“It might have been a panic attack,” says Fancy Moustache, “but you should go to hospital for tests as soon as possible, just to make sure it wasn’t a coronary event.”
“It wasn’t a panic attack! How could it be? I’m a very mindful person.” Zainab shakes her head with a haughty air.
“Let’s go tonight. We’ll have the tests. Which private clinic is open right now?” Fatema ignores Zainab.
“Better to be safe than sorry,” I coo at Zainab, stroking her hair.
Zainab refuses to go in the ambulance, but agrees for us to travel by taxi when Fatema tells her she has no choice about getting the tests done. “All this trouble for nothing!”
I help Zainab gather her purse and put on her rida while Fatema phones her assistant with instructions to call some VIP or another who will smooth our passage at the clinic.
An hour later, Zainab has had an EKG and chest X-ray, and we are waiting in the spotless and mostly empty clinic for her results. Her fingers worry her tasbih, each prayer bead a marker for her murmurings of “Astaghfirullah.” Forgive me.
“What do you need forgiveness for?” Fatema mutters. I ask Zainab, a second time, if she wants me to text her husband and she shakes her head, continuing her prayers.
“Maybe all of this talk, you know, about khatna, has been hard on you.” Fatema looks at us, guiltily.
“Astaghfirullah, Astaghfirullah, Astaghfirullah …” Zainab ignores us.
“Zainab, are you okay? Talk to us.” She doesn’t answer. I look down the hallway, impatient for the doctor, who we all agree looks like a young Shabana Azmi, to return.
“It’s time for maghrib prayers,” Zainab says.
“You want to do them here?” Fatema is solicitous. “Maybe they have a prayer room somewhere. I can ask.”
“No.” Zainab grabs her phone, opens a compass app. “Just pass me a sheet from over there. That will be my mat.” I spread the sheet across the small space, and stand beside her. I waggle my brows at Fatema, who sighs and, surprisingly, doesn’t protest. She moves into the space beside me. I imagine it’s been forever since she’s done this, but, like riding a bicycle, Fatema’s cellular memory takes over, and she synchronizes with us. When the young doctor appears, we are seated on the floor, just finished. I stand and hold out a hand to Zainab.
“You appear to be physically stable, Mrs. Motiwala. Your symptoms indicate a possible panic attack.”
“But I’ve never had such a thing before. I’m not paagal!”
“You don’t need to be mentally ill to have a panic attack,” assures the doctor. “We can all be overwhelmed by stress from time to time. Did something happen recently to trigger this episode?”
Zainab shakes her head and Fatema and I nod. The doctor looks at us, half-amused, half-concerned.
When none of us offers anything further, the physician continues on with her recommendations, which for tonight include a good meal, rest, relaxation.
“I will take care of that,” Fatema says, picking up her phone, calling someone who will call another someone who will arrange something for all of us.
We return to the suite, and ten minutes later a room-service attendant brings us dinner: daal, rice, kheema, raita, kachumber. Home food, comfort food. We dig in, even Zainab, who at first shakes her head, insisting she has no appetite. Each dish tastes as though it could have been cooked by a relative. How did the hotel’s chef manage to get it right?
Fatema chews and says, mouth full, “I told them to cook the Dawoodi Bohra recipe. Who knows? Maybe one of our cousins works in the kitchen.”
FORTY
We rise early, all of us sluggish even though we reported pleasant sleeps in our big white beds. I pack my shoulder bag and text Murtuza to buy a bottle of wine for my arrival tonight. I need a break from my thoughts. Also, I know he’ll have many questions, and they’ll be easier to answer with a glass in hand.
After breakfast, I encourage Zainab to stay at the hotel, to rest until checkout time, and meet us at the station. She will have none of it.
“I’m healthy. Last night was something out of the ordinary only,” she asserts.
Our appointment is at nine-thirty and what should be a short ride is taking us thirty stop-and-start minutes. I check my phone every few minutes, fretting we’ll be late and wishing I hadn’t scheduled everything so tightly. Our train is at eleven-fifteen, and my one hour with Meena is diminishing minute by minute.
