Kitabı oku: «Останься, дочь / Stay, Daughter»

© Каро, 2022

Все права защищены

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday

Pearl Buck

Glossary of relationships

Wappah – Father

Umma – Mother

Wappumma – father’s mother

Marmee – my father’s only sister. Marmee is the Tamil word for aunt.

Marma – my aunt Marmee’s husband. Marma is the Tamil world for uncle.

Asiyatha – father’s cousin – the adopted daughter of his mother’s only brother.

Rohani Cassim – great-grandfather. My mother’s father’s father.

Thalha Cassim – eldest daughter of Rohani Cassim. Being the sister of my mother’s father, she was my grand-aunt.

Kaneema Marmee – Thalha Cassim’s eldest daughter. My mother’s first cousin.

Fathuma Aunty – one of Thalha Cassim’s younger daughters, sister to Kaneema Marmee.

Zain Marma – one of my mother’s maternal uncles. Of all my grandmother’s many siblings, my mother was closest to him.

Zain Marmee – Zain Marma’s wife whom we affectionately called by her husband’s name.

Maraliya, Hidaya and Nabeesa, my father’s nieces – his only sister’s daughters.

Mackiya Thatha – my mother’s second cousin. Thatha is an honorific meaning “elder sister.”

Rameesa Marmee – the daughter of one of my father’s half-brothers. Having married one of my mother’s 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 mother’s 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 shouldn’t 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 girl’s 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 didn’t 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 father’s 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 father’s cousin – the adopted daughter of his mother’s 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?”

“Didn’t Grandfather have money?” I asked.

“Yes, but he had all those children from his first marriage. He couldn’t 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.”

“Didn’t 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. “Don’t 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 father’s mother could not read or write. She couldn’t 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 Omar’s wedding. Cousin Fathuma was just learning the aleph, bey, thay of the Quran, and her little brother had begun to eat solid food. That’s when I was born.”

“No, which year? How old are you?”

Wappumma knitted her brow and shook her head.

My grandmother’s 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 didn’t 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 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 were showing signs of being less than perfectly docile. Besides, one of the lines drawn inside my own head, which I did not easily cross, was the one that said, don’t ask unnecessary questions.

No sooner than he had stepped inside, Marmee eagerly asked her brother what he might have seen in the Galle Fort that day. He brought reports of buildings three and four times as tall as their house, verandahs enclosed with rows of glass windows, and gates of polished brass you could mistake for gold. She tried to imagine what a motorcar looked like, marveled that white ladies walked all on their own in broad daylight, and that children were taken around in wheeled carriages. The day she heard about water that had turned into cold blocks of stone covered in sawdust, and sold by a man who pushed a cart, she wondered whether her brother made things up.

Marmee was most impatient to know about the happenings in the homes of the wealthy shangakara Muslims in the Galle Fort. To be told about their large houses with ornate gables, tiled roofs, spacious courtyards, and name boards with English lettering: Ocean View, Eglington, Jasmine Cottage, Haley; the ebony divans and elaborately carved tables set up in the front halls; the tall ceramic vases and dwarf palms along the inner courtyards. And how intricately carved and beautiful the wooden lattice screens were, without exception, that sealed off the women’s quarters.

Her brother described what he saw as he walked by the double Dutch doors that opened out onto wide verandahs. What lay within he didn’t know. He never stepped inside any of those stately homes. In those early days, Kuhaffa Hadjiar’s jewelry shop on Leyn Baan Street was the only smooth floor in the Galle Fort that took the imprint of his dusty feet.

Before Marmee was done with her questions, her mother waved her aside. The widow had waited all day too, for her son to come home.

“A jackfruit fell down in the front garden. Pick it up before someone else does… Walk to cousin Zubeida’s house and tell her I’ll come by to see her after dark… I’ve been waiting to drink something. Can you pluck a King coconut for me?”

Wappah was happy to oblige – he didn’t want his mother to go outside her home more than absolutely necessary. They may have been poor, but he wasn’t going to allow people to say the females in his family roamed the village like infidel women.

His presence at home was valued most, at least by Marmee, when the roving salesman, Majeed Nana, came to the village. This itinerant trader carried on his head, a huge cloth bundle packed tight with textiles and fancy goods. His appearance always thrilled the maidens of Shollai who never set foot in a shop themselves.

A few weeks before the great festival of Ramazan, wives, daughters, sisters and aunts would divulge their preferences to the men in the families who did the shopping for them.

Some men ignored these declared choices and bought what they thought would look good on their female relatives; others, returning home with arms full of packages, learned to their befuddlement that taffeta was not the same as satin, and that silk came in various grades and textures, not all of them equally desirable. A few particularly sharp fathers and brothers did know how to choose “a saree with threadwork along the edges but nothing on the front border and no sequins unless they were the kind that wouldn’t come off if a small child was to tug on the fabric.”

Lately, some fashionable Fort ladies had begun to ask that they be taken to the entrance of textile stores in the Galle bazaar. Seated safely inside their curtained buggy carts, they chose from bolts of fabric that were brought to them. Marmee found it hard to believe that women could be so forward.

She gave no instructions, either, to her brother, so she said. And whatever Wappah brought her was alright, she said too. Yet, she counted the days till it was time for Majeed Nana to visit the village.

On one such day, Marmee, when she was fifteen or so, heard a loud voice.

Sarongs! Sarees! Cloth!

Sarongs! Sarees! Cloth!

She searched for her brother. Where was he? Had he stepped out into the backyard or gone to look for their roaming goats? Was he in the outhouse? She had no time to lose. If no voice stopped him – and only a male voice could do that – the trader would walk right by their house.

Wappah had heard Majeed Nana too and came running. When he called out, the cloth trader stopped and turned, then with slow steps, walked up to the small house. At the front door, he propped a wooden yardstick under the bundle on his head, shifted it to his shoulder and carefully brought it to the ground.

