by Z. P. Dala
“Afroze! Go to the khaya. I have my bag in there. You’ll find it easily. It has syringes and glass vials. Bring it here.”
Afroze hesitated. Somehow, even in the face of this imminent death, she could not face going into the khaya.
“Afroze! Move! He is going to die,” Sylvie’s voice was strong and commanding. It hearked back to the old days, when the great Doctor Sylvie would boss and bully everyone around her.
Afroze jumped and was jolted out of her fear and panic. “The keys. Mother . . . where are the keys to the khaya?”
“In my sari drawer. Now go! Go!”
Afroze ran wildly into the bedroom that she slept in. The large dark-wood wardrobe that contained her mother’s saris, the one that she lay awake staring at since she had arrived back in Brighton but dared not open, loomed before her. Again she froze, and she felt hands push her toward it. The teenager had followed her into the room, by his own volition to desperately save his father, or maybe Sylvie had sent him to push Afroze into action. Sylvie seemed to know her daughter well enough. And she seemed to know when her daughter would falter.
“Open it!” the boy shouted, and pushed Afroze with force.
Not stopping to think, Afroze swung the doors open, and the smell of her mother’s perfumed saris assaulted her, lingering in the desperate air like a fortifying tonic that sent her into rapid action. That perfume did not haunt her any longer. Something about how it lingered like cobwebs rather than hitting her nostrils like a stone wall made her suddenly love the perfume.
She knew exactly where the keys would be. As a child, she had seen her mother slip them in there a hundred times, but her memories had failed her. In the state of shock seeing the old man gasping for breath, Afroze’s mind had gone blank. On the day she had been kicking the door to the khaya after her mother denied her the keys, Afroze only realized later that the childhood memory of her mother slipping something into the cupboard of saris slowly came back to her. It was not that she didn’t know how to find them herself. It was that she had enjoyed kicking that door. Running her nimble fingers over the neat piles of folded fabric, she found the one sari her mother kept wrapped in thick plastic. She dug her fingers into the back of the plastic package, and with a jingling sound that sounded very much like a prayer answered, she pulled the keys out. Two large, old-fashioned, thick, iron keys dangled heavily on a big metal ring.
There was no time to hesitate or to muse. The boy again pushed her by her shoulders, not saying anything. Just prowling like a crazed guard, prodding her to fast reactions.
She ran to the back of the house, the boy at her heels. His breaths were rapid, and the sweaty smell of his panic melded with the strong attar cologne that he wore. The heady smell was not unpleasant, but in her current state it made her want to throw up.
At the crumbling yet thick, rough door to the khaya, she forced the first key into the keyhole, which seemed crusted over with age and underuse. It barely moved. She tried the second key. It slid in reluctantly, but she could not turn it, even using her entire body weight as a lever. The boy, his anxiety careening into a heavier, pungent fervor, pushed her rapidly out of the way, and in the dark back yard, she stumbled for a footing. She had to grab onto his strong back to regain her balance.
He tried turning the key with all his brute force, and after what seemed like an eternal wrestling match between metal and wood, the key turned. Both rushed into the khaya, bumping into each other. It was deathly dark. None of them had even thought of a light. The boy pulled a cigarette lighter out of his pocket, and the hissing smell of butane filled the room. The lighter flame was weak, but it was enough. Afroze found the bag filled with what Sylvie had described thrown haphazardly onto the floor. She saw nothing much else in that dreaded room, but as she groped for the bag, her hands grazed a number of oddly shaped things.
“Got it,” she huffed, and the boy grabbed it and ran back into the house.
Afroze lingered in the complete darkness for a second. This two-roomed building, this secretive place that swallowed her mother up in its monstrous maw for hours every night, threatened to swallow her up too. She sensed something sinister there—the suffering was palpable, a live, beating thing that cried out in anguish to be acknowledged and let loose. It was as if a hundred voices came resounding from the flaking walls and pockmarked concrete floors, voices that begged for a witness.
Hear us. We were here. Hear our stories.
Afroze shook off the strange eeriness and backed out of the door, the only source of a murky light that fell in a perfect moonlit rectangle on the floor.
