Amma can keep me alive for exactly ten days.
It’s actually good.
I only ever liked even numbers anyway.
Amma has two brown eyes. Two strong hands. Two straight rules for me: Always love your Amma the most, and never put your leftover roti in the kitchen sink. In the past, she had a six-digit salary.
Today, Amma took me to Pakkay Peer Saab. PPS. As I wore my Star Wars sneakers whose laces now resemble the dainty rainbow cobwebs dancing in Amma’s cold master bedroom, I shouted, “But it’s okay to die!”
She dropped the car keys and, after a slight clink, picked them up immediately. If I had blurted such radical declarations just a few years ago, she would’ve left the keys on the floor, crashed into my bed, and stayed there till Naani Maa would’ve come over to take over the house and her daughter’s mind. Now, she doesn’t get the privilege to let keys stay forgotten or dropped in her home for more than an instant. There are things to do and places to be before the happy business of death finds us poor and lost in our home.
Also, Amma picked the keys up today because she has been gradually losing the verve with which she once went over the same conversation in this house with Abba.
“Die is a bad word, Jaani!”
“Which one?”
“Meena, please don’t start with the child now!”
“Amma, which one? The one with an i or y?”
“An i, of course! I won’t hear it again from you or your Abba.”
“Fine! We can all use dead instead. Hai na, Abba? Abba will be dead soon. OK, all?”
Soon, we were rushing downstairs to our Cultus, looking grievous in its wet cement hue just as its two drivers over the last two decades always did. Amma insisted we keep the windows shut – she does this even when it’s stiflingly hot inside. “The air’s bad today. We can always take a bath once we get back home.” She always takes this bath. I never do. But then, I never sweat either. In the past, when the idea of death was distant and distasteful, people who secreted copious amounts of sweat around me used to make me very jealous. Pearls dribbling down the forehead, disappearing into the thick brows, and then reappearing heavier and darker under the eyes. Shirts clinging to dark bodies, refusing to sway in the gentle July breeze. Miracle babies do not sweat, Amma tells me. She pretends it’s a divine trait and that I’m better off without smelling like rotten rohu in this town. She can’t pretend I don’t feel hot too. Miracle babies feel hot. They do wish to roll the window down and gulp the coastal breeze down their hollow metallic throats.
“Amma, can you please let me roll down the window?”
“Jaani, we’re just there! We’ll meet PPS and then head straight back home. OK? Won’t take more than an hour. Promise!”
The question was stupid. The window is, in fact, broken. It has been for many weeks now. To roll it down, one needs to grab a spanner of a certain size from the boot. Amma wouldn’t have stopped the car in the middle of the road to grab it for me. Amma wouldn’t have stopped the car for anything today. You see, I’m dying pretty fast, pretty certainly. And my Amma believes PPS might fix me yet.
“Amma, please let me drink water when we reach there. It’s too hot today.”
No answer. No glance. She began pressing her nape, which all these years with her and Abba have taught me to mean a no; a no that means she’d rather say yes, that she’d obviously want to say yes. In fact, she’d rather prefer to die before saying a yes or no.
Realizing that I was staring at her, she turned around to look at me with an apologetic smile.
“Jaan, how about an oil massage tonight? It always makes you so happy.”
It could, yes. We’ve not been happy for a long while now. I wonder how much God would have to give us back, or give back more than He’s taken, to make us as happy as we were before. We were the happiest until I learned the art of storytelling. Amma, Abba and me – together and happy. Then, I put nazar on our lives. That’s what Naani Maa says.
Naani Maa tells me that when I was six, I began writing stories about my perfect family. In hindsight, they weren’t meritorious or especially worth anything beyond childhood banter. But I had faith in them.
Back then, I had decided something unalterable and serious for myself: I will become a writer and read stories about my Abba and Amma to the whole world. Of course, that whole world didn’t stretch beyond the whereabouts of PPS because he has to take care of me and my poor body that can do without water but certainly not his special oil and spells. And of course, my stories didn’t wander into far-off oceans or thriving jungles without the pulsating presence of my protagonists’ parents – really mine – because children like me need their parents at all times.
