THE MORNING A TREE APPEARED outside my window, I received a phone call informing me my mother was dying. Mashal amma’s voice was muffled and the signal kept breaking. Red flowers dotting the sumbal tree that had crept in from my father’s farm in Punjab, flashed like a warning. The tree shook in the cold mountain wind.
Somehow the tree had made it past the convent gates in the beginning of summer, settled on the slope under my office which overlooked the hill station, the pines, the marketplace with its dwindling stream of tourists, the high grey walls around St. Mary’s, the creaking swings that hosted a girl or two.
“Asiya bibi,” Mashal amma whispered. “Sahiba is very sick, and sahib refuses to take her to the doctor.”
“Can you put her in the car and get Ashfaq to drive her to the army hospital?”
“Bibi, sahib has taken the keys. I think he is drunk.”
I did not ask Sister Isabelle for leave at first, hesitant to depart the high stone walls of the convent, which for so many years had been a sanctuary for me. As stories reached us over crackling mobile phone connections of strange occurrences down south, I could not leave my cold, but comforting, grey bedroom with a tin roof that rattled under continuous hailstorms.
I taught literature to Class Eleven, a group old enough to understand subtext beyond the government approved curriculum, yet young enough to refuse its importance. These days, with loo winds extending into the winter, daisies emerging in the snow, everything was text.
Mashal amma called me again, two days later, when I finally decided to return home. “Asiya bibi, your mother is with Allah now.”
***
I fell asleep watching the pine trees race pass the dusty window of our school van, lit up by the golden sunset of the mountains and awoke in the oppressive heat of the plains. I arrived late in the evening and our fields were covered by darkness so absolute, I had to turn on the flashlight from my cell phone. Not a star in the sky, the moon completely shrouded with a veil of thick black. The van had to stop every few feet just to make sure we were still on the dirt road.
As I disembarked, a rush of air dampened my cheeks. The wind came from the river many miles away, but the sound of water felt so near, right around my ankles, as if it was preparing to rise up and submerge me.
A few candles lit the front porch. My mother was hunched over a pile of pine nuts, her stubby nails digging into their black shells which fell at her feet. The wooden floor was dark from days of nut casings or perhaps just from the lack of light.
“Mama,” I tried to say. But she was not paying attention and when I turned back to the verandah after dropping my bags in the hallway, she and the pine nut casings were gone.
All the bulbs in the house had stopped working. A heavy smell of old paint, plastic and dirt hung over every room. My mother’s body was on her bed, wrapped in a white shroud, surrounded by gas lanterns.
A few women from the village had gathered, waiting for me to help wash the body. Mashal amma held my face in her shaking hands, her eyes shining with tears against the candlelight.
I had never noticed this in Mashal amma when I was a child, or it is more accurate to say I never looked closely. Now with years of bitterness behind me, dislocation from my mother, and a nearpermanent estrangement from my father, I saw her. Like the melting candles lining our hallways, Mashal amma too had sunk into the floor of this house, so permanent was her bondage. Her once sharp nose dipped over loosened lips that also were turned downward at the edges. Her mahogany complexion had darkened even further because of the lines that had deepened in her cheeks, around her bright sparrow eyes so much like shining obsidian. She seemed so tired.
“Asiya baby, we worried you would be too late.”
“I didn’t want to be. I am sorry, Mashal amma.”
“We called you many days ago about her illness. Why did it take so long?” Her white hair hung like a shock of lightning around her thin face.
I stared back in silence and Mashal amma muttered, “You children think that by leaving you can forget all your responsibilities. You aren’t better than us because you left.”
I had spent the last decade avoiding this place, relying only on occasional phone calls from my mother who sighed about the way things had been, who believed so fervently that my return would correct the balance of this earth as it was spinning off its axis. She was a specter in this old house, even before her illness, clinging onto Mashal amma, letting moths get into her treasured chests of clothes and shawls, filling them with holes.
The villagers’ weariness clung to me like an illness. They were all old, and there were no young people left here to hold their hands on the way to their graves.
My mother’s body had shrunk, as if all water and fluids had been drained out of it. Her skin was a sickly yellow that hung loose against her bones, her wide lips and full cheeks had sunk into her skull. She had somehow, in just a few years, aged by twenty years.
I rubbed water and soap over her face with a washcloth and Mashal amma began to brush and braid the grey hair tinged with orange from henna.
