She is twenty-three years old but feels middle-aged. Every day she ticks the same tasks off her imaginary list; each day is the same. Often she thinks she would welcome death with a soft sigh of relief, a deserved reward. But then she remembers the children, her anchors to this life.
Most mornings the boys wake early, demanding breakfasts of porridge and sticky fruit juice, after which they need their bums washed, their teeth brushed, their bodies covered in goblin-sized clothes. Muhammad must have his vest and underpants turned inside out, or the labels will itch him. Raqim needs his socks perfectly aligned over his little toes or his takkie will be unhappy. Makeen will not wear anything that has red in it, not even a red cotton thread, and will not wear shoes on his feet, only his hands.
Her brain manages through automatic functioning – remembers to tell the heart to beat, the lungs to inhale and exhale – but all waking and sleeping thoughts are controlled by the three boys who tug at her heart and twist her, like the dough they play with and mould into distorted animal shapes. She is their willing captive; they imprison her each night anew with their sleepy smiles.
If Salena could gaze into her future, she would choose to pause her life forever at this moment of bliss and boys, because the future holds a tragic blow.
In a few weeks’ time, while Zain sleeps dreamlessly on his mother’s brown leather couch, his body full of her steak and sweet yellow rice, Mrs Parker will take her much adored grandchildren into the garden. And she will leave them alone briefly as she retrieves letters from the postbox.
Little, last-born Makeen will toddle away from his brothers, pushing past the unlocked gate, and will slip into the pool, trying to reach a mysterious yellow rubber duck. His tears will mingle with the chlorinated water, and he will float to the surface like a dead leaf, waiting to be discovered by his hysterical grandmother and disbelieving father.
Salena will not accept Makeen’s death. She will not believe that the warm sun continues to light the world while her boy lies under layers of damp, dark soil. She will continue to shop for three boys, throwing out Makeen’s old clothes and replacing them with new garments, never to be worn. His room will become a shrine to him and a sanctuary for her. Everyone else will avoid the room; she’ll spend her waking hours lying on the carpet, waiting for him to come back.
In the years ahead, Salena will dream of Makeen’s last moments, hear his water-logged cries in the middle of rainy nights, and wake up to count the breaths of her living boys, until they are long grown, until they leave her house.
One day, travelling on a plane to be by Zuhra’s sickbed, Salena will meet an American traveller. Deep into the dark flight, she will listen as her neighbour, his tongue loosened and made maudlin by the free liquor of South African Airways, blurts out the story of his baby’s death. He will tell her of his one-hundred-and-one-day-old daughter, forgotten in the rush to get to work, entombed in his car in a stripmall parking lot, a mere five metres from his dental offices. Salena, watching the child die in the flickering heat of the car, will listen and weep for both children. Accidents happen. She will stop blaming herself; she will realise her need to be healed.
But all this is in the future. Today, at the beach, Salena has her three boys around her, and the sun pours its rays like honey over her children, turning their yellow skins brown, brightening their smiles.
The Rescue Cat
MUHAMMAD WAKES HER UP FROM A REVERIE IN an old garden chair, where she’s been sitting for an hour or more. She’d been aware of the boys playing noisily behind her in the old limbs of the loquat tree, but only notices the silence when Muhammad shakes her shoulder hard.
Raqim has climbed to the top of the tree and swung himself, like an agile monkey, onto the flat roof of the garage. There he squats, immobile, wide-eyed, looking down at her like a trapped cat. Her heart contracts painfully but she tells him calmly that she is going to get the stepladder from inside the garage and bring him down, instructing Muhammad to chat to his brother while she fetches it.
She carries the ladder outside, props it up against the garage wall, and negotiates the dozen or so steps to the edge of the roof. She motions Raqim to her and he rises, as obedient as yeasty dough. With her right hand she pulls him to her and settles his body against her hip, before retreating down the ladder in reverse, holding onto it with her left hand: a slow descent that seems to cover many miles. Back on the ground Muhammad shakes his head.
