by Sheba Karim
“You can’t separate histories,” Ghaz argued, but stopped because the teenage girl had bounded up the front steps of the house and was waiting for us at the main door. The stairs were shaped like a corset, narrowing at the waist and widening again.
“Fiddledeedee,” Ghaz muttered under her breath, and I elbowed her.
The daughter, aka my stepsister, led us into the foyer and instructed us to wait. The walls were covered in deep orange wallpaper patterned with lions, the floor was shining marble, and above our heads glittered a pendant chandelier. Hanging over the fireplace was a gilded mirror, on the mantel an enormous golden candelabrum. Two oval-backed, velvet chairs flanked the fireplace, set atop a gorgeous antique rug decorated with stags.
“It kind of reminds me of the Beast’s castle,” Umar said.
“If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it,” Ghaz said.
“What?” I said.
“Look at those,” Ghaz said, gesturing at the historic portraits of mostly ugly white people that lined one wall.
“He’s kinda cute,” Umar said, pointing to one man with slightly messy, thick chestnut hair and a beard.
“He was a slave owner,” Ghaz stated. “Man—right when you walk in the house, it’s like, meet our generations of rapey slave owners!”
“What about our ancestors?” I said. “A lot of Muslims used to be slave owners, too.”
“The only reason the Prophet didn’t forbid it is because it would have been too upsetting to the economies of the world,” Umar explained. “That’s why he encouraged people to free their slaves. It had to be phased out slowly.”
“Daenerys Targaryen didn’t do it slowly,” Ghaz said. “She white-woman saved the day in less than a season.”
“She—” Umar was cut off by the arrival of my stepmother.
The first thing you noticed about Hannah Rae Tipple was the massive creature on her shoulder, a bird with stunning blue feathers and yellow-ringed eyes. The bird stood completely still as it regarded us, as did Hannah Rae, who was tall, fit, blue-eyed, very blond, dressed in beautifully tailored cream pants with a matching linen blouse, a chunky gold bracelet, leather espadrilles. She had Botox face, her skin stretched and smooth and semi-paralytic. But you saw where her daughter got her beauty.
“Hello,” Hannah Rae said. “I’m Hannah Rae and this is Sherman.”
“Hello!” the bird echoed.
“Hi,” I said, figuring I should get right to the point. “I’m Mariam Sharma. I’m Rahul’s daughter.”
“Oh,” she said. Though the work she’d done on her face limited her facial expressiveness, there was no mistaking the surprise in her light eyes.
“Didn’t know your husband had a kid, did ya, Hannah Rae?” her daughter said.
“Athena, hush,” Hannah Rae said.
Athena gritted her teeth. “It’s A.T., Mom.”
“Whether you’re Athena or A.T., you still have no license to be rude,” her mother reprimanded her in a lilting Southern accent.
Behind her, A.T. made a face, clicking her tongue ring extra loud.
“Well,” Hannah Rae said, turning back to me. “This is . . . unexpected. Rahul did mention to me that he had children from a prior marriage, but I don’t know much about it—about you, I mean.”
“He left us, my pregnant mother and me, when I was two,” I said.
“Of course he did!” A.T. snickered.
“Athena, go to your room this instant!” Hannah Rae said. At the sound of his owner’s raised voice, Sherman opened his sharply curved beak and grunted loudly, twisting his face toward her.
“It’s okay, Sherman,” she assured him, scratching his head. “And you, young lady, to your room.”
“Oh, come on,” A.T. protested.
“Now. I mean it.”
“Fine!” A.T. cried. She thudded up the curving staircase, stopping halfway to yell, “Why can’t you admit you married a loser?”
“You’re grounded,” Hannah Rae called back, and A.T. let out a piercing scream before running the rest of the way up the stairs. Sherman spread his gigantic brilliant blue wings and descended to the floor, where he started dancing in a circle around Hannah Rae.
“It’s his protective circle,” Hannah Rae explained. The heated exchange with her daughter had made her flush red, forehead to collarbone. “Shall we go sit down? Dorothy!”
