The Writing on My Forehead (3 page)

“What are you doing? I have decided, haven’t I? Ameena has the greater need. She will be under the fan!” Nanima said this in an imperious voice as she, once again, arranged the cots to her liking. Her volume was going up, and the fact that she had to stop to tuck in a lock of steely hair that had strayed from her tightly wound bun was a grave indication of the loss of her composure.

“No! Saira is very sick. She has a higher fever than Ameena. She needs the fan more!” Big Nanima’s long, wild, and curly locks of gray and black hair swung forward onto her face as she shoved the beds back again.

“Yes and she wouldn’t be sick, would she, if she hadn’t eaten all of that trash with you?
Her
illness could have been avoided. Poor Ameena has been good. She has eaten only what I make for her at home.” Nanima tried to push the cots back, but Big Nanima had planted herself in her way.

“And it’s no wonder she’s sick!” shouted Big Nanima.

Nanima stood up, lengthening her spine to its usual straightness. Her thin, frail figure was no match for Big Nanima’s bulk, and Nanima, realizing this, turned and walked out of the room with a “Hmmph” that left us no illusions about the depth of her anger.

Remembering Nanima, I felt guilty that I seemed to suffer so little grief over her death. I supposed it was my own fault that she preferred Ameena to me. For more than one reason. Though I understood the language, I didn’t speak Urdu as well as Ameena did, and Nanima never hid her displeasure at that fact. I also remembered running away from her on several occasions when she’d stopped me to request that I massage her aching and arthritic legs. Ameena took pride in the task. She believed, as we were taught in Sunday school, that service to our elders was a sure-fire way of earning the points needed for gaining eventual entry into heaven.

For me, the potential long-term gratification was not worth the short-term pain. Any moment alone with Nanima meant the onset of a lecture—which was odd, considering that her sister, Big Nanima, was the one who actually lectured for a living. It was easy to see where Mummy had gotten her moralizing tendencies from. But Nanima recited essays rather than stories. Her themes of virtue and vice were always illustrated through the abstract. There was a lot of talk about heaven and hell. Good and evil. And little representation of what that might look like in actual fact, making these little sermons, devoid as they were of people and plot, rather too dry and humorless for my taste.

Big Nanima, too, told stories. In beautiful English, which made my communication with her less lopsided than the kind I ran away from with her sister. Her stories, however, had no apparent moral messages. They were rude, crude stories, peppered with plenty of practical lessons on the process of human digestion with all of its funny sounds, sights, and smells. They were told solely for the purpose of eliciting laughter…totally devoid of any ulterior motive that I could ever find. And they were usually accompanied by demonstrations. The sounds of belching and farting, coming from Big Nanima, never failed to bring on a giggling fit. Even Ameena, when she could tear herself away from Nanima long enough to hear one of Big Nanima’s stories, couldn’t help but laugh.

As I spied on Mummy consoling Ameena, I remembered another conversation I had listened in on one afternoon in Karachi, on our last visit there, when Nanima was still alive. I was restless, pacing the hallway, waiting for Big Nanima to finish her prayers. It was even hotter than usual and she had promised me a
gola ganda,
a snow cone, one of the deadliest sins and a sure harbinger of deathly illness in Nanima’s eyes because of the unknown quality and origin of the water used to form the ice that was its primary ingredient. Ameena and Nanima were in the dining room, both seated at the table. Ameena was shuffling her fingers through a tray of uncooked rice, sifting through it for stones and pests. Nanima was slicing onions as she talked, her quiet, firmly uttered words punctuated by the rhythmic thud of the knife falling effortlessly, it seemed, and repeatedly, on the cutting board. It was the only time that I remember being drawn into their company—the topic was personal and there was a wistful, smiling tone to Nanima’s voice that, because her back was to me, I am not absolutely sure I would have found confirmation of on her face.

“You never met him? Never even talked to him before the wedding?” asked Ameena, who was so engrossed in Nanima’s words that she didn’t notice me standing in the doorway to the room.

“Oh, no. It wasn’t done. No, no. Not until the wedding day. And even then—I was veiled, my face was covered. So was his. He wore a veil of roses, a
sehera
. When I peeked up, once—when I thought no one was looking—all I could see were strings and strings of bright red roses.” Nanima laughed, “Your poor grandfather! He must have been so hot! Oh, yes. It was a very hot day. Maybe as hot as it is today.”

“But how could you have—I mean—” Ameena’s relatively fluent Urdu seemed to fail her.

“Well, that was the way it was done. It was very, very different then. And it worked. Your grandfather and I—” Nanima faltered inexplicably for a moment, using the end of her scarf to wipe her face, her eyes. For one brief second, I thought she was crying. Then I remembered the onions. And she continued, her voice strong again, “Your
nana
and I were very happy. For many, many years.”

