“You know,” Robina said, “these are my children, but they are not my children. Their mother was my sister, Mukhtara, who was killed a few months ago. So the children came to live with me, and now I am their mother.”
I did not know this about Robina, and wondered why Ammi never mentioned it. I touched Robina’s hand.
“Our parents live outside of Sukkur. They were too poor to give a dowry for my sister, so they gave her to a man older than our father who was already married with five children. She begged them not to do it. I told her to run away, but she said to me, ‘If I refuse to marry him, they will kill me.’ And I knew it was true, you know, so she was trapped. Seven years later she had four children, plus she took care of the first wife’s five.”
Robina said nothing as she lay the baby down on the string bed. I thought she was gathering strength to continue her story.
“One day a neighbor told her husband he saw Mukhtara talking with one of our cousins. He accused Mukhtara of adultery, and her husband filed a case against her in court. Before the court ruled, the mullahs condemned her—she is kari, they said, black. Trash. Five men cornered her at the well pump one day. She tried to hide in the rows of sugarcane, but they caught her. They stripped her naked and stoned her to death right there in the field.”
Robina was rocking back and forth as she spoke. I reached out to touch her, but she waved my hand away, smoothing her kameez and attempting a smile.
“So now, suddenly—motherhood—my sister’s four, and I’m expecting a fifth later this year,” she added, patting her belly. “My husband sells cloth in the street all day and works on cars at night. We get by.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had never faced problems like these, or seen such fortitude. I admired it, but it also made me uncomfortable.
“I should go,” I said, and Robina stood to open the door.
“Ujala, your mother is a saint, you know. Even with the problems she is having now, she has offered to let me use her sewing machine to make some extra money. Please tell her that I will accept her generosity as soon as I can find time away from the children to do some sewing.”
I was surprised by this news about Ammi offering the use of her sewing machine. She was always very particular about who used her machine and how. She still would not let me spin the wheel or tap the treadle unless she was by my side, supervising.
“May Allah heal her quickly and bless your family,” Robina said. “Let me walk you to the road.”
“I’ll be all right. I’ll find a taxi at the corner,” I said, kissing Robina on both cheeks.
Why didn’t Ammi tell me about Robina’s sister or about loaning out her sewing machine? I felt a sudden jealousy of their relationship that held secrets, and of Robina’s strength. She knew what she believed, and she spoke her mind. She accepted whatever faced her, and at the same time was gracious in a natural way, not the result of convent training. I wondered what else my mother was not telling me. I wanted to know Ammi’s secrets, the missing pieces of her childhood, all the things she never talked about. I realized that in wanting these things, I was violating an unwritten rule that only she could control the subjects we discussed. I had to find a way to get her to talk to me.
As I walked up Clifton Road I considered that maybe the missing details of Ammi’s life were the keys to finding out where life was taking me. Turning into the family compound, I saw my father pacing next to a truck parked at the door.
“Abbu, what’s going on?” I asked. “It’s Ammi, isn’t it?”
He squeezed my shoulder. “We’re going to the hospital, Uji. She may have had another stroke. She is still breathing. Please be here for Amir and Meena when they get home.”
The men pushed the wheels of a gurney over the cobblestones and lifted Ammi into the truck. Abbu climbed in next to her.
“I’ll call you when we know more.”
Then he stretched his arm out to grasp my hand. He spoke in Punjabi, “‘Jau tau prem khelan ka chao, sir dhar tali gali meri aao.’ Say it many times,” he instructed. “It will calm your fears.” I knew my father’s old Sikh prayer about preparing yourself to make the sacrifice that love requires.
But the words didn’t calm me. They frightened me.
As the porters closed the back of the truck, I heard my father’s voice calling to me, “We have to love God more than we love each other. We must accept the will of Allah, not our own.”
I could only swallow to hold back my tears.
“Jau tau prem khelan ka chao, sir dhar tali gali meri aao,” I whispered to myself. If you want to play the game of love, come to me with your head in the palm of your hand.
My mother used to tell us that the first thing she noticed about our father when they met was his long, smooth fingers.
As I stood at the door to their bedroom where my mother lay immobile, I watched those fingers arrange and rearrange her blankets—to warm her, to ensure that the smoothest silk edges were close to her face, to have something to hold onto, something material, physical, undeniably present. If only a blanket.
I imagined I heard her call him “Mr. Singh,” as she so often had. “Mr. Singh, is that you?” she would have said. But she could not speak. She could only hear her worried children who surrounded her bed.
Meena, curious: “Is she asleep? Why doesn’t she say something?”
Faisah, bossy: “Shh! She can hear everything we say.”
Amir, sad, questioning: “But her eyes are closed.”
