After a couple of minutes, he asks, “Would you like to?” in that considerate and kind way he usually does, and the spell is broken. But I don’t know how to tell him that the spell is broken. The good wife in me nods; after all, I’ve been away for a few days, and it’s been over a week since we had sex. I empty my glass, take a quick shower, change into a cotton nightie, and wait for him.
It goes the usual way, it’s nice, and I am half-numb. Only now, I can perceive the numbness, the pane of glass between me and everything. And now I know why it’s there. But it doesn’t help, this knowing. Actually, it ruins everything because I have no idea how to shatter it. It was easier to be clueless.
He climaxes, and I don’t, and instead of telling him that I’m satisfied, I curl up in a ball and sob. I can’t stop it and I don’t want to. I haven’t ever cried during sex except these past few months in India and it feels pathetic. India has turned me into a crybaby. I’ll never be able to have normal sex again. I might never be able to have sex without crying again.
Murtuza tries to comfort me, to uncurl me and hold me, but I only grow smaller, tighter. I feel his hand rubbing my back. I hear his self-recriminations: I am so sorry, honey. I shouldn’t have suggested this. I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have had sex tonight. I was so insensitive. I’m sorry. I hear him, but can’t respond, can’t help him.
I lose myself in the sobbing, don’t know how long it goes on or why it stops. When I open my eyes, the bedside lamp is turned on, blindingly bright. My pillow is wet.
“Did I do something to upset you?” He looks so scared, his face taut, his eyes bulging.
“No. No, it wasn’t you. It was me.” I reach out my hand, let him hold it.
“You? What do you mean?”
“I was just so sad. I started to think, to realize …” How to put it into words?
“What?”
“Khatna did this to me. When we have sex. Maybe every time I’ve had sex. With anyone. I’ve been only …” I trail off, searching for words.
“Only?” His voice is soft.
“Only half there. Protected from something that could happen. That’s why I hold myself back …” I feel as confused as he looks. He scooches closer, takes my other hand tentatively.
“It’ll be okay, we’ll get through this. Together. Don’t worry,” he says, solemnly. My eyes fill with tears again, but this time I don’t pull away. I’m too tired to pull away.
FORTY-THREE
A dog barks, setting off a chorus of other canine yelps and yaps. It’s 4:08 a.m. I think I fell asleep shortly after ten. Six hours, not bad. I pad to the bathroom, then to the kitchen, and switch on the coffee pot. There’s a faint ache around my temples, residue from last night’s red wine and tears.
I open Meena’s file to the section about Abdoolally’s marriages. Much of what she documented I already knew, but she has filled in missing dates and ages from archival records. The facts are the steel girders of my project, strong and firm.
He married Sharifa in 1877, when he was twenty-two and she sixteen. They had three children, each a year apart, Raushan, Husein, Batool; girl, boy, girl. They were eleven, ten, and nine when she died in childbirth, at age twenty-eight, she and her barely born perishing together. When I first heard about the poor state of maternal health during that period, I was shocked; while I laboured for fourteen terrible hours with Zee, I never imagined I could die that way. Now, having heard this story repeated often, I’ve become inured to how these young mothers were so easily lost, expendable.
The nine-year gap between Sharifa’s second last and last pregnancy leaves me curious; was it an accident? Maybe there had been several miscarriages in between, but there are no records for such commonplace tragedies. Meena included an annotation that Abdoolally and Sharifa were not related, and their marriage most likely arranged. But could it have been love, too? I wonder. Had they exchanged longing glances when they saw one another in the street or at community gatherings? Or perhaps I’m painting them too innocently; they might have been covert lovers, boyfriend and girlfriend. I shake my head at my own romanticism. Probably not.
I ponder our names. From what I can tell, I am the first Sharifa in our family’s tree in a century and a half, the name slipping away, almost forgotten, like she was. Mom and Dad told me Syedna chose Sharifa, but today I like imagining this ancestor as my namesake.
