from Birmingham, though Sakeena had tried to describe the village to her.
‘How green it is,’ she said.
Bilal smiled at the insertion of ‘green’ in English in the otherwise Punjabi sentence. ‘If you wait just a little while … ah, there.’ He pointed. ‘That’s Hayward Beach. Can you see?’
She sighed with a smile at the misty outline of the sea beyond the rolling hills. To think just a few minutes ago she was thinking of Sakeena’s grave. But then she had always known that on the other side of the grave lies heaven. Or hell, depending on your life’s deeds.
The few times Sakeena had visited Bilal, Rukhsana had decided to stay in the confines of their home. The breaking of her routine too often led her to break into a rash. She felt harassed by new things. Maybe that’s why she was so adept at recounting old feelings. Ever since her husband had died she’d told herself that her emotional capactities were worn, and now, years later, her sister’s death reinforced the truth of it. What’s more, Rukhsana was going to be a burden to her nephew. What a way to live: to constantly be the responsibility of another.
‘Your ammi never liked it. “Too quiet,” she said. “Too many white faces.”’ Rukhsana stared out of the window. ‘I said you live in a white person’s land – what colour should their face be?’
‘That was Ammi: always liking the idea of something,’ Bilal replied in English.
‘Hain?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I like to leave the house and not know who I will meet,’ Sakeena had said the first time she returned home after a trip to Babbel’s End. She stitched the golden buttons on the cuffs of Mrs Patel’s hot pink kameez. Sakeena had started off sewing bits and pieces as favours for people, until she realised she was good enough to make money from it. ‘In that village everyone knows each other and everyone looks the same.’
Rukhsana had shook her head fondly, unpicking another customer’s trouser hem. ‘You only see the same faces here as well.’
‘Oh, nahin, Rukhsana,’ she’d replied. ‘That’s because you’re not looking for anything new. I tell you, if I look for something new here, I can find it.’
Rukhsana would do the laundry, dust the coffee table, organise kitchen cupboards, help with sewing (she was quite talented herself). Cooking and cleaning for Sakeena was the only way she could thank her for having saved her life. Actions being handy when the appropriate words failed. Rukhsana had now lost the impetus to do all those things, purpose having died with her sister.
Bilal drove into what seemed to be a cluster of life after that vast expanse of green lan
d.
‘This is the heart of the village,’ he said.
Apparently a few shops and a post office was enough to give something heart. There were a few people going about their business, some cars parked up.
‘Bas?’ she asked.
‘That’s it,’ Bilal repeated.
In only seconds they’d passed it and were on a windy lane where Bilal stopped in a lay-by to let a car go by. The person waved at him.
‘You know him?’ asked Khala.
‘No.’
People were obviously politer in villages. Bilal slowed down at a white signpost with arrows pointing in different directions as he took a left. There was a woman herding sheep through a gate in a walled field on one side, several cows chewing on grass on another. Rukhsana wanted to ask Bilal to pause. She could barely take in one image before being faced with the next. They passed a large yellow house, decked with hanging baskets in full bloom, and it was a good few yards before the next house. Each had its own garden path, leading to their front doors. Some houses were yellow-painted with thatched roofs; others white-washed and wooden-beamed; black-framed windows and bottle-green doors; ivy sprawling over red bricks; lavender and daisies growing in beautiful excess.
‘Here we are,’ said Bilal.
Rukhsana watched as they pulled into the drive of a tall, white-washed, detached house with pointed wooden beams. She counted eight windows, each flanked with their own pair of wooden shutters. Another black car was parked out front, with those big wheels. Rukhsana didn’t like her chances of getting her leg up into that.
‘Oh, God,’ Bilal muttered as he opened Rukhsana’s car door. A skinny, tall old lady was marching towards them, with two dogs barking and bouncing behind her. Rukhsana was caught between fearing the unruly animals and admiration for how full of energy a woman with so much grey hair could be.
‘Hallo! Have visitors, do we, Bill?’
The dogs came charging towards Rukhsana as she shuffled back into the car. Dogs were smelly and their saliva made you unclean. Her prayers wouldn’t be accepted and the fewer the barriers to God’s grace, the better.