We approach a fender-bender, the cause of our delay, the two drivers in the middle of a roadside shouting match. We finally pass them and arrive at Meena’s home office on a side street just off the congested Mirzapur Road. I rush up the stairs, taking two at a time, while Zainab and Fatema follow a few steps behind. Meena greets us at the door wearing jeans and a green T-shirt, and looks like she might be about around our age, judging from the few grey hairs sprouting from her part-line. She wears bright red lipstick, cat’s-eye glasses, and shakes our hands vigorously, waving away our apologies about tardiness and bad traffic. She guides us toward her living room and seats us on a long, blue leather couch and grabs a folder from her glass-topped desk.
I notice she is not wearing a wedding band. There is no sign of any children in this immaculate house, but then middle-class Indian homes often look this way, hired help maintaining their dustless, toyless appearance.
“All right, we’ll get straight to it since we don’t have much time.” She sits across from us and spreads open the manila file on the coffee table. “This is your copy. I’m so glad you called me two days ago. I hadn’t thought to search Rumana, Abdoolally’s child from his second marriage, in Dholka’s records and after I did, I was able to fill out a few more details.”
After meeting Muffadal, I’d texted her information about his lineage.
“Great,” I say.
“So … I’ve compiled archival information on as many family members as I could find, but because you asked me to focus in on Zehra, here’s what I’ve pieced together.” She pauses, takes a deep breath, and so do I. “Zehra was married to Abdoolally for two years, and then they divorced. He didn’t marry his next wife, Maimuna, until about two years after.”
“So that’s probably when Rumana would have gone to live with her grandmother in Dholka, then?” I recall what Muffadal told us.
“I can’t say, but it would be logical if no one else was around to look after her. Abdoolally’s other kids would have been grown up and his mother was deceased by then,” Meena adds, tapping her pen on the table.
“I still want to know what caused the divorce,” Fatema says.
“Archival records don’t tell us that, but we do know what happened next for Zehra. And this is where things get interesting.” Meena smiles at Fatema. “There is a record of her remarrying a Dawood Slatewala about five months later, in Dholka.”
“That’s pretty fast!” Fatema says.
“Dholka? Was Zehra from there?” Zainab asks.
“No, Zehra was born in Bombay.” Meena points at a page to help us follow along. “Her father was a wealthy businessman there. He had a jute factory.”
“Why would a city girl want to go to a village to remarry?” Zainab wonders.
“I don’t know. We only know that Dawood was not a wealthy man, but he lived in Dholka and worked for Zehra’s father, distributing jute in Gujarat.” Meena turns a page to show us his documentation.
“So let me get this straight …” My mind is swimming. “Now both Rumana and Zehra are living in Dholka at the same time? The old part of town we saw is pretty small, especially the Bohra area …”
“Yes! From the records, they were neighbours, a few houses between them,” Meena confirms. “It is interesting that Zehra’s father would have arranged this marriage. It would have been quite a step down, status-wise.”
“Maybe Zehra and Dawood were lovers all along!” Fatema laughs.
“But how would she even have met him if he lived in Dholka and she was in Bombay?” Zainab asks.
“I have something more to show you.” Meena seems to be enjoying this slow unspooling.
“Zehra had two children with Dawood — one, Nabil, died in infancy. The other, Rasheeda, died when she was twenty. Zehra outlived her husband by ten years. She had no heir and left her entire inheritance to Rumana.”
“Wow!” Fatema’s eyes are wide like a child’s at storytime. “So she and Rumana stayed close.”
“Probably. I can’t tell you for certain, but this act does suggest a certain sentimentality, or a desire to look after Rumana, who by the way, would have been well set herself. As a child of Abdoolally, she received an inheritance from him, too, according to his will.”
“A desire to look after Rumana,” I repeat.
“That’s all I’ve got about your mysterious Zehra. The rest of what’s in the file is more of what you already know, but read it through — perhaps I clarified a few details here and there about him and his other three wives.”
“We need to get going,” Zainab says, checking the time. “Our train leaves in half an hour.”
