Free Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel by Samina Ali Page B

filled his son’s plate himself. The boy was ten, around the age I was when Dad remarried.
    “So the dul’han is awake!” Dad called, then chuckled as his light eyes flitted beyond me to Amme. Since the wedding began, he’d been having fun calling me the bride to tease my mother, not me, because he knew my wedding was a fulfillment of her dreams.
    Sabana glanced up at me and slowly took in the golden kurta- chooridar from last night’s ceremony After the women had bathed me by massaging my scalp and body with turmeric and oils, they had redressed me in my first wedding outfit and told me to wear it to sleep. Now that the wedding had started, there was never to be a moment when I was not to look like the bride.
    Sabana herself was dressed in a yellow shalwar-kameez, though she had not attended the ceremony. Her lipstick had stained her teeth red and was also smudged on her chin. The kurta creased across her growing stomach. Her pregnancy was two months behind Henna’s, five months ahead of my own. She now lifted a spoon and served Dad as she said, “All morning, your father has been stopping Nafiza from waking you, saying the bride needs her sleep. A father can spoil his children, but a husband will never spoil his wives. Look how I attend to your father, even in my pregnancy.”
    Was she telling me to emulate her actions, this woman who was sitting in my mother’s house? I held my tongue, for speaking aloud such things was what led to trouble, beatings.
    Dad pushed back against the wall while sucking the marrow from a bone. His lips and mustache glistened with the cooking oils as much as my own skin and hair glistened with the almond oil and perfumes. I had already become invisible to him, receding once more with Amme into his past life. His younger son, Ziad, curly haired like his mother.
and with the same thin face, asked to be excused. He said he was tired of eating rice and curry. He wanted cereal. He wanted to go home. Sabana reminded him that they had come for my wedding. Ziad was four years younger than his brother. If my own brother had been alive, he would have been three years younger than me.
    Nafiza hobbled up the verandah steps with my plate of food. Just beyond her, in the courtyard, Ahmed was waving to get my attention. He was holding one of the floral ropes from last night’s ceremony. With exaggerated steps, he tiptoed over to the sleeping lamb and hung it around the creature’s neck. The animal didn’t start, as I thought it would. It simply opened one eye, and its moist nostrils curled back as it sniffed. It began eating the dried-up flowers. Ahmed roared and clapped his hands. I turned away
    Nafiza was glancing from the dastar-khan to Amme, wanting to know if she should seat me with Dad’s family. Amme shook her head and told her to take me to the kitchen, to feed me there as she used to when I was a little girl.
     
     
    HENNA FINALLY ARRIVED, two hours before the evening’s ceremony. While my aunts and uncles were being seated on the verandah, Amme ordering the servants to serve chai and cold sharbat, I grabbed her hand, bloated with pregnancy, unrecognizable to me, and rushed her to the roof. On the climb up the three flights, she had to halt several times and grip her belly with both hands, out of breath. The last time we’d come up here, soon after my engagement, we’d raced each other, winding around and around the circular staircase, she winning. She had always been more courageous than me, not cautious, as I was, about where she placed her step, of how she might fall. Though a year younger, she’d done everything first, walking, riding a bike, starting her menses, and now this, getting married, having a child. It was to Henna I went for advice, as Amme went to Abu Uncle. Like her father, Henna’s eyes were dark and deep-set, expressing the same mixture of kindness and understanding. The eyes promised redemption. So
why was it that now, when I was finally alone with Henna, I could