The Sweetest Cup of Tea
Published in the Bombay Review’s Anthology of South Asian Literary Fiction in 2018.
1
“Three spoons of sugar… that’s excessive,” I thought as I let the prayer beads slip from my palm. Sultan had asked me to make him a very sweet cup of tea. I wondered whether he usually took this much sugar, he was hypoglycaemic after all. Sat amongst mostly women in monochrome, the room felt like the reel from an old film’s negatives. Everyone was dressed in either black or white.
They prayed- whispered- or pretended to pray on handfuls of prayer beads that were actually date pits. It was customary to pray on each pit individually and then place it in a separate pile, so that one could differentiate the touched seeds from the untouched. The little brown pits were scattered over a large white cloth, touching one another softly in small gatherings around the source: a big pool of dark pits- already prayed upon.
In a few hours, the date pits would be buried six feet under-ground, alongside a shrouded body. They say that if one remembers the deceased more than five times a day, they will come alive again even faster than a date tree. Water and love for life. That was a thought! However, things spiralled out of control when I considered the practicalities. It would take commitment to a daily ritual of remembrance. Plus, did I really want to take on the onerous task of bringing the dead back to life?
“Let it pass,” I said to myself.
Seated beside me was Aunty Fran, who brought me out from my contemplation and back into the funeral home. She asked for an explanation about the ceremonial rites at soyems.
“Why does it take three women to bathe the body before burial?” She inquired without looking directly at me. I could tell because her voice was was not coming directly at me. It seemed to come from a position that was faced the covered, white vessel in the front of the room.
I couldn’t think of an explanation... in fact I couldn’t think at all, so I just pretended not to hear her. It helped that I wasn’t looking at her either. On most days I would investigate unanswered curiosities immediately, just to get a conversation started and Aunty Fran was full of good conversation, thus making her question an opportunistic moment to engage. Then again, like I said, I was disinterested, so I let the curiosity turn to vagrancy. Lucky for me, she did not ask again.
I still got up from my cross-legged position on the white sheet with the date pits, and made my way to the kitchen, in case she asked again. To get to the kitchen, I had to squeeze between the shoulders of men, whose designated prayer area was in the space between the kitchen and the women, or the dining room. Once through the sea of men, most of whom were standing, I was finally in the kitchen. There I had to remind myself of the purpose of my journey.
Tea for Sultan, of course!
As I poured a second spoon of sugar into the teacup, my eyes fell upon Aunty Fran, who was venturing into the men’s den with cautious steps. Hurriedly, I scooped a heaped third spoon, added it to the mixture, and made my way back into the crowd to find Sultan.
Aunty Fran was one of my grandmother’s relatives, all of whom were part of Pakistan’s perishing Parsi community. They were very small in number- in height and generosity too- but immense in most other respects. Apart from contributions to academia and architecture in the city, the Parsis did more social work than the federal government had done in half a century. Their tolerant and enterprising spirit was also a breath of fresh air in Karachi's sanctimonious high society- at least on the outside because that’s where you remain if you aren’t born a Parsi male.
As the time in between Monday’s afternoon and evening prayers crawled on, occasionally I wondered off through the badly lit hallway and into my grandmother’s room. I don’t know what my grandmother’s real name was but everyone called her Gaya. Apparently, her family decreed her as mute because she didn’t start speaking until she was five years old. From then on, she’d only speak when necessary, usually in response to a question. In stead, she spent most of her free time climbing to the top of the neem tree in the backyard of her childhood home. They said she was like a little buddha, but since they couldn’t call her Buddha they called her Gaya, affectionately of course.
Gaya’s was the only room in the house with a skylight. From there, I wondered off elsewhere, into other rooms and spaces, until summoned back to serve someone else tea- or gracefully accept another condolence. Once done, I’d go back to shuffling the date pits and wondering why our rituals had not evolved beyond the cultural melancholies of death. There must be better ways to celebrate life.
A year and some weeks ago Gaya’s old husband had passed on at the age of 86. Exactly a year later, Gaya took her leave as well. On that day was her funeral.
After the prayer and the sorting of the date pits, Gaya’s body was transported in an ambulance and she was laid to rest at her husband’s feet; an orientation she had resisted fiercely in her life. The placement, however, was unintentional. She had been born a Parsi but converted to Islam when she married. By name, she simply traded one community for the other but in practice, she belonged to neither. In truth, she desired to be scattered in the saline breeze of the Arabian sea, but we had no crematoriums in Karachi and since she was no longer allowed in the Parsi community's Tower of Silence, our options were limited.