Once upon a time, there lived a tall prince with his tall father and tall mother in a yellow sea. The prince frequently visited his cousins in the blue sea…
Many years ago, there lived a sweet boy with his sweet father and sweet mother in an apple… The boy never feared the worms in the apple because they were his mother’s friends…
Last Eid, I visited the beach with my happy parents…I saw a little red crab who had lost her way. My father picked her up and put her on his hat so that she could look for her parents…
Naani Maa says I used to read these stories to everyone who visited our home. She tells me true believers, pious men and women of God, don’t do that. They share tea and crisp samosas with every visitor but never their happiness and blessings.
One evening, when I had yet to comprehend the pounding weight of what nazar meant or the inexplicable sensation of dying in succession to my Abba, I began reading these stories to Naani Maa’s sister and brother-in-law.
The old man and his older wife used to visit only when Naani Maa was staying with us for summers. Amma couldn’t tolerate her own relatives without Naani Maa. Naani Maa couldn’t tolerate her daughter’s severance from her only sister’s family. Abba couldn’t tolerate much in any case. But Abba tolerated Amma a lot better when Naani Maa used to come over. So, unlike other children, I never went over to my grandma’s place; she came over every year and, naturally, became the woman of the house.
Naani Maa used to infiltrate our home like a pest. Everywhere, she left traces of her stinky paan and stinkier schemes. Washing Amma’s dirty malmal chemises. Scrubbing and scrubbing where the armholes had turned the color of her turmeric-stained teeth. Cursing her only child for lack of etiquette in housework. Wondering aloud how her husband tolerates her. The husband was, by default, the next project. Grilling fresh fish for him every night with freshly boiled eggs. Insisting it’s a delicacy from where she came. Assuring him he can eat her fish with his 9 p.m. doodh patti.
“Beta jee, this is not the fish that causes phulbehri.”
“Which one does, Amma jee?”
“Here’s the thing. Nobody knows. You eat away. Enjoy your Amma jee’s special food!”
“He’s not comfortable eating your special food right now, Amma. Perhaps in the morning?”
“Did I say I’m not comfortable? Haan? And who eats fish for breakfast?”
“Fine! Mujhay kya? Grow all patchy and hideous for all I care! You’re not much to look at as it is!”
Naani Maa would later hum her favorite lullaby while washing the grease-and-yolk-stained plates in the kitchen with cool tap water that she thought was the only cure for the infernal heat in our town. After listening to her lullaby for some time, I would hear beside me fish-odored sighs, followed by light snores.
That particular evening I was telling you about, before Naani Maa possessed my mind as she often does if you’re her family, her sister and brother-in-law had seated themselves comfortably in our worn-out leather sofas, talking about a certain summer in their childhood days in the village. How Baba Bakkay ka mazaar became their playground for the whole summer, the very day some kids found a red and yellow swing set up in its courtyard flying in the air by itself. No djinn, churail, of course. It was Baba Bakkay ki masoom rooh.
I interrupted the old folks’ boring tales of bygone days. My stories were far more interesting and truthful. So I began. It was the first time I’d decided to narrate my stories to Naani Maa’s summer guests. I had high hopes of only appreciation.
As soon as I geared up for my third story about the young sailor and his one-eyed father and one-eyed mother, they put their teacups down. Slowly, apologetically, and then with a sense of urgency, they began making their way out of the house.
“No. No. We really can’t stay for dinner. We have to get home to the kids. You know how it is, baaji. We can’t leave them alone for long.”
I rushed toward them. Surely, they had to know why my one-eyed sailor sacrificed his other eye for his father. The old man and his older wife were standing just outside our door, dabbing their foreheads with crumpled tissue paper, leaving traces of white snow all over.
I was certain they had to stay and listen. They had to know. Everybody had to.
“But you don’t have kids, khaloo jee. Are you lying? Naani Maa, is he lying?”
