The Writing on My Forehead (16 page)

“I’m not, Mummy. That was a play. That wasn’t real.”

“But how do I know what is real, Saira? How can I ever trust you now? You’ve lied to me, betrayed me. How do I know now, ever, if you are telling me the truth or telling me another lie?”

A battle began inside of me about what to say next. About this question of truth and lies, which I had known would be asked of me, for which I had an answer ready. The answer I gave her, finally, to try and make her understand: “You lied to me.”

“What?! When have I ever lied to you?”

“About Nana. You told us he was dead. But he wasn’t. He was alive, all the way up to the week before Nanima died. He was alive and you told us he was dead.”

“You think that’s the same thing?”

I knew it wasn’t. “No. I didn’t say it’s the same. But it was a lie.”

My mother closed her eyes, shook her head in disbelief.

I pressed on, “You never even asked me about it—about meeting Belle. About how I felt when I found out. And when I tried to tell you, you wouldn’t listen.”

“I didn’t ask you—I didn’t listen—because I didn’t want to know. I still don’t. I refuse to discuss that with you.” Her actions matched her words. She stood up and walked out of the room.

We never discussed the play again, the whole argument absorbed into the urgent preparations for the wedding that was soon to take place.

A
LL OF MUMMY’S
family came to celebrate Ameena’s wedding, except Big Nanima, who was busy working on the production of a television drama, an adaptation of Dickens’s
David Copperfield,
which she had written. Madness pervaded our home as the family reunion that was supposed to have taken place the year before at Zehra’s wedding (and which didn’t, because of Mummy—who did not invite controversial “foreign guests” to
her
daughter’s wedding) took place here, in our home in America, where there were no servants to order around, no drivers to hustle people back and forth to sightsee and shop, and plenty of guests who were accustomed to both. I remember feeling invaded and under siege. Saris were burnt on the ironing board by people who had never had occasion to iron, teacups piled up every few seconds on tables and counters and in sinks, bathrooms had to be scoured out every half-hour (by me, most of the time). The washer and dryer were in perpetual use. And once, someone—trying to be helpful—ran the dishwasher using regular dish soap, causing a flood of foam in the kitchen.

The wedding itself was cultural schizophrenia. The house was crammed full of aunties and uncles and cousins, an Indo-Pakistani oasis of exotica, overflowing with music, spicy foods, loud laughter, and the late-night hum of conversation, which intrigued the neighbors, who peeked out of windows surreptitiously as they nosily bore witness to the bustle that our home could not contain. They must have wondered at the four minivans parked in front of the house, rented to provide transportation for the nuptial militia that is required to get a
desi
wedding off the ground. I felt like a member of the Addams family and made Ameena laugh at my metaphor, snapping my fingers to punctuate the “ba-da-da-dum” I sang whenever we saw the neighbors’ curtains rustle. Most of them, our neighbors, were invited and delighted to attend, looking stiff and foreign at the backyard
mehndi
and, later, at the hotel reception—their suits and dresses drab next to the flaming colors of the saris,
gharara
s,
shalwar kameeze
s, and
sherwani
s that my relatives upstaged them with. They stayed close together, the white people, Ameena’s friends among them, along with my father’s colleagues and friends of Shuja’s, like a group of wide-eyed tourists, amazed at the strangeness of the natives, a little afraid of getting lost, as if they really were in a foreign land.

Ahmed Chacha and Nasreen Chachi came, too, the last to arrive, just one day before the first of three wedding functions. Mohsin and Mehnaz were with them. Mohsin was more or less the same, the purple hair having been replaced with green, peace sign still dangling from his ear, camera in hand. My mother’s lips pursed at the sight of him, something that tickled the slightly wicked sense of humor that I was developing as I waded deeper into adolescence. Mehnaz, however, made Mummy smile and cluck with approval.

I could see why, once I managed to recognize the stranger who stood beside Mohsin. She was modestly dressed, devoid of makeup, her hair styled conservatively in a sleek bob. She offered demure
salaam
s to my mother and father, a cheerful hug to me and Ameena. I studied her closely, barely able to keep my mouth from hanging open, looking and listening for some sign of a barbed tongue tucked into a cheek, a pointed arch of a brow, a curl of a lip, anything to indicate an act at my parents’ expense, or hers, failing to find any. My eyes met Mohsin’s, flashing a question at him, which he answered with a slow, mocking smile.

