My Sisters Made of Light

by Jacqueline St. Joan

  “I am not Scheherazade. I’m a journalist. I have to know the truth.”

  “Well, you know two endings that weren’t possible—her being a dancer in Chitral, and her being murdered in a fatwa. Isn’t that truth enough?”

  “OK, I guess,” Lia said. “I guess I can work with that . . . But next time you go on a rescue, can I please come with you? Just once?”

  “I can’t promise you that.”

  “So it’s information on a need-to-know basis only, is it?”

  “You can understand that, can’t you, Lia?”

  “But, Ujala, I have been writing stories about people like Chanda for years. Does it make any difference, really? I want to do something real for a change, take some action to help even one person.”

  “Do what you do best,” I told her. “Keep writing about it. Keep talking about it.”

  “But so few in this country can even read what I write. Aren’t they the ones we want to reach? The ones who ultimately will make these changes happen?”

  “We’ll think of something,” I said, emphasizing the we—this is when I realized that Lia was becoming part of the family, too. “Don’t leave Pakistan,” I said. “Come with me to Lahore. I want you to meet my sister and her friends. If you are serious about working on these issues, they are the people for you to know.”

  Her smile spread from cheek to cheek.

  “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she said. “Let’s go today.”

  I left Lia at the hotel to walk back to the school. I bound my shawl against the wind, donned my sunglasses and work boots, and trekked along the tractor paths. I passed the bazaar and turned down the road to the school. I inhaled the crisp cerulean air, feeling happiness expand inside me. By now Amir and Chanda would be leaving Peshawar on the flight to Lahore. Amir would be home, and Chanda would dance again. It was spring, and my work in Chitral was almost done.

  I passed Chitral Gol, the wildlife sanctuary where snow leopards hunt the horned goats. A sparrow and a thrush whistled on the holly oaks that grew in the cracks of cliffs. In a field of snow-covered rhubarb, a pair of partridges called back and forth in staccato, as if I were a wild cat to warn other birds about. Crows swarmed as one body, cawing their criticisms across the back fences.

  Who is she? What is she doing? Where is her husband?

  When I reached out to push open the gate to the enclave, I heard Aga Ji arguing with someone. He sounded distraught. I pulled back to watch through the crack between the doors. A rotund figure in a striped woolen shawl shook his walking stick at Aga Ji. I waited, then hid behind a clump of scrub oak as the Jeep slid through the gate and turned toward town.

  “Baji, Baji,” Aga Ji cried out when he saw me slip in through the gate. I was shocked to hear his voice. He had never spoken to me in all the months I had lived there. A sheet of tears spread down his cheeks. I ran to him while he knelt by the lean-to, holding a cloth to the head of his shivering dog.

  “Who was that?” I asked. Aga Ji just shook his head.

  “From the tea house. They are looking for Chanda Khan.” His voice cracked. “And you.” He lifted the bloodstained cloth and howled like a child.

  “Look what he did.” The red dog’s ears were gouged with V-shaped marks. “But,” he said. “It is no worse than what I have done.” He buried his head in his hands. “I told them Chanda was with you.”

  I had to find a way to leave the school compound without being seen. I telephoned Lia.

  “Want to come on a rescue?” I asked.

  “So soon? Of course I do, Baji, but who are we rescuing and when?”

  “Me,” I answered. “Now.”

  “Well, damn, girl. You are letting me into the club.”

  Soon Lia arrived at the school by taxi. She instructed the driver to collect a special package from Tahira—a large tamboura case wrapped in thick blankets.

  “No! Don’t touch it! My musician friend is very particular about who handles this instrument,” Lia told the driver. The three sisters and their father lifted the case up, and the driver tied it to the roof of his taxi. “Drive very slowly,” Lia instructed as they pulled out of the gate. “I wouldn’t want to damage the merchandise.”

  Inside, I closed my eyes and breathed through a metal tube Aga Ji had bored into the tamboura case. For the next three days—until the Saturday flight left for Peshawar, I remained in hiding at the Hilton. Lia did not let waiters or housekeepers into her room. She ordered room service, or large portions for meals in the dining room and brought the leftovers to me. We passed the days playing cards, watching TV, checking the Internet, and watching the activity on the street.

  By Saturday, I wore a boyish European-style haircut and heavy makeup. I borrowed a pants suit from Lia, dark glasses, and a stylish floppy hat purchased in the gift shop. I no longer looked like the Pakistani schoolteacher in work boots and a shalwar kameez. I passed by the police station easily on our way to the airport.

  Deep in one pocket, I carried the handgun, and in the other, the Q’ran.

  7

  Clifton, 1985

  Eleven years earlier

  The polyphonic discord of Karachi broke the dawn. First, there was a screech of loudspeakers from the Clifton mosque, then the chanting of a tone-deaf muezzin, followed by a distant electronic shriek. Then another, and another. Kulraj Singh prayed.

