Saffron Dreams

Four

FOUR

May 1993

Ami’s backless choli was an instant hit at Sabeen and Sarfaraz Khans’ wedding anniversary party the year I turned eighteen. She was back in our lives for a short while and I watched Abu painstakingly try to cater to her every mood in an effort to get her to stay.

Ami emerged from her room, the pallu of her black crushed silk saree draped around her body. As soon as she turned, Abu frowned in disapproval at the exposed skin but said nothing. I felt a bit ridiculous in my own sage green low-necked salwar kameez with beaded edges that Ami had insisted I wear. I kept my exposed cleavage covered with the dark long-trimmed dupatta. We all knew why I was invited. Parties were a great place to arrange matches. While the singles roamed around, adults fitted them like puzzles and decided the course of their lives. It disgusted me. I was too independent-minded to succumb to such matches, or so I believed then. It was useless to argue with Ami; if things didn’t go her way, she pouted for days. I had agreed to wear lipstick at Ami’s persistence. After repeated strokes, almost bruising my lips with the plum-colored lipstick, she then proceeded to powder my cheeks when I decided I was done.

“That’s enough, Ami.” I eased out of the chair. I knew Abu didn’t care much for makeup.

Ami shrugged and examined her own reflection in the mirror. She fluffed her hair and smiled in satisfaction.

The Khans’ mansion was filled to the brim with the elite of society: glittering and heavily made-up women wearing dazzling jewelry, sporting the latest fashions, trying out fancy English accents when they had not yet perfected the grammar, while men huddled together in circles, comparing sales figures, watches and cars. An ever-growing mass of unrelated and indifferent uncles and aunts, titles imposed on them by society, approached me at intervals to peck me on my cheek. I looked around for Abu and found him sitting on a couch at the end of the hall. Earlier he had been in an animated discussion with some of his friends about politics, a subject he could discuss for hours on end. There was a general uneasiness among the public since the new prime minister had been ousted within months of coming to power. That year had been a political disaster for Pakistan. Both the prime minister and the president resigned from their offices citing serious differences. Even the central and provincial assemblies were dissolved. Abu had great faith in the interim Prime Minister, Moin Qureshi, and was impressed by his determination to check the plague of corruption that had been growing in the governing bodies. Abu’s hope of such a person taking over the country and turning it around was futile; Qureshi’s tenure lasted only 90 days.

“Politics today has gone to the dogs, Tehsin Saheb,” Uncle Athar was telling Abu, taking a slow drag off the cigar in his hand. He was a pediatric surgeon at the hospital where Abu worked. “The governing bodies have wiped the country clean. Totally absorbed in their own personal gain. How can a nation grow in such a climate?”

“The whole country is rooted in bureaucracy,” Abu observed, shaking his head. “Until that’s taken care of, our progress is questionable. You can’t even get a simple identity card without bribing someone.”

“I waited twenty months to get a new phone line,” offered Uncle Zahoor, a mutual friend whose profession I could never remember. “Twenty months, can you believe it? Even a baby is born quicker.”

“Can’t match that even if you count from the actual conception,” Uncle Waqar interjected. He had thick, tightly permed hair that made him look like a hedgehog. “You might have better luck in that time period, Zahoor. Maybe you could end up with a son that you always wanted.”

The men guffawed at that comment, and Uncle Zahoor looked mildly offended. He had four daughters and each year tried his luck at having a son and failed. So far his wife had been pregnant four of the five years they had been married.

I started to lose interest in the discussion and looked around. The single young women at the party looked like they were straight off the runway and paid to parade at the party. Like moths, they flocked together with no room for expansion and eyed me with disdain. Suddenly my 4,000-rupees suit lost its class. I had not seen many eligible bachelors that night, and I didn’t see the sense of being dragged to a party where the primary purpose of my attendance was not being fulfilled. The only young men I saw were already with women or pretended to be.

“Are Saheb, corruption breeds corruption,” said Uncle Waqar, “What can the public do when they can’t even get basic necessities? It is simple. Without bribing, you will be in a hell hole and who wants to be there?”

“Did you look at the list Qureshi published of the defaulters of tax and bank loans?” Abu responded. “They say Rana and Jabbar are on it, too.”

