Shammo’s Curse

Khurram didn’t belong to anyone.

He came one day, cocooned in a light brown blanket, casually thrown at Shammim’s flung out arms by a darvaish dressed in a long robe and a green silk scarf, who disappeared as quickly as he had come. The qawals with orange beards and tortoise rings, sang in the distance. The baby cried. Yet this was a dispassionate scene, clinically planed by Sarmad and his accomplices. There were no emotional outbursts from a joyous father, no expectant grand parents pacing the corridors of the hospital, no declarations about the sex of the baby to be made to neighbours. No sadqa’s or mithais were given away. A pot of charas circulated instead, politely passed on by Sarmad without a puff. A three week old baby lay in Shammim’s arms. As tears poured down her cheeks, she wondered if it could really salvage a marriage bruised by three years of silence. And so, amidst the humming of Bhar dhe johli , the smell of opium, the flames of the bonfire, and her own illogical tears, Shammim became a mother, finally!

But what if she had become a mother some other way, like most women do, where the midwife announces the prize and then hands it over to proud winner? Perhaps she would have, had it not have been so for that hot monsoon night when the electricity went away for the fourth time and refused to come back till right before dawn and just after Shammo had given in to the pleas of Malik sahib’s son. She had been in love with the neighbour’s son, for want of better choices, I presume. Sarmad, on a similar night, many moons ago, after returning from his night shift at the local grid station, came up to the terrace and saw Shammim gazing at him through the jaffery that separated their verandas. Knowing that he was being watched, he came closer to the fence that joined the two houses, slowly took his shirt off, while humming a popular ghazal which lamented of days of puppy love, of a lover tiptoeing barefoot in the hot courtyard. The lunatic silver of the moonlight observed the proceedings. Instead of shying away, the sixteen year old surprised even herself as she rewarded the younger Malik’s serenading by unbuttoning her kameez till the mole on her breast stared back at him. That jaffery become the conduit of communication, the crystal ball though which they would touch each others hands and through which they would see their confused and huddled future. Such scenes repeated themselves with growing details over three summers of varying heat, during which time their nocturnal ritual evolved into an unspoken relationship of such intensity that if Malik’s son had asked, she would have, without hesitation or remorse, packed her entire life in an attaché case, sat on the back seat of his rented motorcycle, and forever had left her parents and their house of many restrictions. That Malik Sahib’s son asked only to let himself in, was too little a sacrifice, too gentle a pain, with too insignificant a blood loss, for the dream she had woven and the life he promised, which amongst other things included a house, where she would rule like a queen and where the electricity would never go. Years later when she held Khurram in her arms for the first time would she realize the price she had paid for that dark night, and her fantasies of freedom. With hysterical tears flowing down her cheeks did she understand that the miracle of birth, the right of cutting the umbilical cord, the sight of her baby’s head coming out of her, were all the joys she had forever been robbed off. One such tear, dirtied and thickened with the kaajal it took out of Shammo’s eyes landed softly on Khurram’s neck, giving him a temporary birth mark, which reminded her of her own mole. What if Khurram was really her own, had come from her womb, shared the same blood that coursed through her veins, maybe even looked a bit like her? What if it weren’t a mazaar, but a hospital, clean, sanitized? Years ago, a corporeal cavity had been temporarily filled. Today lay instead, a permanent vacuum in her soul. What if she hadn’t done it? Goddamn Malik, for implanting that eternal ’what if’ question mark, for leaving Shammo to correct his mistake by some back street quack in purani Anarkali. A mistake corrected to such perfection that it would not be possible to make it again, even if would not be a mistake, even if it was wholesome and ordained by God Himself and if even imploring chaddars were to be laid at Data Darbar Thursday after Thursday for forty consecutive weeks. Such can be the curse of power failures, if you’d ask me.

Sarmad, despite the suicide threats and ultimatums given by his mother, ended up marrying Shammim, but not before the next monsoon season. At first she thanked God for having spared her the guilt and shame of her dark secret. But Sarmad’s behaviour changed this gratitude into a curse. Perhaps it was easier to live with the burden of her secret, than it was with a husband who knew of it, perpetrated it, and now would not forgive her for it. Sarmad’s initial excitement gave way to his self righteous upbringing, which had no shortage of double standards, and which had no room and no respect for a woman who had lost her honour before she had won her right to be given a new name. What if it wasn’t me, but her other neighbour, Taufeeq? If she could have done it with me, she could have done it with anyone? And so, he too would forever be tormented by a question mark. Sort of a what if question mark. What if she wasn’t even a virgin on that hot monsoon night. After all she was engaged to be married to her cousin before Malik Sahib, and his reluctant wife knocked on her parents’ door, beseeching the happiness for their son, the soon to be electrical engineer who would forever keep Shammo happy, in a house where the fans would run all day, and where she would be their beti, not a bahoo . What if she had done it before him?

