Shekiba did not have to guess. Though she recognized the signs, pregnancy was no less of a shock to her. She chewed on a piece of raw ginger and tried to ignore the nauseous rumblings in her stomach.
I will be a mother. I will have my own baby. Is this possible?
It meant a permanent break from her previous life. She could no longer float between genders like a kite carried by the wind. No more binding her bosom to disguise her figure. She would fool no one.
She watched Shabnam pull on her mother’s sleeve and try to pull herself up. She had learned to crawl only one month ago and had already tired of it. Shabnam was a beautiful girl. She had dark curly locks and lashes on her pleasantly plump face. Her loveliness softened her father’s disappointment. But Aasif only smiled at her when he thought no one was looking. He let her crawl onto his lap and paw at his face until he heard footsteps.
“Come and get your daughter! She’s driving me mad!” he would call out.
“Shabnam, come and leave your father alone,” Gulnaz would say as she swooped the smiling baby off her father’s lap.
Shekiba had seen him caress her cheek, the corners of his mouth turning up in a quiet smile as he watched her slap her palms together clumsily. He laughed at the way she rolled around on her back, her feet in her hands.
“But he’ll always resent her,” Gulnaz said with a sigh.
“That’s how it is for girls. A daughter doesn’t really belong to her parents. A daughter belongs to others,” Shekiba explained. Gulnaz should have been wiser in such matters, Shekiba thought.
She tried to hide her condition from Gulnaz, thinking her husband’s wife might be envious. Shekiba dallied in the washroom until the waves of nausea had passed and her stomach had emptied itself. She knocked basins over to mask the sound of her retching. Gulnaz was so preoccupied with Shabnam, Shekiba needn’t have worried so much.
Aasif did not notice either. After Shabnam’s birth, disappointment temporarily cooled his fire. He opened Shekiba’s door less often and she was thankful for the reprieve. There was nothing about his sweaty grunting that appealed to her and she hated the way he pressed her face to the side, as if her disfigurement might spoil his momentum even in the darkness. But after three months, he had a renewed determination. Shekiba could hope only for her monthly bleeding to save her from her wifely duties.
With her queasy stomach, Aasif’s visits were even more repulsing. He suddenly had an odor that made her stomach reel. She would hold her breath for as long as she could, taking deep gasps in between, which her husband mistook for pleasure. He paused and looked at her, surprised.
“So, you’re enjoying this, aren’t you? Such a performance you put on!” he said with a crooked smirk.
He did not notice her belly growing until she had missed six cycles of her bleeding. He looked at her curiously as she leaned against the wall to rest after dinner. Gulnaz was knitting while Shabnam slept beside her. Shekiba instinctively tried to bunch her dress over her growing abdomen. Aasif’s eyes zeroed in on her belly.
“Maybe there is hope for this house after all!”
Shekiba’s face reddened. Gulnaz’s lips tightened, just enough that Shekiba could see the tension in her face. Gulnaz had confronted Shekiba two months ago, having noticed the way she kept Shabnam’s kicking legs away from her belly.
When Shekiba had nodded, Gulnaz smiled, but with hesitation. She knew what it would mean if Shekiba delivered the son Aasif so desired.
Aasif let out a guffaw, an awkward sound in a room with air so thick.
“We’ll see what Shekiba can do.”
Gulnaz had whispered to Shekiba as she scrubbed the pots clean.
“He’s so different from a couple of years ago. Can you imagine that he used to like to take walks in the evenings with me? This same man! The last two years have soured him. I don’t know what he’ll become if he’s handed another daughter. There’s nothing you can do now, is there?”
Shekiba lay awake at night pondering that very question. She thought back to all the mechanisms Mahbuba had described but it was too late for any of them. Someone had told her about the powers of chicken livers, she remembered, and headed to the market the very next day to buy as many as she could find. She did not miss a single prayer and whispered to the ceiling, her palms open, with a fresh desperation.
Please, merciful Allah, I am begging you to give Aasif the son he so desires. Satisfy his wish so that we may live in peace with this bitter man.
Whether it was the chicken livers or the prayers or just God’s will, Shekiba gave birth to a son.
Aasif walked with his head high, a smug smile on his face as his family came to visit. Shekiba hardly noticed him. She was fascinated with the ten fingers, the perfectly formed pink lips and the tiny chin that nuzzled against her bosom. She had checked him over head to toe but there was nothing wrong—nothing about him was marred or mangled.
“His name will be Shah. My son, a king among men! And a real one! Not like the coward we bow to now!” Aasif had chosen a name. Shekiba could see the spite in his choice. When he mentioned Habibullah his jaw clenched in a way that made Shekiba shudder. She fretted as she stirred the litti. Gulnaz had tried to make some but had filled the house with thick smoke instead. Gray soot clung to the once-white ceiling.
Shekiba was not pleased with her son’s name. She had secretly hoped to name him Ismail, after her father, but she knew she would not be as successful as Gulnaz in this battle. So his name was Shah and on the sixth day, they celebrated his birth with a prayer and halwa.
As the days passed, Shekiba became terrified. There were too many pats on the back, heartfelt embraces of congratulations, baskets of sweets sent to their house. She worried about nazar, that their good fortune would be cursed by someone with a jealous eye. Her king sleeping peacefully, she fired the espand seeds and wafted their protective powers over him.
Nazar was not the only danger. Shekiba remembered what she had seen Dr. Behrowen doing in the palace and boiled everything that came near the baby. She boiled his clothes, even the evil eye that she had pinned to his tiny blanket. She scrubbed her breasts raw before she let him nurse. Her fears multiplied when Aasif came home shaking his head.
