|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
        |
 |
||
|
Excerpt of NOOR, Chapter One Noor was Sajida’s secret. She knew the exact moment her child was conceived. Purple passed slowly, the lowest of clouds, over her eyes. Bathed in such magnificent color, Sajida lay perfectly still. Much later, she would try to relive the exact moment, as if she needed to understand how the fact of her child could have entered her body and mind at the same time. But Sajida would not summon the gentle shade ever again. Instead, the vaguest hint of it would swim in her memory like the brief feel of a distant place she might have visited when she was a child. Except for sounds of breathing, the room was silent. Loadshedding had stopped the ceiling fan and silenced the drone of the old, straining air conditioner. The stifling heat hung thick in air made almost sweet by the faint smells of lovemaking and freshly bathed and powdered children asleep on the floor. Without opening her eyes, Sajida rolled away from Hussein. She pulled at the sheer cotton of her nightgown and blew on her chest until she felt the film of perspiration tighten and dry. Slowly, a hum rose from across the room. Sajida, accustomed to the amplified bellow of the azaan in the early hours of an Islamabad summer morning, thought little of the interruption. But when the hum broke into an entire round of a young girl’s giggles, she was startled enough to open her eyes. In the farthest corner of the room, a soft glow lit up a scene. An adolescent girl—twelve or thirteen by the likes of her curves—hovered above a wooden chair. The girl seemed to float in her movements, her hand rising ever so slowly in the air until the arc stopped on her painted lips. Her long hair, an electric combination of oranges and pinks, was thick like a rope and waved gently over one shoulder and then the other. Sajida stared at the strange girl. Her color was richly dark, her flat nose was bridged by oddly slanted eyes, and her perfectly sculpted miniature ears appeared as if they were meant for a far younger child. The girl’s white teeth seemed too big for her mouth, yet the crowded rectangles fit one after another in an impeccable row of white. Her wrists ended in pudgy bracelets, like those of a healthy baby. Although the girl’s characteristics were otherworldly, they were familiar to Sajida, as if she might have located the striking combination of grace and innocence in someone close to her or, perhaps, somewhere in her own self. Suddenly, the giggles stopped and the suspended girl focused her attention on Sajida. The velvet texture of her big black eyes poured into her plea. “Ammi,” she called in the high-pitched voice of a young child registering an all-consuming need for her mother. The sound of the word, the fact of it, made Sajida’s vision blur. It appeared, then, to be the utterance itself that caused the young girl and her small wooden chair to dissolve like pieces of a scattered puzzle into sheer darkness. The force of what was said stunned Sajida. The “Ammi” that grew from the strange girl was different. It had an urgency all its own, absent in the wails of her young sons who took the word for granted, blending the two syllables into expectation, repeating it again and again until it was merely a sound. The cry evoked a private set of memories Sajida had grown to forget. Among them, she now recalled how she’d begged for her own mother, calling for her again and again in the maternity ward of the government hospital when she was giving birth to her first child before an irritated nurse covered her mouth and told her that God did not intend for children, especially sons, to be born to weak women. Staring at the corner of the room, where the vision of a strange young girl bearing resemblance to herself had just dissolved, Sajida trembled. Because her past, unclear and unspoken, forever lingered just beyond her touch, Sajida immediately recognized the visit from her future. Afterwards, Sajida got out of her bed, walked to where the girl had been and pulled back the heavy curtains from the window. She pushed her face against the screen, searching the night for an explanation for what she’d seen and heard. She pulled on her robe, fit her feet into her husband’s khussas and left the room. Outside, she approached the chaukidar who was clutching a pocket transistor radio against his ear in his nocturnal struggle against sleep. He jumped to his feet, reaching quickly for the rifle he’d carelessly leaned against his stool. He assured her that he’d heard nothing, and then shouted to the chaukidar of the neighboring house to confirm his statement. Returning to the house, Sajida climbed the steps to the narrow patio outside the living room. She sat on a plastic chair adjoining a table stacked high with chair cushions and carefully covered each evening in the event the rains would finally come. Resting her feet on the table, she leaned her head against the back of the old chair allowing her long, thick hair to be caught in the cracks. She considered