“Salaam alaikum, salaam alaikum,” Majeed Nana said aloud, as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He pitched his greeting into the air as though he was speaking to no one in particular. But he knew full well, that watching his every move through a crack in the doorway, holding their breath until he untied his package, were the women of the household. The older, married females holding the door ajar, and the komarus standing behind, peering over their shoulders.

“Shiny satin… Manipuri sarees… Chintz… India muslin… Java sarongs…” Majeed Nana described his merchandise aloud as he laid them one by one on a white cloth. “Why,” he exclaimed, in a voice that was carried into the house, “this is what you get in all the fancy stores. If truth be told,” he pitched his voice a little higher, “this is what the Fort ladies like.”

The cottons came first: the cambric and flowered chintzes women used for everyday wear, the striped Java sarongs worn by men. Next lace, both broad and narrow, for trimming blouses and underskirts. And last of all, the sarees: delicate voiles, Manipuri silks with intricate cord work, georgettes embroidered in every color of the rainbow. When Majeed Nana wiped his hands on his sarong and unfolded the yards of an embossed chiffon, Marmee gave a little gasp.

She had no place to wear such a saree. Besides, they could not afford it. But Wappah brought it in for her to see.

“Take your time, take your time,” the trader said, speaking into the air once again. He was an unhurried man, well used to sitting on his haunches on some front verandah, while men and boys carried his merchandise in and out. Women rubbed their cheeks against soft silks and murmured. They draped liquid folds over their shoulders, ran their fingers over delicate embroidery, held shiny fabrics up to the sun, and chose what to keep and what to give back.

After the textiles had been displayed, Majeed Nana took up the tin box that had been at the very top of his bundle. Inside, in a tray divided into compartments, were coral beads, perfumed soaps, and talcum powder. He set all that aside and reached for the container at the very bottom. Marmee tightened her hold on her mother’s arm.

Nestling in folds of white voile were dozens of glass bangles: red, blue, green, yellow, even gold; some multicolored, some striped diagonally over the narrow bands, others with shiny specks inside the glass. They glinted in the light. With just two bangles on her wrist, a girl could make a delicate, tinkling sound.

Marmee turned to her mother.

Wappumma shook her head. “The glass will break when you do your housework; and where else could you wear them? Where do you go child, that anyone would see?”

Marmee bit her lip and said nothing.

But Wappah walked up to Majeed Nana’s box and picked up a pair of bangles. He said if it made his sister happy, he would buy them for her.

The next morning, after her son had left the house, the widowed mother placed the crossbar against the front door and closed it shut.

Chapter II

Let not the believers take the disbelievers as Friends.

The Quran, 3:28

Because it was the custom among our people that when a man married he moved into his wife’s home, our family lived in the Galle Fort, where Umma had been born.

After some years as a jeweler’s apprentice, Wappah had struck out on his own and become wealthy enough to be considered an eligible bridegroom for a daughter of the prestigious Cassim clan, to which Umma belonged. Marriages like that took place when a Fort family could find no one amongst themselves for a girl who was unmarried and growing old. No one ever explained why Umma, who everyone considered beautiful and elegant, had not been able to marry earlier. I couldn’t really ask, that being another unnecessary question, but I suspect it had something to do with the decline of family fortunes – the decline that often happened to the subsequent generations of wealthy families. Where no big dowries could be offered, people who were otherwise keen to be set apart from those who lived in the villages allowed themselves to consider an up-and-coming bachelor from a place like Shollai.

The Galle Fort, this place where I grew up, was like no other. Or so the Ulemas, the religious scholars of Islam, must have concluded with great consternation. They insisted the faithful keep away from the infidel; inside this cramped citadel, no one could keep very much away from anybody else.

Perched on a cliff that jutted out into the sea, the fortress was a small outcrop of land surrounded on three sides by water. Inside, within an area that was less than a tenth of a square mile, lived hundreds of people. With roofs and gutters touching, and only a common wall in between, their houses jostled against each other. To talk to a neighbor, a person stood in his courtyard and shouted over a wall, or sat on the steps of the front verandah and pitched his voice across.

The back doors opened out to narrow alleyways, giving cover to Muslim women who wanted to visit their relatives without walking the streets. They also opened out to minuscule pieces of land that families used for raising livestock. Here, a neighbor’s goat wandered over to chew on sprigs of jak leaves brought from the countryside, and a neighbor’s ducks waddled in to splash in mud puddles left behind by monsoon rains. The smells from adjoining kitchens mingled and wafted in the breeze and into this mix was added, every day, another odor, when the bucket man from the municipality opened a latched door at the back, and emptied into his handcart the brimming pails that he pulled out from the latrines.

My mother’s uncle, Zain Magdon insisted that the first Muslim allowed to live inside this citadel was one of our own ancestors. Nearly two centuries ago, his great-great grandmother, Raheema Umma, a widow with seven daughters (all of them very beautiful, Zain Marma also insisted), had lived in Magalle, a small town a few miles south of the Fort. Some hooligans who knew about the pretty girls began to harass the family, and one night, the notorious bandit Kitchel, who worked with the fearsome robber Gurubaldi (so Zain Marma’s story went), broke into the house to abduct them. Though the cries of the women brought out the neighbors and the widow and her daughters were saved, the next morning, the terrified mother appealed to the colonial authorities to give her a safe place to live.

At the time, there was a Dutch law that restricted Muslims – whom the colonizers called Moors – to their own enclaves in the country, but in 1774, Raheema Umma was allowed to move to the safety of the Fort with its army barracks and impregnable walls.

Not everyone in the Fort was willing to accept that it was someone in Uncle Zain’s family who had been the first to move there – such distinctions were only grudgingly conceded. But when challenged, Uncle Zain whipped out the evidence: Dutch Governor Willem Jacob Van der Graff’s census of 1789 did have an entry for a Moor widow with seven daughters living in the Fort; and the name of the widow was recorded as Raheema Umma.

