She nodded, her lips a straight line, but he knew she was proud of him, knew they had left the village for a better life, and for now, their better life was just this, this one nicked book about a lion in a jungle that he struggled, word by word, to understand.
FIVE
I startle awake. Murtuza snores lightly beside me, his fist tucked under his chin.
I shut my eyes, retrieve and re-enter the strange dream I’d been inhabiting: I’m showing my cousin Fatema my bedroom closet in the old Edison house. It has a hidden door that opens to a passageway I’ve never had the courage to explore. But with Fatema there, I feel brave.
Before we can even approach the closet, we must clear a dozen heavy boxes that stand like cardboard sentinels before the main door. Then, after opening it, we need to yank away a forest of hangers that block the back of the closet and its concealed door. Each time we remove a hanger, another sprouts in its place, clothing magically reproducing. I grow tired and hopeless.
Fatema, in her bossy manner, nudges me out of the way and works at twice my pace until finally we can see the back of the closet. Without any hesitation, she swings open the secret door and crouches down to look inside.
“Do you want to go through first? Or should I?” I can’t decide. She releases a long, frustrated sigh, her breath like a gust of wind clearing my mind.
I step forward.
I awake, shivering, my chest slick with sweat.
Murtuza stirs, roused by my distress. He reaches out an arm, its deadweight landing like a log across my bladder.
“You okay?” he slurs.
“Yes, just had a dream.” I turn over and reverse into him, making myself the little spoon. He rests his cheekbone on my shoulder blade and exhales cool air onto my drying skin. I shift away so that our bony parts no longer meet and he cushions my spine with his cheek.
We match our breathing. I return to my childhood bedroom with its baby blue drapes and bedspread.
“You go first,” I say to Fatema with certainty this time. She crawls into the hole. I watch the pink soles of her feet disappear, but I don’t follow her.
“You coming?” she calls, in a voice that already sounds faraway.
A gentle amber glow permeates the drapes, the first blush of morning. The clock tells me that two hours have passed since I drowsed off. Six twenty-four seems a reasonable time to surrender to wakefulness. I swing my legs out of bed and plod to the kitchen to put the coffee on.
At 7:30 a.m., or 5:00 p.m. Mumbai time, I send a message to my cousin Zainab, requesting her to help her mother, my Tasnim Maasi, turn on Skype. Maasi has lived alone since her husband passed a few years ago. Zainab and her husband were lucky to purchase a flat across the road from her soon after their marriage, an arrangement that benefited my cousin when her two kids were young. Lately, Maasi is the one who needs looking in on — not that she requires much — she is still active and has a servant to clean up, do laundry, and chop vegetables for her dinner.
I wonder if it’s strange for my seventy-three-year-old aunt to be speaking to her niece halfway across the world via Skype. When I was a child, the land lines in India were notoriously unreliable, and long-distance calls expensive. When Maasi and Mom were children, most people didn’t own telephones.
On good days, our irregular Skype calls morph into a group party with six or eight people gathered around our two computers, depending on who is home. After the first five minutes of fiddling with volume and acclimatizing to the oddness of seeing our own images in the left-hand box, it begins to feel almost normal to communicate this way, as though we are chatting across a wide coffee table rather than an ocean.
Zainab must be at work, because Nafeesa, her sixteen-year-old daughter, has been dispatched, and by 8:40 a.m., Maasi dials me.
“Nani, press this when you are finished,” Nafeesa instructs her grandmother in Gujarati. Nafeesa looks ready for a party, her long lashes blacked with mascara, her mouth painted pink. She must have had to argue long and hard with her conservative parents to appear this glam.
“I know how to work it,” Maasi grumps at Nafeesa. “I’m an old lady, but I know which button to press.” Nafeesa apologizes, kisses her grandmother’s cheek, then says a quick hello and goodbye to me before disappearing.
Maasi’s English fluency developed after years of speaking to the gora tourists who frequented their Colaba clothing shop, which Zainab and her husband now manage.
My Gujarati comprehension is serviceable, but speaking full, grammatically correct sentences is a struggle. Like a child, I am perpetually in the present tense. We shift back and forth between languages. Maasi, and most of my Mumbai relatives, can do this with Hindi and Marathi, too.
“Sharifa, how are you?” Tasnim Maasi looks at me over her bifocals.
“Majama chun,” I reply. She follows my lead and switches over.
“I’m looking forward to you coming. Soon, no? You’ve given Zainab all your details?”
“Haa. Us, too, can’t wait.” I make a mental note to look up “can’t wait” in Gujarati. I give her updates about Murtuza and Zee, who have just left for the library and camp. She asks about our turtle, Tartala, whom she’s never met in person but always inquires after. I move the laptop to his aquarium and she gushes when he pokes his leathery head out of his shell and stretches toward the screen. She marvels at how much he’s grown since they last digitally visited. Tartala, as if in reply, wags his head left and right and then turns his tail toward the screen.
I feel her studying me as she adjusts her glasses again. Can she tell that I slept poorly last night?
“What would you like me to bring you from here?”
“We need nothing. Don’t weigh down your luggage.” Although Mumbaikers can purchase anything, and at a better price, it is still my habit to ask. Until I was a young adult, my family would fill an entire locked suitcase with chocolate, cosmetics, and Jell-O. I tell her about Mom’s idea for an Indian research project, and she wobbles her head, like Tartala did, in affirmation.
“Has anyone done research into the family ancestry?” I continue. “On Abdoolally?” I ready my pen for any facts she might share.
“Oh, Abdoolally Rangwala.” She smiles. “A great man. That would be very good research to do. I’ll introduce you to people who work for his trust, but no, I don’t think anyone is recording his life story.” The businesswoman Maasi was, I know she’ll complete some groundwork for me the next time she is out socializing.
“You know he willed most of his money to start charities for pregnant women and orphans? It was because every one of his wives died in childbirth.” I scribble her words into my notebook.
“Mom thought he might have divorced one of them.”
“No, no. She is mistaken, I think. I was told he was widowed three times.”
Near the end of our call, there is a knock at Maasi’s door and my cousin Zainab’s face fills the screen. She came straight from work; she’s still wearing her rida, a fancy one. It’s our community’s trademark hooded dress, a garment worn by devout women when out in public. I wear it begrudgingly and only at religious gatherings where it’s mandatory.
“Like it?” She steps back from the computer to model. It’s white with pink sparkly flowers dotted across the hem.