Ummuselma sits facing Vyasa and his elephant-headed scribe, Ganesha. She is waiting for advice on authoring a meta-narrative.
Ganesha browses through her manuscript and says to Vyasa, "This is regular Dear Diary stuff, boss, and it's not complete, what meta and all, I don't even…"
Ummuselma interrupts the scribe and addresses Vyasa directly. "Sir, that is because I'm writing it even as I'm living it, just like you had done with the Mahabharata."
Ganesha snorts through his trunk at Ummuselma's attempt at ingratiating herself with the sage. Vyasa looks up from a dusty tome, tired eyes twitch at the light filtering through the window. He doesn't grant even a cursory glance at her manuscript but he looks intently at her. She thinks of the phrase 'penetrating gaze' and then thinks of how Dhritarashtra was born blind because his mother had shut her eyes in terror during sex with Vyasa. In the background, Ganesh coughs suggestively. Vyasa sighs and looks away, but addresses her. "If the story you are writing is what you are also living, content and contiguity will rarely come easily. Be prepared to intervene."
Ummuselma says, "If I am living it, then does it not follow that I am intervening all the time?"
Vyasa groans in bored disgust. "No, you women don't know there is a difference between authoring a life and finding yourself caught in one. It's not entirely your fault. You are taught to be footnotes in your own narratives. You can extract what is epic, but you don't dare create it."
Ganesha sniggers from behind a shelf. Ummuselma rises; a martyred silence fills the air. "I'll teach you to revise that," she says, and snatches up her manuscript.
The sage and his scribe watch her walk briskly away. Trailing her feet are the shadows of a thousand women. Ganesha studies the shadows and points out the ones he recognises. "Ganga, Amba, Kunti, Draupadi, and oh my god, is that Kannagi? I didn't think they even knew each other…"
Vyasa returns to his book, shaking his head. "Poor girl," he sighs.
***
Consider spectacles. Wire-rimmed, glass-filled, two-legged. See how they run.
"Where are they?" Ummuselma inquires anxiously. Where are they? Where could they be?
Ummuselma passes through the rooms like a domestic typhoon, upturning blankets, newspapers, plates, towels – every object that seems to hide something within its shade. From the drawing-room window she sees her daughter standing in the courtyard. "Paathu!" she calls out. "Paathu, come look for my glasses."
"But I'm on my way to class," she shouts back.
"Shut up and come inside, Paathu, those people will be here any minute now." Ummuselma watches her daughter trudge back into the house. Paathu is a tall, sullen girl of fifteen, whose gangly limbs are always threatening to tie themselves into a knot. "What a blight of an offspring," Ummuselma mutters to herself.
Neither mother nor child felt at ease in the house. Ummuselma felt she was absorbing the age and afflictions of the house, its unyielding dilapidation. She suspected forms of activity within the older rooms that could not be considered natural. If she stood still, she could sense an aberrant cosmos roiling behind her, threatening to slither up her feet and merge with the varicose in her ankles. If she ignored it as she does now, as she walks into the dimly-lit kitchen, she cannot avoid shuddering at the atmosphere performing an exaggerated stillness.
She looks around her warily, "What just moved? Didn't something move?"
"Moved? What do you mean? Nothing has moved."
Paathu briskly walks into the bedroom, but stops when she hears the rabble of an approaching mob. As she turns to leave the room, she catches the wink of metal and glass between the sheets on the bed. She picks up her mother's spectacles. "They're here," she hears her mother shriek. Paathu begins to run.
She finds her mother weeping over the kitchen sink.
"Spectacles be damned. There's nothing here I want to see. Bring me a log of firewood from the stove, child."
Something shatters a window in the dining room. Something else hits a wall. The noise outside has grown louder, fiercer, clearer. Paathu keeps her mouth clamped shut for fear of her heart leaping out through it. She wants to ask her mother why she needs a log of wood, why the police can't be called, why no one has come to help, what the hell God is doing. But she can't open her mouth because her heart is already knocking at her teeth.
