The house was always silent, like the leaves of a cypress tree after a storm. The house was big, unusually big like an ancient palace with endless doors and corridors. The house was too big for the two of us. Grandma was very old. She was always like that. Her body: white like a shroud. I had known her for two decades, and she always looked like an old sweater. She lived in that room, beside the guest room, covered with portraits of her ancestors: her father, Nawab Kaleem, the Baudelaire of Lucknow; her mother, the beauty queen and the failed film actress. There were photographs of Grandma herself too. When she was a child, then a student at La Martinere, then her marriage with my grandpa. She lived in that room, like an old portrait herself, hardly came out, be it the light of summers, or the gloom of winters. Her room was lit with candles placed inside glass chandeliers. The whole place, dimly lit, felt like a sad poem a young girl writes in the back of her notebook. A poem for a boy who loves someone else. The door of Grandma’s room would always be open. But you had to knock before entering or she would go mad. You had to knock thrice slowly on the door’s edge, said Grandma, and if she didn’t reply, that meant she didn’t want you to come inside.
Once when I was a little child, I entered her room without knocking. God, what she was doing on her bed. I was so scared. She pulled her hair when she saw me, as if she had gone mad. She cried for the maid and asked her to take me away, far away. She cried like those widows cry when their husbands die on the wedding night.
And then we didn’t see each other for two months. I missed her. But I was scared. Sometimes I stood outside her door. The door was closed, but she knew I was outside. She would cry “Go away.” I would come back to my room, put my head under the pillow and cry till dusk.
Grandma was my only friend. The cypress tree of my deserted barn. Maybe I never made any friend deliberately, since I knew I had her. There was something peculiar about her, something that was hard to understand. She was a mysterious book with infinite pages, knew more stories than Scheherazade, a better storyteller. Even the way she talked to every person was different, the voice. With me, she talked the way teenagers talked, and with our lawyer, she talked the way the wives of kings talked. She had the acumen of a trained actress, the mysticism of a blind saint.
After two months, she sent the maid for me. I crept into Grandma’s room, holding the door’s edge with my rosy palm. “Come inside,” she said in a baritone voice. She was seated in the bed’s middle, her legs inside a bowl of warm water. She looked at me and lifted her head. “Come here, you devil.” I slowly walked toward the rocking chair beside her bed. She asked me to sit, not on the rocking chair but on the plastic chair beside it. She never allowed anyone to sit on the rocking chair. She said Grandpa’s ghost was resting on that chair. Sometimes when she was sleeping, I would peep into her room, I would see her tired body coiled toward the wall, under her college portraits. The room would be silent, like a mortuary, but the rocking chair would be moving
“I’m sorry, Grandma.” I said, my legs hanging over the plastic chair. She didn’t say anything, just looked at me for two hours. My heart thumped like a little bird trapped in a hunter’s net.
Two days after that meeting, we were back to old terms. I vowed that I would never again enter her room without her permission. But still, I wanted to know what she had been doing that day, the day I hadn’t knocked. I didn’t dare ask her. I knew she would go mad. Maybe someday I would get to know on my own. The day I am as old as my grandma. What if I died before then? Who, besides Grandma, could reach that age?
She said she was two hundred years old—two hundred years and seven months. If you asked her exact age, she could tell the hours and the minutes too. She kept a diary where she noted her age. She would never let anyone touch that diary. She locked it in the drawer of the bedside table. The key she wore like a queen’s necklace.
I knew she had written her lovers’ names in that diary. She was a shy woman. You could see it from those portraits, where her eyes were always lowered. She belonged to the breed of women of Lucknow, who had never seen their husband. They were so shy, they would close their eyes, the moment, they heard his footsteps. Women of those times, Grandma said, recognized husbands by the sound of their feet and also lovers and their ghosts. But still, a woman of her age must have had forty-two lovers. Kings and viziers. Soldiers and enemies. Horse-cart drivers. Butchers and colonels.
I often asked her about them. She would smile. Once, she said, “Your Grandma was beautiful in her younger age, like that Tzar’s wife.” She then opened the drawer and took out a picture. God, she was beautiful, like that film actress Monica Vitti. In the photograph, Grandma was standing behind a cypress tree, with a rose in her hand. A man stood in front of, looking back as the photographer clicked.
“Is that Grandpa?” I asked.
“No, he isn’t your grandpa. Your grandpa was an ugly man, ugly like a blind owl. The man in the picture here was my lover, a man who came out of my dreams.”
Then she told me about her first lover. He was a Knight Templar. He had come to the city looking for treasure. They met once near the Asafi Imambada, where he was roaming around with a torn map. When he saw her, she wanted to run away, but he ran and stopped her. Then he looked at her like a person looks at an ancient painting inside a museum. He had his burning yellow eyes on her. My shy Grandma: she couldn’t look at his face. She looked sideways.
