Sins of Monsoons
Shaila Abdullah – United States

The first thing you noticed about him wasn’t his bedraggled state or his incessantly snotty nose. It was the bluish-black scar that ran lizard-like across the entire breadth of his chin, forming a half-smile, a semicircle of nature’s mockery or a product of someone’s cruelty. It lent an unforgettable quality to his features, rendering his incredibly common face very uncommon. The presence of that scar was how I remembered Ramu in the beginning. I forgot faces easily even though I was a very perceptive child with a photographic memory, much to the exasperation of my parents. I could hold them accountable for events and promises made on a whim with no intentions of ever getting fulfilled.

Ramu was Mai Jan’s son. She was the maid who came to our house daily at the crack of dawn to do what we had deemed beneath our status to do since I was five — clean up after us, launder our soiled clothes, wash our dirty dishes, and cook for us before we hired Khansama. Mai Jan even gave baths to the little ones. The days she didn’t show up, the dishes piled high, and we ran around in a disheveled state: dirty, unwashed, with stinky knickers, sweaty undershirts, food stains and the day’s grime coloring our shirtfronts, hair unruly and uncombed. Ami pretended not to notice. On such mornings, she sat in her room, painting her toenails, Lata Mangeshkar blaring out of the radio, curtains drawn. Us basti ko jaane waale, leta ja paigaam mera. O Traveler, take my message to the village.

We were chased away when we tried to peek in Ami’s room. She almost always had a headache that she was nursing and didn’t want to be bothered. Usually when our driver, Azad Baba, came back after dropping Abu off, he would come inside the kitchen and fix us parathas for breakfast, square, fat pieces of dough powdered heavily with flour so they wouldn’t stick to the pan. He deep-fried them in canola oil to mouth-watering perfection and then slid the oily, slithering masses straight from the pan onto our plates, the steam partially hiding us from each other’s view. The first mouthful would always burn and numb our tongues. Azad Baba always cautioned us. We never listened.

Ramu’s appearance in my life when I was eight brought a welcome change, although short-lived. He invoked the rebel in me and forced me to take risks with my situation. I was always a dutiful daughter with good grades. I did everything right; I studied hard, I ate well, and I obeyed all authority figures. Later on I loved with a fierceness, too. Ramu operated on a single theory: do what your heart wants and be carefree. I liked his devilish attitude. I learned in time that his rebellion rose from a life of being stifled and ignored. He seemed to have an undaunted spirit despite that and a ready smile.

Ramu was also disaster-prone. He had the face of someone who got beaten up one too many times. When I met him, his nose was at an awkward angle, slightly off-center; he had a swollen cheek and a puffed-up lower lip. And it seemed that every time I saw him after that, his features were shifting and readjusting, old wounds dying, fresh ones taking their place. He fell off a ladder, Mai Jan would offer one day. Dekh ke nahi chalta, he walked through a door, would be the excuse for another day, and so it went on. None of it ever had the ring of truth to it, but we just nodded and went about our lives, afraid of the burden that knowledge would bring to our conscience.

I saw him for the first time when Mai Jan was still new, the morning I caught her and Ami in an animated discussion. Mai Jan was unusually late, insisting that it was because she had nowhere to put Ramu, her nine-year-old son who had just been expelled from his school, his third one, for being too raucous. Mai Jan requested, no, pled, short of going on all fours and prostrating in front of Ami, to let Ramu stay outside our door while she worked.

“Alright, okay,” Ami conceded at last, wagging a red-tipped finger in Mai Jan’s direction. “As long as he does not cause any trouble here.” As an afterthought she asked, “Does he bathe daily?”

“Whenever we have water in the basti, he does,” Mai Jan said sadly in the voice of one who had perfected the art of groveling to get a win in any situation.

Ami scrunched up her nose. “Which is probably never. He better stay out of trouble, or else —”

Mai Jan waved her hands widely to reassure her and joined them together in gratitude before turning around to go about her business. Another battle won as far as she was concerned. The “or else” in Ami’s world could mean so much and often nothing. There was no way to tell until the time came. And so Ramu became a permanent fixture near our door that summer, hunched up and busy with his few marbles, swatting flies all day long while Mai Jan toiled endlessly in our home.

