The Sweetness of Tears (18 page)

“This is not a joke. This is a question of your daughter’s future.”

“She’s only a child.”

“Now.
Now
will become
then
before you know it, you stubborn man. And then this little terrace-to-garden friendship will start to look like balcony scenes from
Romeo and Juliet
.”

“Worrying about it will not make it come slower. And what you worry about is not a matter of
when
. It’s a matter of
if
.”

“
Oof!
Can no conversation be had between us without playing some kind of game? All right—what will your response be,
if
?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I will offer my congratulations.”

“Be serious! Their community and ours are not the same. You—surely you would object if—God forbid—something happened in the future?”

“There are a lot of things I object to. Friendship in any form is not one of them.”

My mother would purse her lips and shake her head. “How very modern of you! How very reasonable! How very lucky for you to be able to live at such lofty, reasonable altitudes. Too bad for the rest of us, who live in the real world, the practical one where reason is a luxury we can ill afford. Like the food on our table, the clothes on our backs.” This line of argument was one of my mother’s that predated my friendship with Umar.

“Yes, yes. Everything has a cost, not a day goes by without you reminding me of that. No food am I allowed to digest without hearing from you about it—the daily price of flour, potatoes, onions, rice, eggplant, and okra—this is what passes for conversation in this house,” my father would say, following the script of old.

“You think I take pleasure in this? In being the one to try and keep your feet on the ground?
Someone
has to be practical.
Someone
has to think of these things.”

“Is there an accusation there somewhere that I should respond to? Can we not be happy with what we have, without pining after what we have lost?”

“You think I am unhappy?” my mother would ask.

“Aren’t you?”

“No. No, I am not.”

“How can that be? In the face of all we have lost?” My father’s tone would shift—from accusation to wonder.

“We have a home and our daughter. We have all that we need and more. I have no complaints.”

“You are a good woman. A good wife and a good mother. Leave aside these worries of yours. The future will take care of itself.”

T
hat our family had once been wealthy was something I knew from Macee, our old servant, who had been with our family since before Partition. Macee loved to speak of the taste of old luxuries lost.

“You don’t remember the days, Deena, when my brother, Sharif Muhammad, was
our
driver instead of working for that friend of your father’s. There was a car. And a cook. A big house and lots of servants. Back in Bombay.”

“How many servants?”

“More than I can count. The family was rich.”

“Then what happened?”

“It was all left behind at Partition.”

“Why?”

“Because
he
told us to. Your father’s older brother. His
brother
. He tricked your
abu
. He told him that the times were too uncertain. That it was better for half the family to come to Pakistan. And half to remain in India. Just for a while—until things were settled. He sent your
abu
here. And kept everything for himself.”

“Everything?”

“Everything but some. A little money—enough to live on in the beginning. Barely. But all of the rest—the house and the business, buildings and property all over Bombay, all of which he should have shared with your father, by right, he kept for himself, betraying his younger brother. That is what he had planned all along. To get him out of the way.”

“How hurt Abu must have been!”

“And your mother. She had to sell all of her jewelry. To help your father start his first business here in Pakistan. The battery factory. A total failure. Until Abbas Ali Mubarak bought it and made it a success. He is the one who hired Sharif Muhammad.” Macee sighed. “Now
that
man is a lucky one. Not like your father, whose hands are allergic to money.” Abu had a knack for losing money—the anti-Midas touch—beginning a multitude of businesses that sucked him dry, only to sell them off and watch them flourish in the hands of others. From year to year, they varied—steel, guar, trucking, and textiles—a series of ventures begun with high hopes, yielding fruit only after he gave up on them.

I sat and mulled this over, thinking of what it might have been like to be rich. “Were we as rich as Abbas Uncle?” I asked.

“No one is as rich as Abbas Uncle, Deena,” said Macee darkly.

Abbas Ali Mubarak was my father’s oldest and closest friend. Every week, for as long as I remembered, Abbas Uncle would come to visit, his booming, bass voice, originating from somewhere in the region of a barrel-shaped belly, preceding his entry into the worn, paint-thirsty double wooden doors of our home.