There was no one there in that big hall where they stood together: my grandma and the knight. Some faint light came from the half-opened door. “You are more beautiful than all the golds and the diamonds of the world,” he said. He came daily to see her after that. They would walk around like lovers in old dreams. She said she couldn’t marry him as her marriage had already been fixed to her cousin. She said that her uncle was a magician. She said if she ran away with him, this uncle would make her an idol of stone.
The knight didn’t believe my grandma, so one day she invited him to her home. She then took him to her aunt’s room. Her aunt, the poor aunt, was lying on a bed like a corpse. She was an idol made of stone. She could move her eyes, like humans, and hear every word but couldn’t move her limbs. Her aunt had fallen in love with the barber’s son. They wanted to run away to Tunis, where he wanted to open his own salon.
Grandma’s aunt hated her husband. He became aware of her plans. And then, the night when she was about to elope, she couldn’t move. My grandma said the barber’s son cut off his head with the same blade his father used to shave the beards of his customers. But the barber’s son didn’t die. Her uncle brought his head and kept it near her aunt’s table. The barber’s son lived for forty days. They mourned together, for his death and their love. He said he would come back one day and relieve her from her worldly pains. “She is still waiting for him,” Grandma said catching a spider climbing over her aunt’s idol.
The knight’s face turned yellow when he saw the aunt. He was scared. But my grandma and the knight still kept meeting after that. They made love once in the dark corridors of that labyrinth beside the Imambada. Grandma said they did it only once, but even if you go there today, you would see two shadows coiled together, like the leaves of two cypress trees. They were madly in love. But two months later, he stopped showing up. She went to the Imambada many times, but she found nothing other than some dead spiders and lizards lying around like dead leaves.
And then one evening, her uncle reprimanded her. “I knew what you were doing behind my back. I should have known that you are her blood. I have a reputation. No one can ruin that.” Two weeks later, my grandma was married to her cousin. My grandpa. She told me that Grandpa didn’t want to marry her. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. Every man on earth who liked women liked her.
“Then what?” I asked, an attentive listener.
“He loved men. He was in love with a Kashmiri Rug seller.”
They both got married against their wishes. She lived in this room with Grandpa for forty years until he and everyone else died. Telling the story, she was in tears. Grandpa wasn’t a good person. He hated her. He said if she had died or eloped with her lover, he would have been allowed to marry his lover. He told his father lies. He said she slept with men behind his back. But her uncle knew everything. He knew the things his son wanted.
We talked until dusk that day, the day of the knight story She rummaged through the pages of her old notebook like someone reexamining old wounds. She then placed it nicely in the drawer. There she found that rose. She took it out and smelled it. Like a young girl who smells a rose given to her by her lover. “It’s the same rose that knight gave it to me. It’s still fresh. He said he found the rose in a tomb in Najaf near the grave of Hazrat Ali.” I tried to take the rose from her. But then she said, “Two women shouldn’t smell the same rose.”
She put the rose back in the drawer. I leaned into the chair and looked outside the window. The sun had set on the horizon. The night’s gloom covered our house like a veil. The maid came and lit the candles in the chandelier. Grandma looked at me with her curious green eyes. “You won’t tell your Grandma about your lovers?” My heart stopped.
“I don’t have any lover, Grandma. I am too young to have a lover.” She looked at me without blinking.
“At your age, I gave birth to your father. So don’t try to fool your Grandma.”
I didn’t tell her anything. I went back to my room. I pulled the curtains and closed the window. I then lit the candles and put my head on the pillow. I started thinking about my lovers. Did I have any? No. I wasn’t lucky like Grandma or maybe I wasn’t beautiful like Monica Vitti. I took the candle and sat by the mirror. I looked carefully at my face, at the big mole on my left nostril. I am not ugly, I said to myself. No, you aren’t ugly, said the candle’s reflection in the mirror.
Once, I was in love with a boy in school. I wrote a letter to him. My friend Nadiya told me to write a letter to him before it was too late. When he read the letter, he looked back from his seat and smiled. God what a pang I felt in my stomach, little butterflies crawling like little children. At recess, he asked me to wait until after school ended. We met outside after everyone left. He tried to kiss me behind the cypress tree. I couldn’t kiss him back. I didn’t know how to kiss. He laughed. “I will teach you everything,” he whispered. “Tomorrow we will go to Imamabada.”
