The Architecture of Loss

by Z. P. Dala

  He threw his Panama hat on the floor, shrugged off that frustrating jacket, and crossed the floor. No turning back. Warm, rough hands cupped her full, heavy breasts; she shivered as he brushed his thumb across them gently.

  “Did you tell Sylvie yet?” he asked and pained her further by sweeping over her sensitive nipples again. He squeezed her breasts and she winced.

  “No. I’ve told no one,” she answered.

  “Well, it certainly suits you. You glow and fill out like a true Mother Goddess.”

  Afroze smirked, catching his eye as he bent over to lick her nipple lightly, maddeningly.

  “I thought you said I was insipid.”

  “Be quiet,” he commanded. “You will never be anything but spectacular. Afroze . . .”

  He whispered her true name into her ear, and drew out its sound with hot breaths. It was the most delicious sound she had ever heard.

  The frenzied singers at the Kavady reached fever pitch. The clanging of bells, the banging of tribal, raw-sounding drums, the combined heat and feverish prostrations of hundreds of barebacked devotees, teeth bared, saliva and sweat and blood in the keening of men and women, all rolling together in an undulating dance . . . the dance, forbidden, sweet and slick in a tiny room behind a big house. Everything became one. Afroze howled out into the world, and nothing made sense anymore.

  The heat of the day had risen to lie in the eaves of heaven. The cool breeze was almost too feather-light to perceive. Afroze lay in tangled sheets, filled with lazy languor, wanting to be nowhere but here. Sathie stood at the window, looking out at nothing in particular. He wore a white vest, his suspenders dangling from the waistband of his trousers. His feet, bare and white, were so beautiful. They looked delicate and fine. He pulled out a cigar and lit it. Suddenly realizing his mistake, he quickly made to put it out in a saucer at the table.

  “Oh, Rosie, I’m sorry. I forgot about . . .”

  The fragrant smoke, an inviting smell of vanilla and toasted almonds, was quick to envelope the tiny room.

  “Leave it. Smoke it. I like the smell.”

  “Don’t be silly, Rosie. I’ll go outside.”

  Afroze could sense his anxiety, and it enraged her. She felt like a woman lying in a married man’s bed. He had broken the spell, the astounding potion they both had sucked on earlier like thirsty travelers. Now his eyes could not meet hers, and his body had become skittish.

  She stood up and began pulling on her clothes. Rapidly and in anger. He watched her but did not stop her. Only when she was fully dressed, in a stained shirt and crumpled trousers, did he make a feeble attempt toward her.

  “Stop, Rosie. What’s wrong now? Why are you leaving like this?”

  She stood at the open door and glared at him. Sathie could not meet her glowing eyes.

  “You called me Rosie,” she said and walked away.

  On the dark street called Petrol, the remains of the day showed signs of the frenzy that had happened while the chariots were being pulled—the festival climax that Afroze had missed. She kicked aside broken pieces of gourds, whole apples, crushed flowers. She arrived at the gate to the fairy cottage and could hear the Qawali singers begin a crooning chorus, ten men together in perfect synchrony, telling the poems of Sufi saints that once walked the Earth. She caught the words of a familiar song.

  In poetic Urdu, the song spoke to her across fields and minarets: “The one with lusty gazes must fear only God.”

  She could not help but laugh out loud as she walked into her mother’s house. A madness had gripped her, and this was a dangerous insanity. It cared nothing for consequence.

  Her mother’s door was wide open. And the old woman, as if having received predictions of times to come from a djinn who slid down moonbeams, called out, “Rosie! I wondered where you were.”

  “Out, Mother. Kavady. . . .”

  Her mother stared at her with eyes that missed nothing. With her bald head, draped in her red, satin gown, she appeared bizarre, but astutely so. “I see. I see, Rosie. Hmmm, I wonder what time Sathie will arrive for breakfast tomorrow morning.”

  She put her painted fingers to her lips, stroking them in deep concentration, looking deeply at her daughter.

  Afroze turned abruptly away, and in her bedroom fell asleep immediately in her red-stained blouse.

  The Qawali singers had now moved on to a beautiful rendition.

