by Z. P. Dala
Moomi, following her own routine, would hear Afroze at the gate and then hasten upstairs, to appear at the entrance to the kitchen as if she had just awakened. With a feigned nonchalance, Moomi would come downstairs only after Afroze had poured herself a mug of steaming brew that Moomi always made the first thing when she awoke every morning, as a ritual. Afroze seated her long body at the pine kitchen table. It was as if Moomi stood at the top of the stairs, listening for those sounds, before she revealed herself. And whenever she did, Afroze’s ice thawed.
She came, softly padding into the kitchen in her slippers full of holes, the thick, fuzzy dressing gown drawn tightly around her girth. Always, when she saw Afroze seated there, she looked surprised, as if this had not been their everyday early-morning routine for almost a year. And always she would pat the stocking on her head, covering uncomfortable curlers, hiding the hair that refused to be tamed. When Afroze saw her slippers, she pursed her lips and rolled her eyes in a game they always played.
“Moomi, why don’t you wear the new ones I bought you, huh?”
She waved the comment away and giggled like the schoolgirl she never was. “Agh, Afroze . . . what if he saw them?”
“Tell him I bought them . . . for you.”
Moomi smirked a response and busied her hands at the stove. She could never do that: tell Ismail that she had been seeing Afroze, feeding Afroze. Both of them knew that.
She began to heat up the thick stew at the stove. The aroma of a traditional Malay bredie, a thick, glutinous stew laced with cinnamon and cardamom, slowly wafted toward Afroze as the old tin pot started to heat the rich tomato gravy and chunks of cheap lamb cuts. This smell of bredie, always beloved by her as her favorite dish, now seemed too strong and pungent. As a child, and then as a woman who was sensitive to light, space, and smell, Afroze sometimes felt that her heightened senses were her blessing and curse. Now they seemed only a curse.
It used to irritate her that Anton persisted in spraying his cologne near her when he knew the smell made her retch. But now she thought nostalgically of Hugh, the American surveyor—a man she had loved with mad devotion, at a time when she was happy. Hugh had been the reason she had left her father’s house, and then Hugh had been the one who had left her after the stadium was not even built. His job had been to estimate its costs. The finished product did not matter to him. When he left her, she was torn to pieces.
Anton had been the power that Afroze craved, the most successful partner in the architecture firm where she had begun her climb to the top. He had been trying to seduce Afroze for a long time, and after Hugh walked away from her, she turned to Anton in a silly act of rebound, trying desperately to fill up the empty space. Afroze knew she would never love Anton, but pride and fear of being alone kept her close to him, and she began to enjoy the social prestige and security that being with him gave her. She was a better architect than Anton, but she had never been offered the partnership that he had gotten. And this irritated Afroze, even when she tried to truly love him during their nights together. Anton was astute; he sensed that Afroze was not in love with him, and he began to grow cold and distant. His slow emotional disconnect from her began to devastate her, not because she missed him, but because abandonment terrified her deeply.
When they came apart at the seams, with the unraveling of her mind, Anton retreated from her. Afroze, who had always prided herself on keeping a strong and stony composure, secretly had been struggling with a deep depression from her teenage years. She recalled a furtive visit to a psychiatrist some months ago, when she finally broke down enough to admit that alcohol, expensive street drugs, and men did nothing to push away that ennui.
Anton had stopped coming home to the fashionable apartment furnished with the latest international flair that he shared with Afroze in the trendy, hipster suburb of Cape Town called Camps Bay. He avoided Afroze when she was awake. And being awake from the drugged sleeps she drowned in was rare. She had found another partner—sleep. Anton was not very patient. He missed society, parties, and laughter. He hated staying home in their claustrophobic apartment, watching Afroze fall to pieces, not telling him why. And one day, when Afroze had come home to tell him something he did not want to hear, he had simply picked up his already-packed bag and left. He never looked back at what he was leaving behind. He had important places to be, and very uncomplicated people to see. She spent the next few weeks, lying under the covers of her bed, flitting from one unwanted memory to the next.