They were both quiet for a few moments, had both seemed to settle back into the tasks at hand and into the cheerless, boring kind of companionship that they enjoyed in each other, when Ameena’s fingers stopped shuffling. She pushed the tray away from her, put her elbows on the table, and propped her face into the cup of her hands.

“Nanima, that’s the way I want to get married. Like you.”

Nanima laughed and shook her head. “No, Ameena. Times are different. I was only sixteen when I got married! Just a child! You will meet your husband before you marry. Like your mother met your father, at your uncle’s wedding. He will be someone they find for you, yes. Someone they approve of. Your mother and father will have a tough time of it, I know.” Nanima’s head tilted as she looked into Ameena’s face. “You are a beautiful child,
Mashallah
. Like I was. The boys will line up at your father’s door, like they did at mine. But you will get engaged only after you have seen the man your parents find worthy of you. And met him. Then, he will take you out. For ice cream, maybe. And you will get to know each other. You will not marry a stranger.”

A hand touched my shoulder. I gasped, but not loudly enough to disturb Nanima and Ameena. It was Big Nanima. I don’t know how long she had been there, how much she had heard. She had a thoughtful look on her face when she beckoned silently for me to come. She took my hand as we left the house, unusually quiet. But then, so was I.

When I had finished my
gola ganda,
I asked, wiping the sticky red syrup on my clothes before taking Big Nanima’s hand again, “Is that true?”

“Is what true?” Big Nanima squeezed my hand, unconcerned about the residual stickiness that I could feel clinging, still, to my fingers.

“Is that the way it used to be? The way that Nanima got married? She and Nana didn’t even know each other?”

Big Nanima frowned and paused before answering, “Used to be? It still is! Too, too often. Girls married off before they become women, like cows at an auction. Before they are old enough to understand what the world is about and what it has to offer. That there is more to life than breeding and birthing.” The frown faded into a smile. “But not for you, that same old story. Not for my Saira. From you, I expect big things.” She tweaked my nose and challenged me to a race home. I remember feeling glad and proud of myself, too. As if in advance for all that she hoped I would accomplish.

I
N THE FACE
of my rather traumatic, tantrum-filled railing against Ameena’s refusal to accompany me, Mummy arranged for a way to let me go to Pakistan alone. Almost. As far as London, at least. From there, I went on to Karachi in the company of Razia Nani, a distant relative of my mother’s—I tuned out when my mother tried to clarify the exact nature of the connection and have no idea of whether the tie was by blood or marriage—whom I vaguely recalled as a somewhat elderly lady. It was a compromise that I could live with, if reluctantly. The same was planned, in reverse, for my return three weeks later, when I would stay with my father’s brother and his family for a three-day visit before coming home. I was nervous about this, because it had been several years since I’d seen my paternal cousins, Mohsin and Mehnaz—eighteen-year-old twins whom Ameena and I had always tried to avoid, finding them more than a little frightening and exceedingly weird.

Razia Nani would, my mother said, take good care of me. “Besides,” she’d added, probably to try and avert the objection I was about to offer regarding the need for anyone to take care of me, “she needs you, too. She’s a lonely old woman. It will be good for her to have your company on the plane, poor dear.”

As it turned out, I found Razia Nani’s company to be highly educational. She was a bona fide gossip, talking nonstop for the duration of the ten-hour-long journey from London to Karachi—with no regard for the tenderness of my young age; with no notice of how close or far my relationship was to the people that she tore through with a generous impartiality that included people she considered to be friends as well as foes; and with no care for the possibility that I may repeat the sensitive and potentially dangerous information that she shared with me.

But for one detail, it would have been a perfect trip. The volume of Razia Nani’s voice—quite unconsciously, it would appear—seemed to increase in direct proportion to the delicacy and sensitivity that her subject should have commanded. While I was thrilled to get the lowdown on so many family secrets, I have to admit that I was quite mortified at the sinking certainty that everyone on the plane seated even remotely within our vicinity would be privy to the same information. I remember spending much of the early part of the flight slumped down in my seat, desperately balancing the need to keep these secrets in the family by urging Razia Nani to “shhhh” against the knowledge that such a “shhhh” would, in my mother’s estimation—and, more important, in Razia Nani’s—not be acceptable behavior toward an elder. Whenever the impulse to hush her became overwhelming, I entertained nightmarish visions of Razia Nani cozying down to tea with my other relatives and making loud declarations about how rudely I had behaved with her on the trip to Karachi, saying, “how ill-mannered and disrespectful that Saira girl is,” and “how badly Shabana has brought up her
besharam
daughter.”

