“Oh my god, Fatema. It’s like a five-star hotel. Thanks again for arranging it for us,” Murtuza says.
“It was easy. The owner lives abroad now and owed me a favour.” She shrugs.
“Mom says our house seems like a shack now,” Zee joins in.
“That is not true. You have a lovely older home. Your houses over there are quite different, that’s all. You people like to preserve your very short history,” she jokes.
“Is that why you stayed at the Park Hyatt during your last visit?” Murtuza teases. She’d declined our invitation, using the excuse that she’d be an inconvenient guest with all of her business meetings and late nights. But I read between the lines that she needed her privacy and room service. We saw her only a few times that week and she was vague about how she filled her schedule, when normally she loves to boast about lunches with famous authors and fancy awards dinners with industry colleagues.
I study the menu. “They have stir-fry beef tenderloin here?”
“Check the small print!” Murtuza smirks. “‘Not real beef’!”
“It’s buffalo. Somehow exempt from protection,” Fatema informs us.
We order the buffalo, roasted duck udon, Ma-po tofu, Chilean sea bass, and a bowl of sweet corn soup for Zee. Murtuza fills Fatema in on the course he’s been teaching on Canadian literature.
“Everyone expected it was going to be all Margarets.” He laughs. “They’re the only Canadian authors my students have heard of. And of course, I am including one Atwood and one Laurence short story, but the rest are people of colour and Indigenous authors like Vivek Shraya, Wayson Choy, Dionne Brand, Cherie Dimaline.”
“Do those books get sold here?” I stir a drop of soy sauce into Zee’s soup.
“Some, not all. We bought rights to a few Canadian authors this year.”
“I photocopied excerpts for the less international works. I’ll give you a list of them so you can scoop them up,” he tells Fatema, who nods at the suggestion.
“Who is your favourite author, Zee?” Fatema inquires.
“Well, I don’t have just one. I like lots of books.”
“That’s my girl. A big reader.” Murtuza puffs up.
“Tell Maasi what you are reading now,” I coach Zee. To Fatema I say, “She’s already finished the Premchand you gave her.”
“Ramona the Pest,” Zee reports dutifully.
“Hey, I love Ramona!” Fatema tells her.
“You read it, too?”
“Yes! The whole series. Me, Maasi Fatema, and Maasi Zainab together. Remember I told you that many of those books are over forty years old?” I remind Zee. The conversation turns to Ramona Quimby and her adventures, while waiters arrive and serve us from steaming dishes.
“Speaking of good characters, how is Abdoolally coming along?” Fatema pops a piece of duck into her mouth.
“Well … slowly. I still know nothing about Zehra, the one he divorced.” I glance at Zee, who has her nose in Ramona. “Finish your soup, Zee.”
“Maybe he loved Zehra the most,” Murtuza speculates, eyebrow cocked. “Maybe it burned so bright it was too hot to handle.” He reaches under the table and squeezes my thigh. I’ve been cool with him since our conversation a few days back, and I know he is trying. It’s irrational, but I don’t feel like softening to him just yet. I cross my arms over my chest and lean away from him.
“Maybe she did something that broke his heart, or betrayed him,” Fatema offers. I can tell she’s picking up on our marital tiff and is trying to keep the conversation moving.
“That’s assuming she was at fault for their marriage ending.” I bristle. A part of me knows that I’m being tetchy, that I should just relax and enjoy this dinner. I gesture for the waiter. “Anyone want a glass of wine?”
We order a bottle for the table from one server, and within a minute a second server is pouring our glasses.
“Indian wines are really getting good.” Murtuza sniffs his glass like a sommelier.
“Really good.” I’ve had two big gulps and am beginning to feel agreeable.
“You know, about Zehra,” Fatema says, “women didn’t leave rich men in those days. I’m not saying it was her fault. But it had to be something pretty big.”
“Religious differences? You hear about that sort of friction with Bohra couples sometimes,” Murtuza ventures. He reaches for my hand, and this time I intertwine my fingers with his.
