“What are you saying?” I demanded, my spidey-sense telling me that they were talking about me.
“You don’t know Marathi?” Zainab asked, mouth open in surprise. She’d lost her two front teeth, and I mentally conjured insults I could use against her if later I needed them. Mine were already growing in.
“No, in Amrika, they only learn one language. My father said so. Here, we are smarter. We have English, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi!” Fatema counted off the languages on her fingers.
“It’s pronounced A-mer-ica.”
Tasnim Maasi came to the balcony to check on us with a tray of Rooh Afza Sharbat. My two cousins gulped theirs down, but I left mine mostly undrunk.
“You don’t like it anymore?” Fatema wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“What do you drink in A-mer-ica?” Zainab asked, a challenging glint in her eye.
I looked to Tasnim Maasi, hoping she would notice my discomfort and take my side.
“You don’t want to be left out, do you?” she asked instead.
I shook my head and sipped the sickly sweet drink.
My Gujarati fluency withered and my cousins teased me when I flattened words with my New Jersey accent. Over time, my mother tongue became as awkward as the gangly teenager I was growing into.
Sometimes we debated about what was better in the U.S. versus India, all of us perhaps trying to regain our balance and figure out how the ground has shifted beneath our feet in the first place. Often I agreed with their Indo-centric perspectives about culture, fashion, and food, for I missed thinking like them, being like them. At each visit, I noticed that I’d changed a little more and irrevocably, my new home becoming more familiar than the old country. They, too, at ages ten and then thirteen, appeared to be growing apart from each other, but I didn’t understand why. When we returned for Fatema’s parents’ funeral, it seemed like my two favourite cousins, at sixteen, had become polar opposites of each other. Zainab was preoccupied with boys, fashion, and her secret makeup stash. Fatema was focused on school and had a group of girlfriends who, like her, dressed androgynously. They hardly spoke to one another. I had to admit that the SCC was defunct.
Fatema wants us to fly, but I insist a train journey will be more scenic. My intuition tells me this trip must not be rushed. They both roll their eyes at the suggestion, but allow it with the provision that we take the luxury Mumbai Central–Ahmedabad Shatabdi Express.
We arrive at the station as the sun rises. Within minutes of being seated in the executive class car, our porter takes our meal orders. Fatema and Zainab choose the cheese omelette while I go for the upma vada with coconut chutney, an option unavailable on any North American train. Half-asleep, the three of us tuck in, but there is too much food for our just-awake bellies.
Like a disapproving aunty, our porter clucks at us when we gesture for him to clear our barely consumed meals. He brings us plastic teacups of steaming chai, and Fatema and Zainab pull out their phones, texting and messaging into the ether. Since the train began to roll, neither have interacted much with the other, except by joining in strained conversations I initiate. It’s like I am the friend in common with two strangers.
How might I encourage them to talk? I remove my notebook from my purse, and review our itinerary, sneaking glances their way. We could be siblings, with our similar heights and bodies. Fine lines crouch at the corner of our eyes and none of us have begun dying our hair black, although we could; rogue white strands glint at our temples. Beyond that, we are as awkward as a scalene triangle.
My phone tells me that an hour and a half has passed, the grey cityscape outside the window becoming lush green. Murtuza has texted, saying that he’s on his way with Zee to see his aunt who lives in Colaba, near the ocean. I showed her a YouTube video entitled A Look at How Mumbai, Then Bombay City Was in 1920s, and the waterfront monument looked remarkably the same as it does now, ninety-five years later. Even the grand Taj Hotel, which stands behind it, existed back then. Probably Mota Mota Nana looked out at the Arabian Sea, scanning the long horizon, the exact way Zee and Murtuza will today.