He waited two years before marrying eighteen-year-old Shaheeda, a prolonged mourning period, according to Meena’s speculation. The children, in their tweens, would have been looked after by servants and Abdoolally’s mother. He was twice Shaheeda’s age, and she barely five years older than her eldest stepchild. Was she like a big sister to them? Or does one assume the required authority and maturity of a mother, the way an actor steps into a role?
Three years pass and Rumana is born. Again, there is no mention of miscarriages before her, but I would assume there must have been; teenagers are fertile, after all.
Shaheeda leaves Rumana motherless at age four, dying in childbirth like her predecessor. She was only twenty-five. Rumana’s stepsiblings are adults: Raushan twenty, Husein nineteen, and Batool eighteen. Meena included a ledger from the printing house from that year which includes Husein’s signature, evidence that he was working for his father. Raushan would have been married a couple of years by then and Batool just married.
Abdoolally waits three months, a paltry grieving interval, and marries wife number three, Zehra, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a fellow wealthy businessman. She’s a little old, almost past her wedding-expiration date for the time. Why the nuptial delay: illness? A previous engagement that didn’t come to fruition? Education? A bad reputation of some sort? Despite Abdoolally being forty-four, he would have been a great catch with his wealth, and only one small child in tow.
And how did he look upon this new, young fiancée? Already married and widowed twice, he sought her so soon after Shaheeda’s demise. Was it a practical process, like purchasing a new home? Or was he selective? One would think that you get better at choosing a mate, the more experience you have, right? You begin to create mental lists of preferences, like the ones my friends and I kept. We assessed new boyfriends, comparing the qualities revered and hated in the previous relationships. We hoped for just the right combination of sexual passion and intellectual and emotional stimulation. We longed for every need to be met.
When they first sat down for chai, did Abdoolally and Zehra talk about books, politics, ideas, the way Murtuza and I did? And had they already known one another for years? I’m assuming that Zehra would have been a contemporary of Abdoolally’s children, perhaps friends with his daughters.
I pause, remind myself not to use my modern lens to view these ancestors, whose norms were vastly different.
My friend Laura comes to mind. I received a notification that she sent a message yesterday, but I haven’t yet opened it. I read it now.
Hey! More relationship drama to report! I just ended things with the two guys I was dating. One was annoying and the other was cheating on his wife! It made me think about our last conversation, and how glad I am that you confided in me. I’m here for you, girl, whenever you need to talk.
Funny, I’m not all that bothered about these last two guys. Have I become jaded? Well, I just reactivated my OkCupid profile and am having dinner with someone tonight …
I miss you and our jungle gym talks! Ding me when you’re online again.
In some ways, I feel so far away from that city, that life. I am on the opposite end of the globe, literally and figuratively, right now. I return to the file.
Almost two years later, Zehra and Abdoolally divorce. It’s 1901, the beginning of a new century. They have no children of their own. Rumana is sent to live with her maternal grandmother in Dholka sometime after.
I read over the paragraphs about Zehra’s life in Dholka, which Meena already shared. Then I read them again, mentally searching for traces of what’s missing in their stories.
&n
bsp; Two years later, at age forty-eight, he marries his fourth wife, Maimuna, the only one to outlast him. She was the destitute widow of his employee and two and half decades his junior. She had a son with her previous husband and then two daughters and a son with Abdoolally. She lived to be ninety-nine, dying in 1980, and I imagine her longevity as a sort of compensation for the first two wives’ early demises. Zehra, too, lived to be an old woman, dying when she was ninety-two.
He died in 1920, at age sixty-five.
I finger the smooth cardboard of the file and then close it. This is all I have: my family’s bio-data and a hundred questions.
Knowing I won’t be able to sleep, I Skype Laura. She waves and croons a hello while wiping her hands on a towel; she’s been washing her dinner dishes. I glance over at our sink, see that Murtuza has carefully arranged yesterday’s wineglasses on the drying rack. When did he wash them?
