by Ali Sethi
“Well, you shouldn’t.”
“You can take the driver, you can take the maid if you want.”
“But I don’t see the need.”
“Every day there are stories, there are rapes and robberies . . .”
“I don’t feel the need.”
“Then take the child, take the child if you don’t see, if you don’t want to see. Don’t leave the child with me.”
And my mother did, to prove a point. But the outings were marred by other commitments, the responsibilities of a journalist: the smoke on roads and the traffic jams in the afternoon; the light red, orange, green and red again; the crescent on an ambulance, and the flashing red light of the cavalcades. The late sun bled and bled.
“I’m trying,” she said, “be patient, please.”
At home, Daadi asked, “So how was the day?” Her tone was armored.
I said it was fine.
“We had a lot of fun,” said Samar Api, inserting her perspective to broaden the view, and later, to me, “You’re so selfish.”
After the protest, when the editor removed my mother from her job, she became briefly confined to the house. Her friends came over to condole, but then she tired of it and began to go out to see them. Her routine collapsed.
At once Daadi became conciliatory. She began to ask after my mother and initiated conversations that were unusual in their involvement and fervency. She was attuned now to the rigidities of journalism: the shortcomings and the endless risks and the futility—it didn’t even pay well. And concurrently Daadi began to talk of her property in Anarkali. They could sell it and build a block of flats elsewhere and rent them out periodically. She had consulted Suri’s husband, who knew about housing and said that now was just the time to invest. In fact they ought to seize the opportunity.
But my mother had made up her mind: she and Auntie Nargis were going to start their own magazine, a journal devoted to women’s issues (but not confined to those issues). My mother was going to edit, and Auntie Nargis had agreed to run the marketing department. They were going to call it Women’s Journal.
Daadi stared at my mother, said she should have known better and went to lie down on her bed.
Women’s Journal was launched in the last week of October. Auntie Nargis went to see the chief minister and obtained a No Objection Certificate after showing him a dummy that was also a fraud: it had only four pages (they planned to have twenty) and showed women standing about in draperies. An actress agreed to attend the launch but called up on the morning of the event to cancel. My mother had to cut the ribbon. There was applause. A photographer took pictures, which appeared in the second issue of Women’s Journal, in a section called “Launch”: there was a picture of Samar Api (Young Samar) and me (and Young Zaki), and one each of Barkat and Naseem, who were given free copies. The editorial was entitled “Repeal the Black Laws!” Auntie Nargis drew a funny cartoon (she signed under a pseudonym) and provided a flattering sketch of Benazir to accompany a profile, attributed to someone called Sara Hasan, who was, like the other contributors, a fake: all the pieces were composed by the editor and publisher, who pretended nevertheless to have gathered a colorful staff from diverse ethnic backgrounds. (They came up with names like Tariq Bhatti, Aafia Khan, Mir Shadaab Baloch and Samuel Masih.) Some of the pages were joined at the edges and had to be torn. The price was twenty rupees.
The first real member of the staff was Miss, my English teacher at school. My mother recruited her at the parent-teacher conference. Miss had earned a master’s degree in English from Punjab University and was sent out a few times to report on cultural events. But her writing style was choppy and unprofessional, and she was soon transferred to the graphics and layout department. It was strange having her in the house with my mother, like a merger of separate realities in a dream, and her loss at school was mourned, because her replacement was an arthritic old lady who couldn’t speak English, who carried a ruler for discipline and shouted, “Don’t behave!” when the class was rowdy.
The circulation grew. Two hundred copies were printed and dispatched in the first two weeks. In the third week no copies were returned, and a vet placed a black-and-white ad on the back page. A bumper issue appeared to mark the start of the new year. It said on the masthead: The staff and management of Women’s Journal wish you a happy and auspicious New Year! The price was raised to twenty-five rupees. But the following week there were letters of protest, two from Lahore and one from Faisalabad, and the price retreated. In spring Auntie Nargis flew to Karachi to meet a businesswoman who had developed a liking for the magazine and wanted to support it in whatever way she could, and there was excited talk at the office of a full-page color ad, estimated to fetch no less than forty thousand rupees.
The word spread. One evening a woman went to Pioneer Store in Main Market and asked for a copy of Women’s Journal.
The manager was sitting at his desk. He indicated the rack that held the newspapers and magazines and said, “It is not there? Then it is not there.”
The woman looked at the publications hanging off the rack. “It can’t be,” she said. “Everyone else has got it.”
“O JUNAID!” cried the manager.
“WHAT!” cried Junaid from the poultry section.
“DO WE HAVE WOMEN’S MAG?”
“Women’s Journal,” corrected the woman.
“WHAT?” cried Junaid.
“WOMEN’S JOURNAL!” cried the manager. “DO WE HAVE IT?”
“WOMEN’S JOURNAL?”
“YES, WOMEN’S JOURNAL!”
“NO!” cried Junaid from poultry. “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WOMEN’S JOURNAL!”
“You are wrong,” said the woman, and laughed disdainfully. “It is the best new magazine. And if you haven’t got it, you haven’t got a thing. You have lost a customer in me today.” And she went out of the shop.