We did respect one of her dying wishes though, we donated the only part of her body untouched by cancer: her eyes. The rest of her was carried to the graveyard, where men preceded over the janaza since women aren’t supposed to partake in the burial rites.
Later that evening, I watched the Imam inhale a plate of aloo samosas and chai. After each bite, he was careful to wipe his mouth and his wiry beard, with the ends of a green cloth. The cloth formed circles above his head, and trailed all the way down to his waist. As I watched the green clothes, the grey hair and his heaving stomach, he reminded me of a pregnant horse. Then I heard the Imam pass a remark to my uncle, who stood nearby.
“Your mother is lucky to have found space at the foot of your father’s grave… the city isn’t just overcrowded for the living,” he said loudly, between a bite and a laboured breath.
“Yes Imam Sahib. In Karachi, this city of 24 million living people, most graveyards seem to be overpopulated and their prices had been run up by inflation,” my uncle responded grimly.
Apparently there is a market for the dead too, I thought. Then I heard the familiar, syrupy voice of old family friend, who I had never seen without make-up. She could have been a geisha with the amount of blush that her cheeks held, but she didn’t really fit the size of the part.
“It is also a blessing for Gaya. She is lucky to have been placed next to her beloved in death too,” she chimed in.
Considering they slept in separate rooms for as long as I could remember, I found humour in this bizarre talk of luck. I think I may even have let out a chuckle.
On the other side of my family was a different story, all about Sultan and Rima. Mostly about Sultan though, who lived in old Clifton with Rima, who was half of his other half. I say half because Rima had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s twenty years before and all that remained was a body half the size of her former self.
Given the logic of lucky graves, overpopulation and scarce land, she was also fortunate to have her grave marked out, and the land is even watered every so often. Functioning high above the market, her resting place was chosen upon her birth. It had been assigned by heritage, next to her mother on a piece of desert land that bordered India.
Sultan was in the toilet when I returned with his tea. I set it down and then remembered that I had forgotten to stir the sugar! While Karachi’s market for graves (and most other things) seemed to run on luck then, my day was certainly running low on it. I was forgetting everything.
2
“That’s too much sugar darling, you’re begging diabetes!” Rima would say, but Sultan never listened. He regularly succumbed to his sweet tooth and she usually dropped the topic without prodding. She picked her domestic fights very carefully, since she spent most of her life fighting court cases for the rights to her homeland. Insouciance was her general disposition but she couldn’t stand to see her father’s architectural work crumble with the rest of the country’s heritage.
Rima was a wealthy and queenly, and an incredibly gentle grandmother. I had heard about how she grew up running through Ottoman inspired drawing rooms, and manicured gardens, but never from her. She had lots of friends in her nannies and in her many sisters and brothers, and it was enough for her. I don’t remember her complaining much, so life must have been more than enough for her too. Like a crystal cluster in the desert, Rima was full of life and song, all the way into early grand-motherhood. Either that, or she was very good at pretending.
She grew up untouched by the world outside of her family estate in Sindh and a summer home in Gloucestershire, England. She was the prettiest kind of electricity in silver skies. Yet, eventually the time came for Rima to leave her palatial home and expand her circle of friends. She did this without complaining because she would do anything to please her Baba, even though Baba had eight wives and twenty four other children. As a muscleman and a sultan, wives and wealth were his birthright. As a Muslim man or musalmaan, he was permitted four at a time.
With that many wives and three times the amount of children, legitimised by him, it is unsurprising that he played favourites. It didn’t matter to Rima though, because she was one of Daddy’s favourite girls. Her special affinity to Baba was a mix of admiration and love.
Rima and her sister were born to an American lady, Ernest, who the sultan married before India were split into two. She was the daughter of an electrician, sent by the Queen to the subcontinent. While pregnant with her third child, Ernest had an accident in her husband’s summer home in Devon, causing her to lose too much blood to continue living or so the story goes.
Rima was only two years old then and Daddy’s new English wife, would watch over Rima and her sister. The nannies were kind and playful too, so it didn’t really matter that Daddy was not around much because he had always been away on state affairs. He was as elusive as a sorcerer, Rima would say.