Mehnaz kept it up the whole drive home, all of us squashed in one of the four infamous minivans. She spoke sweetly, in perfect Queen’s English, all of her
h
s intact. Mohsin studied the scenery earnestly while his sister gushed with Ameena over the wedding plans, asking eagerly about color schemes, henna patterns, and wedding songs. Ameena and Mummy were both happy to launch into descriptions of what had been their whole and sole focus for months. Nasreen Chachi fell asleep in the car. Daddy and his brother discussed the weather and the stock market. After a long battle with traffic, we dropped this other branch of the Qader family off at a hotel near our home—something Mummy shamefully lamented but that couldn’t be avoided, given the crammed, no-vacancy state of our own house by now. So I didn’t get a chance to ask Mohsin about how Mehnaz had been transformed into a Stepford wife-in-waiting.

Nor would I, for the next few days. Not until Ameena’s wedding reception, by which time I had yet seen no sign of return of the old Mehnaz. I saw Mohsin sneak out of the reception hall, onto the adjacent terrace, just as dinner was being served, and guessed the reason. I followed him and found him lighting up. Alone.

“Mehnaz doesn’t smoke anymore?”

Mohsin shook his head.

“What about her boyfriend?”

“She dumped him.”

I took a moment to digest this. “What’s happened to her? Did your dad put her on tranquilizers?”

Mohsin shrugged his lips—a totally failed attempt to smile, which made me feel oddly worried. I watched him take a drag on his cigarette.

“Mohsin?”

He shrugged his shoulders this time, as he exhaled a stream of smoke and said, “Mehnaz and I—we’ve always had this weird, competitive thing between us. Since we were little. Which one of us learned to read faster, to ride a bike, swim. We’d see who could eat more ice cream. And how fast. Who got better marks at school. It was—it wasn’t something we ever talked about. Then, later, it was which one of us could be more rebellious. Which one of us could piss our father off more.”

“She was winning, big-time, when I last saw you.”

“Yeah. Well. She’s given up, hasn’t she?”

“Given up?”

“Thrown in the towel. Decided to go straight. And narrow.”

“Oh. Why?”

“Because she knows she can’t win.”

“She can’t win?” This was heading somewhere I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I thought of Mehnaz, about her boyfriend. I briefly entertained the hope that Mohsin’s confession—for that was what I felt was coming—would be nothing more than just such an admission. He had a girlfriend. I looked up to find him watching me. And the look on his face made me abandon that hope. “What is it, Mohsin?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. When he did, he looked away and seemed to want to change the subject. “You remember Magda?”

I frowned and nodded warily.

“She’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“I haven’t seen her in months. After that night—last summer—when you talked to her, I used to stop and ask how she was doing. She’d answer sometimes. Sometimes, she’d just mumble to herself. I gave her copies of the pictures I’d taken of her. She thanked me for them. And then—I haven’t seen her since Christmas. I don’t think she was well. I asked the people who work at the McDonald’s—they didn’t know who I was talking about. The people at the newsagent’s next door—a
desi
family—they haven’t seen her either. No one’s seen her. I think she might be dead.”

I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought of the old homeless woman since I’d seen Mohsin in London.

“I had copies of those pictures of her framed. I’ve brought them to give to you. If you want them.”

“Of course I want them.”

He lapsed back into a heavy, awkward, frustrating silence.

It was my turn to shrug. I think I turned to leave, mumbling something about getting some food, when Mohsin stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.

“You really want to know?”

I turned back around. “If you have something to say, Mohsin, just say it.”

His eyes were on the glowing tip of his cigarette, fast approaching the filter. As if addressing it, he said, “In England, we call these fags. I believe the word means something different here.” His eyes moved to lock with mine. Then he threw the stub down. I watched him grind it under his shoe and heard him say, explicitly, what he had already implied: “Saira. I’m—queer.”

“I figured you’d tell her eventually.” Mehnaz had appeared out of nowhere, her beautiful
gharara
caressing the ground as she crossed to close the distance between us. “Though I don’t think little Saira knows what you mean.” She stopped to appraise my incredulous face, and added, without needing to, “He means he’s gay. A fruitcake. Homosexual. A poof-ta.”

I looked from her to her brother, unable to decipher the cryptic tension that flowed between them. Then I put it all together, what Mohsin had told me, and said, “Mohsin’s gay. Okay. And that’s why you’ve decided to be the perfect daughter?”

She laughed, acknowledging the point I had scored. “We can’t both get ourselves disowned. Who would Mum and Dad leave all their lovely money to?”

I saw Mohsin laugh—out of the corner of my eye; I was having trouble meeting his gaze. I’m not sure what I felt. Confused, I suppose. Putting gay and Mohsin together in a sentence felt strange, somehow wrong, because the word was a derogatory epithet in the typical suburban high school that I attended. Even if the label was his choice, I felt uncomfortable about its association with someone I cared for and admired.

