When he arrived home one night after dark, Zehra met him at the door and said, “I think you should call for the doctor. Mummy seems very unwell.” He rushed to his mother’s bedside where his daughter Raushan stood, looking down at her grandmother with worry. Zehra must have called her over; she lived only two streets away with her husband and infant. So close in age, they related to one another as friends.
He pressed his hand to his mother’s forehead. She was hot and unresponsive to his prodding.
“Could it be …?” While the bubonic plague had claimed thousands of lives, it was mostly mill workers and those who lived in chawls who were most impacted. The family had relocated to Dholka for a couple of months the previous year as a precaution, but had returned when the scare receded.
“Yes, we must call the doctor. Raushan, you go. You don’t want to pass anything to your baby. Tell the servant to fetch Dr. Fuller.”
“Yes.” Raushan dashed down the stairs.
“What’s happening, Mummy?” Five-year-old Rumana stumbled into the room, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“Don’t worry, baby, Daadi is just feeling a little sick but she’ll be fine in the morning,” Zehra cooed, pushing Rumana out of the sick room. “Let’s go back to bed.”
She lifted the skinny girl and carried her to her bedroom. Abdoolally sat on Amta’s bed and watched her sleep, as he had done many times before, back when they’d slept on the same mat in a small room they’d shared with another widow and her three children.
He whispered a prayer to Allah: Please don’t take her yet. Let this not be the fevers. Let her awake in the morning.
TWENTY-NINE
I wish I hadn’t clicked open the link Fatema shared today on her Facebook page. This one is by a woman named Insiyah, a citizen journalist writing about her khatna experience. I’m curious about this rising tide of women publishing their stories, their names, even their photos.
After the second paragraph, I pause; I’m not sure if I’m up for it today. Before I can decide, Mom rings me on Skype and I call Zee over from where she sits at the other end of the dining table, working on skip-counting puzzles.
“My Zee-nut!” Mom greets Zee.
“Nani!” Zee yells back.
“Where’s Murtuza?”
“Sick in bed! Caught a cold. Hey, you’re up late.” It’s almost midnight for her.
“Had too much caffeine this afternoon.”
“Look, Nani!” Zee tells Mom all about how she just figured out that if there are four flowers in a bunch and there are three bunches, then there must be twelve flowers all together.
“Clever girl! Isn’t this very advanced for second grade? That’s multiplication,” she informs me.
“I guess so, but they call it problem-solving at this level.”
Zee shows her the full page of problems she’s already completed, reviewing each one in detail. “You’re doing so well, keeping up with your classmates,” Mom praises Zee.
She updates us on her travel plans, and Zee loses interest in the adult talk and her math book and wanders out to the terrace.
I fill Mom in on the anniversary party, and she complains, “That brother of mine! He couldn’t wait for me to arrive?”
“I guess they wanted to celebrate their anniversary on the actual date?” I tease her.
“I suppose,” she concedes, pushing her lips into a pout.
Insiyah’s article is still open behind Mom’s face, and I recall the unease between Maasi and Fatema across the thaal. I want to tell her about it, to see what she thinks about khatna, but she interrupts my train of thought with her own news.
“So Brianna was crying in the hallway today.” Mom shakes her head wearily.
“Really?”
“You know, this is her fourth breakup in five years! She just can’t seem to find the right match.”
“Oh no, poor thing.”
Mom has mentioned Brianna, her thirty-year-old neighbour, to me on a few occasions, consulting with me about modern relationships, which is funny, because I mostly repeat what my friend Laura scribes on her blog.
Of course, Mom knows even less; she hasn’t ever dated and probably never will. She and Dad were introduced when she was nineteen and he twenty-three. They were second cousins who knew each other vaguely prior to being set up, and their courtship consisted of two lunches, both chaperoned by an elder.
“Brianna told me that she met this last guy through a mobile telephone app. You swipe one way if you like the face, and swipe the other way if you think they are ugly! Can you believe it?” I laugh as she huffs with faux outrage.
