Najma had not cracked a smile, touched Nafeesa’s head, kissed her cheeks, or hugged her, the way women in the family always did. Who is this woman? Nafeesa wondered. And on the long drive to the London flat, she found out, as Najma listed the secrets she expected Nafeesa to keep.
“You mustn’t tell anyone these things. You know how your mother is.” She looked at her niece. “You understand me? Tell no one.”
Nafeesa nodded.
Najma sighed, locking the back door and settling into the corner of the seat.
“But then it’s not really her fault now, is it, love? It’s really how everyone back there is. Ignorant. Petty. Tied to their backward ways.” Nafeesa was flabbergasted.
“Why, Baji, I had no idea you felt that way.” Najma became irritated.
“Don’t Baji me! I am more than someone’s older sister.” She sat up and shot Nafeesa a look. “Call me Najma.” Nafeesa felt a strange giddiness. She thought she might float away.
“You seem so different now than when you visit Punjab,” she said.
“Call me Ava Gardner, then,” Najma replied, turning her head to light a Chesterfield. A leafy remnant stuck to her bottom lip. “I am an actress when I am there—the Pakistani Princess Act, I call it. I use it whenever I return to Punjab. Or, if I run into anyone from back there here in London, I find a way to cover up. But they don’t recognize me without the garb, anyway, you know?” She picked at the tobacco on her lip and then ran her open palm across the surface of her skirt. “And I rarely go into London’s Asian ghetto anymore. So that is how I do it,” Najma said, folding her bony arms over her flat chest. “I deceive them, I just lie, and if you can’t go along with that, well, then you won’t get along with me . . . Now we will see what this girl is made of,” said Najma under her breath, as if Nafeesa were not there.
Nafeesa looked out the window at the blur of city lights in the London mist. Najma’s challenge—what this girl is made of—melted into the sound of rolling tires on wet pavement. She was too tired to think about it.
The driver dropped the luggage on the sidewalk, and the taxi pulled away. Nafeesa realized there were no servants or uncles or cousins around. Najma eyed the footlocker, the suitcases, and the train case as she sucked her teeth.
“Grab hold of one end and I’ll get the other. Good for a flat tummy,” she said, patting her abdomen. “We’ll get these things up in just a few trips, and then we can sit down to a nice pot of tea.”
Later Nafeesa found the nerve to ask Najma about her husband.
“But where is Uncle Ibrahim?” She gulped the sweet and spicy tea.
“Oh, Ibrahim found a floozy and took off for America years ago,” Najma said, turning to read the shock written on her niece’s face. She brushed it off. “It’s OK. I taught myself to type and take shorthand. Took an office job with the city. Worked my way up to office manager.” Nafeesa thought she caught a whiff of pride mixed with her auntie’s sadness. “I do all right. It’s how I live my life now, so I’m glad we’ve set things right, straightaway.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Nafeesa said, laughing with delight.
“Don’t laugh at me, girl! Why are you here in London if you, too, don’t want to get away? Hmm?” She pressed her lips together.
“Well, my studies . . .”
“Oh, that’s just your cover story. I know. I have mine and you have yours,” Najma said with certainty. “It has to be that way.” She let go Nafeesa’s gaze, got up and walked toward the kitchen. She turned to face Nafeesa. “I was young once, you know. You can go deeper than that with me.”
She stood by the dining table with her fists on her hips. An autographed photo of Frank Sinatra hung on the wall above the pile of 78 LPs she had slipped into their flimsy covers. “Najma, come fly with me,” Sinatra had written. “Love, Frankie.”
Nafeesa could not believe her good luck.
“No no no, Baj—Najma, you misunderstand. I am not laughing at you. I am simply amazed that you have pulled this off.” Najma’s face relaxed and her voice became musical. She smiled.
“Just don’t go getting yourself into any trouble while you’re here, or it’ll be trouble for me, too. You’re a grown woman now and don’t need me questioning you like Scotland Yard. Just be home for dinner so I won’t worry about mashers getting you. And stay out of those rock-and-roll joints. Stick with the college crowd—the Arabs, the Indians, the Pakis, too. If their families ask about me, just say that I don’t get out much—bad back or some such. And not a word to anyone back home,” she said.
Nafeesa could not stop grinning.
What a gift fate has given me in Baji Najma! If only Ammi knew!
“Not a word,” Nafeesa promised, extending her palms to heaven. “I will tell no one.”
And don’t lovers seal their fates by following the lure of what is forbidden?
Many years later, after Nafeesa’s death, when he thought back to 1958, Kulraj Singh gave thanks to the forces that had brought them to London, where their eyes had been allowed to fall on each other’s faces. When he saw Nafeesa for the very first time, Kulraj Singh knew her bones like they were his own. He wondered then if he had seen her before in a dream. It was a familiarity that he could not penetrate.
