“No. I am a teacher,” I said. I liked saying it.
“Ooh,” said the driver, pretending to be impressed. “A teacher!”
My comment edged the class line between us. I withdrew from his false, sticky flattery.
Standing by her door, holding the baby, Robina watched me tug the wagon down the passage to her house.
“Amir!” she called to my brother who came from inside her house. He took hold of the wagon’s handle, and I pushed from behind.
“Tsk! That driver should have brought you all the way down here,” said Robina. “Those guys move too fast, always on to the next fare, cutting corners.”Amir lifted the sewing machine onto a metal crate in the corner. One of the girls napped on the couch next to a spittoon. Robina and Amir disappeared into the next room.
“Where are the other children?” I said in the direction of the door. Robina peeked around the corner.
“Oh, they are out here. If you don’t mind, why don’t you join us?”
What I had assumed was Robina’s “other room” was actually a mudbrick courtyard that her family shared with ten others. Robina’s “living room” was the family’s only room. Outdoors each family had its own kerosene stove. A community toilet was concealed behind corrugated tin under a thatched roof. Laundry lined one wall, where women sat cross-legged, crocheting, shelling beans, kneading dough, nursing babies. Two girls swept the packed dirt floor with tied sticks. A dog slept in the shade beside a naked toddler. Flies swarmed near them. Older children played with a pink soccer ball.
Robina offered me a metal folding chair in the shade, and tea and the butter cakes that Amir had delivered earlier. Soon the neighborhood children crowded around. I realized they were hungry.
“Run along,” Robina said, shooing them. They moved a few feet apart, but kept their eyes on me, this stranger with butter cakes in her hands.
“Robina, I’ve been thinking about becoming a teacher,” I said, “but I need experience.”
“Oh?”
“I was wondering if you would help me by letting me work with your children.” She broke off morsels of butter cake and gave them to the children who were back at her side. “What if I taught some lessons here for a few hours in the afternoons, while you work on your sewing?”
“Here?”
I tried not to sound insulting or condescending. “I am bored at home. Abbu is home in the afternoons and can stay with Ammi. I am free to use that time.” I hesitated, not wanting to beg. “I’d really like to try,” I said.
Robina tossed her head back, looking all around the courtyard.
“It would be so wonderful, Ujala, but how can I accept such a gift? You know I couldn’t afford to pay you.”
“Oh, no. It is no problem. You’d be doing me a favor.”
“As you wish,” said Robina. “But it’s not only my children who can’t go to school. None of these children can go to school either.” I counted eighteen children in the yard. “The prime minister’s famous literacy program built a school nearby, but it was open for less than one term when the teachers quit. They were not being paid, and books and supplies never arrived. Soon the politicians made a big noise about who had taken bribes, who had run off with the book budget, and who had not repaired the building. Another scandal and the children suffer.”
“You think I could teach these other children, too?” I was stunned by the idea of such a large class.
“I am afraid you would have to. You won’t be able to teach mine without the other mothers knowing. They would resent it. As it is, they are jealous because someone like you comes to visit me. You must stop by and visit each one of them while you are here. To do them the honor.”
Robina handed me a bowl of hard, pale lentils.
“Would you like to pick through these while I mix the flour?” she asked, squatting and stretching to reach the plastic bowl.
I ran my fingers through the beans, taking pleasure in their cool, smooth texture. I found a few broken stones. I recalled Ammi spelling it out for me, “Teach them.”
“Yes. I could teach the others, too,” I decided.
“We could set up a school right here,” said Robina. “Don’t worry. The mothers will do everything to help.”
Before I left that day, I visited each cooking area to sit with the other women.
“My son,” a toothless woman told me, casting her eyes to the eight-by-ten framed photograph of a young man in uniform. “He is on the border. Kashmir. Ooh,” she said, cupping her hand over her mouth and squeezing my hand. I glanced at Amir, who stood by the stove, listening.
Opposite the wall with the family photos, the eyes of a Bollywood poster seduced anyone who looked into their shadows. A child-sized plastic ET peered from a behind a chair. One woman’s daughter and her daughter-in-law looked like teenage twins. Their babies were wrapped in sweaters and caps, even in the swelter of Karachi.
“Sit next to me,” said the oldest woman. She was a wrapped figure with a smooth face and three teeth. Her eyes oozed like candle wax. She took my hand. Robina sat on my right, and soon another woman with a baby joined us on the cots, each greeting me, “Assalam aleikum.” The old woman kept stroking my hand. Finally I wrapped my arms around her body and rocked her like a baby.
“What is it? Why is she crying?” I asked Robina.
“She was a city worker for thirty years and retired two years ago.”
“But why is she crying? Does she miss going to work?” Robina shrugged her shoulders and gestured toward the man lying on a cot in the shade.