When this great-grandmother, several times removed, first settled into a house on Church Cross Street, she lived, a lone Muslim, among Christian Burghers – the middle-class traders from Holland whom the Dutch had encouraged to migrate to their Asian colonies. After the British repealed, in 1832, the law that restricted the rights of the Moors to live where they wanted, more of them migrated into the Galle Fort. Traders by profession, they appreciated the advantages of living near what was then the country’s principal harbor. Eventually, a large community of Muslims came to live inside this fortress, among the descendants of the white-skinned people who had colonized Ceylon. We called them Parangis, from the Arabic Ferengi for Frankish crusaders.

“Grandfather Rohani Cassim spent so much time with the Parangis,” Kaneema Marmee told me, “people began to talk.”

Kaneema Marmee was the oldest of a group of relatives who regularly got together to chat over afternoon tea. The daughter of my mother’s paternal aunt, Thalha, she was Umma’s first cousin. Nearly every day, they gathered at our house on Lighthouse Street in the Galle Fort, to sit by our spacious courtyard and be cooled by the gentle sea breeze. The savory pastries and sweet confections our cook laid out, made it even more of a favorite venue.

“What were they saying about your grandfather?” I asked Kaneema Marmee. Someone had lain themselves open to almost the very worst thing that could happen to a person – have people talk about them. Someone in my own family, no less. Had this person not cared? I felt a thrilling shudder just considering the possibility of such boldness.

“They complained that he was spending too much time with the Marshazi.”

The Marshazi were ‘others’—maru in Tamil, meaning different and shazi meaning group, or type. The Parangis who were Christian naturally fell into that group. They were people unlike us – infidels from whom, the Ulemas warned, we were to stay away.

“Didn’t other people do that?” I searched my aunt’s face as she took a bite from a crisp pastry.

“Not the way he did.”

Great-grandfather Rohani Cassim, I learned, was not like most other Muslim men of his time who worked as local tradesmen dealing in gems, hardware and cloth. He was a ship chandler who sold coal, oil, rope and other supplies to the foreign vessels that berthed in Galle. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when he began his business, this harbor in the south of the island was a port of call for hundreds of steamers, mail boats, and military vessels. Travelers from all over the world disembarked from visiting ships, and with a regularity its residents came to expect, the narrow streets of the Fort teemed with Europeans in white morning dress. Many of them, directly or indirectly, were Rohani Cassim’s customers.

His exposure to the ways of the Marshazi must have been more than for most, which was saying something, since there was hardly anyone among the faithful in this fortress who was shielded from the unbeliever. On the verandahs of spacious houses were men who smoked and drank alcohol. Everywhere were unveiled women who walked the streets by themselves and stopped to talk to strangers. At celebrations in the fancy hotels were the couples who danced to music.

The believers were tempted even more directly. Such were the activities the Parangis had introduced. During horseracing season, for instance, who could resist standing on the tall batteries of the Fort to watch the stallions who galloped to a finish on the esplanade below? How many Muslim men must have gone into the betting stalls to engage in the prohibited pastime of gambling?

Even the pious who stayed away from such haram activities were becoming more familiar and at ease with the ways of the foreigner. On their way back from afternoon prayers, if they took the road around the ramparts near the mosque, they would see the heads of colonial agency houses, in short trousers and knee socks, swinging golf clubs and shouting into the wind. Perhaps one or two among the believers not only stopped to watch this unusual game but also chased after wayward balls and threw them back.

Great-grandfather Cassim was someone who was likely to do that, having become, as people were beginning to notice, very comfortable hobnobbing with the Parangis. Needing to talk to ship captains, he had learned enough of their foreign languages to communicate with them; this of course allowed him to strike up conversations with other Marshazis who came his way. He likely became an acquaintance of the Dutch Burgher Henry Andre, who had established a mail service from Galle to the capital city of Colombo, and perhaps also Mr. Janz, who was the manager at the booking office. They must have chatted while they waited, weekday afternoons on Custom Street, for the mail coach to come rattling over the drawbridge of the old moat.

“The way Grandfather became friendly with the Marshazi – that was too much,” Kaneema Marmee said as she picked up the conversation again. “At least, that was the complaint.”

I was about nine when I first heard this story, and for some years now, Umma had let me play with and spend long hours at the house of my Christian classmate Penny.

“How friendly are we allowed to be?” I asked.

“The Ulemas say we can be good neighbors and do business, but we shouldn’t become very close.”

“What’s ‘very close’?”

“Taking them to our hearts.”

I didn’t know at the time what exactly it was to take somebody to my heart, but I imagined that what I was doing with Penny – giggling nonstop, holding hands when we walked, and telling her all my secrets – probably came close.

“Why? What’s wrong with that?”

My aunt took a while to answer. “Well, the Ulemas say that’s how you begin to pick up their bad behaviors.”

As far as I could tell, my behavior with Penny was not that much different from my behavior when with my Muslim playmates. But with grown-ups, you could never tell. I was at an age when I was beginning to realize that they could find fault with you for going against rules you didn’t even know about.

Kaneema Marmee looked into the distance before she brought her attention back to me. “People said it was because he got so friendly with the Marshazi, especially that Mr De Vos… his neighbor – you know the house?”

I nodded. Everyone knew the prominent Dutch Burgher family.

“Because old Mr De Vos became Grandfather’s friend, they said – that’s why he did what he did.”

“What? What did he do?” I nearly knocked over the tea tray, and Umma, who was busy with her sewing on the other side of the room, looked up.

“Came home one day and announced he was going to send his daughters to school.”

Chapter III

To imitate the Infidel is to become them.

Hadith, Abu Dawood

In 1963, in the town of Buraydah in Saudi Arabia, men rioted when the first girls’ school was opened. King Feisal had to send the National Guard. For a year, the only student was the headmistress’ daughter.

Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire

Perhaps it was a balmy day in 1887 when Great-grandfather Rohani Cassim held his six-year-old daughter, Thalha (Kaneema Marmee’s mother), by the hand and walked her out of the house and down stretches of open road, to the English Girls’ School on Middle Street. It was the kind of thing you could expect, the shocked people of the Galle Fort said, from a man who made friends with the infidels. Of what use was the reading and writing of foreign languages? Why sully the minds of his children with knowledge of ungodly people and places? Hardly anyone thought it necessary to educate even their sons beyond what was needed for writing receipts and keeping accounts in a shop, and here was a man ready to send his daughters to school. A school run by Christian missionaries no less.

“Did Great-grandmother object?” I asked Kaneema Marmee, “was she willing to send her daughters to school?”

Kaneema Marmee considered this question about her mother’s mother. “I don’t know for sure. But her father had been an interpreter for the Dutch, so he must have mingled with the Parangis too. He changed his name, you know, from Makhdoom to Magdon to make it sound more like a white person’s name. He probably liked the Marshazi too.”

“He didn’t think of sending his daughter to school, though?”

“Nooo, not during your great-grandmother’s time, over a hundred years ago. There wasn’t even a girls’ school in the Fort.”

My mother’s family, I was being told, had a penchant for mingling with the infidels. Perhaps that’s why – and I made this connection only much later – Umma let me spend so much time at Penny’s house. When Umma’s lawyer uncle Zain, who everyone snickered had “really taken the Marshazi to heart,” sent his youngest son Usuf to play with Penny, I was allowed to tag along. Soon, I was spending whole days with her and even sleeping over during weekends.

I didn’t reveal this last fact to Kaneema Marmee. I thought it might be a bit too much, even for someone from the Cassim family. I had overheard disapproving comments about Umma having a soft spot for certain Marshazi ways, and I really didn’t want people to talk about my family, or me.

So, as Kaneema Marmee described it, her mother, my Grandaunt Thalha Cassim, continued to walk to school even as men on the road stopped and stared, and women standing behind lattice screens flapped their hands. Her father had not cared. Not only did she go to school, but when their time came, all of her younger sisters enrolled there too – to sit next to infidel classmates and learn their lessons from foreign teachers.

No matter how much they enjoyed learning, each of Great-grandfather’s daughters, when she turned nine or ten, was pulled out of school. It was unthinkable that a girl would go out of her house when she was close to puberty. If their father had considered it – and knowing his stubborn ways, people speculated he might have – their mother probably put some sense into him. “Who would come looking to our family for brides, if after they had grown up, the girls were seen running around a school yard with their heads unveiled and their legs below their uniforms shamelessly bare?”

* * *

My Grandaunts having all gone to school, I discovered, was connected to a routine that my mother established in our home.

Umma wanted all the newspaper food wrappings that came to our house. Not the smallest pieces scrunched around a handful of betel nuts or sugar crystals, but anything bigger than a note page. Full sheets of newsprint were best, but these had sometimes been folded over a pound of tuna or mackerel, and smelled of fish. They were thrown away, of course, but not, I recall, before they had been held up over the trash bin and a glance or two taken at the blood-soaked pages. Through the day, our maid stacked the torn-out paper in a corner of the whatnot in the dining room. At tea time, Umma dragged the canopy table to the edge of the courtyard where the sun streamed in, smoothed out the creases with her tapered fingers, and leaned over to read.

Umma could read when most other women her age could not, because of the tradition in her family that girls get at least some education. But because it was also the expectation that they would be taken out from school at age nine or ten, she had dropped out after third grade.

“I would have cried and rolled on the floor,” I told Umma, “if that had happened to me.”

“Why would you have needed to do that?”

“Because it’s school. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave.”

“Everyone left early in those days.”

“But I would have asked Wappah to let me stay. Couldn’t you have asked your Wappah to let you stay – just a few more years? If you had cried and cried and said you wanted to, he would have let you. I think he would have.”

Umma shook her head. “I didn’t think anything about it. All the girls left school after third grade.” She picked up her sewing and thrust her needle into the fabric.

I brought up the subject again a few days later. Leaning against her sewing chair, I asked, “But if someone really, really liked school, Umma? You should let them stay, shouldn’t you?”

Umma snipped off the end of her thread.

“What do you mean – stay in school? Most girls stay now, till at least the eighth grade. Mostly tenth.”

“But, some girls…”

“Some girls?”

“Well… some girls, they study for a long time, right up to the end of school and even after that.”

“Not our girls, they don’t. You know that, right?” Umma searched my face. “Right?”

I looked back and said nothing.

I wondered what my mother did during the long days at home after she had left school. We had no storybooks in our houses – only the Quran and prayer missals. Hardly anyone in our families sang or made music or painted. It wasn’t the kind of thing the Ulemas encouraged. Sometimes women played a drum at weddings. But how long can you play a drum by itself? And how many weddings can there be? Maybe that’s why Umma had become so good at sewing.

“Didn’t it make you sad when you had to stay at home all day? Junoodha Marmee told me she cried when her younger sister went off to school and she had to stay back.”

“No. I got used to it. People get used to things. They always do.”

We got used to it. Everyone in the older generation said that. It was the explanation for everything that had happened in the past. The reason for keeping everything the same in the present. The comfort that would eventually come in every hard situation. I never heard anyone wonder whether there were people who couldn’t get used to things. And what would have to be done about them.

It was some time before I spoke again. “But you had nothing to read. No story books or picture books or anything!”

“I did read.”

“Read what?”

“I read the newspapers – all the food wrappings that came to the house. There were all kinds of stories there, news about accidents on the road, people who had been robbed and what was happening in England – when Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose had been riding their ponies. Things like that.” Umma smiled.

“Really?”

“Yes. The difficult words, I would ask my Wappah or my brothers.”

I moved closer to Umma as she talked.

“The double sheets were the best. I waited and waited for them. You could get a complete story there. The small pieces were sometimes torn right in the middle of the most interesting part.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I kept looking in the next day’s wrapping or the next.”

