The Washer of the Dead

These are difficult days. I am busy all the time. My children complain that I no longer have time to cook for them. That their mother ignores the living for the dead. What can I do? Respect must be given to the departed. So few know how to prepare them correctly. In these times where death lies heavy in each house it is strange that such an art should be lost. My mother taught me and in my time I will teach my daughter. She fights with me, saying she will never do a job like mine. That it is dirty and ugly and scares her.

But I have no complaints. When I see them laid out on the marble, all I feel is pity. Their nakedness on the table fills me with compassion. No matter what their age is, to me they are my children.

Mine are the hands that prepare them for the journey. I strip them naked. Then soothe them with cold water. I clean their wounds. Bathe their weeping sores. Lay soap and un-guent and balm upon them with gentle hands. Mine are the last hands they know, hands that midwife them into another world.

I don’t remember when they first began to talk to me.

As I tended to them, more intimate than their mothers had been, they began to whisper. As I traced the scars, the sign-posts, that life had left upon their skin they began to tell me the story of each marker. It was not just their skin that lay bare upon the marble slab, it was their lives that they stripped for

me in confession. I absolved them, washing them clean. So many stories! So many women cold upon the stone. Today the woman is young, young. Her lashes lie long

against her cheek. The makeup is still on her face. Reddened lips, dusky soot upon the eyelids.

I begin with the feet. The history of all the ground a woman has covered in her life is worked into the feet. I have seen feet soiled and cracked. Fissured from the hard miles walked na-ked. Feet bony and spare, thick with scars. Feet bloated with carrying the weight of a body grown too heavy. These feet are soft and unspoiled. The heels are perfect, with the sheen of eggshell. They are delicately patterned with mehndi. The girl on the table is a bride.

Her anklets are still on the slim ankles. I take them off, their jingling loud in the silence. The one on the left foot slides off to reveal a small crooked scar.

I got that for my brother she whispers. Her voice is soft. Shy as befits a bride. A seashell whisper.
     I fell while trying to catch a kite for him. “Run” he told me “I want that kite!” And I ran without looking, eyes up at the sky, seeking only to get him what he wanted. He was my adored. My captain. My leader. My brother. We had no mother and our father was a distant man. It was he who gave me all the love that filled my childhood.

The soft skin of her forearm has a name tattooed on it. The blue ink is almost black against that white skin.

It is his name.

She speaks so softly that I have to strain to hear. Her voice is a tired little whisper scratching up the grains of her life.

When I was nine, the two of us ran down to the nullah where the gypsies had set up their camp. There for our whole monthly allowance we each got tattoos. The needles hurt and I tried not to look. My brother tattooed the name of an angel on his wrist. I chose his name.
     My father beat me. It was not my brother’s name that I was meant to carry through life. I would be married soon. What would my husband say?
     What did I know? The only love I knew was my brother’s.

I fetch soap and cloths and water in a large pewter basin. I sponge the length of her body lying spent on my table. Long slow strokes that soothe her.

When I was eleven my father discovered that I was a girl. The neighbours pointed it out to him. They told him I had no busi-ness running around wild with my brother even if our mother was dead. Terrible things could come of it. It was the first time I heard of that thing called “izzat”.
     I could no longer go out without being covered from head to toe. I could not go unaccompanied. I could no longer talk to all the boys who had been my ragged companions for so long. If I did—the izzat of the house would shatter immediately, so frag-ile was it. I wondered why my brother didn’t have to change his life to guard the izzat of the house. Why the burden fell only on my shoulders.

Her breasts are small and tinged with pink. Life has not laid its heavy marks on her yet. She is not yet marked by marriage or childbirth or heavy toil, or the hands of men.

An old spinster aunt came to live with us, to teach me how to be a young lady. She watched my every move and lectured me on cooking and husbands and duty. I hated it. I hated the long black robes. I hated the sense of guilt and deceit and disaster lying just one false step away. I was confined completely to the house and railed against it.
     My brother was good to me. He brought me things from the outside world, sat for hours and told me all that he had been up to. One day he even brought me a cinema ticket. He and his friends had been all the way to the big town to see a show! How I smoothed that rumpled ticket and turned it over again and again as if in its little span I could see all the wonders he described.
     In time he grew busy. He was becoming a man. When I complained that I hated being locked up in the house with aunt, he said, “You’re a woman. It is right that you be so.”

She has long hair falling to her waist. It is matted and snarled with blood. I fill a basin with water and perfume it and soak her hair to loosen the tangles.

I dried my hair on the terrace, looking up at the sky. That was all the freedom that was left to me. The sky above our tiny terrace. How I loved it! I counted the kites, the eagles, and drifted off with them into the clouds. My brother had started keeping pigeons and then abandoned them because they were too much work. I took them over and fed them and gave them names and told them to fly far away and come back and tell me in the evening all that they saw. I would lie there and open my arms to the sky as they wheeled and circled above me.
     My aunt told me no good would come of lying around on the terrace. It was an invitation to disaster. Stubbornly I insisted that I had to feed the pigeons and my father gave permission so she had to content herself with grumbling.
     The first time I found a gift, I wondered if my brother had left it. But he hadn’t been to see me for weeks. There in the pigeon coop was a leaf cup and nestled in it were a handful of walnuts. The next day there was a pomegranate. I ate the ruby seeds surrounded by a shifting rustling carpet of iridescent grey. “Salma . . . Shezadi . . . Kali . . . tell me who was it? Who could it have been?” They looked at me with beady red eyes and cooed.
     What delight those gifts brought to my day! At last there was something to look forward to. A secret to hold tight against myself. Who could it be?

