A letter writer near the post office entrance starts to eat a paratha. Oil mixes with the ink stains on his fingers. When he wipes them on a greasy newspaper, they leave blue streaks.
I didn’t see Mumtaz enter the post office, but I see her now, emerging, and my first thought is to leave, to slip the car into reverse and slide back onto the street. The wind and rain have made a solid mass of her hair and it hangs in clumps beside her face, curling, thick. The way it does when she sweats, after boxing, after sex on a hot day. I know what it must smell like.
I’m startled by her walk, how familiar it is: shoulders back, chin up. For all the world invulnerable, perfect, until she stumbles on the uneven pavement in front of the post office, a quick trip followed by an even quicker smile, a smile I’ve seen countless times, what her mouth and eyes do when her guard slips and she laughs at herself.
I don’t know what I can say to her. I don’t know why I thought she would be different. I wish the sight of Mumtaz had brought my memory of her into even the slightest doubt. Because this, seeing her as she was, makes me want to run away.
I don’t run, though. I get out of my car. Wet dust on cement, smooth like paper, like silt, retains my footprint. I take two steps and wait. She stops. Then she walks over. We stand for a moment, watching each other. She doesn’t speak.
Something hot rises inside me, like a sob on fire, demanding release, and I tilt my head back and shut my eyes, my mouth in line with my throat, my face flat to the rain. And gravity pulls me down, overcoming exhausted muscles, an unfed, unslept body, bending weak legs, bringing me to the earth, leaving me on my knees. The air lacerates my lungs as I breathe, the world turning against me, existence an agony.
Then a shock as I feel her hands. She strokes my hair gently, cradles the back of my head with long fingers, pulls me to her, buries my face in her loins. And I lean against her legs, upright only with her support, my arms at my sides, my chest against her thighs, as she caresses me from above. It lasts until I’ve stopped waiting for her to let go. When she walks away my body remains erect. And when I open my eyes I find I have the strength to stand.
The police come for me that afternoon. I hadn’t expected them, but I go quietly. In the back of their mobile unit, one asks me why I did it. I don’t answer him.
‘Why were you in such a hurry?’ he asks.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The boy you killed because you couldn’t be bothered to stop for a red light. What was so important you couldn’t wait for him to cross the road?’
I look at him, not understanding.
‘He was probably rushing to meet a woman,’ another says.
They laugh.
And as I look out the open back of the mobile unit at the intersection falling behind and people on firm ground receding as though carried away by the earth’s spin, I begin to remember and to understand. I feel something, wild anger and confusion perhaps, but I’m so tired I can’t place the emotion, and it, too, slips away as I shut my eyes.
16
the wife and mother (part two)
It’s me again: Mumtaz. Now commonly called ‘the monster.’ Sometimes even to my face. Which makes my story, I suppose, a kind of monster story. With Daru among my victims.
I wonder what would have happened if I’d met him a few months earlier, when he still had his job. Or maybe even years earlier, before his mother died, before I’d gotten married and had Muazzam. We probably would have had an insane affair, a couple weeks of wild sex, and that would have been that. I wonder, because that’s what should have happened. But when I met Daru his life was falling apart, and our relationship became something else.
Even though I told him not to, Daru fell in love with me. Maybe ‘love’ isn’t the right term. He became obsessed with me. And I guess you could say that it was, at least in part, my fault. I stayed with him past the first warning signs. I don’t know if that was wrong of me. All I know is that it made me feel good to take care of him. I was desperate to prove to myself that I wasn’t a bad person, that I wasn’t selfish and uncaring, that I could be giving and good. That it wasn’t my fault I didn’t love my son.
As soon as I heard Daru had been arrested for killing a boy in a car accident, I told Ozi. And Ozi smiled.
That’s when I realized Ozi knew about our affair. He’d never said anything, didn’t say anything even then. But something in his expression left no doubt in my mind. I felt sick. Disgusted by what Daru had done, disgusted by my husband’s glee, disgusted at myself for having the affair in the first place, for ending it so abruptly. I felt sorry for all of us.
And then I made up my mind. I decided that I couldn’t stay in this house any longer, that I needed to abandon my family to save myself.
I thought about Muazzam growing up without a mother. I told myself that he would still have Ozi, his grandparents, his nanny. That they would take care of him. That he’d be emotionally disturbed if he grew up with a mother like me. That already I was spoiling him to make up for the love I didn’t feel. But as much as I tried, I never convinced myself I wasn’t hurting my son by leaving him behind. I just knew I had to. And I felt strong enough to live with it.
So one day I transferred half the money in our joint account to one I’d opened for myself, took my jewelry out of the safe-deposit box, and packed two suitcases. I felt almost as determined as I had the day I told Ozi I’d marry him. But when I told Ozi I was leaving, when I saw him register the shock and pain, then I felt sad, too. For both of us. And for Muazzam.
Ozi didn’t get angry. He was quiet for a long time. And when he spoke, softly, he just said he’d see to it that Daru wouldn’t get out of prison for a long time.
I didn’t lie, didn’t pretend I hadn’t had an affair. I just said, ‘You killed the boy, didn’t you?’
Ozi didn’t answer. Which was his answer. I felt like crying.
He didn’t speak again until the servants were carrying out my suitcases. Then he said, ‘Please stay. I’ll forgive you.’
And who will forgive you?
I thought I would go home to Karachi, but I haven’t. Something keeps me here. Zulfikar Manto, maybe. My parents’ complete inability to understand. A reluctance to run from where I’ve been, what I was.
I think about Muazzam more than anything else. I remember his long eyes, eyes that are neither mine nor Ozi’s but his own, uninherited, original. He isn’t a strong boy. He tires easily, cries more than most three-year-olds. But he likes my voice, likes me to read to him. It puts him to sleep.
Muazzam called me ‘Amma.’ And not softly, but insistently, desperately, even when he was barely awake. I wonder if he always knew I would leave him. Maybe all children do, maybe that’s where nightmares come from, nature telling them their parents will be gone one day. But I wonder if mine suspected his would leave sooner than she should.
I don’t think I will ever be able to explain to him why his mother couldn’t stay.
One thing he will definitely know is that his mother was a very bad woman. Everyone’s talking about this trial, and more than anything else they seem fascinated by the question of whether or not Daru and I were having an affair. I say ‘the question,’ but it isn’t, really. I don’t think many people are giving me the benefit of the doubt.
Or Daru, for that matter.
But Zulfikar Manto’s been writing an article that tells things from Daru’s perspective, or what I imagine his perspective to be – I haven’t spoken with him since he was locked up. I’ve interviewed people who are willing to say, anonymously, of course, that a Pajero and not a Suzuki killed the boy. And certain members of the Accountability Commission, while refusing to be quoted, have pointed out that it would be extremely inconvenient for Khurram Shah, himself under investigation, if his son were to be accused of this crime.