Reshma, thinking of Ammi: “Everybody out of here.”
Like the tax collector, Ammi’s second stroke took its toll bit by bit. She could not walk, but with help she could sit for short periods. She could not talk, but she grunted in several tones. Her weak arm became the stronger one because what had been her stronger arm following her first stroke became entirely useless following the second. Her memory seemed intact, as did her hearing and vision, but she could no longer read anything but the simplest words. She had trouble swallowing.
We took turns spooning yogurt and kheer into her.
I could see the effort it took her to make her crooked smile. She wanted so much for us to think that she was holding up. She would pull herself together for dinner and try to perk up for visitors, appearing to listen, nodding and smiling. But eventually her eyelids fluttered and her consciousness drifted away.
I knew it was only a matter of time. Allah, be merciful! She was a tiny boat on a vast horizon.
Everyone’s routine changed. Before leaving for her classes, Faisah bathed and dressed Ammi. Abbu took leave from his firm to be home when Meena and Amir returned from school. He prayed even more than usual. Often he was on his knees by the window when she woke from naps. I was determined that the twins keep their routines, dress properly, and have their books and assignments ready for school. I watched them board the school bus in the mornings. Then I would sit on the verandah and read the newspapers to my mother.
One morning I sat at Ammi’s feet reading the news while she rubbed mustard oil into my hair. She dabbed the oil onto the palm of her bad hand, then dipped the fingertips of her good hand, to work it into my scalp. She pulled the oil down the strands of hair slowly as I read, until my scalp was slick.
“Whew! I smell like a lamb kabob!” I laughed and Ammi tried to cuff my head but missed her mark and batted the air like a kitten.
It was a close and peaceful time for the two of us. We kept each other’s worries company.
She sat in the wheelchair with her legs propped against a flowered pillow on the string bed. She didn’t look sick at all.
“You look lovely today, Ammi,” I told her, which brought out her crooked smile again. “Your color is clear, even your eyes look lighter.”
I placed a mirror in her good hand, and she dared to look. Her hair was beginning to gray. Faisah had woven a single braid for her that morning. When she was vertical, the braid hung down like a spine. When she slept, it rested on her shoulder and fell over her breast. I
could see that Ammi found some comfort in fingering the braid during the day. At night she unloosened it slowly, and our father brushed her hair before lifting her into bed.
“The government’s report on progress in Pakistani education is on the front page today,” I said, placing her cup of tea on the tray between us. She took a sip.
Ammi mumbled and grinned.
“Yes, that would be a short report,” I replied, realizing I had interpreted her mumbles accurately. Then I began to read the report’s statistics.
“‘Twenty-six percent of Pakistanis are literate, ranging from almost sixty percent among Sindhi men, to less than two percent among Balochi women.’ It says that this may actually represent a decline in literacy compared to ten years ago.”
Ammi groaned, knowing that as bad as the numbers were, the statistics had been inflated. The government counted you as literate even if all you could read or write was your own name.
I folded back the page.
“Here’s an interesting commentary,” I said. “‘Studies reveal that parents’ biggest concern about sending a girl to school is the possible danger that might occur to the girl’s honor.’”
Ammi snorted. Honor—a word I knew she despised for the cruelty it concealed.
With her index finger Ammi began making little circles on the pillow. I stopped reading and watched. Concentrating in order to control her arm, she drew a short vertical line on the cotton cover, then a horizontal line to cross the vertical one.
“You’re trying to write!” I said. I was really excited. “Are you trying to write?”
Ammi relaxed back onto the pillow, nodding, forcing her face into a relieved, uneven smile.
“I’ll be right back.”
I rushed away and returned with a pad of paper, a pencil, and Amir’s round red plastic See and Spell game. It had the entire English alphabet on it. “You can write with the pencil, Ammi, or just point to the letters,” I said, placing the items by her good hand.
She pushed the pad onto the floor and took up the pencil. She stretched to point to the letter T.
“T,” I said, looking at her expectantly.
Ammi nodded and put the pencil down, which confused me.
“OK, Ammi, I understand—T is the first letter, now, what else?” I asked. Again I put the pencil between her fingers, but I could see that Ammi was running out of patience. She lifted the pencil again and stretched her arm pointing to the E.
“OK, T . . . E . . .” I said, scrutinizing, as Ammi strained to point next to the A. “T, E, A,” I said and laughed. “Oh! You want some tea?”
Ammi grunted and lay back again, nodding. Yes, I want some tea! I held a cup to her lips. She slurped her satisfaction, then pointed the pencil again.
“R,” I said.
Ammi pointed to the U.
“R . . . U,” I repeated, “ . . . Am I what, Ammi?” I asked her.