A middle-aged black woman stepped into the foyer. Her hair was in braids, tied up in a tall, stylish bun at the top of her head. She was wearing a maid’s apron over her jeans and T-shirt.
“Dorothy, we have guests,” Hannah Rae said.
“I see that,” Dorothy said.
“Would you please bring some sweet tea and savories to the drawing room?” Hannah Rae requested.
“Sure thing.”
Hannah Rae entered the drawing room first, followed by Sherman, then us. It was a stunning room, with high, arched windows and two-story double French doors that opened onto a stone patio. We squeezed together on a silk settee, Hannah Rae taking the divan across.
“So you’ve come here to see him?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“How long has it been?”
“Since he left when I was two.”
“Oh.”
With a grunt, Sherman hopped onto her lap. She leaned against the divan’s curved side to make room and he rolled onto his back like a puppy so she could tickle his tummy. His tail was even longer than his body.
“Why now?” she questioned. “If I may ask.”
“Why not?” I replied, not about to confide in a woman I barely knew.
Dorothy entered with iced tea and a plate of mini-quiches. She looked at us curiously, probably trying to figure out who we were. I smiled; she smiled back.
“Dorothy, will you please go get Rahul? He’s out back playing croquet,” Hannah Rae said.
“Croquet?” Umar whispered.
After Dorothy left, an awkward silence ensued. We watched as Sherman nudged Hannah Rae’s shoulder.
“Darling,” she told him, “I know you want a massage, but now is not the time.”
Sherman cocked his head.
“Okay, my spoiled little chick,” she conceded, and began vigorously scratching around his neck. Sherman released a high-pitched squawk, resting his head against Hannah Rae’s stomach as she moved on to the front of his chest. Then he lay back, his head nestled against her elbow.
“Oh, you want to play puppy now, don’t you,” Hannah Rae cooed. She toyed with his talons, which were as big as her hands, continuing to scratch his tummy and his neck as he rolled back and forth, his massive beak occasionally nipping at her fingers.
“That looks like a strong beak,” Umar noted.
“Oh, yes,” Hannah Rae said, still in her bird-puppy voice. “You can crack coconuts with this beak, can’t you Sherman?”
Sherman crawled up to her shoulder, stood erect. “Hi! Kisses!” he said, and made a kissy noise.
“You rascal!” Hannah Rae laughed, planting a noisy kiss on his coconut-cracking beak.
I couldn’t have imagined this any weirder than it already it was.
We heard singing.
“Main pal do pal ka shayaar hoon . . .”
I’m a poet for only a moment or two.
I didn’t know the song, but Umar and Ghaz were already humming along.
“Pal do pal meri kahaani hai.”
My story only lasts a moment or two.
A man stepped through the French doors. He swept his arm forward, hailing Hannah Rae.
“Hi! Kisses!” squawked Sherman.
Hannah Rae nodded toward us, and he turned, his arm still in the air.
His eyes met mine.
My father.
His face had become pudgier, his cheeks rosy. He had a double chin and a gut that hung low and round over his cotton pajamas. He was unshaven, his hair tied back and slightly greasy. He was wearing a blue silk bathrobe, his pajama shirt parting at the last button to reveal a slic
e of hairy stomach, significantly paler than his face. On his feet were pink furry slippers a size too small, his toes, long and skinny like mine, curling over the edge.
His eyes were lively, amused.
“What do we have here?” he said in a thick British-Indian accent. “‘I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly, / And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise / Saw three fair creatures, couched side by side.’”
What the hell.
“Rahul, this is Mariam,” Hannah Rae said. “Your daughter.”
He brought his thumb and forefinger to his jaw, pinching his chin. “Mariam, my daughter?”
“Yes,” I said. The utter surrealness of this situation was at least allowing me to maintain a state of relative calm.
“Excellent,” he said, walking to the mahogany bar, humming the same song as he went. The back of his robe was decorated with a dazzling peacock’s tail. “I think this calls for a drink.”
Hearing this, Sherman flew off the couch and went over to join him.
“Rahul! It’s ten a.m.,” Hannah Rae chided.