I wandered outside to get a closer look at Ramu, and he scowled at me and returned to his game. I watched him intently, not the marbles, but him. The scar intrigued me.

“Where did you get that?” I asked him. At our age, we rarely bothered with the formalities of introduction. Where Ramu came from, they probably didn’t even bother with them as adults.

“Those are mine.” He scooped up the marbles hurriedly and pressed them to his chest. One fell off and rolled over to where I was standing, and he lunged at it.

“Not that, silly,” I said with a laugh, kicking the fleeing marble back to him. “The scar on your face!”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said proudly. “I have tons of those all over my body.”

I looked at him wide-eyed.

“How did you get them?” I asked again.

He didn’t answer. Then his eyes brightened up. “Do you want to play with these? We could play for keeps.”

I didn’t know how to play marbles, and I certainly didn’t know what playing for keeps meant. I nodded nonetheless and sank down beside him, neatly folding my pinafore under my knees so my thighs wouldn’t be exposed, just how Ami had shown me.

He laughed. “You girls dress funny.”

I smiled at him uncomfortably. I hated that dress too, but Ami’s tailor insisted it was the latest “fassun”. The tailor was quite enamored by Ami’s generous proportions and spent hours measuring her. I had seen his fingers go into Ami’s nether regions too, but she seemed not to mind. I always made sure I brought along my measurements written out neatly on a piece of paper with an HB pencil.

Ramu was quite an expert at the game, and I didn’t realize just how much time had flown by until Ami came looking for me outside and seemed shocked to see me with my little companion.

“There you are. I looked all over for you!” she exclaimed, eyeing Ramu suspiciously. “What are you doing out there in the dirt?”

Ramu didn’t look up. He knuckled the blue rainbow marble against the green one and yelled, “Woh le!”

I followed Ami inside but paused to look behind briefly. Ramu winked at me.

“You lost the game. That was for keeps,” he whispered.

“What does that mean?” I mouthed back.

“You will be my slave girl for a whole week.” He laughed.

I stuck my tongue out at him.

“That’s what playing for keeps means, don’t you know?” he whispered.

Of course, it didn’t, but I didn’t know it then.

“Dumb, rich girl. Spoiled, so spoiled. Doesn’t know anything,” he continued.

Ami turned around at our derision and buzzing and subjected Ramu to a sharp stare. He bowed his head down and returned to his solitary game.

That night Ami gave me a bath, an unusual occurrence, and oiled my hair afterward. Unlike the amount she used in making eggs, she generously emptied an entire cup of foul-smelling coconut oil over my head. Usually Mai Jan was responsible for keeping us clean, although she often forgot to clean us behind our ears. Ami parted my hair in an uneven two and plaited it tightly on both sides. I winced, and she tapped me lightly on the head.

“You should know better than to play with Ramu’s type,” she said irritably. “What will your Abu say?”

“Ramu is fun. What’s the harm in playing with him?” I picked up the pink hand mirror on the bed and studied my plaits. They seemed to grow almost horizontally from my head like two giraffe ears. I winced at the crooked parting and the uneven distribution of my hair. I couldn’t wait to fix it. I decided to wait until Ami left the room.

“He’s Hindu,” Ami said as if it were a bad word, taking the mirror away from my hands. “Don’t you know?”

I swallowed hard and looked at her in defiance. So?

“He’s filthy, in case you haven’t noticed.” Ami tried to strengthen her case. “And the smell he carries around. Chi!”

Personal hygiene was a big thing with her.

He did have a particular odor, but I didn’t find it offensive. It was no different than Mai Jan’s — kind of a unique merger of an unwashed mop and stale spices that in time you start associating with a person or kind. To me, it seemed perfectly normal, balancing out the better-smelling scents around the house: the fresh vegetables, Ami’s and Baba’s colognes, the moghra bracelet Abu brought for Ami and me on Thursdays — to me it all helped keep it neutral, kind of a nice balance of sorts.