But I think I understood the honor implied in his confidence in me. “They—your parents don’t know?”

“Mo’s still alive, isn’t he?” Here, finally, was the Mehnaz I knew.

I wanted to say something profoundly accepting to my cousin. But I had no idea what that should be. I was still trying to think something up when we were interrupted again.

“There you are!” My mother called from the glass door that connected the terrace to the reception hall, out of breath as she had been for days. “Come in, all of you. It’s time for the
jootha-chupai
.”

We followed Mummy back into the hall, and the rest of the wedding proceeded as normal. I took my place among a gaggle of giggling cousins, stealing one of Shuja’s shoes. Mehnaz took the other. And Zehra—whose wedding had been the setting for an old family scandal come to life—took the lead in negotiating with Shuja and his friends over how much money he had to pay in order to receive his shoes back so that he could leave the hall respectably, with his bride on his arm.

Mohsin’s quiet declaration—the seed of future scandal that would explode and reverberate over long-distance phone lines throughout the family when he would come out two years later—faded in the noise of music and laughter. It took me a day to formulate all of the questions I fired at him—the whats, whys, hows, and so on—of what his sexuality meant. The details that I needed to understand who he was and why that would make him an outcast later. Another outcast, like my grandfather, whom I was supposed to shun and would not.

Ameena’s
ruksati,
the traditionally tearful good-bye that she bid us as she departed from the reception hall—with a significantly poorer, shoe-clad Shuja—signaled the end of the evening. Daddy’s eyes were moist when he put his hand on Ameena’s head in a clumsy farewell gesture that smooshed her hairdo. Mummy sobbed as she embraced Ameena, the daughter who had fulfilled all high hopes and expectations. I did, too, for that matter, the daughter who would not.

F
OR THREE YEARS
after Ameena was married, I was the only child. That was difficult. There was no one else for Mummy to focus on. And after what had happened with the play, she made a point of being vigilant, wanting to know where I was and what I was doing at every second of the day. Then, I got into Berkeley. And through the miraculous powers of influence that Ameena and Shuja wielded, I was allowed to go—despite the dire warnings and strongly worded resistance of my mother.

“She’s difficult enough to control already! What will become of her with so much freedom? Drinking and dating and drugs, I warn you, Saira, if you do any of these things, I will never forgive you and neither will God! Keep yourself pure, Saira, and chaste, until we find you a good husband, like Shuja, who will love you and take care of you as well as he does of Ameena. O God, I implore You to send us a good boy for Saira, so that she is engaged and settled quickly and safely! Promise me, Saira, that you will remember who you are, remember what we expect of you. No drinking. No dating. No drugs.”

Of course, I broke all of those promises. The rebellion began almost immediately.

Alcohol came first. Then pot. Dating. And then sex. Sex, not love. All of them—while pleasant enough, with some practice—turned out to be highly overrated.

The morning after the first night I had sex was bad. Shivering with chills, I felt sick and feverish, my stomach clenching and unclenching with each breath. The guy was still asleep, the smell of last night’s beer and tequila heavy in the fetid air he exhaled. I felt cheap. And used. Like the wilted, dirty condom on the floor next to the bed. I knew love had nothing to do with what had happened in the tangle of sheets that he did not wash as often as he should.

By then, I was corresponding regularly with Mohsin, the only one who could understand the gravity of the choice I had made, a choice that meant the loss of a morning-after discussion with my mother—something I knew I would have been entitled to, because I eavesdropped for quite some bit on the one that took place between Ameena and my mother—the choice not to save my virginity for the sanctity of a wedding night.

But what had happened could not be undone. This choice was exclusive to others and I had made it with eyes and arms wide-open. Until now, the journey I had consciously diverted from the directions my mother had given me had been on a parallel route. Three right turns was all it would have taken to get me back on her one-way street. Now, I was going in a different direction—and Ameena’s footprints had never marked these sands.

Mohsin offered me support without judgment, calling me long-distance from some squalid location in Africa—where he was taking photographs of starving, balloon-bellied children—when I wrote to him about my exploits.

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

“It was okay.”

“It’ll be better next time.”

And it was.

But the best thing about college really was what I was there for. The classes, the professors—some of the male ones I had intense crushes on, unlike the postadolescent boys I merely slept with. I attended my own classes and anyone else’s that sounded good, read required books and others that Mohsin recommended. I was majoring in history, but had no idea what I would do after graduation. Except that it wouldn’t be what my mother planned and prayed for.