We board the train minutes before it departs the station. We haven’t spoken much since leaving Meena’s, all of us digesting the new information.
Fatema breaks the silence. “I’m still trying to figure out why Zehra would marry a guy in Dholka.”
“And only five months after her divorce,” Zainab adds.
“My money is on an affair!” Fatema says. I shake my head.
“Whatever happened between Abdoolally and Zehra … and Dawood, what’s really clear to me is that Zehra loved Rumana,” I say. “That relationship endured.”
“Huh. So the real story here is not about the divorce, but about a stepmother and stepdaughter staying together despite a divorce.” Fatema slaps her knee.
“You like that, don’t you?” Zainab laughs.
“It’s the more feminist story. The story of the women in the family.” Fatema raises her eyebrows. It’s a reach, but I nod, wanting it to be true. Still, I can’t help dropping into the reality that Zehra was probably evicted for something she did, or that she was perceived to have done, and then she was forced to reconstruct her life later. In a way, her life journey, and Abdoolally’s, forked, causing her to travel to the tiny village from which he’d originated.
After our meals, I close my eyes. I’m much too tired to think, to talk, to play cards. I’m not alone; my cousins have retreated behind their electronic devices. As I drift off, I remember that just two days earlier we were on a different track, taking a train in the opposite direction. I was hoping for a cousin-sisters reunion, a tourism-slash-research jaunt to Dholka and Ahmedabad. I didn’t count on learning about my khatna. I place my hand in my lap, feeling it grow warm where it meets an old hurt. There is still so much to process about that, but for now I let it go, allow the train’s rhythm to lull me. I open my eyes only to notice as we slow and pass through Anand, Vadodara, Bharuch, Surat, Vapi, Borivali. Finally, we reach Mumbai.
FORTY-ONE
Bombay, 1905
Only eight hours after he’d deposited her at Dr. Fuller’s clinic, a special arrangement he’d insisted on, the teenaged peon came knocking on his door shouting excitedly, “Baby is born! Baby is born!”
“Shamoon, come! We’re going to see your mother and the baby,” Abdoolally yelled upstairs. He asked the boy, “Tell me. Is everything okay?”
“I think so,” the boy replied.
Abdoolally and six-year-old Shamoon entered Maimuna’s room. He exhaled relief when he saw her sitting up in the bed, holding the swaddled baby in her lap. Maimuna’s mother beamed at them.
“You are fine?” he asked, inspecting her face. She looked pale, and there were dark rings under her eyes.
“She is just tired. Which is normal,” Maimuna’s mother answered.
“Look, look at the baby. She is fine, too.” Maimuna held the bundle out to him. “Take her.”
He hesitated. He hadn’t held a baby since Rumana was born, more than a decade ago. He placed one hand under the tiny head, the other under the legs, and clutched the bundle close to his chest. Then he lowered himself, his ageing knees aching on his descent, to Shamoon’s height. The baby opened her eyes, looked at them with drowsy curiosity. Shamoon touched her shoulder gingerly, as though petting a skittish cat.
“She’s so fragile,” Abdoolally murmured.
“No, she’s not. She is a healthy baby girl. And I am healthy, too. You musn’t worry,” Maimuna said firmly. “We are blessed.”
“Al-Humdulillah,” Abdoolally whispered. He passed the baby back to her. “I’ve made plans for you to stay here overnight. Just to be safe. We’ll come to pick you up in the morning, if Dr. Fuller says that all is well.”
“Yes, dear,” Maimuna conceded. She’d already argued about this the previous week — this whole clinic thing was unusual. She should have been at her mother’s home, or at the very least at theirs. But she’d surrendered to her husband’s anxieties.
Abdoolally and Shamoon stepped outside, onto the street.
“I finally have a sister!” Shamoon exclaimed. “What will she be named?”
“We have to go to the Syedna still. We’d planned to go next week, only she came early. But you know, you already have three sisters, and one brother,” Abdoolally corrected.
“But I’m not related to them.”