While she tells me more about the intricacies of the dating app, my mind drifts to my last year in high school, when some of her Bohra friends suggested that it was time to commence my betrothal plans. Although we’d been in New Jersey for a decade and a half, the old notions persisted, at least among some in our extended family and friends. Mom was uneasy with their suggestion, but she encouraged me to meet a Bohra boy. “Not for marriage, you are too young for that, but just to meet, or only to be friends.” While it sounded like she was resisting her friends’ ideas, there was a glimmering hopefulness in her voice, an unspoken wish that I might desire some of what her more orthodox-minded friends’ children wanted.
“Maybe later, Mom,” I said, not wanting to disappoint. “I’m not really thinking about that kind of stuff right now. There are exams, and then starting college …” and she nodded, satisfied, or satisfied enough that I was a good girl on the correct path. The truth was that I’d been dating Nick since eleventh grade and we were “serious.” We’d both been accepted to NYU and planned to live together in second year. My parents had no clue, believing me when I littered the house with lies about spending time at my friend Stephanie’s house, or at the library, or the mall.
When Nick and I split in first semester, I travelled home for Christmas break, ten pounds lighter than at Thanksgiving. Mom congratulated me on my figure but questioned the dark circles under my eyes. I told her that I was tired from exams.
“Well, she stopped her crying and went home. I hoped it helped, a little.”
“Brianna is lucky to have you.” The screen freezes for a couple of seconds.
“Arré, bad connection! Oh, there, we’re back again.” She blinks a few times.
“You know, I wish I’d gone to you for support when I went through a breakup in college.”
“What?” Her face falls, and I divulge the details of my high school dating. Inexplicable, delayed-reaction tears well up in my eyes.
“That boy who was on the debating team with you?” Her face screws up in concentration.
“I can’t believe you remember.” My wet eyes aren’t for Nick, but my nineteen-year-old self who grieved alone.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” She leans against her desk, cradles her face in her palm.
“I’d been keeping way too many secrets. I wouldn’t have known where to start.” I can’t maintain eye contact, instead focus on my own video image.
“Oh, that’s terrible. I’m sorry it was like that.” She sighs.
“No, I’m sorry, too. I wish I’d told you. After the initial shock, we’d have been all right.” I don’t fully believe this, even now, old catastrophic teenage thoughts lingering: being grounded for months, prohibited from seeing my boyfriend, not being allowed to go to prom. Later, in college, I feared a loss of her trust and respect.
“I never encouraged you to talk about those kinds of things back then, did I?”
“You lived a very different life. How could you help me navigate dating and breakups? Have you even had a breakup in your life?” Then I back away from the screen a few inches, searching for the words that will correct the ones I just blurted.
“No.” She looks away, too.
“It’s like losing Dad,” I say, filling in the silence that has just formed between us. “On a much smaller scale.”
“Yes, I suppose I felt like that while talking to
Brianna.” She sniffs, reaches for a tissue.
And so we talk about Dad, about mourning, and then about how she is looking forward to joining us soon, getting out of the empty condo. I leave the subject of khatna for another day.
When I shut down Skype and close the screen, Insiyah’s article loiters behind it. Scrolling down is like trudging through mud, and yet I do.
I was taken to a strange place by a trusted older female relative, under false pretences, and then a scary, incomprehensible, and painful thing happened, after which I was given the cake I’d been promised earlier. I had been excited to go, I love cake. What child doesn’t?
The particular components of these stories don’t vary much, as though an entire community, generation after generation, is following the same terrible, unwritten script.
I push back my chair and go to the cupboard. I arrange a few chocolate chip cookies on a plate. I crunch one, the chocolate dissolving on my tongue. I close my eyes and think, It’s always the promise of sugar, the lure, the bait.