Now all that mattered was Moomi’s simmering lamb stew, and Afroze realized she was starving. But her stomach wouldn’t allow her to bear the meaty unctuous stew. Too early in the morning. In her mind she gorged herself, though she knew she would barely manage a few mouthfuls. How much she missed food. Good food. The taste of things would never be the same again. She avoided Anton, he avoided her, and in the coldness of their once-bustling world, she sank into a place where nothing felt good, nothing tasted good, nothing looked good. Afroze was numb. She had lost her joy, and although she had never been described as a bubbly woman, the smile that could light up a room had drained out of her.
When the beauty and magic of Cape Town, which could banish the darkest melancholy, failed to lift a smidgeon of this gloom from Afroze, she realized something had to be done. She could no longer walk around with a mercurial monkey on her back. She decided it was time to consult a psychiatrist.
Dr. Singh’s offices were in a part of the city where no one Afroze knew could see her enter and leave on her twice weekly appointments. Despondant though she was, she still tried to maintain the false mask of composure while among her colleagues. Her position as the only woman in the architecture firm was tenuous, because she was the only woman who had come close to being offered senior partner, and she was sure that “women troubles” such as depression would quickly destroy her reputation among the male partners. They had no time for such troubles.
Dr. Singh was good. Astute and kind, he slowly teased out Afroze’s blocked memories and treated her with gentle but strong therapy.
“Afroze, you do realize that you are suffering from major depression,” he told her on their second consultation.
She knew. Inside, she knew. But she resisted the diagnosis. “Look, Doctor, I am a busy, active, and very balanced person. I doubt it is something as serious as major depression.”
Dr. Singh leaned back in his wingback chair, looking every bit the psychiatrist. He was silent for a long while, regarding her. She felt uncomfortable.
“Afroze, forget the label, the diagnosis, for a moment. You have described to me in very brief detail your childhood. Why is it that you cannot talk more about it?
“Well, what’s the point, Doctor? Talking about it won’t change it. My mother abandoned me when I was six, threw me to a father that didn’t want me. The only person I truly have is my Moomi. What’s there to say any further?”
“Blocking it out doesn’t make it go away, Afroze. It gives it even more importance and space in your head. You need to let it all out. You have so much anger in you.”
“I’m not angry. I’m fine. I just want some pills or something to feel better, so I can continue with my hard-earned life and work.”
“Well, if all you came here for is pills, then you have come to the wrong doctor. I don’t believe that popping a few pills will be a magic bullet that will cure anyone. You need to talk about your past.”
“My past . . . my dreadful, dreadful past.” Afroze sighed and leaned back in her chair facing the doctor. He smiled at her and wrote something down in his yellow pad.
“So, what’s that you’re writing, Doc? That I am a difficult woman? A pain to have around? Tell me . . .”
“Do you think you’re a pain to have around Afroze?”
She looked in silence at the hourglass that the doctor kept on his desk. The tiny white grains of sand slid slowly downward, telling the time. Counting down to the moment when he would send her out of his office into the big, bad world and probably sigh with relief.
“Well, what I think doesn’t matter, does it? Everyone else thinks it and then they eventually get rid of me. Like you . . . with your hourglass . . . ,” she said sarcastically.
“I want to help you. I am here to support you. I can see how frightened you are.”
“I am not frightened,” she spat back, sticking out her chin. But she did feel fear. The fear of a child who was rootless, unwanted, cast away.
“You are very frightened, my dear,” he said simply.
She remained silent and drummed her fingers on the armrest.
“Oh look, the hourglass is almost empty. Time to go, Doc,” she said, and again the cynicism dripped from her.
“Afroze, why did you come here? What do you hope to achieve by having consultations with me?” Dr. Singh asked with an even voice. He pointedly ignored the hourglass, and folded his arms.
“I don’t know.” Afroze breathed out, and suddenly her tired shoulders slumped forward. That steely exterior was cracking. Could she allow it to? Was this hard facade not the gate that kept the ugliest demons inside their cages? It was exhausting to spend days and nights batting away ugly memories. She felt afraid to let them out, but she knew that the doctor was right. Keeping them in was eating her alive.