The porter rolls a beverage cart past us and I ask for water. Zainab and Fatema glance up long enough to reach for their glasses. I wish we could share a bottle of wine; it might loosen our limbs and tongues the way it does for my book club back home. No one gets drunk, but by the first half glass, the day’s tensions fall away. We momentarily forget our jobs, spouses, and children and talk about the novel we’ve read. The book discussion is a prelude for more personal talk. That’s when we remember our jobs, spouses, and children again, commiserating and laughing about reality. At August’s meeting, we read Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, our conversation lingering on interpretations about the protagonist’s love life. The discussion soon shifted to infidelity, most of the group weighing in harshly on the main character’s lack of guilt for her indiscretions. I listened carefully, but kept quiet.
Wine is not an option this early in the morning. Anyway, Zainab doesn’t drink, and even if she didn’t mind, I wouldn’t partake; it would feel haram to imbibe in the presence of someone wearing a rida. I imagine Fatema feels the same way, but perhaps not; she might openly flout the rules just to provoke Zainab.
I study my two cousins, their gazes focused on tiny screens. Then I pull a deck of cards from my purse.
“Beh Thrun Panch?” I don’t wait for their agreement before I deal the cards onto our shared table.
Fatema sighs loudly, making it clear that I am a giant pain in her arse. “All right. One round. Then I have to get back to my work emails.”
“I haven’t played this since the kids were small.” Zainab collects her cards.
The clubs and diamonds and hearts and spades are magic, evoking muscle memories of sitting cross-legged on Nani’s living room floor, our hands still too small to comfortably hold the slippery cards. Before long, Fatema is trash-talking Zainab, who spars like a champ. Then the two of them gang up, utilizing a strategy that’s always eluded me. I lose game after game. The defeat is worth it. We play four rounds, and two hours and three decades disappear.
Fatema’s assistant has arranged a private car and driver, Muffadal, to fetch us from Ahmedabad’s train station and take us the forty-five kilometres to Dholka. My map app says it should take us seventy-two minutes, but I’ve learned that GPS doesn’t accurately estimate in a land where there is little adherence to traffic regulations.
Muffadal prods the car through a traffic jam. I marvel at how close our vehicle is to the motorcycle beside us. Its driver steers his front tire into the two inches of space ahead of him while his unhelmeted passenger perches sideways, preserving her sari’s pleats. Her body is slack, relaxed, one hand resting on his waist. She wears flip-flops, one of them balancing off her left big toe. They lurch forward and are gone.
Muffadal beeps his horn into the wall of lorries and cars and a few minutes later we see the holdup’s culprits: two cows meandering in the left lane. Everyone veers around them, giving them wider berths than they would another car.
“Bloody hell,” Fatema grumbles.
“Last week Zee and I crossed a six-lane intersection with a heifer. We used her as our chaperone,” I quip.
“You are a real Indian now!” Zainab laughs.
The traffic thins, and Muffadal honks with decreasing frequency. Zainab points out dozens of blue, purple, red, and yellow kites — children’s hopes lodged in trees — remnants of the Makar Sankranti kite-flying festival that happened almost six weeks ago, in mid-January.
Finally, we exit the stop-and-start traffic and are on an open road. Along the way are gated communities with new houses, their stone walls keeping out the crumbling, smaller dwellings that border them. The landscape turns rural, and my eyes relax in a way that they cannot in Mumbai’s crowds. Dotting the landscape are rice paddies, emerald marshes with drowned-looking plants. We pass an intricately carved and opulent Hindu temple with a ten-foot illustrated Gandhi poster overlo
oking it. It is surrounded by shanties.
“I wonder what great-great-grandfather have thought about the Mahatma’s early political work? He was alive at that time.”
“He’d be in favour of it,” Zainab says. “Gandhi challenged the caste system, something we don’t believe in as Muslims.”
“And he would have supported Indian self-sufficiency and independence,” Fatema adds.
“But one the other hand, he got a lot of his business from the British,” I tell them.
A triple speed bump at a sign for Kashindra makes my pen jump. Conversation lulls for a stretch. Zainab naps, and while I can’t see her in the front seat, I suspect Fatema is drowsing off, too. I gaze at a children’s playground in the middle of nowhere, dry, high grass fencing it in. We overtake a scooter with a bungee-secured box filled with a pyramid of fried snacks. My stomach groans hunger and I unwrap a vada I saved from breakfast.