“Then it’s noon somewhere over the Atlantic,” my father stated. He held up a bottle with a blue label. “And it isn’t scotch. Normally I am a scotch man, but this! A single malt French whiskey, so fine, aged in cognac barrels.” He faced us, the bottle to his chest, one end of his bathrobe’s waist tie dangling toward the floor. “Children?”
“I think I’ll pass,” Umar said stiffly.
“No, thank you,” I demurred.
“I’ll have a sco—French whiskey,” Ghaz said.
“On the rocks?” he asked Ghaz.
“Neat,” she replied.
He nodded approvingly, pouring a generous amount of whiskey into a glass of etched crystal. He held the glass out to Ghaz. She waited for him to bring it to her, but he didn’t move, so she got up instead.
“So kind of you,” she said, her voice saccharine.
My father arched his eyebrows, one higher than the other. He knew she was telling him to fuck off.
“Sherman,” Hannah Rae said. “You know I see you.”
Sherman grunted at my father’s feet.
“I can’t, my feathered friend,” my father apologized. It was the first time since he’d spoken that he sounded sincere. “Your mother doesn’t like it when you drink. But what about your mother? Hannah, my dear fairy, my maiden Idun, can I wet your lovely lips?”
“Only a tiny bit,” Hannah Rae said.
He did her the courtesy of walking over, bowing and kissing the back of her hand as he delivered her drink. Hannah was blushing, the corners of her lips turning up as much as her Botox allowed. I couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed, or enjoying this theatrical display of affection, or both.
“Do you like birds, Mariam? My wife,” he said, reaching into his bathrobe pocket for a lighter and Dunhill cigarettes, “she adores birds. She was an Amazon parrot in her past life, and before that, a Tasmanian emu, and before that, a pterodactyl. But in this incarnation, she is the golden apple of my life.”
“Don’t mind him,” she said to us. “He’s . . . eccentric.”
An eccentric who seemed completely unfazed that the daughter he’d abandoned sixteen years ago had shown up unannounced.
Except now he was looking at me while sitting rather daintily on the divan’s golden-edged arm, one leg crossed over the other, furry slipper flapping against his foot. I waited for him to say something, but instead he blew a smoke ring that held its shape for an impressively long time before dissipating. Umar coughed.
“Rahul,” Hannah said, “your daughter has come to see you after all these years. Don’t you have anything you’d like to say?”
“Fairies, come take me out of this dull world, / For I would ride with you upon the wind . . . / And dance upon the mountains like a flame,” he recited.
In all the ways I’d imagined this meeting, it had never been like this.
“Anything besides poetry.” Hannah Rae was starting to sound annoyed. For some reason, this made me feel better.
“You know, if he doesn’t want to say anything—” I began.
“Well,” Ghaz said harshly, “not saying anything is saying something, isn’t it?”
“What should I say?” my father replied, spreading his arms wide. “She came here to meet her father, but I am but a shell of a man, a shadow of a shadow of a shadow. It is only by the good graces of my wife that my heart still beats.”
“Oh, Rahul. Why must you be so dramatic?” Hannah Rae protested. “Why don’t you start by asking her how she is?”
“I haven’t asked her in sixteen years,” he said, returning to the bar and his beloved French whiskey. “I would be a hypocrite to start now.”
“Do you have anything you want to say to him?” Ghaz asked me. I could smell the alcohol on her breath.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to know why you never got in touch with us, never asked how we were. Weren’t you even curious?”
He tilted his chin, his body sagging some, a puppet whose master had slackened the strings. Then he took another sip, and, buoyed, leaned his elbows against the mahogany bar. “Because you were better off without me,” he said. “Hasn’t coming here convinced you as much?”
That was it. What else could I say? He knew what he’d done, he was unremorseful, and he had justified it to himself long ago. There was as little point arguing with him as there was with Sylvia.
Ghaz couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Behenchud chutiya,” she swore at him.
My father raised an eyebrow. “Meey ghar aake, meri whiskey peeke tum mujhe gaali deti ho?” he said. You come to my house, drink my whiskey, and give me insults?