Ummuselma sleepwalks towards the courtyard with a flaming log of firewood. Paathu watches the stumble in her mother's step, numb with dread. There is a simmering disquiet in her, a predatory restlessness around her fingertips, a desire to grasp and hold and render immobile, to preserve and defend.
***
Ummuselma Fatimatul Shaji was old money. She was born into land, into an undemonstrative abundance. She knew earth; she knew soil and seed and fertility, fish and fowl and crop and cattle, the need for sons and rainfall, large families, noise, the wait between the sowing and the harvest in both land and woman. When Ummuselma turned nineteen, she was married into new money. Thereafter, it was an education.
On the afternoon that Ummuselma first met her husband, she peered through the window and spotted him and his entourage of relatives being received by her father as though they were royalty. She turned around to tell whoever would listen that she didn't want this marriage, but an aunt clamped a hand over her mouth and said, "Shut up you foolish girl. In this house, you do as we say."
Ummuselma's husband was an industrious man of a different era; his vision was in technicolor, his selfhood atomised. He wanted nothing from land. He bought a large house and a printing press and then had the insolence to die early. But at least there was the house. So many didn't have even that, Ummuselma was told during the funeral. It is prudent to compare one's tragedies with the most tragic of tragedies. This is how you learn acceptance and maybe even gratitude. Ummuselma wept at the disrepair that death brings, the many unfinished things that the dead pass on to the living. She began to howl with hatred until someone clamped a hand over her mouth.
Exam time now. Quiver as you will, but don't stammer when you speak. Cover your head with the scarf, adjust your spectacles, but raise your chin. Use the youngest child as bait. Ummuselma held the hand of her four-year-old son as she faced her father and asked for the land she was entitled to. It was a blister of a day in June, two months after her husband's funeral. Her father lounged back on the cane chair, fanning himself with a newspaper.
"You have a house, don't you?" he asked her.
"Yes, but what am I to do with just a house?"
"A house is not a house, Ummu, it is a home, what did you think it was, it is a place to hang your head, you can hang it from a nail on the wall or from the ceiling fan, you can do all that in your house, if you have a house you have a home and that is all you need, take it or leave it, this is all I can give you right now."
“I want my share of land. There is nothing to eat in that house. How am I to feed my children?”
“There is no land.”
“What do you mean?” Ummuselma’s grip on her son’s hand tightened. The child began to wail.
Her father set down the newspaper and looked at her impatiently. When he spoke again, his voice was a mocking laugh and glint of steel. “What do you think paid for the biryani at your wedding? Who do you imagine bought that house? Where did you think the money came from?”
“You sold the land?”
“I needed money.”
“What do I do, then?” Ummuselma felt a deadening fatigue.
“You have a house, don’t you?”
The house was elderly, bulky and squalid. It loomed over the Kaloor town junction with blotted contours, crumbling ruefully and steadily. Every rain brought the house closer to vegetation. But for all its age and decrepitude, the house registered a certain immensity of scale to the beholder. Towering pillars framed a wide airy veranda, latticed woodwork around window frames, high ceilings that cooled stone; the house said ancestry, it said grandeur, wherewithal, estates of cardamom, but a part of it also said yesterday. It was not built for a family, but for whole generations. The patriarch who had built the house had migrated to Qatar after a string of suicides among his children, adding to the spectral quality of the house. Land is land is land, but here is a house, Ummu, it is as much of a fixture as anything else, this is where you sleep, this is where you sow, this is where you reap.
In time, things slanted hellwards. The printing press her husband had started lurched and collapsed. After her husband’s business partner fled the premises, the workers went on strike, which was a relief since there were no wages to give them anyway. When she couldn’t find a way around the debts or the strike or the court orders, Ummuselma marvelled at the persevering malice of men.