“My husband,” the woman said. “A drug addict all his life, and now his liver fails him.”
My stomach felt as tight as the jute on a string bed.
“Shouldn’t we discuss their children coming to the school?” I asked Robina.
“No need,” she said. “You touched their hands. You held their grandmother. It is enough. They will come.”
We watched Ammi die a little bit each day. Finally, one night her neck muscles slackened, her head rolled onto her shoulder, and Abbu carried her to bed one last time. Reshma stayed with us in the women’s quarter during those days. I remember her lifting Ammi’s limp arm so I could thread it through the armhole of her nightgown. Ammi grabbed the cotton with her good hand and pulled the gown away from her body.
“Ammi,” said Reshma. “Ammi, let us do it. Let us cover you.”
But Ammi refused to surrender. “Arrrgh!” she mumbled, giving my arm a sharp pinch.
“Ouch!”
I had underestimated her strength again. The agitation was exhausting her, and we were making things worse trying to dress her. What difference did it make if she was naked?
We laid her head on the dark muslin pillowcase, fanned her hair away from her body, and blotted her perspiring brow and neck with cloths.
“I’ll stay with her,” Reshma said. “I’ll cover her if it turns cold.”
I looked at Ammi, recalling the vibrant mother of my youth.
“I remember the years before you were born, Uji,” Reshma said, “when I was the only child and had Ammi all to myself. She took me with her everywhere. At her Women’s Aid meetings, I did homework while they planned their literacy projects.
“‘Education is the light of the eye,’ Ammi told me. She piled magazines into my lap and told me to trace all the eyes I could find in the pictures, so I would never forget how precious it is to learn. ‘And don’t forget to put the light in them!’ she would say. I never could draw light, but to Ammi, anything was possible . . . now look at her. O, Ammi! Allah, be merciful.”
Later Reshma slept by the window. I rocked in the walnut chair that, until Ammi’s illness, had remained in Amir’s room—he and Meena were the lap babies, the last ones to be cuddled in it. Now we each took turns in the rocker, watching our mother awake or asleep. In her restlessness, she would murmur “oy,” and, from time to time, she called out a garbled “Ammi!” wanting her own mother.
September cooled as the ch
anging winds arrived from the sea, cleansing the air of Karachi. At the window I rested my eyes on the glistening sea. I felt the changes around me without judgment, without opinion. I rocked in the chair, while Ammi lay pale against the dark bed linens, resting in a fetal position, her hands fisted together in her naked lap. With a bubble of breath Ammi died that way, wrapped into herself, like a slice of the moon above a starry sea.
When I went to Abbu, he was kneeling by an open window, letting the chill wash over him. He had seen the crescent moon and the stars. He pulled on my hand to bring me to my knees and he prayed.
“May the soul of my beloved rest in the union of her divinity and Yours.”
I went to awaken Faisah and Meena. They held each other, crying less than I would have expected. Then Meena pulled away.
“Baji, I’m afraid to look at her,” she whispered.
“Oh, Meena. We will send her to God’s arms.”
I went to Amir. To my surprise, he was in the dark, playing with his video game. He would not look at me.
“Amir, my Amir,” I said, lifting his chin, forcing him to look into my face. I put my arm around his shoulder. “Ammi died,” I told him, and he cried like a baby.
Reshma took over. Abbu and I telephoned family and friends, who came to be with us in the middle of the night. From the verandah I could see Abbu and Amir spreading out rugs and arranging chairs for our guests. Abbu was trying to comfort his son.
“Amir, pleasure and pain are one set of robes that men must keep on wearing,” he said. “Remember when you were a child and broke your arm? Remember how much it hurt?”
Amir nodded.
“That pain passed, didn’t it? You must let this pain pass, too.”
Reshma had taken a plain cotton cloth and tied Ammi’s slack mouth shut. The effect was comical.
“She looks like she has the world’s biggest toothache,” I said.
Reshma did not crack a smile. She handed me a folded cloth.
“Now place this sheet over her body.”
“No,” I said, “not yet. I want to see her still.”
“We will see her,” said Reshma. “First we must cover her, and then we will wash her. You and Faisah, get clean water, shampoo and soap, washing bowls. Meena, bring some camphor and rose water.”
When we returned, the four of us began our task, including eleven-year old Meena, who watched Reshma all the while, not looking at Ammi’s face.
“In the name of Allah,” Reshma said, lifting our mother’s upper body forward.
“In the name of Allah,” we said, placing our hands on Ammi’s back.
“Tie these cloths around her feet and ankles,” Reshma said.
We worked at a deliberate pace, speaking only when necessary. We cleansed Ammi completely—her head first—rolling it to one side and then to the other. Next, we washed her torso—the upper part first, and then the lower, the right side first, and then the left, all according to the teachings.
