Останься, дочь / Stay, Daughter. Ясмин Азад
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to take it off.
When her husband died, somewhere around 1910, the colonial officials representing His Majesty in the district of Galle requested that my grandmother submit last wills, affidavits, and properly notarized deeds. The Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, of whose existence she had barely been aware, demanded to know the exact dates of events. Wappumma looked to a man in her family, someone who knew the ways of the white people, to stand in her stead at the courts and registries. Perhaps, it was he who had brought those documents and said, “Put your thumbprint down here.”
Aunt Asiyatha tucked a fresh wad of betel leaves into her mouth and fixed her eyes on my father who was sprawled on a recliner on the other side of the back verandah, chomping on his cigar.
“He it was, who guarded them. Your grandmother, she always said, ‘my little Abdul Rahuman, after he began to work, we never stretched out our hands to anyone.’”
My father’s sister, whom I called Marmee, brought out cups of cardamom-flavored tea and joined the conversation. “Thambi was so small when he went to work, half a sarong would cover him from waist to ankle. Our Umma would cut one into two and hem the edges. That way, he had one piece to wear while the other was in the wash.”
Wappah pitched his voice across the room, as his ears had picked up the familiar name for little brother, thambi. “I always woke up at dawn. As soon as the muezzin at the mosque called out the morning prayer, I jumped up from my mat.”
“Nice jumping up from the mat!” Marmee laughed. “I shook his shoulders, and shouted into his ears and splashed water on his face, but he just pulled his sarong over his head and rolled over. Then Umma put her head into the room and yelled. ‘Only a boy visited by Shaitan would sleep until the sun shone on his behind!’ That’s when he got up.”
“As though the sun could have shone on my behind or anywhere else in that dark corner of the floor where I slept!” Wappah scoffed. “But I didn’t say that to my mother. Would have got a good slap on my face if I had.”
“That’s right,” Marmee lowered her voice. “In those days, he was not a periyal, a boss. He had to listen to us. We told him what to eat and when to go to sleep and made him take his baths. And that… Subhanallah!” My aunt shook her head and raised her eyes and hands upwards.
Wappah, Marmee said, would run all over the house and garden to escape a bath at the backyard well. He crept under coconut fronds, squeezed his scrawny frame behind the outhouse, climbed into empty gunnysacks. His mother always found him. Her hand curled tight around his bony wrist, she would drag him across the yard, over drying jak leaves, goat droppings and chicken feathers, and set him down on a slimy patch of ground by the dugout well where his sister waited – a bucket of water drawn and ready.
When the first chilly cascade landed on his head, he sputtered and hopped from foot to foot. His teeth chattered. He snorted water out of his nose and shook it out of his ears. Before he could catch his breath, another torrent of cold water hit his shoulders. Then, another and another.
“Scrub all the dirt out, or he will get sores again!” Wappumma shouted from across the yard where she squatted over an open hearth, making breakfast.
Marmee would wedge a sliver of yellow soap into a piece of coconut husk and scrub: neck and back, arms and shoulders, down the legs and the spaces between the toes. When the next bucket of water landed, it fell on skin scraped red. Her brother screamed.
“When Thambi got his first job,” Marmee smiled, “he started to take good baths on his own. He knew he had to look good to work in a place like the Galle Fort.”
A relative who knew of Wappumma’s descent into poverty had secured for her young son a job as apprentice to a jeweler in the Galle Fort, a fortress in the southwest corner of Ceylon. This had been the military stronghold of European colonizers for many centuries. Built by the Portuguese in 1588, some decades later, it was wrested away by an invading Dutch army. Finally, in 1796, it came into the possession of the British, the last of the Westerners to rule the island. By the early twentieth century, when my father was a boy, the Fort was no longer an army garrison. It had become the administrative and commercial capital of the Southern province. A thriving citadel with hotels, warehouses, shops, schools and churches, it was also home to civilians, several of whom – and this was of utmost importance to Wappah and everyone in his village – were some of the most prestigious Muslims in the country.
When her brother set off in the morning, Marmee stood behind the front window to watch him leave. He was eleven or twelve (no one in the village knew exactly when they were born) when he first began to work, and she being about two years older, was, by this time, a “big girl” who had been brought inside. To keep herself unseen by strange men, she did not set foot outside her home during the day. As a komaru—a female past puberty but not yet married – the rules of seclusion were far stricter for her than even for her widowed mother.
Pressed against the wall and leaning in against the wooden frame of a little window, Marmee got as good a view as she could of the road beyond. A little while ago, her mother had made breakfast. Squatting over the open hearth, she had swirled a batter of flour and coconut milk in a sizzling pan, and made hot, crisp rice wafers. The smells wafted in and mingled with the odor of damp walls, dirt floors, and goat droppings that always hung in the air of the little house.
Outside, the dew was wet on the grass and the only people to be seen were the men in white tunics and caps who were returning from dawn prayers at the mosque. Marmee’s eyes followed her young brother as he walked along a footpath that led away from clusters of small houses built with bamboo and clay. She saw him swipe a juicy guava from a neighbor’s garden and tuck it into the knot of his sarong. The ground was cool to the soles of his bare feet but soon the sun would rise, and before he reached the Fort, more than two miles away, beads of sweat would glisten on his forehead. A few feet ahead, beyond a grove of coconut trees, was Talapitiya Road, the main highway that cut through the village of Shollai. There, he took an abrupt turn and vanished from sight.
“I waited all day for him to return,” Marmee said. “When it was time to light the oil lamp at dusk, I went back to the front window and looked out.”
Leaning in against the wall again, and peering out through the wooden bars, she caught sight of the coconut palms that threw long shadows on the grass. The same men and boys in white tunics and caps who had been out in the morning were now on their way to the mosque for evening Maghreb prayers. They walked by the house without making out any part of her, not at all suspecting that a pair of girlish eyes was gazing out into the world.
Her brother came into view as he turned the corner from the main road – a small figure lugging a basket of fish and vegetables, veering from side to side to avoid the piles of cow dung that dotted the field. When he approached the front steps, Marmee called out to her mother, and Wappumma hurried to take down the crossbar that had been set against the front door. It had been there since her son left in the morning to shut out anyone or anything that could intrude on the modesty of the widow and her daughter.
“Don’t let any outsiders in before you have given us time to hide,” Wappumma always told her son as he stepped inside. Now that he was home, neighborhood boys and male cousins several times removed might walk into the house. He didn’t need the warning. Early on, he had acquired the trait that was to last a lifetime – the fierce protection of female honor. Acutely aware of the presence in his home of the non-mahram—the unpermitted male – he allowed no man in before he had shouted out a warning and heard the patter of feminine feet hurrying away.
The first sign of such a man approaching, and Marmee fled. She didn’t linger a second longer than she should have. Or so she told me. She appeared to be one of those girls, so numerous in those days, who if their elders drew a line on the ground and said, don’t put your foot beyond this, not even one little bit, they never did. I didn’t ask Marmee whether she was ever a bit curious about which man or boy was coming into the house. The question would have flustered her. It wasn’t something she allowed herself to think about: that she could choose to look or not. Her life was what it was supposed to be, nothing more or less. This was the key to the unquestioning obedience always held up for those of us who