October’s cool air is like the return migration of celestial birds of mercy. You’d call this lyrical excess unless you’ve been here in August. I’d been an August bride in Peshawar, and even the epic ardency of our love had been overmatched by daunting insufficiencies of friction.
It’d been overmatched in other ways too and someone always pays for transgressions of the natural order, but right now we were here to celebrate a wedding, in the proper season.
***
We were related in one way or another to everyone on this street. I was only an in-law and of course of mongrel origins, but the rest were entangled so hopelessly you’d think they’d all been hatched by spiders. My son’s aunts and uncles were his cousins, too; they were cousins to their own children.
It was a pretty egalitarian area, if you think about it, with the slums pressed right up against the backs of the rich people’s gardens, so when you have a wedding or celebrate Eid, the whole neighborhood shows up for a plate of pullao and a little dish of zarda.
My father-in-law Baba wasn’t wealthy or even rich and he’d had no common sense in how the two houses in his compound had been constructed, but it was really only the mango orchard in the back that he cared about. The front garden had mangoes too and jasmine, and room enough for another house if one was ready to sacrifice the lawn. Between the two buildings was a courtyard, and more jasmine, and tuberoses; he was proud of those. About the mangoes he was ferocious.
He and Ammi were living in the little house and my husband was staying in the other. He’d been here since June and we’d be joining him eventually, but right now our son and I were here to celebrate a wedding in the proper season.
***
This was like the formal consolidation of two princely states into one vast kingdom.
Our nephew—my sister-in-law’s son from up the street—was marrying the daughter of his father Saleem’s cousin Haji Sahib from down the street. Haji Sahib’s Big Wife was Saleem’s sister. Haji Sahib’s Little Wife was the bride’s mother.
The groom’s compound was maybe a three-minute walk from the bride’s, right next door to Baba’s, but he was seated on a white horse when he went to fetch her, and she rode back in an open carriage, with her two brothers beside her.
She’d have looked like a queen even if they’d stuck her in an oil drum and rolled her to the gate. That girl made the rest of us look like turnips and potatoes.
***
My husband had been back here a few times since our marriage, but the three of us had only first gone, all together, that January.
After sixteen years of assorted flavors of bitterness, I was being truly welcomed as bhabi and “auntie” and even Ammi was calling me beta now like it was natural speech, and I was so grateful, I thought there was finally a real foundation on which to build good things together.
***
Everyone knew how badly Haji Sahib’s Big Wife, Mariam Apa, had wanted a child. They got the call one day, a tribal woman dead in childbirth at the hospital, the father willing to sign over any rights to the baby and if they wanted the girl they’d better come get her now.
People don’t ever really adopt children over there unless it’s a blood relative and you need a male heir.
But Haji Sahib was fine with it; as soon as his parents died he married a sixteen-year-old who gave him a daughter and two sons who all called Mariam Apa “Big Mommy,” which was hilarious, when you thought about it, because she was the tiniest little thing you’d ever seen.
That baby, Shazia, was in her twenties now, a lecturer in English at the university and married to an amiable second cousin with no particular ambitions in life, but that really didn’t matter because she had purpose enough for both of them.
We got together and came up with the idea of a women’s center for the very poorest, teaching needlework and literacy skills, and my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law, who was Saleem’s brother’s wife, and a few of Shazia’s colleagues at the university all came in with us, and when my family and I went home in January, I raised the money we needed.
***
A neighborhood woman, Khanu—widowed with five children—sometimes worked in Ammi’s house, and her eldest daughter Uzma worked in my sister-in-law’s house up the street, and I got to know Uzma that October because of the women’s center.
I never asked Uzma which of her two ex-husbands broke that front tooth of hers.
First husband was a university professor, quite a step up in status.
He was a drug addict, though; beat the crap out of her. Who was going to stop him? In a place like that, she had the guts to divorce him and go back home.
Second husband was a Christian. Pakistani Christians over there were the lowest class in society.
He beat the crap out of her. She had the guts to divorce him and take their daughter and go back home.
With Khanu and a teenage son and Uzma working, somehow they managed to pay the school fees for Uzma’s little girl. There wasn’t all that much sense in it. A poor family’s daughter, half-Christian, what can she ever do with an education? Maybe they didn’t think it out that far.
I saw that little Alishba once, in the school uniform all the children wear, blue kameez and white shalwar, while she sat outside our kitchen, waiting for Khanu. Mother or grandmother washed and ironed it every day. Simple as it is, it’s still too expensive to allow for a spare set.
Uzma asked me to start a second shift at the women’s center so she could attend afternoon classes once her work was done. The teachers, who were all poor women themselves, looked at each other and back at me when I asked if we could do it. They had responsibilities at home, didn’t I know that? And the heat—who doesn’t rest in the afternoons?
Uzma kept asking, and I kept telling her—really regretfully, but still—I didn’t think we could.
She was small and slim and pretty until she smiled and that broken tooth distracted you. For some reason she held her head straight and looked people right in the eye.
Around there, the poor women didn't cover their faces—it’s a mark of higher social standing, to do that. So all the neighborhood guys, seeing her, you knew what they were thinking. All that sex she’d had, between those two husbands of hers.
Widows, at least, you think to yourself, as they say there, God is master, you have to submit to His will. Widows are good for screwing but they still have a frayed sort of honorable status attached to them. Divorced—world over, that’s just another word for slut.
***
Over here weddings last at least three days, minimum. We’d had the mehndi the day before and now I was dancing with my whole heart, welcoming the bride into the wedding tent, and somehow in all that crowd she found my own eyes, and in the radiance of her glory made me feel I was the only guest who mattered. The foreign auntie she’d only just met that year, yet she made me feel I’d been present at her birth, had been waiting to dance at her wedding all her life.
Later I saw Uzma, dancing with all the other girls on the front lawn. Divorced twice, mother of a school-age girl, that night she looked like a teenager in the midst of this great celebration, her hair uncovered and unbound and rippling down her back—young and happy and lit with the beauty that even a momentary happiness gives.
***
Two or three days later, I overheard the bride—gorgeous in her splendor, her silk and gold and diamonds—and possessing treasures not even her father’s fortune could have bought for her—the actual love of her bridegroom and his kind and self-effacing mother—I heard that rose-and-snowdrift-colored girl laughing to her friends about Uzma, who’d had the nerve, despite those two shameful divorces of hers, to let down her hair and dance.
Evokes memories of similar experiences in Middle East and Equatorial Pacific.