by Z. P. Dala
Slowly, Sylvie stood up. She leaned on her walking stick and began to drag her body away from the table, making for her bedroom with great effort. Halaima again pounced. This time, like a protective mother lioness, reaching out to help the hobbling woman negotiate the tiny space between where she ate and where she slept.
Sylvie put up her hand and, in a motion, told Halaima to let her be. She knew she could reach her bed. The drag-drag-depression sound of her walking cane on tile lingered long after her body had found its bed.
After she had left, Halaima turned to face Afroze, rage in her taut body. This time she was an eagle, a sharp-eyed eagle, yellow eyes blazing, seeing all. Even the tiny burrowing creatures that were blind to light.
“I hope that this outburst is the last one. The doctor is very sick, and I hope you finally have it out of your system.”
“Oh, please. Stop being so self-righteous. Yes, she is sick. She’s still a kicking and screaming banshee. And she feels no remorse.”
“She feels remorse,” Halaima said simply.
“What do you know?” Afroze said, tears that had been manacled now began to prick into the corners of her eyes.
“I know that there are many things about your mother that you don’t know.”
Afroze turned and looked at Halaima. Tears began to flow freely now, and Afroze made no attempt at stopping or hiding them. They fell in splashes onto the brick red–painted veranda floor.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“He is not going to be there. He is gone,” Halaima said, and a softening of her gaze said so many things: the knowledge of a sister-woman who knew of rejection and of lovers who disappeared into the air of it-never-happened.
Afroze ignored Halaima and almost ran the distance across the field where the chariots had stood, the ground still bearing evidence of the rituals that had happened there. She stepped over dried flowers, she crushed pieces of fruit, she kicked aside burned-out coals in her march. And she knew before she arrived to knock at the door of the tiny outbuilding at the back of a big house that he was gone.
His door was open, as if he had just fled having heard her footsteps. The room looked sterile, cleaned well of their combined scent. The only lingering smell was of the lovely, fragrant cupboard that stood empty with its doors gaping, mocking her. Nothing here, sweetie. That man sure is gone.
A woman came to stand next to Afroze, possibly the owner of the big house. She looked at Afroze staring at the empty room, and sighed a tsk-tsk she had done many times before.
“He left his piano,” Afroze murmured.
“That piano was never his,” the woman said.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Qawali singers are going home to rest. They have sung their praises deep into the night. All the way across the world, in the city of Ajmer, India, there are Qawali singers who have sat on pure, white daises, fervently putting ancient poetry to song, in praise of the Saint Kwaja Gareeb-un-Nawaaz at the mazaar, on the anniversary of his death.
It is the sixth day of the festival, its deepest heart, and commemoration belongs to where his remains lie, in the ancient city in Rajasthan. The desert echoes with the concluding badhaawa, a passionate recitation by thousands of pilgrims, a poem sung out loud with no musical accompaniment. The ever-present percussion instrument, the femininely round tabla, is slumbering here—it had been only the beating of it that had driven the souls of men to look inside, look outside, look everywhere for their beloved. As the evening becomes dawn, and the festival draws to a close, the most burning desires of faithful lovers need no percussion, they need nothing of strings or chords to pull their hearts toward God.
In the small gathering of the Brighton mosque, a band of brothers bearing just their voices wrap their beloved tablas in white calico.
They will store them away for a night when they will beat their drums to prayer again. There is always a time for praise and there is never a time when drums fail to drive faith into any heart, even the heart of the most faithless one.
Afroze left the tiny room that converted her heart from a tiny, whispering speck into a roaring, angry wail. She did not know which way her footsteps would take her. The road to the Norwegian Christian mission was a meandering one, and it would take her directly to their creaking door. There, she knew that the door would open to reveal dusty halls, walls covered in tapestries by the tiny patient hands of the Savior’s brides, lovers who have never known the touches of a mortal man. Inside the filigree of ivy walls, she knew she could easily disappear and live forever on tonic, angelic voices.
In the Shiva temple, floors were being swept with a long, grass broom, the swish-swish sounds turning a once-sandy floor into the polished marble of pride and joy. Inside its fragrant, open courtyard, she knew she could sit and lean her aching back against a cool pillar, and she knew the tinkling sounds of bells would soothe her. She knew that the smell of burning, fragrant fires would anesthetize her to the world, and she would forget all space and time.
The tall minarets of the little mosque, now scented with rosewater, would allow her to lie flat on floors of lush green carpets in the section where ladies sat last night, behind carved, latticed panels of soft rosewood, equally in love with the mystical beauty of the poetry and song. Here, she could allow a soft, black veil to hush away all her cries.
It was so easy. So easy to find places that would take a wandering traveler. Safe houses of the Gods that would shelter her away from the world, soothe her and calm her and give her a place to belong.
Afroze remained frozen, standing on a street of noise and bustle. She did not know if she should go left. She did not know if she should go right. Maybe she should just stand in a space, frozen like a statue of a Botticelli Venus. She felt her body swell, her breasts engorged, her hips filled out in the most beautiful roundness, the authority only a woman can possess.