In her early twenties, a timely agreement took place between the prime minister of a nearby state and Rima’s father. As in all state affairs, there were casualties; Rima was to be wed to the prime minister’s son. Today, the two states have amalgamated into two larger nation states. One is India, and the other Pakistan- not that either man lived to see the difference.
So, the prospect of a young barrister was promising to Rima. His name was Sultan, like her Daddy’s title, and he had nice symmetrical features. Sultan spoke in a funny colonial accent, and did not seem boring. If it’s what Daddy wanted, then she did not mind the arrangement, even though the lawyer was initially betrothed to her younger sister, Idi. At least that was her nickname. They say Idi was one hell of a looker, but if Rima was electric, Idi was explosive, and as one would expect, the lawyer knew where to make his home.
So Rima accepted the proposal gracefully but with a question that vexed her relentlessly. She couldn’t fathom why the man took so much sugar in his tea!
3
Mechanically, I set the sugar down on the table besides Sultan’s cup of tea, picked up my cell phone and went to sit in the sea of seeds and faces. I had daydreamed my way down the hall again, drifting in between temporal memories, when I was pulled back to the room by something that demanded my presence.
Looking up, I noticed several glances with similar expressions. To think that people can look the same with starkly different faces is odd; especially when human effort to be noticed individually is so enormous, that it could probably achieve anything it wants if channeled into a collective consciousness. I suppose that even though we exercise many different muscular movements, our faces contort to form a restricted range of expressions. So sometimes, we all look the same. Some times.
The faces around me held mixed looks of disapproval and sympathy. I never had dealt well with either emotion. In such moments I wouldn’t think, I’d simply react and then I’d fulminate; like a flame that has been lit too close to an oxygen machine.
Two days ago, Gaya tried smoking while connected to an oxygen concentrator. My uncle stopped her and gave her an e-cigarette instead. Otherwise she would have killed us all before the cancer killed her.
Before returning the looks of disdain with one single stare down that I mastered back in school, I realised that the theme song from Game of Thrones was ringing from under my leg. Shit! I had mistaken Sultan’s phone for my own, and its ringtone had sliced through the hushed, heavy atmosphere surrounding the room. My resentment turned red hot, and wilted into embarrassment. I fumbled to silence the damn thing before it disrupted the prayers any further.
Once it stopped, I noticed a text message saying, “You are the sweetest thing in life.”
It was from Abacus.
I caught myself smiling at the message. I’d like to think my reaction was because I was tired and not because I have the perverse sense of humour that my sister routinely accuses me of. The message seemed sweet but so uncharacteristic of my grandmother (of both my grandmothers really), and then I remembered that Rima hadn’t formed a full sentence in years.
On this Monday, sleep seemed far away, my movements were mechanic, head was full of hay, and emotions as dull as a dishwasher. Stupefied, I switched off the screen and left the phone on a table in the other room, where it would be easy for Sultan to find.
“Who is this Abacus,” I said to myself in half a voice. I think I already knew.
4
Between the age of two and six, my best friends were my grandparents. I have to be just and say it was both sets, but I was partial to Rima and Sultan growing up. I don’t know why I called them by their names though, because that just was not done in my culture. Then again, as I got older, I came to see that my family did many things that were not done in our culture.
As I grew up, Rima and Sultan were growing old too- but not too old- not while I was young enough to play. As their only grandchild at the time, I received their undivided attention. Sultan was steadfast in his commitment to Saturday night rituals. Rima was too when she was around. Cassette rentals and ice cream drives were sacred to us- or at least to me- and they made sure they safeguarded my faith.
I usually alternated between Gaya’s home and their home on weekends, where I interrupted their checker games, and didn’t let them watch the Bold and the Beautiful. Sunday mornings with them meant eating French toast and watching Top Cat. By Sunday evening, my grandparents were sapped, battered and knackered, but they never let it show and they rarely ever got angry.
There was this one time though. I remember I got yelled at by Sultan because I was spying on him and his friend having a serious discussion in the drawing room. He caught me sitting under the dining table. In turn, Rima got upset at him for shouting, and tried to console me. Ego bruised, the brat in me sulked through the evening and until I fell asleep on the spoon-back divan in her bedroom. Delicately, she tried to move me to her bed but I awoke.
