Saffron Dreams

Three

THREE

May 1989

Karachi

Early evening cast its long shadows as I came out of my room, almost tumbling over Mai Jan. She was mopping the floor on her haunches with an agitated expression, her sari pallu tucked in her waist.

“Choti Bibi, watch where you are going!” Mai Jan’s voice was a little harsh for her stature, and I glared at her without answering. At fourteen, I didn’t think I needed instruction on how to go about my own house.

For years, I had seen Mai Jan come to our house daily at the first light of dawn to do what we deemed beneath our stature to do—clean up after us, launder our soiled clothes, wash our dirty dishes, and cook for us. The days she didn’t show up, the dishes piled high, and we ran around dirty, unwashed, with stinky knickers, sweaty undershirts, food stains and the day’s grime coloring our shirtfronts, hair unruly and uncombed. Ami pretended not to notice. On such mornings, she sat in her room, painting her toenails, Lata Mangeshkar blaring out of the radio, curtains drawn. Us Basti Ko Jaane Waale, Leta Ja Paigaam Mera. O Traveler, take my message to the village.

We were chased away when we tried to peek in Ami’s room. She almost always had a headache that she was nursing and didn’t want to be bothered. Usually when Azad Baba, our old driver, came back after dropping Abu off to the office, he came inside the kitchen to fix us parathas for breakfast—square, fat pieces of dough powdered heavily with flour so they wouldn’t stick to the pan. He deep-fried them in canola to mouth-watering perfection and then slid the oily, slithering masses straight from the pan onto our plates, the steam partially hiding us from each other’s view. The first mouthful would always burn and numb our tongues. Azad Baba always cautioned us. We never listened.

Where is Ami? I wondered. I was having my period and there were no sanitary pads in the house. As usual she had probably used the last one up and not bothered to restock. I headed to her room in a huff.

I didn’t know about periods when they first started a year ago, not until I woke up one morning and my bed sheet had bright red spots that matched those in my underwear. I ran to Mai Jan sobbing, since Ami was not around. The old maid could not believe that Ami had kept such an important fact of life from me; God knew awkwardness could not have been the reason. In a dark corner of the kitchen, Mai Jan showed me how to loop the old fashioned bulky pad and wear it with woven string that we used to secure our loose trousers. Shaken and traumatized, I took the instructions but could not believe that I had to do that the rest of my life. I was certain my duck-like posterior hid nothing from others. I was certain people whispered behind my back, she’s menstruating, she’s unclean. Later when I washed my soiled linens under running water, I was so disturbed I wanted to injure somebody. But I didn’t. I had read somewhere that you can’t pray when you are having your monthly “problems.” That wasn’t an issue in our household. No one prayed there except Azad Baba.

“Bibi,” Mai Jan called out to me as I headed in the direction of Ami’s room. Her voice had an urgency to it. “Don’t go in there.”

“And why not?” I said rudely. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

Mai Jan wiped her nose with her pallu and sulked, tucking the cloth back around her waist. She was sweating profusely, her hair bunched in a damp, untidy coil on top of her head. The mole at the tip of her nose seemed gigantic today. She was looking at me blankly. I could tell she was fishing for a good reason.

“Woh ji, I just cleaned that area. It’s still wet,” she offered lamely.

“So what? I’ll be careful.” I got on my tiptoes and moved forward so as not to leave smudges.

“Choti Bibi, no.” Her mole mocked me but I refused to be distracted.

Ami’s door was half ajar, and I could hear a conversation within. Oh, Abu is home, too, I thought to myself. Maybe the discussion about pads would need to wait.

I glanced inside, opening my mouth to call out to Ami, and then stopped and swallowed hard. The man sitting on the bed with his back toward me wasn’t Abu. He was leaner and taller, not balding like Abu. A plume of thick white smoke emerged over his shirtless back and like a halo circled his head before disappearing into the whirling ceiling fan above. He turned around and smiled. Eyes glazed and eyebrows furrowed together, he had the satisfied look of a cat that had eaten its catch; it was Uncle Jalal, Abu’s chess buddy.