  Your veil has fallen forward, dear one. Now I see your gaze is drunk.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It is surprisingly easy to allow your actions in a dream to galvanize the actions of a day. It is wonderfully simple to make a dream your guiding light. Does not a murderer dream of blood on his hands and, upon waking in a cold sweat, he finds his hands are clean? Much is told in lore and in life about the dark grimoire of sleep and the places it takes you when you want nothing in your world to appear voluntary.

  It is as if a dream sweeps its hand, clad in a black velvet glove, toward a screen, giving you permission to see what your mind hides away. But if this is what a dream does, if its purpose inside your neuronal fireworks display is to gate all your secrets, then a dream is not a good thing at all. Veils, in all shapes and sizes, in their black and their gauzy white, are dangerous things. For they are such easy things to blame.

  Er . . . I blocked it out, and er . . . it haunted me in my dreams, and . . . er, I guess I didn’t know it was wrong . . .

  There were no dreams for somnolent Afroze this time. Soundless, deep, and almost-dead sleep took her pleasured body into a shelter of nothing. There is a first time for everything.

  Like a chrysalis she lay curled up, a ball of worm. Creepy crawly into the house after a very naughty deed indeed. But, naughty turned a little whispering mite into a butterfly with sticky wings. Tomorrow, she would unfurl her new pair of purple passion wings, outward and outward. They would never stop at doorways or gates, they would push with force, breaking walls with their delicate strength.

  Look, it was funny, very funny, that an afternoon of sex with a man twenty years older than her—the rather incongruous pungent virility of this aging masculine coupled with her ripe-age feminine—would have been so pleasurable. But it was very pleasurable, and it was not the act itself that made it so. It was all that surrounded it that made it so much more than it actually was. It could have been the trances and dances of the devotees, their bare skin glistening in rapture. It could have been the songs and hymns, the fervor of a day that screamed passion up to heaven.

  It could have been all the things that one might imagine it to be. Like the usual suspects of a little reverse Oedipal Electra or the analysis of archetype. Crone vs. harlot. Simply put, daughter takes her mother’s lover.

  And it was all of those things. It was also more. Afroze bedding the older Sathie turned out to be the best way forward, the means and methods that allowed a woman to soar. And of course, to soar is so much better than to crawl.

  Afroze had had lovers, a fair number of good ones. She had fallen in love and lust many times over. Cape Town was a city that made it impossible not to fall in love a hundred times a day. Everything about the city made every bah-humbug careen into a melted moment. Romance hung in the air. Sweeping views of movie-style sunsets from Chapman’s Peak made one want to sit on a bench and kiss someone. Oceanside cafés flooded with availability; blue and silver color schemes and artfully chosen lounge music made one decide early on in the evening who one would be taking home for the night.

  And that mountain. That mountain throbbed sexual energy into one’s pores. It had tiny magnetic fields within it that pulled polar opposites together, to attract and to crash into each other like bodies of moths. The streets thronged with love and lovers. Kissing couples of every variety. Just like that. Stop and kiss in the middle of traffic. Quite cosmopolitan.

  Afroze had broken some hearts, and had hers broken by some. She had sneaked out of beds at dawn carrying shoes and stockings in her fists. She had waited in bed, pretending to be asleep, when t
akeout coffee and cornershop croissants were brought to her in grand expectation of her awakened surprise. She had even taken walks in flower gardens and accepted daisies into her long hair. Been there, done that, Afroze.

  Sathie, in his trousers and tucked-in vest, those old-school suspenders hanging at his sides, those feminine pretty feet and those satin, soft lips—nothing amazing and nothing new. But she liked him. Despite and notwithstanding all the deeper reasons why an abandoned girl would steal her mother’s lover, despite it all, she liked him. She really did. Revenge was secondary.

  “Mama, where is Uncle Sathie?”

  Bibi was pouting. And pouting with force. She looked dolefully at the seat next to her, the one that her sweet, sweet benefactor always occupied. She genuinely liked him too. Sweets were secondary.

  “I do not know; now eat your breakfast, Bibi. And say your dua before eating.” Halaima chastised the girl, placing a plateful of crisp bacon on the table, making certain to keep the plate as far away from Afroze as she could.

