One-Handed Ibrahim

1

‘Hey, Nabeesa, they say One-Handed Ibrahim is dead. A wild elephant trampled him at Surulipatti early this morning. They’ve laid out his body at his elder brother’s son’s house. All the women are going to see his face one last time. What’s there to see? They’ve gathered him up and brought him back rolled like a bundle of cloth. The elephant left only his face alone—squeezed and crushed the rest to pulp.’

Nabeesa was silently sweeping the little house. With her right hand, she wiped the sweat from her forehead and dried it on her sari. In the mirror opposite, its silvering worn away, her face looked like someone else’s. Had her hair gone so grey? ‘It must be twenty years since it happened, mustn’t it?’ Her mind turned into fingers, counting up the years.

‘Why are you standing there like a mute? After something this big has happened! Instead of being happy…’

‘Shall I make you some tea, Rahima? Less sugar, isn’t it?’

‘Mm, make some. Why less sugar? Has Allah given me diabetes? Whose home have I wrecked? Put in a good handful. We’ve had good news, haven’t we? That bastard who ought to have died of the runs…’

‘Has your son-in-law written to Zaibun from Dubai?’

‘Changing the subject, are you? Aren’t you truly happy, Nabeesa? Don’t you see this is Allah’s punishment? An elephant is a wise creature, mind you. It can sniff out a man who’s wronged a woman just by the smell of his arse. What did you think? It’s no stupid donkey. They say elephants go into musth—do you know what that is? When an elephant sees an unclean woman or a man running wild, it goes into a rage, as if someone’s struck it on the ear with a pestle. This is Allah’s command. My grandfather used to call the elephant a black angel.’

Without answering, Nabeesa moved towards the kitchen and called out, ‘Shall I crush some ginger and put it in?’

‘I don’t want any tea, dear. Drink it yourself. My daughter will be alone. I’m off.’

Before Nabeesa could reply, Rahima was already walking past the tamarind tree.

Rahima had set things going and left. Before the burial and the recitation of the third-day Fatiha, many more might come. Wasn’t it by gossiping endlessly about other households that all women soothed their emptiness? Otherwise that emptiness would turn into a demon and swallow them whole. Each woman bundled the demons coming at her into the folds of her sari, carried them over, and unloaded them in another house.

Last week, when she had told Kamalam Mami, ‘I’m tired of listening to all this town gossip, Mami,’ the older woman had said something she could not forget.

‘Nabeesa, understand one thing. There are two things a woman simply cannot avoid. One is washing her menstrual rags. The other is gossiping about the town. Not one of us is an exception. And if there is an exception… she must have landed a good husband. Or she must have snared some other woman’s good husband and pulled him into her lap. It’s because the other thing isn’t getting its proper use that they keep this stinking mouth working without a break.’

‘But Mami… there’s something I don’t understand. If some woman who roams about can snare him and pull him into her lap, how can he be a good husband?’ 

That was Rasiya. Everyone burst out laughing. 

‘Oh, get away with you, you good-for-nothings. “Good” means something quite different with men. In this business, every last man is—pah!—filth.’

‘And what about women?’

‘Look at our Nabeesa here. Doesn’t she live pure as fire? A woman can live any way she chooses. That’s the resolve she’s born with as a woman.’

Raihana had been there while they talked. Noticing her only then, Nabeesa said, ‘How many times have I told you not to stand about listening? Go inside and study.’

Raihana would turn twenty this coming Chithirai. She was studying computers at the college in Palayam. ‘Jabbar Uncle said she’d get a job straightaway if she studied that. Hasn’t Kalaignar opened some sort of computer park in Madras? A park has plants and creepers, doesn’t it? What’s a computer park?’ She had been too embarrassed to ask him anything more. ‘Is he an ignoramus like me, stuck in the sixth standard? He passed the tenth even in those days. If he says so, it must be right.’ So she had cashed in the monthly chit fund she had been paying into with Jalaja and enrolled her daughter in ‘computer studies’. The girl was doing well, too. Now she had to save up jewellery for her and ‘put her hand in some man’s. What fate has Allah written on her forehead?’

Nabeesa never worried very much about her own circumstances. At every turn, she thought only of what came next. On the television in Ayesha’s house, a song was playing: ‘Tonight is our wedding night… tonight is our wedding night.’ The memory of her own wedding night stirred in her mind. She forced it aside, gathered the saliva in her mouth—which had turned bitter for no reason—and went outside to spit. ‘Thoo, thoo.’