“Such is life,” her brother said with sagacious disinterest when she approached him for money. “Why don’t you sell the house and stay here with us?”
“The house is all I have left.”
“Then think of what else you can sell.”
Exam time. One morning, the workers of the erstwhile printing press gathered outside the house with stones and broken bottles. The first rock shattered the glass panes of the dining room window. The second hit a wall and ricocheted back to the mob, inciting them to further violence. The third rock was a flowerpot hurled at the main door, splintering it. Ummuselma came out and stood in the veranda, hair loose, teeth bared, a flaming log of firewood in her raised hand. The spectacle of her vulnerability was perversely exciting, as was her resistance. The mob advanced on her, but she did the same, swirling the inflamed log sharply through the air as she screamed down ancestors and their ghosts. Sparks from the wood flew into the eyes, ears, mouths of the mob. “Give us wages, we need jobs!” someone shouted. “Then go to Dubai!” she shouted back. The fourth rock hit her chin, the fifth one her shoulder blade. Then from nowhere, a bucket of water lunged towards her and the torch in her hand. Is she unconscious? Should we call the police?
***
The workers are still outside the house. Paathu shrinks from the noise as her mother walks towards it. The desire to capsize is simply too much; she intends to weep with the purity and abandonment of those who experience untrammelled injustice. But she doesn’t do that yet; instead she runs out to the backyard, shouting, “Toffee! Toffee, where are you, Toffee?” As she rushes from kitchen to backyard, she realises that the passageway is growing longer and narrower. “Toffee, help me please!”
Taufeeq, the son of the electrician whose shop shared a wall with the house, hears the din and walks to the wall, craning his neck to see what the matter is. As if in answer, Paathu bursts through the back door, his name bleeding through her mouth. He swiftly vaults across the wall and hurries to her. She begins to hiccup and heave, her words are hurled not spoken.
“They’re here to kill us, Toffee. Call the police. Umma went to them to set them on fire.”
Taufeeq is a strapping youth of sixteen who is troubled by how often Paathu appears in his dreams. He could now do a pencil-sketch of her features from memory – her grim mouth, beak of a nose, small breasts, even the distant look in her eyes. But at the moment, her eyes are swimming around in their sockets as she dissolves into hysterics. He holds her still, by the shoulders.
“Where are the children, Paathu? Where are Kulsu and Althaf?”
“Upstairs with the maid.”
“Take them and go to the shop. Now!”
Paathu looks at him with drowning eyes. She nods and he loosens his grip on her shoulders. Taufeeq watches her frantic figure disappear back into the house, feeling a surge of manhood. You have to be worth the hair of your moustache, don’t you? He strides towards the courtyard.
To Carthage then I came, burning burning burning burning.
He comes upon Paathu’s mother brandishing a flaming torch at a mob that closed in on her. “Get out of my courtyard, else I will burn all of us down to our bones!” she screams.
Ummuselma is unaware of her one ally in the battlefield. Flames graze Taufeeq’s face as the log is flung through the air; his attempt to rescue her is merited with ash and ember.
“Water, somebody get some water!” Taufeeq cries out in pain. But a singed and charred soul next to him bends down to pick up earth and stone. They are then flung at Ummuselma, along with water; she falls, returned to element.
Before commencing her belligerent counter-attack on the mob, Ummuselma thought of how Draupadi must have reacted to Duryodhana’s summons after she had been wagered away in wanton tomfoolery. In her moment of humiliation, Draupadi is said to have fallen at the feet of Dhritarashtra, grand architect of chaos, begging for mercy. Was he merciful? No, he babbled an amnesty that was promptly overturned by Duryodhana and Shakuni. Draupadi prayed fervently to Krishna as Dushasana disrobed her. Krishna could have decimated her molesters if he wished, but no, he gave her fabric instead. Draupadi looked at each of her husbands. Did they give a hoot for the hair she left unbraided and wild until Kurukshetra? For a time, yes, for hair and honour share a bed. Now Ummuselma was being called to court, to face the wreckage of a husband’s miscellanies. She thought of reciting the last two verses of the Surat-ul Bakra in the Holy Quran. The verse ended with asking Allah to give us strength to bear our burdens, to give us burdens that we can bear. But something shattered a window, and at that moment she felt not that she was done for, but that she had always been done unto. It had been an education in endurance. But to what end? Why is protest never a part of our education?