In the heart of the indigo-colored rectangle, a sheet of paper lay innocently, obviously dislodged from its brethren by the frantic search for the medicine bag. As she backed away, not wanting to turn her back to that place filled with malefic, childhood imaginations, she grabbed the piece of paper and stuffed it into her pocket. She slammed the old door shut and bolted like a chased fox back into the light and warmth of the house.
She arrived in the front room to an atmosphere that was pregnant with relief. The old man had been given a strong dose of adrenaline. Sylvie had prayed the vial was forgiving in its expiration dates and storage conditions. The patient had begun to breathe with a shred of normalcy. His chest rose and fell weakly, but in a regular rhythm, and almost imperceptibly, the color on his face began to return to normal. Slowly.
Sylvie seemed a new woman. With the body in her hands, she had forgotten her ails, she had forgotten that she had forgotten how to treat patients, and she was deftly setting up a portable machine that would deliver more medication into the man’s lungs through a hazy mist of air from an oxygen mask. The dust-covered machine, which was tiny and portable yet ancient in its design, had been lying underneath all the syringes and needles at the bottom of the bag.
“He’s bloody lucky,” Sylvie growled. “So many things could have gone wrong here.”
It seemed that the prayers and praises that the Qawali singer had thrown his lungs at during his time on the stage had gone answered by the God he answered to. The ancient machine worked well enough, despite its veneer of dust. And the doctor who was now avidly listening to his breathing through her beloved black-and-silver stethoscope had come back to life with the life she had saved.
Afroze went into the kitchen and, craving coffee but taking tea instead, found the teenage boy standing at the sink drinking deeply from a glass of cool water. He seemed to relax into a familiarity with the space he occupied. He sipped and regarded her as she put the kettle on and took out a pretty, floral teapot she had never seen before.
“He sang so beautifully tonight,” the boy began to talk, not taking his eyes away from Afroze. He had washed the tracks of black kohl off and she could see that he would one day soon be a very handsome man.
“What happened?” Afroze asked him, sensing that he needed to talk.
“My papa is the best Qawali singer in this country,” he said with blatant and unreserved pride for the man that he hoped to one day become. “He sang tonight at the festival, the commemoration of the death anniversary of our beloved Khwaja-ji. His dream is to sing at the shrine in Ajmer. And he told me that tonight he will sing at the gravesite of Khwaja-ji. He told me his body will be here, but his voice will be in Ajmer. And I believed him because I have never heard him sing as beautifully as he did tonight. But after he led the final song, he looked upward, he held his palms to the sky, and he fainted, his breath heaving like he was going to leave us. But, the doctor . . . she brought him home. She brought him back from Ajmer, and she gave him back to us. He brings us blessings from the shrine of Khwaja-ji. We all will be blessed now.”
Afroze ignored the whistling kettle. The boy’s hypnotic voice, his mystical tale, had entranced her. In her short years in Brighton, she had been surrounded by a mother who did not believe in God or organized religion. In her growing-up years in Cape Town, her stepmother Moomi had been fervently religious, but in a superstitious way—she had been unlearned ab
out the depth of the faith she ritualistically practiced. Afroze had always sought to learn the deeper aspects of everything. Her favorite subject in school, and even at university, had been history. She believed, almost obsessively, that to understand anything, you had to unearth all the secrets of how it came into being. She enjoyed frames of reference, because they soothed her into thinking that she had a place in a larger fabric.
Moomi could answer none of Afroze’s deep questions. Her father, Ismail, cared nothing for schooling Afroze in anything, religious or academic, though he spent all his time on his prayer mat. She had blundered around, searching for answers, looking for a world to belong to, and, finding none that spoke to the deepest, most mystical heart of her, she had chosen none. In theory, she practiced the religion of her father because she had lived in his house.
She fasted for the month of Ramadan, she occasionally wore a headscarf, but only to funerals, and she murmured and muttered the traditional words and greetings of Moomi’s large extended family during festivals such as Eid. But as she listened to this young boy tell his tale, in her mother’s kitchen, a dying man brought back to life in such a beautiful rendition of mysticism, something began resounding deep inside her cells.
