On the day I made the chameli garland, my monthly bleeding had ended, which meant I had to go to the maulvi’s house, instead of watching Sultan prepare for school.
As with all the homes in the village, the smell of burning dung emanated from Zakia’s kitchen, a pyre to buffalo waste. Before we reached the front door, we could detect the odor, but the pungent smoke comforted me more than Zakia, in her unfathomable rigidity.
In the courtyard, close to the front door, Zakia sat on a low stool at her outdoor kitchen. The two clay stoves that made up her kitchen were built in the corner of the veranda. At some distance was the pump that served as the sole source of water in the one-room house.
Her two other students for the morning lessons, Hamida and Nafissa, twin sisters from next door, were preparing the morning meal. They sat close to Zakia. Hamida rocked as she kneaded the dough to make rotis, and Nafissa sliced the onions to prepare the main meal later that day.
Hamida and Nafissa cleaned Zakia’s house, washed her clothes, swept her floors, and cooked her meals in exchange for her teaching them to read, for which they were beholden to her. Their parents and grandparents had never had the opportunity or the reason to learn how to read the Holy Book, or any other book, for that matter.
Like Taaj, Maalik, and I, the adults must have chosen ways to avoid learning from a teacher like ours when they were young. We slipped into the front courtyard without Zakia’s noticing us. If we stood silent for half an hour, she would not expect to teach us, and we would leave when the time was up.
The early-morning shadows of the lone lemon tree in the front courtyard camouflaged us for a few minutes. I stood close enough to see her wrinkled clothes and unbrushed braid, covered hurriedly with a blue dopatta. Zakia was preoccupied, the frown on her forehead holding tight to thoughts that she would never share.
She rolled up the sleeve of her right arm and then rolled it back down again, sensing Hamida and Nafissa halting their dough making and onion peeling to stare at the bright scars on her taut left wrist, contrasting with three green glass bangles.
As she looked away from them, she saw the three of us in the doorway and spoke harshly. “Where were you all buried this morning? When the maulvi comes, you boys will get a beating.”
Then she looked at me.
“And you, daughter of a nabob, what’s with the flowers on your wrist? You think you’re a movie star?”
We didn’t respond but took special care to straighten our shoes as we took them off to sit on the reed mat in the courtyard.
“Yes, you—princess without a state! Where have you been?”
I straightened myself and pulled my head higher, my bruise barely healed from the time she had hit me with a coal catcher for laughing when she’d stumbled. I wouldn’t let that happen again.
Under my glare, she busied herself stirring the onions in the oil. She hunched on the stool, covered with ashes that Hamida had just blown over her while helping to build the fire. She looked old, and I felt even more beautiful. But I didn’t have enough feelings to feel sorry for her. She was quick to remind me why I shouldn’t.
“You didn’t throw out all the garbage yesterday. Look at that corner, piled with filth, covered in flies,” she scolded Hamida.
Amman Bhaggan scolded me about keeping the place clean too, but it didn’t bother me as it did when it came from Zakia. Would she sound different if she had her own child? I, the motherless child, and she, the childless mother. Did we behave differently because of what we lacked? Would I have had more respect if my mother had taught me? Would she have had more love if she’d had a child?
Unable to stop myself, I blurted out, “You only talk to her like that because you know her mother is afraid to say anything to you.”
I glanced at Hamida to see if she realized that I was trying to protect her, but she had already moved on to cleaning the clay stove—an unnecessary task for an outdoor stove that would capture dust regardless of how often it was cleaned. Everything here was covered in dust. And the dust was covered with a layer of flies.
I attempted a deeper stab: “No wonder Allah doesn’t grant you a baby. He knows you wouldn’t care for one.”
“How dare you!” she yelled. “After all I do for all you brainless idiots. This is how you repay me? Get out!”
Then she took off her slipper and threw it at me, and I ducked, and it flew past, barely missing the maulvi, who, having returned from the mosque, stood in the doorway.
I covered my face with my chador to hide my smile and waited for the maulvi to explode, but before he could react, the sound of raucous movie music emanated from the house next door: “When you whisper my name, I die in ecstasy.”
It was the soundtrack of one of the most popular movies of the time, and it drowned out all other noise.
Just then, Zakia fainted, toppling off her perch on the stool. She had a habit of reacting to loud noises like that.
Hamida and Nafissa rushed to her.
“Bring her some water!” one said.
“No, rub her feet,” the other suggested.
The two boys jumped up from their lessons, pleased at the diversion. “What happened to her?” Maalik asked.
