Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel by Ali Samina

Author:Ali, Samina [Ali, Samina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2004-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

ZEBA ASKED ME if I still wanted to join Feroz and her in the prayer room to recite the Qur’an as the two had been doing every Friday for eleven years. We had talked about my doing so all week, ever since she started tutoring me and saw how many Arabic letters I could actually recognize and knot together. Guttural sounds, that was what I produced, a hum from deep within the throat, with no understandable meaning for me except that which was nonverbal, nonhuman.

But she was not asking the woman who had been praying with her all week, but the one who carried the American passport, the one who had openly kissed her husband at the breakfast table. What she had been blind to before was apparent to her now: the daughter who communicated with the mother in Urdu was the same who spoke to the husband in English, the daughter who covered herself in a duppatta similar to the mother’s was the same who bared herself when out with the husband, out of her presence. She was seeing all now, what I had been exposed to—would expose her son to—when out of her house. Her limits had limits of their own.

Of course I would pray with her, as we had been discussing---as I had been looking forward to—all week. Family traditions, there were none in our house, save those ancient rites we had inherited, culture passed on along with the knobby bones of the spinal cord, erecting our existence: shaving my head at ten days as the Prophet had shaved the heads of his children; a bismil’lah ceremony at four years to declare I was Muslim; at twelve, the onset of menses celebrated with fireworks and the gathering of one hundred in front of whom I was showcased, marriageable age; at nineteen, the wedding. And there were those other traditions I had practiced, though not necessarily with my family: attaining a driver’s license, getting drunk for the first time, sucking at my first joint, graduating high school, entering college, losing my virginity. What most any Muslim girl, most any American girl goes through, here, there. But what Feroz and Zeba were doing each Friday, voices mingling, backs swaying, this song, this lament, was not about who they were outside, joined with a larger community, but inside, joined together, mother and son. And now, mother and daughter. Sister and brother. Family

Yes, I would join them, if they did not mind my halting breath.

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