The Sweetness of Tears (17 page)

When he came home, he saw the look on my face and said, “He’s fine. His leg and arm are broken. But he will mend.” I burst out crying and my father took me on his lap and dried my tears, trying to make me laugh with his words. “Well, Deena, this is a new twist on the old story. The monkey falls on the crocodile in a preemptive strike, breaking his bones and frightening him away before he ever dares to look upon her heart as a meal for himself.”

His words made me cry louder as he laughed, until I had to laugh, too, after first reassuring myself that the boy really was all right. When the tears and the laughter faded, I said, “I thought he was dead.”

“That’s what the boy thought, too, when he woke up in the hospital. That you must have died in the fall. He was glad to know that his bones were not broken in vain.”

This was not the first interaction between the boy’s family and mine, although it was the first in a long time. When I was very little, the only telephone on our block belonged to these neighbors. And anyone who needed a phone would knock on their door. It was a service the lady of the house was not very happy to share, and even though everyone in the neighborhood tried not to take undue advantage, insisting on paying for the calls they made, no one entered the house without hearing Mrs. Yusuf’s grumbles and complaints—that was her name, the mother of the boy I had fallen upon—who stood guard over the phone, within inches of the caller, able to hear every word of every conversation, and making no secret of the fact that she did. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when others on the block, better-mannered and less abrasive, finally had phones installed—though we were not among those who did.

Our own relations with the Yusuf family became even less friendly, long after we began to use another neighbor’s phone, and the fact that my father went to their house to apologize was not a small matter. Several years before, you see, a young girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen years of age, had knocked on our door. She was the daughter of Mrs. Yusuf’s washerwoman, next door, and wanted to know if my mother would hire her for work around the house. This was a time of relative prosperity in the ups and downs of my father’s ongoing serial of business ventures, and my mother decided that it was time to hire a second servant, someone to help in the kitchen, to wash the clothes, which were getting harder for Macee, our old servant, to handle. Things worked out well with the girl. Until the ten days of Muharram approached. I see you are nodding. Sadiq told you about this—about Muharram? And about Sunni and Shia? I would say I am surprised. But the rest of what you have told me he shared with you has dulled my capacity to be surprised.

Well, as Muharram approached, the girl suddenly wanted to leave. My mother was taken aback, asking her if she had been unhappy working for our family. The girl said no, that everything was fine, but that she must leave on an urgent matter to go back to her village. My mother probed deeper and found that the girl had been told, by our neighbor, Mrs. Yusuf, that we were Shia.

“Is that true?” she wanted to know.

My mother told her that it was.

She hesitated for a moment. And then said, “You see, my mother’s employer, the lady next door, she says that you Shias celebrate a great sacrifice on Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram. Is that also true?”

My mother said, “We remember it, yes. The battle of Karbala, when the Prophet’s grandson Husain and his family and friends were slaughtered by the forces of the tyrant Yazid.”

Another moment of pause was followed by a great rush of words. “You see, the lady of the house next door wants me to work for her, with my mother. She has convinced my mother that it’s dangerous for me to be here. To work for you. That you Shias kill young people, Sunnis, on Ashura. That you kill them and cook them up and eat them as a sacrifice. I didn’t believe her,
Bibi,
but she went on and on and has persuaded my mother, who is very frightened. The lady said all kinds of horrible things about you. About Shias. She said that you are not true Muslims, that you are evil. And that you eat Sunni children.”

The girl wanted to be reassured. And my mother did manage to do so, eventually. Poaching for the servants of another household was not unheard-of among neighbors. Perhaps, because the mother of the girl worked for her already, Mrs. Yusuf felt she was entitled to do so in this case. But the virulent propaganda directed against us due to who we were was striking. And exceptional. From then on, my mother referred to Mrs. Yusuf, lips pursed, with a dismissive wave of her hand in the direction of the house next door, as “That
Wahabbi
woman.” You know the word? Yes. It’s a common term now, isn’t it? For Shias, it was always an epithet of intolerance—a way to label Sunnis who were particularly hostile. Most Sunnis were not. None of my school friends and none of the other neighbors.

