by Nafisa Haji
The convent school I attended was one among others in Karachi, along with similar boys’ schools, run by priests, which were considered the best source of education at a reasonable price. It is strange to think about now. Of the nuns who were our teachers. We girls were fascinated by them, constantly speculating over their lives, harassing the boarder students with questions about life after school hours and what they knew of the private lives of our teachers, who lived in quarters behind the classroom buildings where we were never allowed to go. Their clothes were so strange—old-fashioned wimples that covered their hair, full-length habits, you understand, that drowned the shapes of their bodies in voluminous folds of black and white fabric, which led us to wonder about what they hid underneath. Did they wear bras? Underwear? These questions never failed to give rise to giggles among us, a natural tendency among girls of our age. Our own clothing was decidedly less modest by design—the kameezes of our uniforms tailored tightly, darted to emphasize the budding breasts that began to blossom as we waded into adolescence, cinched at the waist to imitate the hourglass figures we admired in actresses like Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor. The dupattas of our uniforms were starched and folded into narrow sashes, veiling nothing; those we wore at home, twisted ropes of chiffon that were all the rage, stretched open minimally, even less so.
The curiosity was mutual. I remember how the nuns, equally inquisitive, would quiz us with questions about our lives at home—about what we ate and where we shopped, how we worshipped, and who we lived with.
I was one of those rare teachers’ pets who did nothing to earn my favored status, willful and wayward, rarely applying myself to my lessons, muddling through them with passing grades all the same. My priorities were social rather than academic.
Once, when I was fourteen, I led the way to convince Reverend Mother Borden, an American woman who was the principal of the school, to let us hold a fund-raising jukebox session during recess for our Charity Club. One of the girls brought in a record player, and we all brought in our favorite rock-and-roll records. Rehana, my friend, was put in charge of playing requests at a cost of four annas per song. With the opening guitar strike of “Jailhouse Rock,” my tapping toes led me into the middle of the courtyard, pulling whichever of the girls were at my side at the time along with me and without even realizing it, we were dancing—girls with girls, swaying our hips and rocking our heads, responding to the rebellious undertone of Elvis’s voice, in imitation of the American girls in his movies and others. Almost everyone joined in, erasing the superficial distinctions between us: rich; poor; Christian; Sindhi Hindus, native to the province Karachi was a part of, whose families had not migrated to India during Partition; Muslim, Sunni and Shia, whose differences were only an issue, a mild one at that, during Muharram; with a sprinkling of Parsis—Zoroastrians—among us, too.
Sister Catherine, a young Irish nun, new to the school, put her hand up to the O of her mouth for a moment, in response to the dancing frenzy that erupted right before her eyes. Then, after giving a cautious look to either side, she smiled. By the visible and rhythmic twitch of the hem of her gown, I guessed that her toes were tapping, too. We danced through two or three songs before our squeals and shrieks drew the attention of Reverend Mother Borden, who came out of the building behind us, marching into the scene to grab the ear of the first student her fingers could reach, pulling her along as she stomped over to the record player and lifted the needle off the record with a piercing scratch that made us all cover our ears. I was at the center of the melee, impossible to single out as the instigator in what had become mass mischief, but somehow the reverend mother knew enough to train her eyes on me with a frown and a finger summons. In the stark, sudden silence, I gulped my way over to her.
“You. You were the one who asked permission for this indulgence. And you are the one I hold responsible for this unseemly behavior, Deena. I suppose I should blame myself, too. I should have known better than to give in.”
Her eyes next found Sister Catherine, who was wringing her hands nervously. Sister Catherine hurried over, visibly pale, the freckles on her face, which we found so strange, standing out more than usual. The reverend mother looked like she wanted to reach out to pull on Sister Catherine’s ear, too, prevented only by the fact that hers was hidden safely out of sight under the wimple of her habit. We watched them retreat into the staff building and waited for the summons, which came twenty minutes later. Rehana and I and a few others sat in the reverend mother’s office for a long while as she paced and lectured, finally drawing to a conclusion with the assignment of an essay to be titled “On Dignity, Decorum, and Duty in the Delicate Sex”—the reverend mother had a poetic streak with a penchant for alliteration—to be handed in the next day.
