“Shukriah,” Faisah thanked him, accepting the paper he offered to her.
“I strongly urge that you not become dependent on government money; even U.N. money is subject to political manipulation, so I’d avoid that too. And you would need someone like Lia, who has experience with the media, and local Pakistanis also, who know radio and who understand Pakistan. We forget how confusing our country is to outsiders. I’ve included people I know at several TV and radio stations. I believe they would share your point of view on the issues.”
Then Kazzaz turned to me.
“I missed the opportunity of an introduction to you and your family through Abida,” he said. “But I have met your other sister, Meena. She used to work in our Grand Trunk Road orphanage.”
“Then you must meet our father and our brother, too,” Faisah said. “We bring an invitation from him to you for dinner next week at our home in Nankana Sahib. What shall we tell him?”
“I would be delighted,” Kazzaz said, rising from his chair. “Now you must excuse me. I hear the call to prayer.”
Kazzaz came to Nankana Sahib during the lamp festival of Mela Chiraghan, in honor of holy man, Shah Hussain, the poet of love. Traditional music and poetry have given way now to boom boxes and radios. Nonetheless, devotees still burned lamps at the shrine. Garlands of marigolds were sold on every corner. We all waited for Kazzaz at the depot. He waved to Faisah through the bus window.
“May I introduce you to our father, Kulraj Singh,” Faisah said. The men nodded to one another. Kazzaz realized by our father’s name, Singh, that he was a Sikh.
When Jabril Kazzaz looked at me, I had to turn my face away. Silly woman, I thought. What is this? Your wear your nicest pastel pink. You dress up for him, and when he looks your way, you dissolve. Frankly, what I had seen in his eyes was that I took his breath away. Faisah and Abbu saw it, too. Later, following dinner under the neem tree, we found ourselves alone at the table while the others busied themselves in the kitchen.
“Enjoy the kheer,” Meena said, as she placed two bowls of rice pudding before us and removed the last dishes from the table. “I am getting too fat in this new marriage of mine, so I am dieting.” She left a pot of tea on the table.
A spring chill was setting in, so I added a few sticks to the heating stove beneath the neem tree. Jabril poured the jasmine tea. Then he took a spoonful of sugar from the bowl, soaked it in the tea, and placed it directly in his mouth.
“An old treat,” he said, chuckling. “When I was a child, our mother was strict and did not allow candy. So my sister and I would prepare tea as an excuse to devour the sugar.”
I leaned back against a stack of pillows and asked about his sister.
“Oh, Baji died many years ago,” he said, “Actually, were it not for her, I probably would not have chosen my life’s work.”
“Go on,” I said.
“I don’t usually discuss it, but because of the way she died, I could not bury her properly, and I grieved and grieved. Then one day I came across the corpse of a woman in the gutter on Lindh Road. My mind must have been mixing with God’s at that moment. I thought, ‘Bury her. This could be Baji.’ So I did, and God gave me fresh eyes to see the world. I want never to forget that each person I meet could be Baji. That is why I sleep in a room next to corpses.”
I felt I knew exactly what he was describing, wanting to be with people who are suffering because you need to be. I told him how my mother inspired me in a similar way—to be a teacher. I was drawn to this man and felt at ease in his presence. I wanted to say something comforting and waited for an opening.
“It has been many months since I have made time for the simple pleasure of dining with friends in a country home,” he said. “The bus ride stirred memories of my childhood. The shifting winds rippling the wheat and blowing orange blossoms in the groves. The petals spread all over the ground.” He sucked on a long splinter he had dug from the tree. “My energy has been renewed by you three young women with your big hearts and big ideas.”
The darkening sky was moonless. Sparrows finished their chorus and crickets were warming up for a song. I interrupted the din with a whisper.
“I believe that for every soul there is a watcher, don’t you?” He looked in my eyes. “Perhaps your Baji watches your soul still, the way Ammi watches mine.”
He nodded and we relaxed until it was time for Amir to drive him to the bus station. The two bowls of kheer remained untouched through the night. The flies must have relished our rich dessert.
6
Lahore, 1996
Meena was weary. She had hosted another three-hour radio program—this one about women jailed under Hudood and Zina Ordinances, laws that cause women who file police complaints about rape to be imprisoned for adultery or fornication. Meena pushed her chair away from the microphone and rubbed a fist into the small of her back.
“It is too much to take,” she said. “I can’t stay for the meeting tonight. This job is exhausting.”
“Maybe we should give you an earlier shift,” said Faisah.
“Maybe so. I have to go now. Want to catch the early bus.” She chewed on a small piece of chapati she had brought from home. This folding chair is not enough support, she thought. I’ll have to remember to bring a pillow from home. She slurped the last of her Pepsi Cola from a paper cup and tossed it in the plastic trash basket.
“Talking nonstop takes everything out of me,” she said, picking up her shoulder bag. “I’m basically an introvert, you know.” She was glad to have a job where she could spend time with Faisah. Since her marriage to Zeshan, she and Faisah rarely had time for each other, and she missed her other sisters. After her wedding she never heard from Reshma, and visits to Ujala in prison were limited. Faisah and the legal team had priority.
