The Sweetness of Tears (19 page)

“It is for your own good, Deena, that you should learn to cook. I didn’t learn until we moved to Karachi. Imagine! I couldn’t even boil water for tea. I grew up in a house where we had a cook and my mother never imagined a life for me without one. But you should be prepared for whatever the future brings you. Who knows what kind of household you will marry into? Rich or poor—it will not harm you to know your way around a kitchen.”

“Is it true, Ma? What Macee says? That we had a cook and car and driver in Bombay, before I was born? And a big house? That we were rich?”

“Yes. It’s true.”

“Do you miss all of that, Ma?”

“Miss it? Of course not! The cook—he was a very good cook. He knew how to make everything. His
shaami
kabab
s were excellent, perfectly spiced and melt-in-your-mouth. He knew how to make Chinese food, too—noodles and egg rolls. He had worked in one of the best hotels in Bombay before he came to work in your father’s house. We used to have lavish dinner parties there—back in Bombay—and everyone who was anyone would come and comment on how delicious his food was. But, oh, that man was a bully in the kitchen, never letting anyone near him while he prepared dinner, guarding his recipes so jealously that you would think they were magic potions. Remember, Macee? What a cranky fellow he was? It has taken me years to figure out how he made certain dishes—through trial and error and taste alone. But I like it better now. Being the mistress of my own kitchen, humble as it is. No, I don’t miss it at all.”

I
asked my father about these matters, too. “Abu? Macee says that your brother cheated you? Is that true?”

My father looked up at me, from the book he was reading, a frown on his face. “Do you know, Deena, that there is an old Arab Bedouin saying:
I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.
That is jungle law. It is the way of the world when the world is thrown into chaos. It is our job to avert that chaos, to fight against it, to resist the urge to become savage. Because the problem with such law is that if you follow it, you are always fighting against someone. There are some who will seize upon any convenient sign of chaos in order to justify descent into such thinking. My brother, it pains me to say, is one of those. Partition was just such a time of chaos. He took advantage of it. Like many do and always will.”

“But that’s wrong! It’s not fair. Why didn’t you fight to get back what was yours?”

“Fight? Against my brother? Then I would be what he is, following jungle law. The only way to rise above is to rise above. The only way to respond to wrong is with right. The only way to deal with injustice is to be just.”

I told Ma what Abu said. “Hmm. Abu carries a lot of wisdom around in his head. But the problem is that in the real world, wisdom is very hard to distinguish from foolishness.”

“What are you saying, Ma?! That Abu is foolish?!”

“I am saying that most people would consider him to be so.”

“Do you?”

My mother sighed. “No, Deena. Don’t tell him I said so—but I think he is wise. It’s the rest of the world that’s foolish.”

T
his assertion of my mother’s tied in very nicely to the way I saw myself in relation to other students at the convent school that I attended, which was run by nuns. In school, the hierarchy of who was who was determined first and foremost by who your father was, just as it would later be determined, in adult life, by who you married. In this sense, Asma, Abbas Uncle’s daughter, was in a class by herself. But I was never ashamed of my father’s fiscal failures, because while being rich counted for something, how well you spoke English counted for far more in the game of class and status in school—in all of Pakistan, for that matter. All of our lessons were in English. Among my classmates, the nouveau riche were those whose parents spoke either no English at all, or a broken, heavily accented form of it that the rest of us secretly mocked. We took pride in the fact that we studied Urdu as a
second
language. Can you imagine? The fact that I spoke English better than Urdu, like my parents, meant that I was among the social elite at the school, where there were many girls both richer and poorer than me. Two among the latter in my class were so poor that their parents had to give them up to become boarders at the school, subject to the nuns’ religious education.