A sign announces Cadila and a sprawling pharmaceutical factory’s campus where women in orange and red saris stand beside the highway, waiting for buses. Then more fields interrupted every few kilometres by small roadside dumps, gardens that grow a rainbow of plastic bags and bottles. We slow to allow a herd of donkeys to cross and I spy a man peeing by the side of a tree painted with wide reflective stripes. As we speed along, I wonder if Abdoolally made this trip to his home village, and what he might have seen along the way.
Muffadal announces the outskirts of Dholka. It looks like a smaller version of Ahmedabad — crowded, polluted. This is the newer side of a town that stretched out its long limbs from the original village.
We stop at a hotel booked through Fatema’s travel agent, and she sniffs the air, as though smelling a foul odour emanating from the three-storey stone building. She mutters, “Minal said it was an original eighteenth-century mansion. Well, it was probably the only worthwhile place. But why couldn’t we have stayed at my villa in Goa?”
Zainab laughs and casts a glance down the residential street. “Our ancestor wasn’t born on a Goan beach, unfortunately.”
I ignore them and pass a list of locations to Muffadal. “Can you take us to these places in the morning?”
He scans the list and flashes a gap-toothed grin. “You are visiting Abdoolally Seth’s buildings.”
“Yes, you know about him?”
“Yes, Ma’am. I am a relative of his.” He straightens his spine, pushes back his shoulders, and I reflexively do the same.
The four of us throw out names, drawing our family tree, realizing that Muffadal is a descendant through Abdoolally’s second wife, Shaheeda. This is the line Abbas Kaaka didn’t know much about.
“Wow, you are what …” I try to map the branch in my head, “our third cousin … no, our fourth half-cousin, twice removed!” He’s not just our driver. He is family.
“You lost me,” Fatema says.
“So his second wife was from here, too?” Zainab asks.
“Yes. And her child, Rumana, was sent back here to be raised by her nani after her death. Later, Rumana married and moved to Ahmedabad. Some relatives live in Ahmedabad, a few in Bombay, and some of us settled back here,” Muffadal explains.
“So interesting,” I say, still making sense of the information.
“You must come for dinner while you are here.” Zainab, Fatema, and I offer the standard response: yes, yes, let’s see, perhaps tomorrow, if there’s time.
“Isn’t it odd that Rumana wouldn’t have remained in Bombay after her mother died? Wasn’t it normal for the new wife to take care of the previous wives’ kids?” Zainab whispers to me as Muffadal waves and gets into his car.
“Who knows.” I make a mental note to email the archivist to find out how old Rumana was when her mother died. Likely the other children, those mothered by Abdoolally’s first wife, would have been grown up by then. “I don’t know how long he waited before he married Zehra.”
“That was the third wife, right? The divorced one?” Fatema leads the way into the hotel’s lobby, which is a tiny front room off the refurbished mansion.
“Yes.” The mystery of Zehra is like a mosquito bite that inflames when I scratch at it, growing warm, irritable. Impossible to ignore.
The hotel clerk is a middle-aged woman, perhaps a decade older than us. Her bindi is the same shade as her hot pink sari. She passes us ancient-looking metal keys for our suite.
We climb the wide staircase to the first landing. Our room is expansive, and its furnishings resemble museum pieces.
“Beautiful,” Zainab murmurs.
“Not bad, better than it looked from outside.” Fatema agrees. “This town really is small. Imagine what it was like a century ago.” She looks out the velour-draped windows.
“Yes, that’s the point, gals, to imagine it in Abdoolally’s day.” I look at the ornately carved doorways, the heavy wooden furniture, and sense we’ve come to right place.
THIRTY-SIX
It’s early evening, and I listen to Fatema clicking on her laptop while I drift off. When I awake, an hour later, the sun is setting and Fatema is still typing. Zainab is standing on her mat, bending, prostrating, standing again, her movements brisk, businesslike.