On another occasion, my transgressions crossed the line severely enough to garner an invitation for my father to the reverend mother’s office. It was Ramzan, the holy month of fasting, when Muslims abstain from food and drink during daylight hours. En-gland’s cricket team was visiting Karachi for a test match and Pakistan was winning. The fifth and last day of the match, my friends and I decided, would be too exciting to miss. It also happened to be the twenty-seventh of Ramzan—the holiest day of Ramzan for Sunnis. For Shias, the important day was the twenty-third, but that would not signify in the plans we cooked up, which had little to do with religion, except to use it as an excuse, and everything to do with loving cricket.
We had skipped class before, many times, to indulge this particular passion. Unfortunately, this time, there was a test scheduled, too important to miss. We knew that if no one came to school, the test would have to be rescheduled. So, we instigated a mass bunking—urging all of the girls in our class to join us, on religious grounds. “Who do these nuns think they are?” we asked the other girls indignantly, those who would normally be too timid to participate in the kind of uprising that we were planning. “To plan a test on such a holy day! Just because they are Christians and have no respect for our religion! Scheduling tests without consulting our calendar—it’s an outrage!” The Shias in my little gang of friends winked at one another as we talked up this angle. Eventually, we got most of our classmates to agree with us. Those who didn’t, we cajoled and bullied to stay home anyway. Of course, one among those we pressured tattled—none other than Asma, Abbas Uncle’s daughter, in fact, the only one to show up at school from our class.
The reverend mother was furious. “This time you have gone too far, Deena. Make sure it is your father that comes. Not your mother. I know how it is with you girls. Your mothers are too soft with you. Only your father will have the will to discipline you as you deserve to be disciplined.”
The sexism of her demand escaped my notice at the time. Perhaps it was too much a part of the world in those times to be striking. Or I was secretly too relieved to reflect on it. In my house, Ma was far more to be feared in matters of discipline than Abu. When he came home from his meeting with the reverend mother, I asked him anxiously what she had said.
“The reverend mother said that you are a very bright girl, Deena. That your intelligence is matched only by your high spirits. You are a natural-born leader. That’s the trouble. If you applied yourself, she said, you would be at the top of the class. She wants me to tell you to concentrate your—how did she put it?—your powers of persuasion for good instead of mischief, to be a role model instead of a ringleader. Despite all the trouble you cause her, Deena, I believe she has great affection for you. She praised your English, too. I told her of how you love to read. From now on, she will make a point of keeping you busy with all the books she can manage to get into your hands. From her own personal library.”
I clapped my hands at this news. This would be a treat instead of a punishment. The regular school library was horribly stocked. One year, I remember, we girls had gotten terribly excited at the news that boxes and boxes of new books had arrived from America, a donation from schoolchildren there. We waited eagerly for the day when they would be
opened and shelved, available for us to read. When the day came, we were very disappointed. The books were all torn and marked, half of them with pages missing. And none of them were good books to begin with. Our teachers made us write thank-you notes for those books anyway, words of gratitude that we did not feel, muttering angrily, under our breaths, at the spoiled American children, anonymous, who thought that torn and marked books could be counted as a gift! What the reverend mother promised my father—that I would have access to her personal library—was tremendous news, because everyone knew that the best books in school were those housed on the shelves in her office. It was news I couldn’t wait to share with Umar. Before I could run off to find him, Abu had one more thing to add, making me frown.
“Don’t be too excited, Deena. You will be expected to write essays on each and every book she lends you.”
Yes, Umar, the boy from next door. We had remained friends for all the seven years since my fall from the wall. Everything I thought and felt made its way to his ears. And one of my other childhood passions, the one Abu had told the reverend mother about, was one I shared with him.