Someone had forgotten to take out the tiny diamond piercing on her right nostril. I tugged it and with a click, the diamond stud fell into my hand. The pin holding the stud in was stuck in the nostril. I half hoped she would suddenly breathe in and it would get caught up her nose. I tried sticking my finger inside the nostril, large like mine with hair that tended to grow too far out if she didn’t trim it. Mashal amma coughed, and I pulled my finger out of my dead mother’s nose. I wiped it surreptitiously on my shalwar.
I woke the next morning to find two uprooted trees and a tractor fallen over outside my window. I imagined my mother breathed overnight, and overturned everything.
***
The tractor lay on its side, wheels slowly turning, propelled by a wind that seemed to have no direction. The world outside shifted as if the earth turned on its axle around our house. I awoke expecting to see verdant green farmlands, the long dirt road below my window stretching into the distance, surrounded by tall stalks of sugarcane, mustard, and thin tributaries of water gleaming at the edges of the horizon. Instead, the river had moved closer to our house, cutting through the sugarcane, tearing a purple and red line through the yellow mustard field, a gush of blood with no intention of receding.
A heavy gust of wind blew open my window with a loud crack, one pane shattered, and the net outside tore. A number of books above my desk had toppled over.
As a child, I spent many nights on the roof of the house, tossing broken pieces of brick over the edge of the banister, aiming for the bushes of the queen of the night. As the sun set over the fields, the flowers would open up to the moonlight, exuding a sweet fragrance that I still remember to this day. When my father was not home, ruling with an iron fist, my mother and I would collect those flowers by the handful, and leave them around the house overnight. By morning, every room smelled like the garden.
We were to take her body around the broken limbs of the trees blocking our driveway, around the river bend, past the dead stalks of sugarcane, to the graveyard where she would be laid to rest. I thought of the silver stud back quietly resting in her nose. As her body disintegrated many feet below ground, the stud would still live amongst the tightly packed dirt, with the earthworms, stained by soil that could no longer sustain the world above.
Mashal amma had opened the French windows leading to our verandah, and faint remnants of the floral smell mixed with camphor from my mother’s body. She – it – lay wrapped in white in the middle of the floor, surrounded by mourning women, their heads covered and bent over prayer beads. Some rocked backwards and forwards as they muttered, like pale stalks of wheat being brushed by the stale wind coming through the door. Someone had scattered rose petals and crushed the queen of the night around her.
The day she married my father, my mother wore those flowers on her wrists and in her hair. Before my father locked himself away in his study, before there was too little water for their fields, and then suddenly too much, before there were no more queens populating the garden at night and their shimmering white faces faded into dark. Before our house was uprooted by the wind and rain, and her precious bushes drowned, my mother’s flowers were her pride and joy.
***
Even when I thought of my father after I left for the convent, I only saw him in fragments, a thick beard and mustache, a firm belly that would soften with excess, and a dark eye that twitched.
I still see my father’s back to me that evening in my childhood, as he faced my mother and Mashal amma in the garden, as clearly as if it were happening today. It was a powerful back, swathed in a cool white kameez and flecked with damp spots between its shoulder blades, and a wider sea of sweat growing beneath the armpits, sweat that made the cloth cling to him, revealing dark brown skin beneath.
Seeing the shape of him under wet cloth felt more intimate than seeing him naked.
My memory outfitted my mother in similarly pale yellow and white, a kurta pajama with a dupatta that appeared to ripple with the wind and blur amongst the flowers. But this could be me painting a picture pulled from romantic films, it was too idyllic to be real.
“Take her inside,” my father was instructing Mashal amma, who glanced at my mother for confirmation.
“No, she should see this,” my mother was saying. She lay down on her stomach, her shalwar spread out around her legs, and she was running her hands over the grass, grasping it and pulling it out by the handful.
The queen of the night had just been planted that year, they had all grown into thick white buds against bushes of bright green leaves that darkened as the sun set.
“Are you seeing these, Zia?” she was saying to my father. “Asiya baby,” she sat up on her elbows and turned to me. “Do you know that in Japan, the queen of the night blooms for only one night in the year?” My eyes widened, and I stared at the buds.
My father’s back heaved, as if he was sighing, and he swatted away the mosquitoes that began to swirl like a tornado above his head. “For once do something useful with your time,” I heard him say. “You are obsessed with this garden, while this house is falling apart!”
