An Unrestored Woman (11 page)

Then her eyes shot open.

The moment they did, someone stuffed a rag into her mouth. Bandra gagged. A shadow passed over her. She bucked forward. Her arms flailed. It was too dark to see the intruder; the window was closed. Her eyes blurred. Focus, she told herself. She tried to get up but her ankles were bound. It was as if her feet had fused in the night. She tilted her head to look down and see what held them but by then someone came from behind, yanked up her arms, and tied them roughly, trussing at the wrists so that her fingers tingled. Bandra thrashed. She flopped onto her stomach. Who was it? She blew against the rag in her mouth, blew hard, but it stayed in place. The intruder turned her over again with a kick to her stomach. She groaned in pain. And then, only then, did she see who it was. And only because she wanted her to.

It was Layla.

She looked down at Bandra. Her face in the half-light was motionless. Eerie in its beauty. She left the room. Bandra crawled and kicked toward the door. Slithered like a snake. She'd hardly moved a yard or two when Layla came back. She had the curved knife in her hand, the one shaped like a scimitar, and Bandra thought she might slit her throat. But instead, Layla bent down, shoved a knee into her chest, and thrust Bandra's head to the side. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the wooden base of the knife coming toward her. In the next instant, it rammed into her face. Rush of pain. A blurred hand reached out. Then the knife came down again.

Teeth flew out.

As Bandra lay groaning, Layla snipped the keys from her kurta bottom, opened the door leading to the street, and let in the morning light. And as if in a dream, the dream that Bandra had just left, Layla turned toward her, and she said, “My name is Zubaida.”

*   *   *

Bandra was found, not much later. The swelling and pain in her face took weeks to subside. Her tongue, when she was finally able to move it, groped for teeth and found only three. And what had been used to bind her hands and feet, Bandra was told, were the cheap silks she had bought for Zubaida's trousseau. She almost laughed. Then she saw herself as if from above, bound: her legs, her hands, her mouth. She saw the cart, the fog, the mist. And then she did laugh.

It was another two weeks or so before Fawzi, the man who did odd jobs in the neighborhood, came by and said he had mud left over from another job and would she like the hole plugged up.

“What hole?” Bandra asked.

“The one in your wall.”

She followed him to the outside of the compound and saw that there was indeed a hole. It was stuffed with straw. She couldn't imagine why there was a hole, or where it had come from. She estimated it was in Zubaida's old room. When she went around, to the other side, there was no hole. How could that be? She looked at every inch of the outside wall until her eyes finally traveled to the decorative rug. She was shaking—with anger, with fear—as she reached for it. She ripped it off the wall and there it was: a hole. Except Fawzi had been wrong. This was not just any hole. It was not ill formed, or sloppy, or small. It was not desperate, and it was not careless. It was planned. It was a window.

She punched through the straw. Her arms were frenzied, she was crying and somehow laughing all at once. The hook, she thought, the wooden hook. I'm a fool! By the time she punched through all of it, the straw was in her hair and in her clothes and it filled her nose. And once it all came down, in poured light.

*   *   *

Over the course of the next two decades, Bandra's business suffered. A new brothel was opened. It catered mainly to the British officers in the nearby cantonments. Alcohol was served. Bandra disapproved. She was forced to reduce her rates, but even the day laborers saved up and went to the new brothel, or they picked up a woman on the street, which was even cheaper.

*   *   *

In her old age Bandra wandered the streets of Peshawar. She wandered from the outdoor markets to the mosque then to Ghanta Ghar and then back again. She had no money, and only rarely made a pittance helping to deliver babies, especially girl babies that needed to be disposed of. She was eighty now. Or was she ninety? Little boys laughed at her, and threw rotten fruit when she passed them on the streets. They taunted her. But she paid them no mind. Her thoughts were elsewhere. They were in another time, and in another place. And of all the girls, she thought most often of Zubaida. Where had she gone? Did she too wander the streets? What else could a girl of fifteen, alone, impure, unable to return home, have done?

