Останься, дочь / Stay, Daughter

“Didn’t they own land?”

“All that came to nothing. The paddy field in Weeraketiya, she used to get a bag of rice once or twice a year, but the rest of the properties, nobody knows what happened to them.”

“What do you mean, no one knows what happened to them?”

Aunt Asiyatha leaned over and lowered her voice. “Don’t tell your father I told you, you know how he is when anyone speaks badly of his relations, but they say a man, one of our relatives, he brought your Wappumma all kinds of papers, got her to rub ink on her thumb and put it down, and one by one the properties were gone. We think they were sold off.”

“But what was written on those papers?”

“Allah, child, how would your grandmother have known?”

My father’s mother could not read or write. She couldn’t tell time or make out a calendar. She needed help counting money.

“When were you born, Wappumma?” I once asked her.

“When was I born? My mother told me it was during Uncle Omar’s wedding. Cousin Fathuma was just learning the aleph, bey, thay of the Quran, and her little brother had begun to eat solid food. That’s when I was born.”

“No, which year? How old are you?”

Wappumma knitted her brow and shook her head.

My grandmother’s life kept rhythm with the moon; she kept track of its waxing and waning. Every four weeks or so, when it seemed about time, she stepped out into the garden and searched the night sky. If she spotted what she was looking for – the faintest of crescents glowing in the dark – she hurried to announce that a new month had begun. Her days began when the stars came out; she said her Friday prayers on Thursday night.

Though she fathomed little about things outside her home, Wappumma was convinced she understood the workings of the world. Someone envious had cast the spell that had taken her husband and comfortable life away. How else could it all have ended like that? But she protected her family now. She hung amulets on her son and daughter – sachets of magical charms tied with thick black string and secured around arms and necks and waists. They warded off the evil eye and the evil tongue, and the many other evil vapors the whole village knew were waiting to enter the unsuspecting orifices of children. She said special prayers at nighttime, too, to keep away the demon jinns.

Once, she found a pumpkin in her backyard that no one could account for. Who had thrown it there? Maybe that same evil person who had cast the first spell. Had she been a fool and cut the fruit open, streams of blood would have come pouring out and put a hex on everything in the house. She yelled out a curse and threw the jinxed fruit over the fence. She was too clever for her enemies.

When I was about eight, Wappumma placed an amulet around me too, but my mother took it off. Umma said that it was mostly people in the villages who wore such things. She didn’t add that people in a town like her home of the Galle Fort, where we now lived, never descended to such behavior, but I sensed that was what she meant, and in that case, I was happy to take it off.

When her husband died, somewhere around 1910, the colonial officials representing His Majesty in the district of Galle requested that my grandmother submit last wills, affidavits, and properly notarized deeds. The Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, of whose existence she had barely been aware, demanded to know the exact dates of events. Wappumma looked to a man in her family, someone who knew the ways of the white people, to stand in her stead at the courts and registries. Perhaps, it was he who had brought those documents and said, “Put your thumbprint down here.”

Aunt Asiyatha tucked a fresh wad of betel leaves into her mouth and fixed her eyes on my father who was sprawled on a recliner on the other side of the back verandah, chomping on his cigar.

“He it was, who guarded them. Your grandmother, she always said, ‘my little Abdul Rahuman, after he began to work, we never stretched out our hands to anyone.’”

My father’s sister, whom I called Marmee, brought out cups of cardamom-flavored tea and joined the conversation. “Thambi was so small when he went to work, half a sarong would cover him from waist to ankle. Our Umma would cut one into two and hem the edges. That way, he had one piece to wear while the other was in the wash.”

Wappah pitched his voice across the room, as his ears had picked up the familiar name for little brother, thambi. “I always woke up at dawn. As soon as the muezzin at the mosque called out the morning prayer, I jumped up from my mat.”

“Nice jumping up from the mat!” Marmee laughed. “I shook his shoulders, and shouted into his ears and splashed water on his face, but he just pulled his sarong over his head and rolled over. Then Umma put her head into the room and yelled. ‘Only a boy visited by Shaitan would sleep until the sun shone on his behind!’ That’s when he got up.”

“As though the sun could have shone on my behind or anywhere else in that dark corner of the floor where I slept!” Wappah scoffed. “But I didn’t say that to my mother. Would have got a good slap on my face if I had.”