I pretended to fall back asleep, but I just couldn’t. Something about the noise from the fan bothered me though I usually shut it out. It was the way the fan’s blades cut through air and made a strange sound, almost like it was talking to me. So, I stayed awake but kept my eyes closed, until all I could hear was the fan.
That night I opened my eyes to find a lamp lit in the sitting area, outside the bedroom. Rima was sitting in the dim light, her shadow cast on the blue and white wall of Hyderabadi tiles. On her own, she looked sad and lonely. Then I saw her cry and I had never seen her cry. I thought of going into Sultan’s room and waking him, he could probably console her. He would hug her like my parents hugged me when I was upset, and she would be all right. That’s what I thought the whole point of marriage was anyway, consolation.
Nevertheless, I remembered something else I had never seen. I had never seen them hug.
5
On the evening before Rima’s funeral, I fell asleep in the blue glow of her bedroom. I could smell her in the sheets from the night before.
On nights when my parents were out, I spent many sleeping by Gaya’s side, where I’d slip into other worlds under the soft blue light that came in through the curtains. I believed it was moonlight until I was older and had to face the fact that the moon wasn’t always luminous. Eventually, I also learnt that there was no rabbit living there, and it certainly wasn’t made of paneer cheese. In truth, there was a dim blue bulb further down the alleyway outside her room. It didn’t matter though. I would still fall asleep bouncing in and out of moon-craters; making balls of cheese to throw into that diamond studded ocean we call outer space.
That night, however, the place I went was dreamless.
A few hours later, condolences started pouring in. People praised my grandmother for her social work, for her kindness, for her devotion to helping the sick, for setting up a school for children with disabilities, and for a final wave of goodwill that came with her death. Her eyes restored the site of two blind men. However, I remember her for different reasons. For the fact that she spoilt her daughter tremendously, for the irritating noises that came from the way she sipped her morning tea, for the strange open relationship she had with my grandfather, and for the fact that she would always ask for things to bring back when I travelled- mostly for other people- or to post a letter to send to some friend in Nuneaton or some other Middle-of-Nowhere kind of place. But these things faded like my moonwalking dreams.
All that really remained was the fact that my grandmother had touched people, and the only reason I could think of was that she was accepting of everyone. In a society teeming with intolerance towards all things secular, towards gender, towards social equity, towards alcohol, towards unconventional professions, towards homosexuality, and towards most kinds of heterogeneities that poke at the cocoon surrounding privileged lives, she was tolerant.
As the evening prayer sounded, lots of people paid their respects to my father and his siblings. By the night prayer’s call, most people had gone. Sultan was still there though. He sat in the corner, tasbih in hand, looking frail and forlorn.
Sat beside him, I asked him what’s wrong. I knew the answer and even expected some theatrics. Sultan loved drama of all kinds; the kind you watch, the kind you read, the kind you perform. Hell, he was the one had who kindled my crude little appreciation for literature. Yet he was a skilled manipulator and an artful liar too. Most often, one could not draw the line between his emotions and his intentions but as I got older, I learnt to discern the difference. He was mostly acting, I thought. In fact, I believed he was an every day thespian, such that he was always acting, in every moment of his life. Perhaps, even when he was alone in his bedroom. It came to a point where I don't even think I could call it acting, because that’s all he did. It must have been real then. Even my mother called him a sociopath, though she loved him dearly.
As his face contorted and his eyes swelled up with tears, my sarcasm took flight. I thought of how carefree Sultan was in the company of Gaya. They spent afternoons playing Bridge at the Colonial Club and she even chaperoned his visits to the doctor while his children were at work. Slowly, I realised that there was no drama on that day. He meant it when he said he had lost a great friend in Gaya, someone he could confide in. I could relate too; she was the easiest woman in the world to talk to.
6
On some evenings during the week, Mama sent me to do my literature homework at Sultan’s. Always literature. Either she hated it or he was very good. Even so, it worked out well because I would sit on the dining table, and write answers about a Midsummer Night’s Dream while Sultan gave extra lessons to law students. If I finished my work in time, I would sit with Rima and listen to the 6’ o clock News too. Always BBC.
She would be in one of her long kaftans, smelling of roses and Oudh. Her tastes were Middle Eastern too, and she said she lived in Egypt before she was born. Her favourite place to visit was Tunisia. Sometimes, we would snack on toast, cheese, honey and dates- always at 6’ o clock. After the News, she would bring out her radio and put on Nazia Hasan, but then she started forgetting to bring it out. She would also forget her phone, where she kept her money, and starting mixing up names, but she never forgot her husband’s name. His name was Sultan but she called him Ozzy. I don’t know why.
