Qasim glimpsed Zaitoon walk past the store. It was too early for school to be over.
“I’m here, Zaitoon,” he called.
He stepped out and noticed her drawn face. “What is it?”
“I have such a bellyache.”
Zaitoon doubled over and Qasim carefully picked her up.
“Did you eat raw mango?” He knew she loved the sour mangoes smothered in salt and red pepper sold outside the school.
“No.”
Her forehead felt damp and cold and he buttoned up her cardigan. “I’d better take you to Aunt Miriam’s.”
He knocked on a curtained window. Miriam opened the door and saw them through the bamboo blind screening the entrance.
“Zaitoon has a bad stomachache,” he explained.
“Come in, brother.”
Miriam held the screen apart and, stooping, Qasim edged past. He laid Zaitoon on the sofa. Miriam darted into another room and hastily having covered herself with a shawl, sat by Zaitoon.
“I’ll take care of her, Bhai: she’ll be all right.”
“Let me know if you think I should take her to the hakeem for some herbal medicine—or if you need anything.”
“Don’t worry: it’s probably something she ate.” Qasim nodded his silent thanks. Miriam turned away, and with respectfully averted eyes he left.
Miriam rubbed Zaitoon’s stomach with mustard oil and gave her an aspirin. She heated a brick and, wrapping it in a towel, coaxed the child to lie on it. Stroking her hair, she recited a verse from the Holy Quran known to ease pain. Exhausted, Zaitoon fell asleep. When she awoke it was evening and her pain had gone.
Next day she went to school.
The pain recurred; low in her belly and sometimes in her back. Qasim took her to the hakeem on his street and when that did not help, to the Parsi doctor near the station.
Miriam told Nikka, “Tell Bhai Qasim not to bother with hakeems and doctors; they won’t do her any good . . . She’ll probably start menstruating in a few months!”
Qasim stopped taking Zaitoon to doctors and she went to Miriam instead. Miriam ministered to her and soothed her with tales about the valor of Hazrat Ali, the wisdom of Hazrat Omer, and the brutal tragedy of Hazrats Imam Hasan and Husain at Karbala.
She also told her that any day now she might find blood on her shalwar. She was to tell no one and come straight to her. “We all bleed. It’s to do with having babies and being a woman . . . of course you won’t have babies—not till you’re married—but you’re growing up . . .” Zaitoon was too distracted by her garbled talk to understand anything.
Zaitoon was eleven. They were playing during the morning break when a classmate excitedly pointing, said, “Your shalwar is red. Are you hurt?”
Zaitoon raised her shirt and looked down. She sat in the dirt, wondering.
“Are you hurt?” her friend asked again.
Zaitoon shook her head, mystified. “You’d better see Nurse.”
A clutch of sympathetic girls accompanied her to the sick room.
Nurse took her aside. She placed a wad of cotton between her legs and tied it in place with a strip of cloth. She told Zaitoon to wash her shalwar and go home. Zaitoon walked to Qila Gujjar Singh holding her legs apart, a little astonished that she felt no pain.
She went straight to Miriam.
“I told you it would happen, didn’t I?”
Zaitoon gaped blankly. She wondered, considering the blood, if she should cry. Taking her cue from Miriam’s calm face she decided not to. Miriam looked happy, almost triumphant—as if Zaitoon had accomplished a feat.
Slowly it dawned on Zaitoon that Miriam had told her something about bleeding and not to tell anyone. She looked bewildered and crestfallen. Miriam held her close and kissed her.
She asked questions and to some of them Miriam gave evasive answers. “You’ll bleed every month,” she said, and, “Don’t be silly child, boys don’t menstruate; only women!” and, “How do I know how babies come—do I have a baby? Allah alone knows! But enough; you’ll understand everything when the time comes . . .”
She gave her strips of cloth, frayed with washing, and taught her the discipline of washing them for reuse.
“You are now a woman. Don’t play with boys—and don’t allow any man to touch you. This is why I wear a burkha . . .”
She decided it was time she had a chat with Qasim. She insisted Zaitoon stop going to school and he agreed.
From her Zaitoon learned to cook, sew, shop, and keep her room tidy: and Miriam, who spent half her day visiting neighbors, took Zaitoon with her. Entering their dwellings was like stepping into gigantic wombs; the fecund, fetid world of mothers and babies.
The untidy row of buildings that crowded together along their street contained a claustrophobic warren of screened quarters. Rooms with windows open to the street were allotted to the men: the dim maze of inner rooms to the women—a domain given over to procreation, female odors and the interminable care of children. Smells of urine, stale food, and cooking hung in the unventilated air, churning slowly, room to room, permeating wood, brick, and mortar. Generations of babies had wet mattresses, sofas and rugs, spilled milk sherbets and food, and wiped hands on ragged curtains; and, just in case the smells should fade, armies of newborn infants went on arriving to ensure the odors were perpetuated.
Redolent of an easygoing hospitality, the benign squalor in the women’s quarters inexorably drew Zaitoon, as it did all its inmates, into the mindless, velvet vortex of the womb.
Zaitoon loved best going to the Mullah’s. His tall, malodorous hive, adjacent to the mosque, sheltered a large joint family and his two wives. His second wife was his elder brother’s widow. Rather than leave them to the hazards of widowed and orphaned destitution, he had married her and adopted her three girls. The two wives got along no worse than the other brothers’ and cousin-brothers’ wives. The female sphere was enlivened by an undercurrent of intrigue and one-upmanship and the effort expended in the struggle was no less there than it was in the corridors of power and politics. Men, although favored, were not specially welcome. Proud husbands, fathers and brothers, they were the providers. Zealous guardians of family honor and virtue, they sat, when in their homes, like pampered patriarchs, slightly aloof and ill at ease, withdrawing discreetly whenever the household was visited by unrelated women, which was often. As soon as Miriam, in her burkha, appeared before a screened door a signal passed and the few men who had strayed in left. If in going they happened to see her, they saluted, “Salaam-alaikum, sister” and continued their unobtrusive passage. Once in a while Miriam might, to show her trust in and friendship for the family, address a few remarks, and the men invariably returned the courtesy by inquiring after Zaitoon’s and her health.
While Miriam settled cross-legged on a charpoy, sometimes taking over a friend’s knitting or embroidery as they gossiped, sometimes helping a girl cut her kurta or shalwar, Zaitoon played with the children. She ran to hide with the others and yelled and laughed when caught. Often she helped the little girls feed and wash their younger brothers and sisters. On summer evenings they spilled into the comparative cool of the alleys, little girls burdened with even younger children on their hips, the babies’ necks wobbling dangerously as their carriers played hopscotch or crouched over a game of bone knuckles. In the winter they rushed up the steep, spiral steps winding to earth-packed rooftops, the boys to fly kites and the girls to play at housekeeping with their dolls and miniature earthenware pots and ladles. In spring when the sky was dotted with paper kites, the young men and boys allowed the girls to hold the manja, kite string made abrasive with finely crushed glass. The girls, afraid of cutting their hands, handled the strings