Not that there wasn’t another side to the story. Now, I am embarrassed to recall how every year, during Muharram, the sounds of shameless sermons were broadcast in the streets, shrill and shrieking, from loudspeakers set up in Soldier Bazaar—Shia sermons that raised the blood pressure of all the Sunnis who lived within earshot. Sermons that were deliberately antagonistic—filled with thinly veiled venom directed at the first three
Khalifa
s of Islam, who the Shia saw as usurpers and the Sunni saw as rightly guided. Can you imagine? Fourteen-hundred-year-old views of history determining how neighbors interacted in the twentieth century? No. You can’t. Because history here is a dead thing. Something captured in books that schoolchildren have to endure and which they forget about the moment the books are closed. In Pakistan, every conversation, however personal, is punctuated by the raspy, decrepit gasps of the past breathing down your neck; every generation has to fight out all the old arguments that have been fought before.

All I knew was that the mean lady next door didn’t like us. That is what I was thinking, the next day, spying on the woman whose offspring I had inadvertently assaulted, as I crouched down next to the terrace wall. I watched as Mrs. Yusuf set her son up in the garden below, fussing over him, going in and out of the house to bring food and drink for him to enjoy, getting him a comic book, and games to play to divert him from the pain in his arm and leg. He wasn’t complaining. On one of her trips back into the house, the boy rested his head back on his chair to take the nap his mother had been urging him to take. Before he closed his eyes, they caught sight of me, hovering anxiously from my perch.

“You’re the girl on the wall.”

“My name is Deena.” My tone was wary. Who knew if the boy had views similar to his mother’s?

“Hello, Deena On The Wall. My name is Umar.” Umar. A Sunni name—the name of one of those much-maligned
Khalifa
s that a Shia would never bestow on a son. His tone was friendly. Which was remarkable, given that there was every reason, his arm and leg among them, for it not to be.

“I’m sorry about what happened.”

“If you were truly sorry, you wouldn’t be standing there again, making me queasy at the thought of seeing you fall.”

Contritely, I took a step backward.

“Wait! Come back. Now I can’t see you, Deena On The Wall.”

I stepped forward again so he could see me.

“That’s better. Did you get any fruit?”

“I’m sorry?”

“It would have been worth it, if you’d gotten any fruit.”

“Oh. Yes. I had a bunch of
jamun
in my hand when I fell. I didn’t notice it in all of the commotion. Not until I was home again. I had squeezed it so hard that the juice ran down my sleeve. My mother thought I was bleeding. That’s when I realized I was still holding the fruit.”

He laughed. “Did you eat it?”

“No. I couldn’t. I felt so bad.”

“And you’d mashed it all up.”

“Well, yes. That, too. Does it hurt very much?”

“Only a little.”

“I’m sorry, Umar. And thank you.”

He frowned. “For what?”

I paused awkwardly, aware of the drama of the words I then uttered, “For saving my life.”

“Is that what I did?”

“Of course! If you hadn’t been there, I would have fallen straight to the ground! I would have died for sure!”

“Who knew that I was such a hero?”

“A hero? I wouldn’t call you a hero.”

“No?”

“No. You just happened to be there. At the right place and the right time.”

“Or the wrong ones, if you take my broken limbs into account. And if that’s the way you think, then there’s no reason for you to thank me, is there? Since you give me no credit anyway.”

“I— that’s not what I meant. I just meant that— well, a hero has to do more than just stand there and break someone’s fall. A hero is someone who has to
do
something. Not just
be
there.”

“How do you know I didn’t take action? I called out, didn’t I?”

“Oh. Yes. You did do that.”

“And I stretched out my arms to catch you.”

“You did?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I did. Yes, definitely. That’s what I did.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe me?! I saved your life—according to your own words—and now you accuse me of lying?”

I had nothing to say to this. I
had
thanked him, after all.