The agony of this unsolvable enigma tormented him during his first few married nights. Finally he found a sanctuary for such disturbing thoughts in the archives of his memory, from where he would selectively replay them every time he needed an excuse to quell his wife’s requests or justify his anger. The request for the new saree would be denied fearing it would reveal too much of her alluring skin which might ensnare another innocent victim. Likewise, when he had come home drunk one night, he responded to her outrage by reminding her, how she should instead thank the alcohol for her life with him, for only intoxication could make floozies like her attractive to otherwise decent men – as indeed, on the night of their first encounter it was cheap whisky rather than Ghulam Ali that set her ablaze with desire. His anger, indifference, occasional beatings, became predictably repeating chapters of her loveless, childless existence. Had she known her fairy tale dreams would shatter piece by piece so callously, Shammin would rather have put her head on a guillotine than nod it brazenly in front of the Qazi and the witnesses. Like a workhorse, with the black leather eye shades around her, she’d pull the tonga of her daily chores without questioning, too focused on the tasks themselves to ponder of their banality. She would make fresh meals three times a day, ensure not a spec of dust ever sat on the on the latest Russian TV she brought in dowry, restore the latrines of the house to glistening glory, and still be rewarded only by the sarcastic reminder from her in-laws of having being born without a uterus. She bore these insults and their contemptuous snickering with the patience of a monk, immune to pain and devoted to her god. But lately it seemed, an invisible wall was being built between her and her god, which if she’d not destroy now, would forever separate them. Shammo’s solution, as recommended by Tabassum, her long time confidant and a successful housewife in her own right, revolved around fulfilling her womanly duties to her husband.
- Twice a week? See you are ignoring him and then you complain he hides in a cave. Satisfy him baby, newly married couples do it twice or thrice a day.
- Baab rey baab – mey to mar jaoon gi.
The mere thought of such high frequency made her body sore and exhausted Shammo’ more than hours of standing in the kitchen or scrubbing the floors with phenyl. But comparing her scorecard with the accepted norm gave her a feeling of sexual inadequacy she was determined to remove, and which she childishly blamed to be the root cause of his alienation, and the invisible wall.
- But I cant just tell him I want to do it. He will think less of him
- Silly, who’s asking you to be so obvious - make him want you. And another thing. Never disobey him, even if he is dead wrong. Listen to him, do everything he wants you to do – at least for the first year. The rest of the life he will listen to you.
And so Shammo started coming on to him, humming tunes with lewd overtones, adding gloss to her luscious lips, and when even these overtures would fail to invoke his libido, jumping on him at the first opportunity they would be alone. The unexpected initiative brought in a welcome surge in their intimacy and added an element of excitement to their otherwise mundane lives, but fell just short of offering any long-term solution. On the contrary her eagerness made her undesirable and her ubiquity rendered her uninteresting.

Twice a week soon became twice a month.

Physical distance started creating other barriers too. The only time they could now comfortably spend together was in front of the TV, surrounded by his parents and the frequently visiting neighbours, who were still in awe of this technological wonder and the amusement it brought which varied from the national songs that quite honestly sounded better on the radio, to dramas that mimicked their own daily novellas, to world news, which at times were as incredulous and blasphemous as man landing on the moon. Millions of miles and a few worlds away, in a small yellow stucco house in Samnabad, there was a much more believable story – of lovers falling out of love. It had been three months the two of them had spoken to each other. Shammim longed for him to call out her name, if only to complain about the salt in the food, the stain on his ironed shirt, or even the stillness of the air. But Sarmad would route his gripes in a circumvent way engaging others in the house without letting them guess the motive behind this cunning approach. And he never shared a smile with her. She felt a prisoner in his house, a stranger in his bed, and a whore in his arms. Their occasional love-making was a bizarre wordless and kiss-less bout. What it lacked in passion, it made up in the brevity of its tremors, rescuing its participants from the emptiness of its aftermath and affording them a quick, respectable passage into the realms of their own mindlessness. She was never allowed into his thoughts and he never stopped by hers. The act, performed out of necessity and duty to bear a child, was about as useful as a pair of sunglasses to the blind, a façade to borrow a sense of normalcy to an abnormal situation. ’There is a risk you may never conceive again’, the doctor had warned. But what choice did she have? Her parents would have killed her. Sarmad never wanted to know the details, and falsely assumed that by paying the doctor’s fee he had not only absolved himself of his sin, but its consciousness and repercussions as well. He didn’t. The two had to make an effort to fake ignorance when it came to the impossibility of being parents, not so much as it couldn’t happen, but that acknowledging it would have necessitated a resolution, which could only have come through dialog – a faculty that had long been expunged from the dictionary of their relationship. Their communication circuit had been totally broken. Perhaps the emotional fuse had blown off when unusually high voltage passed through their bodies. She would amuse herself with such imagery and wonder how her engineer husband might one day explain the deconstruction of their powerhouse, why there was no light in her life, no current in his touch, no warmth left in their bodies. But he never bothered to explain. That the electricity had gone, she knew, but whether it would ever return, she still wondered.

Soon after their second anniversary, Shammo started sleeping on the floor, under the pretext of a bad back and in the hope that Sarmad may invite her back to the bed, if for no sweeter reason than for avoiding the discomfort of changing a habit he had grown used to. He did not. It was then she realised that the chasm in their relationship, no doubt totally ill founded and inexplicable, had grown too big to be filled by human endeavour alone, and that she must now resign herself to this fate of unrequited love, of unfulfilled dreams, of a young body that would not be held or loved by him again. What kept them together, under these circumstances were neither the memories of the monsoon nights, nor the remnants of love they once shared, but a strange sympathy one terminal patient feels for another. They were both victims of an over dose of love and now indifference, not hate, was the prescribed antidote. On a practical level, they both dreaded the inconvenience of being exposed to their parents’ told you so’s had they seen even the smallest fracture in their marriage. Neither of them had any energy left to face the public humiliation of a defeat they had privately accepted. They had finally fallen out of love, almost as unceremoniously as they had once fallen into it. On a hot monsoon night without electricity.

But three days after Neil Armstrong took that small step for man and that big one for mankind, Shammo decided she had had enough and set out to find a new moon for herself, where she too could happily bounce up and down amidst the admiration and awe of millions of people.

’And where do you think you are going?’ asked Sarmad, whose worried eyes belied the coldness of his tone.
No response.
’Shammim? I asked you a question’.
’To my life. To the child you made me kill’