“They do what they can to stay out of this filth.”
Zeba felt her throat knot. Ever since she’d been a small girl, she’d looked up to her mother. Even when she felt that her mother was vengeful with her jadu, she’d believed her to be someone larger than life and invincible. That’s what made it acceptable to push her away. Her mother was not frail or needy. She was an island of autonomy even when the world around her was at war. Zeba did not push her mother down — she had merely walked away from her.
But this was a different Gulnaz. Before her stood a simple woman, made of flesh and scars and regrets. She was a story with an arc that fell suddenly and tragically when it should have lifted. Zeba did what she could to banish the pity from her eyes. That was not what she wished for her mother. It was cruelty to have a light shine so brightly on the one lie she had built her life upon, the one fallacy that allowed her to carry on each day and walk with her head held high. Zeba hated that she knew the truth about her father, that he had simply walked out on her because he couldn’t stand to be around her mother. That her father was not a wretched man or an insane man or a dead soldier only made matters worse. He was alive and well, a decent person who’d made a drastic decision — choosing to walk away from everything he had and every person he’d ever loved simply to get as far away from Gulnaz as possible. He’d left her with as much dignity as he could until their paths were forced together once again.
Zeba could see the lines on her mother’s face and wondered how she’d never noticed them before. The green of her eyes didn’t sparkle. Was it because they sat beneath a sky of hammered metal or because they had lost their luster years ago and Zeba hadn’t noticed? The bend of her spine, her shrunken lips, the slight tremble in her hands — all were tiny revelations for Zeba.
“Madar,” she started. Why did it have to be like this? Why were she and her mother like two survivors floating on rafts, reaching out for each other only to be bounced apart by wave after tumultuous wave? Would they ever reach still waters?
“Now you know,” Gulnaz said, her moist eyes half hidden by heavy eyelids. “Now you know everything. And I’m glad you do. It surprises me to say it but it’s true. I hid it from you because you were a girl. You couldn’t have known what a husband was.” Gulnaz stared off into the distance. She spoke softly, a thin attempt at lightening the heaviness in the air. “But I don’t have to tell you now, do I? You know better than most, jan-e-madar, that some husbands are quite burdensome creatures.”
“They are, aren’t they?” Zeba laughed, bringing a trace of a smile to her mother’s face. Zeba went on, “I always dreamed of trekking across the country, climbing the mountains and finding some green flag somewhere or a pile of stones and being struck with this knowledge that somehow I’d stumbled upon my father’s grave. I imagined him a martyr, a hero who had spilled his blood for freedom.”
“It was a different kind of freedom he was after. He was no martyr, neither was I.”
“I suppose not.”
“I knew he would speak to you,” Gulnaz said. “I begged him that day not to say anything, but I could tell from the look on his face that he wouldn’t be able to hold his tongue for more than a few moments once I left.”
“How could he? I would have hated him for it.”
Gulnaz looked up sharply.
“You wouldn’t have known to hate him for it. He could have simply left things alone.”
Zeba shook her head.
“That’s not the way it should be. I needed to know.”
“Did you? Has it made anything better? Has it restored anything in you? I bet it hasn’t.”
Zeba wouldn’t answer that question. Her mother looked pained enough.
“Have you told Rafi?”
Gulnaz nodded.
“I had to. No sense in waiting for him to hear it from you or, worse, from your father.”
“Father” fell from her tongue like a drop of poison. Zeba saw just how much her mother despised her husband and knew resentment was at its root. Gulnaz had wanted him to be something better and he’d disappointed her.
“What did Rafi say?”
“Not much. I don’t know if he’ll try to see him or if he’ll just pretend he never heard about this. He was almost a young man when your father left to—” Gulnaz caught herself before she completed the phrase with the lie she’d been telling for so long that it had grown roots in her mind. “When your father left. He’s angry about that.”
“He has a right to be. We all have a right to be angry at him for leaving.”
Gulnaz looked up, grateful for the bit of anger that survived in her daughter after learning the truth.
“Those were difficult years.”
“I’m sure they were, Madar. I don’t doubt that for a moment.”
“Shame is a terrible thing.”
Zeba knew it well. It was terrible. Shame was more binding than the shackle around her ankle at the shrine. Shame, in its many shapes and colors, was what had broken Zeba, Gulnaz, and the girl Kamal had raped. It threatened to cast them out of their communities. It threatened the promise of a new day. It was an indelible stain on their spirits.
“I’m sorry you felt ashamed,” Zeba said. It was the best she could offer. She could not tell her mother that she should not have felt shame or that she should not feel shame even now. She would not compound one fallacy with another, not when her mother could see right through it.
“It’s done,” Gulnaz said flatly. “I should have expected this to happen. Nothing stays buried, especially in a place like this where people are always sticking their hands into the dirt and trying to dig things up. But he doesn’t want to come back. Nothing will change with the family. Your father turned his back on them, and for him to return now would bring shame to him, too. He’ll stay hidden behind that beard and shrine until the day he dies and his wife can bury him there as the great mullah who spent his years helping the troubled.”
“He is not a bad person. He told me he meant you no harm.”
“I didn’t disagree with his choice,” Gulnaz admitted. “We were once happy, but that was before I knew him. When he was only my fiancé and we were at arm’s length, we were very happy with each other. But by the time my wedding henna had faded from my hands, I hated being his wife. I would have hated being anyone’s wife, to tell you the truth, and I told him that at the shrine.”
“What did he say?” It was a bold question for Zeba to ask, such a private matter between her parents. She asked anyway because boundaries had already been crossed.
“He knew it. He’s always known it. That was why he did me the favor of not divorcing me. He could have, just to free himself, but it would have been a bigger shame than his walking out. He could have stayed and taken a second wife, but even that didn’t appeal to him. He wanted to wander, and hating me gave him a good excuse to do it.”
Zeba hooked her fingers on the metal fence and pressed her face against the mesh, the rings making impressions on her skin. Her mother touched her cheeks and nose with a fingertip, a caress as light and warm as sunlight.
“I don’t think any less of you, Madar-jan. I would have done the same. I probably will do the same, actually, when it comes time to tell Shabnam, Kareema, and Rima about their father. I’ll come up with the prettiest version of the truth I can and pray that they believe it until we’re all dead and buried.”
“What did happen, Zeba?”
Zeba bit her lower lip and grimaced. She shifted her weight and felt the softened earth give way beneath her, molding itself to the shape of her feet.
“I found him attacking a girl I’d never seen before — a girl barely older than Shabnam. I’d never expected to see something so evil in my own home. It was the blackest thing a mother could see. He. . he ruined her.”