Revenge Read Free

after high school, and Habib had completed his university matriculation only for appearance’s sake. Hasan, now living at home, content to eat whatever was set before him, never worried his head over household matters, but a few weeks ago he had appalled us all, producing a thirteen-year-old girl in a red sari whom he proclaimed his wife! The girl, Ranu, was weeping, wiping her tears with a white handkerchief, the red from her lips running down her chin. Who was she? We all wanted to know. And where had Hasan found her? Was she a gentleman’s daughter he had kidnapped, or a novice hooker from the red light district?
    Haroon and his father attacked Hasan the second he brought the girl into the parlor, setting upon him with their fists, pushing him to the floor. The young girl herself began to howl in fear and horror at the bloody mess her husband had become. What had happened? Words soon tumbled out through a deluge of tears. She had left her military father’s house to come away with Hasan, who’d kept her hidden for six months. And then she howled some more. “We are leaving the country,” Hasan blubbered, welts and bruises rising on his cheeks, blood dribbling from his nose. “I cannot live here.”
    Habib was quite the opposite. He had no aspiration to travel. He relished the idea of living in one’s own country and carrying on like a lord. Nor did he show any sign of falling in love or preparing to marry. Such traditions, he declared often, were futile in the extreme and bothersome. Strutting through the house, he sang with abandon,
strumming the guitar that hung from his neck. He was in love with music, he proclaimed. “Life is short,” he’d say in response to any criticism. “One may as well sing or dance!” And sing he did, no matter how his parents worried.
    But now Amma seemed more disturbed about the destiny of her only daughter’s hapless husband Anis, whose problems she confided in me because she thought I might broach the subject to my husband. But Haroon knew only too well the misfortunes of all his siblings. Night after night, he would sit, lost in thought, smoking one cigarette after another.
    “Why do you worry so,” I once asked.
    “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “Why wouldn’t I?”
    I had never been successful in convincing Haroon that I was quite capable of coping with the problems that afflicted his family, although I tried reminding him, with added emphasis, that I had been a student of physics. I may cook, but I am better educated than Rosuni, I would say. One night, sensing he would be receptive, I approached Haroon about Anis, and he listened. “Perhaps I could bring him into my firm,” he said. “We’re collaborating with the Koreans, and I need a new man.”
    As for Habib and Hasan, I also obediently raised that issue. “It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll send them abroad to earn a living!” But he did not consider me capable of real discussion. There were hours of meetings in the drawing room—he and his parents, brows furrowed, considering the fates of his ne’er-do-well brothers—but I was invited only as the bou , gracefully sweeping in and out serving tea and biscuits.

    Why, I wondered, had Amma been so eager for my assistance with Dolon’s husband? Did she imagine that Haroon, caught up in his marriage, had no time to spare for his family, that her only access to her oldest son was through his new wife? And why was her most passionate concern for me that I cook when I showed all the signs of being pregnant with her grandchild? Yes, there was the custom of the bou of the house preparing certain foods, but wasn’t it also the custom that the daughter-in-law reproduce?
    I pulled myself from bed and entered the kitchen. Garlic, onion, raw fish, and turmeric, smells I’d always loved, suddenly intensifying my nausea. Rosuni had already cut up the fish and onion and measured out the garlic, and Sakhina, the second maid, was grinding the spices into a paste. I