“So good to see you again!” Laura asks me about my research and Mumbai’s food, and I offer anecdotes.
“So, tell me about the date you had — was it last night?” I try to remember the hour at which she messaged me and then calculate the time difference.
“Yeah, oh, a total flop. He talked about himself through the entire dinner and then mansplained — to me! — blogging,” she laments.
“Oh, no!” I laugh.
“I asked him if he’d ever written a blog, and guess what?”
“Never. But he knew everything and wanted to teach it all to you, anyway?”
“Exactly.” She guffaws. “Hey, what time is it there? Are you calling me in the middle of the night?” I nod and tell her it’s 5:00 a.m. She gives me a sad face. “What’s going on? Do you want to talk some more about that whole situation?” She’s alluding to the affair.
“No, it’s about something else, something bigger …” Somehow it feels easier to tell her the hard things this way, the computer screen a confessional. I consider my words; my head is so full that I don’t know how to parse the important information properly. Instead, I blurt, “Laura, I’ve never had an orgasm.”
She sits back in her chair, and considers what I’ve said for a moment.
“Never?… With no one?… Not even alone?”
I shake my head three times.
“Gosh. I had no idea.”
“Well, I never said anything.” I shrug, like it’s not a big deal.
“And here I’ve been going on and on about my sex life this last year. On and on.” She twirls a lock of hair around her finger.
“That’s okay, I like hearing about it.” That’s mostly true.
“Well, lots of women don’t have orgasms, right? It’s normal, right?”
“I used to tell myself that. Now, well, I’m realizing that the reason might be something … abnormal.” I rest my chin on my hands, stare at my image in the left-hand corner.
“What do you mean, abnormal?”
“I … I can’t get into that right now. It’s all kind of fresh. Stuff I’ve learned since being here.” I watch her watching me.
“Is it serious? Do you need to see a doctor?”
I did see a doctor once, when Zee was a toddler. I’d developed a strange skin condition “down there.” It itched. It embarrassed me. My family doctor sent me to a gynecologist to check it out.
“Probably a mild form of lichen sclerosus,” the specialist tut-tutted as she stared into my vulva. “Doesn’t look good, though it’s common and treatable.” My mind shifted to underwater plants, growing and spreading under my delicate skin.
I had to return two weeks later for a biopsy. They required one-eighth of an inch of tissue from three places and I told myself not to mope about it. It was tiny, almost nothing. But then I added it all up to three-eights of an inch, and thought, That’s almost half an inch.
After applying the freezing, the doctor picked up her a medical instrument, something that resembled a tiny hole-punch. The intern, who had been studying the whole process with unblinking eyes, flinched when the doctor began. I shut my eyes, counted my breaths, told myself to relax while the doctor did the procedure, and the intern murmured ridiculous words: Very good! That’s it! Almost done now!
Before the appointment, I’d read everything I could find on the internet about a vulvar biopsy. Some women said it felt like a mosquito bite after the freezing wore off, but they must be delusional. It was more like a cigarette burn, though I’m only speculating on what that would feel like.
“Oops,” the doctor said, and I opened my eyes to see she and the intern crouched on the floor, as though searching for a contact lens.
“What happened?” I craned my neck.
“Sorry, we dropped one of the samples, I think. But it’s okay, two will be enough.” I would think about that the next day, when all three lesions burned under a stream of hot urine.
The doctor gave up the search and once again faced my vulva and I allowed my head to drop onto the papered table.
“While you’re down there,” I asked, my voice squeaking, “there’s something I want you to check out. It’s kind of … personal.” She didn’t reply, so I took her silence as permission to continue. Who knew when I’d have another opportunity or the gumption?
“So. I’ve never had an orgasm. And I’ve tried. Lots of things. So, I’m wondering … is there anything … that physically doesn’t look right?” I specified the physical because I wanted her to know I wasn’t stupid, that I understood orgasms are ninety percent, or something like that, psychological.
