The Writing on My Forehead (21 page)

“That’s why you kept away for so long.” Mummy’s hand was on my forehead. Smoothing, caressing.

“You remember when you used to write on my forehead?”

Mummy nodded.

“What was it you used to write?”

“An
ayat
from the Quran.
Ayatul Kursi
. A prayer for protection. Ameena does the same thing for Sakina.”

“Does she?” I could feel Mummy’s fingers begin to trace the script, right to left. “I’m glad.”

THAT HAD BEEN
one of Mummy’s good days.

There were bad ones, too. Days when her pain was so bad that nothing seemed to help. On those days, I did as she requested—what she had asked me to do on the afternoon of my return. I told her stories—stories of what I’d seen and written about over the course of my exile. War, hunger, poverty, death, destruction. Mummy hung on every word, meditating on the suffering of others in a vain attempt to distract herself from her own. Hours would pass before she could finally manage to close her eyes and sleep.

One day, as the tension on her forehead eased and I saw that finally she would be able to rest, Mummy’s eyes turned to Ameena sitting in the chair by the window, and she asked, “Where’s Sakina?”

“She’s at home.”

“You’ve been here all day, Ameena. Go home. Take care of Sakina. Don’t neglect her because of me. Saira is here to take care of me.”

“She’s all right. Shuja is with her.”

Mummy smiled. She closed her eyes and said, “Shuja. He dotes on that child. I think he loves her even more than he loves you, Ameena. And that hardly seems possible.” I tried not to see the wringing of my sister’s hands.

We waited, Ameena and I, for a few minutes before quietly leaving the room, leaving Sakina’s old baby monitor on so we could hear if Mummy called out. Ameena followed me into the kitchen and watched me put the water on for the tea that I had resigned myself to drinking. The silence was dangerously awkward, carefully cultivated by me and reluctantly respected by Ameena.

With relief, I saw her reach for her bag and scarf. Watched her put it on, tucking her hair under it carefully. She was getting ready to go home. Back to her life.

I took a deep breath and said what I had been planning to say: “You have nothing to feel guilty about, Ameena. That’s why you wear
hijab,
isn’t it? Why you’ve become so religious?”

Ameena smiled gently and said, “You’ve been talking to Mummy.”

“She’s wrong?”

Ameena cocked her head to one side. “Maybe not.”

“Please don’t feel guilty, Ameena. It’s such a useless emotion.”

“How could I not? I drove you away from us.”

“You didn’t do that.”

“Yes I did, Saira. If I—”

“There’s no if, Ameena. Only what was. What is. You have nothing to feel guilty about.”

Ameena took a step closer to me. She put her hand on my arm. “What I feel guilty about is that I have no regrets. I’m not sorry, Saira. If it all happened again, I would do the same thing.” She put her face in her hands. “What kind of sister am I—that I would do it again? Put you through it all over again? Even though I know you regret it.”

“No. I have no regrets.”

I met her eyes, saw the struggle in them, the doubt, the fear.

The last took me by surprise. “You’re not—afraid of me, Ameena?”

The quick intake of breath was my answer.

I shook my head, put my mug down, and took her shoulders to give her a shake. “You have no reason to be afraid. I promise. I have no regrets.”

Out came the breath and the tension in her shoulders eased as she nodded, wiping at the corners of her eyes.

I put my hand on Ameena’s cheek, tucked a lock of stray hair back under her scarf. Without thinking, I asked, “Will Sakina have to wear one of these when she gets older?”

Ameena took a step backward and paused for long enough to make me realize what I had done.

“I’m sorry, Ameena. It’s none of my business. How you choose to raise your daughter.”

“Whether Sakina chooses to cover or not will be up to her.”

I held my hand up. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.” I picked up Ameena’s car keys from the hook where they hung in our mother’s kitchen. “Here. Mummy’s right. Go home. Be with Sakina. Give my love to Shuja.”

“Saira—”

“I’m sorry, Ameena. It was a difficult day. With Mummy. And, I suppose, it’s only going to get worse.”