“Did they ever come?”

“I don’t remember that it did.”

If the printed word came to her, Umma seized it. Every morning, when the paperboy on his bicycle balanced one foot on our doorstep and sent The Daily News sliding over our cement floors, she hurried to pick it up. She read it through from top to bottom, all the pages, except the sports section at the back. Any news about the royal family in England, she eagerly lapped up. Her lips tightened if the fashion pages displayed scanty clothing, and the Bringing up Father comic strip made her laugh as loudly as she ever allowed herself to. “That Maggie, using a rolling pin to hit her husband. Imagine!”

Umma picked up the printed word in other places too: a newspaper that someone left behind on a train (trains and not buses being the only public transport that was considered suitable for the Muslim women of her generation); magazines in a doctor’s office; some stray reading matter at Zain Marma’s, one of the few houses among our relatives with books lying around.

Once, she asked to go back to the dentist though he was done working on her teeth.

“But he said you needn’t come back!”

“I know. But I didn’t get to finish the story in the Femina magazine that was in the waiting room.”

“Umma, we can get Femina delivered to the house. Would you like that?”

“No.”

“It’s easy. We just place an order at Lake House bookshop and the postman will bring it.”

Umma shook her head.

“But you don’t have to do anything at all.”

“No,” she said in a firm voice. “That’s not what I am used to.”

Of the new-fangled notion taking hold in the Galle Fort of allowing girls to go to school, a dowager of my grandmother’s generation had this to say: “It will give them ideas, you wait and see. All this reading and writing. They will neglect their household duties and turn away from prayer. They may even—” and here, the old lady had drawn her veil closer and lowered her voice— “stuff love letters into mango seeds and throw them over the back wall. Then what will we do!”

Mothers and fathers ignored the warning. Sometime after Great-grandfather Cassim had sent his daughters out of the house to get an education, other families followed suit. By 1937, forty-three Muslim girls had been enrolled at the English Girls’ School, and by the 1950s when I was growing up, not only did almost every girl go to school, she stayed there until at least the eighth grade.

The first to do that, as might have been expected, were my mother’s cousins, the daughters of Thalha Marmee – that girl from the Rohani Cassim family whose going out of the house had shocked everybody in the Galle Fort so many years ago. Thalha Marmee’s oldest daughter Kaneema, though she got more schooling than her mother, had dropped out relatively early. But the younger girls in the family had stayed on. Haleema not only went to school after she had become a “big girl,” but also set her sights beyond reading and writing. She acted in plays, performed in concerts and led the patrols of her Girl Guides troupe. Then she passed the Junior Cambridge Examination. Her little sister Fathuma followed in her footsteps. Two young maidens, going out of their home at fourteen, unveiled and in short dresses. Fourteen, when a girl was almost a woman.

It came in very useful for Umma and her other female relatives that their cousin Fathuma had acquired all that education. Her knowing English and the ways of the white people helped with those things they couldn’t negotiate themselves. If a child brought home a report card that said she needed to be more diligent, Fathuma Aunty, as I called her, could explain that it meant she needed to work harder; if someone was described as not being punctual, that meant they were often late. When a recipe created in England called for dripping to be melted in a pan, you had to use animal fat.

Just being around Fathuma Aunty expanded Umma’s vocabulary: the plural of Madam, she knew, was Mesdames; the glass jug on the bedside table, everybody was informed, was properly called a decanter. And if people were going to indulge in the disgusting native habit of chewing betel, this Junior Cambridge qualified lady insisted, they had better use a spittoon.

Fathuma Aunty wrote her own letters too, without badgering her children to do that for her, like other mothers. Thanks ever so much for your kind letter recently received, she often began, and when she signed off, she sent everyone her best compliments.

And all her female relatives Fathuma Aunty judged by a single, unyielding standard: can she read a jam label?

Umma asked Fathuma Aunty to take me to places where it helped to know the language of the Marshazi really well. So it was that my aunt took me to Mrs. Bartlett, the Burgher dressmaker on Middle Street, whose skills even Umma, who was an excellent seamstress herself, held in awe. No one could match Mrs. Bartlett in making replicas of the outfits that appeared in Weldon’s Fashions for All, the English magazine Galle Fort women passed around before Ramazan.

“My mother, you know, never went to places like this when she was young,” Fathuma Aunty told me as she held my hand and walked up the steps to the dressmaker’s house.

This was true. By the 1950s and early 60s, much had changed in the Galle Fort. Hardly anyone now wore the full burkha when they stepped out of their homes. There were even some women, if people could believe it, who hardly bothered to cover their heads at all. A woman would still never sit in the front seat of a car, not even if the driver was her husband or son. But the days of automobiles curtained at the back to seclude female passengers were fast receding. No one would ever mistake a Muslim woman for a Parangi. Not yet. Her dress and manners would immediately identify her as vastly different. Yet, some deep-rooted changes were setting in, and it was perhaps recognizing the threat of the slippery slope that had made some of the traditionally faithful react as they did to what was going on in Rohani Cassim’s home.

“They threw stones at the house,” Kaneema Marmee said.

“People threw stones at your mother’s house?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“They were angry.”

“About girls going to school?”

“That too, probably. But what they said was, they were angry about the piano.”

“The piano?”

When little Thalha Cassim and her sisters went to school, Miss Lucy Vanderstraaten, their teacher in kindergarten, had not only taught them to read, but also to clap hands to “Ring a Ring of Roses,” “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down.” And the little girls, enthralled by the sounds that tinkled out of the big wooden box with ivory keys, asked their father to get them a piano.

This caused a problem since some Ulemas had said music is haram. Even those who concluded that it was permitted didn’t think of it as anything to be encouraged. It was the kind of activity that seduced people into dancing and drinking and all manner of bad behavior; one thing could lead to another and you couldn’t predict where it would all end up.