It was not nice vacillating between God’s houses that each call out to you, offering separate but equal solace. Which house of which God to go to when you were a refugee in someone else’s land? It was not nice not knowing where to go, being a parvenu. Being rootless in a ruthless world.
The choices were presented, each with a most pleasing allure. But when there were choices, the troubled soul sometimes chose none but the place from where it came. Afroze chose to go home. To her mother.
Sylvie lay down flat on a silky coverlet, hating every fiber of comforting silk that caressed her old skin. She hated the color burgundy, and she hated the fakery of painted-on peonies in a country where no one had actually seen a real peony. How perfectly restful she would have felt if she lay on a sack of rough-hewn brown cloth, its fibers twisted and warped by the many bodies that had flung their nightmares helter-skelter in the few precious moments when the stark lightbulb seemed to not exist anymore. Her true sisters. Comrades. How they lay in those cells. Four steps across. Four steps down. And they were done. This was just number one of the thousand more rounds and rounds she would do in that cell.
Please. Please turn out the light. Just for five minutes. Please. So we can sleep.
But the lightbulb in its relentless wattage hisses.
I will burn. And I will burn bright. And I will never stop burning.
Somewhere inside the lightbulb moments, the bloodied sack moments, and the moments when she regretted not taking the easy way out, there was a moment that the sleep-deprived began to imagine that sleep must mean death. And that death must mean peace.
And yes, the struggle was strong, the training was good, the comrades tapped their urges to her with a spoon on a concrete floor, egging you to hold on, just hold on, my sister. But somewhere, the womb of her began to ache for what it had left behind, long girl-legs with no ankles, just sticks rapidly drawn into the backseat of a stranger’s car.
Activists were mothers and they were fathers too. The struggle for a free society was her illegitimate child, while her real one flew away from her, to distant places. And they would hate her forever, because they d
o not understand. And yes, she did think of suicide. Often.
After all was said and done, after trials and after beatings, after the world howled at the same moon and, like a magician’s rabbit, the freedom and democracy that she had been fighting for was granted by fearful presidents, after her comrades gained high places in a building that once sentenced them to death, and she a piece of forgotten history, she accepted the burgundy silk coverlets and garish curtains because maybe someone believed that you finally deserved opulence and grandeur. At least someone wanted to coddle her, and laud her with soft furnishings. Still, the best moments and the worst moments she had ever known had been when she lay on dirt.
Sylvie dozed, but this was not uncommon. The cancer had become a tenant of a body that was too weak to manage evictions. Inside the secrecy of tumors lay the times when she had hoped something would come and take her life. And now something had. At a most inappropriate time. A time she looked into the firebrand eyes of the girl she left behind, and something called “mine” swelled up, pushing tumors and failed organs into the back seat.
I have so much to tell you, my child. Daughter of mine. I have so many things to teach you. I have so many moments I want to ask you to walk through with me.
Do you know that I love pears? Do you know that they taste best when left on a warm windowsill for a while, imbibing the sun until their cells burst with juice? Do you know that I have a favorite color? Do you know that I sing popular Indian movie songs sometimes?
Do you know that I prefer afternoons to mornings? Do you know that I wore saris because, in a world where we had to give away our unique Indian identity and become African, this stupid, uncomfortable, very impractical garment was my only connection to where I came from? Do you know that I saved my best silk sari for you to wear one day? And that I kept my ugliest one for you to dress me in when I go?
Do you know that I love you enough to make my heart burst?
And do you know that I don’t know how to tell you?
Afroze.
CHAPTER FIVE
The banging on the door was relentless. At first, fast and unbridled. And when there came no answer and fatigue set upon a fist, slow and almost melancholic. Thud-pause-pause-pause-THUD-pause . . .
This tired pounding, chiding the occupants of the doctor’s house to answer wordless pleas. When no one stirred and the sound was left unanswered, a voice took over the pleading.
“Doctor! Please, Doctor! I need the doctor. Please, someone come. Please.”
Afroze heard the sound, but she ignored it. In her knowing-unknowing malaise, she could not lift her body off the chair in the veranda to stir, to move toward the frantic calls. Someone else would do it. She did not care.
But no one did it. No one rushed to the door. And the frenetic banging and crying did not go away. More than worry, it was irritation that coursed through her. Now what?
It had suddenly become difficult for her to spring up and bolt. Something shared her blood and her life force, and it was not a generous sharer. But she stood up and walked with heavy steps toward the passageway. Her mother’s door was open, and on the bed Sylvie lay asleep, oblivious to the loud calls.
Afroze stood at the bedroom door.
“Mother. Mother!” she called out loudly, and Sylvie awoke with a start. It seemed somehow strange that the racket at the door had not woken her, yet the voice of her daughter made her start up to full awareness. This day had been long, and it had been difficult. Some sort of torpid draft had swept through the house, drugging the women inside into a haze of disinterest. Let the world fall to pieces. I have nothing left to give.
After seeing the ugly emptiness of Sathie’s room, Afroze had arrived home and fallen into the rattan chair on the veranda, unmoving. Staring with unblinking eyes into a frightened, distant place, fear and anger leaving her unable to do anything but breathe slowly in and out. Sylvie had heard Afroze arrive, knowing the waning moon of shame and disappointment that haunted the woman’s body, not because she had loved, or that she would miss the lover. But because she hated herself for being so exposed.