I watch her, thinking about how Tasnim Maasi taught the three of us to pray when we were preschoolers, tut-tutting at the laxness her siblings were showing toward our religious upbringing. When she discerned that I’d forgotten the Arabic after three years away — my parents had become sporadic in their prayers and didn’t enforce mine — she had Zainab school me again. Now, I watch Zainab mouthing the words, my mind following along: subhanallah … subhanallah … subhanallah.
I use the palatial, gilded washroom. When I return, Zainab’s mat is folded and Fatema has stowed her computer.
“Ready for dinner?” Zainab asks. “The lady at the front desk says there are a few good Gujarati places nearby.” We agree on one that is within a ten-minute walk.
The server brings us steaming thalis filled with eggplant cooked with fenugreek leaves, sweet and sour daal, okra curry, potato and tomato curry, rice, chapatis, dhokla, and kachumber. Later he exhibits a platter of burfi, squares in shades of green, orange, and brown. They are freshly made, creamy, and so much better than the facsimiles I buy from the shops in Edison or Manhattan’s Curry Row. My pants are tight after the meal, but I have to admit they’ve been snug for a while. I tell myself I can return to my normal diet in three months, when I am back to the land of substandard thalis and burfi.
We walk to the hotel, at first going in the wrong direction. It’s on a quiet street off the main one, and now that it’s dark, the unfamiliar buildings are unrecognizable.
“There, we passed this house. Remember? You commented on its pink shutters earlier.” Fatema points in their direction.
“And these puppies were here, too, unless they moved, or are a different litter.” I look at three golden-haired dogs nestled into a single lump by the side of the road. I’d cooed over them on the way to the restaurant. Now their mother, teets hanging low, creeps closer, ready to protect her babies.
“Oh, good,” Zainab says. “Yes, it must be down the road from here then. What time do we get up tomorrow?”
“Muffadal will arrive by ten, then take us on a tour of buildings funded by Abdoolally’s trust.” I list the sites we’ll visit. “Then, he’ll drive us back to Ahmedabad in late afternoon, and there may be time for a little sightseeing. In the morning, we’ll meet with the archivist. Good?”
“Look what he created, what he started. Our community had such promise. Now it’s gone to shit.” Fatema kicks a stone and it skips along the road, coming to a stop in a pothole.
“Don’t say that, Fatema. You are always so negative. It’s not good for your health to spread negative energy.” Zainab sighs.
“Come on. It’s become so regressive over the last few decades. The religious leadership is more concerned with keeping people in line. And no offence, but ridas are a good example of that. They are a modern trend. It’s all about
making people conform.”
“It’s not that bad. Look how pretty these modern trends are. And isn’t it nice to have something distinctive, special, to wear, to make our community unique?” She twirls, her skirt fanning out.
“And then those bloody ITS cards, to monitor everyone’s movements,” Fatema grumbles, clearly not amused by Zainab’s fashion show.
“Well, we need to know who is allowed into gatherings, who has paid their dues,” Zainab counters.
I watch them, fearful that our recent camaraderie is about to end.
“You mean who to shun or who not to shun?” Fatema retorts.
“Well, we have a tight community. We take care of each other. And a strong culture. Don’t lose sight of that. And our cuisine!” Zainab continues to attempt to lighten the mood.
“We will never progress as a community while the leadership continues to control. They hold on too tight, and like sheep, the people follow.”
“We are not sheep!” Zainab rebuts, her tone no longer conciliatory.
“Come on, you two —” I attempt.
“You are blind, Zainab. Just look at the khatna debates. We try to educate women and they parrot back that khatna is good for girls, that it is religiously required, that it helps to control women so they stay faithful to their husbands. It’s utter garbage! They steal pleasure from girls, replace it with pain.” She waves her hands, underlining each of her points.
“On the contrary, I have not had any pleasure stolen from me. Maybe if you got married, you would understand.”
“I don’t have to get married to know.” Fatema looks at Zainab, incredulous, angry, her fists balling like a prizefighter’s.
“I understand that it is different for each woman. Some are very badly affected, while others are not,” I appease.
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