Amna has a background in international development and diplomacy. Her novel in progress is set in Islamabad. Its opening is below.
Email: Ajato001@gold.ac.uk
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Sara
It is the first of January. Ali Naqvi is dead. He was found on the street between his house and ours, early in the morning, three days ago. Pinned to his bloody t-shirt was a note. It said this would teach boys who snuck into girls’ rooms at night.
The police visit. They ask to speak to me, on suggestion from a neighbour who they don’t name. My grandmother tells them they can when they bring her some proof. They say this is a murder investigation and they are within their rights. My grandmother asks them which murder in this country has ever been solved. And that if tomorrow someone finds a dead body near their house, can anyone come along and speak to their daughters about it?
I haven’t left the house since it happened. All day we sit by the gas heater and watch the news. On TV they rerun clips from Benazir Bhutto’s funeral and last rally. When our President comes on TV he tries his best to look sombre. The election meant to be next week is postponed to next month. The country burns.
*
I know my grandmother is watching me, so I do my best Musharraf, sombre but fundamentally unaffected. I wake up early. I put on clean clothes every day. I put a lot of energy into our meals. I wash, soak, slice, knead, roll, stir, and scrub unlike I have ever done before. When we eat, I force myself to finish my rotis even though they feel stuck in my chest for hours afterwards. When I am next to my grandmother on the sofa, I stare intently at the TV, even when they are showing the open-eyed detached heads of double suicide bombers side by side. I don’t go near the front door. I act with concern, within limits, whenever there is talk of the poor Naqvis.
All this to prove that I am a serious girl who, having recently finished college, is only waiting for a good marriage proposal. I have no business with the unfortunate death of the son of our neighbours.
The act is keeping my grandmother at bay. So far, the only thing she has said to me is that I shouldn’t sleep in my own room, for a while at least. Its box windows look out onto our small lawn and the houses opposite. So I sleep with her now. We share her double bed. At night she uses her bathroom with the door open. At some point this will end, I think. She and everyone else will tire of suspicion.
I only let myself go in the shower, where I can shake with grief and hold the wall for comfort.
*
I didn’t get to see him after he was found. I wasn’t allowed to go to his house for afsos like everyone in our street and the streets around our street did. My grandmother went briefly that first day, wrapped in her largest black chaddar. She came back shaking her head. ‘God have mercy on the parents who have to bury their children,’ she said. ‘He was only 19.’
Later, when they were taking him away, we heard his mother’s screams. ‘Oh my Lord,’ she cried, ‘what have you done to us? What have you done?’ My grandmother wondered if she should say nafal for his family that night, to ask God to strengthen their hearts. ‘That would be good,’ I said, my words catching in my throat as I worked very hard to breathe.
*
It was my idea.
I brought it up on a sticky afternoon in July last year. For lunch we had had chicken from the day before with parathas I pressed ghee into. My grandmother was lying face up on her bed. Her bent arm covered her eyes, her face shuddered from a light snore. The ceiling fans were on at full speed. I dragged the phone set from the TV lounge to the furthest corner of the dining room. I miss called him and put the ringer on low. A minute later, the phone purred.
We talked about how to meet. We had been talking on the phone twice a day for over a month. ‘I’ll get the car and take you somewhere. You can say it’s your friend’s birthday.’ He laughed. ‘Before my sisters got married, all their friends had two birthdays each a year.’
‘That won’t work.’ I told him what my grandmother thinks about grown girls having friends.
‘So you don’t have any?’
‘I have a few,’ I lied. I didn’t tell him that my only friend in college stopped speaking to me when she found out that her brother and I sometimes met after classes. Her brother was engaged to a cousin at the time. My friend said I had no shame, and the rest of my batchmates knew about it before our finals were over.
‘How else then?’ he asked.
‘You could come see me here, at night. Late at night.’ Did I pause? No, I didn’t. ‘You would have to jump over our wall and through my window, but if you came after midnight no one would see you and we would get at least two hours together.’
There was silence on the line. Finally he said that I was crazy and asked where on earth I got this idea from.
But two weeks later, he brought it up himself. He told me that it was actually three jumps to get to me, not two. He had to get over his own wall too.
Three jumps to me and three jumps back, late at night in a small street in G-10/3, while the country was distracted by bombs, the Chief Justice, the mosque near Aabpara, and Benazir Bhutto saying she was coming back from exile. No one was supposed to notice.
