“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” — Toni Morrison, Beloved
Anita was twenty-seven when she got pregnant. A stranger who came like all strangers come, unannounced in her life. She was in those dark days of her youth when she knew the nerves of wandering strangers and desperate drunkards. Such was her vocation. It was a fine night. The Stranger came to the rusty, rugged establishment where Anita worked. He was, as she’d confess later to Rozina, ‘handsome’. His curly hair looked perfect without oil, and a fine, elongated nose justly positioned on his fair-complexioned face, and his chin was sharp as a knife. The only feature that seemed out of place in his rather amazing personality was his eyes. They were red, for he had consumed alcohol to the point that it formed crimson blotches in his eyes, which gave him a deeply melancholic look. Anita was engaged in a promiscuous conversation with a brute who constantly ogled beneath her neck. She was a woman among many whom he liked at the very first glance. In less than a minute, he stood before her. All his movements were inexperienced; his eyes dropped, his lips quivered, his locution faltered, but somehow he managed to hide them behind his overtly rough voice.
‘How much?’ he asked, one hand in pocket.
‘A thousand, ’ Anita doubled the charge, frustrated at his arrogant voice as she scanned him.
He took out four new notes from his pocket.
‘Here, four thousand. Make sure the room is clean.’
That was the longest she’d heard him say something, because in the night, he became more stoic and said nothing worth remembering. He was so inexperienced that Anita chuckled two or three times during the course of their arduous night journey. As the first ray of the sun seeped through the window, he left the sweat-smelling room, not to come back again, leaving her asleep on the old rug whose threads dropped all the colours.
For a month, she entirely forgot about that snappy night and that handsome gentleman until a day came when all her mates had their monthly cycles, and only she was left to answer for the blasphemous deed.
‘Bibi will kill you if you keep the child,’ Suraiya warned her as the news of her pregnancy broke out in the brothel like a wildfire, ‘But don’t you worry. Sit here, I will cook a potion that will rid you of the burden.’
‘You will do no such thing, Suraiya. I am keeping it, he’ll be handsome like his father,’ was Anita’s reply, which she said timidly.
‘Which father?’ Suraiya asked, her face flushed in anger, ‘We do tons of men every week, which father are you talking about, huh, stupid girl? Firstly, you aren’t supposed to do such a goddamn thing; you’ve broken an important rule here, and now talking rubbish!’
As Suraiya was about to leave the small room, she heard Anita saying, ‘I know who the father is, and it was my impulsive request he fulfilled, for I liked him that night from the very first glance. Please let me keep this one part of him. He’ll be handsome like his father, Suraiya, why don’t you understand?’ she said, caressing her belly, which hadn’t begun to grow yet. Her round face was pale.
‘And what if it’s a girl?’ Suraiya asked, more angrily, ‘What then, she’ll be handsome too, and then what! Listen, girl, she’ll be a prostitute like you and me and nothing more, and all kinds of men, ugly, monstrous, cruel, handsome like the one you did that night, will come for her, devour her and leave her like he must’ve left you that night. Why don’t you understand that it’s written in our fate to live and die as filth?’
‘I know it’s a boy, I can feel it,’ she cried, ‘but in case it turns out to be a girl, I will leave this place with her so that she’d come to be a free bird’ Anita was unhesitant when she said this.
‘You will leave this place now, you filthy bitch,’ came a voice like a wretched thunder. Bibi spat on the door and thrashed her feet on an old iron bed to display her ardent anger.
‘I can’t take another bastard. Suraiya,’ Bibi shouted, her hand was in the air, ‘she is leaving my house tonight, make sure she takes nothing she earned in this place. She should be on the streets as we found her, hungry and like a beggar,’ and before the echo of Bibi’s voice could fade, she disappeared like lightning after the lone tree in a deserted ground caught the fire.
For three weeks, Anita begged from city to city, door to door. In those summery days, she’d exhaust like a feverish woman, but still she’d continue to do dishes, mop spotted floors, wipe cars for pennies, so that she could earn some eggs and milk. Her face withered like a dead flower, the clavicles came out of her chest and formed a mound. The baby in her womb was growing earnestly. As night would descend, she’d want to see the moon over the horizon, and see it blue, but it always appeared grey like a corroded bowl of silver, and in its grey light she’d caress her belly, sometimes due to inexorable hunger, and other times due to an immense affection for the unborn child.
During those heat-searing days, Anita was six months pregnant when Rozina found her in a state far too raw to be written. But for a better understanding of what state she might’ve been in, one must know that when Rozina saw her, Anita was unconscious and not a single piece of cloth was guarding her body.