  “Not hungry this morning, Rosie?” Sylvie said, and flitted a quick glance at the empty chair before settling her strong, unblinking gaze on Afroze.

  Afroze shifted a little in her chair. The ache in her lower back, a dull throb threatened to divulge all her secrets. She resolved to maintain the qualities that had seeped into her body with yesterday’s bravado.

  “No, Mother. I am starving,” she replied, and to prove her ravenous appetite, she shoveled huge forkfuls of fried eggs onto her plate and almost immediately into her mouth. She gulped noisily on her sweet tea. Determined to provoke. Her mother looked at her with keen acuity. Afroze felt fortified, strong, and a woman anew. She looked back, wanting to appear straightfaced, cool, yet some acid leaked out of her eyelashes and dripped onto her lips, which curled upward.

  Despite her unbending stare, Sylvie’s stare back held little malice. Ignore the painted mouth, the dark black-lined eyes. Ignore the skewed wig. Witches often do not look like such parodies, and mothers often do not look like obvious mothers. Ignore the obvious uneasiness of a primal place, a place that responds badly to long, unblinking stares. See that in the eyes of this undeserving mother crept a whisper of worry. A whisper so soft that it became the butterfly wings that beat a spreading, concentric ring.

  But Afroze did ignore. She was too steeped in her own version of the way things had been, she could barely see the way things were now. She wanted to recapture a moment when she was a petulant teenager with raging hormones, rebelling against a mother who told her not to date the boy with the motorcycle. Sylvie had sent her away when she was six. That number never left her brain. And her teenage-girl angst had been meted out on another woman.

  Another woman had handed her a sanitary pad through a bathroom door, opened just enough for a little 11-year-old wrist to slip through. Sylvie had not had a rock-music-blaring, purple-haired-gum-chewing, spotty-faced angry young pubescent to manage. Sylvie had been spared. Afroze wanted to spare her nothing more. She wanted to throw things in her mother’s face. Sylvie knew all this, with one trained glance at her child. She may not have reared her, but she knew this girl. Sylvie thought it best to indulge her.

  “Quite an appetite you’ve worked up, Rosie. Maybe this place is growing on you,” Sylvie said dryly.

  Afroze felt game for a fight. She did not let her mother’s manipulative attempts at being droll in conversation while bubbling in underlying venom bat her off her path.

  “Yes, this town is growing on me, Mother. I’m thinking of staying on longer. That’s if you don’t have me kicked out and sent away, of course.”

  She muttered the word “again” and was certain Sylvie heard it.

  “Stay. Stay for as long as you like. Who am I to prevent a consenting adult?”

  Afroze, betraying her cool facade, glanced at the empty chair next to Bibi, the empty space that would have held the kindle to her rapidly growing fire. Her glance did not pass unnoticed.

  “He won’t come,” Sylvie said with casual finality and continued chewing her toast.

  The possibility that her mother might be right, that the chair might always remain empty, caught in Afroze’s throat. Disappointment turned bitter gall into biting pangs that twisted her stomach, now full and slightly queasy. It was not only the rising thought that her mother might be right that constricted Afroze’s gut with anxiety and hate. It was that her mother had to be the one to tell her.

  She imagined a laughing, manic witch telling a simpering Snow White, “Someday your prince will not come.”

  Did it have to be Sylvie who bore the crown of disappointment and rejection down onto her bowed head? And why must she bow that head, after all? She had transcended now. She had evolved and morphed in just one night. One act of harried, secret passion had given her the right to lance wounds. The time had come.

  Of course all this bubbled inside Afroze. The morning was quiet and peaceful. Autumnal mornings are so civilized. They never assault you, throwing your body around to heights and troughs of heat or cold. They sip tea with you, making light banter, so refined and subtle. Preferring beige to bright red. Here, Afroze sat, an aching back niggling at her memory, scratching deeply and vigorously at the beige, waiting to find the red. Demanding to draw blood. She was spoiling for a fight.

  “My dear, your face is flaming. Do have a sip of water,” Sylvie said and chuckled. Was it mocking? Was it?

  “I . . . I . . . my face is fine. I don’t want water,” Afroze spat out a toddler tantrum. She suddenly sounded squeaky and was fast losing composure. The brittle, little self-possession she had erred in thinking she was now a custodian of began to fissure.