In her wanderings she sometimes stopped at various stalls and begged for food. Vegetables they were throwing out because they were spoiled, or day-old roti they might be able to spare. Once she happened upon a man who had a monkey. The monkey was doing tricks. The trainer was seated in front of it, telling the monkey what to do: somersaults, jumping rope, running and climbing. People laughed when the monkey bared its teeth and stuck out its tongue. The whole time, the monkey was blindfolded. Bandra waited until the show was over. Until all the spectators had left. “Why is it blindfolded?” she asked.

The trainer sat back, studied her, and she could see the disgust in his eyes. An old woman, a beggar. Her clothes dirty, smelling, her body bent and wrinkled, a mouth with hardly any teeth. He looked away. “Why? Are you its mother?”

Bandra said nothing.

The man collected the few copper coins people had thrown into his topee. He counted them slowly then put them into an inside pocket. He began packing up the few props that had been used.

“Why?” she asked again.

The man turned toward her. She thought of the snake, the one Zubaida had challenged. She thought of her as a little girl, collecting kindling, hurrying home to an evening fire. The man held the topee toward her. “Throw in a coin or get out,” he bellowed.

Bandra remained, watching him.

When he had finished packing up, the monkey climbed onto his shoulder. The blindfold was still in place. The trainer rose to go, he looked at Bandra and shook his head. She thought he might yell at her again, as they so often did, but he only raised his voice. “It's a trick,” he said. “If you can get them to keep the blindfold on and think it's dark, even when it's not, you make them afraid. And if you make them afraid,” he said, “you make them yours.”

 

T
HE
L
OST
R
IBBON

If I were to tell Leela what I'd done, I know what she'd say. She'd say, No mother would do that. No mother could do that. But then I look down at my arm, at the scar left by the cigarette burn, and think, What do you know? Because what
I
know, what I won't tell her, but what I will tell you now, is that I was long dead before I ever killed you.

Yet it's all true: I took you, your moist eyelashes wide with curiosity, the tiny yellow ribbon in your fine hair bowed and alert, watchful, as if it were standing guard, and I wrapped my hands around your neck. You blinked. Then you smiled your toothless smile. It was a hot, bright morning in September. The sun shoved through the cracks in the door, past the edges of the curtains. Everyone said it was a long and strange summer. The days too warm, the clouds too thin. The monsoons were so late that year that well into September the entire Punjab and the Northwest Frontier broiled, simmered indecently, the dust a mad dervish, crawling into even your earlobes in the long breathless nights.

I'd bathed you that morning using more water than usual. I sprinkled your tender skin with a thick coating of talcum powder to protect you from the heat. I dressed you in a freshly laundered bright pink frock. I'd spread it carefully under a thick bundle of clothes the night before to press it, to make sure the pleats were crisp. I'd picked the yellow ribbon because it was the closest color to white. But none of it mattered. Thousands upon thousands were dying that summer. Entire villages were being laid waste in the crossings between India and Pakistan. What did it matter if the ribbon was yellow or white? I tightened my grip, I willed myself to close my eyes, to keep pressing. I felt the gentle curve of your windpipe, your brave and rumpled pulse, and I told myself, If you don't kill her, he will.

The only question I ask myself now, after all these years, is why I closed my eyes. Why? I missed the last tiny breaths of the only life I've ever loved. There are so many answers, or maybe there are none. But I was afraid; I was afraid you'd recognize the act.
Know
what I was doing. And in some small corner of your silvery, still-beating six-week-old heart, you'd scoff at me. You'd say, What makes you think I couldn't have withstood the world? And I would've laughed and said, It's not the world we have to withstand, my Noora, it is ourselves.

But all of that is ridiculous, of course. You hadn't spoken a word. How could you? Only the tiny yellow ribbon seemed capable still of speech, still upright, oblivious, delighted by the fineness of your hair, by the life it would never lead. Besides, I know what you would've said if you could've formed the words. You would've said exactly the same thing he said the first time he raped me. You would've said, Open your eyes.

