Suleiman thought his question was the death of Abbu.
He rested his head on Abbu’s arm and wept. I stroked his head and pacified him with kissing sounds.
I am cursed. At the most delicate of moments my thoughts are invariably profane. Abbu is dead. No point describing how cleaning and changing him twice a day—my own father!—would spark thoughts that embarrass me. Stroking Suleiman’s head, I imagined how pleasurable it would be to… oh, sick. Even at seventy-one every man seems a potential. Reason must intervene on every occasion and prompt my virginal subconscious in a hushed murmur: he is father, he is brother, he is milkman, he is postman… Suleiman is my brother’s son’s son. My grandson. My grandson! I repeated it several times till the feel of his coarse hair turned indistinguishable from that of any other object.
‘Son,’ I said at last with complete conviction, ‘we must arrange his funeral.’
Suleiman raised his wet, grieving face, ‘My question distressed him, Shazia-dadi. I killed him. I killed him!’
At Abbu’s age, so much as a gentle breeze could have polished him off. But I didn’t tell Suleiman that. His guilt was precious to me.
At birth, marriage, and death, a man’s life isn’t his own. Abbu’s funeral was a circus. While washing Abbu’s corpse, the maulvi dropped it in alarm. ‘Oh, the profanity, the deceased is uncut!’
Uncut? Uncut. Uncut? Yes, yes, uncut!
The question and answer crept through the acquaintances who had gathered at the graveyard. What was uncut? No one would tell me. I sat alone on the special spot for females near the entrance. ‘He’s a convert, maybe that’s why?’ Suleiman suggested to the maulvi.
A convert? A convert. A convert? Yes, yes, a convert!
Another round of whispered gossip. Another maulvi stepped in and finished what the earlier one had abandoned in horror.
The following week blurred by.
Then the day came: the day of Suleiman’s departure.
I began by saying, ‘Been just nine days since Abbu. Stay some more, Suleiman.’
Didn’t work.
So I asked, ‘Why be a refugee in an unknown city? This house is yours only.’
No effect.
So I cried, ‘Stay! Have pity on a seventy-plus woman!’
Suleiman continued to pack with a chilling apathy. This was the world Abbu said he would always shield me from: a world uncaring of a woman who had never married or bred. But to be treated like this by one of your own? ‘Oh, Abbu!’ I gasped, lamenting his absence and the profound loneliness that lay ahead.
‘What’s that?’ Suleiman looked up from a bag he was bending over.
‘You killed my Abbu,’ I whispered. This was my desperation talking. Suleiman froze. ‘Your anger, your question, it crushed my frail old father.’ Suleiman hid his face in his hands. I concluded with a curse, like a haggard second-rate witch: ‘Wherever you go, whatever you do, never forget that you stripped a lonely old woman of her one and last protector.’
Suleiman looked up with the same wet grieving face he had at Abbu’s death. ‘But I can’t stay here, dadi! I can’t! The woman I love is waiting for me in Mumbai!’
‘Then take me along!’ I joined my hands and begged. ‘As your mother, as your responsibility, you must take me with you to Mumbai!’
Abbu would have been happy to know: for the first time I left a man speechless and unable to say ‘no’.