A crowd had gathered at the entrance again. Nabeesa was too weary even to talk. Why not quietly put on her thuppatti and take a bus to Chinnamanur? Her brother and mother invited her every time they came, didn’t they? It was Nabeesa who never went. Even in May, she and Raihana would sit here, staring at the empty house.

Fazlur Rahman had been dead for two years. He had died suddenly the day after the Bakrid fast the year before last. What Nabeesa endured that day was unending torture. Every hour, another woman would turn up and torment her with talk of what was proper in the eyes of the town.

Within a few months of her leaving Fazlur Rahman, he had married another woman. The very day Nabeesa gathered her clothes, took a yellow cloth bag in one hand and her infant in the other, and crossed the threshold, he had stood in the street and shouted ‘Talaq, talaq, talaq’ before everyone, like a tapioca seller crying his prices, and finished with her. He had waited those six months only because Bilal Hazrat had told him, ‘This is wrong according to religious law.’ His second wedding, to Yasmin, a distant relative, had been a grand affair. Yasmin had been married in Vathalagundu; when her husband died in an accident, she came with her three-year-old son, accepted around her neck the black-beaded marriage necklace that Fazlur Rahman’s aunt tied in his name, and stepped into that house.

When they came to tell her that Fazlur Rahman was dead, Nabeesa was eating thikkadi she had made with Qurbani meat someone had given her as charity. As they described with great feeling the suffering he had endured on his deathbed, and how he had breathed his last lamenting over her, she did not so much as murmur in response. Without a flicker of emotion, she had begun sucking on a marrow bone.

‘A woman shouldn’t harbour this much spite.’ They said it within her hearing. Nothing anyone said could move her. Raihana cried all that day. Her brother returned from the funeral and said, ‘Couldn’t you at least have gone to see his face, Akka? This town will talk you to death.’

‘When has the town ever stopped talking?’

‘All right, let Raihana go, at least.’

‘Did I pick her up from a rubbish bin? Wasn’t she born, damn her, from this wretched belly?’

‘That’s true enough. But whatever ties you broke when you left, does that mean he’s no longer the child’s father?’

‘Let’s leave it there, dear.’

Her mother, who had come with him, said nothing to her. She simply looked at her daughter and sobbed. Once Nabeesa made up her mind, that was final. She would listen to no one. ‘She’s as unyielding as her paternal grandmother.’ Her mother had lamented this many times through her tears.

She was sixteen when she married. For four years, she had no child. The whole town tormented her; there was not a dargah she had not visited. The moment her brother asked, ‘Shall we go to the hospital, Machan?’ Fazlur Rahman struck his brother-in-law with a slipper. Until then, Nabeesa had never spoken against her husband in public. That day, with the whole street watching, she said, ‘You’ll rot and be ruined. Just you wait. You’ll get cancer in the hand that struck my brother, and die of it.’

It was cancer that killed Fazlur Rahman at forty-six. Even as the whole town marvelled at the power of her words, Nabeesa remained silent. Not even in her own mind did she feel a moment’s pride. She was unwilling even to believe it was ‘Allah’s punishment’. ‘Aren’t we going to go ourselves one day? The moment we’re born, Allah writes how it will be on every one of our foreheads. We’re the ones who invent the reasons, aren’t we? Every death is a death. There’s nothing more to make a fuss about,’ she said, and put an end to it.

‘Then why won’t you even go to see his face?’ 

‘I don’t feel like going. That’s all.’

When Abu, the second wife’s son, came to invite her to the third-day Fatiha, she said, ‘Let that be, dear. Will you have some tea?’

‘No… Please come…’

He must have been unsure what relation to call her. He was the very image of his mother. The same smooth, long face. It must have been she who, disregarding what others said, had respected the first wife’s place and sent her son to invite her to the Fatiha. She had never hated Nabeesa. Whenever they met in public, she would smile a little and try to speak. It was Nabeesa who would grip Raihana’s hand and move away. What was there to say to her?

Whether it was the herbal physician’s pill, the water over which the Bodi Hazrat had prayed and secretly given her to sprinkle around the house, the care with which Nabeesa’s mother had carried out the remedy prescribed by the soothsayer with the little drum without even the neighbours finding out, the three visits to Beema Palli to tie a cradle and shed garlands of tears, divine grace beyond all these, or mere chance that had nothing to do with any of them—only after four years did Raihana take shape in Nabeesa’s womb.

