by Nawaaz Ahmed
Did she conjure up, for herself and for me, the hope of visits between siblings and cousins, like in Chennai, so that it wouldn’t be just the two of us—mother and son—dependent only on each other for any sense of stability and continuity? And had she even contemplated paying the price she’d once rejected, the shameful silence that would enable it, if both parties agreed? With my grandmother’s prognosis, it had felt urgent. And only this morning, with Tahera signing the will, it had felt possible.
Tahera touches the Quran to each eye, then collects the rehal from the floor and makes protective space for them in the suitcase lying open at her feet. The rest of the strewn contents she stuffs haphazardly back in and closes the suitcase. She tightens the hijab around her head, picks up her handbag from beside the futon.
“Tahera, don’t go,” their mother pleads, in Urdu. “Seema, say something.”
“If she wants to go, let her go,” Seema rasps, in English. “I’m not going to stop her. You came to see Ammi. Well, now you have—”
“Are you saying I’m a bad daughter? As if you are perfect.”
“Seema, Tahera, stop—” Nafeesa wrings her hands, but both sisters ignore her.
“I know I’m not perfect,” Seema says. “But even I can see what Ammi needs now.”
“Yes, this is what Ammi needs now!” Tahera waves a contemptuous hand at Leigh. “So you and your lover are going to take care of Ammi? Seema, you’ve never taken care of anyone but yourself.”
“You don’t think we can?” Seema takes Leigh’s hand back in hers, aware that she and Leigh have never discussed this before. But Leigh doesn’t pull away.
“You people are selfish. You only think about yourselves. Did you even stop to think what effect this will have on Ammi’s health? Of course you didn’t—the same way you didn’t think about us when you ran away to pursue your selfish sinful desires.”
“Now you’re simply being hateful, Tahera,” Fiaz says.
Tahera turns on him. “At least I am trying to live honestly and quietly, and by my understanding of the Quran. I will be able to answer to our Maker, but will you and Seema?” She pauses as though expecting Seema to respond.
“Yes, you live very quietly!” Seema bites back with spite. “With your fatwas and your jihads and your suicide bombs. No wonder everyone is afraid of you, even in Irvine.”
Tahera pales, pulls her jilbab tighter. “If that’s what you believe, then why did you ask me to be your child’s guardian? Why didn’t you ask your lover? Or your best friend? Nobody who shared your liberal values was willing?”
Leigh’s hand in Seema’s goes slack. “You asked your sister to be Ishraaq’s guardian?”
“Oh, you didn’t know?” Tahera’s laugh is bitterly strident. “She had us witness her will just this morning. I wonder why she asked me and not you or her ex-husband. I don’t know how long your kind of relationships last. Maybe she doesn’t expect to stay with you very long. Knowing Seema, she may have already found somebody else. But who can say what Seema is really planning? It’s hard to guess—” Tahera’s face scrunches up. “Maybe she thought if she asked me, I would be happy to stay and do the cooking and cleaning and be the unpaid midwife as well. Be careful, she may only want you as a babysitter.”
No one attempts to stop her: there’s no stopping her, she flings her arms after each accusation as if to block any response from getting through to her, the flared sleeves of her jilbab her shields. “I’m sure that’s why she married Bill, too—so Abba would take her back. You’re a user, Seema. You use and throw people away, you don’t care who you hurt—”
Every shaft finds its target. But Seema has something new to worry about: Leigh has pulled away and grown still.
“Is she right, Seema?” Leigh says. Her lips seem to hardly move, but Seema feels the burn in her words. “Is that all you want from me? A babysitter for Ishraaq?”
It’s an assault from both sides: a thwarted sister, an anguished lover. Who is Seema to respond to first? And how to deny the half-truths on both sides?
You’re a user, Seema.
How to speak when the truth is not simple, when everything she says will need qualifications, and those qualifications will need further qualifications, and so on. How to explain in a moment what has taken a lifetime to accrue?