My mother would sing gently to herself most days, but today she lay there singing loudly at the top of her lungs. She sang about moonlit nights, about the lover’s hair, the end of innocence. The more my father spoke, the louder she sang.
Even then I knew the signs that awakened the sleeping beast inside him, and my mother knew how to goad him. He was shaking and the wet kept pooling in his crevices, my mother laughed, and Mashal amma and I cowered.
I still see my father’s foot before I see his face, because that foot struck my mother on the hip that afternoon, with its brown leather sandal, the sturdy flat toes with overgrown nails. It left a grey mark on her white shalwar, grey that disappeared among the grass stains that spread as she rolled over and laughed until she hiccuped.
The darkness gathered, and I ignored the scene unfolding around me, waiting only for the petals of the queen of the night. Did the flower twitch? Did one petal separate from the others?
But someone grabbed me around the waist and the breath was knocked out of me as my father’s thick arms hoisted me up. I screamed and clawed at his shoulder.
I smelled his musty breath, and heard the door slamming behind us. My mother lay curled on her side in the grass, her laughter giving way to quiet sobbing, and I did not get to see the flowers bloom that night.
***
A thin buzzing grew louder and louder outside the open window of our living room and the mosquitoes gathering above each bush swarmed inside. The mourning women jumped up, waving their arms and swatting into the air. I sidestepped the frantic activity and turned to the front door, where a tall figure with a thin shawl wrapped around her shoulders beckoned me.
She looked like my mother, but younger. She stared at me as if I was a book she wanted to peruse for a long time.
“I am sorry for your loss. May Allah grant her the highest place in jannah,” she said.
“Thank you. Did you know my mother?” I asked.
“Yes. She took care of my children.”
“How many children? Are they here?”
“Too many,” she smiled. “But this village has no more children.”
We looked out at the edges of the fields where for the first time I noticed a curious fog hanging low over browned and withered stalks. I turned, begging my leave of this strange woman, but she had vanished.
It was still midday, but the queen of the night was awake. To my shock, I saw three, four, and then ten white faces gleaming at me from the bushes around the house. These bushes had been uprooted and destroyed in last night’s wind, but the flowers shone as if they had just been freshly watered. I held the door frame tightly.
The sound of porcelain shattering made its way through the door of my father’s study. He had knocked over another teacup.
Many years ago, after I left home and moved to the convent, I received a frantic phone call from him. “Have you read anything about the dolphins with legs that have been eating crops?” he said abruptly. This was how most of our rare conversations began.
“The dolphins? I thought they died,” I said.
“Something has been eating our crops and Mukhtar says he saw something that looked like the river dolphin except it was crawling. On land.”
“Abbu, Mukhtar is senile.”
“Strange things keep happening here. The other day your mother swore she saw the trees move from one corner of the garden to the other. It was dark then, but in the morning the tree had definitely moved.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I was easily exasperated back then. “You both need to get your eyes checked. When was the last time you went to the doctor?”
I refused to listen to them then, even after I heard from Mashal amma how the land was revolting against its own nature. My mother’s accelerated aging, her body turning her once tall frame into a withered, shrunken, dried up root, I explained away by the stress of my father’s drinking. My father’s sudden return to drinking I explained as the habit of an addict, unable to forget the moments of forgetfulness.
I explained away many things growing up on that land. I explained away the late nights and the early mornings where women materialized from my father’s study, covering their heads, muttering about being asked to help him with something, wiping away tears, adjusting their shalwar, hiding the bruises on their cheeks. I could explain Mashal amma’s miscarriages, her constant illnesses, the babies who emerged out of the woodwork. As an overeducated college student, I could blame it all on the uneducated, backward villagers who refused to learn about contraception, didn’t understand our country was bursting to the brim with babies.
But the queen of the night opening its eyes in the morning, the moving trees, the tractor quietly appearing overnight, the shifting water, I could not explain.
***
The women took over carrying my mother’s body to the gravesite. After the men’s feeble protests, and my father’s inability to protest, they placed her gently on the charpayee. Two women held the front legs, while a number of villagers gathered underneath the charpayee, its knotted ropes tangling with their scarves. I took up the back, propping one corner of the charpayee on my shoulder, clasping the leg, and dragging my feet as the villagers traversed our weed-covered lawn.