“I would have phoned, my friend, before I came, but I don’t suppose you have resolved your differences with the telephone-
walla
s, eh?” he greeted my father.

“You would insult our old friendship, Abbas, if you ever stood on such ceremony—modern conveniences should not hinder a man’s freedom to pay and receive the pleasure of unexpected company. And no, to answer your question, the battle with the telephone-
walla
s rages on. They sent a new man, last week, whose request for a bribe was at least more suitably delicate than his predecessor’s shameless demands. He hemmed and hawed, round and round, and had the decency, at least, to look embarrassed. I give him a week before he is fully acculturated to the corrupt climate of Pakistani bureaucracy,” my father said.

“What do you think you’re proving by all this fuss, Iqbal? If you won’t shell out the money, let me give the bribe for you. Think of it as a wholly inadequate repayment for all the advice you have given me.”

“That would be a strange form of repayment, Abbas, if any is required. To undermine the principle I have chosen to stand on in these matters. I do not pay bribes. And neither should you.”

“Did you hear that, Rukaiya Bhabi?” Abbas Uncle said to my mother, who entered the room with a tray of tea and biscuits. “Did you hear what your
sadhu
of a husband would have me do? How do you live with this impractical man?” He took the cup she offered him and scooped and stirred sugar into his tea with vigor. “These little niceties—bribes and
baksheesh
—these are merely the cost of doing business, Iqbal. Merely a means of spreading the wealth.”

“Spreading the wealth? It’s a disease you spread—your dirty hand greasing all the outstretched palms it encounters.”

“I didn’t make the world so, Iqbal. I take it as I find it.”

“Is that how you console yourself? I thought ambitious men like you were in the business of reshaping the world. Try that for a change.”

“Ah, Iqbal, my friend, your sour sanctimony would be insufferable if it wasn’t accompanied by the sweet, uncanny wisdom of your business forecasts.” Abbas Uncle turned to me, always to be found eagerly skulking in the shadows, waiting watchfully for his big hand to reach into deep pockets, as they did now. “Did you know, little Deena, that your father is a prophet of profit? A brilliant man—I owe my whole fortune to him. If he hadn’t failed so miserably at his battery business—letting his high and mighty self be robbed blind by the kind of men he seeks to save from my corruption—he would never have sold it to me. And in all the years since, his advice has been golden, directing me to every project I have undertaken. See these sweets that I bring for you?” The hand withdrew from the pocket, filled with foreign chocolates, already soft and melting in a climate alien to their origin, a weekly luxury I had come to cherish. “I can afford them thanks to your father. Who should take his own advice—not the nonsense he tries to reform me with, mind you, but the shrewd, clairvoyant acumen he refuses to feed his own hunger with.”

The barbed exchanges between the two men were typical—the kind that only a friendship born in childhood could withstand.

“You confuse hunger with greed, Abbas. The one, by the grace of God, I have never suffered. The menacing growl of the other, I agree, I refuse to nourish,” said Abu, with a sincere sigh of contentment.

“Ah, well. I owe you. Of that, there’s no doubt. Tell me, Deena,” Abbas Uncle would turn to me again, “how many marriage proposals have you had to refuse this week?” Here, inevitably, was the teasing moment when I paid the price for the Cadbury-flavored sweetness that would, by now, have made its way into my mouth, my tongue and teeth chocolate-coated, empty wrappers crumpled in the fists of my greedy, little-girl hands, heedless of the lesson that my father had just delivered to his friend.

“Have you finished those chocolates already, Deena?” my father would laughingly ask. “If you
will
join the ranks of those corrupted by your uncle, at least set your price a little higher than a few moments’ pleasure.”

