Saman Shad
‘Open your eyes, Mina.’
Her eyes slowly willed themselves to part. Bright sunlight flooded in, each beam shining with the vigour of a new day. Blinding her temporarily. Leading her to see only shadows and red, blue flashes.
‘Mina.’ The voice asserted itself again. ‘Mina.’
Who is it? This person? Is it a person?
The dark shape of their oval head appears before her, shadowed by the light. Ammy, she swiftly thinks. Warm rays of comfort pulsate through her. Suddenly the load of that heavy metal plate, that grey, antiseptic metal that clanged inside of her, that acted like a hollow dead weight impeding her every breath, is lifted. Suddenly, everything is better. Her heart feels lighter. As if it is able to beat with a normal rhythm again. A rhythm that reminded her of the dhol they played at weddings. Doof-doof! Doof-doof! Each slap of the drum driving the beat forward.
‘Ammy!’ she almost squealed with excitement. With relief.
‘No, no, Mina. Not Ammy. Aunty,’ the shadowy voice says slowly. ‘Aunty.’ The repetition of the word hammers that rusty nail even deeper through her heart.
But she is unwilling to give up. She wants to hold on to it, that brief little speck of a moment, when suddenly life seemed to shine again. When for a minuscule instant she had recaptured hope.
‘Ammy?’
‘No, Mina, no,’ her aunt repeats patiently. ‘Ammy is dead.’
Three round, milky-brown biscuits sit on a little white plate. To her they look like a face. The face of a ghost wailing. Its two blank eyes dead. Its mouth forever frozen in a howl. A howl that perhaps never had time to escape.
Her aunt sighs. Her first day here and already she was a Burden. A Picky Eater. A Problem Child. She’d been presented with a variety of foods, the names of many of which she hadn’t heard before, and refused them all.
Tuna sandwiches, they’d called them. But they smelt like something the cats in her alley ate from the gutter. Nutella on toast, they said. But it was brown and sticky and didn’t look too appetizing. Jaffa cakes – ‘Look, it’s chocolate. Choc-o-late,’ they repeated slowly. Trying to entice her in some way. Not mentioning the orange goo oozing out from the middle.
She didn’t want to say she never really ate chocolate. That she’d never liked the taste of it when, on occasion, she’d had some. When her second and third cousins back home had saved their rupees and bought the expensive treat and hid themselves behind the cupboard in the living room, away from all the little nuisances like herself, and gorged themselves before they were finally found out. Back then she had pretended to be curious about it. Pretended to want it so bad that she cried and nagged them into giving her a bite. She’d tried hard to hide the look of distaste that unfolded across her face as soon as she’d popped the brown block in her mouth and felt it melting on her tongue, the horrible bittersweet aftertaste quickly moving to the corners of her mouth.
‘Get the digestives,’ her aunt had said to her cousins as a last resort. They didn’t hear her, occupied as they were by a toothy man in a bright, patterned jacket on TV. ‘Digestives! Digestives!’ her aunt exclaimed, as one of them slowly dragged himself off to do as she asked.
Her aunt didn’t look like she moved much. She had big meaty upper arms that reminded Mina of chicken thighs attached to narrow little chicken legs – those being her aunt’s lower arms. Her body seemed to be squeezing itself out of her shirt, the flesh creating a river of ripples down her sides, straining to be let loose from its confines. Her aunt’s body didn’t seem to belong to her head, which was small and oval, like her Ammy’s. Oh, no. No, no, she must not do that. She must not remind herself of that. She must stop that. Stop that! Stop it! But it was too late.
‘She’s crying again, Muuuum,’ her cousin who came bearing the face of a ghost on a plate casually stated to his mother, who too had become distracted by the excitable loud man on TV.
‘Hain? What? Oh, no, Mina. You must not. You have cried enough. You mustn’t cry any more.’
Mina pretended to understand. Knew it was for the best. She gritted her teeth and gave a firm nod. But the tears didn’t stop. They kept flowing and flowing, as they had done from the moment her world had come to an end.
Her aunt tsked and dabbed Mina’s face with a worn kitchen towel that had once been used to wipe spills and surfaces. Its rough texture scraped her tears and scratched her nose. She had been crying so much, they had stopped wasting tissues on her. ‘Chi, chi, so many tissues. They don’t come for free, you know,’ her aunt had said. Already she was starting to become aware of her status as a Financial Burden. At least she wasn’t just a single type of Burden.