That night Salena wakes up a few minutes before the witching hour, confirming the time with a glance at the clock next to her bed. She waits. Punctually, at midnight, his screams shatter the silence. She glances over at Zain’s side of the bed, undisturbed. She drags herself out of bed, her body rising along with the screams, but when she gets to his room she is too late; Muhammad is already there, climbing into his brother’s bed.
She stands in the doorway, watches her eldest son cover Raqim with the duvet, pat his brother’s back, whisper words into his ear. She feels a lump in her throat; she wishes she could be consoled like that. As abruptly as he wakes up, Raqim goes back to sleep. Still, she waits until both boys’ breathing becomes regular before leaving.
Back in her own bed she hugs a pillow to her body, aware that she won’t be able to sleep for a while. Raqim’s nightmares began three years ago, shortly after Makeen’s death. Night after night he wakes up bewildered and howling, a lost puppy. Sometimes she gets there before Muhammad and holds Makeen, rocking him back to sleep, slowly silencing his pain. Some nights he will only accept reassurances from Muhammad. Zuhra has suggested she get Raqim a cat, something warm and furry and alive to cuddle at night.
The next day Salena takes the boys to the local animal shelter where they tell the woman in charge to choose a kitten on their behalf. She brings in a tattered black beast, with half a sagging tail. He’d been dumped from a moving car on the nearby freeway and brought in to the shelter by a driver who had witnessed the incident. Raqim reaches for him, murmuring into his raggedy fur. Peanut Butter. They become inseparable and, after a few weeks, night-time in their house is peaceful, only interrupted by Zain’s clumsy early-morning returns.
Dishwashing Daydreams
THE EARLY MORNING WINTER LIGHT CLIMBS THROUGH the kitchen blinds to play in the soapy water. Salena is at the sink, washing the serving dishes in preparation for Zain’s guests. She gazes up occasionally at her reflection in the kitchen window, milky with raindrops.
It’s Ramadan, and Zain has invited three of his colleagues and their families to eat at their house. Salena can’t decide what to make as a main meal, but her sons have inappropriately suggested gingerbread boys for dessert. She decides to phone Zuhra for some suggestions. Her sister tells her she’s an idiot to be wasting her cooking skills on people she doesn’t know or care about. Zuhra, her first semester of university behind her, proposes that Zain is a chauvinistic moron and that Salena should insist that he take them all out for supper.
She hasn’t used this crockery set in years, not since Makeen’s death. She wipes away the excess dust before immersing each dish in the water, wishing it were so easy to wash away her memories. If only she could make a gingerbread Makeen-boy and breathe life into him.
Behind her, at the breakfast nook, the boys are eating porridge with the rapidity and relish of growing bodies. She turns and catches Muhammad licking his snout joyfully. Raqim offers up a bowl, cleaned of all food debris, ready, he says, to be returned to the kitchen cupboard.
Salena still cannot believe, five years after Makeen’s death, that life continues to surge ahead. Each day, when she looks at Raqim, she imagines the stark contrast between this breathing boy and his replica, now skeleton and teeth, in his small, once-white shroud. There are days when Makeen’s absence weighs heavily on her. Without the boys’ incessant chatter and demands, she doubts she would ever get out of bed.
She stares out the window that she cleaned the previous day with newspapers and methylated spirits, watches the rain run off the glass, and falls
into her favourite reverie, the one in which she has three sons.
In her dream it is late at night. Her three sons are asleep in their beds, while outside, beyond the safety of the house and garden, cars splash through puddles of rising water. Lightning bolts brighten the sky like fireworks during Diwali. Salena is alone in the kitchen – Zain is still at the office, working late, as usual.
In her imagination it is not the phone that transmits the news, the way it did when Makeen died. Instead, the doorbell rings, and at the door are two policemen. I’m sorry, your husband has died in a car crash. And she cries, but not too much; her mascara does not leave black streaks on her cheeks.
The rain stops, a little sunlight shines through the window. It is not midnight, and behind her there are only two boys, and Zain is still breathing, somewhere, with someone else.