After my first year away, I came home resigned to going backward in time under my parents’ roof. Mummy moped around the house with me, obsessed with the idea of getting me married. I had reached the age when Ameena was married and that seemed to make Mummy a little desperate. I shudder, now, to think of how my mother, trying hard and failing to be subtle, got the word of my availability—accompanied, I learned later, by a full-size, glossy headshot—out on the proverbial “street” where
desi
families gathered and speculated, assessed and collated young people into the “happily ever after” that getting married was supposed to promise. A couple of inquiries had been made and I’d even been forced to meet a prospective marital candidate. I blew him off as best I could, but he proposed anyway. Mummy was ecstatic. Until she saw my reaction.

“Oh well. If you don’t like him, then you don’t like him. Nothing to be done. But—he was handsome, Saira. You have to admit. An engineer! With a good income! Maybe if you met him again—no? Are you sure? Absolutely sure? Okay. I understand.”

Two weeks into summer, Mummy suddenly decided that we should go to Pakistan. I had my suspicions about what her motives were—feeling uncomfortably like a worm on a hook, about to be cast.

“Is this going to be some kind of husband-hunt, Mummy?”

“No! Of course not.”

I knew she was lying—but decided to go along so I could see Big Nanima. And Mohsin, who was back in London, conveniently en route.

Soon after we got to London, I was fuming. Mummy had tried to hide her motives for going to Pakistan from me. But not from anyone else.

“I don’t understand why you’re taking this trip in the first place, Shabana. Everyone knows that all of the Prince Charmings of India and Pakistan are in America anyway. Earning the status-symbol degrees that their fathers wish they could have earned, giving their mothers something to brag about to their friends at their tea parties and club dinners. Haven’t you looked for a good boy there?” Ahmed Chacha was stirring the tea that Nasreen Chachi had just handed him as he addressed my mother, that old familiar smirk still there, swimming just under the surface charm of his voice.

“That’s true, Ahmed Bhai, but the boys’ mothers are all back home, aren’t they? And the sons will be home, too, at this time of year,” Mummy said to her brother-in-law.

“What a good girl you are, Saira! To go along with your mother and father on a trip like this. You must be eager for marriage. Well, I’m sure you’ll have no problem finding a good boy. Who could resist our little Saira? And the green card that comes with her, eh?” The smirk had surfaced. It glinted at me through his teeth.

I wasn’t fourteen anymore and wanted him to know it. But I resisted the urge to reply with a snarl. The smile I flashed at him did involve the baring of teeth, however, as I tried to change the subject: “How is Mehnaz?”

Nasreen Chachi was standing near the tea trolley. She glanced at her watch before picking up a plate of samosas to offer around. “She called a few minutes before you all arrived. And will be here any minute. She and her husband. With the children. She was quite eager to see you.” Mehnaz had married a parent-approved Pakistani a year after Ameena’s wedding and had two children already.

I didn’t ask about Mohsin, since I probably knew more about him than his parents did. He had been out of the closet, and out of the family, for two years. I looked up to see Ahmed Chacha watching me, brow furrowed, seeming to guess where my thoughts had wandered.

A heartbeat of awkward silence reigned until Nasreen Chachi said, smoothly, “And Ameena? How is she?”

“She and Shuja are well.”

“No children?”

“No.”

There was more awkward silence as we all waited for the bowl of
gulab jamun
—which had replaced the plate of samosas—to make the rounds.

Then Nasreen Chachi said, enthusiastically, as if she’d just remembered something important, “Shabana, you must look up my friend Hawa in Karachi. Her son is a lovely boy. Studying business at Harvard—or was it Yale? I can’t remember.”

I watched Mummy pull out the little black book in which she had begun to collect names and contact information for people who might help her on the hunt she was on. (It really was a little black book!) I fixed my eyes, over Ahmed Chacha’s shoulder, on the old bar that stood in the corner of the living room and felt my tongue run longingly along the rim of my lips as I read the labels for expensive bottles of whiskey, cognac, and other stuff I would have killed to have a little of. I wasn’t sure how I’d make it to Pakistan without doing bodily harm to my mother.

The doorbell rang, and in seconds we were knee-deep in the noisy antics of Mehnaz’s two boys. The room bustled with activity, and clumsy attempts at conversation were now unnecessary.

Under cover of all of this commotion, Mehnaz leaned close to say, “You’re here ’til the end of the week? Mohsin wants to see you. Can you meet him day after tomorrow at Hyde Park? Speakers’ Corner? At noon?”

I looked around nervously and nodded, wondering what excuse I’d give to get away from my parents.

But my cousin had thought of that. In a cozy voice, loud enough to be heard above the howls of her children, Mehnaz said, “Shabana Chachi, I was just telling Saira that I’d love to take her shopping. Day after tomorrow.” Mehnaz turned to me smoothly, pointedly, “Shall we meet at noon? At St. John’s Wood Station?”