“That’s right,” Marmee lowered her voice. “In those days, he was not a periyal, a boss. He had to listen to us. We told him what to eat and when to go to sleep and made him take his baths. And that… Subhanallah!” My aunt shook her head and raised her eyes and hands upwards.

Wappah, Marmee said, would run all over the house and garden to escape a bath at the backyard well. He crept under coconut fronds, squeezed his scrawny frame behind the outhouse, climbed into empty gunnysacks. His mother always found him. Her hand curled tight around his bony wrist, she would drag him across the yard, over drying jak leaves, goat droppings and chicken feathers, and set him down on a slimy patch of ground by the dugout well where his sister waited – a bucket of water drawn and ready.

When the first chilly cascade landed on his head, he sputtered and hopped from foot to foot. His teeth chattered. He snorted water out of his nose and shook it out of his ears. Before he could catch his breath, another torrent of cold water hit his shoulders. Then, another and another.

“Scrub all the dirt out, or he will get sores again!” Wappumma shouted from across the yard where she squatted over an open hearth, making breakfast.

Marmee would wedge a sliver of yellow soap into a piece of coconut husk and scrub: neck and back, arms and shoulders, down the legs and the spaces between the toes. When the next bucket of water landed, it fell on skin scraped red. Her brother screamed.

“When Thambi got his first job,” Marmee smiled, “he started to take good baths on his own. He knew he had to look good to work in a place like the Galle Fort.”

A relative who knew of Wappumma’s descent into poverty had secured for her young son a job as apprentice to a jeweler in the Galle Fort, a fortress in the southwest corner of Ceylon. This had been the military stronghold of European colonizers for many centuries. Built by the Portuguese in 1588, some decades later, it was wrested away by an invading Dutch army. Finally, in 1796, it came into the possession of the British, the last of the Westerners to rule the island. By the early twentieth century, when my father was a boy, the Fort was no longer an army garrison. It had become the administrative and commercial capital of the Southern province. A thriving citadel with hotels, warehouses, shops, schools and churches, it was also home to civilians, several of whom – and this was of utmost importance to Wappah and everyone in his village – were some of the most prestigious Muslims in the country.

When her brother set off in the morning, Marmee stood behind the front window to watch him leave. He was eleven or twelve (no one in the village knew exactly when they were born) when he first began to work, and she being about two years older, was, by this time, a “big girl” who had been brought inside. To keep herself unseen by strange men, she did not set foot outside her home during the day. As a komaru—a female past puberty but not yet married – the rules of seclusion were far stricter for her than even for her widowed mother.

Pressed against the wall and leaning in against the wooden frame of a little window, Marmee got as good a view as she could of the road beyond. A little while ago, her mother had made breakfast. Squatting over the open hearth, she had swirled a batter of flour and coconut milk in a sizzling pan, and made hot, crisp rice wafers. The smells wafted in and mingled with the odor of damp walls, dirt floors, and goat droppings that always hung in the air of the little house.

Outside, the dew was wet on the grass and the only people to be seen were the men in white tunics and caps who were returning from dawn prayers at the mosque. Marmee’s eyes followed her young brother as he walked along a footpath that led away from clusters of small houses built with bamboo and clay. She saw him swipe a juicy guava from a neighbor’s garden and tuck it into the knot of his sarong. The ground was cool to the soles of his bare feet but soon the sun would rise, and before he reached the Fort, more than two miles away, beads of sweat would glisten on his forehead. A few feet ahead, beyond a grove of coconut trees, was Talapitiya Road, the main highway that cut through the village of Shollai. There, he took an abrupt turn and vanished from sight.

“I waited all day for him to return,” Marmee said. “When it was time to light the oil lamp at dusk, I went back to the front window and looked out.”

Leaning in against the wall again, and peering out through the wooden bars, she caught sight of the coconut palms that threw long shadows on the grass. The same men and boys in white tunics and caps who had been out in the morning were now on their way to the mosque for evening Maghreb prayers. They walked by the house without making out any part of her, not at all suspecting that a pair of girlish eyes was gazing out into the world.

Her brother came into view as he turned the corner from the main road – a small figure lugging a basket of fish and vegetables, veering from side to side to avoid the piles of cow dung that dotted the field. When he approached the front steps, Marmee called out to her mother, and Wappumma hurried to take down the crossbar that had been set against the front door. It had been there since her son left in the morning to shut out anyone or anything that could intrude on the modesty of the widow and her daughter.

