Bitter Orange Tree, page 10
But he died a second time. The relative who had gone with him to Bombay so that Salman could seek treatment for respiratory problems came back to tell the widow that he had buried Salman with his own hands in the Muslims’ cemetery there. The Indian physicians had been unsuccessful in treating him. His heart, which had held nothing but love for Athurayyaa, had erupted. In the final moments of his life, he had her image before him, exactly as he had first seen her when he came back from Zanzibar: a young woman with fright in her eyes, a look that made him dizzy with desire to answer her needs, and hands that had never been scratched or scarred. A very young woman who had buried a son and two husbands before she learned how to braid her own hair.
This time, the certainty of his death was a lance that settled directly in her heart, burying itself deeper and deeper until her heart erupted just as his had. This time, Athurayyaa felt the same sense of shyness and innocent shame that had paralyzed her on the day she married him; the shyness that propelled her to believe that she did not deserve this gift, that it was no longer suitable for her to joyously celebrate a wedding, to want to make herself pretty, to marry, once she had put two husbands in the ground. When Salman died for the second time, she felt this same onrush of guilty innocence, and that is what convinced her that he was truly dead. This time, her sense of embarrassment welled up because she was still alive—she was breathing air and tasting food and walking among the living. It was then that she felt it was no longer right, no longer suitable, for her to live, to go on, to pick up the petty little matters of life on this earth. And so the sharp arrow edge of certainty that Salman was dead wound deep into her heart, further and further, slowly but determinedly. Deeper and deeper, until her heart erupted and died. In less than a year, she followed him.
After Athurayyaa died, she was wrapped in the length of fine cloth that her daughter, Hasina, had sent home while still a bride: a gift from Burundi, along with her first letter to her mother. The color had faded even though Athurayyaa had never touched that fabric. She had always waited for the moment when her child would return to her embrace; only then would she drape that beautiful length of fabric over her body. As it happened, though, the moment never came, and the one instruction she ever gave about this cloth was that it was the only shroud she would wear after her death.
Perfection
We were in the meadow just next to the university buildings. Flocks of birds were gathering, about to make their long winter migration. We hugged our heavy coats around us and gripped our paper cups, full of hot coffee. “I don’t see what the problem is!” Christine exclaimed to Kuhl. “You love Imran, so marry him for real. Your parents love you, they’ll understand.” As she spoke, Christine was all but hopping from foot to foot. It was impossible to imagine her speech or her wiry figure unaccompanied by this constant, energetic movement. As impossible as imagining Kuhl without this look in her eyes—lost in love—and her dreamy smile.
Kuhl gripped Christine’s arm. “Christine. . . they won’t understand.”
Christine shook her head vigorously, riffling her blond hair, now cut short. “Maybe if you come clean with your mother first.”
Kuhl laughed drily. “My mother? When I decided, along with Suroor, to start wearing hijab, she refused to be seen with us. We couldn’t go to any theaters or restaurants with her, because her friends might see us.”
“You have to be perfect in your mother’s eyes.” My words were barely audible.
“Uuh. The contemporary mother!” said Kuhl. “Her child is the one who ends up with all the responsibility for keeping her happy, and not frustrating her hopes and plans. Because everything was all planned out for that child from the moment of birth or before.”
“And swerving off the path of the maternal plan is unforgiveable?” asked Christine.
“Yes.” Kuhl’s voice was firm. “Because what kept our grandmothers busy, all the time, totally, was just keeping their children alive, keeping them safe as best they could, given the conditions they lived in, the poor medical care and all. What keeps today’s mother busy is inserting her child into the agenda.”
So that’s why grandmothers didn’t have such a sense of guilt, I mused out loud. And why they were more accepting of children who were always ill or had some imperfection, as they saw it, or didn’t seem very intelligent.
Kuhl laughed again, her laugh thin and bitter. “But our mothers—ours—search for perfection in us, because we came into their world according to a carefully drawn plan where there were no uncertainties lurking. And we will be even harsher than they are in these matters.”