Music in the Galle Fort certainly came from the Marshazi, not anyone else. Every Sunday, from the Dutch Presbyterian Kirk on Upper Church Street and All Saints on Middle, bells pealed and hymns spilled out into the streets. Alongside the harbor, the grand bands of visiting ships regularly played dance music while crowds stood by to listen. The most religious of the infidels’ songs came too, once a year to people’s very doorsteps. On Christmas Eve, Portuguese carolers dressed in colorful clothes walked the streets and stopped every few yards to sing. While violins played, the young among the spectators intertwined their arms and danced on the streets. Muslim men stood on the verandahs to watch, while their women peered from behind wooden screens.

Perhaps, on such nights, Great-grandfather Cassim carried his daughters out front so that they could lean over the verandah wall and look at the man who turned the Nathal lantern around and around, spinning the images of the Virgin Mary, Baby Jesus and the Star of Bethlehem. Perhaps the little girls got on the floor and twirled right along to these seductive sounds.

“The sounds, that’s what they said bothered them,” Kaneema Marmee nodded. “The piano distracted the pious on their way to the mosque.”

“But the house is so big. You almost can’t hear from one end to another! How could it disturb anyone?” Here again was the uneasiness that had been aroused in me: even when you didn’t think you were doing anything wrong at all, it was possible to get into trouble. What were the rules, and even more, who had the right to make them?

Kaneema Marmee paused. “We were called the Parangi koottam, the Parangi clan. People complained that our women crossed their legs when they sat and carried handbags like nurse ladies. That the men had become London kungees, London brats. But the reason they threw rocks was the music. So they said.”

The changes that were overcoming the community would eventually have happened with or without the prompting of the Parangi koottam. Hardly anyone who lived in the cities and towns in twentieth century Ceylon was able to resist, or even wanted to, the forces of westernization. There were too many social advantages to becoming modern.

For the Muslim women of the Galle Fort, perhaps it was advice from their prophet himself that was hastening change. He had insisted, and not once but many times, that we treat our neighbors well. A generous family – and generosity was a cornerstone of the faith – during Ramazan, shared with the Christians next door a mutton biryani topped with fried raisins and cashews. At Christmas, they received in return a cake decorated in delicate pink roses, frosted over with crystalized sugar. In the inner rooms of her home, a girl said: I’d like to learn how to make icing flowers just like that, and a mother or father, seeing the longing in a daughter’s eyes, decided it was not so outrageous that she would go to a Parangi lady’s house to learn this exquisite art – wasn’t she going out of her home anyway, when she went to school?

There were many advantages, even for girls, to learning the language and adopting the manners of those who ruled the country. All over Ceylon, privileged children were wearing western clothes and speaking English, and the Galle Fort Muslims did not want to be further behind the times than was absolutely required by the rules of the religion.

Our girls could not, like their brothers, go away from home for higher studies, or hobnob with the ruling elite by playing tennis at a Gymkhana Club – that was going too far. But they could take on some Western fashions and manners, and they did. They wore knee-length frocks and court shoes with heels. No longer did they wait patiently while their mothers oiled their hair and combed out the tangles in long black strands. They cut their hair short, stood before mirrors and patted a fashionable bob into place. Under their sarees, women wore a chemise, and their little daughters, under their dresses, bloomers trimmed in Nottingham lace.

Families in the Fort who had once arranged their days around the rhythms of the Islamic year began to keep track of a child’s birthday on the English calendar and celebrated it, too, with a ribbon cake made by the Burgher Miss Jacotin. Soon, a girl was considered a desirable daughter-in-law only if she could make such a cake herself, and only if she could sew a tailored dress after the fashion worn by Parangi children.

Chaperoned maidens in the Galle Fort veiled their heads, walked the back alleyways and dashed across ten feet of road to places where someone would teach them how to make marzipan violets and sew Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, complete with lace collars and knee-breeches. A little Muslim girl setting out on Ramazan day, fitted in a frock that Mrs. Bartlett had made, with an “Alice band” on her head and Clark’s buttoned shoes on her feet, could almost be mistaken for an English child – which was the whole point of being taken to the Parangi dressmaker’s house that her grandmother would never have considered entering.

Because Umma had little experience with the institutions that had become part of her children’s lives, she took Fathuma Aunty along when she needed to talk to the Irish nuns at my school, Sacred Heart Convent. Watching Fathuma Aunty among these white people, I thought she looked more like them than like us. With her very light skin, short hair and lips colored red, she could have been mistaken for the lady in the advertisements for Pears Transparent Soap.

Like the Parangi ladies in the Galle Fort, Fathuma Aunty played “A Maiden’s Prayer” on the piano, and, like them too, hung paintings on her walls. She had done that in the 1930s and 40s when no one else had considered such a thing. This was partly because such decorations were an unknown, foreign custom, but also because people took seriously the preaching of the Ulemas, who had said no one would be tormented in hell more than the painters of images. Fathuma Aunty obviously disregarded their warnings: The Blue Boy, in his satin jacket and trousers, with one hand at his waist and the other holding a feathered hat, looked out into the world from above her sideboard.

Like foreign ladies, Fathuma Aunty called her husband by his given name, which, as any elder among our people would have explained, was not the thing to do. Not at all. The name of someone so revered was not to be bandied about, and when a properly respectful wife wanted attention, she was supposed to say, “Look here,” or “Listen,” or “Are you there?” In his absence, she could refer to her spouse as “The house person,” or “The children’s father,” or just “Him.”

Years ago, women whose husbands were away or dead would come to Great-grandfather Magdon-Ismail, who was a Justice of the Peace, to ask for help with legal matters. As they stood modestly behind a screen to answer his questions, an inevitable one would come up.

“What is your husband’s name?”

“His… name?” the woman would stammer.

“Yes, his name.”

She looked to someone who could answer that question and if no such person was available, went back home only to return with a child in tow. Taking her position behind the screen once again, she instructed a young son or daughter, “Tell the gentleman your father’s name.”

