The maulvi mumbled a shabash for my first attempt at reading the Holy Book with harmony, but I didn’t think my lessons would continue. I sat with my hands in my lap, unsure of what to do next, and he spoke softly.
“Leave it here.” He gestured to the book. “I need to read it before I eat. Go home now.”
I gave a perfunctory salaam to Zakia, who was now upright, with the two girls still hovering around her. The boys had already left. They had to go to school. I pulled my chador tightly over my head and rushed toward the front door.
Beams of sunlight reflected off the marbles in Maria’s right hand as she juggled them and then caught all three in her left hand. Her tiny fingers strained to keep them from falling onto the dusty pathway just outside the maulvi’s house.
I stumbled across the maulvi’s doorstep toward my friend, glad to be distracted by her dexterity. As if sensing an audience, she looked up and caught my admiration. She embraced me with her warm smile.
Abandoning her pride in having caught the marbles, she praised me instead.
“Your recitation, it sounded so beautiful. How did you convince Maulvi to teach you?”
With ease, I projected my accomplishments for Maria’s veneration, and, with the same ease, she embraced my explanation. I badly needed to comfort myself by maintaining control of the situation, even if my perception was a skewed interpretation of reality.
“He had no choice this time. I wasn’t going to let him go.”
Still feeling uneasy, I switched the focus to her, declaring, “You should be happy you only have to go to the church on Sunday. I must do a lot more work than you. I have the morning lessons, and then I’m supposed to pray five times a day. You have it much easier than me, sitting juggling marbles on the streets.”
“Did you see how I caught all the marbles in one hand?” She stood up, smiling, with her hands on her hips.
But I felt my self-control returning, and so I ignored her question. Sensing the putdown, with a turn of her head, Maria signaled her impatience, but I was her match.
“If I had time like you, I would have done better than that. And I can still beat you at hopscotch.” I didn’t want the situation to slip out of my control.
“But you’re taller than me,” she mumbled, clarifying why I could jump across the big squares that we both knew I drew large enough to make her stumble.
Maria’s smiling lips straightened, and she turned to walk in the opposite direction. I didn’t want her to know that I would rather have spent with her the half hour I’d been at the maulvi’s house.
Instead I pulled my dopatta around my head to shift the moth hole to one side and hide it in the folds, pulled my shoulders back, and lifted my still-developing chest. I would never admit to Maria that I sought out her company to build my confidence. I decided to follow her but picked up speed so it seemed as if I were leading the way. I would join her in helping her sister, Stella, and take her to Saffiya’s home.
We walked past the mud houses, and I pulled her aside when she wanted to step on dog shit in the middle of the road. We could hear the village sounds of chickens, cows, and the tractor humming in the distance. Somehow, our silence was louder than those sounds.
As Maria’s parents’ one-room home came into view, the high-pitched, frenzied screeching of Jannat, Maria’s mother, warned us to slow down. As we got closer, we realized Stella was the focus of her ire.
“I swear, my mouth fills with bile. Even your father doesn’t smell that bad. Can’t you smell the foul stench of egg? And why does he stare at you? What does he see in a cripple like you? I tell you, he is deranged. Crazy.”
Jannat’s breathlessness and the swish of the broom as she berated her daughter Stella indicated that she was busy sweeping the one-room hut.
“Sultan is just like his father. The old hag Bhaggan thinks her husband was perfect, but he wasn’t. The whole village knows his reality.”
Maria slipped her hand into mine as we moved closer to the door. I had never heard anyone disparage Bhaggan’s husband, or Sultan, for that matter. Had Jannat always disapproved of them, or was this one of her fits that would force Maria to return to me for company?
“Bhaggan’s husband came and went to the main house as if he belonged. And now his son does the same. Why does he go into the room where you sit to do your embroidery? I’ve seen him stare at you when you limp by him.”
I was surprised to hear her criticism. When had Sultan shown so much interest in Stella? Jannat was on a rampage.
“Quiet boys are more dangerous. I don’t know his intentions, but you keep your distance from him.”
I was outraged that Jannat, the crazy woman, was maligning Sultan. Why would he be attracted to Stella? He had confided in me, shared his fears, and now Jannat was insinuating that he preferred Stella, not me. Had Maria been right when she’d said Sultan had given her a notebook for her flowers? Impossible!
Maria and I stopped outside and waited until Jannat was finished yelling at Stella. We heard the broom swish across the bare courtyard, and then a pile of broken glass was swept outside the front door. Jannat’s head appeared at the bottom of the doorway, as if she were squatting on the floor.
I pulled Maria behind the open door, but not soon enough. Jannat caught the movement of Maria’s bright pink dopatta and lashed out at us. “And where did you die? You’re never home. Always following Tara, as if you’re her tail.”
Maria started mumbling before she made eye contact with her mother. “We saw a munyari wala selling all kinds of cloth and red glass bangles near the canal. You would have liked what he was selling. I thought I would come and tell you.”