names. Fatima, Mehnaz, Razia. She wondered what one named a child like that. In the fleeting glimpse of the future which had been shared with her in the adolescent form of the magical child who had just been conceived, a name was not offered. She placed her hand on her stomach, as if it already held a kicking baby, and spoke the first words to her daughter. “Beti,” she said softly. The endearment became long, and Sajida marveled at the sound of the second syllable, the way it drew out her breath like the thread in a needle pulling the first stitch in a cloth. A hint of light appeared, followed by others, until together they became the sun, the unrelenting ball of yellow so strong so early in the morning. Sajida shaded her eyes and head with her chaddar, the long shawl Hussein had purchased for her in the distant valley of Kashmir when they were first married. Wrapped in dazzling embroidery, she bowed her head to the burning Margalla Hills coming to life beyond. Sajida had loved Hussein since she was fifteen and had seen him for the first time when he emerged, smiling, from his mother’s freshly waxed sedan in the driveway of her friend’s house. Two children later, she loved him with far deeper intensity. Looking back on her teenage years, she thought herself lucky rather than wise that she’d so stubbornly cast her affections his way. Nonetheless, there was a part of herself she didn’t share with Hussein. For almost as long as she had known him, Sajida knew not to engage him in her dreams. The dreams, infrequent now, in which her mother spoke, had once been a source of contention between her and her husband. She recalled how uncomfortable he’d been one evening a few weeks after their marriage, when she sat down in front of the new sewing machine and began to stitch her new husband a summer shirt. “How did you learn to do that?” Hussein asked one evening, the freshly pressed shirt hanging on the back of the bedroom armchair. “Ma is free with sewing advice,” she said carelessly, as if her mother, dead for thirteen years, lived in the house next door and was integral to their daily lives. When Hussein said “Sa-ji-da,” drawing out her name in distinct syllables in a way that became a portent for his anger, she quickly corrected herself. “Was free with it. She taught me long ago.” Sajida had learned to hide this part of herself from him. When Sajida saw a strange girl dancing in the corner of her bedroom, it had been years since she’d discussed her dreams and where they came from with Hussein. She no longer wondered about whether her mother’s words really did come from the bottom of the ocean, as she’d thought when she was a child, or whether her mother was speaking to her from a life in the safety of beyond. Now a new voice, an unknown face, a yet-to-be person having appeared before her, Sajida couldn’t imagine what she might attempt to say to Hussein. She’d had a dream? She’d seen their child, so different? How would she describe the ‘Ammi’ she’d heard and make him understand? Hussein would only think her mad. Sajida had known immediately that her daughter would be different. But the recognition that her daughter was a thread to another world came to Sajida slowly, during the long nights of her pregnancy when she was frequently awakened by an aching bladder. Resting her throbbing feet on the cold marble floor in the bathroom, she would feel a shawl of warmth settle on her shoulders. Sometimes she remained sitting on the wobbly toilet seat for several minutes after she needed to, caressing her belly in the darkness. Awakened by the journeys to the bathroom, the baby stretched and moved inside her. Savoring the miracle of the dance, it was easy for Sajida to imagine that it was her daughter’s life that provided the warmth in the unheated bathroom. On the toilet, Sajida considered the bathroom differently. The walls were dull, not white, the porcelain tub and sink a muted orange, the crack that ran through each of them stark. The faucets were stained with age, the red for hot and blue for cold buried under gray sediment. The bathroom mat, a washed out durri, was worn and frayed at one end, its once bold lines nondescript. Surrendering to deep sleep, Sajida’s dreams grew more vivid than they had ever been. She pictured the landscape of East Pakistan—Bangladesh now—and her long-ago childhood in greens, each different from the last: rice paddies, banana leaves, palm trees, limes, sails of fishing boats. In her waking life, the rose bushes on the patio came alive, despite leaves coated with dust and an old ceramic pot unwiped for years. When the sweet peas blossomed for the second time that year in multiple shades of crimson, she pulled Nanijaan into the short driveway and asked, “They’ve always looked like this?” Inside the house, Sajida ordered the carpets washed and dried in the sun. The pattern of hexagons in the Bukhara carpet in the living room leapt up at her in deep reds and soft browns, and the tree of life in another carpet was suddenly transformed with branches of blues. Sajida saw the birthmark on her eldest