“Well, personally,” said Christine, “my dreams are limited to having one kid, no more than that.”
We answered in one voice. “Planning the kid already.”
“But really.” Christine was musing. “Do you really think I wouldn’t let my own child do something that went against my thinking?”
“Of course you wouldn’t!” said Kuhl. “Just like my mother, who won’t let me do anything that frustrates her dreams, which means marrying me into a family higher up on the social scale than my family is, or at least into one that’s as elite as ours.”
We occupied ourselves with staring at the birds, in silence. Had Sumayya frustrated my mother’s dreams when she stopped talking to anyone—to anyone at all—after her husband died by drowning?
The blessing of happiness, the peace of good conscience, were forever destroyed for Sumayya the Dynamo. The blessing of contentment and acceptance had been forever destroyed for my mother by the nervous attacks that followed each of her miscarriages. After Sumayya was widowed and went silent, my mother went back to wandering through the rooms of the house at night, unable to sleep, exactly as she had done after Sufyan’s birth.
She could not bear Sumayya’s silence. She could not bear that this young daughter of hers had become a widow in such tragic circumstances. And then! How was it possible, then—how dared she?—lose her voice, withdraw from the power of words? This was too much.
In that moment, observing Kuhl’s twisted smile, I thought about what it must be, to be a mother like mine. To give birth only to three children, none of whom ever came close to perfection.
The Theater
After graduating from King’s College London, Kuhl’s mother tried to get work in theater production. She actually secured two or three meetings with Hanif Kureishi, for the purpose of presenting her ideas. She believed he would help her, because, she said, “All of those in London with Pakistani roots must help each other out, of course they must.” That’s what she had heard her father say repeatedly. But Kuhl’s mother stumbled, with her expectations of help as well as her understanding of theater itself. She tried to make up for this by frequently attending plays and cocktail parties hosted by former classmates for whom the stage curtains had graciously parted more than they had for her. She had her special soiree attire, black and bare-backed, with her black hair left loose and flowing. She took great care to never appear fatigued even after hours in high heels, resembling—unconsciously—one character or another in a Hanif Kureishi play.
At one such party she met a very gallant and good-looking man, who was in London to wed some serious money to works of art. Unlike her, he was not a Londoner. He lived in Karachi, where he ran Pakistan’s leading bank. This attractive young woman had already let go of her theatrical ambitions by then, and she was ready to accept his offer of marriage, on condition that he buy her a flat in London where she could spend the summers. Her other condition was that he would not force her to have children. The banker complied, and two weddings were held: one in London in a white gown, and one in Karachi in red Punjabi.
After three happy and carefree years, however, the still-young bride realized that the only way she would ever strengthen her position in her husband’s family would be through the sanctified status of mother. And so she planned it all out, following the prescriptions that were supposed to guarantee that she would have a male child and heir. But when the child came, it was a girl. And three years later, when she tried again, another girl. If she didn’t stop now, she thought, this stream would become a torrent and the undercurrent would submerge her. It could destroy her figure and demolish her freedom, and it might even put an end to her husband’s affectionate coddling. Suroor and Kuhl were enough, she decided. She would make do with them.
The older Kuhl got, the more her mother’s disappointment with the fruits of her own motherhood grew. Who would ever believe that this daughter, with her brittle, frail hair and irregular features and rather too full body, was her daughter? Her daughter! She for whom marriage and childbearing had only enhanced her bewitching magic, her elegance, her shine! Kuhl’s mother dismissed her daughter’s intelligence and success, and preferred Kuhl’s younger sister, Suroor—so pretty, so subdued, so perfect! Their mother made her preference obvious in so many ways.
The envy and anger that could have erupted so easily between the sisters did not appear. Kuhl withdrew into her own world, creating a place for herself. Suroor showed her respect and affection, but mixed with strong sentiments of guilt, as though she had to atone for being regarded as prettier and more delicate and perhaps more refined. And for having a bigger piece of her mother’s heart, which could not expand to embrace someone so unlike herself.