“I don’t know, that seems like a modern problem,” Fatema counters.
“Interesting, though. I wonder what the religious debates were back in 1900?” I feel my shoulders relax. I pull out my notebook and write the question there.
TWENTY-TWO
Bombay, 1898
Abdoolally understood that miscarriages were common. Sharifa had had one and seemed to take the disappointment in stride, but then she’d already had three healthy children and was satisfied to have no more.
It was different for Shaheeda. So young, and yet she’d already had three, each one a heartbreak that left her grieving for weeks. Frankly, he didn’t understand the depth of reaction, but he tried to offer her encouragement: next time, next time it will work out. Their British doctor, Dr. Fuller, reassured Shaheeda by telling her that miscarriages were God’s way of ensuring that unhealthy babies would not be carried to term.
Their next time was different, and Shaheeda gave birth to their daughter, Rumana. A good pregnancy, an easy birth. The spell of bad luck, if you could call it luck, now broken.
Three years later, she was pregnant again. Perhaps, he thought, this next child, his fifth, would be a boy, a second son who would grow up to help Husein take over the business.
But this was not in Allah’s plan.
Abdoolally asked the doctor, that tall white statue of a man: If pregnancy was natural, why was it so dangerous? Why did this have to happen a second time? Why did he have to lose another wife, another child this way? The doctor’s watery gaze was gentle, but ultimately useless.
He took the question to his amil, the kindly older man he’d known most of his whole life. The cleric held his hand, a rare gesture, and the warm solid pressure of his touch calmed him. The amil preached faith in Allah’s will, that it was Abdoolally’s duty to accept a second wife’s death from childbirth.
He could be dutiful, but not in the ways the amil suggested. He pledged that day that he wouldn’t allow his daughters to die in such a manner. They would not be broken by birth.
He returned to his study and made a list of topics to take to the bookseller: miscarriage, childbirth, fertility. He would overcome his pain through knowledge.
He sauntered past his bookshelves, running his finger across the spines of his favourite volumes. He exhaled.
The children’s Hindi reader, the first book he’d ever owned, caught his eye. He opened it, turned its now yellowed and worn pages, escaping to the jungle.
TWENTY-THREE
Perhaps it was the MSG. Or the wine. I lie awake, contemplating a nightmare.
I dreamt that I lived at the edge of a forest. While I stood on my deck, staring out at a green wall of trees, I thought I saw the outline of a lion, the kind that roars at you at the beginning of films: huge, majestic, commanding.
He didn’t move, and so my dreaming mind assumed a trick of the eye, a rock and shrub formation coming to life in the dark.
And then his right jowl shifted slightly, and his gaze redirected, fixing on me. He was real. And waiting for me.
In an instant, my denial curdled into fear, and I rushed across the deck, slid open the screen door, and scrambled inside. By the time I’d slammed the glass door, he was an inch away, his hungry breath fogging the glass. I stared at his frightening muzzle, heart pounding. Haunting me for the next few moments was a confusing kind of warning: apparitions can be real.
In the morning I search for the dream’s meaning online.
Lions symbolize strength and power and overcoming emotional difficulties, but if the lion is in attack
mode there could be a self-destructive force, a challenge, or obstacle that must be faced.
My mind turns back to Fatema, to Zainab, to Maasi. To khatna. I close the page and the computer. I am not interested in self-destruction or challenges or obstacles. I am in India, on a long-awaited work break with my family. I want to sleep, to dream pleasant things, to vacation.
And yet I can’t shake the nightmare. I tell Zainab about it when we meet in the afternoon. Her online Muslim dream site suggests a special diet to recover from an illness.
“No street food for you while you’re in Mumbai,” she teases, referring to my dual weaknesses for pani puri and stomach distress.
I laugh, welcoming Zainab’s trademark lightness of being. Sometimes dreams are just dreams.
I watch her as she carries her laptop back to the bedroom. Like me and Fatema and all the women of the family, she is curvy, and growing rounder with age. As kids, we fit into one another’s clothes and perhaps still could.