‘Look,’ her aunt said. ‘They are only biscuits. Only plain, simple biscuits. Eat them. You must. Eat them.’
Her aunt seemed to like repeating herself. Perhaps she had learned that repetition created conviction. And when you spoke with conviction, people obeyed your every word.
‘Eat!’ she said. ‘Eat! Eat!’ Her face didn’t display any emotion. She didn’t seem upset or angry. She was just compelled to ensure that Mina ate. It was of the utmost importance that some form of food went into Mina’s mouth.
Mina didn’t want to prove her aunt’s repetition theory wrong, so she picked up one of the ghost’s eyes (better to have one eye and one mouth, Mina thought, than two eyes and no mouth) and bit into it. Her aunt smiled with satisfaction. The bone-dry biscuit broke into tiny crumbs on Mina’s tongue and went straight down her thirsty throat, causing her to choke.
‘Arre, what’s wrong with you, you silly girl? Didn’t they feed you biscuits back in Pakistan?’
Mina knew her aunt didn’t mean to be so insensitive. Perhaps she thought that since Mina didn’t speak much, she didn’t understand the words being spoken to her, so it didn’t really matter what was said in front of her. Or so Mina liked to think.
Her aunt’s first few calls for water went unheard, but finally they got through and one of the sisters went to answer it.
When Mina had drunk a full glass of water and her tears and coughs had died down, her aunt asked again what it was she wanted to eat. But Mina didn’t know how to tell her. In a place where they just ate dry foods like bread and biscuits all day, how could they understand?
‘Maybe you should sleep and we will start fresh tomorrow. Hain?’
Sleep seemed to be the agreed form of escape for both Mina and her aunt. Though it was still daylight outside, it was as if they both preferred this option. Even at this age, Mina knew that, being young, she could will her body into sleep no matter what the time or situation. She looked at the adults around her, who had no choice but to be bogged down by the awful reality of the world, and she knew she was lucky to be able to dream when she wanted.
Upstairs in bed, Mina ignored the beams of sunlight that wanted to barge through the curtains and excitedly tell her, Look, it’s sunny outside. It’s time to play. Come out and play, Mina! There’s still time for fun.
She resolutely shut her eyes against them. She was not going to be distracted by their superficial folly. They were not going to take her away from the far better world of dreams that awaited her. Sure, lately the dreams hadn’t been so good. But she remembered her grandmother telling her that no dreams were bad. You should never say dreams are bad, dreams are just dreams. And they are always good. If you have a nightmare, just take it as a sign. But never say it was bad.
She wished she had asked her grandmother why that was so. Why you should never say you’d had a bad dream. But she hadn’t. And now of course it was too late.
She remembered her grandmother covering her face with her white dupatta and turning away from her as she left for the airport, as if the sight of Mina reminded her of a thought more painful than she could bear.
Mina – the tiny splinter of pain everyone desperately wanted to remove.
She closed her eyes and willed the dreams to take her. Whether they were good or not so good, they were still taking her away from here. And anything had to be better than here.
Her three English cousins, two girls and one boy, who were between three and eight years older than her, didn’t seem too taken by her. Initially she’d been a momentary distraction. They’d pinched her cheeks and smiled at her charitably. But soon the call from the glowing box in the corner of their living room became too hard for any of them to ignore. So they spent most of their time kneeling in front of it with mouths wide open, like worshippers at a temple.
Back home, Mina remembered, they didn’t really watch TV. There never seemed any time for it. Days were full of school and of playing with cousins, and neighbours, and friends of friends of friends, and of eating food from street carts despite the many adult warnings against it, and sure, of getting the occasional beating, which did sting initially but they were just slaps and no one really took such things to heart, and of filling your lungs with the brown Karachi air as you ran down muddy alleyways, and of washing yourself with warm water from buckets and cold water from taps, and of being fed by hand morsels of food which at the time didn’t taste like anything spectacular, but which now seemed to be the tastiest meals ever cooked.
Mina’s stomach rumbled at the thought.