Burfi
500 g Nestlé powdered milk
1 can Nestlé cream
250 g icing sugar
1 tsp powdered elachi
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
5 ml rose water
½ cup ground almonds
Mix the powdered milk and cream in a food processor until it resembles fine bread crumbs. Add the icing sugar and elachi to the mixture and stir well. Boil the sugar, water and rose syrup until it thickens. Remove from heat and stir into the powdered milk mixture. Add the ground almonds, and mix again. Pour into a square serving dish and refrigerate for 3 hours or until set. Cut into squares. You could decorate these with slivered, tinted almonds. A heavenly sweet that should be shared only with true dessert lovers.
Sunday Lunch
SALENA IS COOKING LUNCH, VEGETABLE CURRY FOR ZUHRA and chicken curry for everyone else. Zuhra has promised to make a trifle. Salena smiles, imagining the excessively polite way her sister will offer Zain a bowl of the dessert. Zuhra will tell him it’s good for him, filled with nuts; brain food. He’ll smile his thanks, oblivious to the insult, and Zuhra will exchange looks with Salena and wink. Salena remembers a time when a young Zuhra spent weeks in front of the mirror teaching herself to wink, and long hours practising snapping her thumb and middle finger together until she heard the satisfying click. Now her sister is all grown up, already in her second year at university.
Salena pulls on yellow kitchen gloves, then places the whole headless chicken on the draining board and expertly opens its body with a single sharp slice of the knife, exposing its entrails. Each time she cleans a chicken she feels like a pathologist working on the body of a baby, examining the fragile soft tissue and yielding bone. But today she won’t think about Makeen. She scoops out the fowl’s innards, removes the fatty skin that the boys won’t eat, chops the remains into portions, rinses the blood off the flesh and adds it to the simmering pot.
She removes her gloves, throws them in the sink and then washes her hands with dishwashing liquid and steaming water. Her left palm tingles for a brief moment and she holds it up to the gleaming tap and notices a new incision. She can’t remember making that cut. She looks at the tiny crusty scars on her hand that no one has ever noticed except Zuhra. She’s told her sister it’s a type of eczema that doesn’t respond to treatment. She can’t explain to Zuhra that a hunger inside of her compels her some days to make nicks in her palms. Would Zuhra believe she doesn’t feel the pain, but that the sight of the blood confirms she is not dead? Of course Zuhra would want to know why Salena does this to herself, and Salena cannot answer that question.
The vegetable curry – brinjal, butternut, broccoli, green peppers, mushrooms, carrots and two fat red chillies – is ready, and she garnishes it with heaps of dhania the way Zuhra likes it, remembers to add curry leaves to the cooking chicken and stirs the bubbling rice. The boys run into the kitchen, shouting their joy; her mother and sister have arrived and she smiles back at them, wondering if there will be enough leftovers for supper or if she should bake a loaf of brown bread for a light evening meal.
After the Awakening
It wasn’t the kiss that woke me. It was simple coincidence that he arrived at the same time the spell splintered, a century later. That’s why the thorns proved trifling, as immaterial as shadows; that’s why they parted for him.
He thinks he’s special. He thinks he rescued me from a dreamless slumber. Actually, I had a vivid dream life: serialised dreams that couldn’t compare to his dull reality (What colour scheme should we have at the nuptials? A chocolate cake or a traditional fruit one?). He is not the man of my dreams. He refuses to understand that I would rather have one of the princes who were pierced to death by the thorns; a rotting corpse would be preferable to him.
He wears a smug smile when he tells people: “I woke her up, it was my kiss that did it!” I tell him I would have preferred an electric toothbrush and a cinnamon cappuccino. He thinks I’m joking. He seems to think I should be grateful. He acts as though I am a fridge, closed and dark, only lighting up when he opens the door.
He thinks I long for sleep because it is familiar. He says I will learn to crave him the way he does me. But I would rather sleep than listen to him recount for the millionth time how those thorns parted for him. So I snooze before breakfast, have a siesta after lunch, a catnap during dinner and the whole forty winks when he practises his lovemaking act on me. Dull, dull, dull. With him around, sleep is my choicest lover.
