A Mere Two Yards by Naima Rashid
Like a prologue, sadness always preceded her. It was present when she lived in Pakistan, and I knew her as a voice at the other end of the line, a voice that made my mother’s face droopy and sad. It was present in the weeks before she moved in with us when Ammi Abbu gave us a talk about how to treat her. It was present when she moved in with us, in the clean downy linen of the sheets on her bed, in the silence we all kept on the ground floor where she lived.
“They begin to feel like furniture after a while, all parents who move in with their children in the West.” We were afraid of breaking her sleep with our noise and afraid of leaving her alone for too long, lest she began to feel she was turning into furniture.
Her fears were altogether strange, I thought. They were so removed from the possibilities of imagination afforded by the bustle of a day that I found them irrational. My parents did not; it seemed. Since Naana’s death, they had started playing along as if they were accomplices in a game of make-belief fears she played all day long in her head.
“Nobody would have known when I died. Nobody would have been present to bury me.” Every day, those words came out of her mouth, like a note in a piano that had to sound itself every day, for no reason beyond the sounding, to assure itself that melody had not left its spirit. I’m quite sure that was why they had brought her over here forever. She said the house had gone silent all of a sudden since Naana died last year. No one visited like before. Maybe all they came for was the money, of the possibility of it.
On the face of it, she was well, It felt like we were providing life support all the time, dialling up the silliest thing that pleased her, ignoring full realities that made her sad. A new version of Naani had appeared since Naana’s death, a frailer one we had to tiptoe around.
We whispered among ourselves that it was Naana’s picture she looked at in her diary (a long gaze of reckoning, like a rehearsal of courage) with the silky tassel where she had the phone numbers of her relatives in Pakistan. Sometimes, she called the ones who were still alive. Here in the US, she had a single niece who lived an hour’s drive out. Ammi Abbu had taken her to meet them once just after she arrived.
On Eid, Ammi made us wear our shalwar kameez and made halwa early in the morning. Frail Naani was impossible to reason with. She wanted to go and give Eidi to her niece’s children. It was impossible to explain to her she was most at risk. (“So important for her to feel like an elder. So important for her to have something to look forward to.”)
Going through her cupboard felt like an invasion. It was the first time I was alone in her quarters. I had no choice. Ammi was too distraught to pack her clothes for the hospital when they moved her to ICU. Earlier that day, they had shown the first footage of mass graves, and Ammi hadn’t stopped sobbing since. She gestured to me feebly for everything that needed to be done; I kept guessing what she meant and doing it.
Next to the lamp on Naani’s bedside table was the diary. I opened it guiltily on the page with the tassel, expecting to see my Naana. Instead, on one side of the page was a glued picture. It showed an old man with death in his eyes looking into the camera. On the opposite page, in her own steady hand, was inscribed a verse in Urdu:
‘Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar dafan ke liye
Do gaz zameen bhi na mili kooay yaar main’
(‘How unfortunate are you, Zafar, for your last respite
A mere two yards, in the shade of kin, you could not find’)
At left, below, signed in Urdu: Bahadur Shah Zafar
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Naima Rashid is a writer, poet, and translator. Her first book was "Defiance of the Rose" (Oxford University Press, 2019). Her writings have appeared in Asymptote, The Scores, Lucy Writers Platform, Visual Verse and many other places online and in print. She was long-listed for the National Poetry Competition 2019. Her forthcoming works include a translation of the Urdu novel "Naulakhi Kothi" by Ali Akbar Natiq (Penguin Random House India 2022), and her own fiction and poetry. Her website is www.naimarashid.com.
Twitter: @NaimaRashid