Gulnaz bit her lip. Zeba was too tightly wound. Where had Gulnaz gone wrong? Why did she have to tread carefully in speaking with her own child?
“Zeba, I didn’t come here to argue with you.”
“Then what did you come here for, Madar? Are you here because you don’t want to see me in prison or because you, the infamous Gulnaz, want to be the one to get me out with your powerful jadu?”
Gulnaz took a deep breath.
“I went to speak to the judge, Zeba, because I have spoken with him before. I met him years ago, before you were born. He came to call upon the great Safatullah once with his father. They were desperate for his younger brother to recover from a crippling illness. The boy was near death, from what I remember.”
Zeba seethed. It was hard to listen to Gulnaz when thirty years of resentment was boiling to the surface.
“His younger brother believed he was saved by your grandfather, the murshid.”
“What does this have to do with me?” Zeba asked through tight lips.
“A life was saved. People don’t forget about that kind of thing.”
Zeba looked back at the yard, half listening to Gulnaz. Latifa sat on the ground with her back resting against the wall of the prison. An unlit cigarette dangled between her fingers, her way of making her stash last longer. Latifa’s eyes were closed to the half-hidden sun, and she looked to be asleep. Had she ever been so at peace in her life? The way she described her family, probably not.
Zeba had the urge to get up and walk over to Latifa — to sit beside her, shoulders touching, faces to the sky.
Maybe Zeba could give her mother one more chance. She unwrapped a second chocolate. They tasted stale and she wasn’t really hungry for them, but it was easier than deciding whether or not to share them with her cellmates later.
Gulnaz laced her fingers through the metal links. Zeba was stubborn as a corpse. There was a grim possibility that was exactly what she would be if the fingers remained crooked in her direction.
My poor grandchildren, Gulnaz thought. They’ll never see their mother again.
“Your father and I were a bad pair,” she said hesitantly.
Zeba was silent.
“Early on, we were decent together. We were both young, and it felt important and new to be a married person. I didn’t mind him and he didn’t mind me. We did what we thought husbands and wives were supposed to do. I cooked. He worked. We visited our elders for the Eid holiday. But we were different people. We argued. We argued about our arguments. We found ways to make each other angry.
“If I knew he wanted rice for dinner, I made soup. He would leave walnut shells on the floor only because I’d asked him not to. It got to the point that I couldn’t stand the smell of your father, to tell you the truth. We were a breath away from choking each other at all times. These are awful things to say now, but it’s the truth.”
Zeba’s anger abated. The timbre of her mother’s voice was different than she’d ever before heard.
“Why did you hate each other so much? Had he done something?”
Gulnaz shrugged her shoulders.
“I never hated him for anything in particular. And I don’t know which of us started disliking the other first, but once it started, there was no turning back. When I look at other husbands and wives around me, I see so many people who were just like us — snapping at each other, sitting on opposite sides of the room. That’s how we were, but bolder. We could admit we were bad together.”
“Do you think he chose to fight in the war because of your arguing?”
“Who knows?”
“You must have some idea. There must be something you’re not telling me.”
“Now you, of all people, think I’m not sharing enough of the story?” Gulnaz snapped.
Zeba bit her tongue.
“Why did you never tell me about him before now?”
“What good would it have done? The man was gone. He wasn’t a bad father to you in those early years, though. But after that, you really didn’t have a father, so there was nothing to talk about.”
“But you call him my father.”
“Better for me to call him a father than to have others call you a bastard.”
Zeba knew it to be true, though she didn’t dare agree. Long ago she’d denied her mother’s wisdom. Recovery would be slow.
Zeba arched her back. Her body felt stiff. Why was Gulnaz able to look so comfortable for so long? Did the pebbles not press into her flesh the way they did for Zeba?
“You couldn’t fix things with him?” Zeba asked, thinking of Kamal as much as she was thinking of her father. “When I was a little girl, I believed you could fix everything.”
A passing cloud cast a shadow over Gulnaz’s face. Zeba’s question pushed on an old but tender wound. Why hadn’t Gulnaz done anything about the way they’d argued? She’d started to once. She’d snipped locks of his hair while he slept and torn a pair of his underwear into shreds. A bit of ash, a bit of blood, and he could have been a different man.
But she did not go beyond those first simple steps. Instead, she let him go. It had been as simple as releasing the string on a wind-borne kite. All she had to do was nothing.
“Our minds are wild beasts. We tame them with fear of God or punishment, but sometimes they refuse to cower. That’s when things turn ugly.”
Zeba understood her mother precisely. In the last few months she shared with her husband, she’d begun to feel exceptionally ugly.
CHAPTER 25
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON IN CHIL MAHTAB AND JUST DAYS AWAY from the Eid holiday. The temperature within the prison had climbed to over a hundred degrees. Women who should have been home preparing to celebrate the holiday of sacrifice were wilting within the prison’s high walls instead. The heat should have rendered the women immobile. . but it hadn’t.
Zeba’s success with Mezhgan had set the women’s prison alight with hope.
A steady stream of women moved through the cell Zeba shared with the others. The guards had, at first, tried to prevent the women from congregating but they quickly gave up. The women were persistent and the guards curious.
“Would you let me speak? You’ve had your chance!” Bibi Shireen, a woman old enough to be Zeba’s grandmother, pushed her way to the front of the line. “Zeba-jan, you’re a mother. You’ve got to understand. My son was in love with a girl and when they ran off together, the girl’s brothers found them and killed him. They’ve locked me up because my son is dead and someone’s got to be blamed. And they want my daughter to be married to one of the killers, in retribution for my son’s transgression. I’ve been here three years and have another twenty-seven to go. Do you see my hair — white as a garlic clove? I will die here! What can you do for me?”
“What idiots. Bibi Shireen, I had no idea you had another twenty-seven years still. That’s a disgrace,” Latifa remarked with blatant disgust. She sat on the edge of her bed and watched over the pleas. She was learning things about her fellow prisoners that she hadn’t learned in her eighteen months in Chil Mahtab.
“Tell me, Zeba-jan. What should I do? I once heard something about the feathers of a white pigeon bringing mercy, but I don’t trust the person who told me. Whatever you say, I’ll do it.”
Zeba listened in silence. She had not intended to create such a maelstrom. It had been an exercise really, a way for her to prove to herself that she could do something, even if it meant dipping her feet into murky waters.
“Bibi-jan,” she said respectfully. “I will think carefully about your situation.”
The women came in two or three at a time with all kinds of requests. Zeba quickly became accustomed to the ones in need of recipes to make families accept their beloved. But the prison housed women accused of more than being star-crossed lovers. Because of their various improprieties, many had been convicted of the broad crime of zina, sex outside of marriage. Some were convicted of attempted zina or imprisoned for assisting another woman to commit zina. An eighteen-year-old girl had run away from her elderly husband. A wife had left a husband after he sold their ten- and twelve-year-old daughters into marriage. Another had been arrested when a stranger reported seeing her leaving a man’s private office.