“Well,” she spoke slowly, “there are many reasons women are anorgasmic, most of them not physical, but on a purely physical level, I can tell you that you’ve got some architecture loss, probably caused by the lichen.” I visualized crumbling buildings, falling walls.
“Oh, and, there’s a very thin scar on your hood, maybe also from the lichen? But listen, none of that should stop a woman from orgasming … the clitoris is mostly under the surface, and multi-branched.” I imagined a forest’s canopy, but the view didn’t relax me.
She asked about penetrative sex versus toys and other embarrassing queries that I barely remember now. She paused to find out whether I had any other questions, and I shook my head, rustling the table’s paper cover.
“Okay, all done!” she said brightly, as though we hadn’t just had that awkward conversation, me lying on my back, legs in stirrups. She handed me a sanitary pad, one of those bulky ones from 1985, and then she and her tense intern exited the room. Before I left, I scanned the floor for the one-eighth-inch part of me, wishing I could have it back.
“It’s not like that. Not a medical problem,” I tell Laura. I feel foolish for opening up this conversation and then shutting it so abruptly. “Listen, I’ll tell you more in person. When I’m back.”
“Okay. You sure you don’t want to talk about it now?”
“Yeah. Sorry to lay this on you. But I feel better somehow. To have told you half the story.”
“Well, I’m glad. You’ll tell me the other half sometime, right?” Her eyebrows scrunch together.
We confirm that we’ll see one another again in a few days, when we organize our daughters’ virtual visit, and then we end the call.
I step out onto the balcony, look down at the street below, where the day is well underway. The fruit seller is receiving a delivery of mosambi, their chartreuse skins bright from five storeys up. Two women in crisp saris rush across the sidewalk, beginning commutes to office jobs.
I recall that after the gynecologist appointment, I recounted the bare minimum to Murtuza, comparing the experience to a dental visit, the worst part being the freezing. He cringed. Now I think about Zainab’s seven-year-old description of “getting a needle” after her khatna, how similar it all sounds.
I sank into a funk soon after the appointment. I went through the motions, teaching all day and picking Zee up from daycare, but I was kind of checked out, letting Murtuza take over with Zee while I went to bed early. I told him I was fighting a cold.
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br /> The deep blue mood lasted weeks, lightening gradually, me a boat, rowing myself back to shore. Back then, I couldn’t understand why I was so sad.
But now, I think maybe it was the act itself, the cutting, that triggered it.
I dutifully applied ointment and the infection cleared. Ian messaged me. Then I forgot all about the gynecologist. Well, not forgot, just stored it away on a mental shelf.
I imagine the khatna in a small metal lockbox, higher up on the same shelf, so high that none of my ladders can reach it.
The sliding glass door swooshes open and Murtuza joins me on the balcony.
“Are you okay?” He rubs his eyes. “It’s early.”
“Yeah, just couldn’t sleep. I Skyped with Laura.”
“How is she?”
“Good.”
“Did you talk to her about everything that’s been going on?” He puts his arm across my waist.
“Well, a little. Not that much. It’s just a lot to tell.”
“It’s important to talk about the khatna, Shari … when you’re ready.” I appreciate the last part; he knows I can’t be rushed.
“You know what I was thinking about just now?” I remind him about the biopsy.
“Oh yeah, didn’t they lose the specimen?” He nods, remembering.
“In hindsight, it was difficult to do all that alone. I think it made me sad. If I had to do it again, I’d probably ask you to come along.” I leave it there, can’t quite hold all the other threads I’ve been weaving in my mind, at least not securely enough to tie off the ends.
“I’d probably want to.” He smiles uncertainly.
“You’d probably crack jokes while squeezing my hand too hard, like you did when Zee was born,” Soon, I think. I’ll tell him what all this means. Soon.
FORTY-FOUR
Dholka, 1911
Abdoolally left Bombay Central Station in the evening, and arrived in Dholka the following noon hour, weary from the journey. He was fifty-six, no longer a young man.
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