I sometimes think about that moment and the quiet that ensued. The world would be perfect if such moments, every now and then, blasted the deceiving glass domes people have created around themselves. Then, we could hear ourselves and everyone around us rather clearly. And then, I could go on telling everyone about my family and its perfection – how I lost all of it.
I knew I had entranced Naani Maa’s sister and brother-in-law to stay for the finale of my story. The young sailor’s father was dying because of orbital cellulitis. So, he decided to give one of his perfect golden eyes to his dying father. It wasn’t a great sacrifice, actually. That particular eye already had the habit of leaving his own socket and sleeping in his father’s in the middle of the night. In my story, both the father and the son lived.
I had the perfect audience that day. The old man and his wife stood there with phantom eyes. At that moment, I had thought I’d won. They were glued to their spots, mesmerized by my eloquence and genius. If only I could live long enough to experience more of this complete euphoria from such performances.
After a long while – because of course the story didn’t end with the young sailor’s sacrifice for his father – the old guests dragged their resigned feet to their grey Corolla parked down the street. I waved my tiny arms to their motionless white heads driving away, disappearing into the coastal heat hazing every asphalt track of this town.
Naani Maa was waiting patiently for them to leave. I could tell because she had begun grinding her teeth very rhythmically – once from left to right, twice anti-clockwise. I gathered, through years of living with and despite her, that she was waiting to say and do something. Usually, patience was not her best trait, but mehmaan can’t be trusted with one’s afflictions. And blessings were already off limits.
Once her mehmaan were entirely engulfed by the long distance between their home and ours, she put her paan-pungent claw on my shoulder and slightly turned me so I had to face her.
“I told you they got cats after Huzaifa and Maria died.”
“Who are Huzaifa and Maria?”
“Their children! Don’t you remember their murder? I told you!”
“I didn’t know, Naani Maa. And they were lying anyway! Cats cannot be people’s kids.”
“No? And someone like you can be? Evil child!”
I could hear her coarse voice in my ear as Amma and I drove to PPS this morning. Evil child. I could make it my epitaph. But I know Amma would have a bigger claim on it. And Naani Maa would agree. Perhaps Abba would too.
PPS was home today. Thank heavens. I don’t like his laboratory near the beach. Always infested with dead snails and an elemental smell coming off the sea that nauseates both Amma and me. You’d think the salt in the air would’ve domesticated her over these forty years of living in this town. But she’s always eloping anything that’s here. Presence repulses her. I am here, and it shouldn’t matter that I won’t be in ten days. It matters to her. It is all that matters to her.
“Thank god you met me at your home this time,” Amma says as she throws her body onto the tan leather couch PPS had accepted as a gift from my parents when they had me. He wouldn’t accept money. He never accepts money. “It eats my brain. I smell mold in here when there’s money clinging to me,” he says as he points towards his bulbous chest.
For some months now, his chest has been bloating as much as his stomach. I’ve been trying to crack this new anomaly. There’s always something wrong with him. PPS’s body, always attacked by some unique ailment, is one of my favorite workbooks. Another one used to be my Abba’s obsession with hiding palm-sized glass bottles, always empty, always rolling under my bed. Amma could never know our little secret, Abba told me. I agreed.
PPS and I have been together more than my parents and I. In a sense, he’s the first guardian I ever knew. I’ve been visiting him for more than ten years now, always with an emergency. Pills don’t work on me. Certain oils do. Certain spells too. Once, when Abba had to take me to PPS because Amma had to meet a client in the city (that was when she had a six-digit pay) and because I had stopped breathing in the middle of a hot shower, PPS took two days to pump some air into me. Normally, it took him two minutes. Apparently, in the middle of treating me, his left arm had started swinging on the shoulder joint on its own. Nonstop.
“You’ve got a nice little fan there. Eco-friendly.”
He smiled at me and thrust a big needle into my blue arm a little too hard. I got one of the best sleeps of my short life that day. My short life. I could make this my epitaph. Amma would not have a bigger claim on it.