My mother? She never preferred one of us over another. But maybe she never liked any of us very much. My grandmother Bint Aamir was the one who cared. She was the one who handled everything we needed, and she was sternly equal in her attentions. Or maybe, perhaps, did she love Sufyan best? I don’t remember. Anyway, the difference in our ages, the six years between us, erased any threat of jealousy. Instead, my eyes were glued to the wall, where Sumayya eternally hung suspended in time.
The Snowman, and the Man of Ice
Suroor stepped outside our triangle because I could no longer go along with her discomfort. I knew that her feelings were based on perfectly understandable moral principles, an anger that stemmed from the errors of other people, the irritation felt by those who are perfect with those who lack their perfection, or rather, against those who persist in their imperfect ways, and continue making their mistakes. Specifically, the errors of her sister, Kuhl. Sins and errors of passion: that was not something for which one could be absolved.
Before Suroor stepped out of this trio we had made, she told me that Imran was like dried grass, a brittle, fragile, but stubborn stalk clinging to a marble column, and that no matter how stubborn the stalk, fragility would in the end prevail, breaking down that obstinate loyalty. The stalk would not be able to hold on; against that marble column it would break or crumple, the wind carrying it off like any ordinary, ephemeral twig. And with that, Suroor pushed aside one rib of the triangle with her thin, elegant fingers—fingers that would never be set on fire by the touch of a lover—and walked out. She did not even turn back for a single look. And then Imran, so very thin and yet as different as could be from a flimsy length of straw, soon replaced the side of the triangle that had been pulled away. Kuhl had hinted once about what she saw as the rather limited attention he paid to other people, but I came to see things very differently.
In Lahore, on the only school trip he ever took out of his remote village, he saw the way the skyline seemed to blend into the towers on either side of the old castle’s gate, and it left a permanent mark in his mind. He tried to draw his classmates’ attention to this singular and powerful impression, but he soon realized that they could only react to tangible objects, while his sensibility stretched further. For the first time, he sensed that at the very base and core of this world was a tiny aperture through which time itself crept. His sarcastic classmates made fun of him when he tried seriously to explain this notion of time’s prodigious, yet tiny, puncture in the universe. From that moment on, he made every effort to conceal what he really thought and felt, and he worked to develop means of self-defense against the ability of human beings to hurt other human beings.
I put my hand out to Imran, and I saw my thumb disfigured and black. I thought I stepped toward him but I found myself almost leaping, trying to span a much vaster distance. I realized uncomfortably that I was fleeing the sound of my grandmother calling out, her voice coming thinly from the isolation of her room. I found that my head was spinning on the ice. My head collided with Imran’s chest. But his chest was carved from stone and it shattered my head into slivers that landed on the street. The children were picking up these ice shards, and trying to make a snowman. I saw my eyes in his icy eyes. I saw my shattered nose in the snowman’s carrot nose.
I was spending whole evenings here just staring out at the ice and snow. I would phone home, to speak to my mother and father and Sufyan, and I always sent my affectionate greetings to Sumayya. One time, my mother handed the phone to her, but Sumayya would not say a word, which in turn stopped me from saying anything. It was a conversation I didn’t know how to start. It was up to her to say something. Anything at all, some nonsense like: “Mrs. Hiba is a fat, burned loaf of bread!” Or something from the past like: “Stab Fattoum with a pencil if she tries to attack you.” Or, “Don’t scream the way you did at my grandmother’s funeral.” Or, “Watch out that the boys don’t destroy the brown lizards’ graves, otherwise their tails will turn into whips and they’ll come after us.” Or even, “If the spiny-tailed lizard pounces, it will cling to us and it won’t let go until seven cows in the heavens and seven cows on earth are lowing.” Or, “Get Gran to understand that Samira Sa‘id isn’t Samira Tawfiq.” Or, “You take the bread to Gran. I have other things to do.” But she didn’t say any such thing. She didn’t say a word. So I was silent. My mother took the receiver and ended the call.