Ameena opened her mouth again, saw the look in my eye, and then reached forward to give my arm a rub. “Get some sleep.”

“I will.”

S
OME LONG MONTHS
after my return home, months when Mummy struggled without complaint through the last race between morphine and pain that is the final stage of cancer, she died.

In the first days and weeks after, every morning was the same. I woke to the sound of my father’s sobs, loud and inconsolable. Barely breathing, I waited for the storm to pass, postponing movement and motion until after it subsided, trying to avoid violation of the carefully constructed privacy of his grief. An hour later, at breakfast, there was never any sign of it on his face or in his demeanor. He resumed the façade of his life the very day after the funeral—going to work and coming home, watching television, and reading the paper. Our interaction fell under this category, limited to formal greetings and good-nights, no references to my mother or the grief that we should have been able to share. The only contradiction to his outward composure was the fear I saw in his eyes whenever I talked of leaving. Then, the assumed calm of his routine would give way to an anxiety he tried to hide. And I knew—instinctively, not from anything he said—that my departure was something he dreaded.

More than a month had passed when Mohsin called to ask when I was going to rejoin him—rubbing salt in the wound of my awkward captivity with news of an exciting story he thought we should tackle.

I was working on my laptop, at the dining table, when Daddy came home. He looked for me when he did, calling my name the moment he walked in the door.

“I’m here, Daddy! In the dining room.”

He came and stood in the doorway, which opened from the kitchen. “Oh. Are you working?”

I shrugged. “Sort of.”

He entered the room and sat down at the table across from me. “Writing?”

“Not really. Sketching out some questions to ask for something Mohsin’s working on. He wants me to join him soon.”

“You’re not leaving already?” There was that note again, of panic, which he couldn’t quite seem to contain.

“Not yet. But I’ll have to. Eventually.”

Looking out the window, he said, as if in reference to the weather, “I—I can’t bear the thought, Saira. Of being alone.”

I came around the table and took a seat beside him. “You won’t be. Ameena’s here. So close. And I promise I’ll come and visit. Not like before.”

He was shaking his head. “That’s not the same. I’ve never lived alone. I don’t know how to do it.” He was tracing the grains of wood on the table where we sat. “I don’t know how he did it. My father. I’ve been thinking of him a lot lately. He had no one at the end.”

“He had his work.”

Daddy shook his head. “I have work. That’s all I have. It’s not enough. It couldn’t have been enough for him.” My father’s eyes met mine. “I promised him I’d go back. You know that. You wrote about it in your story—‘Bearing Witness.’ But I didn’t keep my promise. He died alone.” The breath Daddy exhaled was ragged.

“But
you’re
not alone, Daddy. You have me and Ameena. Sakina and Shuja.”

“I have been a cold and distant father.”

“No!”

“Don’t deny it. It’s true. I know it. Your mother—she always complained. That I wasn’t involved enough. And now—you and Ameena will go on as before. I will see her often, with her family. You, less often, when you visit me now and then. But you are both as distant from me as I was from him. I feel bad, now. About coming to America. Staying here, when I said I would go back. But it was easier to stay. I didn’t think about him and what he might have needed.”

“Daddy—”

He held up his hand to stop me from speaking. “It’s all right. I’m not complaining. I know you have to go.” He stood and shuffled out of the room.

I followed him into the living room and surprised myself with my next words—an idea I had toyed with and discarded as unfeasible. “Daddy—why don’t you come with me?”

“What? Where?”

“To India. We’ll meet up with Mohsin. Then, we’re going to Pakistan.” I didn’t tell him about Afghanistan after that.

He raised his eyebrows. “Go with you? To India?” He frowned down at the remote control in his hand. And then put it aside, very deliberately, without flicking on the television as he had planned to do. He turned his face up to look at me as he said, sounding surprised himself, “Yes. I think—I’d like that.”

