Salman died twice. The first time was when some sailors in torn robes and bare feet, colored rags binding their heads, knocked on the door to Salman’s home and informed Athurayyaa that on the way to India, the ship had foundered on the coast near Bombay. No one had escaped alive.
Salman had traveled to India two or three times before, with cargoes of dried dates that he had worked long days and nights to harvest and prepare. They boiled the dates in huge vats over a constantly replenished supply of wood, the hissing of the boiling water sending terror into the children gathered around, waiting for the water to be poured off and the dates to be lifted out to dry in the sun. The children were paid twenty bisa for every reed mat they could cover with dates, lining them up carefully so that the sun would reach each individual date. It was an annual ritual and a bit of a party as well. Salman’s keen involvement extended to accompanying this export to India himself. But it wasn’t just about the dates. Every time, he came back with a pile of books for Athurayya: legendary exploits and biographies and the ancient reports of the pious ancestors’ lives and deeds. He had also acquired high-quality silks, gold-embroidered cushions, ornately fashioned wooden boxes, finely worked silver kohl pots, spices, and tea. He expanded his shop, and his commerce.
When the sailors left Athurayya on that day, the skies opened and a yellow rain pelted down. Athurayyaa put on white mourning clothes for the third time in her life. But this time, and for the first time, when all the mirrors in the house were covered by heavy black fabric, it was because this was what she wanted. But still, she could not put to rest a sense of bewilderment and denial. In fact, she found it harder and harder to believe the news that Salman had died; that he had drowned and might well be lying inside the belly of a whale or a large fish. Less than a month later, Salman himself came back, loaded down with his precious mercantile goods. He opened up his shop, to the light, to laughter, and to new goods. Athurayyaa peeled off her mourning clothes as if she had emerged from an oppressive nightmare and said to him, “I knew you were still alive.”
But he died a second time. The relative who had gone with him to Bombay so that Salman could seek treatment for respiratory problems came back to tell the widow that he had buried Salman with his own hands in the Muslims’ cemetery there. The Indian physicians had been unsuccessful in treating him. His heart, which had held nothing but love for Athurayyaa, had erupted. In the final moments of his life, he had her image before him, exactly as he had first seen her when he came back from Zanzibar: a young woman with fright in her eyes, a look that made him dizzy with desire to answer her needs, and hands that had never been scratched or scarred. A very young woman who had buried a son and two husbands before she learned how to braid her own hair.
This time, the certainty of his death was a lance that settled directly in her heart, burying itself deeper and deeper until her heart erupted just as his had. This time, Athurayyaa felt the same sense of shyness and innocent shame that had paralyzed her on the day she married him; the shyness that propelled her to believe that she did not deserve this gift, that it was no longer suitable for her to joyously celebrate a wedding, to want to make herself pretty, to marry, once she had put two husbands in the ground. When Salman died for the second time, she felt this same onrush of guilty innocence, and that is what convinced her that he was truly dead. This time, her sense of embarrassment welled up because she was still alive—she was breathing air and tasting food and walking among the living. It was then that she felt it was no longer right, no longer suitable, for her to live, to go on, to pick up the petty little matters of life on this earth. And so the sharp arrow edge of certainty that Salman was dead wound deep into her heart, further and further, slowly but determinedly. Deeper and deeper, until her heart erupted and died. In less than a year, she followed him.
After Athurayyaa died, she was wrapped in the length of fine cloth that her daughter, Hasina, had sent home while still a bride: a gift from Burundi, along with her first letter to her mother. The color had faded even though Athurayyaa had never touched that fabric. She had always waited for the moment when her child would return to her embrace; only then would she drape that beautiful length of fabric over her body. As it happened, though, the moment never came, and the one instruction she ever gave about this cloth was that it was the only shroud she would wear after her death.