It’s been a week since Fatema’s confession about khatna and I haven’t spoken to anyone about it except to argue with Murtuza. The words crowd in my throat, and I swallow them down. And anyway, how fair would it be to talk about something so potentially distressing to Zainab? Or maybe she doesn’t see it this way? Could she believe in the practice, too?
Instead of broaching the subject, I chop vegetables alongside her as she prepares her family’s meal. I share with her my anticipation to join my friend’s consulting business in the spring.
“Al-Humdulillah! You’ve been talking about wanting a change for many years.”
“Yes, she sort of suggested it two years ago, but I wasn’t ready then. And then Dad died and …” I drift off.
“Losing someone really highlights what the important things are, no? We take happiness more seriously?”
I smile at her platitudes.
She tells me that the store is doing well, and she’s decided to work part-time so that she can keep an eye on Nafeesa, who recently admitted that she is in love with a boy in the neighbourhood. Zainab and her husband, Adam, considered a prohibition on the relationship, but instead negotiated with the boy’s parents to maintain a short leash.
“I don’t want to react like my parents,” Zainab admits. Maasi discovered she was flirting with a boy when she was seventeen, and severely limited her time outside of the house. The matrimony search, which had already begun, moved ahead with vigour and within six months, Zainab was engaged. I recall attending Zainab’s wedding two years later, when I was twenty, feeling the ever-widening chasm of cultural difference between us. I was nowhere near ready for marriage.
“Why can’t she be like Sharmeen? She never talks about boys.” Sharmeen is her eldest, nineteen years old, studying at a Bohra college in Udaipur. “What if Nafeesa has sex? What if she gets pregnant?” She drops diced tomatoes into the daal.
“Well, she’s sixteen. It’s not like you can control her every move. Better to have open communication. When I was her age, I was sneaking around, lying to my parents. That’s no better,” I counsel. “You know, I told your mother about my first boyfriend right after he and I broke up. I didn’t ever tell my mom. But your mother, who was so strict with you, kept my secret. Can you believe it?”
“I can. She is hard to understand that way. But then maybe she wasn’t worried because you’d already broken up? If you were still together she might have told on you?”
“Maybe. What would you want me to do if your daughter shared a secret like that?”
“Oh Allah! Has Nafeesa told you something?”
“No, no! It was hypothetical! I swear.”
“Things were much simpler when I was young.” She shakes her head. “I had suitors, but it was very innocent. The most I ever did with them was hold hands, maybe a kiss on the cheek. I hear that girls these days do so much more.”
“Which is why you have to talk to her. She needs information, about how not to get pregnant, about how to stay safe,” I offer. My cousin’s crumpling face tells me she’s not prepared to have that conversation.
“I should have forced her to wear ridas like me. She’s just a little too modern, too Western, I think,” Zainab says. Then, with a mischievous curl of the lip, and a sideways glance at my sleeveless sundress, she says, “No offence.” I wave away the insult before it can land.
Her phone chimes a reminder that it’s time to pray, and she puts the lid on the pots and turns down the heat.
“I’ll join you if that’s okay?” I don’t know from where this impulse arises; it’s been many months since I last did namaaz. I follow her to her bedroom, and she unrolls two prayer mats with colourful floral designs. Hers is pink and purple, matching her rida. We both do waadu, the ritual ablutions, and I borrow a rida that matches my mat. As we stand side by side, speaking the prayers under our breath, bowing, prostrating, our knees cracking in harmony, I feel peace for the first time all week.
I envy Zainab. A nightmare leaves me questioning everything, searching for illusory meaning where there might be none. My cousin, on the other hand, can pass it off as a mild dietary warning. Where I have anxiety, she has prayer.
After, I carry home containers of kheema and daal for dinner. It’s the same recipe we all follow, learned from the same woman, our nani, who would have learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers. Somehow, I can never quite get mine to taste as good.