son’s leg, faded until it had almost vanished, again as it had once been: a raised, deep raspberry. While Sajida’s belly grew into a daughter, the lens with which Sajida saw her world sharpened to absorb a life of color as never before. No one, including Sajida, understood until much later this intimation of what her daughter would bring to her world. During this time, Sajida could not help but recall General Z’s daughter. As a rule, Sajida did not keep up with politics. But she and Hussein, who was only a year older, grew up with General Z’s daughter in their midst. In the years of General Z’s rule, it was impossible not to have formed a lasting impression of the child gleaned from persistent, whispered stories. No one knew how many children General Z had, except that the boys were older and not very smart, and there was only one girl. She was a fat child, perpetually nine or ten during her father’s long reign, and sat with her father at state dinners. She was known to stare at guests until they were compelled to excuse themselves to use the bathroom or blow their noses or rise from the table suddenly and without explanation, clutching at their waists, claiming that their stomachs had got the better of them. Although the child could not speak, legend had it that she had powers to see into her father’s guests, make judgments about their loyalty and estimations of their lies. She conveyed her thoughts to her father through inarticulate moans and wild gestures. Under her father’s order, the child was not permitted to be photographed, but people had a vision of what she looked like (small, fat, dark) and what she was: in a word, stupid. Sajida only had her premonition of Noor, a dreamy manifestation of a child yet to be. Besides her features, slightly misshapen, Sajida knew nothing of what Noor might bring into the world. Without knowing whether she would need it, Sajida made the decision to protect her child. When she chose to make Noor her secret, she did it afraid of how Noor might be written into her father’s life: squeezed into stupidity at birth or strangely flaunted, mute and dumb, underneath priceless chandeliers at a state dinner laden with heavily embossed crystal and china. The possibility that Hussein might get a head start on images such as these before Noor even arrived made it impossible for Sajida to share her secret with him. In the slow nine months before Noor entered their world, it was much, much harder to keep the secret from dear, sweet Nanijaan, whom Sajida longed to tell. Although Nanijaan was her dadi, Sajida—along with everyone else her grandmother knew—called her Nanijaan. The day Nanijaan’s first grandchild, visiting from London, mistakenly called her that, stomping her feet with conviction when she was corrected, no one was able to let it go. In the years since the name had been given to her, Nanijaan had become the consummate grandmother, having the time, energy, and love to spare for her grandchildren that she feared she’d exhausted when she was raising her own children. Sometimes, when Nanijaan rubbed Sajida’s swollen feet in the last months of her pregnancy, Nanijaan’s small, flaking hands able to find aches she didn’t know she had, Sajida was tempted to share her premonition. “Have you ever seen such a thing?” she wanted to ask. But she kept it all from Nanijaan because she was afraid, more than anything, that Nanijaan would have a remedy. As much as Sajida had prayed for healthy children when she was pregnant with the boys, she believed it was faithless and wrong to bare secrets before their time. Life was specific that way: it was best not to offer conclusions until life had unfolded as it was meant. Left in the dark until the baby arrived, Nanijaan sensed the shift in Sajida’s mood. The way she would one day describe it to Sajida was that she had set her sights inward. “It was like you were looking inside yourself during those months, taking leave of your world. Farooq and Adel got away with murder then. They watched video after video. The driver fetched them whatever film they wanted. When I wasn’t looking, the cook fed them halwa for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Nanijaan pampered her as best she could. She prepared Sajida’s favorite foods and saved the malai the cook collected from fresh milk in the kitchen for her breakfast. Concerned with Sajida’s sudden tendency toward distraction, she tried, ever so gently, to probe. “Are you happy?” “Yes,” Sajida said, but looked away so quickly Nanijaan suspected otherwise. “Do you think it might be a girl this time?” Nanijaan asked. “It is.” “You’d rather have another boy? Three boys? My goodness, there would be nothing but raised toilet seats and pants in this house.” “As if there weren’t already.” “Give me your feet, then,” Nanijaan said firmly, setting aside her tea, sitting on the floor next to Sajida’s feet. Sajida closed her eyes as Nanijaan expertly kneaded her feet. “You can tell me anything,” Nanijaan said, trying again. “Please, Nanijaan,” Sajida suddenly said. “Stop dyeing your hair.”