  “Can’t you please help them to harmonize, just once?” he asked, opening his palms to heaven. How he missed the breathing melodies of the harmonium, the light strings of the tamboura. I’m beginning God’s day entertaining this annoyance, he thought, and turned to kiss Nafeesa’s smooth cheek.

  “You are my beloved,” he whispered in Punjabi, as he did each morning. “You are my path to God.” Her eyelids fluttered under a mass of black hair, and her breathing was even and noiseless.

  The room where they slept together spoke of order and devotion. The mahogany dresser and bureau stood like totems topped with lace scarves. The Iranian carpet was so clean it had not a stray hair on it.

  The prayer Kulraj Singh slipped into Nafeesa’s ear was his first whisper of gratitude. The bath was his second, the enactment of his intention to remain clean, body and soul. In the ambrosial hours he had transformed these habits of Sikh practice by facing Mecca on his knees. Allahu akbar! God is great!

  His conversion to Islam had been a way to protect the family.

  “For you, I can be anything on the outside,” he had told Nafeesa when they began their life together. “God knows who I am on the inside.”

  The most difficult part had been telling his father that he had decided to become a Muslim. But even though his father’s heart had quickened with grief at the news, the man had not flinched.

  “We did not fight only for our right to live and believe as Sikhs,” he told Kulraj. They sat in the temple compound under a neem tree, where the kites of young boys flew above them. The boys’ identically wrapped topknots bobbed as the kites responded to the slightest crook of their fingers. His father watched the paper battle as he continued. “We fought for the rights of all to worship as whatever befits them. And here, where ninety-seven out of one hundred Pakistanis are Muslims, where the government is useless and the mullahs rule, your family needs the protections that being Muslims will bring to them. Do not worry about conversion. The hand of God is on your head.”

  Sikhs in Pakistan understood the compromises their choice to remain in the country required. Kulraj Singh had retained whole what his father had taught him—the core of the Guru’s teachings. But publicly he carried an Arabic name, Ehtisham Mohammad. Now he studied the Q’ran and the Islamic holy men with interest, but, in his mind, he was still his own priest.

  He opened the window to feel the cool air on his face and turned the faucet for the bath. Amber water trickled out.

  “Allah, tsk-tsk-tsk! Be merciful!” he prayed. “Nine million people in this hot, imploding city by the sea, and eight-and-half million are thirsty!”

  Nafeesa
had been fearful during the night. Her private demons returned again and again. She had never been able tell their five children the tragedy of her family’s injustice to them.

  “Shall I tell them now?” she asked Kulraj for the millionth time, and he replied, “They are old enough now to know the truth.”

  “I can’t do it. I just can’t,” she said, turning her head to the pillow. “They might become curious and go looking for my family. It could be so dangerous. Telling them will create all kinds of questions that I cannot answer. They have only known kindness and protection. I’m afraid, Kulraj. I’m afraid.”

  It was a conversation they had been having for twenty-seven years.

  “It is your decision if and when to tell the children. We’ll talk about it in the morning, Nafeesa,” he had said the night before. “We also have to talk about whether to let Ujala and Faisah visit Karachi Central Prison.”

  “Remember dinner last night, God?” Kulraj prayed. “What is it you want today? You want our daughters’ heads, too?”

  He fastened an undergarment around his waist and tied the knot. He was almost dressed, working with precision, as his father had taught him. Then he returned to the bedroom, and was surprised to see Nafeesa drinking tea.

  “You are awake!” Their servant, Masood, had lain the copper tray next to her in the bed. She held a teacup to her lips with one hand and smoothed her hair with the other. “The water is bad again,” he reported. “Please ask Uji to wait for the water man.”

  Nafeesa was not listening. She sighed.

  “I feel torn, Kulraj—between wanting our girls to be safe and wanting them to be brave.”

  “I know.”

  “But to be brave, they have to practice. Should we let them go into that jail? What do you think, Mr. Singh?” Nafeesa called her husband Mr. Singh either when she was teasing him or when they were deliberating a serious point. “Ujala would be good at legal aid work,” she said. “She’s a good listener.”

  “She is the listener,” he agreed. “People like to tell her their stories.” He laughed. “And Faisah is the doer, never sitting still.”

  Nafeesa curled her legs under her and leaned back against the headboard.

  “How could we ever have known which child would be the listener, which the doer, or the talker—”

  “Reshma, of course,” he continued, recalling how, at an early age, she knew all ninety-nine names of Allah. And how, when she began to speak English, she could not pronounce the F sound. “Remember how Allah, God of the Orphans became Allah, God of the Orpans?”

  “Allah, the Prend of Everyone.” Nafeesa chuckled.

  “The Alpa and the Omega.” They laughed hard until the air was empty. Then they both felt that something was missing. “I miss our Reshma,” he said quietly. “I miss those days.” But before his melancholy could grow, Nafeesa lobbed another idea to him.

  “What about the watcher?”

  “That would be Meena. I always find her hiding somewhere near where I am working. And what about our boy?”