Then two children came in, younger boy and older girl, and asked for a copy of Women’s Journal. The manager was distraught. He picked up the telephone and dialed a number and said, “We don’t have it here. But come tomorrow and you will find it.”
Outside the shop, in the van, my mother said, “What did he say?”
“He said come tomorrow,” said Samar Api.
I said, “He was calling someone on the phone.”
And my mother said, “Good. Good. That’s initiative.”
The next day Pioneer Store ordered twenty copies of Women’s Journal and hung them on the rack.
Once a year my mother and I went to see Papu and Mabi in Karachi. They paid for our tickets, a detail that was mentioned again and again in Daadi’s room and turned our trips into acts of privilege and privacy. Packing was discussed for days, and suitcases were stuffed and emptied and stuffed again. It was important to consider toys and clothes with honesty and to take only what was necessary.
“O God,” said Samar Api. “Take something to read.”
She could say it because she had read many magazines.
I enjoyed the Beach Fantasy Hotel, though by now nothing resembling a beach fantasy could be found there. The water beyond the deck was black and swampy and stank of fish in the afternoons, and was surrounded by territorial seagulls that were always in a panic. The elevators inside the hotel were occupied by fat, fiddling men and made-up women, silent and habitual, as though they had dressed for a wedding that was perpetually around the corner.
But little had changed in the general manager’s suite on the fourth floor of the tall, whitewashed building. My mother said Papu was like the man he used to be, pressed and cuff-linked in his suits, with only the thin new folds of skin on his face to show for his age. And Mabi was able to move around the suite with youthful ease in a sari, though she was shriveled now and slightly stooped, like a chili exposed to the sun. Sometimes our trips coincided with those of Auntie Shazreh, my mother’s younger sister, who brought expensive chocolates from Canada but left her husband and children at home.
“Why does she do that?”
I asked my mother.
“Because she still hasn’t forgiven Papu and Mabi.”
“Why hasn’t she forgiven them?”
“Because some people hold grudges.”
“What’s grudges?”
“Look it up.”
I said, “Does it mean something bad?”
“Not bad . . .”
“Then what?”
She thought about it and said, “They’re disciplinarians. And it’s important to have some disciplinarians in your life.”
I said, “Who’s the disciplinarian in your life?”
“You’re getting quite sharp, mister. Shall I leave you here with Mabi?”
“Sorry,” I said, because it was not something I could imagine, living with Papu and Mabi in the suite and having to eat all my meals at their small round table, where the napkins were starched and folded into triangles and placed on the smaller plates, and forks and knives were used in limited ways. It was not uncommon, while we were eating, for Papu to look up from his plate and say:Zaki Zaki Strong and Able
Take Your Elbows Off the Table
This Is Not a Horse’s Stable
But a First-Class Dining Table
So I stayed away from the general manager’s suite, and spent my time chasing cats in the courtyard by the lobby, or diving in the shallow end of the swimming pool. Sometimes I played with the children of hotel guests and drew them in with my knowledge of the hotel premises; I took them in the lift up to the conference room, and farther up to see the Chinese restaurant with the revolving doors on the sixth floor, then down again to the lobby and back into the area by the pool. I led them from place to place until they began to understand their surroundings and began to express their opinions and assert their independence; then I felt betrayed and fought with them and abandoned them and went back up in the lift to the suite on the fourth floor.
One day I went up to change out of my jeans, which were soaked after being in the pool and were starting to itch. The door to the suite was open.
“But I don’t understand,” Mabi’s voice was saying. “You’re young, you’re attractive. What’s stopping you?”
Auntie Shazreh said, “You’ll never understand her. You never understood me! Even then you were of the opinion—”
“Look,” said my mother. “It’s not what you think it is. I’m not stopping myself. And he’s not the obstacle in my path.”
“Obstacle” was a mixture of “obvious” and “bicycle.”
“Then what is it?” said Mabi. “You have to explain it to me.”
“I don’t have to explain anything,” said my mother. She had stood up and was walking toward the door.
“Zaki!”
“Sorry,” I said, even before she had finished saying my name.
She was looking at me now, and looking as if for the first time, a boy in rolled-up jeans who had nowhere to go and was not the obstacle in her path.
“O God, sorry!” I was crying now, bawling.
“Shhh,” said my mother, and lifted me up in her arms.
Her happiness was not in question. There was cause for thought, moments that belonged to a time when she was someone else, a girl in a Polaroid with the depths of mountains showing behind her. But even that was tainted by the incipient story of my life, as though I had been in her womb all along and was pushing her from the start toward the axial event of my birth. I couldn’t ask her if she was unhappy because I couldn’t ask her to say that I was not the cause of her unhappiness.
“Samar Api,” I asked one night, “do you think she doesn’t get married because of me?”
We were lying in wicker beds on the roof. It was August, the last month of the monsoon. All day the rain had been slashing and insistent; trees swayed and fell and lay like logs in the roads, which were swamped. The overhead wires had snapped; there was no electricity in the neighborhood and the house was dark.