And here’s something else, working from inside my mother’s body, undermining her further: a rift is opening up between the placenta and her uterine walls. A trickle of blood—an embryonic spring—is welling into the uterus and pooling around my amniotic sac. She registers it as a discomfort in her abdomen—she shouldn’t have gorged on the biryani, or is this perhaps the beginning of labor? An invading languor, an apathy almost, renders her unequal to the task of facing her sister and her lover. I register the reduced supply of oxygen and glucose as an irregular heartbeat, a climbing chill, a fickle tipsy consciousness.
Can my mother sense my distress? Her mind is elsewhere, grappling with what to say to the two women confronting her. She finds nothing that can heal the rifts, has little energy for it now. The two women continue waiting.
Leigh gives up first. “I should leave.”
Nafeesa, harassed, depressed, says, “Look what you’ve done now, Tahera.”
She gestures to Seema to do something to stop Leigh, but what is Seema to do?
There’s not much time anyway: Leigh moves quickly, stooping to collect her jacket and bag. Without even pausing to put on her jacket, she gives a thin smile to Nafeesa, whose hand is extended out toward her, and letting herself out of the apartment, clatters down the stairs. The door to the building opens and shuts.
The silence is broken by Tahera: “I didn’t ask her to leave. I asked nobody to leave. I said I was leaving.”
“Then leave,” Seema says. “Everybody leave. I don’t need anyone’s help, I don’t need anyone. I didn’t ask you all to come here. Just go. Please go.”
She turns toward her bedroom, without a glance at her mother or sister. Fiaz makes a movement toward her, but she stalls him. “You too, Fiaz. I’m tired. I’ll call if I have use for you.”
She shuts the bedroom door and locks it. She doesn’t turn on the light. She climbs into her bed and pulls her comforter over herself. She ignores the knocks on the door, the rattle of the doorknob, Fiaz’s strained voice, and places a pillow, her mother’s pillow, on her face to block all light from her eyes, even though the room is already dark. The smell of the coconut oil her mother uses assails her nostrils, and she turns the pillow over to the faint scrubbed fragrance of detergent.
This dark is a blessing. This solitude is a blessing. She takes a few deep breaths, and her lungs fill with relief, as if she’d been holding her breath not just the last few minutes, not just this evening, or even this week, but all her life.
The pillowcase is cool against her eyelids, like leaves with the drip of summer rain after long dreary days of oppressive heat.
Her mind glides toward calming thoughts: flowers budding in gulmohar trees, mangos ripening in fragrant stillness, monsoon suns smiling through shiny eaves, sweet Reshmi’s cheeks, a smiling infant’s breath.
And all the while, blood continues to pool and swirl around me, in shifting fleeting patterns that neither of us can see.
33
Poor Tahera. Her sister has locked herself in her room. Her dying mother regards her with eyes that threaten tears at any moment. And though Fiaz stands by Seema’s bedroom door, he appears to be present everywhere she looks, judging and condemning her. What is she to do?
A part of her wants to apologize, to throw herself around her mother’s neck, to knock on Seema’s door and beg for forgiveness. But these actions would constitute an admission of guilt, which she cannot bring herself to do. For to do so would be to accept the enormity of her offense, not only against her sister but against her mother as well, and her own understanding of the teachings of the Prophet. So she tells herself: Allah as her witness, she has done nothing wrong. She stands irresolutely by
her suitcase, clutching her handbag to herself.
“I’m going to catch a taxi to the airport,” she says, testing her power to leave.
Does she want Nafeesa or Fiaz to make another effort to persuade her to stay? And if they did, would she give in? But the option is not presented: Nafeesa is still bereft of speech, and Fiaz is ready to take Tahera at her word.
“I’ll drive you,” he says.
He makes his offer without any rancor that she can detect. Is he simply determined to get her out of Seema’s apartment? Does he mean to take her to task on the way? Or is he laying claims to being the nobler Muslim? Her indignation gives her the strength to leave: “There’s no need. I can manage by myself.”
