Her suggestion gives me pause. I once considered doing an oral history with my grandparents, but I abandoned the idea after they passed.
“That could be a possibility.” The idea makes my heart beat faster, and I realize that I’m two steps ahead of my mother. I slow my stride.
“And you know we have a patriarch — my father’s grandfather, my great-grandfather.” She looks at the cloudless sky, calculating, “Your great-great-grandfather. What was his name? Everyone talks about his legacy, how he went from poverty to creating charities and an educational fund for future generations. I applied to it for a loan for my education.”
“Really?”
“Yes! His name was Abdoolally, I think. Self-taught man, didn’t go to school. Had four wives.”
“At the same time? A polygamist?”
“No!” She slaps my arm. “I think each one died and then he remarried as a widower. I’m not sure, but I think there was a rumour that he might have divorced one of them, too, which would have been highly unusual for his time. Ask your Tasnim Maasi. And your father’s uncle, Abbas Kaaka, has begun keeping a family tree. Your dad’s side is also somehow related to Abdoolally.”
“Everyone in our family is somehow related to one another.” I laugh and she does, too. My parents are second cousins. Murtuza and I figured out that we are fourth cousins, twice removed.
We pause to look out over the water, then backtrack. We are too breathless and hot for conversation, but my mind is moving lightning-quick as I plan the first few steps of my research project.
FOUR
January 1866, South Bombay
Eleven-year old Abdoolally huddled under the yellow glow of a streetlamp, his index finger pacing his laboured reading.
“The lion … lives … in the … jungle,” he whispered. “His … ro … roar is … loud.”
An elderly fruit-seller trudged by with an empty wooden cart pulled by a weary bullock. Just in time, Abdoolally wrapped his legs around the post to avoid a heavy hoof landing on his toe. A fly, one of the bullock’s many winged passengers, hopped onto his hand and then onto the Hindi primary reader he had “borrowed” from Sunil, the nine-year-old boy of the family for whom he worked. He told his mother it was gift. Did she believe the lie?
Thinking of her, it seemed, could summon her. He looked up and saw her face framed in the window of the third-floor room they shared with another widow and her three young children. She fanned herself with her orna; despite the evening’s cool, the day’s heat lingered in the room. He waved to her and pleaded, “Five more minutes, Mummy.”
She nodded, her lips a straight line, but he knew she was proud of him, knew they had left the village for a better life, and for now, their better life was just this, this one nicked book about a lion in a jungle that he struggled, word by word, to understand.
FIVE
I startle awake. Murtuza snores lightly beside me, his fist tucked under his chin.
I shut my eyes, retrieve and re-enter the strange dream I’d been inhabiting: I’m showing my cousin Fatema my bedroom closet in the old Edison house. It has a hidden door that opens to a passageway I’ve never had the courage to explore. But with Fatema there, I feel brave.
Before we can even approach the closet, we must clear a dozen heavy boxes that stand like cardboard sentinels before the main door. Then, after opening it, we need to yank away a forest of hangers that block the back of the closet and its concealed door. Each time we remove a hanger, another sprouts in its place, clothing magically reproducing. I grow tired and hopeless.
Fatema, in her bossy manner, nudges me out of the way and works at twice my pace until finally we can see the back of the closet. Without any hesitation, she swings open the secret door and crouches down to look inside.
“Do you want to go through first? Or should I?” I can’t decide. She releases a long, frustrated sigh, her breath like a gust of wind clearing my mind.
I step forward.
I awake, shivering, my chest slick with sweat.
Murtuza stirs, roused by my distress. He reaches out an arm, its deadweight landing like a log across my bladder.
“You okay?” he slurs.
“Yes, just had a dream.” I turn over and reverse into him, making myself the little spoon. He rests his cheekbone on my shoulder blade and exhales cool air onto my drying skin. I shift away so that our bony parts no longer meet and he cushions my spine with his cheek.
We match our breathing. I return to my childhood bedroom with its baby blue drapes and bedspread.