WE WENT TO
India first, to Bombay—which is what Daddy and Mummy had continued to call the city of Mumbai, even after its name was officially changed—where Mohsin was waiting. At first, Daddy was our guide, showing us the house where he was raised, the schools he and Mohsin’s father attended. Later, he tagged along with us as we worked, interviewing patients and doctors at women’s clinics all over the city for a story on selective female abortions.

At one of these clinics, Mohsin and I introduced him to Dr. Asma Mohammed.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Qader. At long last.”

My father looked from Dr. Mohammed’s face to mine, not understanding.

I let her explain: “I met your daughter—and your nephew—three years back. They found me here, in this clinic which your father founded.”

“My father?”

“He was our neighbor.”

Daddy frowned.

“In the flat that he lived in at the end. I was just starting college when he shifted to our building. He was a great man. A mentor to me. The reason I became a doctor. He spoke of you often.”

“Did he?”

“Indeed.” She waited for some response from my father. When none came, she said, “Would you like a tour?”

My father nodded. And we followed. I watched him assess the facility, taking stock, perhaps, of what his professional life might have been like if he had fulfilled his father’s wishes. He paid close attention to Dr. Mohammed, asking questions about the kinds of services offered at the women’s clinic.

At dinner that night, in the restaurant of our hotel, he was unusually quiet. Daddy didn’t come out with us the next day, claiming to be tired. When Mohsin and I trudged back to the hotel in the evening, Daddy was excited. He’d taken a cab back to the clinic, had spent the day there with Dr. Mohammed—Asma, he called her.

“She’s incredible—that woman. She told me how you two helped her create their fund-raising brochure. It’s beautiful—the pictures, the personal stories. Tell me—what do you know of her? Is she married? Does she have children?”

Mohsin’s eyes met and held mine for a moment, their widened state conveying a curiosity that I caught and registered before answering my father. “She’s a widow. Her husband died years ago. No kids as far as I know.”

My father spent the next few days at the clinic with Dr. Asma Mohammed.

One morning, after watching my father burn his tongue in his hurry to finish his tea and dash off to the clinic, I turned to Mohsin and said, “Do you think—?” Mohsin was familiar enough with my inquiring mind to know where I had stopped myself from going. He answered me with a shrug, and I felt my own shoulders lift in answer to his.

WE WENT TO
Karachi—where I had been several times since the husband-hunt Mummy had dragged me on when I was still in college. Karachi, my cousins always tried to convince me, had changed. All the way from the airport to Lubna Khala’s house, they would point out the proof of progress: McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, Dunkin’ Donuts, shopping malls, boutiques, bridges, and flyovers. To my eyes, they were hollow symbols set up within the familiar and still shocking sight of open garbage pits and dirty rag-clothed and limb-severed beggars—bitter signs of stagnation and despair that my cousins, and everyone else, seemed not even to notice.

Big Nanima was what kept me coming back, the reason I had not avoided my aunts and cousins in Pakistan, like I had my family in America. She was eighty years old. Since she had broken her hip a year before, she was living with Lubna Khala, having sold her own flat and relinquished the independence she had fought to keep for so long. She used a cane to walk, now, and shuffled forward into the foyer of Lubna Khala’s house to greet us when we arrived.

She reached up to put her hand on my father’s shoulder. “
Beta
—we have not been the same since we heard. It is a cruel thing, to have to live long enough to see my children die before my eyes. Shabana was my sister’s daughter, but she was my child, too, and I remember her and miss her with every breath that I take. But this is a temporary world.
Inna lilaahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon.
” (From God we come and to God we return.) “Shabana was very fortunate. To die surrounded by those she loved and in the lifetime of her husband. She died a bride and not a widow.” Then Big Nanima turned to me. “Saira.
Beti.
You are not alone. You don’t have your mother, but you have your mother’s family to love you and care for you. Always.” She hugged me to her, put her paper-thin cheek against mine, and wiped the tears I had not noticed trailing down my face.

Mohsin was already in Peshawar, making arrangements for our next story. I had only a few days in Karachi, days I spent with Big Nanima, leaving my father to spend his time with my other relatives—Lubna Khala’s family, Mummy’s cousins and his own—to talk of the old days in Bombay.