Gently I comb the tangles from her hair. I look at that face and wonder how best she liked it dressed. Finally, I set it in two braids. The hair an innocent would wear.

For a whole week there were gifts every day. And, think though I might, I could not understand who could be leaving them for me. I saw no one, spoke to no one the entire day except my aunt and my father. Then it struck me that it could be someone from the houses that had terraces that touched ours. One of my neighbours. I shivered when the thought came to me—could it be a man?
     That day I regarded the handful of mulberries in the leaf cup with misgiving. I turned and looked from terrace to terrace. They all lay empty in the heat of the afternoon. The pigeons drowsily cooed and gurgled. The summer sun burnt my hands and feet but I felt cold.
     I had thought that all men were like my brother. But my aunt had told me about them in thick whispers. What they wanted. How every man’s eyes and hands and desire were drawn to the slightest sight of a woman. Encourage one of them with a look, with a gesture and your izzat would be de-stroyed immediately. I found it strange. If they were so danger-ous why were they not confined to the house and we left free to roam? My aunt beat me when I asked her.
     I knew I must no longer go up to the roof. My handful of sky had been snatched from me by a stranger. That day my father came home and announced that he had found a husband for me. I was terrified. I felt in one day I had lost everything. My brother laughed and teased and promised to feed the pigeons for me when I was gone.

The dried henna is still on her hands. No one has thought to wash it off. When I do, the patterns blossom in orange on those tiny hands.

I went up to feed the pigeons for one last time. Everyone told me not to, a bride should not dirty her hands. But it was a goodbye I wanted to say to all the things that had made up the only world I had known.
     I stepped onto the terrace and knew something was wrong. In place of the familiar sounds of dozens of birds rustling in their coops, there was silence.
     I called their names “Rani . . . Alam . . . Razia . . . Aasma . . .”
     Silence. I looked down. Someone had strangled every one of the pigeons on the roof. I was standing in an ankle deep carpet of dead birds. The living carpet that had shifted and stirred was now clots of stinking feathers.
     Someone was standing on the terrace that faced ours. I recognized him then. He was our neighbour’s son. One of the group that I and my brother had played with. He was a sickly child who was always left behind. Often we had found ourselves tailing after the others who never waited for us.
     I stared at him standing there on the other roof. The width of a tiny winding lane separated us. He was holding a leaf cup. It was empty. He threw the leaf into the darkness and held his arms out to me. My heart began to pound. I turned and ran down the stairs, screaming my brother’s name. I ran past all the guests, the uncles and aunts and cousins, straight to my brother’s arms.
     “What is it?” he asked gently “why are you weeping?” A day earlier the whole tale would have tumbled out of me. But now I dared not tell him. Instead I clung to him saying I would not go. I would not leave this house. He laughed and teased me and led me to back to the women. I think he loved me most then. For all his teasing, there were tears in his eyes too.

I gently wash the face clean of powder and tints. Tears have smudged the kohl and left deep tracks on her cheeks. I wipe her clean. She looks like a child, lying there in sleep.

The next morning the women gathered to paint henna on my hands and feet. There was singing and sweetmeats and excitement. I sat, nervous and trembling, my heart loaded with dread.
     Midway through the ceremony we heard screaming outside. The shouts of men. One voice higher than all the others.
     A fat old woman brought the news. The neighbour’s boy had run mad. He was screaming in the street. I dared not ask what he was screaming.
      Outside there were shouts and arguments and excitement. In the room the whispers began. The eyes of the women in the room began to shift to me. The whispers hummed and buzzed around the collection of women. One word I heard. It hissed in that room again and again “izzat” . . . “izzat” . . .
     My hands trembled so much that the patterns could not be laid on.
     And then my brother came. I ran to him though the women tried to stop me. His face was grim. “What have you done?” he asked me.
     “Nothing!” I said. “Nothing. You must believe me. I would never lie to you.” “Our izzat is being dragged in the street outside.”
     “I swear I have done nothing you have to be ashamed of. I swear by the love I have for you.”
     He looked at me a slow time, then he took me in his arms. I thought he meant to hold me because I was afraid. Like he used to when we were children and I woke at night screaming. I thought he meant to hold me to his heart.

The circle is so perfect it looks painted on. It is just under the left breast. A tiny red circle, ringed with black.

Only when I turn her over is the whole story told. The exit wound is gaping. Her shoulder blade is gapped and incom-plete. Clots of blood slide from the wound and splatter the table. The blast has broken her back. She hangs limply in my arms. I find no bullet even when I probe the wound deeply.

It hurts she cries. Oh, it hurts. Oh, it hurts.

It takes me the rest of the night to clean the wound and fill it. All through the night she cries like a child. Cries and cries.

I loved my brother, she whimpers, I loved him.

I washed the clots out of the dark mouth of the wound and thought of all the betrayals I had seen lie naked upon my wash-ing table. Women who had their most beloved turn upon them in anger, in hatred, in violence. Women killed by husbands, lovers, sons. One woman with the skin flayed from her back. Another black with burns and bruises. She begged me not to let her children know so I painted her carefully through one long night, mixing clay and rice powder and laying it on in layers. Another had taken a face full of acid at the hands of a thwarted suitor. She had been vain of her looks and pleaded with me to do something. But there was nothing I could do to restore skin that had melted away, bone that had dissolved. So many women. So much pain.

I do my best for them. Wherever they come from. Whatever the betrayal—here under my hands they are soothed. I sing to them sometimes when their hurt and pain will not be eased.

I sang the girl a lullaby. One that I sing to my own children. Her whimpers faded into silence.

Her brother came for her in the morning. His eyes were red. But he carried himself with dignity. He is a man now. He has done his duty by the family and is well satisfied.