Today, PPS asked me to recline on a charpai turned very poorly into a stretcher. The last time I was here – not a long while ago, of course – he made me lie on an old almirah balanced on two stools to the accompaniment of lots of prayers by Amma. He began working on my body. His heavy hands rested first on my eyelids, then my throat, and finally my heart in a slow span of many minutes. Amma was certain he was taking longer than usual. I wasn’t. I was occupied elsewhere. I had begun studying his twitching hairline.
… …. .. – and then silence.
“Don’t curse, PPS!”
He smiled his customary defeated smile. This time, he thrust a small needle into my arm. This time, it did not hurt at all.
Amma and PPS left me on the charpai. I wasn’t sleeping even though PPS gave me two shots more than the usual dosage. On the fifth, I preferred to close my eyes and begin my rhythmic breathing-drifting-into-sleep routine I occasionally followed when Abba used to put me to bed in a bad mood; he always used to be in a bad mood.
So, in the end, you see, I couldn’t sleep, although that is exactly why Amma took me to PPS today. That, and my slow heartbeat. And my small eyes dropping out of my big sockets from asar to maghrib. And my skin turning the color and texture of rust. And my food coming out of my bum just as I engulfed it, sometimes a little rotten when Amma didn’t empty my bowels in time. And my words trailing back to year 1 when PPS taught me that the difference between Amma and Abba is not merely a matter of two phonemes. And that I wasn’t dying so much as degenerating.
I could hear Amma and PPS talk in the other room.
“What more do you want from me? I’ve already told you he’s got ten days. Ten days, Meena!”
“Please. You have to clear this…this…”
“Mess?”
“Miracle!”
“We’ll settle for machine.”
I never thought of myself as a machine. I was always a jaan, jaani, baby, or babu. I was never a mess or miracle either.
“Don’t call him that! He’s my baby!”
“Let’s not deceive ourselves anymore, Meena.”
“Please, only you can clear this. You made him. You gave birth to him.”
They were arguing over trivialities. In ten days, Amma will have to restart her life without all of us – Abba and Naani Maa are already gone, and now it’s my turn. Yet, she wastes her good time and mine here, bickering with a man who makes jaanis and babies as faulty as me.
“I did not give birth to him, you idiot!
“Oh, I know full well you used more than scraps. Please! You know the words. You have the gift. Use it. Please, use it and make him as good as he was before.”
“Are you accusing me of evil? I didn’t do any evil, alright? You came to me with your half-wit husband who couldn’t give you children, who was going to die before you could accept his death! I gave you this…this toy, really. There is no gift, you understand?”
“Yes, yes, you’re right. But those words, you read them from the book. Where’s that book you always had here before you made him?”
She was pacing around the whole house now. I’d love to read that book. The book of my creation! PPS should’ve given it to us a long time ago. I would’ve given it to Naani Maa so she could understand how her daughter suddenly brought home a boy who looked like a seven-year-old but talked and walked like a possessed machine.
“You read from it, and he began seeing, talking, walking. My baby became alive because of your words.”
I could hear PPS following her frantically around the house. At some point, they became less audible. I would’ve opened my eyes or sat up a bit, but I knew better than to take that risk. Or maybe I didn’t know any better. Maybe, despite all my lessons with PPS over these years, I knew nothing about humans and their many fears and failings.
“What words? What book? Don’t you dare utter another word now, Meena!”
“God’s words! You bent God’s words right here in front of us.”
I heard her footsteps rushing into the room where PPS had installed me on his charpai-stretcher. I could now hear the doors of the old almirah creaking and banging. Amma would’ve ripped the whole place apart.
Her feet finally rested. Moment of triumph? I could hear she was now rifling through some books.
“What are you searching for, haan? I’m not an evil magician. Meena, stop this madness!”
The frantic rustling of pages continued for a while and then, almost abruptly, halted. Had she found the academic elixir to my life?
“No, I didn’t say you’re evil. PPS, you’re God’s chosen one. You read from God’s books, and scraps become sons and daughters.”