“Zain!” Fathuma Aunty called out to her husband. “Zain!” No matter how many times they had heard it, Umma and her cousins whipped their heads around. When she walked breezily into a room, crossed her legs on the divan and asked, “So how are your hubbies?” they probably choked on their tea.

Nobody threw rocks at Fathuma Aunty’s house as they had done at her mother’s. It had become more acceptable to not hold so rigidly the lines that divided the Marshazi from us. And, in any case, how much could anybody control from outside those boundaries between them and us that people might have crossed in the recesses of their minds? All I knew was that if I had to spend time at a relative’s (and the Ulemas said it was always good to spend time with your relatives), I finagled a visit to Fathuma Aunty’s. I hankered after the books and pictures she owned that had come from across the seas – that seemed the principal enticement. Or so I thought. Looking back, I realize that what drew me most strongly was being around someone who had made an inner journey to a place far from where she had been born, and didn’t seem to much care who knew about that.

Chapter IV

What leads to the forbidden is also forbidden.

Principle of Sharia law as expounded by Imam Malik

Besides the time I spent at Penny’s house, my most frequent dealings with the Marshazi happened at Sacred Heart Convent, a girls’ school established by Irish missionaries. Situated a little outside the Fort, it was the educational institution of choice for middle class Muslim girls in Galle. And almost from the first day I set foot in this place full of people unlike us, I had questions.

Was a nun a girl or a boy? That’s what I wanted to know when I was in first grade. Sister Bernadette wore a dress, which was like a girl. But her hair – I saw through a gap in her bonnet – was short and stubbly, and that was like a boy. So which was it? It was no use asking Wappah, he said he knew nothing at all about the people in my English school. So I asked Penny and she said nuns were girls, definitely.

From Penny, I also learned about the pictures that hung in the classrooms and hallways. The baby in the box of hay? That was Jesus – his mother and father were too poor to get him a proper bed. The man in a brown robe with a sparrow perched on his shoulder? He was St. Francis – who loved birds and animals. Why were there so many pictures of a heart covered in thorns and blood? That was how our school got its name – it was the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When Penny wasn’t around, I tried to figure out a story myself.

I shared her Sunday school books. In The Illustrated Children’s Bible, I discovered Jonah who had gotten himself swallowed by a whale, Pontius Pilate who was a very bad man, and Moses who went down a river in a basket. Soon, I knew exactly how to fill in the coloring pages: the shepherds’ robes in stripes of brown and yellow; the plumes on the Roman soldiers’ hats, in the deepest, darkest red.

There were no pictures in the madrassa where I learned Islamic religion. On Saturdays, during Ahadiya lessons, we sat on wooden benches and shouted out the answers when Razik Nana, our teacher, asked his questions.

Who are we?

We are Muslims.

What is our religion?

Our religion is Islam.

Our voices reached the rafters and bounced off the walls, white and bare except for the splotches where the paint had started to crumble.

Razik Nana continued:

Who is our prophet?

He is Muhammad, peace be on him.

Who is his mother?

Armina, peace be on her.

There were no statues or pictures in the Galle Fort mosque either. Being a girl, I had never been inside, but once, when I balanced my toes on the parapet wall surrounding the outer garden and peered inside, I saw there was nothing except prayer mats: no statues or pictures or decorated glass windows. A single bare lamp hung from a chain in the ceiling and swayed from side to side when a breeze blew through the wide arches.

One day, in madrassa, Razik Nana told us how, when the prophet was saying his prayers in a cave, the angel Jibreel came down from Heaven to give him the Quran.

I knew that angel. Penny had called him Gabriel in the picture where he wore a long white dress, had wings, and a golden circle over his head. He was telling the lady in blue that she was going to have a baby. I wanted to jump up and tell Razik Nana that I knew all about the angel. But if I had, Razik Nana would have swung his cane in midair and made it come down on the table with a “thwack!”

“Haram!” he would have said. “It is forbidden to draw pictures. Forbidden! Angels do not come into houses where there are images. Do not look at such haram things.”

But I did want a closer look at images I only glimpsed from afar. Umma had said I could go anywhere with Penny, except to a church, where, the Ulemas warned, people prayed to false gods. Penny had said that the chapel where the nuns prayed was not exactly a church, and seeing no reason to question her too closely, I promised to help with her arithmetic homework if she would sneak me in.

There was very little light and at first all I could dimly see were colored glass windows, flickering candles, and shiny brass bowls. Up front was a statue of the lady in blue with her arms outstretched and, by a door that led out of the room, a picture of Jesus – he had that golden circle around his head. The large painting showed him with a stick in one hand and a lamb in the other. All around him were groups of sheep, some munching grass, some looking into the distance, and others with their heads turned towards him. They wanted him to look at them, I thought, but he was smiling down at the lamb he held in his arms.

“That’s the Good Shepherd,” Penny explained. The lamb had run away and got lost and Jesus brought him back. Right there, I thought, was a fine story. The lamb running away, Jesus looking all around, perhaps spotting him behind a bush somewhere, and chasing him down, his robe flapping in the wind, maybe those thick sandals tripping over cobblestones. “No! No! No!” Penny said. “That’s not it! Jesus loves the lost lambs best, that’s what the picture is about.”

For weeks after, I tossed that picture around in my head. What did it mean to love the lost lambs best? There was no one else I could ask without letting people know I was taking an interest in the images of a kafir religion. So I figured something out on my own. I decided if I were a lamb, I would run away and get lost every chance I got. There was no point to sticking around and being ignored.

Far different from this educational institution full of Irish nuns was Wappah’s childhood home in Shollai where I often spent Sunday afternoons. Wappah thought it a good day for me to visit his sister where she lived, in their old home with her husband and children. Wappumma was there too until she passed away, when I was about ten years old. My three older brothers Naufel, Sheriff and Bunchy hardly ever came because no one seemed to expect that boys would take time off to make family visits. Besides, they did not have much in common with Marmee’s only son, who didn’t go to the same school or spend time with the same friends. My aunt’s three daughters did not have much in common with me either, but Wappah said I should stay close to them, no matter what.