“Don’t let any outsiders in before you have given us time to hide,” Wappumma always told her son as he stepped inside. Now that he was home, neighborhood boys and male cousins several times removed might walk into the house. He didn’t need the warning. Early on, he had acquired the trait that was to last a lifetime – the fierce protection of female honor. Acutely aware of the presence in his home of the non-mahram—the unpermitted male – he allowed no man in before he had shouted out a warning and heard the patter of feminine feet hurrying away.

The first sign of such a man approaching, and Marmee fled. She didn’t linger a second longer than she should have. Or so she told me. She appeared to be one of those girls, so numerous in those days, who if their elders drew a line on the ground and said, don’t put your foot beyond this, not even one little bit, they never did. I didn’t ask Marmee whether she was ever a bit curious about which man or boy was coming into the house. The question would have flustered her. It wasn’t something she allowed herself to think about: that she could choose to look or not. Her life was what it was supposed to be, nothing more or less. This was the key to the unquestioning obedience always held up for those of us who were showing signs of being less than perfectly docile. Besides, one of the lines drawn inside my own head, which I did not easily cross, was the one that said, don’t ask unnecessary questions.

No sooner than he had stepped inside, Marmee eagerly asked her brother what he might have seen in the Galle Fort that day. He brought reports of buildings three and four times as tall as their house, verandahs enclosed with rows of glass windows, and gates of polished brass you could mistake for gold. She tried to imagine what a motorcar looked like, marveled that white ladies walked all on their own in broad daylight, and that children were taken around in wheeled carriages. The day she heard about water that had turned into cold blocks of stone covered in sawdust, and sold by a man who pushed a cart, she wondered whether her brother made things up.

Marmee was most impatient to know about the happenings in the homes of the wealthy shangakara Muslims in the Galle Fort. To be told about their large houses with ornate gables, tiled roofs, spacious courtyards, and name boards with English lettering: Ocean View, Eglington, Jasmine Cottage, Haley; the ebony divans and elaborately carved tables set up in the front halls; the tall ceramic vases and dwarf palms along the inner courtyards. And how intricately carved and beautiful the wooden lattice screens were, without exception, that sealed off the women’s quarters.

Her brother described what he saw as he walked by the double Dutch doors that opened out onto wide verandahs. What lay within he didn’t know. He never stepped inside any of those stately homes. In those early days, Kuhaffa Hadjiar’s jewelry shop on Leyn Baan Street was the only smooth floor in the Galle Fort that took the imprint of his dusty feet.

Before Marmee was done with her questions, her mother waved her aside. The widow had waited all day too, for her son to come home.

“A jackfruit fell down in the front garden. Pick it up before someone else does… Walk to cousin Zubeida’s house and tell her I’ll come by to see her after dark… I’ve been waiting to drink something. Can you pluck a King coconut for me?”

Wappah was happy to oblige – he didn’t want his mother to go outside her home more than absolutely necessary. They may have been poor, but he wasn’t going to allow people to say the females in his family roamed the village like infidel women.

His presence at home was valued most, at least by Marmee, when the roving salesman, Majeed Nana, came to the village. This itinerant trader carried on his head, a huge cloth bundle packed tight with textiles and fancy goods. His appearance always thrilled the maidens of Shollai who never set foot in a shop themselves.

A few weeks before the great festival of Ramazan, wives, daughters, sisters and aunts would divulge their preferences to the men in the families who did the shopping for them.

Some men ignored these declared choices and bought what they thought would look good on their female relatives; others, returning home with arms full of packages, learned to their befuddlement that taffeta was not the same as satin, and that silk came in various grades and textures, not all of them equally desirable. A few particularly sharp fathers and brothers did know how to choose “a saree with threadwork along the edges but nothing on the front border and no sequins unless they were the kind that wouldn’t come off if a small child was to tug on the fabric.”

Lately, some fashionable Fort ladies had begun to ask that they be taken to the entrance of textile stores in the Galle bazaar. Seated safely inside their curtained buggy carts, they chose from bolts of fabric that were brought to them. Marmee found it hard to believe that women could be so forward.

She gave no instructions, either, to her brother, so she said. And whatever Wappah brought her was alright, she said too. Yet, she counted the days till it was time for Majeed Nana to visit the village.

On one such day, Marmee, when she was fifteen or so, heard a loud voice.

Sarongs! Sarees! Cloth!