‘Looks like they’ll bury him at the big mosque only after Isha. Zainu said they announced it at the mosque.’

The house she rented had a thinnai, a raised front veranda. Beside it stood an enormous tamarind tree, and beyond that was an open ground full of haystacks. The land belonged to some wealthy family. Thanks to a quarrel among its co-owners, four or five houses on the street got their tamarind free. Even under the fierce midday sun, people could sit on Nabeesa’s thinnai and gossip about the town. The women were even prepared to cut coins in a curse to ensure the brothers of that wealthy household never made peace. The thinnai mattered. The shade mattered more.

From feeding two stomachs to sending Raihana to college now, everything had been possible thanks to that thinnai. By seven each morning, Nabeesa would light the stove at one end of it and begin steaming idlis. They came with two chutneys and sambar. Her thick chutney, doled out with a ration shop’s frugality, was in great demand on the street. Sometimes she made sweet paniyarams and appams as well. Most people on the street did not bother making breakfast. Nabeesa was the street’s morning Annapoorani. During the day she worked in two houses. Whether it was murukku or sweet filling that needed making, everyone thought of Nabeesa. She would also go along to help Peeramma cook biryani.

However much she earned, she never wore a good sari. Never combed her hair properly. Her face was always oily, her sari grimy. But the beauty she was born with had never left her, whatever hardships she faced.

‘Are you really forty? Your figure hasn’t changed a bit,’ people would say, casting an envious eye. She had walked out of her husband’s house when Raihana was a year old. After that, she had lived alone with a fierce resolve, her daughter her whole life. Her brother and mother had pleaded with her to marry again, saying, ‘We’ll bring up the child.’ Nabeesa would not give them an opening. Rather than burden her brother, she had moved into this house within three months and begun cooking herself in idli steam. Every man had his eye on her. But none had the courage to knock at her door. That was how much they feared Nabeesa. In the gossip sessions held in their absence, every other woman had been laid out on that thinnai and stripped again and again by the town’s tongue. No one had so much as entertained an improper thought about Nabeesa. ‘She’s Kannagi in a white thuppatti. That one burned a city down. This one keeps the fire going under her idli pot and lives a chaste life,’ her landlady, Kamalam Mami, would often say. At such times Nabeesa would neither smile nor blush. As if they were speaking of someone else, she would quietly go on with her work.

‘Which wife are they waiting for? Keeping that stinking body till Isha. Isn’t One-Handed Ibrahim on his own?’

‘His elder brother’s son has to come from Madras, apparently.’

‘What the fuck is he going to find in that pile of dung an elephant’s trampled? But what Kamalam Mami says is true, you know. She really must be a chaste woman. It’s her words that have brought this sort of death on that damned one-handed bastard. The man who cast her off lay like a mangy dog on his bed in middle age, his body rotting and crawling with worms, and died. All the helpless grief she scattered into the wind with fire in her heart has roused an elephant and brought it to trample this one. Just look.’

‘Of course. Is a woman’s curse a small thing? Did they take him to the post-mortem shed?’

‘What’s left to cut up? They say Military Mohammed knows the police and the doctors. He stepped in, and they brought him straight home.’

‘Oh yes, Military. A fine soldier. You talk as if he’s some great man who took up a long rifle and shot the Chinese. He only joined the army to grind flour and keep starvation away. Her mother will tell you. Weren’t they a wretched, shiftless family, without even a rag to cover their arses? And listen to the airs now. Military this, great hero that.’

‘An elephant ought to trample him one day. If you go to his house to fetch water, he looks as if he’ll roll both your breasts away with his eyes, like a dung beetle. Such a filthy look.’

‘Why did you go looking for his water?’

Someone made an obscene gesture with her hand, teasing her, and their laughter must have carried as far as the street where the body lay. In a little while, these same women would pull their saris over their heads, embrace One-Handed Ibrahim’s aged mother, and sniffle and weep as though lightning had struck a house they had painstakingly built themselves, wouldn’t they? It wasn’t even an act. That was real. This was real, too. It was only she who did not know how to inhabit each moment’s truth. The first thing was to ask Kamalam Mami to have this thinnai demolished. They were only idlis; she could pour the batter indoors.