I was sullen because I didn’t agree with Ami. She also was not very firm when it came to discipline. She contradicted herself readily and daily. What was acceptable one day could become a crime the next; situations she strongly disagreed with in the morning wouldn’t matter to her by late afternoon. Ami’s method of parenting lacked consistency, and for my other siblings, it translated into absolute and complete freedom. They did whatever they could whenever they could — the very philosophy that Ramu believed in as well.

He was there again the next day when I sneaked out while Ami was napping. This time he was drawing a two-foot circle with white chalk on the concrete as he frowned in concentration, eyebrows meshed together. He selected a shooter, a big red marble, and placed it inside the circle, and then he chose another smaller one, kneeling on all fours, wiry hair touching the ground. He flicked at the smaller marble deftly, aiming for the red one. The marble rolled with increasing speed and pushed the shooter out of the circle.

“Woh le ho!” Ramu shouted, both hands up in the air, his greasy sleeves falling down to his elbows. I noticed that he was missing most of his front teeth. His victory cheer never made sense to me, but I had heard street kids holler in that manner, too. Ami would probably have a heart attack if I mimicked that in the house. Ramu was wearing a strange-colored shalwar kameez; it was probably once the color of camel skin but had grown grayer over time with grime and stains that no amount of washing could erase. I wondered how many times it had actually been washed. He saw me and smiled.

“Did you see that? Did you?” He was so excited that saliva shot out of his mouth and showered my face. His breath smelled of foul eggs. I pretended not to recoil, and he didn’t offer any apologies.

“I did. Good one!” I admitted, clapping my hands in camaraderie, and sat down beside him. “Can you teach me this game?”

He was an impatient teacher. When my fingers wouldn’t flick the marble in the right direction, he would hold his hand roughly over mine and almost force the marbles to lunge forward with his strength. I still felt drawn to him although he had crude mannerisms that I wasn’t used to.

I heard my baby sister, Zoha, cry inside the house and got up with a start. Ami had left me in charge of her before she went down for her nap. I could hear the dhub dhub of the wooden laundry bat from somewhere inside where Mai Jan was thrashing our laundry, punishing the clothes for the stains they carried, absolving them of all sins. Deliberate or not, her labor almost muffled the young child’s cry.

Those days I measured my life by the sights and sounds that affected me most: the doll I carried around that had lost a ribbon, the toothpaste called Binaca that I used with the curious flavor that lingered in my mouth for hours, the scent of Ami’s perfume — the fragrance of a self-absorbed existence — and the unforgettable taste of falsas. On hot sweltering afternoons, Ramu and I ate red, sour berries that with their juice turned our tongues crimson. I would buy the berries for the two of us from the street vendor who came by the house some afternoons. Ramu and I often indulged in a fierce competition to see who could spit the seeds out the farthest. Once we even aimed for Khansama. When Ramu’s seed struck his dark balding head, he turned around, scratching his head in confusion. We pretended to be busy with our marbles, trying hard not to laugh.

Other days we chased the white puffballs — the flowerlets of the shimul tree, fleeing from their split pod — all across the yard. We paused only to trace their wayward path as the gleeful seeds raced past the rose bushes and the bougainvilleas along the fence, bouncing off the windows, escaping from nature and manmade snares. We never caught a single puffball. They always traveled a little too high, a few fingers beyond our reach, like unattainable dreams.

After playing with Ramu those afternoons, I would come home dirty and smelling like a street urchin. Ami would wrinkle her nose and instruct Mai Jan to bathe me. I was certain some days she knew where I had been but decided that I was too headstrong and opinionated to listen. It was either that or she believed that all friendships and relationships have a life span and ours would run out soon. I refused to think that she didn’t pay attention to my afternoon adventures simply because she did not care.