“I am going to have a baby,” Afroze told the boy.
He looked at her, unblinking for a long second, wondering why this woman was telling him this. It made no sense. And he did not really care to hear it.
But Afroze felt wonderful for saying it. She felt suddenly that this baby that was hiding inside her had now become a person to the world. Saying it out loud, to a boy she knew did not care, who she would probably never see again, made her feel the strongest of bonds with the unborn child. She wanted to shout it out loud. She smiled happily at the confused boy, and told him to go back to check on his father.
Her hands flew to caress her belly. A reflex. A mother’s reflex. Suddenly, for the first time in her life, Afroze knew she wanted strong roots, and a place to bring a child home.
CHAPTER SIX
When Halaima came home from visiting her husband, early the next morning, she sniffed something new in the air of the cottage. She did not know immediately what it could be, and resolved to set about cleaning with extra verve. Maybe strong bleach would chase away this unfamiliar scent. She did not know then, but sensed soon that the house smelled like warmth.
Her night with Rasheed, her husband, had been good. He was a Pakistani native who had come to South Africa after the Taliban had created much instability in Pakistan and it had cost him his entire family and all his possessions. He was young, resourceful, and quiet. And there was always a place for someone like that in any part of the world. Rasheed had been brought to Brighton by one of the feuding brothers of the petrol stations, who had met him in a mosque in Durban and recognized that he was a faithful, reliable man—one that could easily manage one of their many businesses. Rasheed, who had been a teacher in Pakistan, eagerly took on the role of managing a busy Laundromat that sat in a small alley behind the petrol station of the calmer brother.
He had found love in the tall, dark Halaima and admired her for her strength and her religious convictions, and it was a very small affair that saw them marry according to proper Islamic rites.
Rasheed was careful not to send letters of this marriage to the shreds of his family that still lived in Pakistan. There were things some people could never understand. Nor accept.
Halaima and Rasheed lived separately. But both knew this was a temporary thing. Her duty was to the ailing doctor. He had not saved enough money to create a home. Their daughter, the precocious Bibi, flitted between them, a child who knew she was cherished. It was Halaima who began whispering to Rasheed late at night about all that had happened at the doctor’s house. Rasheed listened in silence. When Halaima’s low voice tapered into silence, spent and exhausted from talking about turmoil, Rasheed whispered to her.
“Biwi, my wife. There is a fable of Nasreddin Hodja that my old grandmother used to tell me. And I will tell it to you:
“One day, Nasreddin Hodja sent his beloved son to the fountain to fill up a favorite clay pitcher with water. Nasreddin Hodja handed the pitcher to his son, and then promptly slapped him.
“‘Don’t break this pitcher,’ he said in stern warning to his son, who was shocked and hurt by his father’s slap.
“‘Effendi Hodja, your son did not break the pitcher, he didn’t even leave for the fountain yet. Why did you slap him?’ the people scolded.
“‘Ah yes, but you see,’ the Learned Hodja replied, ‘If I slap him after he breaks the pitcher, it will be too late.’”
Halaima stared in mild confusion at the man who she had grown to love and admire.
“Oh, Biwi,” Rasheed said mildly, “you see, a parent knows their child. No matter the circumstances, a parent knows the weakness of their own flesh. And sometimes they throw harsh slaps to lovingly protect their child from the child’s impending doom.”
Halaima sighed. She had grown accustomed now to Rasheed’s conversations, highly peppered with fables from the grannies and aunts of his youth in Peshawar. It sometimes took a while to grasp what Rasheed was saying in his style of speech, but often, when she did grasp the essence of his tales, she understood many things better.
“Ey-ey, Mwamuna,” Halaima clucked, calling Rasheed by the traditional Chichewa word for “husband.” It was ill-omened and disrespectful to call a husband by his given name, and even though Halaima had left Malawi years ago and Rasheed would never understand her native village language, she dared not offend God or men.
“I feel very afraid,” she continued. “The doctor is very ill. She does not have long in this duniya, this world. The daughter, Rosie, is a very angry woman. Maybe she will lose her mind and she will chase us all away from the house. What will happen to Bibi and me?”