For years now, that thinnai had been the street’s common property. Besides the women who sat gossiping there, little boys would come and play some game or other. Nabeesa put up with it without showing her displeasure. Once, when Ameerdeen’s maternal uncle’s boys came to visit, all the boys sat there playing cards. That was when such a fury seized Nabeesa. She took up boiling water and nearly poured it over the children. But everyone knew about this, so the street said nothing against Nabeesa; they scolded the boys and drove them away instead. When the Mahabharata was shown on television, Nabeesa went to Ayesha Akka’s house to watch. During the gambling scene in which Panchali was staked, she got up without a sound and went home. From the next day on, she did not go to watch the Mahabharata.

‘Nabeesa, will your mother come to the funeral? However vile One-Handed Ibrahim was, you’re all kin, aren’t you? Your brother will probably come, at least.’

Without answering, Nabeesa kept blowing on the fire. The only question running through her head was, ‘Why hasn’t Raihana come back from college yet?’

2

Even as a girl, Nabeesa had never had any great expectations of marriage. ‘Once I go to my husband’s house, Mother won’t be there to scold me. I can live in peace.’ That was all she thought. Nooramma was always watching her daughter. Nabeesa often felt that ever since she came of age, her shadow had no longer been her own. She had begun menstruating at eleven. For five years, she had suffocated in her childhood home. As she stood garlanded beside Fazlur Rahman, he seemed to her like a window. Thank goodness, she would no longer have to gasp for breath. Mother would no longer spy on her. Even after daybreak, she could sleep flat on her back, legs spread, without worrying about the sari over her breasts.

Fazlur Rahman had lost both his parents when he was young. He had no sisters either. Only two elder brothers. Both were tailors and had settled in Tiruppur with their wives and children. ‘Nabeesa won’t have a mother-in-law or sister-in-law to torment her,’ her family said happily.

When she entered the room on her wedding night, Fazlur Rahman was asleep, drooling. She looked with disgust at the man sleeping there, his great belly rising and falling as intermittent snores—‘purr, purr’—and farts—‘drr, drr’—escaped him. She thought of her brother’s face and build, his invariably fastidious ways. Not knowing what to do, she sat silently on the bed. At moments like this, the heroines in the films she had seen would weep without disturbing their make-up. She did not feel like crying. She remembered playing mother and father with Abbas as a child. Thinking of that, she fell asleep with a faint smile.

Half asleep, she felt as though something had climbed on top of her and was lying there. She woke in alarm. Her sari had ridden up. Close to her face, Fazlur Rahman was baring his teeth in a grin, pressing down on her like a buffalo. The roof beams of that ancestral house were somewhat rotten. Cobwebs, long undisturbed, hung in thick tangles. The chirping of crickets and the barking of dogs joined the tremors of her body. Amid the rank smell of aloe, a serpent’s hiss.

‘Did that feel good?’ 

‘……………………….’

‘Go and fetch me some water. I’m thirsty.’

There was no water in the kitchen. She drew some from the drum outside and filled a pot. She was not used to lifting water pots. She would have to drag it into the kitchen. Water vessels, tumblers, and plates flung aside after meals lay about with leftover food and dregs of tea. The very sight disgusted her. As though picking up a dead rat, she took just one water vessel, held it in one hand, and rinsed it. There was nowhere even to put a foot down. Their own house was so clean. Holding up her petticoat, she came back with the water to find Fazlur Rahman asleep again.

Whenever the women on the street asked, ‘Did it come this month too?’ she would sit in the kitchen at night and stare at lizards or cockroaches mating. She would not feel like crying. She would think that the moment a son or daughter formed inside her and came out, even before the umbilical cord was cut, she ought to ‘give it a good couple of whacks on the back’.

Only when her mother asked, ‘They say your husband plays cards all day. Won’t you ask him what he’s up to?’ did she learn that he played at all. What annoyed her then was that her mother had now begun keeping watch over him as well.

‘What else is he to do if he’s bored?’

‘Mm… scratch his arse. Why don’t you go and squat down and play with him?’

Nabeesa had never hated cards as a girl. A cousin of her mother’s who worked in Singapore had taught her and her brother to play without their father’s knowledge. The three packs he had bought and left during his visit might still be lying, frayed and worn, behind the gunny sack on the kitchen slab in the Chinnamanur house.