I was scared to go to the Imamabada. Nadiya told me about the girls who went to the tomb. There was a girl at our school, our senior. She vanished from the tomb. They said there was a ghost of a Knight Templar who lived like a lizard. I told everything to Nadiya. “I knew what he wanted, that’s why I asked you to speak to him.” I didn’t go to the Imambada, where I heard he waited for me till dusk. That night I saw a strange dream, that the boy was waiting for me at Imambada so that he could kiss me, but I had died in the day, not only me, but even Grandma, and so did others, everyone, only he was alive, seated on those soot-covered stairs beneath the mosque, waiting for me to turn up. I felt bad for him, I knew he was the loneliest man alive.
At school, the boy stopped looking at me. When he saw me, he would move his face toward the blackboard. Finally, I gathered some courage and went to the Imambada that day after school. There in the courtyard of the labyrinth, I saw Nadiya coiled with him like a snake. They were two snakes, like the shadows of two snakes. I ran back to my home. I never told Nadiya what I saw. I didn’t want to break my friendship. I thought maybe I would tell Grandma my story. She would confirm about that ghost, about the snakes. Maybe then I would know whether it was a genuine fear or if I was a fool. But then I didn’t tell her.
For years, we talked about her lovers. I would knock on her door in the afternoons, after my classes at school and then after my classes at college. Two weeks after Muharram, I found a job. Grandma didn’t like that I would be working. She fought with me for days. Those were difficult days. It was the second time in my whole life that we weren’t speaking terms. She said we were the progeny of the Kings and the Prophet. If I worked, my ancestors would roll over in their graves like lizards without tails. I wasn’t worried about my ancestors’ names or their corpses in the grave.
Grandma thought she was ancient and maybe wise. She didn’t understand our position. We lived in a palace, but we were paupers. Everything had been sold for my education and her medicines. We only had that house. We needed to pay the maid, the doctors. I had taken a huge loan the last year from the goldsmith Abdur Rauf. He respected our ancestors, and that’s why he sent his boy only once a month. I had seen him abusing other families who were under the weight of his loans.
I was happy, glad, thankful to God that my meager education led me to a job at the bank. It was at the mercy of Uncle Kaukab, our family doctor. Money was one thing. The other thing was that I didn’t want to rot in the house alone. Grandma’s stories were enchanting, her companionship was desirable, but still, I needed to go out. I wanted to make new friends. To be precise, I wanted a lover. I needed a lover. I had overcome my old fears of ghosts and lizards. I would go to any tomb, any ruined palace my lover asked me to go. I would dance like a courtesan if he was ready to make love to me. I craved human touch, the warm skin of a man. I wanted to leave our home, so I could come back.
For two months after I started working, Grandma and I talked less. Then one evening, I finally told her, “Grandma, I am in love.” She was lying on the bed, reading Anaïs Nin’s diaries. She put the book on the pillow and sat against the wall.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“A customer at the bank,” I said. Her eyes shone.
It was all an accident. How I met Kemal. He had come to the bank to withdraw some money. He was unusually tall and had a thick mustache. He wore a long coat like a Russian spy. He had a black suitcase. He was there to withdraw money. Ten thousand rupees. It was huge money back then. I had to inform the manager. It took some time. Kemal didn’t look uncomfortable. He just sat there, turning the pages of a newspaper, looking at me and then at the pages. I knew he was pretending to read, the newspaper was in Urdu, and he wasn’t a local.
I gave him the money a few minutes before lunch. He didn’t count it. He put it nicely inside his coat’s pocket and then left.
That very evening, he came back around 4 p.m. He looked a little disturbed. Four notes in the deck were counterfeit. He gave those green hundred-rupee notes to me. I looked at them. He said the hotel owner had refused to take the money. They weren’t original. I went to the manager again. “You should have checked the time we gave it to you,” the manager said. A heated discussion followed. Kemal said he was in the city for some government work, said he should be treated with respect. We gave him the money. He adjusted his spectacle and looked at me for a while, like lovers on railway platforms look at each other. Then he left, like that boy at school left the Imambada that day when I didn’t show up. Sometimes it felt like Kemal was the grown-up version of that boy. All men in my life were a version of that boy whom I loved, but they loved someone else.
Two days later, on Saturday, he was back again. He was late, and we were about to close. He said he desperately needed more money. I didn’t go to the manager. I opened the vault and gave him the money. I asked him to check. He was in a hurry. I wanted to tell him that we wouldn’t take the notes back, but he left so fast with his suitcase.
That very night, we ran into each other near the Mayfair cinema. I had gone to pick up some books from the British Library for Grandma. He recognized me. I thought he wouldn’t. He was there to watch a film, The Sound of Music. “You look different outside the bank,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. He kept on looking at me. He must have thought I would say something. Then, after rehearsing it in my head twice, I said, “I hope the notes were fine this time.” I thought he would laugh, but he didn’t. He looked at the books in my hand.