“Page?” Umar would call out.
“One hundred twenty-seven,” I would answer from my perch at the wall.
“How did you get so far ahead?” he would complain as he rustled the pages of his book to catch up.
We read books in parallel fashion, sharing passages out loud from terrace to garden and back again. Alice in Wonderland was one of the first. Umar refused to read Little Women, though he listened to me read quite a bit of it out loud before shutting me up with a taste of my own medicine with Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Beginning with Arthur Conan Doyle and moving on to Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner, we outdid each other with wild guesses and reckless bets on whodunit that changed as we twisted and turned our way through mysterious plots until unlikely culprits were revealed by Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Perry Mason, Umar with his copies of the titles we read and me with my own, both of them rented from the book man who came to our street every week, on bicycle, renting comics for two annas and paperbacks for four—that is an eighth of a rupee and a quarter—knowing us well enough to make sure he kept two copies of books by authors we liked, because we couldn’t wait for each other to finish and had to read our selections together, at the same time. We laughed out loud, in concert, at the antics of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, saved the world from outlandish villains out to dominate it with Ian Fleming’s James Bond, which we read at Umar’s insistence, and for which I had my revenge with Gone With the Wind. Somerset Maugham kept us busy for a while. And then we ventured into Russian literature. Anna Karenina first, whose title character I could not forgive for having abandoned her child in pursuit of a passion that proved to be so self-destructive. Then Dr. Zhivago. That one we loved so much we were compelled to buy our copies instead of renting them.
With Zhivago, we talked, as we had on that first day of our friendship, about whether Yuri was a hero or whether he just happened to be always in the right place at the right time—or the wrong one, depending on your point of view.
“So you think that Yuri’s infidelity was all right? And Anna Karenina’s was despicable? That won’t do, Deena On The Wall. To sympathize with one and condemn the other.”
“How can you compare the two, Umar? Yuri was the victim of history and fate. Anna was nobody’s victim but her own.”
“So—Anna is less of a heroine because she chose the direction of her life? And Yuri is a hero because he didn’t? And what kind of choice did she really have anyway? She was no less a victim of circumstance than Yuri.”
“Come on, Umar. She wasn’t separated from her family because of war and chaos.”
“But she was a woman. The life she left behind was predetermined for her. Her passion for Vronsky was the first time she ever had a choice to make for herself.”
“The same was true for Yuri. But he didn’t make that choice. To walk away from his duty and obligation to his family. Even when passion arose, he turned away from it. At first. Until there was nothing else left—no choice but to surrender to fate. He did the right thing, the honorable thing—until every other road was closed to him. And when that happened, he didn’t let himself be devoured by selfishness and self-involvement. He wrote poetry. His passion for Lara became the source of something great. He created something and left it behind for others. Even then, he made his life about something more than himself.”
“This is heavy talk. Too heavy to be had at such a distance.” My father had made his way up to the terrace so stealthily that I had not heard him behind me. This had become a new habit of his, instigated by my mother, worrying enough now that I was well into my teens, to send my father up to the terrace for tea, to keep an eye on things and try to avert potential disaster. It was the wrong move on her part. Instead of dampening our discussion, Abu did what Ma would never have allowed.
He invited Umar up from the garden. “Why don’t you come up for some tea, Umar? This is an interesting discussion, better conducted at conversational volume, rather than having to shout up and down at each other in this unseemly fashion. The hawkers in the streets have a hard enough time as it is, making ends meet, without having to compete with the sound of your disagreements.”
Neither Umar nor I said anything for a moment, both of us surprised, the distance between us one we were used to and hesitant to bridge. I saw him shrug off the significance at the same time that I suppose I did. Within minutes, Umar had gained entry into our home and was up there, on the terrace, with Abu and me. The literary argument that had flowed so naturally before was now stifled, both Umar and I suddenly shy in light of the formality of my father’s presence.