Abdoolally looked at the little boy who was so forthright in his speech. Normally, he would have disapproved of the backtalk, but tonight his mood was bouyant.
“Yes, that is true, but so it is true that they are your siblings. And you and I are technically not related, and yet I am your father, just as your first father was your father.” He clapped the boy’s back. “Life sometimes gives us riddles, no?”
Shamoon frowned as he gathered and sorted all these facts like carrom pieces arranged asymmetrically in the middle of a board. He nodded thoughtfully, and reached up to hold the older man’s hand as they made the trip home.
FORTY-TWO
Fatema’s regular driver meets us at Mumbai Central Station.
“What’s his name?” I whisper to her, while he loads our bags into the trunk. I feel guilty for not having asked before and consider, that like Muffadal, he, too, might be a distant cousin. She makes the introductions, a bemused look on her face.
“Thanks, Varun.” I shake his hand.
“Most welcome, Ma’am.”
He navigates through the crammed streets. When we arrive at Zainab’s building, Fatema and I get out to offer a limp hug, and I watch her wearily climb the chipped front steps. Zainab was subdued on the ride home. Perhaps she is contemplating the rewritten story Fatema has given us about our childhoods. I wonder if she’ll process this with anybody tonight — her daughters, or husband — or will she be alone with her thoughts? I look across the street, three floors up, and scan Maasi’s dark balcony. Then I turn my gaze back to Zainab. Fatema observes my worried expression.
“She will be fine. She is strong.”
I nod, knowing she’s right, but I also know some part of me feels lost right now. I can’t identify it, but it tingles like a foot that’s fallen asleep. I’m guessing Zainab feels the same way.
I text Murtuza to tell him I’m nearby. After five minutes of heavy braking and swerving, we reach Fortune Enclave. Fatema squeezes my arm and whispers, “I’ll telephone tomorrow.” Varun passes me my bag. When I turn to face the lobby, Murtuza and Zee are standing at the door. Zee runs out in her nightie, and throws her arms around my hips. I lean down and hold tight to my scrawny seven-year old, breathing in her just-washed and still damp baby-shampoo-scented hair.
We read ten, fifteen, then twenty-two (“just a few more, Mom!”) pages of Ramona the Brave before I convince Zee it is time to sleep. When I emerge into the living room, Murtuza has two glasses of Sula Shiraz poured. I take a big gulp and lean into him. He puts his arm around me and I r
est my head on his shoulder.
“I missed you. More than Zee did, even, if that’s possible,” he whispers.
“Me, too. What a weekend. I never expected all this.” I drink more wine, feel its warmth descending, defrosting. I recount Meena’s discoveries about Rumana and Zehra.
“I can’t imagine sending Zee to live with your mother if you died.” He shivers, and I pat his chest.
“I’m not dying.”
“So, no more details about the divorce?”
“Only confirmation of dates. But I’ll wager he divorced her and not the other way around.”
“Right.” Murtuza refills my empty glass.
“I hope that whatever she did back then to inspire his anger was worth it.”
“You mean, like a love affair or something?” His tone is light, as though he is enjoying the intrigue of it all, but I can feel his neck and shoulders tensing.
“It might have been that. Maybe she was in love with Dawood Slatewala all along and was having an affair … but I hope not.” I realize I’ve chosen my words well, because Murtuza’s shoulders drop.
“You might never find out.”
“Maybe.” I stare into my glass, get lost in the deep red. Red like blood, like life, like rage. I put down my glass.
“Shari?”
“Yeah?” I realize I’d drifted away.
“Do you want to talk about khatna?”
“Not yet. I just … can’t.” Although I’m not sure. The wine is making my body both light and strong. It makes me brave, solid. But I say, “I’ve got to let it sit for a little while.”
“Okay, whatever you need.” His eyes are dark, his gaze penetrating. I kiss him, and I can tell he is at first surprised, but then he follows my lead, kisses me back.
“Kiss me hard, like before.” He does, and I’m turned on, transported, just like I was then, Murtuza becoming the fierce presence I need him to be.
Seven Page 21