Sugar and spice and everything nice …
I open my eyes and look out to the terrace. Something feels wrong. Zee is no longer there. I call out to her and when she doesn’t reply, I race outside. I scan the street below, my logic-brain shut down. When I run back inside, she emerges from the bathroom. I exhale.
“Whaaaat?” Zee, hand on hip, appraises me. I must look weird.
“I didn’t know where you were.”
“I had to pee.”
“Did you finish math?” I check my watch, see that we still have another hour for home-schooling.
“A long time ago.” She rolls her eyes. I walk away, breathe, sit at my computer.
“Okay. What’s next? Health?” I open a file and consult our plan. I play a six-minute video on the tablet about the Food Guide Pyramid. A disembodied female voice describes protein, and Zee watches, reaching for the cookies.
The video ends. I grab pencil crayons and ask her to design a healthy lunch.
“A ham sandwich. That’s protein and carbohydrates,” she says. I’m impressed she remembers the words.
“What else would you put in the sandwich, for the other food groups?”
It’s almost lunchtime, and so the lesson turns into an impromptu sandwich-building exercise. We have all the ingredients except the ham, of course. I cut the sandwich into two halves and explain that cheese doubles as dairy and protein.
“Why don’t we have ham?” she asks.
“Well, Muslims don’t eat pork. It’s a religious belief.”
“But why?”
Murtuza and I argued about this when we first moved in together. Except for trying a slice of pepperoni pizza as a teen, I haven’t challenged the pork prohibition; it is a part of my identity. Murtuza, on the other hand, questioned everything, and finding no evidence that pork is unhealthy or “dirty,” as I weakly contended, he ate it from time to time. We agreed to disagree, but I insisted that we not have pork in the house.
“Tell you what. That’s a big question, with many answers. How about we leave it for tomorrow’s class?” Perhaps I can weave it into geography or health somehow? She nods, satisfied to let the question drop. After we finish eating, I sit her down with her workbook, where she has to match up pictures of food — spaghetti, apples, meat — with their categories.
I return to my computer, close the Food Guide window. I also close Insiyah’s article and am bounced back to Fatema’s Facebook post. I hit “like” and then share the article in a private message to Mom, writing an ambivalent “thought you might find this interesting” caption above it.
I glance up to see Zee focused on her book, still absorbed by the nutrition material. She’s curled up in her dining-room chair, all three-and-a-half feet of her taking up only a fraction of its seat. Everyone says she looks like me, but I see Murtuza in the shape of her lips, the spread of her nose. She brushes her hair out of her eyes.
“We really need to take you for a haircut.”
“Is Tony here?” she asks with wide eyes. He’s her regular hairdresser.
“No,” I laugh. “We’ll find someone nearby. You know, I went to a hairdresser here when I was your age. The owner made a big deal about an American kid coming to her salon and sent someone out to get us Thums Ups.” I’d felt proud, then, to be from away, special.
“Can I have a Thums Up when I go?”
“Maybe. Finish your exercise.”
She complies, and I try to recall the location of the salon, which was a short walk from Nani’s. It was hot, and a standing fan was set to high, blowing the cut hair on the floor into a corner.
It’s funny how I remember these random things. I hope Zee will remember much more of this trip, but perhaps it’s normal for childhood memories to fade.
A blue double checkmark now sits beside the message I sent to Mom, indicating that she’s seen the article. Will she read it? I assume that khatna happened to her. Will it raise her own terrible memories? Can she remember them sixty years later? Do I really want to know?
“Mom, I need your help with this next part.” Zee is at my side, pointing to her workbook. We need to find an example of packaged food so we can read a label together. She grabs the box of cookies, still sitting on the counter, and together, we parse its nutritional value. Zee reads aloud the fats, cholesterol, and sugar content in a neutral tone.
“Mom, are these nutritious?” Her blank expression tells me the question is innocent.
“No. They have too much sugar.”
“Sugar makes us hyper, right?”
