FATIMA STOPPED BY ONE MORNING AND ZEBA HAD RELUCTANTLY invited her in. As she poured a cup of green tea, Fatima explained the reason for her visit.
“Fareed sent me to see if Kamal has the money he owes him. We’re not wealthy, you know, and he promised to pay us back months ago. Oh, look at Basir-jan. He takes after his father so much now. .” Fatima’s voice droned as she watched Basir pass through their courtyard.
Zeba’s stomach tightened. She hated to admit the obvious likeness between Kamal and Basir, because it made her feel things toward her son that she did not want to feel.
Zeba had even tried to find ways to change him so that she wouldn’t see Kamal when she looked at him. She buzzed his hair to the scalp. She never let Basir wear his father’s clothes. When she kissed him, she would press his face on both sides, his cheeks doubling on themselves and leaving no semblance of Kamal’s likeness.
Basir will be different, she promised herself. He will be better than his father.
He was her eldest son, the child she should have cherished above all the others. He had done nothing worse than other boys his age, nothing out of the ordinary. But from time to time Zeba saw, or believed she saw, a flash of anger cross his adolescent face, and inside her a dark feeling would bubble up, fear that she had re-created Kamal. Most days, Basir would come home from school and sling his arm around her shoulders and kiss her face. In those moments, Zeba was wholly ashamed of her ghastly betrayal. What kind of mother was she?
Perhaps she could learn to love Kamal again. Perhaps she could find a way to make him sing love songs again.
It took time to despise or love a husband — this much Zeba knew from her conversations with other women. Neither emotion presented itself on the wedding night or on any of the hundred nights that followed. The way a woman ultimately felt about her husband, whether she would spit his name out or whisper it in rapture, this would be decided over the course of years. It would be decided only after thousands of meals had been prepared, after the birth of a few children, after the death of a loved one, after a few nights spent apart and the temperaments had shifted between hot and cold like the seasons.
Marriage was a sport. One point for love, one point for hate. The heart kept score.
His arm around her shoulders in the moonlight. The way he kissed his daughters’ foreheads. The smell of sweat and iron on his clothes after a hard day’s work. The way he kissed her mother’s hands on the holidays. Points for love.
But the passing of each day saw changes in Kamal’s many moods, a dial turned to a different frequency.
Yes, she’d been too dependent on him, but what else was a husband for? She would not turn to him as much, she promised herself. She had less and less desire to, anyway. The way he turned away when she undressed, the way he snored through her labor pains, the rage-fueled times he’d called her a fatherless whore — those were all points in the wrong direction. The marriage game was not as close as it should have been.
The poor children, Zeba thought. They were not players, but losing all the same.
She loved them with all her heart, even the ones she’d lost — or perhaps especially the ones she’d lost. They were good children. They were her legacy, her creation, even if Kamal had claim over them as well.
So many days, Zeba had woken with a hope their lives could be restored. So many nights, she fell asleep chiding her own naïveté. She thought, If only Kamal had been the one to die instead of his brother.
Allah decides the moment of your birth and your death well before you take a breath.
Zeba’s father had taught her as much before he disappeared. A smarter Zeba would have inquired further.
What about the moments in between — are they His or mine?
HAD SHE KILLED KAMAL? ZEBA COULDN’T BE SURE. TOO MUCH had happened in the span of a few moments. The images ran through her head too quickly to discern. Truthfully, she was afraid of what she might see if she slowed it down. She would face it eventually, just not today.
And maybe it wasn’t all that important to think about it. She could convince herself that she had killed him just as easily as she could insist she would never be capable of such a thing. Wives, mothers, daughters—women did not do this sort of thing. They didn’t have the stomach for it.
By the time the sun went down, by the time she’d shared another dinner with the three women in her cell, Zeba was one step further from being Kamal’s wife. She was one step further from being a resentful and short-tempered mother. She was one step further from being a pawn in God’s capricious games.
By morning, Zeba would share a few more words with her cellmates. She would feel a bit more at ease behind these hollow bars. By morning, she would feel her appetite pick up and the dark circles under her eyes would lighten.
By morning, Zeba would be a bit more Zeba — relying on no one to fix the small messes an average day brought. It was one of life’s many tragedies that Kamal wasn’t around to see it.
CHAPTER 10
ZEBA HAD JUST MET WITH THE WARDEN OF THE PRISON TO GIVE her account of the crime she’d been charged with. The warden, a stout middle-aged woman who spent most of her time behind her desk, was unimpressed and unsurprised by Zeba’s poor memory of recent events. She had frowned as she closed the manila folder with Zeba’s name on it and nodded for Asma, the red-haired guard, to lead her back to her cell.
Zeba stared at her feet as they shuffled over perfectly square bone-colored tiles. The walls were painted the same color but mostly hidden by the scribbling of children and a few bored women. The cell doors and gates were painted an incongruously cheerful blue.
Two preschool-age boys ran past them, an elbow brushing past Zeba’s thigh. Their laughter made Zeba uneasy.
“Slow down!” Asma yelled after them. She shook her head and flicked her veil to the side. “They’re just as bad as their mother.”
Asma led Zeba past the guard’s station, a half-moon glass enclosure in the middle of the prison with views down long corridors in either direction. Inside was a wooden table with a radio, its antenna lying limply on its side, and a small stack of refolded newspapers. Another guard sat inside and looked up as they passed by. Zeba turned her gaze back to her feet.
They turned the corner, and a stairwell led to the second floor. A girl, probably a year older than Rima, sat on the landing between the two floors, a pinwheel in her hands. Her violet dress flared against the concrete. She looked up and smiled beatifically at Zeba. Zeba wanted to smile back at her, but it didn’t quite make sense to do so.
Loud voices came from the small room next to the stairwell. Zeba glanced in as they walked by and saw a folding chair placed in front of a vanity. Gaping drawers revealed round and flat hairbrushes, tins full of bobby pins, and tubes of lipstick. A can of hair spray sat atop the counter. One freshly coiffed prisoner sat in the chair, twisting her neck and torso to get a look at the back of her head. Two other women, rust-colored fingertips stained with henna, stood around her, one of them applying rouge to her cheekbones as she stared into a mirror the size of her palm. They didn’t bother to look up as Zeba passed by.
“Like they’re going to a wedding,” Asma muttered, her eyes unlined and her cheeks unrouged. “Boredom is a crime waiting to happen.”