Big Nanima never spoke of the old days, because she was still too vibrantly involved in the world around her. “The best thing about reading your stories, Saira, is that it makes me feel that at least we are not alone—there are places in the world more miserable, even, than here. What this country has come to! That an old lady is not allowed to take a walk on the street of the house she lives in.”

“Not allowed?”

“Not allowed! Lubna says it is not safe. Ha! Safe! In my own neighborhood, I took a walk on the streets every day for all of the years that I lived there. But now, here in this walled and gated fool’s paradise, I am confined—a prisoner. The only place I am allowed to go for a walk is to another walled garden, getting in the car to be chauffeur-driven from one fortress to another. Everyone is afraid—the kidnapping and the carjackings. It gets better and then worse again. We have a few months, a year even, of relative calm—when only a few cars are hijacked, when no one
we
know is kidnapped, when the only people being butchered are strangers whose names we don’t recognize when we read them in the newspapers.

“And then—all it takes is a spark—and the whole thing lights up again, exploding and exposing what has been there all the time, simmering just under the surface. This is no way to live. Children don’t play outside anymore. They are shuttled back and forth from schools and homes and clubs, all guarded by armed men in uniforms. In my neighborhood—before—
all
the children played on the streets. Together. The children who lived in walled houses, in flats, the children of servants. Now, there are some children who have never felt the air outside! Even that is filtered by those obnoxious air-conditioners that drown out the sounds of the street. All anyone can talk of is how to get out. Laborers line up for visas to the Gulf. The rich all have green cards ready, or are applying for immigrant status in Canada. Everyone lives with one foot on the ground, gathering up their money and profits with one hand, and packing it all into a suitcase with the other, the other foot set on the steps to an airplane out of here. How will anything change?”

Every day, she muttered the same complaints as we walked around the Gymkhana garden, which, like the garbage pits and the children who lived among them, seemed to stay the same, year after year. After a few rounds, we would sit down for some tea or cold drinks.

On one of those days, when she and I had sat down and ordered tea, I told her about Asma Mohammed.

“You think he will marry her,” Big Nanima said.

“I don’t know.”

“Would that bother you?”

“I don’t know. It shouldn’t. Should it?”

She didn’t answer me for a moment, stirred her tea vigorously before raising the cup to her lips a little unsteadily. “No. It should not. But it would be understandable if it did.”

“Hmm.”

“What about you, Saira? Are you going to be a gypsy for all of your life? Forgive me, but I have a right to ask. Your mother is dead. Your
khala
s are worried.”

“I know.” They had tried to set me up with an eligible bachelor within hours of my arrival.

“You were hurt? By a man?”

I laughed. “No. That’s not it, Big Nanima.”

“Then? Your work—it
is
important, Saira. But you shouldn’t let it consume you.”

“You called me a gypsy. That’s what I am. I don’t have time to commit myself to anyone.”

“And that is not something you will regret? Later?”

Her question was in the wrong tense. The answer I repressed was a bittersweet mixture of regret and remorse already realized, processed and assimilated into who I was. Later was not something I worried much about. I shrugged—a defiant gesture of ambivalence that was forced and familiar.

“How is Ameena?”

“She’s fine. She’s in
hijab
.”

“Is she? Hmm.” Big Nanima shook her head. “It’s become quite a trend, hasn’t it? An international revival, the reclamation of what
my
generation cheerfully cast off. How strange it is—to live long enough to see the wheel go ’round again. She must be busy, eh? Taking care of her little one? She must be four years old?”

“She just turned six.”

“Six already? She’s started school.”

I nodded.

“What is her name?”

“Sakina.”

“I wish you had a picture of her to show me. You must tell Ameena to send me one, eh?” We were interrupted by an old student of Big Nanima’s. I watched them speak for a moment and then excused myself to use the restroom. When I came back, the student was gone, but Big Nanima was still not alone. I paused, coming down the pavilion steps onto the lawn, when I recognized the man seated next to her. Majid Khan. He stood when he saw me and remained standing until I sat down.