The men in the group exchanged uneasy looks.

“He’s trying to expose the scams of the old governments,” Abu continued. “I am not surprised that there are many affluent people on that list. Some that we even see here at this gathering today.”

At that, a few disentangled themselves from the group and walked away to seek other, more uplifting conversations, far removed from actual reality. A handful of others simply slipped away.

“I think his idea of making the State Bank of Pakistan an autonomous body will go a long way,” Abu said to Uncle Athar, his only audience by then, who nodded and was relieved when his wife called out to him. He hurriedly excused himself and left Abu’s side.

Meanwhile, Ami flitted around from one group to another like

a winged creature, creating a stir wherever she moved, oblivious to Abu’s incisive conversation. Men ogled her choli, swooned over her, and even made suggestive jokes in groups. She seemed to enjoy it all until a hand swung her around and planted a kiss on her cheek in the ways of high-society—Uncle Jalal. Fantastic, I thought, and rolled my eyes. I sat down beside Abu, and he smiled at me, setting down his Coke on the side

table—the womanlike contours of the bottle making it seem like a woman abandoned.

“Having fun?” he asked.

“Oh, is that what this is supposed to be?” I feigned surprise, and he laughed, hugging me close. That was the exact response he was looking for. I glanced briefly at Ami, now working the floor escorted by Uncle Jalal, who had his hand on her bare back. Every so often I saw that hand travel a little too low, and she seemed not to mind. I was surprised by how well they fitted together. They were both social butterflies, eager to be admired, thriving on attention. Abu probably just dampened Ami’s style with his political talk.

“Come, let me show you something,” Abu said after awhile, following my gaze and briefly looking at Ami and her beau. I wished his embarrassment was a tangible stain that I could scrub away. He stood up, taking my hand. I followed him to the Khans’ library and almost forgot to breathe. It was no less than a museum of books. Two corners of the large ballroom-sized room were filled with bookshelves up to the ceiling, sections devoted to various subjects, even a music library at the far corner with headsets and a large collection of old records. There were three large mahogany tables with leather-backed chairs around each and a giant spinning globe in the very center of the room on an ivory bureau, an intricately hand-spun Afghan rug underneath. But the thing that caught my eye was a woodcut engraving on the adjacent wall. I inched in closer. It was an interesting composition of a city being trampled by a devil.

“It’s New York,” Abu commented, taking off his glasses and scratching behind his ear. “See the signature? It was created by Albert Abramovitz, the greatest engraver of all times.”

There were more details below the artist’s signature.

Mefisto, New York. 1932.

“Virtually all of the work Abramovitz created was socially and politically oriented,” Abu explained.

I was mesmerized by the composition and its subtle details. There he was, Satan in a loincloth with a menacing expression on his face, crouching on a tall building and balancing his other foot on a smaller one. He had an arm raised in the air, watching, waiting to strike. I felt a chill run down my spine. The scene was of night, a clueless, unaware city lit up for its final destruction. Somehow I couldn’t pull myself away.

Abu motioned me to follow as he walked over to a bureau and bent down to open the last drawer in a familiar manner. I realized with an ache that that room had probably been his refuge at many Khan parties when Ami was busy charming the crowd. Abu drew out a scroll map and laid it out on one of the tables, his forehead lined in concentration.

We stood with our heads bowed low over the map of the world in front of us. My eyes went over to the West, scanning it for New York. What had motivated Abramovitz to do a rendering of a city’s destruction? I couldn’t shake the thought. Abu’s words brought me back to our side of the world.

“This is where your grandfather was born.” He pointed to a tiny speck north of Karachi. “Khairpur.”

The two ends of the map rolled down on both sides of the table and curled up. We studied the map, totally absorbed. “See how Pakistan looks,” Abu pointed out. “Like a mango squeezed of its pulp, misshaped and misproportioned. Elongated and lost. Our poor country.”

I peered closely and couldn’t help agreeing. The marked lines defining the contours of the land looked like a piece of gum stretched in one direction to its maximum length. Pakistan was a shy, squirming bride next to India, which spread its corners all around, looking for opportunities to advance, captivate and mesmerize. Bangladesh, a teardrop of India, was caught in years of natural disasters, as if paying for the price of some transgression almost in a karmic way. It wasn’t apparent looking at history what it was paying for, but someone knew.