“You may be able to work around the clock,” she said, “but I just want to get home and crawl into bed with my husband.”
“I’ll walk with you,” said Faisah. “You really do look shaky.”
“But I have to leave now,” Meena said. “I want to catch the early bus.” Faisah had a way of making everything take twice as long as it should, until she was ready to move, and then there was no keeping up with her. Meena’s voice communicated clearly that she was not tolerating any delays today.
“No, no, I’m ready,” said Faisah. “Let’s go.”
Outside, the city baked. Meena’s eyes stung and nausea rose in her throat. She swallowed the stomach acid back down and pulled the dupatta over her head. Faisah began her fast-paced walk. Meena no longer hurried to keep up with Faisah, as she had as a little girl. She had become familiar with the shape of Faisah from behind, the angle of her body and her long-legged pacing, as if she had something heavy in her pockets. Sometimes Faisah walked with her head down, sometimes in a book, while she nonetheless advanced at a fearless pace, regardless of traffic, potholes, other people.
I might not be able to recognize Faisah’s face in a lineup, but I sure would know her from behind, chuckled Meena to herself. Ten paces ahead, Faisah stopped and glanced back, waiting.
I just can’t keep up with her, thought Meena. She sighed. If I miss the early bus, I’ll just take the next one.
Her mind was trying to shake off some of the violent images it had created during the radio show. Meena imagined the women’s bodies as if they were sketches in an art book or an anatomy text. She pictured a dull blade sawing through tendons and muscles at the back of a knee, and the whetting stone that had been passed over in favor of a rustier cruelty. She imagined chubby fingers probing the wound. She shook her head to change the movie in her mind.
“Sorry,” Faisah said, as Meena caught up with her.
“I thank God I have my life,” Meena said, “and not the ones we report about on the radio.”
“Yeah. We are lucky.”
They crossed the bazaar and entered a shady, walled alley where pedestrians walked in single file to and from the buses parked at the depot up ahead. The stencils a
nd tin fringes of the buses were coated with dust. It was hard to imagine how they could gleam after a rain shower—when the faces of women imprinted on the sides of buses and praise for Allah in Arabic script would flash in the headlamps of passing cars. Every inch of every bus was decorated to death.
“Extreme decor,” said Faisah. “If only these men treated women as well as they treat their buses!”
“Or their trucks,” said Meena.
“Or their cars.”
“Or their Vespas.”
“Or their bicycles.”
Meena snickered. “OK, you win. What else is there?”
Faisah stepped into the mud-packed street to let a woman with three children in tow pass by. Two men with their faces hidden inside shawls walked from the opposite direction. They did not step off the sidewalk, as expected, but passed close to Faisah and Meena, closer than men were supposed to walk by women. The larger man’s shoulder brushed Faisah’s, as he refused to yield the sidewalk. Feeling the insult, Meena turned her head automatically away to the inside edge of her dupatta.
Then she heard Faisah scream. It was an unearthly sound, a high and piercing wail. At the same time she felt herself pulled backward, pushed into the wall. She lost her balance and fell to one knee. She saw the two wrapped figures running away.
Faisah’s voice rose hysterically. She was on the ground, leaning on both elbows with her face turned toward the dirt. Around her, a circle of people gathered, shrieking at the sight. Meena limped, pushing them aside and kneeling next to her sister. She saw a wet, blackening wound creeping down the side of Faisah’s head, eating away at her neck and her cheek, moving toward her eye. It seemed to devour everything in its path and its edges thickened like leather. Acid masked the side of Faisah’s face, burning its way into her body, mutilating and devouring as it seeped into the layers of skin.
“My face, my face!” Faisah cried in agony. “OOOOh!”
Bystanders watched, immobilized, fascinated. Meena panicked.
“Help!” she shouted at no one in particular. How to stop the pain? How to get rid of the acid? Should she touch Faisah’s face or not? She ripped her dupatta from her head.
“Here, wipe it off with this,” she said. “Or let me do it.”
Faisah groaned as the fibers floated onto her skin. The contact was unbearable.
“Get some water,” Meena shouted. “For the love of Allah, somebody get some water.”
In response a man ran toward the bus depot. A child handed her a bottle of Pepsi and Meena poured it slowly over the raw, black and red, widening wound.
Faisah’s moaning stopped, and Meena feared she was dead. Then suddenly Faisah sat up, leaning on her elbows. She turned her charred, disfigured face to the crowd and glared at them with her one good eye.
“Chase them,” she demanded. “They are getting away! For the love of justice, catch them!”
But no one moved.