A group of men, mostly farmers, stood outside. At first I thought they would stop us, seeing all these women bearing the body of the lady of the house, but they quietly stood aside. They had laid their tools down for many days, maybe even months. The colors in the fields were muted and washed over many times by a coat of dirty yellow, and the brown sky began to fade into dull grey and purple clouds giving the morning an evening glow. Most of the men followed us. The cloth wrapped around my mother’s face rose and fell and I imagined she sat up suddenly, awoken by the gentle rocking of her favorite charpayee.
Dust gathered around our feet, as our procession made its way down the narrow path. The newly formed river undulated beside us, a wet breathing body with mysterious dark shapes floating in its depths. A myna bird hopped alongside us. It opened its beak and a crow’s screech emerged from its little throat.
A long line of almond trees used to shade the graves. We often drove past them, and I would admire their proud stances, the gentle bounce in their branches that angled to fly away from the earth. Now the earth lay flat and still, without the trees, as if they had never existed. No one commented on their disappearance, no one seemed to notice that browning blossoms from the almond branches were still scattered on the graves like the trees had left them as a parting gift and walked off.
The graveyard had once belonged only to the farmers; our family burials took place in the city. But my father’s isolation and my late arrival meant my mother would be buried with the people her husband controlled with an iron grip.
Mashal amma held my hand as the women lowered the charpayee to the ground where a deep hole had been dug. The grass around her had dried, the once white headstones were grey or black. One woman started praying loudly and everyone adjusted their scarves and held up their hands.
A distant wind from the mountains brought the smell of pines, shaking the grass around us, and I shivered in surprise.
As my mother was lowered into her grave with unexpected speed and strength, one woman began covering her up with mud, her wrinkled hands grasping a shovel and with little effort tossed chunks of soil onto the white shroud.
“Why have you returned?” I heard my mother’s voice next to me as I watched her body sink deeper and deeper into the earth. “To say goodbye.”
“Not to me.” I heard her laugh. “You said goodbye to me long ago when you ran away. You came to say goodbye to this place.”
“This place is still here,” I said aloud.
“No it is not. It died a long time ago. You are standing on its corpse.”
That night, the women cooked large pots of food from the last of the chickens and the cattle. They brought the last buffalo to the center of our garden and sacrificed it. I watched as they ran a long knife against the neck of the barely struggling creature, its eyes rolled back into its head, the tongue lolled out, and its blood ran into the scattered bushes, some of it splattering the white face of the queen of the night.
Mashal amma looked happier, calmer, her tears long dried.
Everyone feasted on heavy meat and bread, licking our fingers and gulping down large tumblers of milk. I was on the front steps of the verandah, listening to the unusual sound of laughter and activity in the kitchen, when Mashal amma sat down next to me bearing a full plate. She nudged it toward me. “Baby, will you eat?”
“I don’t feel like it,” I said.
She nodded, and looked past me at the darkened fields.
“How did you do it?” I turned to her, and saw her white eyebrows rise. “How did you put up with her? Put up with him?”
“Did I have a choice, baba? Where could I go?” she sighed. “None of us have prospects anywhere else.” I felt the barb. I had indeed left, and found a world away from here.
“Don’t think that way.” Her hand reached for mine, “Someone had to leave, I suppose it could have only been you.” Even she didn’t try to mask the bitterness.
The house was ravenous, sucking in mourners and their smells and the food they brought with them. Light from gas lanterns and candles filled our hallways, the deep red carpets and old portraits moved with renewed activity.
My father’s round figure moved on the edges where light could not reach, shuffling away from the putrid smell that emerged from his den, pulled by the noise and movement like a hungry beast prowling or a lesser god hiding in the quiet and dark places untouched by human hands.
***
In another world, death happened and the stars kept shining, the sun rose and set, the rain fell at the designated time, and dried soon after. Anything out of the ordinary was just that, an aberration that must be shoved under the carpet. But my mother’s death was different; the world had cracked open with us.
The next day the river had come to us, or we had shifted closer to the river. I woke to the soft sound of lapping water, splashing against the side of our house. Spray from the river found its way through the window netting and onto my face. I woke up with a start, tears finally springing to my eyes as I realized the bed was wet.
Something like shame bubbled up within me.
I was not sure if this was a dream, but I found myself in front of the house.
The disappeared children of the village were seated on our front steps. The soil around them shifted softly, gently, and their eyes, my father’s eyes stared back at me, their stubby hands, so like his, their heavy gait, some older than others with his low paunch. Some were still small, impishly grinning, like he once did.
