Tanya Tania (23 page)

The police, she whispered and her face crumpling like a child's, she started crying into her hands.

Something about the way she cried, lustily, with such abandon, reminded me of you, Tania. I thought, when Tania cries, she cries like that. It made me want to comfort Chhoti Bibi.

It took some time to untangle the mess but I finally got to the bottom of her fear of the police. It turns out that the family of her husband-for-a-day had threatened police action when she bit the boy and left him. Chhoti Bibi's family had rubbed this in when she had refused to go back, building up a picture of a police force whose priorities, among dealing with riots and murders and highway robberies is to find Chhoti Bibi and put her in jail.

But why would they want you? I asked her.

She looked through the fingers of her hands in surprise. Why would they not?

She also has a tangled understanding of universities, of the government—of authority, in general, I suppose. It took a lot of patient explanations to convince her that the police is not the paramount authority in the country and that they have nothing to do with universities and schools or anything else really. I'm not sure she fully understood or believes me but at least, by virtue of swearing on the Koran that the police does not know her exam scores, I was able to assure her that the police was not coming to get her because she had failed her exams.

She wiped her eyes and began to make dinner. She got me a stool to sit on while she began to make the dough for rotis.

I don't ever want to live with a man, she said firmly. My father used to beat my mother before he died and then after he died, his brother and his mother beat my mother. My mother was married into this family when she was fourteen years old and has lived with them ever since. She doesn't even know where her own family is anymore.

When I was getting married, my mother went to the mosque and prayed for me to have a husband like her father. My grandfather was a very good man. He never beat my grandmother and he worked very hard and he provided for every single of their nine children. He used to go to the fair every spring and bring back new clothes and toys and fresh, hot jalebis for everyone and he used to love all his children equally, even the girls. He built them a separate toilet with his own hands so they wouldn't have to walk to the fields in winter.

‘What if the man you had married was going to be like your grandfather?'

She spat scornfully into the dustbin and pummelled the dough furiously. ‘He was the bully of the village,' she said. ‘Everyone hated him. We had to go the long way round to get water because he would sit with his idiot friends to say horrible things to us and try to touch us as if we went the short way.'

I pictured him as Hamza, the big bully of my school. I could easily picture Hamza doing all of that.

‘Also,' said Chhoti Bibi, ‘his family is in a lot of debt. God knows what would have happened if I had stayed with him. They would have definitely taken my jewellery and sold it.'

‘Where is your jewellery now?' I asked.

‘My mother took it.'

‘So you don't have it anyway.'

She looked at me in surprise. ‘My mother can have my jewellery.'

Every time I think I understand Chhoti Bibi, she eludes my grasp.

‘Baji, do you know how to make rotis?'

I shook my head.

‘Then come and learn. You will need to make rotis one day.'

More because I didn't want to go back to my room, more because I liked sitting there with her in the cheerfully lit kitchen with dusk falling outside and a cat meowing somewhere and the blue flame of the stove twinkling, I agreed.

She taught me how to measure the size of the ball and she taught me how to flatten it gently before rolling it flat. She taught me how to dust it lightly, very lightly with flour so that they wouldn't stick. She taught me her secret trick of dipping her little finger in a bowl of oil and rubbing it lightly into the roti before setting it on the tava. She was so happy to teach me, her face glowed with sweat and focus. I realised suddenly that she does have intelligent eyes and somehow in the dimmer light of my room, sitting at my desk while she sat on the floor, dreaming out of the window every time she thought I wasn't looking, I hadn't noticed the quality of her eyes.

She told me that the boy she had been married to had been a real dunce in school. ‘Worse than me,' she said, taking a mangled piece of dough from me and rolling it again into a ball. Then she added half proudly, half shyly, ‘I was actually not half bad in school.'

‘Then why didn't you study here with me?'

‘Because I don't want your life!' It came out in a burst with flecks of saliva dotting her mouth. Standing under a fluorescent tube light, she was lit against the darkness of the night sky behind her like a picture of a Hindu goddess I had once seen, glowing in the dark.

She hung her head. ‘I want to be Bibi.'

I could only look at her, silent.

She grinned and said, ‘Happier. Bibi but happier.'

She made me put my lumpy rotis on the tava. She made me flatten them and smoothen them and flip them over on a low flame.

‘Bibi has so much money. She has bought two houses and now, do you know, she makes more in rent from those two houses than she makes here in your house?'

I didn't know.

‘Once Bibi retires, I will take over her job. And then I will go get Mohammed from the village. My mother won't mind. She is tired of children.' Chhoti Bibi deftly rescued my slowly burning roti and dropped it on the counter where she had spread a red napkin faded to pink. I remembered that napkin from when I had been in kindergarten. My mother used to wrap it around my tiffin box in which she used to always put grapes, no matter the season. I used to love sitting alone at Break, away from teachers and girls, break open the starched, ironed napkin and expose the luscious green grapes. Grapes were my favourite.

‘Besides,' said Chhoti Bibi, ‘Mohammed loves me the most in the world. He calls me Chhoti Ammi.'

I burnt my finger on the tava. Chhoti Bibi grabbed it and dunked it roughly into a screw of salt in her hand. I felt the burn numb my finger, the damp warmth of her palm enveloping it.

‘I will send Mohammed to an English-medium school,' she said seriously. ‘He will have to pass his exams. I will hire tutors.'