Then Reshma held Ammi’s head over a bowl, while I rubbed shampoo into her scalp and through her hair, on the right side. Faisah poured clean water over the soapy mass, and Meena lifted clumps of hair, running her fingers through, rinsing until it squeaked. We completed the washing and rinsing on the left side, then repeated the entire process. In the end, Ammi’s hair was washed three times. We took turns holding her head and fingering her hair for the last time. Then we divided her mane into nine parts, braided each part separately first, then braided the nine into three, and placed them underneath her body.
She looks refreshed, I thought. As if she’s been swimming.
When the body and the hair were completely cleaned, we tapped every centimeter of her skin with cloths, anointing her with camphor and rose water until the fragrances overwhelmed us. Reshma again covered Ammi with the white sheet, and then removed from fresh brown paper five white cotton cloths: two sheets, a long sleeveless shirt, a cloth cincture, and a head veil. We lifted Ammi up so we could pull a sheet under her and lay her down on it. Our tears sprinkled the cloth. Ammi was wrapped, cloaked, shrouded, and draped in death’s shawl. We placed the veil last, then put her hands across her chest, her right hand on top, and folded the edges of the top sheets over her and fastened cloth ropes around her body. One rope was wrapped lengthwise, from her head down under her feet, and two ropes were wrapped around the middle. Finally, we lifted the package that was our mother and placed it onto a common string bed.
Then Reshma handed each one of us a clean white dupatta, and, as we covered our heads to pray, the four of us climbed onto the poster bed and gazed at what we had done. We knew we were different for having done it.
12
Adaila Prison, 1996
Ujala heard a rustling of plastic bags under Rahima Mai’s desk and wondered what gift she had brought this time. Then Rahima Mai handed Ujala a block wrapped in thin paper. Ujala sniffed the fragrance of lavender. It was scented soap.
“And one other thing,” Rahima Mai said, handing her an unwrapped pink and orange dupatta.
“It is identical to the one I gave to Khanum!” Ujala said. She was both touched and confused by Rahima Mai’s thoughtfulness, her strange cheerfulness.
“And like the one you gave to Robina,” said Rahima Mai, smiling ear to ear. “I am officially bribing you—now that’s a reversal!” She laughed, picked up the two plastic chairs and placed them near the teakettle again. This time she did not have to ask.
“So let me tell you at last what actually brought me to Adaila.”
* * *
One afternoon after my return from Chitral, I drove to the WASP office from a training session in Gujranwala. I followed the Chenab River to the GT Road. I remember now how the setting sun was reflected in the copper pots that hung from stalls along the road. Melamine dishware and piles of second-hand clothing were stacked on dhurries under a line of poplars. The road was littered and the river was choppy.
It was early evening when I climbed the staircase of our office building. It was hot, and I was weary. But even the stuffy corridor was preferable to the intensity of the sun.
Then I saw him.
Standing in the hall outside of our office was the man I had seen in the striped shawl with Aga Ji in the compound. There was no one else in the hallway, and he had not yet seen me. As he turned around, I reached into my bag for the revolver.
“You stole my daughter!” he yelled, shaking his fist over his head. He ground his feet into the floor to block my passage.
With my eyes on him, I stepped back toward the stairs. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bottle. He uncorked the cap and tried to splash me, but I jumped away. I extended the revolver, gripping it in both hands, as I had practiced. But he faced me down, his moustache quivering. He held the bottle’s mouth toward me as if it were a gun.
I fired once, aiming above his head, hitting only the wall. He jumped back.
“You stole my daughter!” he repeated, spitting in the air. “You stole my daughter!” He stayed frozen where he was, with his hand extended. Acid dripped out the bottle, down onto his hand. When he raised his forearm in response, the chemicals rolled along his arm into his loose sleeve. He grimaced with pain and dropped the bottle.
“Get out!” I commanded, gesturing with the gun toward the staircase behind him. I could hear his body tripping down the stairs and his last words, screaming: “Next time, you devil, you will not see me coming!”
* * *
Ujala was squinting and shaking her hands as she dramatized the moment for Rahima Mai. Then she realized that this was her last story. She settled into the molded plastic that hugged her hips.
“So that is how I started out on Clifton Road and ended up in Adaila Prison, Baji—jailed the next day for kidnapping Chanda and for brandishing the revolver at her father, attempted murder.”
Rahima Mai’s chair scraped the floor as she rose.
“I see,” she said. “I see.” Then she turned to face Ujala. “But how . . . I mean,
why . . . what was it that made you so sure, so willing . . .”
Ujala listened to what Rahima Mai was struggling to ask. “Because I became their mother,” she said.
“Their mother? Whose mother? Faisah, Meena, and Amir?
“Yes. And the others.”
My Sisters Made of Light Page 25
