My Sisters Made of Light

by Jacqueline St. Joan

  “Yes, Madam,” one woman said. “They treat us well. It’s just like home here.”

  Suddenly, the lady jailer pushed her chair backward, scraping the concrete floor. She strained to lift her body, signaling that the meeting was over.

  “The gentlemen will have to wait here. Only ladies inside.”

  The male student, the professor, and a policeman with a belt full of keys headed for the men’s side of Central Prison. Faisah and I, and two other students—Rani and Laila—trailed the two inmates down a covered corridor to the women’s section. The key turned noisily in the lock, and the metal doors creaked. I cringed a little.

  The doors opened to a large yard packed with women and children. The space was roofless, framed by mudbrick walls. On one side of the courtyard was a line of small rooms without furniture, a larger dormitory with a few string cots, and several stalls for toilets at the far end. Next to the dormitory was the outdoor kitchen where women were chopping mustard greens and boiling rice. Others washed clothes at the hand pump and hung them on a line, or they clustered under the only available shade—a thatched verandah outside the row of sleeping rooms. Women sat cross-legged on the bare ground, eating with cupped fingers from plastic bowls and feeding their children in the same way, or laying their babies across their laps underneath their shawls, where the babies sucked until they slept. Quite a few women were pregnant.

  “It’s a kind of village,” I whispered to Faisah.

  “A village of the damned!” she said.

  “Call me Sita,” said the Kholi girl who carried Ammi’s clothes. “Will you help us, too?” She squeezed my elbow, keeping hold of the soft spots by my tendons.

  “I’ll try,” I said, pulling my arm away. The girl was hurting me.

  “Follow me,” Sita said. Then she grabbed my forearm and led me to the area where laundry was stretched across a wall to dry. Children squealed, playing tag between rows of wet clothes.

  Sita wore a chiffon sari that was spring green in color and embroidered with cheap red and white thread. The scooped neckline of her blouse rested in the pockets of her collarbones. Her veil was clipped to her head and hung freely down her back, as if it were an extension of her hair. White plastic bangles circled her wrists. The girl looked different now than when she had mumbled her replies to our questions in the lady jailer’s office. When she spoke, she placed her fists on her hips. Her tiny body was as unmoving as a mountain.

  “We shouldn’t be in here,” she said. Her voice rose in anger. “It is injustice! We don’t belong here at all.” I motioned for her to sit down next me on the ground, and I opened my notebook.

  “What is your full name?” I asked.

  “Sita Chengur. My two sisters are here with me—Hanan and Manya.” She stopped talking and looked at my pad of paper, unable to read it, but waiting for me to include her sisters’ names in my report. “My people were in debt bondage near Hyderabad. When I was ten my family was released by a court action, but we had nowhere to go.”

  A small child walked toward us, trying to balance two cups of tea on a piece of wood. A bright orange and blue print sari caressed her frame. Her right cheek dimpled.

  “You didn’t spill a drop,” Sita said, grinning at the child, as she spread a clean cloth in front of me and reached for a cup. She rested her cup on her bent knee.

  “Hanan,” she said, shooing the child away. “My family walked from interior Sindh to Karachi looking for work, anything at all—just to stay alive. Our mother worked a weaving machine in the cotton mill, but she got asthma and an eye infection that made her blind. Our father earned money in the villages along the way with his two dancing monkeys and by playing his drums. But he says that people aren’t interested in monkeys and music anymore, now that they can watch TV and play video games. But he told us that Karachi is by the sea and the sea is rich, so we would be rich too. So we came here.”

  Ammi had told us about the Kholis, Hindus who originally inhabited Sindh and the western desert of India. Many became nomads or workers to landlords who bound generations of them with debts, and who hired thugs to make certain they never ran away. I remembered Ammi saying, “Sometimes they only have bread soaked in chili and buttermilk. And children are forced to pick cotton or carry mustard flowers, make bricks—and the landlord’s men use the girls as they wish.”

  “But isn’t bonded labor illegal?” I had asked Ammi.

  “Of course, but anyone who complains is thrown in the private jail. Thousands live in virtual slavery. It is self-perpetuating, all part of the feudal economy and Sindhi and Punjabi social structures.”

  Sita continued her story.

  “In Karachi somebody beat up my father and stole his monkeys. Now he can’t walk at all.”

  “Where are your parents?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” Sita said, matter-of-factly. She paused and her voice saddened. “Probably in jail.”

  “Tell me about your case. Why are you and your sisters here?”

  Hanan returned with Manya and stood by Sita’s side. Manya looked to be eight years old and had a dimple similar to her sister’s. When she laughed her lips parted easily, displaying large teeth yellow as corn. Her sari was a magenta print with gold leaves, and it framed her face. All three girls were barefoot. As serious and determined as Sita seemed to be, her two sisters seemed carefree and playful.

  “They called us whores,” Sita said, without a bit of embarrassment. “But we are not whores. It’s all a mistake. We made our living as garbage pickers in the landfills on the edges of Karachi.”