He never, as far as I knew, asked Umma to come along. Fort ladies who had married outsiders from the towns and villages beyond, generally preferred the company of their own relatives and made only the most perfunctory visits to their in-laws. Ever since Umma, as a bride, had seen Wappumma wipe the rim of a coffee cup with the edge of a saree that had been worn all day, she made any excuse she could not to go to Shollai.

Sunday being the driver’s day off, my father, who had learned to drive late and never took the car out unless he had to, would prepare to get behind the wheel. First, he tightened the belt over his sarong. Then he shook out his handkerchief and cleaned his glasses. Lastly, he slipped off his sandals and put them on the passenger side – he was more comfortable using his bare feet on the pedals – and settled himself behind the steering wheel of our Austin A40.

Our garage, like others in the Galle Fort, was narrow, and the road outside barely ten feet wide. When Wappah lowered the rearview mirror, turned the key, shifted the gear into reverse, and inched out, one wall or the other was usually in the way. He drove back in. Then he turned the wheel all the way around, craned his neck and went back out again. On a rare day, he was able to get the car out on his second try; more often, it took a third or fourth. While he went back and forth, I coughed from the petrol fumes, and our houseboy shouted directions over the roar of the engine.

“Keep straight, you’ll hit the door! No, no, a little to the right!”

“How much to the right? Don’t say a little.”

“I don’t know, just a little.”

“You didn’t warn me about the pillar!”

“I didn’t see it!”

“Move over to the other side. Move over and tell me how much room there is.”

Soon, a group of bystanders, of whom there never was a shortage in the Galle Fort, joined in.

“More to the right!”

“Cut left! Cut left!”

Beads of sweat collected on Wappah’s forehead. He looked one way and then the other, gripped the steering wheel with both his hands and shouted in his gravelly voice.

“You fellows keep quiet! I know what I am doing!”

Sometimes, a wheel fell into the storm drain and a loud, collective “Aiyooh!” burst out. That was the signal for the houseboys loitering at the Lighthouse Street junction to leap into action. “Come, come,” they hollered, as they tightened their sarongs and ran up. “We have to get P.T. mahathaya’s car out of the drain.”

One Sunday afternoon, when I was about eight, a day when I had even more reason to want to set off without much delay, we did. Ten minutes after Wappah had got into the car, it was out of the garage, facing the right direction, and on its way to Shollai.

We made our way down Lighthouse Street, past the tennis courts of the Galle Gymkhana Club, and out from under the main Fort gate. People who knew us smiled and waved, but Wappah gripped the steering wheel and looked straight ahead. Soon, we were driving by the esplanade where boys played cricket in their blinding white shirts and caps, their arms wheeling above their heads. Across from that field of close-cropped grass was the Pacha Gaha, the “liar’s tree” where street hawkers sold medicinal oil they said could cure every illness and amulets they swore could ward off every evil. Wappah never drove by the Pacha Gaha without a long tirade: “Just because everybody believes something doesn’t mean you should too. Fake healers, bogus holy men, and greedy politicians. Liars all.” He slowed down to take a look at these particular set of fraudsters.

“Let’s go, Wappah, let’s go quickly,” I said.

At last, we turned into the main street of the Galle bazaar. I rolled the window down and put my head out. It was coming up now, on the right side of the road between a dry goods shop and a bakery: W.M.M. Salies Hardware Stores.

Nearly everyone had an interest in Salies Hardware in the Galle bazaar. Women bought their kerosene cookers from there, men dropped by for flashlight batteries, and school children came for fountain pens. For some time now, when we drove to Shollai, I’d had my eyes on what leaned against the bi-fold doors at the entrance: a bicycle with the cross bar angled down, steel spokes glinting, and red and blue plastic ribbons fluttering from its handlebars.

“Can I have a bicycle, Wappah?” I asked as we neared the store.

“A bicycle? Why do you want a bicycle?”

“For riding around.”

“For riding around? What? Girls don’t ride bicycles.”

“My friend Penny does.”

“The teacher’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“She’s a Parangi, that’s different. Our girls don’t do such things.”

“But I’d like to. I would really like to.”

“No… everybody will say you are behaving like a boy.”

People raised their eyebrows at ambula kadijas, tomboys, and disapproved of anything that blurred the line setting girls apart from boys. When our drill teacher at school asked us to wear divided skirts, the Muslim mothers wrung their hands – the girls would be wearing clothing separated in the middle, like trousers. Some came up with a design of pleats that went over the waist so that, though it was divided, the uniform looked just like a regular skirt. Umma got me exactly what the teachers asked for because she had respect for schoolteachers and said we should do what they wanted us to. She didn’t care as much as everybody else, I also suspected, about girls looking like boys.

“Please, Wappah. I told Penny I would get a bike,” I held the back of the driver’s seat.

“Why did you tell her that without asking me?” Wappah’s voice was sharp.

I didn’t say anything in reply as it dawned on me that I had to be careful about blurting out what it was I did with Penny.

Wappah looked at me through the rear-view mirror. “Don’t I get you all the dolls you want?”

This was true, he did. My toy cupboard was full of beige cellulite figures that had once dangled from the rafters in the Galle bazaar. We usually got them on our way to Shollai. I had fancy walkie-talkies too from Colombo. “You spoil her,” Umma sometimes complained when Wappah handed over yet another doll dressed in an organza dress, with a bow in her hair. But when I buried my face in a mass of golden curls or breathed in the fresh smell of new porcelain, he smiled and said, “I like to make her happy.”

We were getting closer to Shollai when Wappah spoke again.

“You can’t do everything the Parangi girl does.”

“Aiyo! Wappah!”

“Do any of your cousin-sisters ride bikes?”