It happened at a dinner party at the home of Dean Albion from the engineering school, a fashionable bungalow not far from the tube station. He felt her presence at once when she entered the room, the way one feels the wind when a door opens somewhere. He glanced into an ornately framed mirror that reflected the light of Nafeesa in the background and his own face in the foreground. Her skin was dark and her eyes were shining. When she smiled, he saw a dimple in one cheek and a little gap between her front teeth. Over her head was a magenta dupatta trimmed in gold. He moved toward her.
She stood by the coat closet struggling to remove a wet trench coat while at the same time she managed her dupatta and a shopping bag.
“May I help you?” he asked in Urdu.
“Shukriah, but I do not need your help,” she said with a measure of gruffness he did not expect. No matter, thought Kulraj Singh, It gives me something to work with.
“Of course you do not need my help, but may I offer it nevertheless?” Without waiting for her response he took the edge of the coat she was removing and pulled it away from her, allowing her to fold the dupatta with confidence and grace. “Like all my Pakistani sisters, you rearrange cloth with no apparent effort.”
Nafeesa wanted to give a prompt retort to this Sikh. Where was he from anyway? she wondered. His Urdu did have a Punjabi edge to it. But she’d have to hear more to know for sure. To have a Sikh actually approach and speak to her was new, as were so many experiences in England. She couldn’t help but notice how slowly his fingers moved and how fine they were—long, lean, and graceful. And she was relieved to hear Urdu spoken again, the language of the educated, the modern, the up-and-coming class of South Asians. She was beginning to feel more herself, more at home. She turned to him.
“If my brother were here, he would walk me away from you,” she said in a relaxed, friendly way.
“You are flirting with me,” he blurted out. “I hadn’t expected that.” His wide smile opened.
“I certainly am not flirting with you,” she replied, again in Urdu. “What an insult.”
“Not an insult,” he said. “You are a grown woman, are you not? You can choose if you want to talk, or walk away, or flirt, or—perhaps—come over to this corner and have a cup of tea with me?”
Nafeesa was completely disarmed. She knew where she was and who she was and why she had come—Dean Albion was her advisor. At the same time, she longed for a conversation with an adult male, away from the hovering men of her country. But meeting with a Sikh—well, that was twice the trouble since he was both male and forbidden. She looked around to discover that there was no one watching. No one cared. She turned her body toward Kulraj Singh, surprised to feel a warmth in her bloodstream, an undeniable surge in his direction.
“A small cup of tea?” she replied. “Perhaps so.”
Kulraj Singh loved Nafeesa as if she were a newborn baby and he the mother being handed an inexpressible gift. He thought she glowed from within, entirely luminous, and he imagined sitting in that light. His eyes ran like fingers through her dark hair. Later, when they were lovers, she would argue with him about her beauty.
“No, it is only my exposure to the flare of you that caused my phosphorescence,” she would say. This was their game—each insisted that the other was more deserving of the love they shared. “I am not a crystal chandelier, you dear man. I’m just an old gooseneck study lamp.”
“You are incandescent. On that first night your dress was gossamer and translucent,” he volleyed. She lobbed the comment back.
“It was navy blue, my darling,” she said, hissing the next word, “serge.”
At first Nafeesa was an enchanting child who wanted her own way—unpredictably stubborn about some things. Kulraj Singh recalled the fit she threw when the wedding flowers were wrong. He almost backed out of the marriage when he witnessed her rage.
“Marigolds!” she spat when she opened the box. “I ordered roses!”
But she was more than an indulged child—she was a woman who wanted him like any man craves to be wanted—a woman with all the layers of desire. Not at first—it took a little time—but she let him know that she would show him everything she was and everything she wanted, without shame or fear.
“I will do anything you want,” she would say. “Let me please you.”
Even though they were married, the indecency of it was shocking, made him laugh, and sometimes it made him shiver.
Of course, his mind was much slower than hers. He could never keep up with her, but even their racing was only a game. Sometimes she would ask him to slow her down.
“Tell me something deep,” she would say. “Something quiet and slow.”
“The ocean out at sea,” he’d say.
“But it rushes to the shore,” she’d say.
“And then what does it do, my love?”
“It rests.”
“Then be still for a moment. Be very still, Nafeesa.”
Even in her most playful and agitated state, her breathing would slow, and it was all he could do not to get her going again by inhaling the breath that floated above her luscious lips.
And kind. Her love was so kind.
“The more I love, the more I love,” she told him once. It went beyond the two of them, way beyond. More than the family, it was the neighbors, and the city. Really, as much a citizen of the world as she wanted to be, Nafeesa loved Pakistan best. She left a legacy of schools and programs. Her love was bricks and mortar.
Once he asked her: “What were you in your previous lives?”