  I had heard of the dangerous squatter settlements where tens of thousands of people lived in shanties and tents.

  “At night we would burn whatever fuel we collected during the day—chewing gum wrappers, cardboard, anything like that,” Sita added, nodding. “We cooked whatever our family scrounged to eat that day. Or we would sell the paper to rag dealers. But we didn’t get much for it. It was better just to burn it.”

  I could not imagine such a life and had no time to conjure what it would be like because then Sita’s story worsened. She cleared her throat.

  “Our father was beaten up, so now our youngest brother sits with him on street corners, tugging the sleeves of passersby, begging for coins, while father plays the drums.”

  Hanan and Manya listened to Sita tell their tale. When she signaled to them, they sat cross-legged in our circle.

  “We have to be careful of the men in our shantytown, Madam,” she continued. “They will snatch and hurt young girls.” The younger ones nodded. “There was an old man there who had a bicycle and a few tools. He would ride through the neighborhoods, calling to the women to let him sharpen their knives. You know. You’ve seen him, or others like him.”

  The girls nodded.

  “Well, one day when it was getting dark, he was riding by.” Hanan and Manya covered their mouths at the memory. “He reached out and grabbed me, touching me here,” Sita said, gesturing with the fingers of both hands turned to her breasts.

  “What did you do?” I asked, immediately annoyed at myself, worried that the way I framed the question made it sound like I was blaming her.

  “I slapped his hand away. That’s what I did.” She paused to register my reaction.

  I showed none.

  “My sisters were the only ones who saw what he had done. We told my mother, but she said not to tell our father. Then the next thing we knew, the police took all of us, including my parents, and brought us to this jail. They said that the tinker reported he had seen my sisters and me alone with three older boys, which wasn’t true. He was just mad because I slapped him, so he lied and said we were whores.”

  I looked up from my notetaking.

  “That’s all there is. Can you get us out of here? We have to get out of here.”

  “But I like it here,” Manya protested, leaning her elbow into my leg and grinning up at me. “The food is good and there is lots of it. We have a clean bed.”

  �
��I miss my mother and father,” said Hanan. “Madam, can you find out where they are?”

  “I don’t know, little one. I don’t know, but we’ll try,” I said, careful not to make promises I might not fulfill. I wrote down the girls’ ages, their parents’ and family names, the name of their village, the tinker, and the shantytown.

  “We have to go,” Faisah said, shouting from a distance and pointing to her wristwatch. Sita grabbed my sore elbow again.

  “And the jail lady?” she said. “We told you she treats us well because she was sitting right there. But she doesn’t. When we first got here she used to beat us. She beats most of the new girls. Behind her back we all call her Jallad—the Executioner. That’s the perfect job for her.”

  Once outside, we waited for the others to emerge from the men’s side of Central Prison. I leaned against the mudbrick wall, stunned by what I had learned.

  “Their stories break my heart,” I told Faisah, “but the girls themselves are so vibrant, so full of life.”

  Faisah nodded. She kept her thoughts to herself.

  Soon the professor walked us to a nearby Internet café where we made notes about our meetings. For once the freedom to choose even the tea we would drink seemed luxurious, unreal.

  “I only managed to get information on one case,” I said to Faisah. “You were able to do two.”

  “Pipe down,” Faisah said. “It was your first time.”

  But I did have three clients in my case, I thought, pleased to have “clients.” I scribbled everything I could remember into my notebook.

  “No problem getting the girls released through the civil courts,” Rani said. She was a first-year law student. “Arbitrarily jailed by the Shariah Court, it is just a matter of having jurisdiction transferred. They can be out in a matter of days—if we can find some relative to release them to. We checked the jail roster, and their parents were not there.”

  I imagined the girls on the street wearing cotton gloves and dragging plastic sacks as they walked, like common garbage-pickers.

  “But what will happen to them then?”

  “Without parents, they will go to the streets, or return to the shantytown to try to find their parents,” Rani said. “Fortunately, it’s not our problem. We get to be lawyers, not social workers.”

  “What will happen to these girls?” I asked Faisah afterward.

  “Who knows? Rani thinks that caring what happens isn’t part of legal work, but I disagree. A good lawyer is a good social worker, too. I told the girl I interviewed we’d try to find a place for her to stay until her family comes to get her.”

  “Let’s go home,” I said when the bus came into view. “Let’s see if Ammi has any ideas. Maybe the Women’s Aid Society can help.”

  As the bus carried us back to the flat-roofed mansions and high-rises of Clifton, my eyes absorbed Karachi. I realized I lived my life in a kind of tunnel from school to home, from here to there, a kind of shroud around my upper-class life. Now my vision was crystal clear, one lucid image after another.

