She saw the shopper with tomatoes as soon as she opened the kitchen door. There were five tomatoes. She saw them in the bag. Absolutely, she saw five unmistakably round and red tomatoes – there is no room for confusion on the count, the vegetable, the shape, or the color. Naila was filling the shopper with tomatoes; she had one in her hand, what would’ve been the sixth tomato, when the door opened. Ahmad was holding the bag open. Their three pairs of eyes darted around, unsure where to settle. A lot of looking, no speaking, and a moment so still, a moment that ended only when she closed the door again. 

She is upset because she sends Naila’s two daughters to school: she went to the school’s headmistress’s office for their admission four years ago because kothi walay are taken seriously while the types of Naila are given the runaround; she pays their fees; she buys them new uniforms every few months. Children grow fast. She begins to count how many uniforms she has bought for them but stops midway, reprimanding herself. When Ahmad’s grandson fell from their third-floor rental, she paid for his emergency room visit, hospital stay, medicines, and follow-up doctors’ visits. She has a big heart, it is often said among those in the kitchen, at the gate, in the quarter.

Memories of good deeds done; the impulse to count them; the expectation that they be remembered and appreciated every now and then, again and again; the discovery of a quiet plan to take five of her tomatoes—all this is dashing around in her head. Her temples are throbbing—did she look too displeased, did she look too long, should she have pretended she hadn’t seen the shopper, was the door’s thud too thud-y? She turns away from the kitchen and walks towards the back of the house. She steps onto the verandah and starts turning over the clothes hung up on the wire for drying. She had just turned them over before walking to the kitchen to see if Ahmad had done the dishes and could be sent away for his afternoon break. And to remind him to get onions and potatoes for the meal he would cook at night.

This calms her, feeling each piece of clothing for wetness in her right or left hand, sometimes both hands; going down its length squeezing it lightly and then turning it over, pulling it towards or across the wire a little, shifting it to the right or left, just enough to catch an extra inch of the sun’s rays. She looks up with a frown at the house towering over the verandah, blocking the path of the sun’s generous rays—at one pm on this May afternoon, the sun’s ferocious rays. The Qureshis have added a new floor to the house after their eldest son’s wedding last year: it is taller and uglier by a floor, and it is noisier by a new daughter-in-law and her three-month-old.

She has spent most of her life making sure her children grew up comfortably, did well in school, no, excelled in school. She, and also Hanif, they abhor mediocrity – their children had to excel. For years she has made sure food was prepared on time three times every day; that all the rooms were cleaned daily; that spider webs didn’t go unseen under and behind the phone table, dresser, and book shelves; that clothes were washed, dried, ironed and folded away onto Hanif’s and every child’s half-shelf in the shared cupboards; that the children were picked up from school every day always on time; that the eldest one’s desk – the eldest’s by afternoon, the middle one’s by evening, and the youngest one’s by night – was cleared of papers and books every morning; that the middle one’s bathroom slippers were outside her door before she returned from school; and that the youngest’s badminton rackets were in the fraying wicker basket outside his room for when he played with the neighbor’s son every evening.

Over the years she learnt to finish her drama before the school, and then college-going children, ended work and took over the room with the television every night. She learnt that finishing the episode alone was easier than having to account for her choice of drama. The children don’t approve of rotti dhotti aurtain on television. She has explained many times that they are good to pass time when she doesn’t have much else to do except wait for one to return from school, the other from college, another from America, but she is quite sure they don’t yet understand what it means to wait for people as they live their lives. Now with the youngest in America too, she can watch whatever she wants, for however long, at whatever volume and time of day.

As she frowns at the neighbors’ new floor and her own blocked sun, she wonders whose sun they would block – the Shamims’? Qaisers’? Sohails’? – if they added an extra floor to their house. They would have to if the children, any one of them, decided to return, wouldn’t they? “America’s taken my children,” she says softly with a pang, pride, and a reluctant smile. Turning on her feet eastwards, then to the south, then westwards, she completes a circle taking in all the houses that have grown old with her. Some houses are also growing new: the Qureshis’, for instance, upwards. The Shamims’ horizontally: they’ve added a new terrace so wide it juts out, over into the Sohails’ driveway. That’s for the Sohails and Shamims to sort out. But thank God construction is complete and the mazdoor are gone. The digging, hammering, and drilling of construction machinery; the squelching and groaning of the UPS battery inside; the grating of the generators outside—she needs sound, she likes sound, a lot of it actually, but not this variety.

