ZEBA’S EYELIDS LIFTED SLOWLY, HER VISION FOCUSING ON A metal grid. Her head felt heavy. She lifted a finger. Then a hand. She shifted and felt a bedsheet crumple beneath her sandaled foot. She was on her cot. She had no recollection of being moved, but her cellmates must have repositioned her on the bed with her shoes on. They no longer bothered calling the guards.
Zeba had never fainted before the last couple of weeks. Not as a child when she’d seen rockets fall from the sky. Not when she was pregnant in the hottest, driest months. Not even when she’d cried for her disappeared father. Something in Zeba had changed, and she knew what it was. The darkness was coming for her.
A lifetime had passed since she’d first seen it—so long that she’d nearly forgotten what it was to live without the terror. It came slowly, infrequently in the beginning. It slithered into her house like the smoke of a fire, curled through the gap between the window and the wall, touching Zeba and her children as they slept and making them jerk with fright in their dreams. It clung possessively to her husband, winding its way around his fingers, crawling up his arms and swarming his head with its bitter cloud. The children breathed it in, absorbing it into their innocent bodies, their veins darkening without them knowing. The family slept in one large room together, Zeba listening for the sound of the children breathing in the night, fearing the darkness would wrap itself around their young necks and choke them before the sun rose. The girls woke with a start, more than once, to find their mother’s fingertips brushing at their throats anxiously, then patting their shoulders with a hush to urge them back to sleep.
When Zeba did sleep, she dreamed of the darkness. She saw it weaving through their food and knew by dawn there would be evidence of its existence: maggots in the sack of rice, mold on freshly baked bread, and apples covered in bruises. She would wake in the morning and toss the most rotted food to the stray dogs. She would have thrown it all out if she weren’t afraid they would have nothing to eat at all. Zeba felt a gray film on their plates and cups and heard the incessant buzzing of flies. She did her best to scrub it off, but she could still taste it. It permeated metal, stone, and skin. It was inescapable.
Zeba’s angst grew. The darkness came more often, once a month. Then once a week.
She wished for her mother. Who better than Gulnaz to deal with something as intangible as this? Gulnaz approached darkness with her special kind of science. But Zeba couldn’t exactly turn to her now, not after the things Zeba had said.
What do you want, Madar? You want my children to be raised fatherless the way we were? You want me to put them through a life of shame and hurt, too? I won’t do it. I’m not you. I don’t want people to look at me the way they look at you!
No, her mother had probably not forgiven Zeba for that yet. She would have to find a way to deal with this herself.
She worked up the nerve to tell Kamal about it.
There is something here, Kamal. It is hurting us.
It was blackening their lives, it was a shadow over their home. The first time she brought it up, she was surprised that Kamal bothered to listen to her. When she finished talking, her hands wringing behind her back, he rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“You’re imagining things. Don’t be like your witch of a mother.”
His words stung, but she breathed a little easier. He was confident and concrete, and she could believe in him.
The second time she’d brought up her fears, he had said nothing but twisted her ear so hard that it swelled to a purple mass. She hid it with her hair and head scarf so the children wouldn’t ask her what had happened.
“I don’t want to be married to one of those stupid women who believe in the unbelievable.”
But if she believed in it, how could it be unbelievable?
Zeba bit her lip and went back to her needlework, unconvinced. He did not see what she could see. He didn’t understand that they lived in a house with no windows.
She watched the children carefully. She kept them close to her. They went from school to home, where she made sure they played at her feet while she tended to the cooking. She scrubbed at their skin like they were day-old dishes and repeatedly felt their foreheads for fever. The darkness could look like anything, she intuited. Kamal was of no help. It was up to her to protect her family.
Zeba lay awake in the nights, ready to meet the invisible trespasser and thinking of ways to fend it off. Though she could not always see it, she could smell it, like a piece of rotting meat so foul that it turned her stomach. Even the mice stayed away.
When Zeba cooked, she breathed in the fresh cilantro, garlic, cumin, and lemon. She tried to cleanse her senses of the stench that had settled into their walls.
By night, it was back.
The children didn’t see what Zeba could see. They acted no differently in the day, as long as their father wasn’t around. Basir’s laughter echoed through the street behind their home. He came home scraped up from soccer games but not broken. The girls helped each other with the chores around the house. Kareema and Shabnam brought sloshing pails of water from the well, each grabbing on to the warped metal handle. They sang folk songs just like other girls their age. Rima stumbled, crawled, and babbled like any other baby. None of them knew any better. Zeba was baffled by their immunity. Sometimes she was grateful for it. Other times she was angry that she was the only person in her family to feel the weight of the darkness.
ZEBA, TWO DAYS BEFORE THE EID HOLIDAY, STRUNG THE LIVING room carpet up in the courtyard to beat the dust from it. She held the end of her head scarf over her mouth and nose with one hand and thumped at the rug with a thick stick. Her husband had been gone since morning. She hoped he’d gone off to work though it was more than possible he was off drinking and smoking what little money he earned.
She started from one corner and moved across the rectangle systematically. The carpet wobbled pathetically under her blows.
Zeba moved her aim downward and dealt the carpet a few more sharp smacks. When her stick snapped in two, she let out a sharp cry, then picked up a broom handle and took up again where she’d left off. Thump, thump, thump. She grunted between blows, puffs of dust rising violently from the tapestry like tubercular coughs.
When she got down to the last square foot of rug, Zeba stopped. She was panting. Her shoulder burned, and she sat on an overturned plastic bucket to catch her breath and let the muscles of her arm rest.
A bitter chill had settled over the village. Even indoors, the children’s fingers blanched with cold. She took the carpet inside and spread it out on the floor, its colors no brighter than they were before she’d attacked its wool fibers. This, for some reason she could not put into words, brought tears to her eyes.
Zeba blew on her hands and rubbed them together. She turned when she heard the door clang behind her. Kamal unwound his black scarf and tossed a bag of walnuts and raisins on the table. Zeba smiled weakly at him, thinking his timing could not have been better.
“How perfect,” Zeba had declared, reaching for the kettle. “Basir’s just brought back some fresh bread. I’ll make some tea. It’ll warm our bellies.”
“It’s not for them. They can eat what’s left from last night. I bought this for myself,” he declared.
Something in Kamal’s voice prickled Zeba’s skin. She looked up, abruptly. Kamal averted his eyes just as she turned to him. She watched closely as Kamal hung his hat and jacket on a hook in the hallway. She saw the slouch of his shoulders, the defiance in his chin, and the shadows around his eyes. How long had they been there without her seeing? She could barely breathe, her throat thick and tight.
Her voice faltered.
Kamal watched her from the corner of his eye. He did not move toward her or away from her. They stood in measured space, precisely six steps apart from each other, his feet planted firmly on the carpet she’d tried to clean just moments ago. He could see the rare silver threads in her hair. She could almost feel the stubble on his face, the face that had rubbed against hers just last night when Kamal had pressed himself into his wife despite her small pleas of protest. Zeba’s dusty fingers flittered to her lips.
But he’s my husband. How could this be?
It was in him, that thing she could not name. That thing she could not speak.
“Zeba,” he said, turning his broad back to her. “Don’t look for trouble.”