“Listen, I will give you a prescription for an antidepressant. Not because you asked, but because clinically I really think you need it. And I am giving you some pills to calm your anxiety, help you get some rest. Maybe you should spend a few nights in the hospital, get proper rest away from life.”
“No. No hospitals. I have no time for it.”
“Okay, Afroze. Here’s the prescription. But you have to come in twice weekly for therapy sessions. The pills don’t work on their own. You are young. You can heal this part of your past and live a fulfilled and complete life.”
She grabbed the prescription paper and held onto it like a lifeline. Absently she nodded and agreed to return twice a week for psychotherapy. She left Dr. Singh’s office feeling tremulous but relieved that something was being done. She promised herself she would go for the therapy sessions and booked them.
After two weeks, the pills began to work. But their side effects made her numb, and just as the doctor predicted during one of their sessions, they were not a magic potion. The numbness was good: it made her function, it even brought small smiles to her face. But the demons still lingered.
She spoke about them in apprehensive monosyllables to the probing questions of the psychiatrist. Secretly she had hoped for a great, golden moment when she would break through from the shackles, but the moment hadn’t come.
“It is a slow process, Afroze,” Dr. Singh assured her. “You have to stick to it. Keep up with our sessions. The breakthrough will come.”
But Afroze was done. She walked away from Dr. Singh’s office one day, feeling ice cold, but her mood had lifted and she could live with that.
“What’s the point in revisiting that awful past,” she muttered to herself, and never went back to the doctor again.
The pills would do her fine.
But a call to revisit her appalling past had come after all. A literal telephone call in the middle of the night, but also a fearsome inner call within her. It was time to lay ghosts to rest. Swallowing more and more pills than necessary to giver her fortitude, she steeled herself with their chemical amalgam.
Devoid of sensation, a sourness remained. Seated in Moomi’s kitchen, she wished there were a spell that brought life to the living dead. An anxious knot, always present in her chest, began to swell as she thought of her impending trip to Brighton to see her dying mother. To comfort herself, she turned to Moomi, and to the stories that comforted her as a girl. She prayed that they would be the magic that would work.
“Moomi, do you remember how you taught me that my name was Afroze?” she teased, wanting to grasp onto a happy memory.
“I remember, girl. And I remember how I begged you to stop calling me Moomi . . .”
The word “Mommy” hung in the air. Both pretended not to notice.
“Tell me the story again, Moomi. The story of Afroze.”
Moomi chuckled softly and settled herself in a chair across the kitchen table, repeating a story she had told this child many times.
“Oh, dear girl, I remember the day your father went away and didn’t return for a week. And when he came back, I was standing at the kitchen door. Ismail walked up the driveway with so many plastic bags in his hands. Like he had gone shopping and had bought you. And there you were. So tiny, thin, and scared. You were creeping like a little spider behind him, your big eyes looking everywhere.
“Ismail handed you to me. I looked at you, peeping at me from behind your thick eyelashes, and I loved you from the very start. Ismail left you with me, and you sat on the sofa, at the very edge, not moving. As if moving might cause you to be in trouble. I made for you a mug of cocoa and you looked shocked. I knew that it was the first time you had tasted hot cocoa. You drank and drank. You asked for more, and I gave you extra sugar, too, this time. I asked you what your name was and you said in this small voice, ‘Rosie.’ But Ismail told me your name was Afroze. So I told you that Afroze was such a beautiful name, a name for a princess. I told you to forget Rosie, and from now you would be Afroze. My Afroze. Your name means ‘light.’ And you have become my only bright light. My Afroze.”
Moomi trailed off, never tiring of repeating the same poetry again and again. She always told it the same way, never changing a word.