My fear of being overheard was compounded by my childish belief in the degrees of separation between people who could trace their heritage to the Indian subcontinent. That there were, essentially, very few of them. It was an irrational belief, I know, but one that I have never really outgrown. Perhaps, originally, it was born from the curious perspective that growing up as part of a very small minority population afforded me. When we were children, my mother always seemed to make friends with anyone and everyone who could claim any connection to the geography in question—so that strangers, encountered in grocery stores, malls, movie theaters, or restaurants, became part of an intimate circle of friends that always felt like family.

This feeling was underlined by the culturally appropriate titles of “auntie” and “uncle” by which Ameena and I referred to these friends of our parents. Totally different from the less intimate Mr.’s and Mrs.’s that we used to refer to neighbors and acquaintances outside of that circle: people who were white, black, or anything other than
desi
—a slang word for compatriot that was more about geography than religion, ethnicity, race, or even nationality.

It was always rather confusing, on visits to Pakistan, to be confronted with a whole population of aunties and uncles. To look into the faces of racially familiar people who looked back at me with the blank strangers’ stares that I unconsciously associated with people of another hue. And part of my discomfort, on that journey with Razia Nani, was due directly to the fear that all of the brown people on the plane must know who we were…must bear some relation to my family within a number of degrees that made their passive participation in Razia Nani’s discourse less than disinterested.

Her revelations began just after we boarded. I was breathless, having barely managed to lug both of our carry-on bags on board and into the overhead bin, where Razia Nani had decided they must rest.

“
Hanh, Beta. Shabaash.
Very good. You see, I must have the room for my poor old legs. Ahh! They are already hurting. They swell up so badly on an airplane. And carrying all that luggage only makes it worse. And my bag is soooo heavy! All those chocolates to carry! I hope they know, in Karachi, all the trouble I go to, bringing them soooo much chocolate. I know how they like it. But still, I don’t think they realize how difficult it is. I’m an old lady, now, and my legs can’t take it. Of course, I love to give people happiness. And if suffering a little, carrying all those expensive chocolates—they’re so expensive nowadays, I don’t think they realize how much I’m giving them—if suffering a little is what it takes to make others happy—well, then, I’m glad for my suffering. Yes, I am glad to do it.”

Since the only one who had suffered so far was me—I had bruises on my legs, I could feel them, from where the heavy bag kept banging against them—I was rather skeptical about the depth of her sacrifice. Her bag was heavy, that was true, and I worried about the weight restrictions that had been written and displayed clearly at the check-in counter. I had pointed them out to Razia Nani, thinking she may have been unaware of them. But she had waved her hand furiously, worried that the attendant might hear my concern and actually check the weight of the bag, which she told me to carry casually, in a manner that would disguise how heavy it was. I briefly imagined the plane crashing, all because of the weight of Razia Nani’s chocolates, and hoped that her self-described willingness to suffer for the happiness of others would not have to be stretched to lethal limits.

We buckled our seat belts and Razia Nani made herself comfortable. She took both the armrests and spilled a little into my seat, making me shrink toward the window a bit in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid getting pinned in.

She issued forth a long, deep sigh, suggestive of much greater burdens than a bagful of English chocolates. “
Aré, Beta!
How I wish your mother were here! It has been
such
a long time since I’ve seen Shabana. My heart longs to set eyes on her. But of course, one can understand. I don’t blame her for not coming. I don’t know what your Jamila Khala is thinking.” She shook her head, placed her hand hard on her voluminous chest with an audible whack, approximately where I suppose she thought her heart was, and continued, “It breaks my heart! Breaks my heart, I tell you!”

I tried my best to give a coolly sympathetic nod, trying to let her know that
of course
I knew what she was talking about. And hoped desperately that she would elaborate.

I needn’t have worried. She was only just getting started.

“Poor, poor Zahida! So disrespectful to her memory, your
nanima,
you understand. Of course Shabana couldn’t come to the wedding. She’s a loyal daughter, your mother is. Not that Jamila, your
khala,
had any choice, mind you. Who would have thought that such a thing could happen? That your cousin Zehra would actually become friends with one of
those
creatures? That she would insist on inviting them to her wedding! Unthinkable! Who would have thought? Not that Jamila’s not responsible, of course. I mean, keeping up with
them
—with that family—for appearances’ sake is one thing. But to actually allow a friendship to develop between the girls!
Tawba!
Lord forgive us! Have mercy on us! That such a thing could happen! What would dear Zahida have said, your poor
nanima,
I mean? Yes, Jamila should have put her foot down. But there is this also, I suppose—that if there was coming and going between the two houses, then what could be done? Order the children not to speak to them? No! That would not be right also.”