Fazlur Rahman’s work was to secure orders in other towns for ready-made clothing companies. He had to spend half of each month in Kerala. The rest of the time he was here. He had taken up cards in Nainar Aththa’s grove to pass the time and gradually become addicted. And yet, all Fazlur Rahman brought to cards was the obstinate passion of a man with no talent for them. He earned well and lost most of it gambling. Since he never left her short of money for household expenses, Nabeesa paid little attention to it at first. He had no other bad habits and played only during the day; later, he began drinking a little and playing at night as well. ‘Poor man, he’s worried about not having a child. What the hell else can a man do, living with a barren womb?’ the town said, finding fault with her instead.

Just once, she asked very gently, ‘When you’re here and not away in Kerala, couldn’t you work in a shop or something?’

‘Why, did your mother tell you to ask? I’m like an elephant. I only need to visit a sugarcane field now and then. The rest of the time I’ll roam about while the whole town looks up at me. If you can keep your cunt shut and stay here, stay. Otherwise, go back to your mother.’

‘What have I said now? Don’t we need something for our future? You even took what I wore around my neck, saying you were going to become a partner in the company.’

‘Yes, as if you’ve borne ten children. You’re a barren bitch. Are you going to lock the money away and buy jewellery for your child? But next time I go out for orders, if I don’t throw your lousy jewellery in your face, I’m no man.’

He went out for orders any number of times after that. But that lousy jewellery never returned to her neck.

The first time he came home drunk, he vomited on her the moment she opened the door. As she shook out her sari right there and washed the floor, he shouted from inside, ‘Come in here. What are you doing out there, fondling your broomstick husband? Take everything off and come.’ By the time she had wiped the floor and gone in, he was half asleep. Lifting the pillow he had been clutching, raising his right leg as if to kick, he said, ‘Did that feel good? Move over, you whore.’

Since the mosque was next door, snakes sometimes came into the house from the burial ground. What if one of those snakes came this very instant and bit him on the mouth?

When her mother came that week, she said, ‘They say it’s that Petticoat Ibrahim who taught your husband to drink. First tell him to stop keeping that man’s company. I’m saying this for your own good.’

‘Must he drink just because that man tells him to? Where are his own brains—up his arse?’

Her mother stared at her and left.

Not just her mother: many people had told her about Petticoat Ibrahim. Petticoat Ibrahim was the same age as Fazlur Rahman. He had studied up to the tenth standard. After a short spell in the military, he had run away. ‘The military is for fellows with no arse. It doesn’t suit me,’ he had apparently told someone. He was a tall man, with a light-brown complexion. Like Sivaji, he oiled his hair and combed it flat, with a bird’s nest puffing out at the side. The town said all sorts of things about him. But face to face, women would talk to him with broad smiles. Whenever you saw him, he looked as though he had just washed his face and powdered it. Like Nabeesa’s brother, he kept even his toenails neatly clipped. Not a speck of dirt. He was the first to introduce ready-made petticoats to Cumbum. The name ‘Petticoat Ibrahim’ suited not only his trade but the other stories one heard about him. Cards were only a pastime for him too. But as in everything else, he was a consummate master at them. He could correctly guess all thirteen cards in his opponent’s hand. A calculation of probabilities, a thirteen-times table, kept running through his mind: if this card appeared there, which one should he put down here? No one could beat him at gambling. The moment he won, he became a different man. Usually, he bought liquor and food for the loser as well. The very next moment, he would forget it all and leave to collect the money owed for his petticoats.

Fazlur Rahman was away in Kerala on his rounds then. His aunt owned a coconut grove, and plenty of coconuts came from there. The husks, too, lay about the house. Petticoat Ibrahim’s mother would come and gather them for her cooking fire. That day there was a communal feast for the flag-hoisting at Bava Palli. Everyone on the street had gone. It was the third day of Nabeesa’s period, so she could not go. That was the first day Petticoat Ibrahim came to her house.

‘Nabeesamma, look, your sari’s blown into the water trough.’

She had been sweeping the house, paying no attention to his arrival or his gathering the husks. At the word ‘Nabeesamma’, she brightened and raised her head. No one had ever called her that except her father, who had died when she was little. Addressing even women younger than himself as ‘Amma’ was one of Ibrahim’s many peculiar habits.

Looking at her sari dripping in his hands, she said, ‘Give it here, Anna.’

‘Anna? Am I your father’s younger brother’s son or his elder brother’s son? Even if you work it out through our distant kin, I’d only be your machan. Just call me Machan, Nabeesamma.’