Sultan got older too. I noticed that it took him longer to respond, and he wasn’t teaching as much, though I found it peculiar that the tuition boys kept coming. Then I grew a few years and before I knew it, Rima had Alzheimer’s.
By my sixteenth birthday, the disease had progressed so far that she moved from spending most of her time at home to spending most of her time in her bedroom at home. By this point, Sultan had his own room. The house had fewer visitors, less food, and a little less noise.
My visits grew less frequent, too. I would have to sift through her old kaftans and smell the Oudh that had migrated from her dresser to the dust in the back of her old cupboard, in order to remember her. The difficulty that came with trying to remember her upset me, and I didn’t know why until I realised that she was around much less than I thought even while I grew up. She spent most of her time fighting for a lost family legacy, the heritage that had given itself to Pakistan in 1947. Lost or not, she seemed happiest when she was travelling.
I continued singing what I thought was her favourite nursery rhyme, Frerè Jacques. She taught it to me when I was four, and up until my twenty-second birthday she still chimed in at the end of the song, “Sonnez le matines, sonnez le matines, Ding Dang Dong, Ding Dang Dong!”
7
Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing, Ding Dang Dong, Ding Dang Dong!
God, I must have fallen asleep to the song, because I woke up with it floating in the space between my ears and behind my eyes. It’s a strange place to be, full of echoes. Two sleepless nights followed by an evening nap had turned my eyelids heavy. Frantically, I stumbled to the toilet feeling like I was late for something, until I realised there was nowhere to be. The day marked the last of all the mixed up Muslim-Parsi customs that surrounded my grandmother’s death.
At lunch, conversations about her life lasted hours between relatives and passings of daal, bhindi fry and dhansaak. In my head though, her story was short. She was born Zoroastrian but excommunicated when she married a Muslim man, my grandfather. They eloped to marry in London- the closest place to Pakistan outside Pakistan- and returned home soon after sealing the deal. Soon after being disowned by her father and the community, she had a son, and was acknowledged again by her father’s affection but not the community. It didn’t really matter though, judging by the populous in her home on this day, she never really left their folds.
That night marked the end of this grieving period in both religions, and also marked the end of a no-meat spell, thus resulting in the morning to afternoon kitchen toil that goes into cooking dhansaak. My grandmother refused to serve meat after my grandfather’s funeral the year before, so my father and his siblings decided to honour her by honouring the tradition. They say the body is decomposing during this period, and in order to prevent someone from eating the recycled remains of their loved ones, one must refrain from love. Love of meat.
After dinner, I went to ask my mother if she was ready to leave, but was met with rancour in the toilet. She was up in arms, on the phone, arguing about some credit cards that should have been cancelled long ago. A few minutes later, my mother came out, grave- faced. Her brother had called to tell her that Sultan had racked up a ridiculous credit card bill, and was running his wife’s inheritance dry.
He said he spent the money on household repairs and medicines, which was believable since he had been hospitalised two or three times that year. Then my uncle looked at my grandparents’ joint accounts over the last few months, and realised that standard sums of money had been withdrawn regularly. Even the old Buick Riviera that Rima inherited from her father had been sold at price well below selling price.
8
Soon after Rima was bed-ridden, Sultan stopped teaching and so the house ran on old investments and my grandmother’s inheritance. He had not intended to give up his profession; it was because he had fallen unexpectedly ill and his energies were wavering. The irony was that my grandparents were now spending much more time in the same house than they had since before I knew them. They were together but apart.
My cousins lived next door and came over to the house on evenings when the weather wasn’t too hot. They rode their bicycles around the outer perimeter of the long driveway, through the cement back alleys and across the unkempt garden, since the streets weren’t safe for children. When they weren’t riding the circuit, they were reliving the youth of the two generations that had frequented the house on Club Road. I remember my mother telling me about how she and her brothers would climb the imlee tree in Sultan’s garden, and throw the fruit into their neighbour’s home. I also recall how my sister and I played Pittu Garam or Seven Tiles with the cook’s sons until we were no longer allowed to play together. When I was twelve, I protested and said I wanted to play but Sultan was unfaltering.