“A little is fine. But yeah, too much sugar gets us hyper, and addicted.”
“What’s ‘addicted’?”
“It’s when we get used to having it and then we can’t stop eating it.” And then I think, Or when it’s offered, we are so excited we won’t say no. “Zee, I need to tell you something important.”
“Okay.”
“If someone ever asks you to do something when Mom or Dad are not around, make sure to ask us first, okay? They might say they are taking you for ice cream or cake. But you can’t go for ice cream or cake unless Mom or Dad knows in advance, all right?”
“Even at birthday parties?” Her tone is disbelieving. I take a breath, try to be clearer.
“No. Mom and Dad will take you to the birthday party, so we will already know in advance. So that’s okay. It’s more if an adult wants to take you somewhere and they haven’t asked Mom or Dad first.”
“Nafeesa took me out for ice cream last week when I was at her place.” Fatema’s words, the warning to keep an eye on my daughter, bear down on me like an oncoming truck’s headlights.
“She did?”
“I got chocolate mint. But it was different than in New York. It was very-very-very green.” She yawns, her eyes glassy.
“And before the ice cream, did you go anywhere else?” My heart beats wildly, even though I know it’s stupid to think that Nafeesa could hurt my daughter.
“No.”
“Okay.” I smile reassuringly, but I want to say don’t trust anyone, don’t ever leave my sight. But I can’t say that. I don’t want to scare Zee and I know I’m on the verge of doing so. My stomach roils, and a taste of cookies mixed with bile splashes up my throat. I swallow hard, swallowing it all back down.
THIRTY
We’re settled into our Indian routine, as though it’s normal for Murtuza to head off each day to the university and for me to stay home and teach Zee at the kitchen island. As I’ve done every visit to Mumbai, I wonder if I could live here, if I could be happy as an Indian transplanted to the U.S. transplanted back to India?
My phone’s weather app still stores New York as a default option, and today the forecast is cloudy, twenty degrees Fahrenheit, with a chance of snow. I show Zee the screen, curious how she’ll react.
“Imagine if it snowed right now here in India!” She takes my distraction as an opportunity to launch herself out of her chair and away from her workbook.
>
“That sure would shock everyone!”
“I could build a snowman on the balcony!” She slides open the glass door, recoils at the gust of warm air that rushes in, shoves it closed again.
“You could.”
“Hey!” Her eyes glisten with new awareness.
“What?”
“I’m not gonna do that this year.” Her shoulders slump.
“You’re right. Not until next year. We’re missing winter this year.” I try to keep the cheer out of my voice; I’d prefer Zee not to inherit the winter-hate I learned from my parents.
“Awww.” She pouts.
My phone tangs. It’s Murtuza.
Need a break?
He’s on his way back to the flat for lunch and offers to take Zee back to the library with him.
Yes. Find a book with pics of string instruments?
I’m thinking ahead to her music lesson, am stumped on how to teach it.
Yup. <3 <3
“Zee, change of plans. After lunch, Dad will help you at the library.”
“The big library?” Her face shifts into a clownish version of excitement that might be sincere.
Murtuza arrives a few minutes later and I warm up leftover saag paneer and roti from last night’s takeout dinner. The three of us eat, while Zee, still thinking about snow, explains that she will have to make twice as many snowmen next year to make up for this year’s lack.
“You will,” I say, and then Zee and I do a rough calculation of what that number might be: eighteen, or approximately three per month, doubled.
“Snowmen aside, being here is better than I thought it would be,” Murtuza says, helping himself to more saag. “I mean, this is nice, isn’t it? I teach in the morning, come home to a hot lunch with my two lovelies. The pace is leisurely compared to back home.”
“I was thinking the same thing earlier. But then I remembered that you’ve only got one graduate course. I’m home-schooling Zee, not working all day. This is not a normal Mumbai life, Murti.” I’m arguing more with myself; he’s never wanted to live in India.
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