But their mothers had not left. Mashal amma had not left.
The smells, lights, groomed garden, everything had returned to its former ruin.
The door to my father’s study was open, and his shadow filled the doorframe. I heard the muffled grunts that always seemed to emanate from there, a book against a wall, a glass rolling against the floor, his dragging heavy unmistakably distinctive gait, the lighter pitter patter of mysterious feet that seemed to run around the room before they were stopped with a loud hush.
A rush of last night’s food filled my mouth and I wanted to revive the buffalo, remove all remnants of my father’s property from myself. I wanted this rotating new world to spin faster, this river to submerge us, these dying trees to take over, and my father to die with his farm.
***
I once introduced my students to poems written after our bloodiest war. The poems were about guilt, guilt in silence, guilt in comfort, guilt in sitting behind large brick walls as the world around us transformed. The nuns reprimanded me; we were not to talk about a century-old war, when our army needs our support today. They had been so focused on protecting us from violent actors, from unruly politicians, from our unruly selves, they did not know how to protect us from unruly nature that slowly crept into their barracks, destroyed their weaponry, flooded their tanks, struck down their jets from the sky. They could not surround and contain the infection that wormed its way through window sills, into water, into the deep recesses of the mind where everything I saw twisted into strange shapes, where past and present and future seemed to be one, and the dead and living existed in tandem, and the world I once escaped from had always been following me, keeping me in check.
The destruction of my house was slow and deliberate at first, and then violent and rushed. The women started with the interior, throwing out our settees and sofas, stripping the carpet from the
floor and then breaking the tiles with hammers and shovels. One woman tore down the paintings and drapery on the walls, smashed the vases with dried and dead flowers, another broke the glass in the French windows. They cascaded onto the tiles like a waterfall, and revealed a dark sky filled with clouds that seemed to anticipate the inevitable end. The river had moved closer, the sounds of water crashing and receding in a rush of air that burst into the living room in spurts.
They moved to my father’s study. I stayed outside in the hope that I would not have to look into his eyes and see my own staring back at me. I heard the crashing, I heard shuffling, I heard a loud grunt. But when they emerged, I could still hear some ghostly weeping from behind the door, distant and faint.
They took my mother’s jewelry and her dusty, moth-eaten box filled with her trousseau. Two women carried the box outside, her earrings, shaped like large flowers with little pearls hanging off the bottom, necklaces of kundan and emerald, and gold bracelets that she once wore from elbow to wrist, were distributed. Some pieces were broken apart with tongs, some diamonds were gouged out of their golden shells, some pearls were piled onto a shawl and women grabbed them by the handful. When everyone received a portion, one diamond necklace from my mother’s bridal set remained.
I pushed it into Mashal amma’s hands.
“I will not take it, my child,” she said. She tried closing my fingers around it.
“I don’t want anything he bought,” I said. “I have my own money.”
“How long will that last?” She said. “What will I do with all this money?”
“Find your children, go to the city. They are all out there somewhere.”
“They are strangers to me. Your father made sure of that. I have nothing, and I will leave with nothing. Don’t give me her blood jewels,” she said with a sudden vehemence that I pulled back and dropped the necklace onto the ground where someone may have grabbed it or it was forgotten.
“You can come with us, or stay here,” she said. “I will get you out of here, and after that is up to you. But this place is dying and soon the river will take care of the rest.”
The river had crept up slowly to our feet, silt and sediment seeped into the grass, the clouds had grown darker and I heard a low moaning through the fog settling above the lapping waves. Even though the wind had just picked up speed, the waves were already smashing into the fields and flooding the landscape, and the sky looked tired and bruised, groaning to burst open and deluge us with its contents. In the distance I noticed that the villagers had gathered and lined up a collection of rafts and boats. The tractor from our garden creaked and toppled over again in a gust of wind. The moan grew louder, this time coming from the house where we had left my father.
They took my hand and led me to the boats and with each step I felt the waves rising behind us, the purple sky sinking over us and I turned around to look once again at my home. My father stood under the door frame, his face in shadow, his arms held forward trying to shield him from the buffeting wind. A bush of the queen of the night flew across the doorway, scattering flowers at his feet. From this distance, I saw his past, present and future, I saw the door slam into him and the house sank in the rising water.
***
The story was originally published in Asian Ghost Short Stories from Flame Tree Press