Maria’s lies sounded so true, even I wanted to believe them. Falsehoods became the truths she told her mother to protect herself from being beaten. Lies were her self-preservation. They were how she made sense of life.
“What would you tell me? That your father has found gold in the gutters. That I could exchange that gold for a new outfit and the scarlet glass bangles. What was written for me is worse than I thought. Stella can’t walk. You walk and talk too much. My babies are dead. What am I left with?”
“Don’t say that, Amman,” Stella said from her perch on the peerhi in the courtyard. “God blesses us all with his brilliance.”
Stoic Stella had spoken. If her sister’s chattiness grated my nerves, Stella’s level-headedness destroyed them. What made her so calm in such chaos? Jannat felt as I did.
Jannat’s glare couldn’t penetrate her daughter’s calm, so she used words instead. “God must have blinded me, then, because I see nothing. He didn’t choose you or me to bless.”
Jannat brushed the last pieces of glass to the left of the doorstep. They sparkled in the sunlight. She stood up, and her knees made a noisy clicking sound. She threw the broom in the corner and, without looking at Maria, addressed her.
“Collect the pieces of glass, Maria, and add them to the pile of glass in the bin. When the garbageman comes along, we can sell the glass, but don’t let him trick you by giving you cane-sugar crispies in exchange. Take cash.”
Maria looked away, as if in protest. The money from broken glass was never worth much, and the crispies were such a treat. Jannat pretended not to notice and continued her tirade. “Well, who else will give us money? Tara’s bespoken mother, Bibi Saffiya, doesn’t care for us. She just keeps piling on more work for me, without ever paying me. You know what she said last week?”
Maria and I stood silently. We knew she didn’t care for our answer. My thoughts wandered to the previous week, when I had found a crumpled five-rupee note under Bibi Saffiya’s bed as I was straightening the covers. It was tied tight in the corner of my dopatta. Maria knew about it, but it seemed she’d either forgotten or wasn’t betraying my secret for the time being.
“That’s enough, Amman,” Stella said softly.
“Enough for whom? You don’t even want me to tell the truth. You’re all liars, and when I tell the truth, you tell me to be silent.”
“We know the truth, Amman,” Stella persisted calmly. “We know that we’re of another faith. We know that we’re poor. And we know we must work for the rest of our lives. What else is there to know?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing to know. Go! Both of you. All three of you. Maria, hold your sister’s hand so she doesn’t stumble. Take her to her corner in the big house. And keep that hero Sultan away from her. I’ve seen how he stares at her. Your father will kill him before I can get my hands on him.”
Stella’s face turned orange as she looked down, embarrassed by her mother’s crassness.
I twisted the chameli garland on my wrist, now wilting in the heat of the early morning. I wondered if Maria would tell her how Sultan had pinned it to my braid that morning. A few buds fell on the newly swept floor, and Stella looked at them. Was she thinking of pressing them in the notebook Sultan had given her?
The thought upset me. I felt self-conscious and awkward. To build my confidence, I started rambling, saying the first thing that came to me: “Jannat khala, Bibi Saffiya will expect you to be early today.”
“What’s the problem now? What’s happening today? I come early every day. Why should I come earlier? I washed the courtyard yesterday, and now my back is killing me. She thinks we’re animals. We don’t need to rest.”
And then I remembered the conversation with Bhaggan from the previous night.
“Amman Bhaggan said you might get paid today. She was paid yesterday, so she’s going to the shrine to give a deg of biryani, large enough to feed all the supplicants, a gift to the pir to pray for Sultan bhai to pass his eighth-grade exams.”
Sultan’s name triggered another mouthful from Jannat.
“That son of an owl. He’ll never pass his exams. She thinks he’ll save her from that hell of a kitchen. But her kismet is no better than mine. At least she lives in the house and doesn’t have to pay the electricity bill. I have a hundred expenses, and we all work, but nothing to my name. Tell Bhaggan I want to go, too. I have some prayers that have not yet been answered.”
As I thought of the money I had taken from under Saffiya’s bed, I wondered what I would buy. Maybe a bottle of shampoo or a soap to entice Sultan away from Stella.
As if she had read my thoughts, Stella caught my eye and I looked at her cloth bag, covered with practice embroidery stitches that she’d done using leftover multicolored threads.
I had checked that bag once when she had gone to the bathroom. Inside was a red rag with five different-size needles pinned to it. One plastic pouch was filled with skeins of silk threads, and another one was filled with thicker cotton threads. Two small pairs of scissors were wrapped in a rubber band and had been slid into a side pocket. None of this had interested me then.
“Here, let me take the bag,” I demanded. I wanted to see if Maria was right about the notebook she said Sultan had given her sister. I ran to pick it up and glanced inside when I did. The bag held more than embroidery materials. A heavier object weighed it down, and as I placed it on my shoulder, my fingers traced the straight lines of a cardboard-covered book at the bottom of the bag. I caressed it and then rushed ahead, not wanting to hold Stella’s hand as Maria helped her sister stumble toward the house.