But she jiggled her head with two lengthy grunts, demanding that I pay closer attention. She pointed the pencil at the S, and before she got to the K, I was feeding her cake rusk from her plate.
“I miss hearing your voice,” I told her. “I wish we could talk back and forth. It seems so selfish for me to be in a monologue all the time.”
Ammi expelled seven even grunts, rocking her head back and forth. “It is not a monologue,” she expressed in her way.
“Great,” I said. “Then let’s keep talking—do you remember our talk about why the other women bought the stale vegetables and I bought the fresh ones?”
She nodded, listening.
“Well, since you’ve been sick,” I told her, “I’ve been out by myself more—not just sending Amir. I visited Robina and her neighbors. For the first time I am seeing poverty—not in the abstract, like they write about it in reports like this one”—I snapped my fingernails into the newspaper—“but in the real details, with real people.”
Ammi pulled her lips tightly across her teeth. I continued.
“Robina’s sister was murdered—stoned to death—merely for talking to her cousin! You knew about it, didn’t you?”
Of course she knew. Ammi closed her eyes and nodded, closing her eyes.
“Why didn’t you let me know before I went there?” I asked, but then hesitated. Ammi couldn’t explain herself now. “But never mind. Robina told me about it, and I saw the four children that are now hers. And did you know she is pregnant?”
Ammi kept her eyes closed and nodded again. I wanted to ask about the sewing machine.
“Robina said you told her she could borrow your sewing machine. Should I take it to her? It would really help, and we’re not using it.”
Ammi opened her eyes and nodded her assent. She looked pleased that I was interested in Robina and her problems.
“I’ll take it to her tomorrow. Of course, she needs time away from the children to do any sewing, but the children don’t go to school. None of the children around there attend any school. Robina says she tries to teach them at home, but I don’t see how she can. I doubt if she can read or write herself.”
Suddenly Ammi tapped the See and Spell to get my attention. She pointed to the T.
I reached for the teacup.
Ammi tapped the cover again, and I watched as she pointed next to the E, then the A.
“I understand. You want more tea, right?”
But Ammi ignored me and focused on what she was doing, pointing next to the C, and then to the H.
“Teach . . . ,” I said, reading the word aloud, while Ammi continued pointing, spelling out the letters—T . . . H . . . E . . . M.
“Teach them. Teach them. You are telling me to teach Robina’s children?”
At last I understood. Ammi smiled and relaxed back onto the pillow.
“Teach them,” I kept repeating. “I guess I could do it in the afternoons when Abbu is home—at least for a while. It would give Robina time to work on the sewing, and it would be interesting, and I might really enjoy it. I’d have to get some supplies. Maybe I could call your friends at the Women’s Aid Society for some ideas.”
I was very excited.
“Yes, I can do it. It would feel good to help somebody who needs it.”
As Ammi drifted into sleep I lifted the tip of her braid and draped it across her heart.
11
Adaila Prison, 1996
A persistent knock on Rahima Mai’s door. Ujala’s heartbeat quickened to the sound.
“Madam, Madam,” the sergeant-guard’s voice called through the metal door.
Rahima Mai was not responding. Her eyes were fixed on the shadowed wall. Teach them, she thought. Teach them.
Daylight had disappeared during the storytelling. Ujala knew it was time to return to her cell. She laid her hand on Rahima Mai’s knee, and the warden jolted back to life. Rahima Mai gestured toward the door.
“Shut her up!”
Ujala rose. Could Rahima Mai understand her now—after all she had heard? She started to ask her, but then thought better of it. Instead, she unlocked the door to let the sergeant-guard into the room. The woman handed her a slip of paper and glanced at Rahima Mai, who sat by the teakettle.
The message was nothing important. Ujala locked the door behind the woman. She began to return the papers to their filing boxes, as she usually did at the end of the workday.
“And after your mother’s second stroke? What happened then?” Rahima Mai tilted her head and raised her eyebrows.
Ujala realized Rahima Mai did not want her to leave.
“My eyes opened again,” she said.
* * *
“You go on ahead, Amir,” I told my brother. “Take the butter cakes to Mrs. Shahani so she will have something to offer us when I arrive.” Amir latched his fingers under the box’s strings and headed for Clifton Road.
“I’ll be back for you in thirty minutes, Baji,” he called to me.
“No need. Wait for me there,” I said. “I will bring the sewing machine in a taxi.”
Under
the archway the faded edges of the bougainvillea were summer crispy. I stood in its shade and tied the sewing machine to the wagon with ropes. I dragged the wagon to Clifton Road and hailed a rickshaw. The driver grunted as he lifted the machine and the wagon onboard.
“You are a seamstress, Madam?” he asked.
My Sisters Made of Light Page 24