It was a bad beginning and I regretted the decision to pretend to have any knowledge. I was lost in pronouns, innuendoes, and obscure references that only enhanced my appetite for solving the mystery of whom and what my mother had referred to on the phone weeks before. It was like walking into a story already in progress—a juicy story, I could tell—but how could I get Razia Nani to start at the beginning? At the “once upon a time” part?

“No, you’re right, Razia Nani. Jamila Khala had no choice, I suppose. I guess it’s all really Zehra’s fault?” I don’t think I managed to keep the question mark off of my statement, but Razia Nani didn’t seem to notice.

“Zehra’s fault?! Of course not! How could it be your cousin Zehra’s fault? No, no, of course there is only one person to blame after all, isn’t there? Or maybe there are two? Well, I’m sure it’s not Zehra’s fault, at least. If anyone, it has to be your grandfather’s fault. Your
nana
.”

“Nana?”
My voice croaked a little, but she didn’t notice. “But he’s dead.”

“Yes, yes. And you’re quite right. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, I know, but what that man did to your grandmother!” Another whack to the chest. “It broke my heart to see Zahida so humiliated. And now your mother won’t even attend the wedding of her dear sister’s daughter. All because your grandfather had to go off with that Englishwoman—that witch, that flower huppie! Gone off and had children, too, would you believe? And Zehra—befriending one of those girls, her own
khala,
isn’t she?
Chee, chee, chee
…such a shameful thing.
Bap re bap,
it happened so many years ago, so many…and it’s still so shocking! The whole of Bombay could talk of nothing else for months and months, you know. Mind you, not that
I
was surprised…Kasim Bhai was always like that, you know. Causing scandals here and there and everywhere! From the very beginning I could see how it would turn out. And poor, poor Zahida! Such a good wife your grandmother was to him, so very beautiful! And the way she put up with his mad whims for all of those years…wearing whatever shameless clothes he bought for her, cutting off all of her beautiful hair just to suit
his
tastes! Going ballroom dancing also! She suffered so much for him…everyone blamed her for it, you know, when all she did was try her best to please him!”

“Ballroom dancing?” I knew then, with the kind of knowledge that comes upon you suddenly, followed by a disbelief so strong that acceptance takes a while to achieve. That the old man from Bombay of my mother’s story was her father. I’m not sure what, if anything, I might have said next. Thankfully, the conversation halted for a few minutes when the flight attendant reached our row of seats to ask our beverage preferences.

“I’ll have a tea, please,” said Razia Nani to the flight attendant, in a thick,
desi
accent that I had failed to notice before. “With sugar and milk, too. And can I have two teabags also?” She waited for the flight attendant to serve her the tea and me my soda before turning to me in explanation. “These white people don’t know how to make tea.
Chee!
It tastes like muddy water, the way they make it. Sooo weak!
Akh-thoo!
But what choice do I have only,
nah
?”

I sipped my soda slowly, eating a few of the bite-sized cubes of ice as I chewed over what I had learned and tried to fit my unfamiliar grandfather into the familiar story of dance and downfall that my mother had told me when she refused to let me go to the eighth-grade prom. I was fascinated, I remember, struck by the scandalous glamour of what my grandfather had actually dared to do. That he had survived the consequences of his actions, at least long enough to have fathered more than one child—I was shocked at the realization as the meaning of what I had learned started to sink in—seemed to lend him a victorious light. As if he had fought a battle with fate, broken the rules of culture and convention—and won. It certainly cast a whole new light on the story my mother had told. Where were his just deserts? What else was there that I didn’t know?

My mouth was cold, now, from the ice my tongue had flirted with, and my mind, too, had settled a bit when I decided to try and steer Razia Nani back to the course she had begun before we were interrupted, jointly, by my shock and the flight attendant’s service.

“Her
khala
? Zehra is friends with her aunt, Razia Nani? I’m so bad with understanding these things. How exactly are they related?”

“Well, it’s simple,
nah
? The English witch’s children—that is, her children with your
nana,
your grandfather, are the brothers and sisters of your mother. And of Zehra’s mother. Of course, they are not full brothers and sisters. Only
sautella
.”

I wasn’t as ignorant, when I was paying attention, as I had claimed. And I knew that in Urdu,
sautella
was a word used for relatives and siblings who were not full or real—that there is no distinction, in the translation of that word, between step- and half-. But if my grandfather was the father of these children, then they were the half-siblings, not step-, of my mother. Which made them, as Razia Nani had pointed out, my aunts? uncles? How many were there?