Tunnel Vision (36 page)

‘
Can I have some tea too?
'

Sometimes I would have a little. Ammi said it was never too early to drink tea.

‘
I
'
ll have to make it,
'
she grumbled.
'

‘
Aren
'
t you making it for Abba?
'

‘
No.
'

‘
Then how are you helping him?
'

‘
I
'
m holding papers. He has to arrange them in a certain order and I
'
m helping him keep track.
'

‘
I can help too then.
'

‘
No you can
'
t.
'

‘
Why not? I can even count, you can
'
t.
'

‘
It
'
s not by number.
'

‘
Then what is it by?
'

‘
Ayesha Bibi, he said to tell you to please go back to sleep and let us work in peace. He doesn
'
t have time for your demands right now.
'

I got back into bed and turned my back to her. The door closed. She didn
'
t appear on the other side to lie down. That night I was the one sniffing, but when she got back she couldn
'
t have known because I was asleep by then.

The late night work meetings continued to happen about thrice a week, possibly more often, but I had gone back to sleeping through most nights after Abba rebuffed my attempts to help him by proxy. Delivered through Nasreen, it seemed an even bigger betrayal. Her over me. I was chilly to him during the day as well, when I saw him, but he didn
'
t seem to notice. Ammi was getting visibly stronger, thanks mainly to Nasreen
'
s help, and in the evenings Abba would flutter around her like a particularly determined mosquito. No amount of swatting, and there was some, would drive him away.

‘
Uff, what is wrong with you?
'
I heard Ammi cry out in exasperation one evening. There was a nip in the air, and Abba had swaddled her and Adil in so many blankets they looked like a two-headed talking quilt.

‘
You should be warm.
'

‘
There
'
s warm and there
'
s hot. And I
'
m feeling hot. Can you please at least remove this horse blanket?
'

‘
It
'
s not a horse blanket, it
'
s an army issue, guaranteed comfort even on the battlefield.
'

‘
Yes, well this isn
'
t a battlefield and we
'
re not soldiers and Adil here is never going to be one either, so please remove it before we melt and you have to pour us into a glass and keep it on a shelf.
'

‘
It would be the highest shelf in the house.
'

‘
Higher even than the Quran?
'

‘
Maybe right next to it, perhaps even a quarter centimetre higher.
'

‘
You
'
d risk the wrath of God for me?
'

‘
Need you ask that?
'

She grumbled about silly kafirs, but I could tell by her tone she was pleased. She generally was in those days, the fatigue and depression that had enveloped her when she brought Adil back seemed to be lifting. She smiled and talked like she used to sometimes, not very often yet, but it was the first sign that my mother wasn
'
t lost to me, just temporarily displaced, knocked out of her standard orbit by the trauma of childbirth. Some evenings, when Abba was home in time for us all to eat together she would wobble to the dining table and sit in her old place, still not putting Adil down but tucking into the food with her free hand. Nasreen would put the food and water jug on the table and retire to the kitchen, as she had been instructed to. Ammi was more tolerant of the girl but it was obvious she would have much preferred her not being around. Then again, that was probably why Nasreen had become so capable of doing all the work, she knew the slightest mistake would give ammunition to the twin cannons trained on her whenever they were in the same room, and being busy with work all the time kept her out of their sights. There was something wrong between the two of them, some storm brewing, but I couldn
'
t for the life of me figure out what it was.

When Ammi began to let me help her with Adil, she wouldn
'
t let Nasreen touch him, I lost interest in everything else. He was so small, so warm, and so needy, the moment I touched him all my resentment vanished. I began eating, sleeping and dreaming babies. What with Ammi getting better, and Abba happy, and someone else worrying about the menu, plus Adil, I was as content as I had ever been. There was no room for improvement in my life. When the crash came, it totally blindsided me.

PYASI ANKHAIN

BACK OF RICKSHAW

~

T
hat night I was woken by the sound of the night watchman
'
s whistle shrieking over and over again. That was the signal for thief, murderer, robber, etc. I knew that and I bolted upright, hissing
‘
Nasreen
'
into the darkness, wanting to share the excitement. But there was no answer and I knew she must be helping Abba again. Maybe he could take us both outside into the road so we could see what was happening? I swung my legs over and onto the floor and padded out, not turning on any lights because I didn
'
t want to wake Ammi. But she was already awake.

I saw her as I got closer to the kitchen door. She was standing petrified in the doorway, her back to me. There was something about the line of her shoulders, a rigidity, a tension that frightened me. Her arms hung by her sides, I was seeing her without Adil attached after weeks, was that what was wrong? Had something happened to Adil? I slid closer, till I was standing next to her and looked up at her face but she didn
'
t seem to see me. Her eyes were fixed ahead of her on something in the kitchen. Her nostrils flared slightly and I knew she was breathing. For a second I thought she had been frozen, rendered immobile by some witches
'
spell. I followed her gaze, trying to see through her eyes.

Headlights from a passing car, a police car perhaps, played across the back of the kitchen wall and made things leap out at us. In one corner, the fridge and the water cooler on the stool. In another, the sink and drying board with the dishes still on it. Ammi would be furious with Nasreen in the morning, she had told her lizards crept across plates at night and everything should be put into the cabinets. In the third, the glass-fronted sideboard that held all the crockery, the plastic, the steel, the china. In the last corner of the room, propped against the marble top table on which dough was kneaded, sweets prepared and dishes cooled before serving were Nasreen and Abba.