“What previous lives?” she deadpanned, mimicking Najma’s baritone. “I am a Muslim. Unlike you Sikhs, we only get one chance. So I have to give it all I’ve got.”
Nafeesa was his loyal and willing partner—like a brother or a sister—as if they had been born to each other, reunited twins. If something needed to be done and he could not do it alone, she was by his side. She asked him about progress on his architectural projects and had ideas for new business. And although she had her friends and the children, she wanted to play, first and foremost, with him. They reveled in their word games, their nicknames, their games in bed. She wanted him to know that she cared—that even if they were from Pakistan and in Pakistan, they were not of Pakistan alone.
In 1958 the air was still sour with the stench of the slaughters that had occurred eleven years earlier when the British ran like dogs and India cracked. The blade that slashed the map also partitioned the bodies of the people, etching fear in their bellies and revenge in their hearts. Everyone—Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus—they all lost someone among the million who died. Ten million people migrated. Lines and lines of Hindus from the Indus River Valley, in what would later be designated “Pakistan,” packed their lorries, rode bullocks, and walked, to cross the border into India. Lines and lines of Muslims from India carried all that they owned to be part of the new Islamic nation. Rioting occurred first in Calcutta and then spread to Punjab. The refugees scouted the routes to avoid one another in the passing. If a trainful of Hindus was murdered by Muslims from Lahore (and they were), then a trainful of Muslims would be murdered by Sikhs and Hindus from Amritsar (and they were). Entire families were butchered and their body parts were delivered by horseback to their villages. The people emptied baskets of breasts and pails of penises onto the ground—even the stubs of baby penises with scrotums like tiny figs. The soil was soaked with all the lost futures, and when it was done, when the trauma finally subsided to abide in the bodies of the people, they had to plant seeds in and eat the fruit of that same earth. Sikhs and Muslims alike knew the taste of each other’s blood well, and they kept to their own.
Kulraj and Nafeesa in London. Romeo and Juliet in Verona. A Muslim and a Sikh in Pakistan. All of history conspired against them, but no matter. They would find a new way.
One day Nafeesa and Kulraj met at a London tea shop. Its walls were lined with shelves of books, cups and saucers, metal canisters of tea. His knees could not fit under the tiny tables.
“I have to admit, before I met you, I’d only seen Sikhs from a distance,” Nafeesa said. Kulraj’s teacup clattered against its saucer.
“Yes, religious minorities in Pakistan, or in London, for that matter, have little opportunity for social interaction,” he said.
“I’ve offended you?”
“No. It is my choice whether to take offense or not. But it is not easy to be a Sikh in an Islamic country.”
Then she tested him.
“Yes. It must be something like being a woman in a man’s world?”
“Yes, it must be,” he said, relieved.
Their desire was kindled by her flirtations and his restraint. Finally everything enlarged to the promise of a lifetime together. But they could not marry in Pakistan, a Muslim and Sikh, unless one of them converted to the other’s religion.
“I am a sloppy Muslim,” Nafeesa said. “I forget to pray four of the five times. I give to the poor when I can and have never made the Hajj. But I will be a Muslim until the day I die.”
“You want me to convert to Islam?” He had not expected this from her.
“Is it always the woman who must give up her faith?” she asked.
“Are you testing me again, Nafeesa? Because if so, it is a test I can pass.” He put his lips close to her ear and whispered, “You are my path to God.” She began a girlish swoon, which he interrupted with a severe glance.
“No, I am not being clear enough,” he said. “Let me explain. This is not a romantic notion. It is the day-in-day-out truth. What I believe: by loving you until our souls collide, I will know the Divine.”
She was filled with love and confusion.
“I think I know what you are trying to tell me, Kulraj. But honestly I can only grasp maybe two percent of that idea.”
“Two percent is enough. More than most. It’s a good start.” He laughed.
“What about your family?” she asked. He swallowed.
“I am not sure. My family is open-minded. I know they would accept our marriage if you converted, or maybe as a mixed marriage, but for me to convert to Islam—that is something else.”
Betraying his loyalty to the Sikh order, something he had sworn he would never do, mirrored the risks Nafeesa would be taking if she converted to Sikhism. The battle left him wondering if they were doing something like trying to walk on the moon.
“Nafeesa, you do not know what you are asking. I wake early. I bathe. I chant.” The more he talked, the more ridiculous he sounded.
“Yes, I thought you probably were devout. I can see it in the clearness of your eyes and the pink of your skin. All that breathing, all that oxygen.” Then she squinted. “But as a Muslim, you could continue these prayers. Why not, if it is the same Go
d?”
He wrestled with himself. Is religious conversion a thing of the spiritual dimension or only a thing of human history? If I am the same person, what is converted after all? Finally he understood the nature of this battle.
“You are asking me to put my head on the line,” he said.
My Sisters Made of Light Page 9