The convent school I attended was one among others in Karachi, along with similar boys’ schools, run by priests, which were considered the best source of education at a reasonable price. It is strange to think about now. Of the nuns who were our teachers. We girls were fascinated by them, constantly speculating over their lives, harassing the boarder students with questions about life after school hours and what they knew of the private lives of our teachers, who lived in quarters behind the classroom buildings where we were never allowed to go. Their clothes were so strange—old-fashioned wimples that covered their hair, full-length habits, you understand, that drowned the shapes of their bodies in voluminous folds of black and white fabric, which led us to wonder about what they hid underneath. Did they wear bras? Underwear? These questions never failed to give rise to giggles among us, a natural tendency among girls of our age. Our own clothing was decidedly less modest by design—the
kameez
es of our uniforms tailored tightly, darted to emphasize the budding breasts that began to blossom as we waded into adolescence, cinched at the waist to imitate the hourglass figures we admired in actresses like Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor. The
dupatta
s of our uniforms were starched and folded into narrow sashes, veiling nothing; those we wore at home, twisted ropes of chiffon that were all the rage, stretched open minimally, even less so.

The curiosity was mutual. I remember how the nuns, equally inquisitive, would quiz us with questions about our lives at home—about what we ate and where we shopped, how we worshipped, and who we lived with.

I was one of those rare teachers’ pets who did nothing to earn my favored status, willful and wayward, rarely applying myself to my lessons, muddling through them with passing grades all the same. My priorities were social rather than academic.

Once, when I was fourteen, I led the way to convince Reverend Mother Borden, an American woman who was the principal of the school, to let us hold a fund-raising jukebox session during recess for our Charity Club. One of the girls brought in a record player, and we all brought in our favorite rock-and-roll records. Rehana, my friend, was put in charge of playing requests at a cost of four annas per song. With the opening guitar strike of “Jailhouse Rock,” my tapping toes led me into the middle of the courtyard, pulling whichever of the girls were at my side at the time along with me and without even realizing it, we were dancing—girls with girls, swaying our hips and rocking our heads, responding to the rebellious undertone of Elvis’s voice, in imitation of the American girls in his movies and others. Almost everyone joined in, erasing the superficial distinctions between us: rich; poor; Christian; Sindhi Hindus, native to the province Karachi was a part of, whose families had not migrated to India during Partition; Muslim, Sunni and Shia, whose differences were only an issue, a mild one at that, during Muharram; with a sprinkling of Parsis—Zoroastrians—among us, too.

Sister Catherine, a young Irish nun, new to the school, put her hand up to the
O
of her mouth for a moment, in response to the dancing frenzy that erupted right before her eyes. Then, after giving a cautious look to either side, she smiled. By the visible and rhythmic twitch of the hem of her gown, I guessed that her toes were tapping, too. We danced through two or three songs before our squeals and shrieks drew the attention of Reverend Mother Borden, who came out of the building behind us, marching into the scene to grab the ear of the first student her fingers could reach, pulling her along as she stomped over to the record player and lifted the needle off the record with a piercing scratch that made us all cover our ears. I was at the center of the melee, impossible to single out as the instigator in what had become mass mischief, but somehow the reverend mother knew enough to train her eyes on me with a frown and a finger summons. In the stark, sudden silence, I gulped my way over to her.

“You. You were the one who asked permission for this indulgence. And you are the one I hold responsible for this unseemly behavior, Deena. I suppose I should blame myself, too. I should have known better than to give in.”

Her eyes next found Sister Catherine, who was wringing her hands nervously. Sister Catherine hurried over, visibly pale, the freckles on her face, which we found so strange, standing out more than usual. The reverend mother looked like she wanted to reach out to pull on Sister Catherine’s ear, too, prevented only by the fact that hers was hidden safely out of sight under the wimple of her habit. We watched them retreat into the staff building and waited for the summons, which came twenty minutes later. Rehana and I and a few others sat in the reverend mother’s office for a long while as she paced and lectured, finally drawing to a conclusion with the assignment of an essay to be titled “On Dignity, Decorum, and Duty in the Delicate Sex”—the reverend mother had a poetic streak with a penchant for alliteration—to be handed in the next day.