We heard a laugh; it sounded like the tinkling of ice cubes in a glass. Ami’s voice. We both looked up. Ami and Uncle Jalal had wandered inside the library, not knowing we were there. Uncle Jalal had his arms around her and had pushed her against the wall. He looked like he was about to kiss her.

“Hello, Jalal.” Abu’s voice thundered inside the library with choked-back anger. “Amazing how you stand out wherever you go, isn’t it?”

Ami jumped and slipped out of Uncle Jalal’s embrace.

“Did it occur to you that you might have gone too far?” Abu’s question seemed to be directed toward both of them.

Uncle Jalal rested his elbow on the wall and turned around with a smile, not bothering to answer. It was almost as if he was unperturbed by Abu’s presence. Could it be too much alcohol in his system?

“How are you, Tehsin? Arissa?” he acknowledged. “Reading as usual, I see.”

Abu didn’t reply and turned to Ami instead. She looked at him scared, tongue-tied. There was a deadly look on Abu’s face, and it seemed that it took all of his willpower not to physically harm her.

“Arissa and I are going home,” he said to her, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, his tone definitive. I was certain Ami knew that she had pushed his very last button, and there was no turning back. “Seems like you are enjoying this party, so I won’t inconvenience you. I am certain Jalal would be happy to drop you home.”

With that Abu turned and escorted me out, his hand firmly holding my forearm. There was a tiny bruise on my arm when I sat down beside him in the car. We didn’t talk the entire ride back, but I knew that that night would radically change our lives. I concentrated on the graffiti I saw along the way, starkly eerie in the dark, blocking out the apprehension for our future. DEATH TO NONBELIEVERS, one read. JIYE BHUTTO, read another. The final one, on a brick wall in the area we had nicknamed Khuda Ki Basti, or the village of God, where teeming masses of squatted and illegal dwellings sat right before we turned the lane into our picturesque neighborhood, admonished DO NOT URINATE. Below it ran a mocking tell-tale trail left by a brave soul.

“Your mother has left.”

The unnerving words echoed across the dining room and like a leech drained the surroundings of all air. The ear-piercing silence that followed became an incessant buzzing that wouldn’t go away. Like a bone, the joke we were laughing at minutes earlier got caught in our throats. Zoha’s hand, which had just lifted a spoon to bring it to her mouth, came to halt midair, and I saw her lower lip tremble. It could only mean one thing. I curled my fingers over her arm and gently but firmly guided the spoon into her mouth. She began to chew her cornflakes slowly as tears ran down her cheeks. Sian, 14 at the time, laid his spoon on the table on the side of his plate, wiped his face clean with a napkin, and escaped to his room without a word.

I glanced over at Abu, who had just delivered the hurtful news, and our gazes locked. There was a plea in his voice meant for me, and I understood it in more ways than I cared to. You perfect that art of deciphering the unspoken words when you live in the Amaan household and confront a situation over and over again.

That morning, Abu’s glance meant that I was to dutifully assume Ami’s duties and become emotionally present for my siblings. It also meant that I should take charge of the help in the house, the driver, the gardener, Mai Jan, etc. It wouldn’t be that hard. Ami had perfected the role of a lazy commander. Out in the real world of working folks, the help were almost always on their own since Ami was never good at supervising. Even when one of the newly hired help, Shama, the maid assigned to do laundry in the house, started stealing, Ami was oblivious to the entire thing. I was the one who caught her red-handed, fingers deep in Ami’s bedside drawer, drawing out a wad of cash that Ami had carelessly left there.

“She hates us, doesn’t she?” Zoha asked me once.

“No, she doesn’t.” I carefully weighed my words. “She just doesn’t know how to love us.”

Hate. Such a strong word, but it was also a mother’s final parting gift to us, the knowledge that she despised us, me most of all.

“I wish I never had you, Arissa!” Ami had said, tears streaming down her face as she dragged her suitcase out the door. “It’s because of you that your Abu and I were never happy together!”

And there it was: my baggage for many years.