Right next door to my bedroom is Mom’s, the one she used to sleep in when she was my age. She’s shown me every corner of that room with excitement: the wall where she pinned posters of a boy band called Junoon, the closet drawer where she stashed all her cassettes of Indian movie songs, the balcony she used to sit on reading romance novels in the afternoon while her parents napped. Ew to the last one! I can’t get over how rich she used to be.
Not anymore, though. In Houston, with me, she’s just . . . average. Getting by. “Starving artist,” she sometimes says jokingly. What a change that must be. Does she secretly hate her life? Does she wish she was a rich Pakistani again? Is that why we’re really here?
I peer into the fridge as if it holds the answers to all my questions. “Do you need something?” the servant girl asks from behind me. Sakina, that’s her name.
“Um, Coke?” I turn around and mutter, trying to keep my words to a minimum to avoid making a mistake in Urdu. Then I smile, hoping she’ll help me.
Sakina sighs noisily and stands up, raking her chair on the tiled floor. She walks to the open fridge and points. “In the last shelf,” she tells me very slowly in Urdu, as if I’m some stupid kid who can’t see properly. I look at where she’s pointing. Oh. The Coke cans are right there in the front.
I take one and go back to the kitchen table. “Can I sit here?” I ask hesitantly. I’m pretty sure I said that correctly, no grammatical mistakes or anything.
She frowns. “Why are you asking me? I’m just a servant. This whole house belongs to your nani, so you can sit wherever you like.”
I understand that loud and clear. Wow, she’s mad about something. I almost run back out of the kitchen, but I need some privacy, and this is the only place nobody will look for me. A few hours ago, Mom even barged into the bathroom while I was doing my business, demanding to know if I had diarrhea. I screamed.
“Listen”—I try to smile—“where I come from, we don’t have servants. Or at least my family doesn’t. My friend Zoe has a . . . um . . . cleaning lady that comes in once a week, but that’s not me.”
I’m so proud of having said all that in Urdu. I smile at her, but all I get in return is a stare. She doesn’t care. I sit on the chair farthest from her and take out my journal from under my arm. I ignore Sakina and begin to write.
Dear Dad,
Summer vacations are boring, if you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t because you’re an adult. You must be super busy with work and everything. Do you ever take a break? Where do you go?
Pakistan is continuing to get on my nerves. There are flies everywhere, and last night a bug crawled into my bed. I woke up with red, itchy spots on my arms and legs. DISGUSTING AND CREEPY!
Mom is being super strange here. She and Nani (another word for grandmother, in case your Urdu is even worse than mine) hardly ever talk, but they have these tight little conversations about nothing that seem to have all this unspoken history behind them. Like that one time you visited us in our Houston apartment when I was six . . . remember that? It’s the only time I ever saw you after you left, and you and Mom sat on opposite ends of the couch and said all these little nothings. Isn’t the weather nice today? Did you watch the new Star Wars movie yet? And then Mom said, “How do you think I’d have time to watch movies when I’m taking care of a child single-handedly?”
Anyway, Mom and Nani have the same weird little conversations. Funny how one reminded me of the other. Ha!
Nana, aka Grandfather, is awesome, though. He tells the corniest jokes, and he’s got a huge collection of old books that I can’t wait to look through. Most of them seem to be about engineering, but he says there are a few coffee-table books with pictures and maps. Although I’m not sure why those books are stuffed in the back of a bookshelf. Shouldn’t they be on a coffee table? Ha, ha!
Nana’s also teaching me to play chess. I know quite a bit already. Do you know how to play chess? Don’t worry if you don’t—I can teach you when we meet. If we meet. As they say in Pakistan, land of the flies, inshallah.
Your loving daughter,
Mimi xoxoxo
A noise startles me. I look up to see Sakina staring at me intensely. She clears her throat. “What are you doing?” she asks, pointing her knife toward my journal.
I put my hands over the page. “Nothing,” I reply. Then I reconsider. It’s not like she can read English or anything. “It’s a notebook my mom gave me. I’m supposed to write down all the places I visit and new things I experience.”
“Like what?”
“Um . . .” I look around. “Like, take those bananas. They are so different from the ones I eat in the US, so they’d be a new experience I could write about. How they’re . . . um . . . mushy and gooey on the inside and brownish on the outside.”
She sits up straight and squares her shoulders. “Our bananas are the best. They come straight from the farms, no pesticides.” At least that’s what I think she says. I don’t really know the Urdu word for farms. Or pesticides.
I find myself wanting to smile, but I don’t. There’s something about her that makes me want to rile her up, get a response. She’s so determined, with her mouth set in a straight line and her scowl ready to display itself at a moment’s notice. I say with complete seriousness, “No offense, but our fruits are so much better than yours. Everything I’ve eaten here so far tastes . . . unusual.” I turn my lips downward to show her what I mean. Strange, possibly yucky. Nothing to write home about.
She looks at me with her mouth open. The scowl is gone, replaced by a smoothness that makes her seem almost at ease. There is a sudden, unexpected gleam in her eye. She puts down her knife and gets up deliberately. She goes to the fridge and comes back with a yellow oval fruit. “I have . . . challenge for you,” she says.
And guess what? She says the sentence in clearly spoken English.
8
Sakina
A Deal with the Devil
The American girl watches as I slice the mango. Juice drips down my fingers, but I resist the urge to lick them. Mangoes are the king of all the fruit, the pride of Pakistan, but they’re so expensive Abba can hardly afford them. Begum Sahiba allows the servants to eat the older ones from the back of the fridge, those that are almost rotting. I don’t care; I’d eat a rotten mango over an American banana any day.
This mango is definitely not rotten. It’s fat and juicy, just arrived from the market in a box filled with about twenty-five others. “Only for the guests,” Begum Sahiba had warned us with a glare. Of course. I wasn’t going to have Abba lose his job over a mango.
But now, I have an idea. It didn’t occur to me until I saw Mimi write in her little gray book. Maybe these guests will be a blessing after all, just like Amma says. Guests always come with blessings from God, she says. I’ve never really agreed with her. Whenever we have guests at our house—cousins, aunts and uncles, long-lost friends come to Karachi from the villages to see the sights—they seem to bring with them empty stomachs, unwashed clothes, and unshakeable thirst. Amma has to cook more, Abba has to go the big market and bring home plastic bags filled with meat and vegetables, and I have to wash clothes all day long. Guests are nothing but work.