Why didn’t Naila ask for the tomatoes? I would not have said no. What business does Ahmad have facilitating Naila’s surreptitious taking of tomatoes? Naila and I go back five years and Ahmad has barely completed a year at my house! Her house. Her parents left her it. She moved in with Hanif and their children the year her mother died, the year the mango tree stopped bearing fruit, and she regulates its economy closely, carefully, tightly. The house is hers, the tree is hers, but the economy that runs it isn’t – at least it doesn’t feel hers. She has to give hisab to Hanif every two months and she hates it. Hanif has earned a salary all his life; all his life he has saved that salary. People can’t just take five tomatoes because that upsets her budget. And that upsets him, especially after retirement. He never says anything, but he looks sad that after all these years she still hasn’t learnt to run a household budget. Naila calls it circuit poora karna. The other day she said, “Circuit hee poora nahin hotta! Allah poochay ga Imran Khan ko, ghareebon ko kitna zaleel kiya hai iss hakoomat ne!” Ahmad says uske ghar ka circuit bhi poora nahin hotta, “Aj kal tabahi kii mehengai hai.” Muttering to herself, she turns her back to the clothes, “Mera bhi circuit nahin poora hoga if you all start taking my tomatoes without telling me.”

Once when they were bickering over the frequency of the gardener’s visits, Hanif had said to her, “As a begum the one thing you should do is keep proper accounts.” She had shot back, “What this begum does is just what managers get lacs to do–managing a house, managing all these people, it’s work! I don’t sit at home stewing in luxury like a salan.” That he had kept quiet made her angrier. He incomplete-d her argument. Later that night she called her sister and proudly repeated that line about stewing like a salan. Then she grew a little unsure and added, “I haven’t even made a salan in months.” Then they laughed, she until her stomach jiggled. 

She peeks into each room, checking to see if everything is in order, as if she’s unsure that all these rooms can be all that empty, and leaves each door wide open before moving on to the next. Her heart stops at the youngest one’s door until she realizes that Naila has folded and temporarily stacked all of yesterday’s laundry on the chair. No, there is no one in the room, except an orderly, just-vacuumed emptiness.

Naila cleans her house as if it were her own. One morning five years ago, she, instead of her mother, came to the kothi. Her mother had had a stroke the day before, could she come instead? Since then, every day at 10 am, the iron latch at the gate clanks open as Naila makes her way into the kothi. For the first two months, every day, she washed each of the three bathrooms, and alternated between sweeping and vacuuming the other rooms. Then she was asked to wash the clothes, do the dusting, and also clean the driveway once a week. The increments in pay suited her, the proximity to the other house she cleaned suited her too. Naila also told her that she liked that in this house she was provided with a tall broom to sweep the driveway, unlike at the Sohails’ where she would have to squat-walk across the length of the driveway as the dust pirouetted around the very short broom, everywhere it seemed except towards the dustpan, and Hammad, the gardener, looked. Increasingly, sitting on her haunches had begun to strain her right knee. With a tall broom she still craned her back and neck, but every few sweeps she could straighten up, arch her torso the other way, and then repeat with a few more sweeps. 

She walks into her own room. She feels tired—maybe it was the emptiness of every room, or the turning over of the laundry, or Naila’s let-down. Standing at the dresser, she starts brushing her hair, counting the white ones bordering her forehead. At twenty-nine she loses count and puts the brush down noisily, “I mean, I’m not heartless, I know tomatoes are expensive but this is not right. I do so much for them.” It sounds more questioning than assertive. She has never been confident about her feelings–anger is forever getting in the way of regret, guilt, consideration. Just as her budget is always being rattled by his children’s illness, or her husband’s lost job, or her unexpected third pregnancy, or her daughter’s sudden divorce; it wouldn’t if she had faith in her feelings and confidence in her accounting, but she has neither.

Why couldn’t Naila have asked? It was just five bloody tomatoes. Didn’t she remember that when Ahmad refused to have tea made by Naila on his very first day, hum issayion ke hath ki bani chai nahin peettay, she had told him he could pack his bags and leave right away because that was not how things happened in her house? That when a week later he had said Naila’s utensils should be separated from everyone else’s in the quarter-wali-almari in the kitchen she had again asked him to consider packing up and leaving? Yahan ke tareeqe aur hain.

Doesn’t Naila know, after all these years, that she would never refuse her five tomatoes? Her throbbing temples. She reaches for the bed post and sits down. Looking into the mirror once again she fingers the cluster of white hair above her right ear, stopping somewhere close to the twenty-ninth strand of white. She counts about ten more and then turns her head away. There are too many more to count. “I can have eighty hundred white hair, what do I care,” she says exasperatedly.

