June 1988
One day she blows back in like the monsoon. Wild hanks of hair escaping from her bun. Her eyes too bright. Her skin too shiny. Her hands like two frantic birds.
“Come, come!” she says to me when I walk in the front door after school. She pats the seat. “Come and sit next to Mama!”
I obey. It has only been six months since I saw her last but my body responds as though a girl has taken a seat next to me on the school bus. Everything curls in on itself: my shoulders my fingers my toes. I press my knees together. I stare at the loose elastic thread dangling from the top of one of my socks.
All these months I wanted her back I begged for it I prayed for it and now—
I force myself to look at her. Something is different about her but what? Of course her hair is a bit longer. She is thinner and paler. But it is not these superficial things. Something is different in her. Someone has hollowed her out and filled her afresh. I think of Father Dubois’s cyclostyled sheets. But they treat women better Latifah had promised. Why then can I not shake the feeling that the person sitting next to me is not the Mama I knew in the hills but the fairy-tale magician’s decoy daughter? The shapeshifting witch. The cyborg. To think that among my prayers was an ardent but I-feared-unrealistic wish for a completely different Mama i.e. one with whom my fantasy future would be possible. But this different Mama is not the one I prayed for, inspiring in me no soaring hope but only a deep unease. A tingling a lightheadedness a raising of hairs and hackles. I must not be tricked by her exact resemblance to Mama. I must not be lulled into a foolish trust.
“Aren’t you happy to see me, Kannu?” she says.
Latifah frowns. “Yusuf,” she murmurs. “We call him Yusuf.”
Her smile perfectly unbroken, cyborg Mama efficiently processes this input and repeats, “Yusuf. Yes. Aren’t you happy to see me?”
“Of course he’s happy to see you,” Latifah says. “His own mother! Which boy won’t be happy to see his own mother after six months?”
I can tell you which boy. I’ll give you two guesses and a clue: he’s at work at the moment but he’ll be back late tonight.
I ought to say it: I’m happy to see you Mama. But a stone weighs down my tongue. A stone in my mouth a stone in my belly a stone in my heart. Mama is back but while the old Mama would have been hard enough—so much to explain or not-explain, so much to ask or not-ask, so much to forgive or not-forgive—this weird new Mama represents the end of whatever dreams I was mad enough to keep alive even cautiously. She is here and she is real and the realness of her in the clear light of day forces me to see that nothing will ever be the same again. My old life is gone forever. There is no coming back or going back for any of us.
At lunch Mama eats fish and chicken like a professional flesh-eater. Like a person who never dreamt it was possible to abstain let alone actually stopped eating them. Such gusto such flaunting: she so badly wants me to look at her that the air crackles from the force of her intentions. But her attempt at telekinesis fails. I do not turn my head.
Afterwards Mama follows me up the stairs to the bedroom. We’re alone for the first time in many months. Perhaps years. Have we ever been alone together just the two of us?
She sits on Reza’s bed. “I’ve come back, see?”
What am I supposed to say to that?
“I’m sorry, Kannu,” she says. I snatch this small good sign up as it flits by and cling to it: at least my name hasn’t actually been erased from her database and replaced with Yusuf. At least she was just pretending for Latifah. “I’m sorry for what you must have gone through. But everything will be okay now. We won’t stay here. I’ll get a job. We can rent something. I still have contacts at the newspaper you know? My old colleagues, most of them are still around.”
I don’t want to look at her. All this puzzling about what is different is starting to give me a headache. My eyes are tired. My forehead hot and tight.
“Say something, Kannu. What do you think? What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. I’m not thinking about anything.”
“Please?”
“I’m not thinking about anything.”
For a few seconds she seems to hold her breath. Then she squeezes her left hand with her right and exhales and says, “You and your brother just the same.”
She looks at me with her too-bright eyes. The threat of her tears forcing me to keep mine locked away when all I want to do is to lie down on the cold floor and weep.
“Just the same, both of you. You think I’m a bad mother. Your brother, from small itself, he could look at me as if … as if I was I don’t know what. A beggar, a prostitute, something even worse. Tell me, if I’m such a terrible mother, then what about the mothers who beat and burn and starve their own children? It’s time for you to know such things happen, Kannu, and—”
“What about Papa? When is he coming back?”
She freezes. Mouth open. Hands in mid-wring. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“You said everything will be okay. So that means—”
“I said everything will be okay, yes. That doesn’t mean I’m promising you a happily-ever-after fairy-tale ending, Kannu. I can’t control everything.”
“But when is he coming back?”
She throws her hands up. “How should I know? I’m not sitting at the right hand of Dr Mahathir. How should I know when they will let him out?”
“Then ask them.”
“Ask them! Wah, so easy, huh? How powerful do you think I am? If I go around asking too many questions, straightaway I’ll be back in the lockup, you know that? They won’t think twice.”
A silence rolls in like a smell. Downstairs the kitchen clock chimes. Latifah calls out to Fauziah to stop the roti man. Fauziah runs to the front grille with the house keys.
“I’m sorry,” Mama says. “I know you want everything to be like before. You want everything to be as good as new. But what can really be as good as new? Not me. Not you. Not even your Papa. The best thing we can do is move on and make a new life.”
“And just forget about Papa? Pretend he never existed?”
She covers her face and through her hands says, “Hai, hai, Kannu! How you immediately jump from A to Z! Who said anything about ‘pretend he never existed’? He will come back when he comes back.”
When can I cover my face? When can I speak through the cover of my hands? On what future date in what parallel universe will I get to be the child and she the adult? Some things never change after all I realize bitterly as the wet sound of her sniffing through fresh tears fills the room.
“And then what?” I ask her. “How will he find us?”
She shakes her head and blows a great puff of air out through her mouth. “We’ll leave a trail of crumbs. Like in Hansel and Gretel like that. Okay? Happy?”
And despite all my resolve all my vows to remain vigilant our future stretches before us again just like that. Mama and Kannu and Reza. Reza and Kannu and Mama. (Almost) A Proper Family. How can I scratch out a story I so badly want to tell myself?