It was Sumayya who taught me to slink into the kitchen at noon to mix powdered milk with sugar and then to creep away with a fistful of the delightful mix. It was Sumayya who warned me against ever admitting that I hadn’t memorized the poems we were supposed to learn for our class in oral recitation. It was Sumayya who taught me to always take a seat at the very end of the very last row, so that I could memorize the lesson by listening to all the other girls who had to recite before I did. Sumayya tutored me on how to say ayy luf yuu to the blond son of the English teacher. At home, Sumayya got me to put on a performance, insisting that I really did need an increase in my allowance in order to buy colored pencils for drawing class—so that she could take the money and buy Mustafa Qamar’s latest cassette tapes. Together, we glued the chicken feathers onto Sufyan’s back and pretended we were going to throw him from the top of the wall so that we could see him fly, all because we wanted our mother to see us and be so frightened that she would actually dash across the courtyard without putting her shoes on first. Sumayya shouted, “Look at elegant Lady Merchant’s Daughter running barefoot in the dirt!” We tossed Sufyan into my father’s arms, and then my father chased us with a whip.
We had a lot of confidence in life (now I would add under my breath, “more than we should have had”). Confidence in our youth, our pleasures, the paths we were taking, our house and home. Confidence that the word broken did not exist. We walked through the streets hand in hand as if our interlaced fingers could be undone by nothing short of death. And death was a mere shadow, a remote thing somewhere out there. There was no cause to dent our happiness by thinking about it. The house was ours; it never crossed our minds that there could be any possibility of losing it. Sofas and beds and pillows and windows and doorknobs and the Sony cassette player and school bags—it all belonged to us. We didn’t feel a moment’s uncertainty about anything. To press our cheeks down against the old carpet in the sitting room in an attempt to imagine the kings of the jinn perched on the chandeliers above: that was what happiness meant.
And we had the trees my grandmother had planted in the garden, we had shoots growing in pots, clothes hanging on hangers, opened letters sitting in drawers, spoons and forks and knives and plates on the kitchen shelves. We had my mother’s fragility, and my grandmother’s fierce will; my father bringing us gifts from his travels, and Sufyan’s amusing little bouts of troublemaking. All of it was ours, and we didn’t doubt that for a moment. We didn’t ask, not even once, whether we were right or wrong to think as we did. What we had was certainty and contentment and pleasure in life. As far as we knew, no dictionaries yet included the word broken, let alone multiple definitions for it.
We did not cross out the days on the calendar hanging on the wall. We did not turn the pages, we did not keep old newspapers, or add new sections to our picture albums, or hang old photographs on the walls. We did not save up our smiles or our dance steps for a later time when we might need them. We did not count the glasses of tea or the cups of coffee we drank.
Talisman
A fever attacked Imran. Fright and Kuhl both held me tightly.
After some hesitation and a lot of thinking about arguments for and against, we decided to visit him in his tiny flat. It wasn’t an easy decision, since he shared it with five other Pakistani male students. “We’ll say we are his relatives,” said Kuhl. But no one asked us.
There was no lift in the building. The ground floor was occupied by an ancient pub. We walked up the four flights in silence, Kuhl leading the way. We stopped in front of the door to the flat, unsure of ourselves. Kuhl adjusted her hijab. “We’ll say we are his relatives,” she said again.
We knocked. A tall young man wearing iPod earbuds opened the door. Kuhl greeted him in Urdu, but he couldn’t hear her. He stepped aside to let us in, leaving the door open. Kuhl and I stood there in the middle of the sitting room. There were articles of clothing everywhere, and empty pizza boxes piled up on the table along with some open cans of soda. The young man waved at the room to the right. We went in.