She looks toward her mother for a last sign of protest, then picks up her suitcase and heads to the door. The suitcase is heavy; she cannot make a quick exit like Leigh did: she struggles to hold the door open while hauling her suitcase through. Fiaz appears behind her, and this time she accepts his help. He descends first with her suitcase, and she follows with her bag.
She is halfway down the stairs when she hears her mother cry, “Tahera, wait.”
Nafeesa’s footsteps sound behind her, but she continues down the stairs and out the building entrance—Fiaz holds the door open for her—into the cold San Francisco night.
“Thank you.” She takes her suitcase back from Fiaz. It’s a stroller; she pulls the handle out, then waits for her mother to join her.
Nafeesa shivers as soon as she steps out onto the street—she has on only her thin sweater.
“Go back, Ammi, it’s cold,” Tahera says, but her mother appears too dazed to respond.
The three stand by the entrance to Seema’s building, like actors who have forgotten their lines. Tahera nods to Fiaz—she wants him to leave, she knows her mother will say nothing in his presence. “I’ll be able to find a taxi myself, Allah Hafiz.”
“Good night.” He accepts his dismissal politely.
He extends his hand to Nafeesa, who returns a squeeze. “Aunty, tell Seema to call me.”
He turns and runs lightly down the street, leaving Tahera alone with her mother.
And still her mother says nothing. Even a reprimand would be welcome. Tahera is bitter: her mother has chosen Seema. The prodigal daughter has returned, and the long-dutiful one is to be turned out for misbehavior, without even a chance to explain herself. Seema has stolen her mother as well. She tells herself she cannot forgive her sister, even if it means she cannot ask for forgiveness herself.
There should be taxis around the corner, two blocks away, and she begins dragging her suitcase in that direction. But first she must, she will, say goodbye—this could be the last time she sees her mother alive. She will not let herself be cheated of this moment too.
She turns around, sees Nafeesa following her. Tahera waits till her mother catches up.
They walk to the sound of suitcase wheels rumbling over the uneven pavement and the slap of Nafeesa’s slippers against her feet. The street is dark except for dull light bleeding out of a few lit doorways and bright white halos under the occasional streetlamps. When will her mother say something? Under one of the halos, Tahera allows herself a quick glance. Nafeesa’s blank gaze is on the pavement, as though mesmerized by the patterns there. She’s accompanying Tahera mindlessly, stopping when she stops, stepping off the pavement to cross the street when Tahera does. Her mother has escaped to some other world, become lost there.
Now they’re near the bustle of the main street. Time is running out, and Tahera has only to reach that brightly lit corner for her world to be altered, perhaps irrevocably. Say something, Ammi, she wants to cry out. She prays for something to change the course she’s on—perhaps she won’t find a taxi, perhaps she’s too late for the last flight to Dallas, perhaps she’s left her purse behind and cannot buy a ticket or board the airplane—even as she realizes that it’s in her power to turn back. Yet how powerless she feels.
At the street corner, she rummages through her handbag: she does have her credit cards and license. Is there anything she’s left behind? The only thing that comes to mind is the book of poetry Seema had given her. She’d seen it lying forlorn beside the Quran but had not packed it. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell to toll her back to herself.
And here is an empty yellow taxi drawing up at the traffic light. Is it a vision or a waking dream? Automatically she raises her hand to flag it down.
“To the airport.” Her voice is surprisingly firm, yet appears to be spoken by someone else, not her. Is she awake or asleep?
She cannot bear to look at her mother. The driver—Middle Eastern, maybe even a Muslim, she thinks inconsequentially—springs open the trunk and swings her suitcase into its depths. Deprived of its weight she feels untethered, as if she could float up into the fog-hazed skies to join the fading moon, leaving the streets, the lights, the city’s inhabitants—her mother and sister—behind.
The driver thumbs open the passenger door for her and climbs back into the car. She turns, finally, toward her mother in a hungry embrace, almost throwing herself at Nafeesa, as if to not give her a chance to resist. She buries her face in her mother’s hair. She would like to press Ammi into her body, to inhale Ammi into her lungs, to kiss Ammi’s cheeks and eyes and forehead and hands, to memorize the feel of every inch of her skin.