I nodded again and saw my mother do the same, happily absorbed in my uncle’s grandchildren, patting their heads a little wistfully. Pestering Ameena to provide her with grandchildren had become a hobby.

A little while later, in the minicab that took us to the tube station, I couldn’t help but wonder out loud why my father and his brother had so little to say to each other. “Daddy? You and your brother—you’re not very alike, are you?”

My father shushed me, pointing with his head in the direction of the Sikh cab driver seated in front of us. I smiled to myself, thinking of Razia Nani and the awful time I had restraining the urge to shush her the last time I had been in London, on my way to Karachi—realizing for the first time where my own theory of diminished
desi
degrees of separation may have originated. When we got out of the cab at the station, I looked across the street at the place where Magda had sat. There was no one there now.

I turned back to my father and tried again, “You and Ahmed Chacha are very different, aren’t you, Daddy?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t seem to have much to talk about. Is it because you’re only half brothers?”

“We never thought of ourselves as half brothers! We’re brothers.
Bas.
”

“But, you’re so different. You wouldn’t have thrown Mohsin out in the cold if he were
your
son. Would you?”

Daddy shrugged.

Mummy said, “Really, Saira. Out in the cold. As if his grandfather hadn’t left him a nice pot of money.”

“Yeah, but he’s still been kicked out of the family.”

“It’s true that your Ahmed Chacha has been very harsh—but it is not something that anyone could have expected him to accept easily.”

I ignored Mummy and focused back on my father. “And you don’t seem to have anything to talk about. With Ahmed Chacha.”

Daddy shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t have much in common, I suppose.”

“Ameena and I don’t have much in common. But we still talk. We’re still close.”

“That’s different, Saira. You’re sisters. It’s different with men,” Mummy said with a smug tone, one I had noticed before, when she’d brag about how close she was to her sisters, despite the miles that separated them.

Our train pulled in and we boarded.

MY MOTHER’S SUPERIOR
assertions were tested the next day, when I woke up to the sound of an argument taking place between her and her sister. It was still raging when I shuffled into Jamila Khala’s kitchen after brushing my teeth hastily and washing the sleep out of my eyes.

“
Oof,
Shabana! Stubborn, stubborn, you’ve always been stubborn! He’s been dead for so many years! Today of all days—enough is enough! I insist that you come with me!”

“I will not, Jamila!”

My father came into the kitchen, apparently oblivious to the sounds of shouting that I had woken to, placed an empty teacup in the sink, and said, “That was excellent tea, Jamila. You should teach your sister how to make tea the way that you do.” When no one answered him, he looked up and around, took in the stony expressions on the faces of his wife and sister-in-law, the puzzled look on my face, and made a hasty retreat, mumbling something about what a good cricket game there was on television.

“Who are you trying to punish, Shabana? A dead man? You’re only hurting yourself with this grudge you won’t let go of. Everyone has made their peace. Lubna went to the
kabrastan
last time she came. Just go and say
Fateha
at his grave, Shabana. For your own sake. Let go of the past.”

“I cannot. For Amee’s sake, I cannot forget. You may have forgotten what he did to Amee—you and Lubna also, keeping up with that woman and her children, treating them like family—but I will not!”

“
Oof-ho!
You act as if it was you he abandoned! What he did to Amee—that had nothing to do with any of us, Shabana. You were not even there. You had gone to America already, begun your life with Nadeem. He didn’t leave you. He left Amee.”

“He left Amee and forgot all about me, Jamila. You don’t know what it was like for me—alone in a new country, dying from homesickness, waiting for them to come and visit, when I heard what he’d done. How can you know what I felt? As if I had lost both of my parents. Especially later, when I became pregnant. You had Amee and Aba with you when you delivered Zehra. When I had Ameena, I had no one. No friends, no family. Just Nadeem and me in that hospital full of strangers. Ameena was two years old before I was able to go and visit Amee. In Pakistan. He threw Amee out of her home and I lost mine, also, because of it. Pakistan was never my home. But he left me no home to visit in India.”

“Oh, Shabana. You never gave him a chance. He wrote to you so many times. You never answered his letters. He talked to me about it, was so hurt that you never wrote to him. He was human, Shabana. Only human. And that is why you are so angry with him. Because you thought of him as perfect—you worshipped him, Shabana! More than any of us ever did. That is why you have to come with me today, on his birthday. I only go to his grave twice a year. On his birthday and on his death anniversary. And I think that your being here, in London, in my house, today—it’s like it was meant to be, Shabana. I will not take no for an answer.”