“You can’t play with servant boys; you’re becoming a woman now darling. You must learn to behave like one,” he said.
Years later, my little cousins were reliving those evenings on Club Road while the cook’s son took his predestined place in the sweaty kitchen at the back of the house. Now I get little more than a shy “Asalam-walaikum” out of him.
Sultan’s favourite grandson was 12 year-old Samir, probably because he was amusing, mischievous and most like him in ways. Samir was the product of a first-cousin marriage. When he was two, he would wear t-shirts on his head and pretend he had long hair. According to Samir’s grandmother, who was also my grandfather’s cousin, Sultan would sneak into his sister’s closet and dress in her jewellery and clothes whenever his father was away on business. Costumes, I thought then. That made sense. Sultan always said he had wanted to be an actor when a child, but couldn’t because his father would not have it.
He never really spoke about his father. At 6, his parents sent him off to boarding school in Kashmir, and soon after, a bloody Independence War broke out, which separated Pakistan from India. Sultan had recounted how the trains carrying uniformed schoolboys back to Sindh carried a mix of uniformed soldiers, dead people and people pretending to be dead instead. He mentioned how a member of his father’s staff had been sent to bring him and his brothers to their new home in Pakistan, where their mother waited for them. He always spoke highly of his mother, a dominant and foreboding woman as I remember her. She lived with him and my grandmother until she died at ripe age of 98.
One evening, Sultan had been admitted to the hospital for a bad bout of pneumonia and low insulin levels. On the way to visit him, I stopped at his house to see Rima, when Samir came into the room with a strained look on his face, like was he had heavy rocks tied around his waist. I asked him whether he was worried about Sultan and he said he was, but he was confused too. He said,
“Appa, I thought Sultan was a musalmaan like us but I think he lied and now the devil has got him sick.”
“Really now? So if he is not Muslim then what is he?” I asked, taken aback but amused too, by the boy’s remark.
Before I could get a clear answer, the 12-year-old started his story. He knit his eyebrows and his voice dropped to a whisper. Then he told me about how he had snuck up under Sultan’s window a few days ago and overheard him speaking to someone in the room. He said that their voices were too low to listen but that they were speaking in Urdu.
“There was a person, who was taller than Sultan, but I- I couldn’t see his face,” he said.
“All I could see was the back of Sultan because there was someone visibly smaller behind him,” he continued.
Then he said that when he finally got a glimpse of this person, he saw a manly hand stroke Sultan’s back.
“Oh Samir! Don’t be naughty, that isn’t a funny joke,” I said, half laughing, half serious.
“I swear, kasam sai!” He exclaimed, pinching the skin on his throat as if to inact a sacred promise.
“There were dark hands with wiry black hair and an amber stone set in a silver ring, all on a man’s hairy right hand. The ring was on his little finger!” Samir said in half a breath.
I was impressed by the intricacy of his observation but I couldn’t wrap my head around his words. Then he described the scene further. He said the hands moved softly down Sultan’s spine and made a home around his waist, where they stayed. Then the two men embraced.
By this point, Samir’s face had contorted into a mix of curiosity and constipation, like he needed to release a painful knot of gas. He said the hands migrated away from Sultan’s waist and into the front of his trousers.
“He’s g-a-y, Appa, he’s gay” Samir whispered the last three letters of the word like it was forbidden pagan chant in Mecca.
Before Samir could tell me how he ran from the window like a man on fire, my uncle came into Sultan’s study and he was frantic.
He told Samir to go home and rummaged through the desk, frenzied. I asked him if I could help and he mumbled a string of words, in separate, disjointed sentences. I picked up on “paperwork for the hospital… credit card… typhoid… hepatitis… dengue… can’t diagnose… no response”.
Before I could digest the last two words of the sentence, he found the credit card and we were in his silver Honda Accord. We were on the way to the Aga Khan Hospital and panic had set in deep.
Everything else fell away and all I remember thinking was that Sultan had always been there. He used to take me to Urdu renditions of English plays at the Karachi Arts Council and now I took him to watch Bollywood movies at the cinema that served warm caramel popcorn. I grew up on midnight drives to eat Peshawari ice cream with him and now I’d take him on midday drives for tea and baakarkhaani. At eleven, I’d sit with him on Saturday afternoons and read his favourite parts of Malgudi Days or watch Fawlty Towers. At 22, we’d spend some Saturdays at Liberty Books, scoping the latest releases in Sub-continental literature. Sometimes we’d even watch Koffee with Karan. He loved Sridevi but thought new actresses like Kareena Kapoor were “feisty”, so he was happy to be entertained. Sure, he was difficult but I couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been around.