Sylvie knew this shameful dance well enough.
Dusk, an ugly part of any day, found both women in a state of inertia, wanting to move toward each other but totally incapable of doing so. Sylvie’s sleep had come restlessly but had metamorphosed into a deep one.
She started up in an anxious jump when she heard Afroze calling her, and then she heard the feverish banging and calls at the front door.
“What is it? Who is that at the door?”
“I don’t know, Mother. Tell Halaima to send them away.”
“Halaima is not here. She left earlier to take Bibi to visit her father.”
Both women looked at each other with deepening worry. Not just the anxiety that the banging on the front door brought, but also, the more frightening apprehension that finally they were alone together.
“Send them away, Rosie. I don’t want to see anyone.”
Sylvie’s voice was tired and unusually soft. She sounded like one defeated.
Afroze went to the door and swung it open, glad for the thick wrought-iron gate that protected her safety. In the past, doors could be opened to allow people in. But now, so much danger lurked in all corners of this country that doors had become just wooden icons that decorated the thick, iron gates with many, many locks.
A young man stood at the door. His face was streaked with tears. Some sort of black kohl that he had used to line his eyes beautifully had run in tracks down his cheeks, making him look like a ridiculous teenage girl who had been crying over her first love. He was dressed in a long, white robe, one worn by devout Muslims at prayer, and his white, crocheted skullcap was clutched in his hand. The hand that he had been using to pound on the green door.
Afroze caught him midmotion. A last half-hearted attempt to bash his tired fist onto the wood. He looked defeated, but when he saw Afroze in the half-light standing there, he puffed out a sigh of relief.
“Oh, thank you. Shukran Allah. Someone is here. Please. The doctor . . . I need the doctor . . .”
“She . . . doesn’t see patients anymore . . . she is asleep,” Afroze said, and hated lying to the frantic teenager.
“Oh God. Please, I beg you. It’s my father. In the car . . . he can’t breathe . . .” the boy stepped aside and Afroze saw a car in the driveway. She could barely make out two dim figures in the back seat, distinguished only by their white cloaks glowing with a milky-white moonlight.
“What’s wrong with him?” Afroze suddenly became concerned. She noticed that the boy’s face was twisted with distress and fear for his father’s life.
“Please, I’m from the mosque . . . My father, he played last night at the Qawali . . . he can’t breathe. He has asthma. Very bad. He is having an attack.”
Afroze hesitated for a second, not knowing what to do. And then she held up her palm to gesture to the boy to wait and she ran to her mother.
“Mother, it’s one of the boys from the mosque. His father is having a bad asthma attack. What do I do?”
Sylvie blinked at Afroze. It had been a while since she had seen a patient. She wondered if she even remembered how to.
“Tell them to go to Doctor Ngotho. Across town, near the mission hall.”
Afroze ran to the boy, who seemed like he had sprinted to the car quickly and come back to the door, cap still in his sweaty hand.
“She says to take him to Doctor Ngotho. Near the mission hall.”
“No. Please. We tried. The doctor is not there. Away for Easter weekend. Please, my father says Doctor Sylvie will help. Please, he is going to die . . .”
Afroze left him and sped to her mother, who could hear now the exchange of words and had sat up in her bed. Afroze didn’t have to explain.
“But . . . I don’t have any of my things . . .” Sylvie murmured and looked at Afroze with wide eyes, almost like a frightened child, an antithesis of the fast, quick-to-action doctor she once had been.
Sylvie placed a hand on her chest, tapping it loudly, waking up her heart, knocking courage into it. With unlikely force, she stood up.
“Right, tell them to bring him inside. To the front room. I’m coming now.” She quickly threw on a silk dressing gown over her plain, cotton nightdress. In Halaima’s absence, Sylvie had put away the frilly, silky nightclothes that seemed to comfort Halaima more than herself.
The boy and another older man, both with faces contorted in worry, carried the old man into the house and lay him on the soft, velour couch. The ugly, leather examining couch had long since disappeared from that room. It was no longer needed.
The old man’s skin looked bright purple, deep blue, and scarily pale all at once. As they carried him, Afroze heard the loud, labored breathing struggling from his chest, but as they lay him down, he barely breathed a whisper. Were they too late? The teenage boy, convinced that they were, put a hand over his mouth to stifle a loud sob.
“Papa,” he wailed.
Sylvie hobbled into the room, trying to maintain a semblance of dignity in her gait, and on seeing the man lying motionless on her couch, flew to his side. Not caring about her own broken body, she kneeled beside him and, with expert hands wrinkled with age and illness but sure and practiced, she began to palpate his chest and throat. From a pocket of her gown she pulled out a stethoscope, one that Afroze wouldn’t have guessed she still kept in her bedside drawer, and listened to the almost motionless chest.
“Adrenaline. Now! He’s still breathing, but his airways are in spasm, almost closed.”
She looked up at Afroze, who lurked fearfully in the doorway. She had always had a deep dread of illness, always keeping a very wide berth from it even as a child growing up in a house thronging with all forms of it.