Do you know what Bhimasena was told in Varanavata on the night the house of lac was scheduled to be set alight? A sacrificial animal is never killed, it is silenced.
Ummuselma then made for the courtyard, determined to overturn a narrative.
But years later, when Ummuselma forcibly arranged her daughter’s marriage, Paathu asked her mother, “Are you trying to make me in your image?”
Ummuselma clamped a hand over her daughter’s mouth. “In my house, you behave as I tell you.”
***
The house had become home to those who helped Ummuselma tide over the debts her husband had left her with. Ummuselma, having cleared one set of debts, found herself in the midst of a more enduring one. Her brothers and their wives moved in, and they renovated the house, reinstating its melancholy grandeur. But the truly damning thing was the terms under which one inhabited the house. Ummuselma had once lived in harangued sovereignty in the house, miserable but autonomous. She had to witness the return of her father’s rules in her house, imposed through her brothers, maintained through their wives. Though Ummuselma referred to the house as her own, she and her children resided there as permanent debtors, every corridor felt like an evasion, every room a stranglehold. Don’t you know what houses do? They establish the order of things, the systems by which we live and suffer and die. If you want to revise a narrative, you must leave a house for another. And Ummuselma didn’t leave.
On Paathu’s wedding day, Taufeeq, the electrician’s son, sauntered past the long tables laden with fragrant, steaming mutton biryani, past the relatives waiting impatiently for the groom’s family to arrive. The thought of Paathu’s marriage filled him with no uncertain grief. He had barely slept the previous night, sifting through implacable visions that were partly dreamed and partly hallucinated. Under the pretext of picking up utensils for the caterers, Taufeeq walked into the house. Pushing past droves of women, he caught hold of a familiar arm and drew her aside. “Kulsu, tell Paathu to come to the bathroom window,” he demanded. Kulsum withdrew her arm and stared aggressively at Taufeeq. He softened and began to plead with her. “Just this once, Kulsumma, you know I cannot do this again.”
She looked him up and down with dramatic scorn, but yielded to his request. “Go to the back of the house right now,” she replied.
His hopes flailing around like a drowning animal, Taufeeq rushed to the marshy backyard and stood facing a tiny window on the first floor. The afternoon sun shone directly on him and as he raised his arm to shield his eyes, he was keenly aware of the tang of his sweat, the bubbling discomfort in his abdomen, the visceral lurching of a body convulsed in anticipation. The bathroom window opened after a few minutes. The face that appeared at the window however, was not Paathu’s but that of Kulsum. She stared impassively at him and dropped something through the window bars before pulling the window shut. He ran forward to examine the package, a piece of paper wrapped around a large stone for weight. The paper contained a brief message written hastily, which he recognised as Paathu’s hand. It said:
“Go away, you fool. You don’t even have a house.”
He read the message again, though it didn’t take him much time. He didn’t even feel like he was reading it. It took all of one glance to know what it said. He looked up at the closed window, willing it to open again so he could throw the stone back into it. He would throw two stones into it. He would throw himself into it. Then suddenly, there were sounds of pandemonium from the other end of the house.
Taufeeq folded the note into his pocket and hurried towards the source of the commotion. At the entrance of the house he saw an angry group crowding around a shiny blue Ambassador. ASLAM WEDS FATIMATUL ZAHRA, it said on the rear of the car, which was bedecked in flowers and glittering streamers. Ummuselma Fatimatul Shaji, who had neglected to revise a meta-narrative, was sitting by the well with her head in her hands, her shoulders locked in a continuous shudder. Her uncles, on the other hand, were valiantly trying to open the doors of the car, hurling abuses that seemed to be distilled from venom. Taufeeq squeezed through the mob and peered into the windows. The bridegroom who was to wed his beloved Paathu sat crumpled inside, smiling benignly at everyone, a trail of yellow vomit stretching down from his chin to his lap.