He brings me neat white oval pills and says, “Take these, they’ll help you stay awake.” I pretend to swallow while secreting them under the exquisitely embroidered pillow which has been my best friend for ten decades. He has no idea who I am. Sleep is infinitely more seductive than watching him, night after excruciatingly tedious night, examining his reflection for imperfections. He is blind to his biggest deficiency, incarcerated in his head. He thinks he’s Prince Charming (who, incidentally, has to be Muslim – he’s married to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella). I suggest to him that he’s not my true love. He dismisses my thoughts with a wave of his manicured nails and chooses our garments for the wedding.
I doze through most of the reception, waking up in time for the toast. I hand him the golden goblet with its powdered surprise. I have prepared it with the same care I take to ready my body for sleep each night. He smiles at me before he gulps the liquid. I stretch my lips in response.
Then he places the back of his hand on his forehead in a poignant display of femininity before he collapses in a swoon. I hear the satisfying thunk his head makes on the inflexible floor. The idiot. He never understood that he was a mere boy, while I am a woman who’s lived for a hundred and sixteen years.
Recorder Blues
SALENA IS UP IN THE DARK HOURS OF THE MORNING, before the birds start their relentless singing. She gets breakfast ready, packs school bags, checks homework again; she particularly enjoys geometry, with its precise angles and calming theorems.
Salena obsesses about her children’s homework. They don’t understand that while mommy is helping them, she is teaching herself. She lives in dread of her boys discovering that she never went to high school. Often she feels shaky, discussing things with her sons that she has learnt about in their own textbooks only the night before, while they lay sleeping.
Geometry, trigonometry, history and science, she absorbs like a sponge, spending the better part of her day studying, reading, researching.
At night, when Zain has sex with her, she closes her eyes and rereads pages from textbooks as they float across the back of her eyelids. If she has been studying biology, she imagines herself as a giant praying mantis chomping off Zain’s head to speed up the ejaculation procedure. She walks away, her eggs fertilised, the now useless Zain still moving his body rhythmically while she chews his head to a pulp. Sometimes she is the queen bee, mating high in the sky. Zain’s penis breaks off inside her, his drone’s job done, and he falls from the sky to the ground, dead.
When Muhammad finishes Standard Six, she is proud and horrified to think that on paper he is more educated than her. The boys come home from school wi
th As for history essays and gold stars for compositions, homework she has assisted with, and Salena feels validated. But she cannot imagine enrolling herself in night school; she is filled with both shame and lethargy.
Salena does all the household chores, cooking, cleaning, laundering, polishing. By 10 am the house is spotlessly clean, lunch has been made and the supper planned, perhaps even cooked, if Zain is having guests over. She spends the rest of the morning doing research for her son’s homework projects.
One Monday Salena finds Muhammad’s recorder lying on his bed. Without a thought, she slips it between her lips. The tinny, whistling sound makes her smile. An hour later, she has figured out how to play “Hot Cross Buns” by following the photographic instructions in his music textbook.
During the course of the term, on the days when Muhammad does not have recorder lessons, Salena teaches herself to play more tunes, and learns how to pinch out the E # with her thumb so that it doesn’t sound blurred or squeaky.
After a few weeks, Salena starts making up her own short pieces of music. Listening to the purity of the notes, she feels the air in her lungs being expelled, moving forward as sweet, delicate notes.
On the morning of Raqim’s thirteenth birthday, she sends him off to school with a home-baked chocolate cake and comes back to clean out Makeen’s room, to throw away the toys that have been waiting for his return for a decade.
Hot Cross Buns for the Recorder
Birds in Flight
SALENA IS SITTING IN THE MIDDLE SEAT, between her two boys, her feet resting on a soft blue overnight bag. They are on their way to England to attend Zuhra’s wedding. She can’t believe her baby sister is old enough to be getting married. She can’t imagine the man Zuhra has chosen to marry. She can’t imagine Zuhra married.
Not a Fairytale Page 10
