Yasmin Azad
Stay, Daughter
© Каро, 2022
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If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday
Pearl Buck
Glossary of relationships
Wappah Father
Umma Mother
Wappumma fathers mother
Marmee my fathers only sister. Marmee is the Tamil word for aunt.
Marma my aunt Marmees husband. Marma is the Tamil world for uncle.
Asiyatha fathers cousin the adopted daughter of his mothers only brother.
Rohani Cassim great-grandfather. My mothers fathers father.
Thalha Cassim eldest daughter of Rohani Cassim. Being the sister of my mothers father, she was my grand-aunt.
Kaneema Marmee Thalha Cassims eldest daughter. My mothers first cousin.
Fathuma Aunty one of Thalha Cassims younger daughters, sister to Kaneema Marmee.
Zain Marma one of my mothers maternal uncles. Of all my grandmothers many siblings, my mother was closest to him.
Zain Marmee Zain Marmas wife whom we affectionately called by her husbands name.
Maraliya, Hidaya and Nabeesa, my fathers nieces his only sisters daughters.
Mackiya Thatha my mothers second cousin. Thatha is an honorific meaning elder sister.
Rameesa Marmee the daughter of one of my fathers half-brothers. Having married one of my mothers younger brothers, she was both my cousin and aunt by marriage.
Shinnamatha one of several poor women who made a living in the Galle Fort by cooking food and helping out in the better off families.
Kadija Marmee and Zubeida Marmee two of my mothers close relatives who regularly visited our home.
Penny my childhood friend in the Galle Fort. A Christian of Dutch Burgher descent. Her mother and father were Aunty June and Uncle Quintus.
For my beloved sons Kalid, Siraj and Jehan And for my nephews and nieces Rashid, Ayesha, Naima, Laila and Amal
With much affection
Prologue
And stay in your houses, and do not display yourselves.
The Quran
We did not stay in our houses. Not in the way our grandmothers had, or our mothers. We went out a little more and veiled ourselves a little less.
Casting off the heavy black cloaks that had once shrouded females from head to toe, we covered ourselves, instead, in flimsy veils. Draped lightly around our heads, the silks and voiles fell casually from our shoulders, and in the minutes it took for us to get from front door to car, a stranger walking on the road could make out the features of our young faces, the curves of slender waists and hips. Sometimes, such a stranger fixed his eyes on us. And sometimes we looked back. Mothers drew our veils closer and hurried us away; you shouldnt allow yourselves to be seen like that, they told us.
Like girls from infidel families, we went to school, and stayed there even after we had become big. And still more like them, but so unlike our mothers, some of us longed for more learning and dreamed about leaving home to get it. The elders shook their heads and cautioned: too much education could ruin a girls future.
The world outside was pressing in on us, and when I turned twelve, Wappah, thought it time to tell me a story. Many years ago, my father reported, when our country, the island of Ceylon, was still a British colony, an Englishman perhaps the Governor himself had invited a Muslim statesman to dinner. Bring your wife too, the important official said. I have never met her.
Aaah, came the reply. That is not possible. She is in purdah and cannot be seen by men outside the family. But, the Muslim man continued, as he pulled out a rose from a nearby vase, look at this. It would be just like looking at her.
My father beamed and nodded as he ended his story. I looked back and said nothing.
If we felt the stirring of wishes unknown to our mothers and grandmothers, we didnt tell them. They would have been shocked, like Wappah, who had only known women like flowers.
Chapter I
Men are the protectors and maintainers of women.
The Quran, 4:34
Not three years after she had become a bride, Wappumma, my fathers mother, became a widow.
She went into shock when they brought the news to her, Aunt Asiyatha said. Rolled on the floor and wailed. What was she going to do? Your grandfather had died in Bombay on the ship bringing him back from Mecca. Who will guard us now, who will guard us? your Wappumma kept asking. She was six months pregnant too. Lost the baby.
Aunt Asiyatha was my fathers cousin the adopted daughter of his mothers only brother. When, as a girl, I accompanied Wappah to his childhood home in the village of Shollai where his sister still lived, she was often there. Patting down a straw mat spread on the floor, my aunt would say, Come sit here; I have some things to tell you. I would sidle right up. As far back as I can recall, I latched on to anyone who would tell me a story.
Aunt Asiyatha spat out a stream of dark red betel juice and continued. What was your Wappumma going to do? Your father was a toddler, and his sister only a little older than that. Who was going to look after them?
Didnt Grandfather have money? I asked.
Yes, but he had all those children from his first marriage. He couldnt leave everything to your grandmother. Soon, the money was used up, then the jewelry was sold, and all the plates and most of the furniture, and in a few years, there was nothing left.
Didnt they own land?
All that came to nothing. The paddy field in Weeraketiya, she used to get a bag of rice once or twice a year, but the rest of the properties, nobody knows what happened to them.
What do you mean, no one knows what happened to them?
Aunt Asiyatha leaned over and lowered her voice. Dont tell your father I told you, you know how he is when anyone speaks badly of his relations, but they say a man, one of our relatives, he brought your Wappumma all kinds of papers, got her to rub ink on her thumb and put it down, and one by one the properties were gone. We think they were sold off.
But what was written on those papers?
Allah, child, how would your grandmother have known?
My fathers mother could not read or write. She couldnt tell time or make out a calendar. She needed help counting money.
When were you born, Wappumma? I once asked her.
When was I born? My mother told me it was during Uncle Omars wedding. Cousin Fathuma was just learning the aleph, bey, thay of the Quran, and her little brother had begun to eat solid food. Thats when I was born.
No, which year? How old are you?
Wappumma knitted her brow and shook her head.
My grandmothers life kept rhythm with the moon; she kept track of its waxing and waning. Every four weeks or so, when it seemed about time, she stepped out into the garden and searched the night sky. If she spotted what she was looking for the faintest of crescents glowing in the dark she hurried to announce that a new month had begun. Her days began when the stars came out; she said her Friday prayers on Thursday night.
Though she fathomed little about things outside her home, Wappumma was convinced she understood the workings of the world. Someone envious had cast the spell that had taken her husband and comfortable life away. How else could it all have ended like that? But she protected her family now. She hung amulets on her son and daughter sachets of magical charms tied with thick black string and secured around arms and necks and waists. They warded off the evil eye and the evil tongue, and the many other evil vapors the whole village knew were waiting to enter the unsuspecting orifices of children. She said special prayers at nighttime, too, to keep away the demon jinns.
Once, she found a pumpkin in her backyard that no one could account for. Who had thrown it there? Maybe that same evil person who had cast the first spell. Had she been a fool and cut the fruit open, streams of blood would have come pouring out and put a hex on everything in the house. She yelled out a curse and threw the jinxed fruit over the fence. She was too clever for her enemies.
When I was about eight, Wappumma placed an amulet around me too, but my mother took it off. Umma said that it was mostly people in the villages who wore such things. She didnt add that people in a town like her home of the Galle Fort, where we now lived, never descended to such behavior, but I sensed that was what she meant, and in that case, I was happy 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 fathers 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! Thats 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 didnt say that to my mother. Would have got a good slap on my face if I had.
Thats 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 Wappummas 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 komarua 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. Marmees 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 neighbors 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.