PPS didn’t respond. I thought that at any moment he would throw us out of his shack, but he didn’t. He should have. We were wasting a good day out of the ten I had.
No sound for a good two minutes. Perhaps Amma had finally lost.
“You made him! Please. Please, just tell me where you’ve kept that book. Just tell me the words, and I’ll read them every moment. I can memorize the verses you used. I’ll make my baby good as new. Please, you need to know he’s more than a child to us. Remember when you gave him to us? He was so pure and perfect. And you made him so. You made my baby!”
“I can’t do anything. He’s all rust now. Don’t you see? God curse this town and the sea! You need to know this was bound to happen the moment I made him. There was nothing real about him. He’s just iron. He’s all iron! He’s back to scrap! Your baby’s completely oxidized!”
No sound of protest or grief left anyone’s throat for a good while. And then, as if both of them had finally decided they were ready to face life again, Amma’s footsteps became louder and clearer. Slowly, she came to me, slid her hands under my armpits, and lifted me from the charpai. I should’ve opened my eyes to spare her this burden of carrying me to the car. Rust is lighter than iron. Still, I let her carry me because she smelled so sweet at that precise moment. Like a memory from my first day in her arms. I decided that once we were home, I’d ask her to keep me more often on her lap.
She carefully lowered me into the front seat of our car. PPS had followed us outside.
“Listen, Meena. I’m sorry I can’t help him anymore.”
“You’re lucky Inaam is dead. He wouldn’t have gone away with a no. Perhaps I should’ve died in his stead so our baby could’ve lived.”
“Everybody leaves when God calls. You know that I tried saving him. You know raising him anywhere else wouldn’t have worked. You tried it once, remember? You came back within a week. It’s not your fault he needed adjustments every week.”
“And your words.”
PPS only sighed and then muffled something that I couldn’t hear. Amma didn’t say goodbye to him, although this might have been their last conversation.
Soon, our car was on the same old road to home. I was waiting for a bump so I could wake up with a suitable excuse, but we were halfway through the journey. I had had enough.
“Amma!”
Keeping her gaze fixed on the road ahead, she began caressing my cheek. She did it for a long time. I let her. I always let her love me the way she wanted. Could she have changed for me a little now?
“Amma, please let me…”
“Yeah, baby. Just a minute.”
She took the spanner out of the glove box and handed it to me. She must have taken it out before we left PPS’s home. I began working on the lever. In no time, the entire coast settled into my nostrils. My hand entered and traced the air running alongside our car. So this was the cost of living. Thinking a little tongue out won’t do much harm now, I lifted my knees on the seat, ventured out into the air and heat, and stuck my tongue out. Salt. At first. And later, sand, sun, sea, snails, salmon, spores, and much more. All of life had come to say goodbye.
I could tell Amma was smiling. She ruffled my hair. I sat down in my seat and rolled up the window.
“Are you happy, baby?”
Her eyes were back on the road but really on me, forever on me.
“You can still keep me at home. You know you don’t have to bury me.”
She knows this. In the days to come, I’ll get to know that, very carefully, she has thought over all the possibilities that will arise after I am not here anymore in the way she always knew me.
She’ll sell the car now that she doesn’t have to take long routes to reach PPS for emergency visits. She’ll buy a train ticket to Naani Maa’s village away from the sea, and take my scrap body with her. The air will probably suit me there even though I wouldn’t be alive to know. She’ll begin eating fresh grilled fish with boiled eggs. No doodh patti afterwards, though. She still can’t trust her mother, dead or alive.
In the distance, the haze was giving way to a softer shade of blue. Amma took the spanner from my hand and began rolling down her window.
Saba Khaliq is an educator, researcher and poet based in Rawalpindi/Islamabad. She earned her master’s degree in English Literature from IIUI. Her poems have appeared in The Missing Slate, Fahmidan Journal, The Brussels Review, and The Lamp, among others. She frequently organizes workshops on writing and language skills. When she’s not working or studying, she’s trying to find some secluded spaces in which to walk and wail. Her life and lies can be found on Instagram @sabaakhaliq.
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