Afroze looked at the dark green flannel of Moomi’s back as she buttered hot toast, not wanting to tell her that all her indulgent efforts were in vain. She felt a wave of guilt, knowing that perhaps Moomi was using up the last of her precious butter on the slabs of brown bread. Save it for yourself, Moomi, she ached to tell her. But she knew that feeding her gave Moomi comfort as much as eating Moomi’s food gave her comfort in turn. When Moomi faced her with the toast, she saw the puffiness of her left cheek.
“Did he hit you again? What is that man’s problem, Moomi? What?”
“Agh, no Afroze . . . forget it now,” she covered her cheek with her hand, “Just eat now. Don’t worry about me, he gets as much as he gives, neh.”
Afroze loved how Moomi always ended her sentences with the typical Cape Malay suffix “neh.” A piece of a word that could mean a million things. Acceptance, asking, wondering, sulking, swooning. A neh for all occasions.
Moomi slapped the butter knife into her palm, smiling slightly at the gesture. He gets as much as he gives. He gave her nothing but blows.
“No, Moomi. He should not be taking it out on you . . . what I did . . .”
“Afroze . . . it’s not about you. He . . . has so many other . . . ghosts . . .”
“I know . . .” Afroze murmured to herself, but she knew Moomi had heard the words.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the silence that was broken only by the clink of the spoon on her chipped plate, Afroze looked around at Moomi’s attempt at beautification. Her lack of money did not mean a lack of finesse. She had somehow turned that old, ramshackle house into a home, with her dainty crocheted doilies and her cheap, plastic flowers placed everywhere. Somehow Afroze preferred the fakery of acrylic roses to the large, real ones she had left behind in her childhood. She saw that Moomi had spent long hours cutting up old newspapers into pretty shapes, using them patched together as a tablecloth. She recognized the kitchen curtain. It was a pieced-together dress Moomi once wore, in a time when she bothered with wearing pretty floral dresses.
Her heart ached, knowing that all of Moomi’s efforts would be laughed at by the trendy friends whose parties Afroze used to attend. Back when she was invited.
Her tumbling mind could not settle. Each thought she landed on became a symbol seducing her into yet another memory. She recalled a New Year’s Eve party she had once attended, a year after she had gained her degree from the University of Cape Town. Twenty-three years old, edgy, and cocky, she fell into a group of equ
ally cocky friends. Among her very rich, chic friends were beautiful models who had taken to the trends of drinking alcohol and using cocaine.
It was a “Bergie” party—a party where the high-fashion guests were asked to come dressed as the cheap-wine-drinking beggars and drug addicts who dotted the Cape landscape. The beggars had become known for having no front teeth. Despite being ridiculed by most Capetonians, male Bergies took a rebellious pride in their appearance and believed that those who had no front teeth would give better blow jobs.
Afroze, wanting to show off as one of the “in” crowd, had fished out torn, brown corduroys from the gardener’s plastic basket at the expensive town house she shared with friends in Claremont. She had enjoyed all the preparty revelry as her friends sipped good wine and took turns tearing up and dirtying their clothes, comparing costumes and celebrating those that were filthier and uglier.
Afroze was in the heady throes of being a newly qualified A-class architect, graduated at the top of her class, the poor girl done good. She had been pursued and seduced into the most coveted internship at the largest architecture firm in Cape Town and her arrogance had reached its peak.
Her troubled childhood, her fractured lineage, all had combined exhilaratingly with fast money and a place on the socialite list. She had become dangerously egotistical. Placing a filthy cap backward over her tumbling mass of curls, she had applied black permanent marker to her two front teeth, and paraded with her guffawing, fashionable friends using the slang language that only the Bergies used.
“I’ll blow you skelm, suckie-suckie, neh neh . . .” she parodied.
Everyone roared with laughter. At the party, amid the incongruent feast of sushi, cassoulet, and umami canapes, a cocaine-addled girl in torn stockings and a maid’s outfit dirtied by grass stains, torn in strategic places that revealed her bosom and her hips, went around loudly singing, “Jou’z want me now, neh? Ize knowz jou’z getting hard for Shamiema, neh. Jou’z come by me and I’ll suck jou lekka now skattie.”