“You go first,” I say to Fatema with certainty this time. She crawls into the hole. I watch the pink soles of her feet disappear, but I don’t follow her.
“You coming?” she calls, in a voice that already sounds faraway.
A gentle amber glow permeates the drapes, the first blush of morning. The clock tells me that two hours have passed since I drowsed off. Six twenty-four seems a reasonable time to surrender to wakefulness. I swing my legs out of bed and plod to the kitchen to put the coffee on.
At 7:30 a.m., or 5:00 p.m. Mumbai time, I send a message to my cousin Zainab, requesting her to help her mother, my Tasnim Maasi, turn on Skype. Maasi has lived alone since her husband passed a few years ago. Zainab and her husband were lucky to purchase a flat across the road from her soon after their marriage, an arrangement that benefited my cousin when her two kids were young. Lately, Maasi is the one who needs looking in on — not that she requires much — she is still active and has a servant to clean up, do laundry, and chop vegetables for her dinner.
I wonder if it’s strange for my seventy-three-year-old aunt to be speaking to her niece halfway across the world via Skype. When I was a child, the land lines in India were notoriously unreliable, and long-distance calls expensive. When Maasi and Mom were children, most people didn’t own telephones.
On good days, our irregular Skype calls morph into a group party with six or eight people gathered around our two computers, depending on who is home. After the first five minutes of fiddling with volume and acclimatizing to the oddness of seeing our own images in the left-hand box, it begins to feel almost normal to communicate this way, as though we are chatting across a wide coffee table rather than an ocean.
Zainab must be at work, because Nafeesa, her sixteen-year-old daughter, has been dispatched, and by 8:40 a.m., Maasi dials me.
“Nani, press this when you are finished,” Nafeesa instructs her grandmother in Gujarati. Nafeesa looks ready for a party, her long lashes blacked with mascara, her mouth painted pink. She must have had to argue long and hard with her conservative parents to appear this glam.
“I know how to work it,” Maasi grumps at Nafeesa. “I’m an old lady, but I know which button to press.” Nafeesa apologizes, kisses her grandmother’s cheek, then says a quick hello and goodbye to me before disappearing.
Maasi’s English fluency developed after years of speaking to the gora tourists who frequented their Colaba clothing shop, which Zainab and her husband now manage.
My Gujarati comprehension is serviceable, but speaking full, grammatically correct sentences is a struggle. Like a child, I am perpetually in the present tense. We shift back and forth between languages. Maasi, and most of my Mumbai relatives, can do this with Hindi and Marathi, too.
“Sharifa, how are you?” Tasnim Maasi looks at me over her bifocals.
“Majama chun,” I reply. She follows my lead and switches over.
“I’m looking forward to you coming. Soon, no? You’ve given Zainab all your details?”
“Haa. Us, too, can’t wait.” I make a mental note to look up “can’t wait” in Gujarati. I give her updates about Murtuza and Zee, who have just left for the library and camp. She asks about our turtle, Tartala, whom she’s never met in person but always inquires after. I move the laptop to his aquarium and she gushes when he pokes his leathery head out of his shell and stretches toward the screen. She marvels at how much he’s grown since they last digitally visited. Tartala,
as if in reply, wags his head left and right and then turns his tail toward the screen.
I feel her studying me as she adjusts her glasses again. Can she tell that I slept poorly last night?
“What would you like me to bring you from here?”
“We need nothing. Don’t weigh down your luggage.” Although Mumbaikers can purchase anything, and at a better price, it is still my habit to ask. Until I was a young adult, my family would fill an entire locked suitcase with chocolate, cosmetics, and Jell-O. I tell her about Mom’s idea for an Indian research project, and she wobbles her head, like Tartala did, in affirmation.
“Has anyone done research into the family ancestry?” I continue. “On Abdoolally?” I ready my pen for any facts she might share.