*
My grandmother has always wanted me married off as soon as possible, and not a day later than age twenty-three, which I will be in two years. But she has been equally keen to not make any mistakes in choosing my husband and in-laws. She says that one pays a heavy price for such mistakes.
The candidates for husband for me have been many over the years. The potential mothers-in-law to-be all love my height, don’t mind my complexion, like my long hair, don’t mind that I am thin. They like that I have a BA and still seem shy. They like how I serve tea on a wooden trolley filled with plates of chicken kebabs, potato samosas, and almond biscuits. Their eyes twinkle when my grandmother talks about all the things she will send with me when I marry.
The most recent person to leave us hopeful was a Mrs Umair. Mrs Umair insisted that she didn’t mind that I am, de facto, an orphan. She had heard that my grandmother is a God-fearing lady, someone who is never seen without a tasbih in her hand. ‘Other than that, who can fight the will of destiny,’ Mrs Umair had said, ‘if the girl was meant to grow up motherless and fatherless.’ Mrs Umair came over thrice, once by herself, once with her sister, and once with her sister-in-law on her husband’s side. She promised that next time she would bring the boy himself, a Farhan who was 26 and a graduate of IT. She didn’t come again and my grandmother estimated that each tea trolley we served her cost us at least five hundred rupees.
I of course had my own complaints. Before every visit I plucked my eyebrows, threaded my upper lip, and waxed my arms, sideburns and my chin. All this was done at least two days in advance to allow for the redness to settle. All the while Mrs Umair came each time with the moustache of a Punjabi film villain decorated thickly over her top lip. On many occasions while pouring milk in her tea or extending a quarter plate in her direction I imagined myself as her daughter in law, getting my tools into that little jungle on her face. Out of pity I might even have done her pits.
Before Mrs Umair, there was Mrs Kashif. My grandmother and her had even discussed tentative dates for an engagement party. We were to host, in our three-bedroom portion. We would have used the driveway and the lawn to seat the male guests, and the veranda and the drawing room to seat the women. We were planning dinner menus and my jora. Then Mrs Kashif called to say that the istikhara had come out negative, and that was that.
My grandmother says this has to be Shakila Phuppo’s doing. ‘Some tayz black magic, because Shakila wants you for that duffer son of hers.’ My aunt comes over twice a year. She is never invited to sit down when she does. She stands in the doorway while my grandmother counts the cash sent by my father. While she waits she always asks for me, says her eyes have been thirsting to see her brother’s first child and only daughter. She will kiss me on both cheeks before running her hands down the sides of my body. ‘You should eat more,’ she will say, ‘these hips, they need to bear children.’ When she leaves my grandmother promises that whoever it is whose children I bear, it won’t be Shakila Phuppo’s son’s.
In preparation for my impending marriage, we have been dowry shopping since I turned sixteen, using whatever is left over each month from my grandfather’s pension and the rent from upstairs. We now have a very good selection of electronics, kitchenware, dinnerware, ladies’ clothes, and soft, fuzzy winter blankets that we store in locked suitcases and trunks in what used to be my mother’s bedroom. We regularly put mothballs in these holdings so that nothing eats up our hard work, my future happiness and the key to my in laws’ hearts.
*
My grandmother is a large woman. She has rolls of fat that hang off her stomach and collect in lumps around the straps of her bra on her back. The undersides of her arms hang loose, and her legs, though slimmer than the rest of her body, are pockmarked and veiny.
She has high sugar, takes medicine every day for her bp, and often complains of burning in her chest. Still, she eats badly and anything she wants, talks of pakoras every time it’s raining and of jalebis most evenings after Maghrib. She can never find anything in her cupboard. She doesn’t think wearing matching shalwars and kameezes is necessary. ‘Who is looking at me?’ she will ask.
I worry about how she will cope once I am married. She has a younger brother in Lahore, but she doesn’t like his wife. She has an older cousin in I-10, but she claims he stole her inheritance. I have asked what she will do all alone when I am gone. Her response is usually defiant. ‘What do contented people, living in their own house, free of responsibilities, do? They eat, relax, and thank their God.’ But a few times, she has been less optimistic, averting her gaze. ‘How much time do I have left anyway? I have been here much too long already.’
My grandmother wears a nose pin in her left nostril, in the design of a flower, in which zircons are the petals and a small ruby is the bud. The rising and falling of this flower on its gold stem when her face is overcome by an emotion, usually sorrow but sometimes laughter, is the thing I think about the most when I think about being little.