Suddenly I felt alone, sitting there on the stool, watching Chhoti Bibi go through the rotis I'd made, discarding, refashioning, selecting, discarding. She turned on the water in the sink and dropped the hot tawa in there, humming tunelessly and frowning as the steam enveloped her. She did not notice when I got up to leave.

I got up and went away to listen at my mother's door as usual. There was an old jazz record she was playing, something she found in one of her manic episodes of ‘packing'. She had taken to filling up a glass of whisky with lemon and honey and sipping it through the day.

How stupid I was, Tania. I really thought I was helping Chhoti Bibi. But the whole time she had just been indulging me. She knows exactly what she wants and has always known it, always been confident in it. She was born into a Chhoti Bibi shaped hole in the world and she fills it every day. Do you know what it takes for a seventeen-year-old Pakistani girl to say with such confidence, I don't ever want to marry a man?

How brave she is. How brave Navi is, uprooting his life to go live in my grandmother's house without complaining. All he wants are soccer cleats. How brave is Ali, coming into and out of the everyday world as he pleases, as he wants, never worrying about his future, never worrying about being kidnapped, never worrying about being loved. How brave are you, telling your mother that you don't want to live her dream for you. How brave is Nusrat with her intelligence and self-possession and her burning. How brave are you Tania, to keep going to school in spite of everything. How brave to continue to plot and to plan, resolute in your vision that you will one day regain your throne.

I'm not brave. I'm not brave, Tania. I'm my mother's daughter. We are not brave.

Love,

Tanya

November 22, 1992

Bombay

Dear Tanya,

Dude, you are so intense man. What's with this brave stuff? Is it because I said you weren't brave? I was kidding man. Come on. Snap out of it. And pick up the phone when I call. No one picks up at your house anymore. I swear I was kidding. I mean I know I'm brave but you are too. I mean look at you all ready to leave everything and go off to America. That's brave! I can't do that!

You like won't BELIEVE what happened. Like WON'T BELIEVE it. I can't believe it.

Yesterday, I had called Arjun to my house. I had decided that I needed to do something. I couldn't have him ruining my life like this. It's my life, my city. My school, my people. I've been here forever, I will be here forever. It's like your dad had said right? Sometimes you have to make sacrifices for what you want.

So my plan was to like offer an exchange. I would do stuff for him and then he had to tell everyone that a lot of what was being said was not true. That the stuff he said, the worst of the stuff he said, had all been made up. Which it was. The kind of shit he's said…anyway, no point in going into that now.

He came over thinking I was going to cry. I could see it in the way he walked in. Pretending to be all caring. Oh T, how are you, T baby I miss you…I wanted to puke on him.

I made him come out to the balcony to talk to me because I couldn't stand the thought of him being in my room.

But I was polite. I had to be. I told him my end of the bargain. That he could have six times with me where I would do whatever he wanted if he would tell people that there hadn't been any of the bad stuff. Anything other than what actually happened.

I don't think he had expected me to be so business-like about it. Then he began to negotiate what I would do during the six times. I almost backed out then Tanya, it made me sick to hear him even say those things. Then he said he would think about it. I told him that the offer would expire in a day and if he didn't take it, I would tell everyone he has a tiny penis. ‘Don't think,' I told him, ‘that I have no power left.'

Then I made him leave because I couldn't stand the smell of his cologne for one more moment. Anyway, then Nusrat and I went to go sit at our spot on the rocks by the sea and I forgot all about it. Well, no, I didn't forget about it but I wasn't thinking about it. Actually I was. I was thinking about the six times and the things I had agreed to. But I was pretending not to.

Today in school, during Econ, a peon came in and gave a slip to Mrs. Kriplani. She looked up and asked Arjun to go to the Principal's office. Someone had to nudge him to go because he was reading a magazine under the desk. I noticed him going but didn't like think anything of it. Maybe he was going to get negative points for something. He's always getting negative points.

Just as class was ending, Arjun came running back in, looking like a crazy person. He was crying and his hair was all messed up and there was a peon running after him. And he ran straight at me! He was shouting. ‘You crazy bitch!' he screamed. ‘You crazy fucking bitch!' There was snot coming out his nose.

I couldn't even move I was so surprised. Thankfully I was sitting at the far end of the classroom (no one sits with me anymore) and some boys got hold of him before he could get to me. The peon came in running and started complaining loudly about how he had tried to hit the Principal and got into a fight with the peons in the Principal's office and had hit one of them with a chair and the peon was bleeding and stuff.

Anyway, the peon that had come with him stood very close to Arjun as he was getting his stuff together, throwing his books and things into his bag. The whole time he was crying and he looked awful, tears and snot running everywhere, swearing, using awful language, calling me all kinds of names, acting completely crazy.

At first I got mad. But then I saw how people were looking at him—with disgust. And how people were beginning to look at me. People were finally looking at me.

I didn't say anything. I was just glad that I'd blow-dried my hair that morning.

Rumours began to circulate that he had been expelled. Nobody knows why though there's tons of speculation. I figured he got caught doing drugs.

At Lunch today, three people smiled at me. And when I walked past my old gang, Nirav asked me what I thought had happened. I just smiled at him and said I didn't want to talk about it.

So I came home and I couldn't wait for Nusrat to be done washing dishes so I could tell her. And then—and THEN—the most unbelievable thing happened.

My mom came home from work early. And if that's not weird enough, she came into my room and shut the door and said, I need to talk to you.

I thought she was going to tell me that I had to apply to college in America. I was so sure she was going to tell me that she had called Wellesley and arranged things and that I would start there in the fall. My heart was beating so fast. I felt like I was in a cage.