Harnessing his ample physical bulk and the pain of his recent rejection, Taufeeq pulled at the handle at the precise moment the bridegroom unlocked the door. A part of the crowd was briefly flattened as Taufeeq fell backwards on them, giving the bridegroom enough space to step out hesitantly from the car. Rancid alcohol and vomit fumes wafted out. The uncles lunged for his throat, demanding blood, not contrition. The terrified bridegroom stumbled backwards, looked up at the house and then his face blanched. A lull spread over the fracas as the rest of the crowd, including Taufeeq, looked up too.
The bride had stepped out into the balcony, shaking off the restraining arms of her sister and aunts. In her bridal finery, elegantly embroidered brocades, and long, flowing veil, she was the closest the crowd would ever come to encountering royalty. She had never looked angrier, or lovelier, or more fearsome.
Paathu’s uncle bellowed at her to return to her room, but she sharply held up a hand to silence him. She looked intently at the groom, her face contorted in abject repugnance. She raised a pointed finger at him. “Get out of my house,” she ordered. “Now! Get out of this courtyard! Out!”
The pointed finger then panned across the crowd, from Ummuselma weeping by the well to Taufeeq, who was lying spread-eagled on the ground. When he tried getting up, a stray knee whacked him across the eye, which immediately began to twitch uncontrollably. He lay back on the floor, with one hand cupping the left half of his face. From where he lay, Paathu and the house were silhouetted against a blindingly blue sky. There was something divine about the whole scene. As the crowd began to holler back at Paathu, it seemed to Taufeeq that they were pilgrims howling for redemption to a God who would have nothing to do with them.
They said to God:
Shut up and go back inside, foolish woman.
God said to them:
Get out of this house before I burn it down.
~Rihan Najib is currently working at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Toto Awards for Creative Writing.Do you know what Bhimasena was told in Varanavata on the night the house of lac was scheduled to be set alight? A sacrificial animal is never killed, it is silenced.
Ummuselma then made for the courtyard, determined to overturn a narrative.
But years later, when Ummuselma forcibly arranged her daughter’s marriage, Paathu asked her mother, “Are you trying to make me in your image?”
Ummuselma clamped a hand over her daughter’s mouth. “In my house, you behave as I tell you.”
***
The house had become home to those who helped Ummuselma tide over the debts her husband had left her with. Ummuselma, having cleared one set of debts, found herself in the midst of a more enduring one. Her brothers and their wives moved in, and they renovated the house, reinstating its melancholy grandeur. But the truly damning thing was the terms under which one inhabited the house. Ummuselma had once lived in harangued sovereignty in the house, miserable but autonomous. She had to witness the return of her father’s rules in her house, imposed through her brothers, maintained through their wives. Though Ummuselma referred to the house as her own, she and her children resided there as permanent debtors, every corridor felt like an evasion, every room a stranglehold. Don’t you know what houses do? They establish the order of things, the systems by which we live and suffer and die. If you want to revise a narrative, you must leave a house for another. And Ummuselma didn’t leave.
On Paathu’s wedding day, Taufeeq, the electrician’s son, sauntered past the long tables laden with fragrant, steaming mutton biryani, past the relatives waiting impatiently for the groom’s family to arrive. The thought of Paathu’s marriage filled him with no uncertain grief. He had barely slept the previous night, sifting through implacable visions that were partly dreamed and partly hallucinated. Under the pretext of picking up utensils for the caterers, Taufeeq walked into the house. Pushing past droves of women, he caught hold of a familiar arm and drew her aside. “Kulsu, tell Paathu to come to the bathroom window,” he demanded. Kulsum withdrew her arm and stared aggressively at Taufeeq. He softened and began to plead with her. “Just this once, Kulsumma, you know I cannot do this again.”