Sometimes, when there were many of them, because most of the time the house seemed to be overrun by a whole host of people, all the kids would gather and sit in a circle around her grandmother,, who sat bearing a large plate of food. One by one, into each of their mouths, she would pop fingerfuls of food which they would then quickly devour. But no matter how hungry you were, you had to wait your turn. Mina remembered her mouth salivating when she knew she was just one child away, and also the fights some of them would get in about who’d had the bigger mouthful.
But it was the last mouthful everyone wanted. No matter whose turn it was, the last mouthful was a free for all. Because the one who ate the last mouthful was lucky. ‘If you eat the last mouthful of food,’ she remembers being told, ‘then you will get the same amount of strength as if you had eaten all the food on the plate yourself. And that means you are very fortunate.’
Usually the last mouthful went to the youngest or best-behaved child, which mostly meant that Mina got to eat it.
But none of that mattered now, of course. Here you could eat a whole plateful, or could, in the case of her English cousins, pick at half the plate of food and throw the other half in the bin. The sight of which had made her wince. There were no lucky mouthfuls of food here. Or perhaps the lucky mouthfuls were the ones that actually got eaten.
Mina squeezed her eyes shut. Come on, sleep. This should be easy. It always had been. But her stomach continued to grumble. Why hadn’t she eaten all that strange food they’d offered her? On the few occasions she had complained about what she was eating back home, she had just been told she was lucky to be able to eat. Lucky to have a meal in front of her. And hungry people ate whatever was given to them. So if she wasn’t so hungry, perhaps she should come back when she was. That was usually enough to stop any complaints.
Not counting, of course, that period around three years ago when she went through her ‘choosy’ phase.
Lying here, starving, reminded her of what it was like then. She was five years old and refused to eat food from anyone but her mother. Except her mother was much too busy to feed her three times a day.
Everyone would complain, ‘Arre, Rukhsana, your daughter is becoming a nuisance. She won’t eat from us. It’s because you make her think she’s a princess. Tell her she’s nothing of the sort. Give her a slap on the head and knock such ideas out of her.’
But, of course, her mother paid no attention to them.
Her Ammy was perennially busy in the kitchen. She seemed on a constant mission of cooking, feeding and washing up after her in-laws. Sometimes Mina would come and watch her, surrounded by huge blackened pots sitting on open flames with various curries bubbling inside, a stack of dirty silver plates on the floor, and hot chapattis browning on an overturned pan. As the only daughter-in-law in the house, her mother was responsible for everything that came in and out of the kitchen. If her in-laws weren’t satisfied, she wasn’t doing her job.
During that short-lived period, Mina ate only once or twice a day, determined as she was to be fed by her mother. Though it meant she would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, ravenous. Her mother, who lay beside her, thoroughly exhausted and softly snoring, somehow always knew her daughter had woken. They would both then quietly get up and creep into the kitchen.
Mina could still feel the coolness of the tiles under her feet as she tiptoed down the corridor. Her mother would walk silently ahead of her, sometimes putting her hand out in the darkness of the night to reach for Mina, to help guide her or perhaps hurry her along.
In the kitchen her mother would light a candle and, under its flickering glow, put two slices of white bread that was meant for next morning’s breakfast on a plate and heat some milk on the stove. She would then sit Mina on the tiny kitchen windowsill and feed her sweet pieces of bread dipped in warm milk. The night breeze blowing over from the docks of Karachi would gently fan them as Mina and her mother whispered to each other, their voices drifting like sighs in the middle of the night.
Mina could picture her Ammy’s eyes as they were then. Tired, with dark circles and a weariness that made her seem older than she was. But there was something else, a tiny little glimmer that sparkled beneath it all. Mina knew that her mother didn’t mind waking up to feed her. Perhaps, maybe, she cherished it as much as Mina did.
Thinking of her Ammy feeding her then somehow made Mina feel better now. She didn’t even want to cry. And it was OK anyway, because she could feel the tug of the dream world pulling her closer. Closer, closer, till she couldn’t see anything but the warm darkness of the sky back home, just before it rained. The air was thick and heavy with humidity. As if a blanket had been drawn over all of them. But no one seemed to mind, because the rain washed away the dirt from the streets and gave everyone a moment of respite from the relentless heat.
But, best of all, when it rained, everyone you knew would run out and get drenched. Completely and absolutely drenched. And everywhere you looked you saw all those you loved with their hands in the air, getting thoroughly wet, wearing big, untainted smiles on their faces, calling for you to join them.