I heard the angry rustle of Ami’s nightgown as she came toward the door and wordlessly shut it in my face. The draft from it sailed into my heart. I stood frozen, unable to move.

“I told you not to go in there,” Mai Jan said from the other end of the room, a slight mirth in her voice at the treatment meted out to me by my own mother.

This is how a family unravels in a matter of minutes: through careless acts of meaningless alliance.

I often wondered if Abu knew about Ami’s relationship with Uncle Jalal. There was no threat of the laws of the land among the elite class, although such an alliance anywhere else in the country was punishable by law. I had seen Uncle Jalal a couple of times after that event but never again in a compromised setting. He would be on his way out when I arrived from school with my siblings, Zoha and Sian. My brother always sulked around him and moved away when Uncle Jalal wanted to tousle his hair, averting his droopy and bloodshot eyes. I was never sure what Ami saw in Uncle Jalal, notorious in society for his drinking and occasional d**g habits. He wasn’t handsome; of course, I thought Abu was the best thing that had happened to mankind. I was a bit skewed in my analysis of my father.

The thing with Uncle Jalal, Ami told me years later, was never real or substantial to her. He was a necessary distraction she needed at the time.

When I was little and still thought the world of Ami, I would sneak into her room when she was taking a nap and pull out her sarees and try them on. My favorite was an orange organza saree with a red-sequined border. I remembered draping it around my waist and slipping on her high-heeled gold sandals on many restless afternoons. I enjoyed parading around the room like Ami and puckered my face at the mirror like I had seen her do when she applied lipstick. Later, I would fold the saree and stomp on it to get the poofiness out, watching as it deflated sadly before I put it back on the rack. Years later, I looked on in horror as she cut that saree to make a shirt that she then decided looked awful on her. I never saw it again.

Ami watched us closely when we left the house or accompanied her on her shopping expeditions and admonished us if we strayed too far. She said there were bad people around, people who carried you away and did unspeakable things to you if you were not careful or vigilant. She never answered me when I asked what those things were. In the society we lived in, knowledge comes from unspoken sources: snatches of news clippings, books no one expects us to discover, whispered grown-up conversations. s*x, I would say to myself when no one was around. It had a husky and penetrating sound to it. It made me feel unclean inside when I said it, but it also gave me a rush. It was the foreign literature that taught me the intricacies of s*x and defined the unspoken, unwanted word called r**e.

I could never understand what made people bad. Leaders, a childhood friend told me once, make society rotten and unsafe. Bad people were mostly poor, I learned later from overheard conversations. Middle-class folks were mostly okay. Many rich people were corrupt. We were an exception, Ami informed us, an unseen crown on our heads that rendered us superior. Uncle Jalal was an exception as well, Ami explained to me. We grew up with stereotypes fed into our brains, dictating the way we operated in our daily lives. When I walked in the market with Ami, I always eyed poor men with grimy clothing suspiciously, certain they would reach out to cup my breast or touch my behind. I walked with a crooked elbow jutting out to shield my body, my purse.

Eventually, I discovered, it is our own who harm us the most.

What can I say about the mother who abandoned us four times over a period of two decades? Abu had checked out long ago from his marriage. I saw it in his eyes, in the smiles that he did not give to his wife, in the questions that he did not answer for her. Instead, the air filled quickly with thick hurtful breathing when they were together, the unanswered questions conveying more than words could: bitterness, disappointments, and a drawn-out sadness. Like a dismal cloak, those emotions landed on us. I tried to gather most of it toward me, wishing to spare my siblings the worst.

“Your mother never learned to love. It took me years to understand that,” Abu said to me years later. “Even on the day of our wedding, I had a sinking feeling that I had captured a koyal bird in a cage, bound her in a relationship that her heart had not accepted. She was born to be a free spirit. You cannot assign roles to such a person.”

Abu had accepted that fact and moved on. I never did, not until I lost Faizan and understood what a free spirit really meant. Not until I met another mother who nurtured my wounded soul and allowed me to forgive myself. Forgive Ami. Forgive the world.