It was raining heavily the day I saw the dark side of Ramu’s life and realized how vulnerable he was under all his machismo and bravado. Ami had gone shopping, leaving us in Mai Jan’s care. I sneaked out when Mai Jan was busy with the young ones and met Ramu outside. He was standing with his hands in his shalwar pockets, looking forlorn.

“I hate rain!” he declared, his lower lip trembling. His nose was running, and he made no attempt to wipe away the mucus.

I shivered and stood next to him under the awning, hearing the rain drum down onto the roof of the house. I loved rain, so I had no supportive remarks to make. The monsoons also provided some much-needed relief from the long, scorching summer days.

He pointed toward a little shed that stood a few steps away in the yard beside an old banyan tree. The branches hung low as if laden with sorrow, the tree seeking comfort by resting its arms on the decrepit shed for balance.

“Can I go in there to hide for a while?” he asked, licking his snot.

The shed had tools that Azad Baba kept for household projects, and Ami used it as a godown for excess nonperishable food supplies like rice, flour, and oil. On hot summer days, Mai Jan used the extra space to dry slivers of raw mangoes called keri before pickling the achar in a huge clay pot covered with white muslin cloth. Periodically, Mai Jan or Ami would fill up smaller jars and put them in the refrigerator for everyday use. There were days Ami didn’t scoop out achar herself. She said she was unclean and her touching the big achar pot on such days would spoil it. It was years later that I found out what being “unclean” really meant.

I was sure the shed had enough room for shelter. I nodded, and Ramu raced toward it screaming as the rain pelted his head. “I don’t want to die,” I heard him yell.

I was surprised at how scared he was. I saw him almost make it to the door when the sound of thunder threw him off balance and he landed on the ground. I raced toward him and pulled his hands to drag his horizontal body inside the shed. He was hyperventilating, and his hair and ears were caked with mud. Under his ribs, his heart was thudding like a panicked dog’s.

It was dark inside, and my eyes needed to adjust. I rubbed them furiously and blinked a couple of times, unleashing dancing spheres. Dark and eerie, they bobbed up and down the wall, making me woozy. A prickly scent of rotting pickle permeated the air along with the stench of animal excrement. Even though I tiptoed around the shed, the floor below me still creaked and groaned from age. I worried that it would cave in and carry me into the womb of darkness below. Uncertainty always scared me. I stopped and glanced behind me. All I could see was a pair of frightened eyes, large and unblinking. The only bulb in the shed was shattered, its filaments exposed, all tangled up with the metal prongs. I stumbled over an old red torch that I quickly turned on.

“It’s okay, Ramu,” I said softly. “Rain doesn’t hurt.”

“It does,” he maintained sullenly.

A few drops of rain glistened on the roof, threatening to drop on us. I laid the torch on the floor, and it formed a giant circle of light around us. Next, I dragged a bucket under a slow trickle that was growing steadier. The place contained a feeling of sadness, of being forgotten.

“How so?” I asked when I was done. I sat beside him on a flour sack.

He was silent and remained still on the floor. I realized that no answer was forthcoming and sighed as I looked up at the wooden slats on the ceiling. Above us, cobwebs and sparrow nests were crisscrossing paths. On one side, an enterprising spider was busy weaving an incredibly large web. I saw it greedily eye a housefly flitting about and weave a few strands its way, seemingly providing a restful area but in reality setting a trap. A baby sparrow flew by nervously at our sight, and her anxious cries filled the shed. Just then a clap of thunder sounded, and it fled for cover.

“I hate love,” Ramu whimpered. “Love hurts.”

When I heard his voice, I turned to him in surprise, not sure of the reason for such an outburst. Ramu’s eyes were closed, his eyelids trembling. A lone tear slid from the corner of his eye and ran toward his ear.

“Who do you love?” he asked after such a long time that I jumped.

I thought about that for awhile.

“I think I love Abu, my brother and sister ––”

Did I love Ami?

“Everybody loves their own family,” said Ramu. “Who do you really love?”

I was quiet, running the list of other people through my head. Did he mean my friends? Schoolmates?

“Forget it.” His voice broke into my thoughts. “Do you think your Abu loves you?”