On the roof the night was clear. The clouds had left the moon in light.
“Not at all,” said Samar Api. “She doesn’t do it because she doesn’t want to. Her heart won’t let her. There’s nothing like your first love.” She closed her eyes and released a sigh. It merged with the breeze.
“Samar Api?”
She moaned.
“Make a wish.”
She cupped her hands, brought them to her mouth and whispered the wish, which was chosen without deliberation, without hesitation, then blew it away and watched as it went up into the night.
5
Morning assembly at an all-girls English-medium secondary school was usually rowdy: it took regimentation and surveillance and repeated warnings from the microphone on the headmistress’s elevated podium to settle the hush. But this was the first day of the first term of the year, a new start by all accounts, and already the square was filling up with early arrivals: the girls stood in lines beneath the leaves of trees and were glad to find a flow in the atmosphere, the confused camaraderie that follows the relief of finding an altered sameness. Talk today was lively and encouraging and frequently involved a mention of Tara Tanvir, a new girl who had joined their school.
“I keep hearing her name,” said Samar Api.
“She’s got a rep,” said Snober Tariq factually. She herself was plain and unremarkable, an ordinary girl who was not in the running for things but had developed an ability to circulate.
“Have you seen her?” asked Samar Api. It was a way of furthering a conversation that had begun.
Snober Tariq said she hadn’t, and added that, to the best of her knowledge, neither had anyone else.
The bell rang and the girls went to new classrooms. They were heightened, practiced, discerning, alert to signs of progress, the way bodies had shed shapes and grown into new ones; and the voices were kinder, less jutting in their own-ness, so that talking to one another felt easier and also surpassable. Samar Api took an empty desk at the back and settled her bag on the floor. She took out her new books and smelled the pages.
Mrs. Waheed came in and said, “First of all I would like to say welcome back.”
Her hands held the topmost edge of the high teacher’s chair at the fore of the classroom. She was wearing a green-and-yellow floral-print sari, a thing for which she was known, and her gaze sought to establish contact, then distance and order. “I would also like to add,” she said, “that we have a new addition to our class. She has just joined this institution and I have no doubt in my mind that you will make her feel at home in no time at all.” This kind of language was assumed to be an aspect of Mrs. Waheed’s specialization in English literature. She enjoyed using words like prudence and prurience and enjoyed writing long sentences in her stylish hand on the blackboard.
“You may come in, Tara,” said Mrs. Waheed, and stood with her hands behind her back.
In the doorway there was no one and the pause that followed was charged with challenge. Mrs. Waheed gave a smile that suggested her patience and experience as a teacher, then repeated her request without annoyance but also without the earlier note of invitation.
The girl came in. She stood against the wall with her schoolbag in her hands, her arms fair and rounded in the half-sleeved summer uniform and linked below her belly in a V as if against a chill in the room.
“Tara hasn’t made any friends yet,” noted Mrs. Waheed.
The girl was looking at the floor and at the fronts of desks.
“But I am sure she will make them.”
Other girls were smiling.
“You may sit down, please,” said Mrs. Waheed withdrawingly, and turned to the blackboard.
The girl began her walk along the column of desks, and was unfazed by the attentive silence. She seemed to live inside a wide-eyed imperviousness that caused a current of self-awareness to pass in her surroundings. Abruptly she chose an empty desk at the back of the room and let her schoolbag drop to the floor.
Samar Api saw that they were neighbors.
For some minutes they remained unacquainted.
Samar Api unrolled the ball and read it.
Hi I’m Tara! Wotsup?
Samar Api wrote, Samar.
The paper was crumpled and returned.
Nice name!
Samar Api wrote, Thanks.
I hate my name!
Samar Api wrote, Why?
I think its so dumb! But frankly I dont care!
Samar Api wrote, I think its a nice name
And Tara Tanvir wrote, Thanks babe!! And then: So tell me something!!
Like what??
Anything!!
Like what??
Are you a virgin?
Later that day we met in Daadi’s dressing room. I had tripped on the gravel path at school and had scraped my knee, and was looking for the bottle of Dettol in Daadi’s cupboard.
“What are you doing?” said Samar Api. She was following the slow progress of a lipstick in the wardrobe mirror.
“Finding Dettol.”
“What happened?” Her interest was minimal.
“Fell.”
“Oh no.” She frowned at the mirror in a version of concern.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“My makeup.”
There was nothing more to say.
“Guess what?” said Samar Api.
“What?”
“Today I had the shock of my life.” She made a smack with her lips.
“What happened?”
“I met this new girl, Tara Tanvir. She’s got a rep.”
I said, “Wow.”
She screwed on the cap to the lipstick and returned it to the shelf, watching herself perform this neutral function.
I said, “What’s your rep?”
And she said, “I don’t have a rep.” She altered her expression in the mirror to one of piety and innocence, then changed it abruptly to one of trauma and shock.
“What’s mine?”
“Boys don’t get reps. Only girls get reps. Like only girls get boobs.”