9
Back at home on the third day after Gaya had passed on, I felt like I had been jolted awake by a rude alarm. The kind that my ayah used to get me up on school days before throwing water one me. I thought about how Gaya was sitting by his hospital bed when I went into see him the night that I thought he had died. When he regained his consciousness and saw me, I recollected how he smiled but more than that, I remember how relieved he was to see Gaya there. I couldn’t help but wonder how they shared a closeness that I had never seen between Rita and him.
At once, everything came reeling back to me. Abacus, Islamabad, the money trail, Gaya and Sultan’s close friendship, Rita and Sultan’s distant relationship, Samir’s spying adventures. Most of these incidents were things I knew but avoided, because that’s how most things work in Karachi… they’re brushed under Persian carpets so that you don’t have to confront them.
I couldn’t avoid the questions anymore though, there were too many. The following morning, I decided to go over and see Sultan. When I got there, the chowkidar said he had gone out.
“Alone?” I asked.
“No, he goes every day with the cook’s son, Kabir. They are usually back within the hour” he said.
I waited in Rima’s room until I heard a honk at the gate. When I went to see Sultan, he looked a drowsy and said he wanted to lie down. I had so many questions dancing in the pit of my stomach, but when I tried to raise them, they merely itched the edge of my throat and fell back into gravity before leaving my mouth. Defeated, I let him rest and made my way out.
On the way to the car, I saw Kabir. “Salam Kabir,” I said. “Where did you go with Sultan Sahib?”
“Walaikum-Asalam, ma’am… to the hospital for his injection,” he answered meekly.
“Which injection?” I pressed.
“I don’t know; the name is written on a paper that Gaya Bibigave me a few months ago... until she was able. She would go to the hospital with him after he got sick. Then she got too ill to go, so she instructed me to accompany Sahib whenever he goes. She told me the medicine was imperative to control his diabetes you know, so she made me promise I would watch that Doctor Ruth administer the shot to him upon every visit. I promised her.” Kabir paused for a few seconds.
“She was a great friend of your grandfather... even Doctor Ruth said that Gaya Bibi had been very kind to her. There are few like her in this world, Baji." He resumed his silent disposition with a forehead blush.
In five sentences, I heard Kabir say more than I had heard since I was twelve. It was almost like he felt he had stepped over some invisible fence, into a land laden with explosives, separating his world from mine. Like a child out of Gaza, wandering into territory that he knows will never be his.
"May her soul rest in peace, God willing" he murmured.
Without thinking, Kabir handed me a paper with Emtricitabine + Tenofovir administered by Dr. Ruth Elvin at the Indus Hospital.
I took my phone out of my pocket and snapped a screenshot of the medication. What medication did Sultan need to receive so regularly and under constant supervision? Was he addicted to some form of morphine? Did he even know what he was taking? I wondered why nobody else had mentioned Nana’s medicinal routines and whether anybody else even knew. Was this for his heart condition? Why did he have to go so regularly? How did he pay for it? Is this where the money had gone? If so, then what does Abacus have to do with this? And what the hell did Gaya have to do with all this, I remember thinking to myself. I couldn’t even ask her.
I handed the paper back to Kabir. “I hope you’re still hitting those chakkas, Kabir,” I smiled and made my way out.
At home, I succumbed to an overwhelming feeling of mental fatigue as I realised that I sat on an even larger mountain of questions. The first thing I did was make myself a strong cup of tea. As I added a teaspoon of sugar to my tea, I checked my photo reel and googled Emtricitabine.
The first search results yielded: “HIV and AIDS Antiretrovirals: control the growth of the virus”.
I felt like I had been living atop a mountain and now the mountain I sat on was metamorphosing into cotton. I felt like it was floating away and I was still left sitting, on something, somewhere. Deliberately, I added two more spoons of sugar to my tea and stirred the cup until the whole body of liquid whirled in four seconds of uniform motion. One spoon for Rima and one for Gaya, I thought as an overwhelming feeling of love for my grandmothers washed over me. For the first time in days I cried and cried and cried, until my tears fell and became part of a very sweet cup of tea.