*   *   *

It's funny though, the things we suffer and the things we remember about that suffering. It's almost as though our thoughts were pebbles skipping across a pond. Take, for instance, that first time. I was fourteen. Now, when I think on that night, think of him pushing up my lehenga, smothering my face with his free hand, stuffing his fingers into my mouth to muffle my screams, I think of your grandmother's paneer. It's just a flash, really, but the softness of the cheese, the taste of the woodsmoke and the twilight in which they were prepared, the thin gold filigree of the cube of paneer breaking like skin, they all rush through me in this moment as if I were that pebble, flying through the air. Then I hit the water again, and something is pushing into me. Thin and hard and knife-edged, it pushed, pushed, until I cried out. Then I think of something else, something quite ordinary, like how cold my feet are in the winter. Or maybe how I should bring in the clothesline; it looks like rain. That's how memory works, skips like a happy pebble, even if the memory is so very far from happy.

Imagine if we remembered things exactly as they happened. If the pebble just glided along the surface. Then we'd remember every detail. One after another after another. So imagine: after that first time, a slight sucking sound and then he turned over and went to sleep. I lay next to him, too afraid to move. There was something warm trickling between my legs and when I reached down my hand came up bloody. But what made me wince was the awful tenderness. That whole part of my body, below my waist, seemed quite apart from me. A scared and collapsed and quivering animal, curled into a ball, knowing only one thing: that nothing remained. Nothing. Nothing would come after. Nothing had come before. He began to snore, lightly, and the room felt close and thick and seething, the smell of his pungent underclothes hung in the air. I rose quietly, my legs nearly buckling under my new and awful weight. The door was padlocked from the inside but the small window was thrown open. That was when I saw the stars.

They were horrible: those stars.

I thought then of a ribbon I'd worn as a child. It was white with a beautiful tendril of red and gold threaded along both edges. I adored that ribbon. It seemed to me the height of loveliness. I wore it to school sparingly, only on Saturdays. I washed and dried it myself, then ironed it delicately with a brass tumbler full of hot water. Then I rolled it up neatly, with extraordinary care, and placed it under my pillow until the next Saturday. And it was during one of those Saturdays, after our half day of school, that a girl in my class—she was the prettiest of all of us—snapped up the ribbon when it'd untwined from my braid. She waved it in front of me teasingly and laughed. I tried to grab it but she ran off down the street. I chased after her. Already, tears stung my eyes so I could hardly see. I saw only her blurred figure, weaving in and out of the narrow alleys. Our town, just outside of Calcutta, was not very big; its great moment had come when Pandit Nehru had traveled through on a Delhi-bound train. My father had taken me to the station, raised me onto his shoulders, and as the train had sped past he'd pointed to one of the windows, and in the midst of the roar of the gathered crowd he'd yelled, “See him? There! There!
He
is our father.” I wanted to say, But I thought you were my father, but even from above I saw his beaming face and decided against it.

Instead I watched the thin trail of smoke disappearing westward into deepest Bengal. It looked like the ribbon I'd so recently lost. I gave chase for over an hour. She'd held it up the entire time, the white ribbon streaming and bobbing in the wind like a kite, like the long tail of a shining mystical bird. I followed it until the girl disappeared down a small alleyway. But when I turned into it she was gone. She'd probably ducked inside one of the homes, probably her own, and I was left standing, alone, lost, but before the fear overtook me—in the tiny moment before I began to cry—I had the strangest thought. I looked around me at the close alley and the unfamiliar houses, asleep in the silence of the afternoon, and in that silence I heard my heart beating. It was a quick and steady beating, a fluttering, and I thought, It's the bird, it's left me with its heart. And though I've lost its tail I haven't, I have not, lost its heart.

But on that night, at that window, looking at those horrible stars, I knew I'd lost both.

So you see? It's no good. The pebble
must
skip. Otherwise we'd die a thousand deaths before we got through a single day.

*   *   *

I'm an old woman now. I've been living in this government-run hostel for single women, near Khalsa College on Grand Trunk Road, for over forty years. Most of the girls living in the hostel are students at the college. They are all so beautiful, these girls. Their faces are clear, bright with plans for the future; I can hear them giggling as they tease each other about the boys in their classes or swoon over the newest film hero. They'll be gone in a year or two, married off to pleasant boys, and they will take up a job, have children, they will settle into the many small and sweet intricacies of family life, and I will still be here. Sometimes, in the mess hall, I sit in the same far corner I have sat in for many, many years and stare at their resplendent faces. What am I looking for? Something like morning light, I tell myself. The lantern glow of untouched skin. My lost girlhood, perhaps. But it is all untrue, Noora: I am looking for you.