She looked him up and down with dramatic scorn, but yielded to his request. “Go to the back of the house right now,” she replied.
His hopes flailing around like a drowning animal, Taufeeq rushed to the marshy backyard and stood facing a tiny window on the first floor. The afternoon sun shone directly on him and as he raised his arm to shield his eyes, he was keenly aware of the tang of his sweat, the bubbling discomfort in his abdomen, the visceral lurching of a body convulsed in anticipation. The bathroom window opened after a few minutes. The face that appeared at the window however, was not Paathu’s but that of Kulsum. She stared impassively at him and dropped something through the window bars before pulling the window shut. He ran forward to examine the package, a piece of paper wrapped around a large stone for weight. The paper contained a brief message written hastily, which he recognised as Paathu’s hand. It said:
“Go away, you fool. You don’t even have a house.”
He read the message again, though it didn’t take him much time. He didn’t even feel like he was reading it. It took all of one glance to know what it said. He looked up at the closed window, willing it to open again so he could throw the stone back into it. He would throw two stones into it. He would throw himself into it. Then suddenly, there were sounds of pandemonium from the other end of the house.
Taufeeq folded the note into his pocket and hurried towards the source of the commotion. At the entrance of the house he saw an angry group crowding around a shiny blue Ambassador. ASLAM WEDS FATIMATUL ZAHRA, it said on the rear of the car, which was bedecked in flowers and glittering streamers. Ummuselma Fatimatul Shaji, who had neglected to revise a meta-narrative, was sitting by the well with her head in her hands, her shoulders locked in a continuous shudder. Her uncles, on the other hand, were valiantly trying to open the doors of the car, hurling abuses that seemed to be distilled from venom. Taufeeq squeezed through the mob and peered into the windows. The bridegroom who was to wed his beloved Paathu sat crumpled inside, smiling benignly at everyone, a trail of yellow vomit stretching down from his chin to his lap.
Harnessing his ample physical bulk and the pain of his recent rejection, Taufeeq pulled at the handle at the precise moment the bridegroom unlocked the door. A part of the crowd was briefly flattened as Taufeeq fell backwards on them, giving the bridegroom enough space to step out hesitantly from the car. Rancid alcohol and vomit fumes wafted out. The uncles lunged for his throat, demanding blood, not contrition. The terrified bridegroom stumbled backwards, looked up at the house and then his face blanched. A lull spread over the fracas as the rest of the crowd, including Taufeeq, looked up too.
The bride had stepped out into the balcony, shaking off the restraining arms of her sister and aunts. In her bridal finery, elegantly embroidered brocades, and long, flowing veil, she was the closest the crowd would ever come to encountering royalty. She had never looked angrier, or lovelier, or more fearsome.
Paathu’s uncle bellowed at her to return to her room, but she sharply held up a hand to silence him. She looked intently at the groom, her face contorted in abject repugnance. She raised a pointed finger at him. “Get out of my house,” she ordered. “Now! Get out of this courtyard! Out!”
The pointed finger then panned across the crowd, from Ummuselma weeping by the well to Taufeeq, who was lying spread-eagled on the ground. When he tried getting up, a stray knee whacked him across the eye, which immediately began to twitch uncontrollably. He lay back on the floor, with one hand cupping the left half of his face. From where he lay, Paathu and the house were silhouetted against a blindingly blue sky. There was something divine about the whole scene. As the crowd began to holler back at Paathu, it seemed to Taufeeq that they were pilgrims howling for redemption to a God who would have nothing to do with them.
They said to God:
Shut up and go back inside, foolish woman.
God said to them:
Get out of this house before I burn it down.
~Rihan Najib is currently working at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Toto Awards for Creative Writing.