“Aapka ghar nahin, aur aapki whiskey bhi nahin. Biwi ke paisay, biwi ki whiskey.” Not your house, not your whiskey. Your wife’s money, your wife’s whiskey.
Instead of riling him up, this seemed to amuse him. “What a fiery capitalist your friend is,” he said. He shook his tumbler, the ice globe clattering against the crystal.
“You were right,” I said. “We are better off without you.”
My father raised his glass. “I’m a wretch, Mariam. When I die, even the vultures won’t deign to pick the meat from my bones.”
“The vultures are going extinct,” I said.
My father looked at me. The corner of his lip twitched, and then he burst out laughing.
Next to me, I heard Umar murmur what the hell.
I couldn’t stay here anymore. My father, Hannah Rae’s coddling of him, this house, her daughter’s angst, my father’s laughter, the ghosts of slaves, it was all too much too much too much.
“Tabitha,” I said.
Ghaz shot back her drink. “We’re leaving,” she announced.
“A wise move,” my father said.
I felt Umar’s fingers circle my wrist. “Come on, Mars.”
We ran into A.T. right outside the drawing room, eavesdropping. She smiled at me, her former petulance replaced by sympathy.
“At least you get to leave,” she said. “My mom’s still married to him!”
Behind us, Hannah Rae cried, “Athena! Back to your room!”
Athena hurried away, but was standing on the central landing of the steps as we entered the foyer. “Hey,” she called out. “If it makes you feel better, my real dad doesn’t give a shit about me either.”
I’d never been so relieved to walk out of a house.
When Umar gestured for the keys, I gladly gave them. Like Usha Auntie, Hannah Rae also felt obligated to follow us out to the car. She stood a few feet away, feeding Sherman cashews from her pants pocket.
“Mariam,” she said as Umar opened the door for me. “I’m sorry. I know it all must seem very . . . unusual.”
Unusual was one word for it.
“All right, I have to ask,” Ghaz said to her. “How did you two end up together?”
“I’ve always been interested in reincarnation,” she explained, “and I started taking classes with a new yoga
teacher who recommended—anyway, long story short, I went to India. I was by myself, but I took a tour of holy places, you know, Varanasi, Bodh Gaya. Your father was one of the guides, and he was so charming. We hit it off. By the time we got to Rishikesh, we were . . . like infatuated teenagers. We couldn’t keep our hands off—I mean—”
“Hands off!” Sherman cried.
Hannah Rae blushed. “We both abandoned the tour, and went farther up into the mountains, and your father showed me such beautiful places. He was so knowledgeable, he taught me about all the native Himalayan birds, which of course for me was like a dream. Then we went to Rajasthan, and in the desert outside Jaisalmer we had a priest marry us, walked around the fire seven times. I know it sounds crazy, but it was so romantic, and exotic, and he was attentive, and sweet. And it’s silly, but doesn’t every girl dream of being with a prince, even if he is penniless?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
Hannah Rae looked at me quizzically. “Your father comes from a royal family. Their palace and their lands were confiscated by the government when India got its independence. They were left with nothing. Your father was supposed to be the next Raja of Totapur.”
Umar started to choke, Ghaz laughed out loud, and I felt my heart sink. My father was a scoundrel, through and through.
“What?” Hannah Rae said.
“Totapur means the city of parrots,” Ghaz explained.
“Yes, he told me. And he showed it to me on a map, it’s in Uttar Pradesh,” she said.
“It’s not true,” I said. “His family’s not royal; he’s not a prince.”
Hannah Rae was quiet for a second. She had impeccable posture, even with a blue-winged giant on one shoulder. “I suppose I always took that story with a grain of salt. I don’t know . . . We still have these moments, when it’s like it was in India. And Sherman really likes him. But now, so much of the time, he’s—”
“I’m sorry,” I said. My hands were trembling, and I lowered myself sideways onto the car seat, clasping my hands in my lap. “I can’t hear this.”
She nodded. “Of course. Of course. Forgive me. I’m sure y’all need to get going.”
“Yes,” Ghaz said, “we do.”
“Would you like me to keep in touch?” she asked.