“Besides, it was your own greed that made you fall. It seems a bit harsh that the one who fell should question the one who saved her. I could have stepped aside, you know. And there you’d be. Splat.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. I guess, then, that you could be called a hero. For not stepping aside. If
not
doing something counts.” My tone was doubtful. Then I asked, “Why didn’t you? Step aside?”

“I didn’t think of it. I didn’t have time to. But even if I’d had time to think, I wouldn’t have stepped aside, Deena On The Wall. I would have stood my ground, spread out my arms, and caught you.”

Less effusively than I had the first time, I said, “Well. Thank you. You saved my life.”

His mother came out again, making me duck, for some reason.

“Why are you laughing?” I heard her ask Umar.

I held my breath, afraid he would give me away and that she might scold me for talking to her son—me, the Shia girl who had caused him pain.

“The comic book. It’s very funny.”

At the same time the next day, I watched him again be settled in the garden. When his mother went inside, he called up to me, knowing somehow that I was there.

“Tell me a story, Deena On The Wall.”

I did, telling him the story of the monkey and the crocodile. Then I made him laugh, telling him what my father had said about the monkey falling on the crocodile to scare him away. That was how our friendship began. We were only children. Neighbors. Young enough for it to be all right, despite the fact that he was a boy and I was a girl, he a Sunni and I a Shia. Even so, there were limits we knew enough about already for us to keep our interaction secret—or try to, at least, though we had no chance of succeeding, considering that the volume of our interaction had to accommodate the distance from my terrace to his garden, and that there was no real way to hide from these vantages, despite the constant ducking I grew accustomed to. Once, I ducked late enough to catch a look on his mother’s face—cold and hostile, enough to make me want to keep ducking.

Normally, Umar’s afternoons would have been like those of the other boys in our neighborhood. As a boy, he would not have been confined to the boundaries of home. Boys could spend their time in the street. Riding bicycles and playing cricket. Umar was still young, so he would not yet have been allowed to travel far, by bus and rickshaw, to the movies and around town, like other, older boys in the neighborhood. Without my parents, I went only to school and back—by horse carriage, no less—a two-wheeled
tonga,
with a driver contracted for that purpose, always accompanied by Macee. My world, a girl’s world, was smaller than his. But now, Umar had to stay home, too. And I was his only company. By the time Umar’s casts came off, our daily conversations had become a habit. While he returned to the larger world that was his as a boy, now he still spent time at home every afternoon. Time with me. No one said anything about this for quite a few months. But, eventually, it became an issue between my parents—a regular argument, circle-shaped, that sounded remarkably the same no matter how many times it occurred.

“A daughter running wild and not one word to say about it. Soon, the whole neighborhood will be talking! Something must be done to stop it. Something, before the boy’s mother, that
Wahabbi
woman, finds cause to insult us again,” my mother would say to the back of my father’s newspaper. She would wait for a response, less and less patiently as time passed and the words became rote. When none was offered, she would say, less than gently, “Is no one listening to me?!”

“I’m listening. Merely trying not to,” my father would finally sigh, giving up on his attempt to read the paper in peace.

“It must be stopped,” my mother would say again.

“They’re only children.”

“Yes, children. Children who will grow up soon enough.”

“So you keep reminding me.”

“Well, what’s to be done?”

“Surely not what has been done before? You won’t have me act as fathers do in the silly, tragic stories of old? An often overlooked fact about those stories is how badly such fathers end up being regarded in the annals of history.”

My mother never laughed. “This is no time for your philosophizing. Something needs to be done.”

“What would you have me do? Ban them from conversing? Again, taking history as our guide, that will only make matters worse, don’t you think?”

“
Something
must be done.” My mother was not to be diverted.

“Must it? What if we do nothing? Most likely, the friendship which began innocently will continue in that vein. And then, they’ll grow up and out of it.”

“And if they don’t? Then what?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have the energy to plan for that kind of battle, let alone to fight it. We’re the old parents in this story. And we always lose in the end.”