Rozina was a tall woman with a wheatish face and a lean body. It was she who took her to The White Ashram, as she’d call it. It was an old building with still-green palm trees and a small garden that had neatly trimmed grass and separate blocks for each inmate, spacious enough to fit two healthy people with all their belongings in them. Anita was immediately given one block, but she thought ‘it was too big for a woman whose only belongings is the child in her womb’, so she raised this concern with Rozina, and Rozina, considering Anita’s pregnancy, moved with her without question.
‘It’s been over a month in this Ashram,’ Anita said one night when Rozina was oiling her head after dinner, as a part of a little ritual they had formed over a period of a month, ‘Not even once you asked me about my past, or how I got pregnant, whether I’d have a husband or not? Not even once!’
‘I know’ was Rozina’s reply, which she put very casually as her fingers travelled through Anita’s thick, silky hair.
‘You know? How?’ She was startled by her answer; she turned her head toward her with childlike curiosity.
‘The marks on your body. I saw them when I found you. Such marks can be found on two kinds of women: the ones who got monsters and beasts for husbands, and the ones who work in places where the monsters and beasts roam freely. You were a latter one, for your eyes are still full of light. Now this is your home, and here nobody will ask you such questions.’ Without saying much, she finished her answer. Anita kissed Rozina’s hand, and by the time she turned her face, the hand was wet and warm.
The next day, it was Sunday, which meant a movie was to play that night. Birju, a young man, would operate the projector, and he convinced the majority of men and women in the Ashram to watch a new Hollywood movie. It was decided in the middle of the movie that if Anita had a boy, his name would be Jack, and if it had to be a girl, she should be Rose.
‘I’d happily name her Rose if it’s a girl, but she must bear it from Rozina, and not some pretty girl from a distant land,’ Anita embraced Rozina’s hair. It was her way to show gratitude for giving her a life far from daily humiliation and unbothered cruelty.
But as Anita wished from those dark days of her life, a boy was born to her, in a night dark as her eyes and thunderous as her shouts.
‘It would’ve been far better if he hadn’t been born at all,’ was the first thought that came to her mind when she first glanced at Jack.
In the tumbled moment, she remembered Suraiya’s sharp words. It’s written in their fate. And she thought that there was an underlying meaning to it, words crawling at her. Suraiya was right when she said that it was a curse for a prostitute to bring a child into the same world she lived in. She thought.
Her petite figure appeared on the white walls of the hospital.
‘I told you, Filth. It’s the mother’s karma that affects the child,’ Suraiya whispered in her hair, and her words seemed to have stuck there, buzzing like mosquitoes.
She lamented for three days; her tears made the walls weak and windows creak. Rozina hadn’t left her alone in those laborious three days. Anita kept asking mad, nonsensical questions whose answers Rozina gave with a long, resting silence, because she understood to some extent a mother’s journey into a temporary shock or a long-lasting madness after such pitiful incidents. So she made sure, like a good friend, that Anita wouldn’t descend into the cruel claws of madness.
Jack was simply unexpected. That’s all the matter was. He wasn’t a flower baby, as was expected; rather, he was a boy who wouldn’t turn out to be a handsome man like his father, but a hideous one. His face looked like an ancient, rusty, round vessel, ugly brown with tiny hair on an unusually big scalp, his lips big and bulging, and his left eye was crossed to the extent that half the pupil hid behind the upper eyelid. After seven days of delivery, as Anita recovered from the traumatic tremor of ruthless memories of the past, the first thing she did was to name the boy. ‘It is Jack,’ she announced with dried eyes.
Jack began to grow as if a weed in an overlooked, deserted field. By height, he was full five feet, reaching a bit above Anita’s shoulder and with time, his eye got much better, almost positioned where it ought to be. Nobody had expected such rapid improvement. Only with much focus could the difference between his two eyes be noticed. Though his head remained bigger than normal, it mattered not to him after a hell lot of bullying in school and on the playfields. The obnoxious Anita, the lamenting sparrow, the one who made a tearful spectacle at his birth and had been in shock for three days, now loved him more than she’d have loved any other child. However, she’d get little to no time to shower it on him, as she and Rozina took the matter of the Ashram into their able hands after the trustees gave them full care of the Ashram. The Ashram was getting bigger and bigger. Day after day, new faces began to come, some for volunteering, for they’d take care of the garden, the resting blocks and halls, the cleaning, the accountancy, and some for the simple purpose of spending the rest of their lives under the shade of a like-aged community. What Rozina and Anita did was nothing short of an immense service to the community, and for that very thing, a prestigious organisation announced that they’d receive a prestigious award for their selfless contribution to women’s and elderly empowerment.