“What is it?” she asked. “Has something happened?”
Aasif was cordial with her these days, engaging in conversations as his first wife listened bitterly from her room down the hall.
“It’s that damn illness again, sweeping across the villages. Even in Kabul.”
“What illness?” Shekiba asked, suddenly alarmed. Shah was only three weeks old. Instinctively, she pulled her swaddled baby closer to her.
“Cholera. Maybe you’ve never heard of it. It’s a powerful disease. God help whoever it strikes. I’ve heard that at least twenty families in Kabul are sick with it. The doctors can’t do anything about it.”
Shekiba knew better than anyone else just how powerful cholera could be. Her back stiffened.
“We mustn’t let the baby get ill,” she said, her voice quivering. Panic was setting in.
“Don’t you think I know that? Just take good care of him and keep him inside. You’re his mother so it’s up to you to keep him from getting sick!”
Shekiba’s mind flew back to her village, watching her siblings waste away in a corner of their rank home. Thinking of her mother, broken at the sight of her dead children, Shekiba boiled, washed and prayed fiercely.
Please, God, don’t let anything happen to my little boy. He’s the most perfect thing I’ve ever had. Please do not take him away!
And when the cholera wave passed, there was time for Shekiba to think of new dangers. She would not let the baby near the kitchen and kept him away from anything made of glass. She surrounded him with pillows and did not take her eyes off him. It was clear she did not trust Gulnaz to watch him. What if he broke his leg and walked with a limp? What if he was hit and lost an eye? Shekiba could hear the names, the teasing, a crestfallen little boy. She wanted better for her son.
“You know, I have managed to care for Shabnam reasonably well this past year. I think I am capable of holding a baby! What is it with you? What do you think I’m going to do? Drop him from a window?”
“I’m just . . . I’m just nervous. Don’t be offended, please. It’s just that I don’t want anything to happen to him.” Shekiba turned away so she wouldn’t see the angry look on Gulnaz’s face.
Shah changed every dynamic in the house, even for his half sister. When Shabnam waddled toward Shekiba, Gulnaz was quick to pull her back, and if she caught Shabnam eating something Shekiba had prepared, she would hold a hand in front of the baby’s confused mouth and make her spit it out. But only when Shekiba was watching.
It hurt Shekiba to see Shabnam yanked away from her. She loved the little girl as much as she could love any child that was not her own. And Shabnam, who had grown up with two mothers, did not understand why one was now off-limits. She looked at Shah with suspicion, as if she knew he had disrupted her happy home.
Aasif made the situation worse. Gulnaz no longer joined them for dinner, always making some excuse about Shabnam needing to eat or sleep. Aasif, having just proudly celebrated his son’s fortieth day, hardly noticed that his first wife had retreated into her room for over a week. What he did say to Gulnaz only made her more resentful of Shekiba.
“Long overdue, but worth the wait. Look at my son! Look at the healthy color in his cheeks! He’s a lion, my son!”
Gulnaz, listening from her room, bit her tongue, thankful that her daughter was not yet aware of her father’s partiality.
“Nam-e-khoda. May evil eyes stay away,” Shekiba murmured nervously as she looked at her fingernails, another superstition she had picked up from one of her uncles’ wives, though she couldn’t remember which one.
Gulnaz nearly laughed. An evil eye could hardly find its way to Shah, with all the talismans and prayers and espand that Shekiba used in the house. It occurred to her then that Shekiba was probably worried about her. She thought on it for a moment and realized it made sense. That was why she wanted to keep Gulnaz away from her precious son!
And so Gulnaz retaliated. She showered Shah with compliments, purposely not invoking the name of God.
How plump his cheeks have gotten! How quickly he’s learned to roll over! He’ll be walking before you know it, Shekiba-jan.
How well he nurses! He’ll grow up to be bigger and stronger than his father! And look at how alert and curious he is!
Shekiba was frenzied. She knocked on wood, burned espand and prayed even more. She tried to downplay the compliments as quickly as they came.
Oh, it’s just today. Yesterday he barely wanted to nurse at all. I don’t think he’s gained any weight in the last couple weeks. He feels so light when I lift him.
You don’t see how skinny his legs are? He’ll probably end up short and bowlegged, at the rate he’s eating.
Animosity simmered as Shekiba slowly realized what Gulnaz was up to. Frustrated, she decided to turn the game around. They sat in the courtyard, giving the children some sunlight while Shekiba hung the laundry on a clothesline. Gulnaz was watering the flowers.
“Just look at Shabnam! She’s walking as if she’s been doing it for years! I bet she could run right across Kabul with those strong legs!”
Shekiba watched Gulnaz’s mouth open slightly and her eyes widen. She mumbled something incomprehensible in return.
“Coo coo! Coo coo!” Shabnam called out, her word for the canaries.
“Yes, my little one, coo coo is there,” Gulnaz said without turning around.
“Coo coo! Coo coo!”
The two mothers turned around and saw only two yellow birds flitting about the cage. Gulnaz walked over, her head cocked to the side.
“Where is the other? How could he have gotten . . .” Her voice trailed off as she neared the cage. “Oh no!”
“What is it?” Shekiba said as she walked over. Gulnaz’s eyes were wide.
“He’s dead.”
The feathered creature lay lifeless on the floor of the cage while his roommates huddled close to one another and chirped softly. Both women were silent. The omen did not go unnoticed.
We’re just like Aasif’s mother, Shekiba thought with a sigh. Making daggers of words.