“I’m so black,” Sajida had said to Nanijaan, at first merely as observation in the full-length mirror of Nanijaan’s bedroom and later as complaint. Nanijaan explained that God knew what He was doing when He made Sajida, He hadn’t dilly-dallied, He’d put all colors inside her, and she was perfect. Sajida knew she wasn’t. But it helped to be told she was. Especially when her classmates came up with a new name, kohl-ki-larki, and she sometimes fell asleep thinking it would be best if she could bury herself in a mountain of coal and become their insult. The night Sajida confided this new name to Nanijaan, Nanijaan dyed her long white hair the deepest black she could find. In the morning, Sajida was startled by the woman hunched at her bedside, framed by an unnatural black hanging around her face, before she reached for Nanijaan and pulled her into bed. There was another time, Nanijaan recalled, when she and Sajida had seemed almost one. A few years later, Sajida growing and Nanijaan shrinking with age, there was a month, or maybe two, when their height hovered around the same penciled line in Ali’s doorway. The day they discovered this, they stood together in the doorway and Sajida, with her arms around Nanijaan, declared, “You belong to me.” “All right, meri jaan,” Nanijaan broke the silence. “You’re right. I’m getting a bit old for black hair, anyway.” “There isn’t anything to tell,” Sajida said, rolling her foot in the air until Nanijaan’s fingers found the inside arch of her foot which ached so much. “I’ll help you with your daughter. She’ll be beautiful like you, rani jaani. I’ve always been good with boys. I had so many myself. And your two . . . . But girls, I didn’t know much until you came. But we haven’t done too badly, have we?” “True,” Sajida said, smiling at last. “Remember when we waxed your legs the first time? Your arms? You were too young, you know. I only let you because you insisted. Remember the quilt we stitched, the one with the horrible, holey China silk? It was a miracle, you know, how we turned it into something beautiful. The flowers we stitched . . .” “What kind of flowers were they anyway?” Sajida asked. “Gladiolas, tuberoses, lilies, daffodils, all mixed together. Do you think she’ll like to stitch? We’ll make pillow covers together, maybe she’ll be the one among the three of us that masters the cross stitch.” “She might never thread a needle,” Sajida said in her only hint to Nanijaan that all might not be well with the child growing inside her. “My mother was a seamstress,” Sajida said quietly, after a moment. “I must have told you. She stitched clothes in our village and several others. Her sewing machine . . . it was so heavy. Black with gold letters. The handle spun round and round. I learned to thread a needle on her machine. Ma could do it while the needle was moving up and down.” “Really?” Nanijaan said, taking note of this last fact because Sajida was not prone to exaggeration. Nanijaan squeezed each of Sajida’s toes between her fingers before pulling on them one by one ever so gently. In the stillness, broken only by the slight popping sounds of her toes, Sajida revisited her childhood, a place to which she found herself returning less and less since having her own children. The boys demanded immediacy: her presence was required in the present, from morning to night, leaving her almost without reason to look back on who she had once been. Concentrating, Sajida thought she could make out the shape of the family hut she’d once lived in, the thatch of straw above the door that threatened to fall, the brown puddles on the floor during the monsoons, the oddly shaped piece of furniture (what had it been?) on which her mother placed her sewing machine that last night. Nanijaan lifted Sajida’s other foot from the floor, the one she’d already massaged snug in her lap. She rubbed Sajida’s calves with both hands, trying to increase circulation to her cold feet. “I hear her sometimes. My mother.” Nanijaan, at seventy, had lived long enough to know that voices reach beyond the grave, and sometimes they pry their way into your head. But the kind she heard, her husband’s reprimands, the snickering before he beat her, were ones she could do without. So she did. “Ma was strong. She’d carry the machine for ages. Kilometers. She didn’t let me touch it.” After a silence, she continued. “In one swoop. The water,” she said, remembering after a long while the night of a terrifying storm. “It was as high as the hills.” She waved at the Margallas beyond. “Higher, maybe. The water, it was alive. Can you imagine?” Nanijaan, who knew she had not sought answers as best as she might have from the girl who had, by chance, become family, was honest. “No, rani jaani, I can’t. I haven’t even seen the ocean!” Nanijaan recalled that Ali had once, long ago, described Sajida as an orphan and assigned the cause. Cyclone, he’d said, as if her presence could be summed up in a simple word. Nanijaan considered pressing Sajida for something more but was interrupted. “Lucky you,” Sajida replied with a sigh, sinking deeper into the sofa, reveling in its solid certainty, the land on which it rested. Still sitting on the floor, Nanijaan kissed Sajida’s toes, warm by then. She cradled Sajida’s foot in her small, strong hands wrinkled from accumulating age and the steady, hard work of a lifetime.
|
|||
 |
© Copyright Sorayya Khan. Contact Information : |
 |