On another occasion, my transgressions crossed the line severely enough to garner an invitation for my father to the reverend mother’s office. It was Ramzan, the holy month of fasting, when Muslims abstain from food and drink during daylight hours. En-gland’s cricket team was visiting Karachi for a test match and Pakistan was winning. The fifth and last day of the match, my friends and I decided, would be too exciting to miss. It also happened to be the twenty-seventh of Ramzan—the holiest day of Ramzan for Sunnis. For Shias, the important day was the twenty-third, but that would not signify in the plans we cooked up, which had little to do with religion, except to use it as an excuse, and everything to do with loving cricket.

We had skipped class before, many times, to indulge this particular passion. Unfortunately, this time, there was a test scheduled, too important to miss. We knew that if no one came to school, the test would have to be rescheduled. So, we instigated a mass bunking—urging all of the girls in our class to join us, on religious grounds. “Who do these nuns think they are?” we asked the other girls indignantly, those who would normally be too timid to participate in the kind of uprising that we were planning. “To plan a test on such a holy day! Just because they are Christians and have no respect for our religion! Scheduling tests without consulting
our
calendar—it’s an outrage!” The Shias in my little gang of friends winked at one another as we talked up this angle. Eventually, we got most of our classmates to agree with us. Those who didn’t, we cajoled and bullied to stay home anyway. Of course, one among those we pressured tattled—none other than Asma, Abbas Uncle’s daughter, in fact, the only one to show up at school from our class.

The reverend mother was furious. “This time you have gone too far, Deena. Make sure it is your father that comes. Not your mother. I know how it is with you girls. Your mothers are too soft with you. Only your father will have the will to discipline you as you deserve to be disciplined.”

The sexism of her demand escaped my notice at the time. Perhaps it was too much a part of the world in those times to be striking. Or I was secretly too relieved to reflect on it. In my house, Ma was far more to be feared in matters of discipline than Abu. When he came home from his meeting with the reverend mother, I asked him anxiously what she had said.

“The reverend mother said that you are a very bright girl, Deena. That your intelligence is matched only by your high spirits. You are a natural-born leader. That’s the trouble. If you applied yourself, she said, you would be at the top of the class. She wants me to tell you to concentrate your—how did she put it?—your powers of persuasion for good instead of mischief, to be a role model instead of a ringleader. Despite all the trouble you cause her, Deena, I believe she has great affection for you. She praised your English, too. I told her of how you love to read. From now on, she will make a point of keeping you busy with all the books she can manage to get into your hands. From her own personal library.”

I clapped my hands at this news. This would be a treat instead of a punishment. The regular school library was horribly stocked. One year, I remember, we girls had gotten terribly excited at the news that boxes and boxes of new books had arrived from America, a donation from schoolchildren there. We waited eagerly for the day when they would be opened and shelved, available for us to read. When the day came, we were very disappointed. The books were all torn and marked, half of them with pages missing. And none of them were good books to begin with. Our teachers made us write thank-you notes for those books anyway, words of gratitude that we did not feel, muttering angrily, under our breaths, at the spoiled American children, anonymous, who thought that torn and marked books could be counted as a gift! What the reverend mother promised my father—that I would have access to her personal library—was tremendous news, because everyone knew that the best books in school were those housed on the shelves in her office. It was news I couldn’t wait to share with Umar. Before I could run off to find him, Abu had one more thing to add, making me frown.

“Don’t be
too
excited, Deena. You will be expected to write essays on each and every book she lends you.”

Y
es, Umar, the boy from next door. We had remained friends for all the seven years since my fall from the wall. Everything I thought and felt made its way to his ears. And one of my other childhood passions, the one Abu had told the reverend mother about, was one I shared with him.

“Page?” Umar would call out.

“One hundred twenty-seven,” I would answer from my perch at the wall.