I sought ease in the familiarity of teasing and said, “This is the first time that you and I have been so close, Umar, since my fall seven years ago. No wonder you are so quiet. You must be afraid of what happened last time—that I’ll be the cause of a broken bone or two at least!”
Umar smiled, his eyes sparkling, at close range, in a way I would not have been able to notice from the usual perspective of terrace to garden.
Abu sent me down to call for tea. When I came back, tray in hand, the conversation was flowing, Abu and Umar immersed in politics, my copy of Dr. Zhivago held firmly in Abu’s hands. I knew that it was a good thing I was finished with it, because he looked like he had every intention of reading it himself.
I poured Umar’s tea and handed it to him, only to watch it grow cold in his hands as the afternoon wore on, he and Abu moving easily from politics to history, reliving Partition and the decisions it had occasioned, and worrying if war was imminent with the country in which both had been born. It was almost dinnertime when Abu said, “I believe you two were on the subject of poetry when I interrupted your argument.”
“Yes,” I said, my hand brushing Umar’s as I reached out to take his copy of Zhivago from him. I flipped to the last section, to the poetry of Dr. Zhivago that Pasternak had included after the epilogue. “You see, Umar. This part. This poem, ‘Parting’—it’s my favorite. It tells exactly what I meant when I said that Yuri’s love for Lara is something that happens in spite of himself, outside of his control. Especially this verse:
In the years of trial,
When life was inconceivable,
From the bottom of the sea the tide of destiny
Washed her up to him.”
I sighed.
Umar said nothing for a long moment. Then, quietly, he said, “My favorite poem is ‘The Wedding Party.’ It’s not a romantic poem, like the one you read. It’s about life and what it means.” Umar reached toward me to reclaim his book, found the page he was looking for, and said, “Here’s the verse I like:
And life itself is only an instant,
Only the dissolving
Of ourselves in all others
As though in gift to them.”
“‘ . . . the dissolving of ourselves in all others . . .’ Hmm.
Lovely. That is lovely,” Abu said. “I think I like Umar’s verse better than yours, Deena.”
Neither Umar nor I said anything, falling strangely silent. Soon after, Umar left.
Predictably, Ma fumed to find that the battlefield had shifted and that the enemy had been invited into the gates. She bypassed Abu—who she believed had crossed over to the other side, and focused her fury on me.
She sat me in front of the mirror in her bedroom, the only one in the house that wasn’t too splotchy with rust to still serve, as she did every night, combing out my hair to braid it with rough yanks that were unusually fierce. “What am I to do with that father of yours?! Inviting the boy up instead of—instead of—oof!—instead of doing what I sent him to do.”
“Instead of scaring him off?”
“Exactly!”
I had to wince at her emphasis, my head snapping back as it suffered its way through the stroke of the comb in her hand. “But—Ma—ouch!—why does he have to be scared off? He’s just a friend!”
“A friend? There’s no such thing between a girl and a boy. Besides, we cannot confine ourselves to worrying about what he is and what you are—we have to worry, also, about what people will make of these things. It would be bad enough as it is. For word to spread about you being friendly with a boy. But the boy is a Sunni. And not just any Sunni. His mother is one who hates us. Whatever I think, and your father, she would never approve of her son marrying you.”
“Ma! I don’t want to marry him!”
“You be quiet! You don’t know what you want! You are only a child—you don’t understand the way that the world works! And your father?! He’s no better! Acting no better than a child himself.” I watched her in the mirror, muttering to herself as, mercifully, the work of the comb was set aside and her fingers wove their way down the length of my hair. When she was done, she put her hands on my shoulders, lowered her face so that it was next to mine, and gave me a little shake, loving but stern. “Look at you, Deena.” She paused to do what she asked me to do, studying my face, putting her hands on my cheeks, her thumbs cradling the nape of my neck. “You have grown up into a woman. Right before my eyes. No longer a child.”
