She recognises one of them and calls out to him and tells him she will sew the item that he had asked her to the previous week, something to which she had said no at the time. But now she will need the money. The substance she will administer to Naheed is very strong, even life-threatening, and she will fall severely ill after taking it. There will be medical expenses.
She gives a rupee to a beggar and asks him to pray for her daughter’s health and happiness, and getting home she puts the padlock on the staircase door, blocking the only way out.
She stands at the closed door to the room, listening intently to the heavy silence on the other side. In the kitchen she begins to prepare the medication. Then she cooks the evening meal and when it is ready she unlocks the room, on alert in case the girl tries to rush out.
But Naheed is sitting still in the chair and remains that way. Tara places the plate of spinach and two chapattis wrapped in a white napkin before her.
‘You’ve put something in it.’
‘I haven’t.’
Naheed touches the rim of the plate with a fingertip and slowly begins to slide it away from her. It goes over the edge of the table and shatters on the floor.
Tara brings another.
‘In your condition a woman must eat to maintain her strength.’
There is no response from Naheed.
‘I didn’t put anything in it,’ she encourages. ‘Surely you know you’ll damage the child’s development if you don’t eat.’
Naheed breaks off a piece of chapatti and scoops an amount of spinach from the new plate and raises it to her mouth but then drops it.
‘I didn’t invent this world, Naheed. Your life will be ruined.’
‘This is Jeo’s last reminder in the world.’
‘He didn’t think of you when he went to Afghanistan, why are you thinking of him?’
‘This is my child. I’ll bring him up myself.’
‘How exactly will that happen?’
‘I’ll get a diploma and become a teacher and when he grows up he’ll look after me.’
‘He? What if it’s a girl? Where will we get the money to marry her off in twenty years? Or will she too get a diploma and prepare her own dowry?’
‘I am not listening to any of this.’
‘And are you sure you are intelligent enough to get a diploma? You didn’t even pass high school.’
Naheed looks fiercely at her, stung. ‘I failed my classes because of you. Your imprudence, that landed you in prison for two years. And you were mad even before that.’
Tara takes a step closer. ‘Why are you speaking to me in this manner?’
‘When you came back from prison, I had to contend with the months of madness yet again. You and your djinns.’
‘What do you mean by these remarks?’ Tara says.
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
‘I was ill a few times, that’s all. I did my best to bring you up.’
‘As will I.’
She is silent but then she speaks. ‘What do you mean by those remarks?’
Naheed looks at her. In her childhood she was afraid of Tara. Terrified of the djinns that visited her. Tara would not speak for days and just lay in bed facing the wall. Naheed learned to cook and care for her from very early on. One day a child even threw a stone at Tara as children do at lunatics. Naheed has always wondered how much of those weeks and months her mother recalls. They have never been mentioned by either of them with any directness. When she became a teenager, Naheed acquired the idea of becoming a teacher, of one day carrying a purse and walking confidently, clipping the front strands of her hair to rest on her cheeks. But her schoolwork was suffering. She remembers the humiliation of having to repeat her classes, and then Tara was arrested.
‘Father will help in bringing up the child.’
‘He hasn’t much of anything,’ Tara says from the armchair. ‘I thought he was wealthy but I was mistaken. Even the house belongs to the people who own the school, and they might want it back one day. Jeo becoming a doctor was the only secure future he, and you, had.’
Naheed looks at the plate and then pushes it away.
‘Your Jeo’s last gift to you will be you becoming the plaything of that man downstairs, or of someone else like him, for the next decade and a half. And then you will be cast aside. Do you wish to make a life around that? Once a month, in the dead of night, you and your child can walk through the dark streets to pay a visit to Jeo’s grave.’
Naheed carries the tray back into the kitchen and returns with a rag and begins to clean the mess of the first plate from the floor.
‘I will wait for a few days, until I am absolutely sure, and then I will tell Father and Yasmin. I’ll find someone to marry me, with my child. You can win great merit from Allah for marrying a martyr’s widow. Everyone says that.’
‘It’s all talk.’
Naheed rises to her feet and looks at her. ‘Then I’ll live on my own.’
*
As Tara stands on the prayer mat and bows down towards Mecca, she has a sense that the girl is standing behind her. From the small metallic sound she knows that she is holding the pair of scissors. After twenty years of handling them Tara knows every possible sound they make. When she finishes her prayers, however, and turns around the girl is still on the bed. The scissors have moved from the shelf to the windowsill. Or perhaps they were there to begin with.
*
Sometimes Tara thinks she has asked too little from life. Sometimes she thinks she has asked too much.
When Naheed was fourteen years old, Tara had been assaulted by a man she had recently met. She went to the police and they demanded — in accordance with Sharia law — proof from four male witnesses that it was indeed an assault and not consensual intercourse. There were no such witnesses, of course, and Tara was jailed for adultery. Naheed went to live with her village grandmother while Rohan tried to have Tara released.
It was while she was incarcerated, terrified of the future, that Rohan had reassured her by promising to make Naheed his daughter-in-law.
And that madness of hers that Naheed mentioned, her djinns — her mind would feel broken into during those hours and days. A young widow, her youth slipping away, she had wanted her husband to be alive again. She cannot believe she is thinking this while sitting on a prayer mat — recalling the days of combatting desire, the feeling of guilt in her whenever she thought of a man, feeling like a criminal for wanting something as basic as love and an end to loneliness, feeling maimed in her very soul. What will Naheed do about these things? Sharif Sharif used Tara for a few years after she was widowed and then threw her aside. He already had two wives and her hope of becoming the third came to nothing. She wants to stand up but her knees won’t let her so she raises herself a little on her haunches and pulls the velvet prayer mat from under her and folds it with a kiss and puts it on her lap. Sitting on the cold floor, she knows she mustn’t allow the girl to repeat her own mistake. The matchmakers said again and again that the presence of the daughter reduced her chances of remarrying, and they advised her to have Naheed adopted. ‘They change their mind when they hear you’ll be bringing another mouth to feed. A girl whose upbringing will have to be provided for, whose honour and virginity protected, for whom a dowry will have to be given one day.’
She sent the child away to live in the village, but even then the marriage talks failed to progress beyond a certain point. People were invariably delighted to learn that she was descended from the Prophet, the idea that through her they could connect with Muhammad’s bloodline, but she would invite the prospective in-laws to this roof and of course it would be a mistake to let them see the poverty. One room with a small balcony at the front, the steep stairs, and a cubby she called kitchen. The last man who came here ended up marrying someone whose family owned a business in Riyadh, the bride no doubt bringing a car and a washing machine in the dowry, a colour television and a VCR. ‘So much for Muhammad’s blood unaided by Saudi gold,’ said the matchmaker.