TWENTY-FOUR
“You don’t like Rooh Afza sharbat, Zeenat?” Tasnim Maasi serves us drinks on a silver tray. I take two polite sips before setting mine aside. Zee grimaces into the pink liquid.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Have a taste at least.” I know my cajoling won’t work; once Zee’s decided she doesn’t want something, there’s no point introducing it again for weeks.
Zee shakes her head, and looks up at me with doleful eyes. I push aside her bangs, which are growing too long.
“You know something, Zeenat? I don’t know why we still drink this stuff.” Maasi places all three unfinished glasses on the tray. “We have much better options these days!”
And then she lets out a rose-smelling belch, its timbre like a bullhorn’s. Zee casts a glance my way, unsure how to interpret the odd behaviour. Since it’s just after lunchtime, I don’t have to labour to match Maasi’s burp. The two of us break out into giggles, while Zee watches us, open-mouthed.
“Zeenat, do you have one for us?” There is a gleam in Maasi’s eye, one she often reserved for me.
While I can occasionally goof around with Zee, playfulness doesn’t come easily, probably because there are so many practicalities to attend to: did you wash your hands? Remember your lunch? Wipe from front to back? Maybe aunties, who are not mired by primary responsibility, are allowed to be kooky.
In fact, there has always been very little talk of morality or respectability between Maasi and I. When other biddies were encouraging marriage, Maasi only said, “If you’d like to meet someone, then fine, we can introduce you. But I’ve learned it’s no good unless a person is ready and really wants it. It’s a little like going on a diet,” she added, winking at me as she bit into a butter cookie.
Maasi continues to egg Zee on, who gives it a good try, but doesn’t manage to pass any gas. Maasi ambles out to her balcony and yells down to the man who runs the grocery stall across the lane.
“Ek batlee Limca!”
“Yes, Ma’am!” a man yells back.
Within a minute, we can hear the shopkeeper’s son’s chappals slapping down the hallway and dinging the doorbell. I run to the door and pass the boy fifty rupees. In the kitchen, I fill three glasses. As the fizz tickles my nose, I ponder the reality I’ve been pushing to the back of my mind: it was Tasnim Maasi and Nani who took Fatema and Zainab for khatna.
There must be more to the story. It’s not that I think Fatema is lying, but I do wonder if she’s got some of the details wrong, is misremembering. If Maasi was involved, perhaps she was pressured in some way, pe
rhaps by her mother-in-law? Fatema said Nani was there, too, so maybe she was the culprit. But that’s difficult to believe, as well; I only have positive memories of my grandmother. Yes, there must be more to the story.
I carry the Limca to Zee and Maasi, holding tight to the silver tray. My hands tremble, betraying my thoughts. Maasi passes a glass to Zee, who gulps it down in one go.
“That’s much better, isn’t it, Zeenat?” Maasi asks.
“We never drink this much soda at home. Too much sugar.” I shake my head. “She’s going to be hyper later.”
“Well, when you are back home you can go back to your regular diet. But India is a place for Limca!” Maasi, too, downs her glass.
I shrug, give in. Zee comes through with a lemony burp and my favourite aunt claps her hands, cheering Zee’s performance.
Zainab, freer these days with her part-time schedule, invites me back within a couple of days. I watch as she buzzes around her galley kitchen, preparing tea for us. Chicken curry bubbles on the stove, tonight’s dinner. She gives it a stir, knocks the gravy off the spoon, and turns the flame down to low.
“Here, take this for Zee.” She passes me a glass of orange juice and I check in on Zee. She’s finished her math for the day. She was bummed that Nafeesa was at school, but appeased by the offer of a movie, and is already plugged into my laptop, headphones on, her focus on Inside Out’s opening scene. Zainab sets a tray with cups and a plate of cookies on the coffee table.
I tell her I’m planning a trip to Dholka, to learn more about Abdoolally.
“I’ve never been there. But people talk about it. Clean air, lots of space, beautiful old homes.”
“My internet searches tell me it’s kind of a dusty, crowded town. Maybe a century ago it was pastoral.” But I, too, have grown up with our elders’ nostalgic stories about the village.
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