“My beautiful woman,” Rasheed whispered and drew Halaima close to him, “I am here. We have enough to make our life. This storm between mother and child is not for us to interfere with. Leave it. Allah will provide. He always has.”
Leaving Rasheed, Halaima felt comforted, as she always did after seeing him. Bibi was happy, proudly brandishing a box of crayons that her father had presented to her with a flourish.
“What will you draw first for your papa?” Rasheed asked, swinging her thin frame high in the early, dawn air as they prepared to leave him and return to the cottage.
Bibi stuck out her fat, bottom lip and pondered for a long time. “Papa, I will draw Rosie. She is so beautiful.”
Halaima clicked an annoyed response. The same response she had shown when this Rosie had appeared at the door some days ago, brash and unafraid, suddenly wanting to enter her mother’s life. Halaima had become afraid then. She had heard talk in the markets of this daughter, of how she lived the high life in Cape Town and how she ignored her ailing mother who struggled to survive on a government military pension—the pittance they doled out to all activists of the anti-apartheid struggle. She recalled how furious she had become when Rosie had given Bibi a hundred-rand note. As if she could buy love and affection with all her money. Halaima was just a nursemaid to Doctor Sylvie, but she sometimes thought that she should have been the daughter of this amazing woman.
She bustled into the kitchen, leaving her bags near her room door, not bothering to even enter it and settle before she started to clang about, making the breakfast that the doctor adored. Always the same thing. For the years that she had known Doctor Sylvie, she always ate the very same breakfast—two fried eggs, crisp bacon, sausage, and toast. And she always drank strong, brewed coffee, boiled for hours in a pot, then strained. Even when the cancers began to eat her bones, she never faltered in her appetite. Through the long, arduous journeys to the government hospital five hours away for the poison of chemotherapy, she would arrive home, retching but starving for her breakfast. Sometimes it was all she ate the entire day.
Halaima was at the stove frying bacon when Afroze wandered into the kitchen.
She didn’t seem to mind the contents of the frying pan. In her hand, she carried a bar of soap, which she smelled often, placing it under her nostrils and inhaling deeply like a drug. That cheap soap seemed to have calmed Afroze down, and she was almost pleasant in her conversation.
“Mother treated a man last night, a singer from the Qawali group at the mosque.”
Halaima looked up in consternation. “How did she manage? Is she okay?”
“Don’t worry, Halaima, Mother did a fine job. She hasn’t forgotten her work, despite her sickness. The man’s son blessed Mother for saving his father’s life.”
Halaima looked at Afroze lingering at the kitchen table in her fluffy dressing gown. She saw Sylvie appear, how the young, beautiful Sylvie must have appeared years long ago. Yes, they did look so much alike.
“I went into the khaya, to fetch her medicine bag,” Afroze said lightly.
Halaima, who had said nothing till then, stopped her business and stared at Afroze in fear. Halaima had sneaked into that old building. She knew what was in there. She knew what had happened in there. Would Afroze damage them all, now that she knew?
“So you know?” Halaima whispered.
“Know what?” Afroze answered, her light and airy mood broken by Halaima’s serious tone. Afroze’s eyes narrowed suspiciously and Halaima realized Afroze knew nothing about the secret of the khaya.
Yet.
But Halaima also realized that the moment for knowing was now upon them all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The kettle whistled. Mist formed on the windows as steam escaped the pressure cooker inside the boiling vessel. Halaima tried to escape Afroze’s sharp stare by pretending to set a tea tray that no one had really called for. She vacillated between speaking and keeping the silence that she had grown accustomed to. Since she had come to work for the doctor, Halaima had become more than just a caregiver. She had sat up through late nights, becoming the doctor’s confidante. And although there were times when Halaima would be falling forward in exhaustion, her arms aching from cradling the sleeping Bibi, she would not stir to carry the child to a bed or even to fall into the soft mattress herself. When the doctor began speaking, Halaima respected her words, and she respected that when someone tells you what is in her heart, the last thing you do is move away.