BURGER FAMILY

LOCAL LINGO FOR NUCLEAR FAMILY

~

T
hey were entwined like creeper and wall, like worms burrowing into each other, oblivious to the swathe of light that drenched them, but they heard Ammi shriek when I slipped my hand into hers. I had done it out of sympathy because I had seen through her eyes and knew that there was something wrong with this picture, but I scared her. She hadn
'
t known I was there. Nasreen and Abba hadn
'
t known she was there. Now we were all present and accounted for, except for Adil. Then we heard him cry out, a high-pitched, inarticulate wail as if he felt part of him missing.

Ammi hesitated for a second, unable to tear her eyes from the couple by the table, straightening their clothes, both unable to meet her gaze. Then she turned and headed for her room, dragging me with her. She locked the door behind her and took me to bed with her and Adil, one on either side. She stroked my hair with a faraway look in her eyes and ignored the timid knock on the door, the rattle of the handle turning, the soft whisper of
‘
Jahan, Jahan
'
. Eventually, I fell asleep.

Without thought I fell back into the blackness.

JEETAYGA BHAI JEETAYGA,
KOI NA KOI TO JEETAYGA

SLOGAN CHANTED BY AUDIENCE DURING LAST
WORLD CUP MATCH IN PAKISTAN

~

I
was no longer in intensive care. I had been shifted while I wallowed in my memories to some other room. A private room in a private ward by the looks of it. There was another bed on my right but it was empty.

My mother was by my bedside, her lips moving as she bent over my right hand, holding it tight with one of her own as the other caressed her prayer beads. They had let her back in then? But not without supervision, a male nurse leaned against the wall right behind her, primed for another attack on the hapless patient. Let her be, I wanted to tell him, if she really wanted to kill me she would have done it years ago. It was a struggle even to mentally string my words together though. This time I had had to thrash hard to break the scum on the pool of my consciousness and emerge into the here and now. And there was a pixilated quality to my vision, as if someone had drawn a strip of gauze over my eyes. The clarity of my earlier sight was gone. Was the end near? Could these be my final hours before darkness pulled me under for good? It seemed only fitting I should spend them with my mother.

She saw me in. She would see me out. There was no one else. Nothing else to show for my life. Father gone. Brother, well, brother twit. Close yes, but still a twit, didn
'
t want to spend my last hours listening to Farah-inspired tripe. Mamu and Mumani, there wasn
'
t a lot to say there. Strong, deep feelings but few words, perhaps the most typical Pakistani relationship of all. And that was it, that was all I had accomplished, relationships that were handed to me from the moment of my birth. Family. Obligation. Duty. I had accomplished no lasting others. The few friends I had met along the road were just that, friends. Nothing sacred. Nothing meaningful, just mutual recognition of social, verbal compatibility extended into a shield against loneliness.

My best friend, dead in the prime of her life. Suicide. An early exit from a battle she felt she couldn
'
t win. I had outlasted her by several years, but natural selection might just win in the end. Cull the weak. Keep the strong. Strong enough to earn, commute, persist, survive, but too unmoved by the search for happiness to venture in any real sense beyond the bonds of family.

It wasn
'
t going to happen anyway because happiness was a busy entity. It had places to go, other people to see, you had to reach out and grab it as it swerved past, not wave amiably, secure in the false knowledge that your turn would come. It wouldn
'
t. We lived in a city. We should have known that.

All of us, Ammi, Abba, Kulsoom, Omar, myself, we should have read the writing on the wall. Not the bits about
‘
Qazi is coming
'
, and
‘
it
'
s very hard to find a virgin
'
, or
‘
Death to America
'
or
‘
Every sister has a bhai, Altaf Bhai
'
, or
‘
Life Sux
'
. The other bits. The bigger bits. The bits that dominated; the empty spaces. The growing distance between words and people, friends and lovers. Poverty. Disease. War. Hunger. Pain. Loneliness. They were winning. We were wrong to believe because they couldn
'
t touch us, they couldn
'
t control us. We
'
d all made a colossal mistake. For all our lives spent in a human warren we had existed in a near total alienation from each other. We had lived in concrete shells, as removed from the rest of the world as the most isolated village. Work. Home. Work. Friends. Home. Work. I felt a sigh building, a shudder in the place my spine should be. Was it the death rattle? Would I really die with my mother, leave without even a word, a nudge, a wink to the only person who had given me peace, however fleeting, my entire adult life? Saad, I thought, I wish I had had time to tell you to get the red car.

This time I let go myself and dived back under, not waiting to be pulled. Whatever subconscious crap I had to wade through before reaching the finish line, I was ready. This waiting was killing me.

VOTE 4 BOOK

ELECTION CAMPAIGN SLOGAN FOR INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE.

~

T
he morning after we discovered Nasreen
‘
helping
'
Abba in the kitchen, our lives changed. Ammi opened the door in the morning to find a silent house empty of outsiders, containing only her belongings, her rooms, and one shamefaced husband sitting on the floor outside. She didn
'
t say a word to him, just walked by with Adil in her arms and me in her trail and went into the kitchen, where she began making breakfast. Abba followed us in and lurked, finally plucking up the courage to speak.

‘
Aren
'
t you at least going to talk to me?
'

‘
Not now, hand me that pan,
'
she sounded quite normal.

‘
Here, let me do that,
'
he tried to take over.