A day before the award ceremony was to take place, Anita got sick. She was coughing with malignancy, and her entire body burned with extreme fever. Rozina was with her in the room, the back of her hand on her forehead. She whispered something to Anita, which Anita couldn’t comprehend. Anita bellowed out a deep sigh. Then she pushed her lips against their will to utter what she wanted to say.
‘Shhhhh… rest, you need a rest,’ Rozina ordered with a childlike voice, her index finger pressing on her own lips.
‘Listen to me,’ Anita said, putting in uncommon efforts to say in a husky voice.
‘What? You need water?’ She lifted her hand and pointed at the water jug.
‘No,’ she whispered in a creak-like voice, ‘Rozina, do you think I loved him less?’ A tear was slipping from the corner of her eye.
‘Loved who?’ Rozina asked.
‘Jack, do you think?’
‘You loved him more, more than you ever have loved if you had another child,’ Rozina uttered it without much thinking.
‘I think, I pitied him more than I loved him’, the tear brought tears till a stream flowed from both her eyes. She turned her head to the other side of the pillow to hide and wipe the tears.
‘Why are you troubling yourself? You gave him life, Anita. The greatest gift ever bestowed upon the universe.’
‘What about his scars? I gave him that too,’ she said this with uncommon belief. ‘Suraiya was right, it was my karma my child suffers from. Now, you tell me how shall I confess to him that I love him, I love him more than he can ever imagine. Trust me, Rozina, I know you do. I never hated my boy; he is brilliant. I care not about his eyes, nor about his head, nor about what the world says about it, I only care whether he hates me for it. I wouldn’t be angry if he does,’ she stopped.
‘Why are you talking like you are going to die, woman?’ Rozina said, her eyes too filled with warm, mutual tears. Her casual remark made Anita chuckle for a second.
‘Am I a coward, Rozina?’ she asked.
‘You’ve never been a coward. Cowards are those who talk about the battle, but when the time comes, they are the ones who flee the ground first. You, on the contrary, my activist, are the finest warrior I’ve ever seen on the battlefield. Now, I am sure, Jack understands this. He knows this, and he is proud of you, dear,’ she held her hands and pressed them against her chest.
‘Now that’s enough,’ Rozina stood up, ‘I’ll fetch some warm milk,’
‘Fetch one more thing,’ Anita interrupted her walk.
‘What?’
‘Two cigarettes,’ she smiled as Rozina’s chuckling face disappeared behind the half-opened door.
The new day approached. The air was cool, the sky was clear, and Anita was all right; her limbs were working fine, her hands were energetic as before, and her eyes were less pale. She checked herself in the mirror; the wrinkles began to appear under her chin, and the skin behind her ears looked older. She thought she’d lost a pound in two months. Only then, Jack appeared at the open door. She turned back abruptly and found him standing in black trousers with a grey cotton shirt tucked in. A big smile that reached to his ears danced on his face.
‘Car is ready, Ma,’ he said at last. He insisted to Rozina that he’d drive them to the award ceremony, where their lifelong work was to be appreciated. He wanted to see both of his mothers as other people see them, as social workers and activists. Why, was Anita’s curious question.
‘So he could love us more. That’s what he said,’ Rozina repeated his answer for her.
Anita, though she was a mother to the child, knew little about this side of Jack, so she was in awe at first, but then Rozina jokingly explained his nature and the jolly side of him to her as he drove them through the jam-packed city streets.
Now and then, Anita would ask him to slow down, to which he’d say, ‘At this point, a sloth is faster than us, Ma,’ then three of them would have a giggle at his joke, and seeing him excited and happy, Anita would take a sigh of relief.
Suraiya, maybe we are not filth. She muttered in her heart.
The award night ended with thunderous applause for Rozina and Anita. Among the audience was Jack, his face flushed with unflinching pride, and his clapping knew not how to stop.
They had a fine dinner of fish and koftas together at the table reserved for them. Then some performances came, little girls and boys put out a good play about a parent-child relationship, as was the theme, then came songs and monologues, and at last, the lights were put out, and with it, the vote of thanks was given. As they were trailing towards the exit, Anita held his hand. She locked her fingers into his as if she’d keep them there for the rest of her life. He held it like a baby holding a precious little toy.
‘I am happy, Jack,’ she muttered under her breath, her voice somewhat humid.
‘It’s so good to see you so happy, Ma,’ he outrightly said, tightening his grip on her hand ‘I wish more good things happen to you,’
She leaned her head on his shoulder as they came out of the main hall and stood on the pavement. Rozina was beside her, smiling at them. Anita put their interlocked hands on her racing heart. To her eyes, the risen moon appeared blue. Her motherly words brought a stream of vigorous moonlight under their visions, ‘Out of all, you are still the best thing that ever happened to me, son’