  A grandfather drove a donkey cart loaded with burlap bags, and a young boy sat beside him. I longed for a close-up view. Who are they? I wondered. I imagined the boy clambering into the back of the cart when the man could not. And the grandfather would guide the donkey through the traffic when the young boy could not. Where are they going? And what is in the bags? Who are their people?

  The bus jolted forward and again my vision blurred. Still, I kept watching, and the clarity returned again and again.

  I saw a young man in a skullcap selling cauliflower. His hair was almost completely gray, and both of his arms were wrapped in gauze. Is he sick? How was he injured? Where did he get the cauliflower? Will he share his money, and with whom?

  When the bus stopped at the Two Swords traffic circle, I focused on a figure in a red-and-white-striped shirt—stripes wider than those on a rugby shirt. It was a boy—maybe twelve years old, standing with his back to the street. He was bent over, and his forehead was near his knees, hanging between his legs.

  “His master is making him put his ears behind his legs. He is being disciplined,” Faisah said. “God only knows how long he has been bent over like that.”

  “This is how they treat children!” I said in disgust.

  “This is how hatred is born.”

  The boy’s master, a bearded man in a tan shalwar kameez, watched the boy from inside a nearby machine shop. His hair was slick and parted down the middle. Two men inside the shop looked up from their work. I wondered how the machinists would react to the man who was torturing the boy in this fashion. Does it make them uncomfortable? Or is this treatment accepted and common? Do they notice we are staring, disapproving?

  They smiled at the boy’s master and exchanged a few words. The master moved casually toward the boy, who tried to straighten his back but could not. His torso remained at a right angle to his legs as he leaned onto a wooden chair in front of him. When he lifted his head, I saw that he was crying, not only the slow tears of humiliation, but also the hard, uncontrollable tears of a crying child. It was the tears, not the backache, which were the purpose of the torture.

  Finally, the boy inched away from the road. The master spoke to him and then wandered back to the neighbor’s shop. The boy watched the master out of the corner of his eye. His back now was stooped as he tried to recover from the ordeal. His eye remained always on his master. The master would always be there, the enemy who would wake him in the morning.

  By the time we reached Clifton it was late afternoon, when women are expected to be home. We walked the winding path, eager to tell Ammi all that had happened. The purple bougainvillea petals at the entrance glowed like thousands of small paper lanterns. My back ached as I pushed the door open.

  Abbu was sitting in the front hall.

  “Come in, girls,” he said, wrapping his arms around us. “Your mother is sick. The doctors say she has had a stroke. Come upstairs. She wants to see you right away.”

  Life stood at its blackboard like a crazed mathematician scribbling his proofs. “See that?” he said, pounding his chalk into the slate, then turning around to look us straight in the eye. “There are no progressions, no formulas, no geometry. God is the only constant.”

  Everyone in the family suffered. Nafeesa’s losses were only the most obvious. The first stroke took her mobility, so Kulraj Singh carried her to the bamboo table for meals or onto the verandah for tea. The next strokes robbed, first, her concentration, then her speech, and finally, they seized her massive energy, and her life.

  He purchased two wheelchairs, one for upstairs and one for down. Until the electric lift could be installed, he took her up and down the stairs in his arms. He would come home from the office to do it if necessary.

  “Iqbal can carry me,” she said. “You need not leave work to do it.”

  “It has always been my pleasure to touch you, Nafeesa. I won’t share that honor with the gardener.”

  On summer nights they slept on the roof under Karachi’s blanket. He placed her chair at the roof’s edge, where they had a clear view of the Arabian Sea.

  “I’m afraid, Kulraj,” she whispered. “Just look into the blackness of the ocean. Look at it out there, waiting for me. It sounds like the rattle in my grandmother’s throat.”

  He dragged over the two string beds that Ujala had prepared with pillows and dhurries. The beds’ guts were dried and prolapsed, in need of mending. He bent toward her and Nafeesa took his hand.

  “Let me help you lie down,” he urged, but her shadow remained stiff and still. She would not turn away from her view.

  “Where will I go?” she asked. The question circled in the midnight, and he let it be. “Will God go with me?” Then she turned to him with a force he did not know she still retained. “You are the priest,” she said. “I am just a woman. You tell me, my guru, my imam, what next?”

  “You are always with you,” he said, “and you are divine—what I have worshipped all thes
e years.”

  She did not respond.

  “And in the dark you must not forget that when it is daylight the sea is calm and blue,” he said cautiously. “And don’t we love what comes to us out of the blue?”

  Then she laughed, dropping his hand.

  “You are a crazy old man, Kulraj Singh!” Then she became quiet. “Will you miss me when I am gone?”

  She wanted something from him. He stared at her question. Miss her? If he thought about missing her, he would never be able to harden his voice to encourage her. So instead, he argued.

  “First, you are not going anywhere soon,” he said, clearing his throat. “You have had a stroke, not a death sentence. Second,” he continued with his list, like a lawyer arguing the losing side of a case, “dying is something we all must do alone.” He said the word, dying, then hurried to add, “but we will never abandon you.”