“It’s the loud music,” Hamida whispered. “Our father can’t hear, so he keeps the volume up, and she faints every time he does that.”
Taaj raised an eyebrow and grinned, though he stayed silent, since the maulvi still stood in the doorway.
Now he moved closer to his wife, but we knew he would never touch her in front of us.
“Help your khala jaan,” he said to the girls, sitting close to her.
Hamida started rubbing Zakia’s feet and gestured to her sister. “Help me straighten her. She’s too heavy for me to move.”
The twins tried to bring their teacher back to consciousness. They still hadn’t started their lessons and would have to memorize the page before they left. Then they had to clean the lentils too.
Zakia came to and pointed weakly toward a glass of water on the table in the corner.
“Hand me that glass. The maulvi blessed that water. It’ll give me the strength I need to handle my trauma.”
The maulvi reached down to retrieve his wife’s slipper, which lay on the ground nearby. He lifted it and gently placed it at the edge of her stool.
“And why is Tara standing, doing nothing?” He looked at me.
I looked directly at him, aware of his half-shut eye, and said, “I want to read the Holy Book with melody, like Sultan.”
“Only boys can do that,” he responded in a subdued voice, like when he explained to Sultan the times for prayer. I listened carefully to what he told the boys. Their lessons were so much more interesting than my mere memorizations in a language I would never understand.
“The first call is before sunrise. The second is in the after-noon—the time of necessity, as it is called. The third is when there’s enough time for a man to walk six miles before the sun sets,” he explained to Sultan, anticipating that, one day, Sultan might take on the role of village maulvi himself. I knew that I, even as a grown woman, would be expected only to follow the call to prayer, never to lead it, as a man would.
“The fourth is when the sun is twelve degrees below the horizon.”
I never asked him what he meant by that. Maybe now I would.
“The fifth, and final, is when the red thread of the sun disappears,” he ended.
If I couldn’t make the call to prayer, I would be sure I could read the Holy Book with the harmony I’d heard when Sultan had learned.
“But why can’t I? I’ve completed the primer and have memorized the prayers Bibi Zakia taught me. Why can’t I read in harmony, like the boys?”
“Because your massi Zakia here doesn’t know how to read like that, so she can’t teach you.”
I felt an even stronger urge now that I knew that Zakia didn’t know how to read that way.
“Then you teach me.”
I wanted to take down the bride-red, brocade-covered Holy Book and caress it lovingly in my hands. I would unwrap it and place it delicately on the intricately carved wooden reading stand. Then, very deliberately, I would open it at the silk bookmark and luxuriate on the green, black, and white Arabic script, with the delicate translation below. Then, like Sultan, I would place my right-hand pointer on the page, take a deep breath, and begin reciting what I read.
The maulvi would follow my finger as it underlined each word, scrutinizing for blunders. His left eye, permanently shut with an ax mark, would move as if it could see.
Neither of us would completely understand what I read. It was in Arabic, and neither of us knew it, but it sounded so beautiful.
As he followed my finger on the page, I would not dare look at his face. Maybe if I could look into his unseeing eye, I would glimpse the memory of despair about a younger son with no option but to teach reluctant children how to decipher this mysterious script from centuries earlier.
I would see the son forced to marry his older cousin because no other suitor was reaching out to her. She came with a dowry of furniture for two rooms, just enough to fill the home he would receive in the village where he chose to lead in prayer.
His wife would teach the village girls, like Hamida and Nafissa, who spent the afternoon cooking and cleaning in exchange for a half-hour lesson of reading the primer to the book each day.
As if realizing my wish, the maulvi sat on the charpoy on the veranda and told me to sit next to him.
“Follow me,” he said.
And I did. I inhaled till I felt dizzy, squeezed my larynx, and began with the best of intentions:
Aoozobillahe minishaita nirajemm: I seek refuge from Allah from the outcast Satan!
Amman Bhaggan was right. Reading the Holy Book was peaceful. Each verse rhymed with the next, creating a familiar harmony that helped me forget the hawk-eyed maulvi following my every note.
I feared the maulvi’s gaze, even though I had no reason to. Nothing he had done had caused me harm, but I knew what he did. I had heard everything that his wife had shared with Bibi Saffiya and Amman Bhaggan. In hushed voices, she had told them how he forced himself on her to create a child that her barren womb would never bear. The violent secondhand memory had seared my mind. I hurriedly finished the verse, not sure that I had the strength to continue my pursuit of finding my way into a world designated for men.