She walks to the room with the television, sits down on the edge of the sofa nearest to the door, rests her right cheek against her hand, and turns on the television. She isn’t interested in anything that’s playing, but leaves on a Hum TV drama at a barely audible volume. The ceiling fan circles above her dully. Quiet, save the occasional creak. She makes a note in the permanent to-do list in her head, which renews every morning, to ask Ahmad to get on the step ladder tomorrow and oil the blades to stop the creaking. As she stares vacantly at the television screen, her right thumb, distractedly caressing her chin, suddenly stops. She lifts her face and touches a spot under her chin with both index fingers. Yes, it is back. Thick as a thorn, it is back! What shameless tenacity! Standing against the window of her room for good light, she would tilt her head backwards and stretch the skin on her chin with the tips of her fingers, as her daughter plucked out the hair with her tweezer. Then she would stop her from rushing away by first feeling for the hair with one index finger and then the other to make sure it was gone. Now with the daughters visiting every six months, sometimes every twelve months, sometimes every sixteen months, it has fallen to Naila to tweeze this stubborn hair. Bartanon ke baad agar time mila ttu zara dekhna yay aik baal nikal deyna tweezer se.

A half-hour passes when she is startled by Naila’s hand on her right shoulder. Standing behind her, Naila folds both hands around her shoulder and starts pressing, first away from the neck and then towards it. The motion is familiar to her, the fingers are familiar to her. The fingers are icy cold–Naila usually presses her after washing the dishes. They smell of the new Palmolive washing liquid. She used to get Max until Naila said it was very harsh on her skin and the fragrance didn’t dissipate. She had stood in the CSD utility store’s aisles smelling multiple bottles trying to decide which one was less pungent. Her daughter had told her on the phone to get “something organic-y”: “Try Al Fatah or Esajee’s?”

“Am I mad?” she had said loudly to the phone. “CSD rates are much lower! I don’t even wash dishes myself!” 

Looking at the television screen, sounding tentative, Naila says, “Oh so the mother okayed the marriage?” She hmms in response. Naila’s fingers travel down her spine one side, then up the other. She then kneads the nape of her neck with her knuckles. 

“Yes, there. Uff. Idhar barrii khich parrttii hai.”

“Idhar itni tension rakhte hain aap.”

The children have been sending her yoga videos for her neck. She’s watched a few but never tried any part of them. The last time she did a yoga class was eleven years ago. Like her accounts, she doesn’t quite trust her body. The body that gave birth once, twice, thrice, can it be trusted with all that contorting and stretching today?

Naila presses down on either side of her neck with both thumbs. Then she traces her thumbs up the neck into the roots of her hair and starts massaging her head lightly. Wisps of her hair, luxuriant, soft, tightly coiled, graying and white, fall on either shoulder as her plait comes undone.

They have seen some episodes of this drama’s rerun together. “Mujhe zeher lagti hai ye, overacting karti hai hamesha.”

“Nayee lagttii hai, kissi aur dramay mein nahin dekha mein nay.”

She says, “You haven’t seen because when do you get the time to! She’s in every other drama these days.”

“Naya sarson ka ttail laga duun?” Naila asks.

She says no, it’s late, almost three o clock, so Naila should go home. Naila’s fingers are on her forehead now, smoothing it out with both hands, starting from the center and making their way towards the temples. She then traces her fingers over her eyebrows a few times, and brings her hands down to the sides of her cheeks. She massages both ears softly.

“Beth jao,” she says. Naila doesn’t.

Some minutes later, “Thank you. Now go, the girls will be back from school.”

Naila lifts her right arm to her shoulder, extends it, and presses from the shoulder to the hand and back a few times. She then opens her clasped hands and starts rubbing outwards from the palm along each finger.

“Is the new washing liquid any good?” she asks.

Naila waits for the mother-in-law’s dialogue to finish, they are both laughing at the television screen, and then says, “It’s very good. Look, my fingers don’t feel as rough now!” She holds out her hands in front of her face. She looks at both sets of fingers: “Yes, softer,” she agrees.

Naila finishes pressing the other arm, steps forward, and stands next to her sofa, an arm on her hip supporting her, looking intently at the television screen.

“Beth jao!”

Again after five minutes, “Beth key dekhlo na!”

Naila says, “Koi nahin, metro mein itna bethna hai abhi.”

The episode ends ten minutes later. Naila says, “Acha phir salam alaikum,” slides her feet halfway into her chappal, and leaves the room.

She straightens up in the sofa, changes a few channels mindlessly, then springs up and hurries towards the refrigerator. She takes out two handfuls of tomatoes, maybe eight, maybe nine, puts them in a shopper, and opens the kitchen door, “Aik minute.”

Naila turns around, looks at her, then at the bag she is holding out to her, smiles and says, “Koi nahin! Kal milte hain!”

Holding the bag filled with tomatoes in one hand, the other hand on the wire gauze most of the door is made of, she watches Naila’s back as it fades away, turns the corner, and exits the gate. As she takes a step back and raises one hand to reach for the bolt, one handle of the shopper slips from her hand and the tomatoes tumble out. Eight or nine, they all tumble out.