“Ah—leave her alone, Iqbal. She’s a sweet girl, your Deena. Have some more,
Beti
. More sweets for the sweet.” His hand would make its way temptingly back into the pocket. “How fast the girl is growing, Iqbal, and how lovely. Don’t count on her to support you in your old age, my friend. And don’t forget—when those proposals really do start to pour in—she’s already spoken for. Such a sweet bride she will make for my son, Akram,” he would joke, only when I was young, before such teasing would have been unseemly, making the second serving of chocolate less easy to swallow than the first. Though I was too young for him to be serious, I frowned all the same.

We rarely visited Abbas Uncle where he lived. Although his house was a gathering place for women during the ten days of Muharram, the
majlis
es were held in the morning, during school hours, so I hardly ever attended. His daughter, Asma, was my classmate in school, but not my friend. She was a difficult girl to like. Occasionally, Abbas Uncle would bring her with him on his visits to my father.

I would invite her to come and play with me on the terrace, and she would reply in a sour, sullen voice, “I’m not allowed to play in the sun. My mother says I am too dark already.” Any pity this might have given rise to would be quickly relieved by her next words. “I’m surprised
you’re
allowed. You’re even darker than I am, Deena.”

At school, she was always accompanied by a servant. Unlike Macee, who left me at the gate every morning, Asma’s chaperone, her
ayah,
would accompany her beyond the gate and onto the school grounds, under strict instructions to follow the girl around, a prettily painted parasol in hand, which she would carry over Asma’s head at recess, to protect her from the sun, as if she were some kind of royalty. This did not endear the girl to her classmates.

Her brother, Akram, was not the despised figure that she was. Like all the girls at school, I knew him by sight. And by reputation. When we were younger, he used to come to our school straight from his to pick up his sister.

“There he is,” the girls would say as Akram rolled up in a big-finned American car, driven by Sharif Muhammad Chacha, Macee’s brother, “the crown prince coming to pick up his sister, the princess.”

Akram had a reputation for being wild. He was a subject of fascination to the girls who were senior to me, the ones who were closer to his age and whose brothers were his classmates. These older girls affectionately called him Akram the
chakram
—a word that comes from
chakr,
which means “dizzy”—staring and giggling at him from afar, the way that girls always do at boys who seem bad. And he
was
bad. His school pranks were famous, going far beyond the typical frog-in-the-teacher’s-desk and tack-on-the-teacher’s-chair level, achieving heights that made us laugh even from our girls’-school distance.

Once, we heard, he’d dressed up in a tattered old
burkha,
pretending to be a mad beggar woman. In this guise, he’d gained entry to the grounds of his school, saying he’d come to ask the headmaster for alms, frightening the poor man and chasing him around the school buildings, shrieking all the while, pretending to have fits—causing all the boys in the school to gather and gape and giggle—until the guards finally caught and threw “her” off the grounds. On the other side of the gate, now safe, still panting, the headmaster caught sight of the schoolboy shoes sticking out of the bottom of the
burkha
. That was the second time that Akram was expelled from one of Karachi’s finest boys’ schools. Rumor had it, confirmed by Abbas Uncle on his visits to my father, that Akram had been kicked out of three of them by the time he was thirteen.

One day, when Asma and I were still young, eight or nine at the most, Abbas Uncle announced that he was sending Akram abroad, to a boarding school in England.

“Boarding school?” I was horrified. Boarding school was the ultimate childhood threat in our world, a last resort brandished when the promise of a spanking was not enough to frighten badly behaving children—like the bogeyman. It was a form of banishment that we knew, from books and stories, was a matter of course in the culture of those who had ruled over us before Independence, when children of the Raj were sent back to cold, gray England, far from their mothers and
ayah
s, in order to become properly En-glish, but which was incomprehensible in the child-centered world that was ours.

And so, Akram the
chakram
was banished, causing the girls in school to have to find other boys to giggle and drool over.

B
y the time I was twelve, my mother had decided that I should learn how to cook. Every day, after school, she would have me watch her and help her and Macee in the kitchen. Trying to stone two birds at once, I think. Keeping me busy was one way to keep me away from the neighbor’s son.