“Oh, Abdoolally Rangwala.” She smiles. “A great man. That would be very good research to do. I’ll introduce you to people who work for his trust, but no, I don’t think anyone is recording his life story.” The businesswoman Maasi was, I know she’ll complete some groundwork for me the next time she is out socializing.
“You know he willed most of his money to start charities for pregnant women and orphans? It was because every one of his wives died in childbirth.” I scribble her words into my notebook.
“Mom thought he might have divorced one of them.”
“No, no. She is mistaken, I think. I was told he was widowed three times.”
Near the end of our call, there is a knock at Maasi’s door and my cousin Zainab’s face fills the screen. She came straight from work; she’s still wearing her rida, a fancy one. It’s our community’s trademark hooded dress, a garment worn by devout women when out in public. I wear it begrudgingly and only at religious gatherings where it’s mandatory.
“Like it?” She steps back from the computer to model. It’s white with pink sparkly flowers dotted across the hem.
“Are those sequins?” I squint at the screen.
“A little flashy, no, Zainab?” Maasi mutters, but Zainab ignores the comment.
“Yeah!” She holds up a flower to the camera. “I got it for free, only — as a sample — from a wholesaler who wants us to carry some at the shop. I don’t think we will, we mostly get tourists who want T-shirts and cheap skirts. But maybe we’ll string him along for a bit so I can get a few more!” We all laugh at the joke. Her mother tells her about my history project.
“You should send out a questionnaire to the family,” Zainab advises. “That way you can get some information in the next two weeks, before touching down here.”
“Good idea.” I write it in my notebook.
“I have to go and do namaaz,” Maasi says, consulting her watch, confirming that it is prayer time. “I’ll see who I can find who’ll help you, Sharifa.” We say goodbye and Zainab takes her chair in front of the computer.
“Have you heard of Survey Ape?” I smile at my cousin’s mistake but don’t correct her. Gratefulness wells up in me; I’ve always been able to trust in my resourceful family, and I’m certain this will be true for my sabbatical project.
SIX
Zee and I join Laura and Elena for a playdate at the park. Laura and I found each other here five years ago, and while our then two-year-old daughters tentatively navigated the sandbox, we slipped into easy banter. She’s a mompreneur who sells custom T-shirts on Etsy and blogs about parenting. A year after we met, she shifted her writing to marital communication, later separation, and after that, divorce and shared-custody arrangements.
This week’s column is about dating as a single mom. She’s gone out with four men since her divorce a year back and tells me about the latest.
“Research,” she says, with mock nonchalance.
“Pretty good job you’ve got!” I quip.
We watch Zee and Elena on the swings, pumping their legs to go higher. Six months ago, they would have been begging us to push them, but now they boast self-reliance. I sigh with gladness and disappointment. One day, she won’t need me at all, I think.
“This guy I’m dating is really good, Shari.”
“Good, how?”
Zee laughs when her swing hits its highest point. Her bottom briefly lifts an inch off the seat before the swing comes back down.
“Well, for one thing, he lasts a long time.” She grins and waggles her eyebrows at me.
“Lasts?” I ask, distracted by Zee’s high flying. She and Elena cackle, pump harder, then cackle some more. “Zee! Not so high!”
“Well, you know. In bed?” Laura rolls her eyes at my obtuseness.
“Really?”
“Minimum thirty minutes. Long enough for me to … you know … a few times.” She looks away, breaking eye contact, and focuses on the kids. As though noticing them for the first time, she shouts, “Elena, take it easy. You guys are being unsafe!”
Zee and Elena let their legs go slack, and their swings begin to slow. I ponder Laura’s words but can’t think of a good follow-up question. Instead I say, “Wow, that’s great. What’s he like otherwise? Is he relationship material?”
“Look, they actually listened to us, for once,” Laura gripes about the kids, but I know she’s considering my question. She lists a few common interests and the things that annoy her.