What she still cannot bring herself to do is meet her mother’s eyes.
“I must go,” she mumbles into Nafeesa’s hair, fighting a sudden and terrible urge to justify her decision. She cannot maintain the embrace any longer without breaking down. She releases Nafeesa, then scampers into the taxi, pulling the door behind her with extra force, afraid her mother might follow her inside. The crash resounds in the cab, and the driver asks, “Were you trying to break the door?”
She doesn’t reply. She has her face pressed to the window, her eyes fixed on the figure at the street corner: small, crumpled, and diminishing, while the moon continues to stalk her.
34
Say: You who tread a different path! I do not revere what you revere. Nor do you revere what I revere. I shall never revere what you have revered. Nor will you want to revere what I revere—
To you your path, and to me mine—
35
Grandmother, where are you? What’s keeping you? Please return soon. There’s hope yet: there’s life in us still, and blood still trickles through your daughter’s veins.
Her hand, still warm and capable of grasping, would, if it were cold and in the grave, so haunt your days and chill your remaining nights that you would wish your own heart dry of blood, just so in her veins red life might stream again and your conscience be calmed.
See, here it is—she holds out her hand, she cries out to you.
36
My mother’s last conscious moments with me: She struggles up in the dark of her bedroom, unable to comprehend what has woken her. The liquid warmth of her blood is a shock, but so familiar from her childhood that she presumes herself in Chennai, waking up to a familiar if infrequent deluge.
“Abba,” she calls out, “Ammi—”
The blood has soaked through her clothes to the sheets, and she pulls her knees in to escape the wet patch, even though in the dark she can’t make out its extent. But her own body prevents her, a protrusion growing out of her, solid, globe-like, unexpected. It’s then she panics, awash in realization, one thought screaming through her mind: Ishraaq!
For one long paralyzed minute she wills Bill to be here, to help her out of this puddle of blood and carry her away, as he’d done once before. But, of course, Bill is no longer by her side, and neither is Leigh, and Tahera has left, and she’s sent Fiaz away and locked her mother out. Her father is oceans away. She’s all alone, like she’d always feared.
She fumbles for the switch of the bedside lamp. Her hand strikes a vase and sends it crashing down—first the splash of water, then the shattering, loud in the confines of the room. She forgoes the hunt for light an
d lurches out of bed, her only thought now to get out of the room toward help—for her baby, her baby!—for whom she would bear the pain of stepping on glass, though she tries to avoid where she expects the shards to be.
But it is the water that undoes her, slimy from the stems of calla lilies soaking in it for two days. The first hobbled step on the slippery hardwood floor, and her foot slides. She teeters for a moment, for the second time in a week, poised as if time itself has paused, and then her world pitches backward. Her hands flail, seeking a reprieve, something to intervene, but this time there is no sister to pull her to safety. Her head strikes the bedside table.
Her last gesture before she loses consciousness: one hand strokes feebly the dome of my world, offering and seeking comfort.
Oh, that each moment could be an age. Then we could live long in little space, and Time itself would be annihilated.
37
Grandmother, you’re sitting on the front steps of Seema’s building. When you return from seeing your younger daughter off, you find the door locked—it locked automatically behind you. There’s no response when you buzz Seema’s apartment, and you decide to sit down for a while, because it occurs to you that you don’t want to return immediately to Seema’s home. You will rue this lapse soon, Grandmother, you will beat yourself up over it.
The truth is, Grandmother, just as you couldn’t find it in you to be angry with your husband all those years ago, you can’t fault Tahera for her departure now. You don’t disagree with everything Tahera has said. Though you want to be, you’re not yet entirely comfortable with all the choices Seema has made. And you’re not unaware of Seema’s shortcomings—unlike your husband, you’ve mostly had a clear-eyed understanding of your elder daughter’s sometimes manipulative and self-serving nature. Some of Tahera’s accusations have insinuated new misgivings in your mind, which you don’t know what to make of yet.