They talked for two hours that day. She made him tea twice. He sipped it with such delicacy. Palms reddened with henna. Evenly trimmed fingernails. A fresh, brand-new shirt. A composure that never let a drop of spittle fly, however much he talked. The easy way he rubbed the tip of his nose with his thumb. Cuticura powder. After that, whenever Fazlur Rahman went to Kerala, it was he who came to gather the husks.

‘Machan, this is your child. Put your hand on my belly and see.’

Before, however fondly he asked her, she had always addressed him with formal respect. That day, for the first time, she called him ‘Machan’. But Petticoat Ibrahim was in no state to notice. He rubbed his forehead lightly and kept his face drawn.

‘How can you be so sure? You still sleep with Fazlu now and then, don’t you?’

‘Wouldn’t a woman know, Machan? Is there a pregnancy its mother doesn’t know? Do you want a boy or a girl?’

‘ ………………….’

‘Machan. Why have you gone quiet?’

‘I have a bit of a headache. I’ll come later.’

It troubled her that he had not called her ‘Nabeesamma’ even once that day. But she soon forgot the unease. The delight the movements in her belly gave her made her forget everything.

When she went home to have the baby, her mother asked quietly at a moment when no one else was there:

‘They say it’s Ibrahim who comes to gather the husks now?’

Her heart jolted. Was this her mother, or C.I.D. Shankarlal from the Tamilvanan stories her brother read aloud? Her mother had always irritated her. For the first time, she was afraid of her. Concealing it, she evaded the question. ‘How would I know whether it’s the mother or the son who comes? Haven’t I got anything else to do?’

Her mother fell silent for the time being. But on the fortieth day after the birth, cuddling her granddaughter, she said, ‘She doesn’t look like either of you.’ Folding clothes, Nabeesa said, ‘Maybe she looks like you.’

‘How can that be? You look like me yourself, don’t you? She doesn’t even look like your father. And I’ve seen Fazlu’s father and mother too, haven’t I?’

One or two people on the street asked the same thing. But the moment Fazlur Rahman saw her, he said, ‘She’s the very image of me,’ and repeated it all over town. Once he had said it, those who looked closely did think Raihana resembled him. Everyone except her mother repeated it. Nabeesa was waiting to show the baby to ‘Machan’. But Rahman did not go to Kerala at all. From the time the child was conceived, he had become careful with money. Making the rounds for many companies, he had saved enough to set up a shop of his own. He kept trying out the sound of ‘Raihana Garments’. Although cards now came second, deep down he still harboured an obsession with beating Petticoat Ibrahim at least once. He was prepared to do anything for it. Petticoat Ibrahim’s business was on the decline now, too. He had to find the right opening and strike. Raihana’s birth had brought him luck. Ibrahim would certainly lose. Could the rat really escape the trap? He had to beat him before everyone. Then take the money home, pull aside the cradle cloth, and pour it at Raihana’s feet. 

That day, the smell hit her the moment she opened the door. He was agitated as he came in.

‘Have you locked the door prop… prop… properly?’ He asked this again and again. ‘You be careful, all right?’ ‘Will you go to Chinnamanur?’ ‘There’s a reason for everything,’ he kept babbling. Now and then he parted the cradle cloth and looked at his daughter. ‘My darling. My darling. I swear on you. That son of a whore… to…mor…row… Daddy will cut him down… I’ll cut him down with this very hand.’ He lurched between baby talk and drunken rambling. ‘Lock the inner room and the kitchen, everything,’ he said, rolling his eyes and behaving strangely. She poured water over his head and questioned him. At first the thoroughly drunken man flared up, then he caught hold of her feet and began to cry.

‘Forgive me. I staked every bit of money I had and played. I can never beat that motherfucker. Do you know how he laughed at me? He used to laugh like that before, too. Before our little Raihana was born. And he’s still laughing. Just because I lost at cards, he asks if I’m a man… Who? Me… Haider Rowther’s son. The lion who fathered my beautiful peacock Raihana. He asked me… truly… I swear on you… Once he’d asked if I was a man, could I keep quiet? The boys said, “Don’t let him get away with it, Fazlu. Let’s settle this one way or the other.” Fucking hell, I had nothing left to stake. My watch, chain, ring, bicycle—I’d lost everything. I offered the house. That motherfucker wouldn’t take it. Says it’s jointly owned. Says there’ll be trouble. Then he says, “I’ll stake my mistress. You stake your wife.” The blood rushed to my head and I went to hit him. “Who’s your mistress?” I asked. The bastard wouldn’t say. “If you’re a man, win, then go and enjoy every bit of my mistress. I’ll come and hold the lamp myself. But she’s a beauty,” he said, and described her all sorts of ways. And that crook Jamal joined in with him, smirking. Looks like he alone knows. The motherfucker baited me with the thought of a woman and got me worked up. Not just that… Raihana’s a lucky child… I was sure I’d win because of her. That’s why I staked you and played… But I lost… I lost…’

Nabeesa sat silently, looking at the husband who was beating his head and weeping as though he were a stranger.

