Haveli by Mahal Zeenat

Author:Mahal, Zeenat [Mahal, Zeenat]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Indireads Incorporated
Published: 2013-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

The very next morning, my father found me.

I was dumb with emotion. He just stood looking at me for a while and then opened his arms. Of course I ran to him, sobbing like the five-year-old I felt like. My father could turn on charm like no one I’d ever met. He spoke with so much love, his eyes shone with it. He spoke of my mother and how much he’d loved her. How sorry he was that he hadn’t come earlier to take us away. He explained, in detail, all the reasons that he couldn’t have come. He said that when he’d heard of her death, he was too devastated to do anything else but mourn. I listened to him mesmerized, so ready to forgive. I drank in his every word. It seemed to me that he was truly sorry he couldn’t be there for me. I no longer felt vulnerable and exposed like I had, especially for the past two months.

I passed the next few days in a daze. All I remember is looking adoringly at my father, waiting for his glances, his smiles, his attention, completely having forgotten about my dreams of retribution. His every word was precious. Every look he cast my way was special. I was crystallized in a time warp that had nothing in its loop except my father and me. He lavished me with gifts. He bought me jewelry, tons of clothes. He took me shopping with him. It felt like he was trying to make up for lost time.

Every time I chose something demure or understated, he would scoff and buy the most daring cuts and colors. He was so flamboyant. A faint suspicion crossed my mind that he wanted Bi Amma’s influence over me to disappear. I was dressing up like I never had before. It was slightly tacky but who cared? Everyone seemed to be taking my change of style as defiance and perhaps it was too. I wanted him to like me, and if that meant dressing up a little vulgarly, then so be it.

He told me so many stories of my mother. How happy they were when I was to be born. How special I was to them. It was like he knew what I wanted to hear. He said all the right things. How could he have known? So he did feel all that; it wasn’t as if I was imagining things. I couldn’t stop smiling and I’d never been so happy before in my life.

Bi Amma looked at me often, sometimes wonderingly, at times worried and concerned. I was too happy to care. She was still not acknowledging my presence. Perhaps she too feared that she’d lost all influence over me. I didn’t know what she wanted from me. He was my father, and he was showering me with more love in these few days than she ever had in all the years I had lived with her.

I didn’t pay heed to the little awkwardness that accompanied him.

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