“Why don’t you come and watch a film with me? I have two passes,” he said, showing me the tickets in his hand.
“My Grandma is waiting at home.”
“Oh let her wait,” he said. “Grandmas are meant to wait.”
I didn’t like his words about Grandma. He wasn’t aware of what she meant to me. I went to watch the film with him anyway. He didn’t look interested in the film at all, but I was following every scene. In every heroine, I tried to see my own face. I wanted to look like them: beautiful, desirable. He picked up the books from my lap while I was looking at the heroines. “Your Grandma reads novels,” he whispered.
“Yes she loves them. She writes poetry,” I said.
“And you?” He wasn’t looking at the film at all.
“I can’t write anything,” I said. He put the books back on my thighs. He let his hand rest there. Then, slowly, he pressed into my flesh. He moved his hands toward the deep end of my thighs. My body warmed like a furnace, like that body I once saw burning near the ghat when I was coming back from the library.
The movie ended around 8 p.m. He invited me for dinner at Capoor’s. I wanted to say, “Let’s go to the Imambada, without wasting any time.” But it felt like he was hungry.
We ate and talked. I asked him about the reason for his visit. He was silent and put the fork in his mouth. Then he said, “I am sorry, I can’t tell you much about my work.” That night he made love to me until dawn. But when I woke up, I was lying on the edge of my bed alone, about to fall. It was all a dream, like all those old sad dreams. We hadn’t made love at all, I remembered. I remembered: after the dinner, he had called a horse-cart and sent me home.
He came to the bank again two days later. We were closing. I said, “I’m sorry. We are closed now.” I sounded a little angry.
“I am not here for the money,” he said. “I wanted to see you.”
That night when we were dining, Nadiya’s words came back, you shouldn’t delay when you are in love. “I love you,” I said to him. He smiled, and then stopped eating.
“I also like you. I hope I can take you to Moscow, and you can meet my mother. But this work.”
We strolled around the lanes of Hazratganj until very late in the night. The next day, he was going to Tunis for some work. I thought of Grandma’s aunt’s lover who wanted to open a salon in Tunis. “I will come back,” he said and kissed me on the cheeks. I could still feel the warmth of his breath on my skin.
After I finished my story, Grandma asked me, “Do you think he will come back?” I closed her door and went to my cage, my room. I tried to dream about him. I went back to the Mayfair, where he touched me for the first time. I wanted him to make love to me in the empty theater. I felt his hand on my thighs. He took it again to that same place where everything ended. I closed my eyes. It felt the same as when I had watched Nadiya and that schoolboy at the tomb. I was happy. I opened my eyes. There was no one inside the theater. Not even Kemal. I felt a hand on my thighs. A hand made of wood. I ran back to my room. I felt the characters in the film were laughing at me.
I looked at every customer at the bank. No one looked like Kemal. Some were short. Some were fat. Some were in the same coat but didn’t have his black suitcase and those wide-rimmed glasses. Grandma asked me daily, “Did he come back?”
I told her, “He will Grandma, he will.” I would assure myself. Two years passed and then two more years. He didn’t come back. I stopped thinking about him, or I tried to, but it wasn’t that easy. Grandma said I should start looking for other boys. She even talked to Uncle Kaukab about my marriage. He said he would look for a groom. The way he looked at me that day, I thought he would say he wanted to get married to me. That night I fought with Grandma. “If you talk about my marriage to anyone else, I’ll leave the house.”
She said, “I am worried about you. Look at yourself, you look older than me. Life is very long to be lived alone.”
I said, “I can live alone. I know how to live alone. I don’t want anyone else, not even you.”
This was the third time we stopped talking and the longest. We didn’t speak for two consecutive Muharrams. Then, one evening, the maid came and knocked at my door. I was just back from the bank. “Your grandma isn’t moving,” she said.
My heart stopped. I ran toward my grandma’s room without my slippers. She was lying with her head toward the wall. Her eyes were wide open. I tapped at her back. “Grandma.” She didn’t respond. God, is she dead? I tapped again. “Grandma.”
She opened her eyes. And laughed aloud like a devil. “I am not dead yet.” My heart came out of my mouth. “I won’t die until you get married,” she said as I walked back to my room.
“Then you won’t die ever,” I cried, locking my door.
I went to the mirror and looked at my face. I touched my wrinkled cheeks. She was right. I was old. Older than all the grandmas in the world, lonelier too, like a cypress tree inside a house where no one lives anymore.
***
Rumpus original artwork by Peter Witte