‘I thought he’d let the business about the woman go. But as I was leaving, he says, “Tell Nabeesa to keep the door open. What time shall I come?” Shamelessly, he asks me. Will he come? Will he come? Will you go? Will you go with him? Oh, my darling… my darling… my precious Raihana… I swear on you, sweetheart. If he touches your mother, I’ll cut off his hand… Let’s see, you bastard—your mistress or my wife? Hey, Petticoat Ibrahim, I’ll cut off your hand. I swear on my little shoot. Shall we see? Your mistress? My wife? I’m ready, mate. Deal the cards… Hey, deal the cards… You call me a sissy? Deal the cards… Deal them, deal the cards.’

Fazlur Rahman kept babbling, flicking his empty hand as though dealing cards. A little later, he vomited on the floor, lay down in it, and fell asleep. All that night, Nabeesa sat beside the cradle, staring.

From the next day on, Petticoat Ibrahim became ‘One-Handed Ibrahim’. True to his word, before dawn he climbed over through the empty cattle shed and caught Nabeesa by the shoulder as she went into the backyard, trying to lay her down right there. She seized the new aruvaamanai, the curved cutting blade she had kept sharp, and struck with all her fury at the hand that had touched her. Hearing him run with blood streaming from him, the neighbours woke and came out. While they still stood helpless, Nabeesa twisted her hair into a knot and walked down the street with her child and her clothes, without shedding a single tear. Recalling the incident again and again, heaping abuse on One-Handed Ibrahim and Fazlur Rahman, the street and the town kept it indelibly in their memory.

3

It was seven o’clock. Why was there still no sign of Raihana? She always came back from college by five. What had happened? All sorts of thoughts crowded in, and her anxiety mounted.

‘They say his elder brother’s son has arrived in a car.’

‘Why? Couldn’t His Lordship get a flight?’

‘Nabeesa, here’s Raihana. Where have you been all this time, girl? Your mother’s standing inside with her eyes popping out, as if she’s swallowed hot coals. Go in.’

Seeing her daughter enter with dishevelled hair and a confused face, she concealed her anxiety and asked in a low voice:

‘Where have you been?’

Putting her notebooks on the table, wiping her face and looking in the mirror, she said, ‘A friend’s house, Ma.’

‘Look here. They’re all outside. That’s why I’m keeping my voice down. You don’t know how to lie. Tell me the truth.’

She turned and looked silently at her mother for a while.

‘Ma… I’m sorry, Ma. When I got to the bypass from college, Nanni was standing there waiting for me. She said she had to go to some house where someone had died and asked me to come along. I asked who it was, but she wouldn’t say. I said we could go home first and then go. She wouldn’t listen to that either. Only when I got there and saw him did I realise it was that bad uncle. I gave her a good scolding. I didn’t even invite her home. She’s going back to her town crying. Why did Nanni take me to that man’s funeral, Ma? And without telling you?’

‘That whoring bitch. Hasn’t she changed even now? Going about stirring up heaped rubbish and sniffing at it. Wretched slut.’

Hurling a vessel into the kitchen sink, Nabeesa strode inside.

‘Who are you swearing at like that, Ma? Nanni? You never use bad words like this.’

‘I should have cut your neck with that blade too. I made a mistake.’

She spoke under her breath, through clenched teeth.

‘Ma, what are you saying? I can’t hear you. Sorry, Ma… I didn’t go on purpose. It was Nanni… Crazy Nanni.’

The moment she saw the unblemished face of her daughter coming inside, still scolding her grandmother, she abruptly concealed her surging rage and the tears her helplessness had brought. Breathing in, from memory, the scent of tenderness that had settled in her heart when they first placed the baby in her arms, she asked softly:

‘Will you have some ginger tea, dear?’

*

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