A little girl pressed more deeply into the folds of her mother’s shalwar. Her eyes widened as she peeked out. She could not resist looking. An old man shook his cane in the direction that the assailants had fled. An old woman, meaning to offer her condolences, began the familiar “tsk, tsk, tsk,” an expression on hearing a tragic story. Two men in Levis and kurtas turned away from the sight of acid searing through the flesh of a young woman, a woman whom, only moments before, they would have tried to catch a glimpse of, a glance of her ankle, a peek of her wrists, a momentary view of her face. The two stood motionless, unable to look at Faisah, unable to look at each other.
“Go!” the old man urged them, stirring the air with his cane again. “Go!”
The two men nodded simultaneously at his order and raced in the direction the old man pointed, their elbows pumping like boys used to competing. But they also realized that by this time the men who had burned Faisah would be lost in the crowd on the boulevard. To chase after them was one thing. For that, they could be heroic. But to catch up with them was another. That might mean to face a fist, or a knife, or the acid bottle, to know the throb and devastation that continued to corrode Faisah’s face.
Rahima Mai thought that Ujala must have been crying all night long. Where she had been gaunt but shining before, now Ujala looked dull and thin. Sore eyes and swollen nose. Absolutely red-faced, Rahima Mai thought. Awful.
“I heard about the attack on Faisah, uh—your sister,” she said, feeling her throat tighten. She, too, felt grieved. From Ujala’s stories, she felt as if she knew Faisah personally. “I am so sorry. If you need to take the day off, you may.”
“Shukriah, Madam,” said Ujala, “but all that I want is to go to the hospital to visit Faisah.” She looked hopefully at Rahima Mai. “If you please, Madam.” Ujala reverted to formalities whenever she was under emotional pressure. She found comfort in the childhood habits she had acquired in her Christian convent school.
She could not let herself imagine Faisah right now. She tried not to recall the face of Bilqis, the face that haunted her still. She tried not to picture Faisah. She refused to imagine her as a victim. But she could not stop seeing Faisah laughing, Faisah ranting, Faisah being Faisah, and the clear, plain, girlish face that was hers. The mind has to picture something. It demands an image, regardless.
“I’ll look into it,” Rahima Mai said. “I can ask Central Security. However, I know that they already have categorized you as high risk. That was a result of your little ‘Letter from Prison’ incident.”
Ujala recoiled, and at once Rahima Mai regretted her words. It would have been enough just to say she would look into it. Ujala had no idea how much headquarters hated the attention that her presence had brought to the prison system.
“Are you losing control down there, Rahima Mai?” the warden had asked when he heard about the radio program. Rahima Mai knew better than to point out to him that the broadcast had said good things about Adaila’s Women’s Section.
“No, Sir,” she had said.
“Then get a handle on the situation! Radio shows! Protesters at the gate! Next thing you know there will be petitions to take our jobs away!”
The terror of losing her job was a worn groove in an old record for Rahima Mai. Without this job, what am I? she thought. Just another lonely woman.
“Have a cup of tea,” she said to Ujala. “I brought some biscuits.”
Talking to Rahima Mai about my life will only bring Faisah to mind again, thought Ujala. “Actually, I would like to work today,” she said. It was the first time she had not complied with anything that Rahima Mai asked. Work was the ticket. It would keep her mind off things. She looked at Rahima Mai for permission not to tell her story today.
“As you wish.”
Ujala began sorting papers into piles on the table. Budgets. Correspondence. Incidents. Invoices. Personnel. Programs. Reports. The last folder contained one thin sheet of carbonized paper for each woman—the police order that authorized holding them. Nothing else here is relevant, Ujala thought. She felt a sharp pain in her rib. Here is a letter from the warden about security precautions. A slight weakening of her eyesight. Letters out of focus. And here is a bill for trash removal. Where do they dispose of the youths of the women in this place? she wondered. And a bill for the truck’s battery acid. Acid. Corrosion. Burn. Bilqis—Ooh.
“Faisah,” she cried out. Her voice squeaked like a puppy waiting outside the door.
Rahima Mai heard the peep but guarded her eyes for the sake of Ujala’s privacy. It had been uncomfortable for her to have her request for a story denied. She could not allow insubordination, even from Ujala. Especially from someone like Ujala—a dangerous prisoner, indeed. Rahima Mai knew her superiors’ eyes were on her. And Ujala has friends in high places. Her knot of worry tightened.
“Madam,” Ujala said, sniffling, getting Rahima Mai’s attention. “—unless you would like to hear about my travels in the Northwest Frontier Province?” Now she was appealing to Rahima Mai’s curiosity. Ujala was desperate to shut out the present, even i
f it meant returning to the terrible events that occurred in the Northwest Frontier Province, the events of the past year that led her to Adaila.
“Oh, yes,” Rahima Mai said. “Yes.” Ujala’s offer cancelled any concerns about insubordination and put the two of them back in their proper relationship. “I would like that.” She put her papers aside and lifted the receiver on her telephone. “I do not want to be disturbed,” she told the sergeant-guard. Then Rahima Mai stood and rolled her shoulders back to release the tension that gripped them. She went directly to the office door and locked it.
My Sisters Made of Light Page 13