“Of course he does!” I don’t know why I sounded so defensive.

Ramu turned to me and asked matter-of-factly, “Where does he touch you?”

The question loomed large inside the little shed, rebounding off the walls and coming to rest alarmingly on me. I looked at him in confusion.

“What do you mean? Like when he holds me close and kisses me?”

He shook his head. “Does he touch you down there?” He gestured toward my knickers, and I recoiled from him and sat up, ready to flee.

“Does it hurt when he touches you? You know, when he says he loves you but it doesn’t really feel like it?”

Ramu’s voice seemed like it was coming from a distance. It didn’t even seem to be his anymore; it had an inhuman quality, as if all emotion had been stripped from it. My own voice was gone. I had no words; I had no answers. I didn’t understand his questions, but my built-in sense of danger alerted me that it could only mean something dreadful.

Ramu stood up resignedly and turned to me as I stupidly backed up against the wall, my heart threatening to open my chest cavity and pop out. I watched as he undid his shalwar strings. The trousers fell in a bunch around his soiled ankles and then he looked up, his face a blank slate. I clapped a hand to my mouth to silence my cry of shock. His little shriveled penis was swollen and red, surrounded by scars and burn marks of all shapes and sizes. His entire lower body was covered in new and old wounds; some angry cuts were getting ready to clot.

“This is how my Baba shows his love ––”

I raced out of the shed, almost tripping over the bucket of water. I ran and ran until I got inside the house. I shut the door to my room and bolted it from the inside. It was then that I fell against it and cried for a very long time. At some point late in the night, his final words came to haunt me.

“Can I show you my love?”

By then the rain had stopped.

I never played with him again. I stayed indoors and stopped wandering outside. Ami seemed pleased. Once in a while, I glanced out the window and saw the top of Ramu’s scruffy head, but he never looked up. On occasion, I hid and listened to the sound of his marbles hitting the concrete. I bore no ill-feeling toward him, only a sentiment of a drawn-out sadness. And then he stopped coming to our house. When Ami asked Mai Jan about him, she raised both of her hands heavenward.

“Allah jane, where he is,” she said and wiped a tear from her eyes with her pallu. “He hasn’t come home in three weeks.”

“Three weeks?” Ami looked shocked. “What do you mean? Have you and Akram looked for him?”

Mai Jan nodded. “I did. His Baba is always doing drugs. He’s never in his hosh to go search for Ramu. He got out of jail on Friday after two weeks this time. Been in there for hashish. Had a big argument with Ramu before that. Men and their tempers. God has created them in a unique mold.”

A chill ran down my spine at the mention of Ramu’s father. He had a sinister presence in my mind. He scared me even though I had never met him. I hovered in the area, listening in with a glass of milk in my hand.

“What about the police? What did they say?”

Mai Jan laughed and sank down on her knees with the jharoo, sweeping away a large arc of dust. The little restless particles took off in the air in distress, shimmering in the light filtering through the window, unsettled molecules that floated in the air in panic and lost their way. I wondered about the fate of the displaced dust particles. Doesn’t man pay a price for such transgressions, I wondered. I looked at the glass in my hand worriedly. I wondered how loudly it would shatter if I let it go. Where would the pieces fall? I was troubled by the unpredictability of everything around me — people, inanimate objects, words. I winced from pain as if a shard had already struck me.

“Bibi, police don’t care for underprivileged children like Ramu,” Mai Jan was saying. “They are a dime a dozen and always running away from home. They will probably tell me to go home.”

Ami was speechless. She was rooted to the spot and looked at Mai Jan for a very long time. Then she turned and went inside her room. I had never seen Ami that disturbed.

For a long time afterward, whenever our car stopped at intersections, I hungrily scanned the sea of disheveled little boys that surrounded our car for a familiar face — the ones who scrambled and fought each other to clean our windshield with their rags. Their discolored, dirty washcloths always left more smudges than what was previously there. For me, monsoons only heightened such imperfections, exposing the sins of the season, laying bare the inequality of our losses.