  Pretty silly to think that it took a day to dilute rage into equanimity, when it took a lifetime to create it.

  “All right then, my dear, if you insist you’re okay. I was hoping that while you’re here, now that you have decided to stay, you would put that university education of yours to good use.”

  In a state of distraction, her mind lingering on Sathie, Afroze stared blankly at her mother. Sylvie shook her head in annoyance and continued.

  “Well, I want to convert this house and that wretched building at the back into a school, as you have been so well informed by our Sathie.” The words “our Sathie” boomed out like a clap of unlikely thunder.

  Afroze choked on the water that she had claimed not to want, coughing messily, bringing loud giggles from Bibi, whose large eyes had been flitting back and forth between both women in their trapeze of balance.

  Before Afroze could speak, displaying by her expression that a massive tempest was about to be unleashed, a stupid tell-all revelation downpour that would more than likely leave her exposed and ashamed, Sylvie held back the black clouds.

  “I want to build on this land. Such a shame to waste this large piece of land on a stupid cottage. I’m certainly not going to live here much longer. I want a place where I can put a plaque with my name on the door.”

  Stupid nature. It will persist. If a storm brews fierce and threatening, and the clouds have collected enough watery tears, if a drop of tear against a drop of tear creates enough friction to cause lightning bolts of savage intent, nothing will quell it.

  It has been said that there are two things that can never be stopped: fire and water. And here, in this place, in this moment, in this town, at this table, in this house there was an angry abundance of both.

  Afroze threw a napkin onto the table, knocking over a tiny jug of milk. She stood up abruptly. Fury finally came to breakfast. It shocked with its eruption.

  “A plaque with your name on the door? A gold plaque? A bronze plaque? What kind of plaque do you want, dear doctor? Maybe a colossal plaque made of the years and years that I lay sobbing, wondering why my mother had sent me away. Will that plaque do you proud? Maybe a plaque of your cold heart, a plaque of your selfishness?

  “A plaque of loss? Yes, I agree, Mother. I will gladly design a building for you. One deserving of your name on the door.
And I will call it a mausoleum, a crypt. Grave! Because that is where your old, self-centered bones are going to rot.”

  Halaima pounced like an agile panther, pinning Afroze against her hard frame, holding the leaf-shaking seething body in a strange sort of hug. Afroze panted, having spat out the words, spittle lingering at her lip corners. Heaving and railing, she could not be stopped. She writhed her body, a bag of angry snakes, and tried to twist out of Halaima’s vicelike embrace.

  In her ear, she heard Halaima whisper, “That is enough. Enough. You are being cruel. The doctor is very ill.”

  “She is not ill, the witch. She will outlive us all. Because she has fed herself and forgotten her child. Thrown away, like a shoe she no longer liked the look of.”

  Sylvie sat unmoving. It was an ancient sort of wisdom that held her body in a different sort of hug, telling her that this tirade must not be stopped. It was vitally necessary. The poison had to be allowed to leak and then pour out of the wound that had been covered over with an imperfect scab for so many years. There could be no other way.

  Sylvie shook her head at Halaima, but all Afroze saw was a shamed mother, shaking her head as if in denial of all her sins.

  “Deny. Go ahead, you mistress of lies. Deny me again. I’m waiting. I want to hear you say it, Mother. I want to hear the words again. ‘Take her away. Please, take her away. Now. Now.’ Say it again, Mother. But this time, I am not a helpless child; I am a woman, a good, strong woman. What does he call you? Ah, yes . . . his Diana. His Artemis. Oh, Mother, look at you. Look at your sagging body, your stupid red lipstick on that failing mouth, that wig. You are bald. Bald, Doctor Sylvie. Bald and old and ugly and dying. Finished. Done for. No one will remember you, Doctor Madam. You don’t deserve a plaque with your name on it anywhere but buried in the ground.”

  “Are you done, Rosie?”

  Afroze looked away. She twisted off the ropes of Halaima’s hands, and crossed her arms over her breasts. Her rib cage ached with the effort of all the vehement vitriol she had spouted. The only sound that could be heard was her hard, raspy breath coming thick and rapid like a train about to derail.