The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar

Author:Thrity Umrigar
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2012-01-12T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Eleven o’clock and still she couldn’t get out of bed. Nishta was awake now but too listless to start the day. At least she didn’t have to cook lunch for Ammi today. Before he had left for work, she had requested Iqbal to drop off last night’s leftovers for his mother. I’ll make her a nice dinner, she’d promised. He had nodded and asked her to take care of the cold she’d told him she was nursing. Before leaving, he had come over and stood at the edge of the bed, a watchful expression on his face. Ever since he had slapped her, she felt his eyes on her at all times, the guilty eyes of a dog who had stolen his master’s dinner and expected to be caught at any moment. And indeed, Nishta now thought, Iqbal had stolen something from her—stolen her last illusion, the story that she had told herself that had made these last few years bearable. For the past decade she had lived within the folds of self-delusion, continually making excuses for Iqbal: Yes, he had turned his back on the social movements that had once buoyed them, but in his telling, Islam supported the same goals of justice and equality that the movement once had; yes, he had forced her to wear the burkha, but he claimed it was for her own protection; yes, he had grown increasingly distant over the years, but at least he had never hit her.

The last thought made Nishta leap out of bed. Had never hit her? Had her expectations of her husband really become so insultingly small? Had she broken her parents’ hearts only to settle for these morsels? The estrangement from her family had carved a hole in her life so big that she had to will herself not to fall through it. And Iqbal’s parents had never stepped in to fill the void. She knew that they had only accepted her because to do otherwise would have meant losing their son. It wasn’t their fault, really. The divide between them and her was simply too great to bridge. The early years, in particular, had been very difficult. Coming from an affluent, high-caste Hindu family, she had always taken certain privileges for granted. But Iqbal’s family was poor, and there were constant reminders of this: in the way her mother-in-law doled out her money, carefully, painfully, as if a rupee note were a nugget of gold; in the fact that Iqbal’s family ate the government-sold rice and not the expensive basmati rice that Nishta had grown up eating; in the fact that her in-laws never “squandered” money on taking a cab or eating out. The cultural divides were even less bridgeable: Iqbal’s parents could never watch television or follow the evening news without instinctively looking for the slights and slurs that they believed were leveled every day against Muslims. Watching a cricket match, which had always been a source of innocent fun, now assumed a new weight if the Indian team was playing the Pakistanis.

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