  “Amir. He may have been born only ten minutes after Meena, but he’ll always be the baby to me. He doesn’t have to do or be anything.”

  “So,” Kulraj Singh said, “do we let our girls go or not?” He waited for her reply without looking at her, without imposing. But when Nafeesa did not respond, he went to her side. “Their intentions are good,” he said. “The professor will go with them. And they are not babies—or little girls—anymore. I think it’s the right thing, don’t you?”

  “Of course it’s all right. I don’t know what I am so afraid of. When I was their age I traveled all the way to London alone. I just worry, that’s all.”

  “And you worry about Uji not being married yet,” he said, raising a subject that was on both of their minds. As the mother, it was Nafeesa’s job to find the husbands. “The pressure is building. She’s almost twenty-two. She should be next, you know.”

  “I know,” Nafeesa said, irritated, defensive. “There is a young man she knows from the university. But I don’t know much about him.”

  “I think we should wait for Uji to tell us about him,” said Kulraj, laughing. “Then we can begin our detective work.”

  8

  Adaila Prison, 1996

  Rahima Mai entered the office and headed directly to her desk. Not looking up from her work, Ujala heard the swivel chair squeaking. The supervisor groaned, and Ujala could hear plastic bags rustling.

  “Here, you can have this,” Rahima Mai said. She held out a few yards of orange polished cotton. “Make a new suit for yourself, but—” Ujala stood across the office, opening another file drawer, putting papers away. She reached out her hand.

  “Shukri—” she began to say thank you.

  “—it is not a gift,” Rahima Mai interrupted. She had seen pleasure cross Ujala’s face at the sight of the cloth. “That would be a violation of the rules. Think of it as an office uniform. The Women’s Supervisor cannot have a smelly coolie working in her office.” She smiled. “So I have a question for you.”

  Ujala looked up from her work.

  “Where was this Yusuf, back then?” Rahima Mai said, as if their conversation had been only briefly interrupted. Ujala could read the change in Rahima Mai’s tone of voice. She pushed lightly on the file drawer, and it closed with a click. “Could your parents not find a suitable husband for you when you were—marriageable?”

  Ujala laughed.

  “Marriageable? Yes, the family tried to get me married ten years ago—way back in Clifton. They tried, in their way. But you have to understand about my family.”

  * * *

  It was one of those days when the water went bad. I twisted the kitchen faucet to fill the teakettle. Nothing but a few drops of yellow and the stench of sewer gas. I slammed open the window and grabbed two plastic jugs. Normally the family would boil both tap water and bottled water, and we had plenty, but Abbu had arranged for an extra delivery on brackish days such as that one. I waited on the verandah for the rumble of the water truck. I could hear the scratching of brooms outside the walls where the sweepers were whisking the street. On the telephone wires, crows broadcast their morning reports. In the courtyard, light washed the cuffs of the calla lilies that Masood had planted.

  “Calla lilies with toast,” Ammi had said the previous evening. “That’s what lilies look like in your hand.”

  “Sounds like the title of a French painting,” I said.

  “Uji, you are as beautiful as a French painting. If only you could see it.”

  My flamboyant mother had a way of naming colors and letting them know the work she expected them to do. Once she handed me a skein of cotton, announcing, “Now this is Sunrise Titian. Wear it when you feel lonely.” Then she draped a few yards of chiffon over her knees. “And this,” she said, opening her hand underneath and spreading the cloth, “this is Silver Ebony. It will attract true love.”

  Husbands, marriages, and weddings, I thought. Is there nothing else to talk about? I wanted to challenge the aunties when they started in on it, but Ammi protected me when they talked about how soon the bloom would be off the rose, the cow’s milk would run dry, and all the carrots would go soft. They prattled on, as if I were deaf.

  “It is in God’s good hands,” Ammi told them, “which have plenty to do without picking this little mango from its branch too soon.” She would pass a plate of pastel sweetmeats to Auntie Tara, who would stuff one into her mouth and begin licking her fingers. “Kulraj and I will not choose husbands for our daughters. You know we are not like that.”

  Privately she told me, “I am sure we will have our views of various prospects, of course. But you must choose wisely for yourself in all the important decisions of your life. Which means, first, find wisdom. Then find a husband.”

  And just where does one find wisdom? I wondered. I scratched my shoulder blade against the porch post. Where is that water truck? I could hear Faisah’s hair dryer making a racket. Meena was bellowing
, “Where is Mithu? Give him back!” Amir must have hidden her parrot again.

  I watched the neighborhood’s morning rituals and routines. The horn of the milkman’s motorcycle sounded its two tones. Masood exited the door under the bougainvillea. His immaculate shalwar kameez and turban caught the brilliance of the sun. He had a ladle in one hand and the milk can in the other. Round containers hung on either side of the motorcycle’s back wheel, where sunlight flashed on their copper bellies. Masood dipped into one, then he meticulously poured fresh milk into the can.