While I half-listen, a question bubbles up: is my problem about lasting? If Murtuza could last even fifteen minutes, or half an hour, would it happen for me? I reflect on my earlier boyfriends, all of whom were energetic, youthful. They’d all tried. And just like Murtuza, there was that flicker of disappointment when they eventually gave up. Afterward, I’d have to try to be cheery and satisfied. I’d read somewhere that something like fifteen percent of women don’t climax, and so I’d reassure them brightly, keeping my face open, unguileful: “Really, I get a contact high from you. All the feel-good chemicals you have, the endorphins, they come my way, just because I’m close to you.” I so badly wanted to be okay with living in a society where one hundred percent believe in an end goal that fifteen percent of us don’t experience.
Each partner grew progressively distant over time. In my head, I know they were poor matches, not meant to be, but my heart has always wondered if the sex had anything to do their serial demises. Did it weaken their confidence in our connection? Could it happen with Murtuza?
Laura is now talking about a different guy, someone new she hopes to see next week. I struggle to keep up. “What’s his name?”
“Matthew. I found him on OkCupid. I’d like to see what it’s like to date more than one person at a time. I’ve always been such a monogamist in the past.”
I nod, asking myself, In another life, would I want what Laura has? Multiple orgasms and the thrill of novelty? My phone beeps; Murtuza has texted me three pink hearts.
“It sounds fun. Very different from the ordinariness of marriage.”
“Yeah, it’s good for now. I’m not ready for anything too committed. To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready again.”
“One, two, three, go!” Zee and Elena scream in unison, as they leap off their swings-in-motion. I’m on my feet in an instant, my heart pounding. But their young legs are springs, nimbly absorbing the shock of their landings. They race to the jungle gym.
“Hooligans.” Laura pats my arm.
“Yeah.” I sit.
“So, you all ready for India?”
“Haven’t even started packing, but we don’t leave for another twelve days.”
“Excited?”
“Actually, I wasn’t all that excited, but now I am. I’ve decided to do an oral history project about my great-great-grandfather.
I’m going to interview as many elders as I can. I’ve always wanted to do something like this.”
“Cool. So you’re writing a book?”
“No, nothing that formal. I was thinking about a wiki or a blog or something. Maybe you can give me a tutorial when I get to that point.”
We both look up when Elena cries out. She must have mis-stepped on her way down and fallen to the sand, but
her wails sound more surprised than pained. Laura rushes over, brushes the sand off Elena’s shorts. In a minute, Elena ascends the play structure to meet Zee at its apex.
The commotion passes and I text Murtuza back three purple hearts.
I check Facebook when we arrive home. A notification tells me that Zainab has invited me to the Rangwala Family Newsletter page. I join, scrolling through posts about an upcoming get-together. I click through a large unedited album of someone’s wedding, but don’t recognize anyone and then lurk on Zainab’s page awhile, noticing that she’s been on a self-help kick, sharing articles about “The 10 Things Happy People Do,” “7 Ways to Love Yourself More,” and other numbered lists that I don’t open.
Zainab’s moniker includes her maiden name so that her school friends will find her. She told me they wouldn’t otherwise recognize her because she’s no longer stylish and pretty. I don’t see the frumpy middle-aged matron she views in the mirror; to me, she’s still that girl who automatically won the role of princess in our childhood games of make-believe. In some ways, thirty years later, Fatema remains the prince. And me? I was usually left playing the lady-in-waiting.
Zainab, Fatema, and I are related through our parents — Zainab’s mother, Fatema’s father, and my mother — who are siblings. Nani dubbed us the Secret Cousins’ Club for the way that we used to huddle, whispering our secrets to one another. We don’t have any other girl cousins close in age, so it was just us.
Fatema was born in mid-May, Zainab in July, then me — trailing by a month — in August. It was as though our mothers had been on a synchronized procreation schedule never again replicated. I am the only “only” amongst the three of us; Fatema has an older sister and Zainab has two elder brothers, each three years apart.
When we were babies, Tasnim Maasi and Mom dropped Zainab and me off at Nani’s for three hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. Fatema was already there, because her family lived with Nani until Fatema was eight years old.
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