A Thousand Questions Read online

  I drag myself out of bed and to the balcony with bare feet, rubbing my eyes at the brightness of the sun. Nani is standing on the ground below with her hands on her hips, screaming. “You killed all my rose bushes, you ulloo-ka-patha! Do you know how expensive they were? I got imported soil for them. I got special food for them. What is wrong with you?”

  A man stands in front of her, hanging his head, wringing his hands. “Sorry, Begum Sahiba, please forgive me,” he pleads in Urdu. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

  This is better than a movie! I watch in fascination as Nani scolds the poor gardener for the next twenty minutes, wondering what ulloo-ka-patha means. She’s wearing some sort of long sky-blue dress, but from my angle I can’t tell if it’s a sari or a nightgown. Her stick-thin arms are clad with the same gold bangles I saw yesterday. Does she sleep in them? Does she bathe in them and take them to the bathroom with her? I cover my mouth with my hand to stifle my giggles.

  Nani’s voice is loud enough to disturb the birds in the trees outside. I can’t believe this is Mom’s mother. Mom never screams at me, even that time a couple of years ago when I was practicing dance moves in her room and crashed into her worktable, spilling her paints on a half-finished painting. I still remember her face: horror, anger, and a twinge of panic. But she just led me out of the room and told me to practice dancing somewhere else. I didn’t know until much later that she’d been commissioned by a famous Houston tycoon to paint that portrait.

  I didn’t know much about anything until recently. Like the fact that Mom’s job at the Art Institute wasn’t enough to pay the bills, and she used to try to sell her artwork to make a little money on the side. Or the fact that important people once paid her to paint their dogs’ pictures in a series called Rich Pups that was later displayed in an art museum. She took me to the opening as a surprise earlier this year, not telling me she was the artist until people started coming up to congratulate her. “What elegance, what style!” a woman in a floor-length gown gushed. “Thank you for making my darling Boris look so . . . human!”

  Mom was embarrassed. I could tell by her red cheeks and nervous smile. “I want to be known for my watercolors of nature, for my collages and my abstracts,” she complained on the way home. “Painting dogs is so humiliating.”

  I didn’t really understand. “Dogs are awesome,” I told her dreamily. I’d been begging for a pet forever, but she said we couldn’t afford it.

  “It’s not dogs, really.” She gave a frustrated sigh and gazed out the windshield. “It’s just the idea of a trivial topic like rich people’s pets. All the classical artists became famous for landscapes and human portraits. Not animals. Especially not animals belonging to some pretentious old people who live in big mansions cut off from real people.”

  I didn’t really understand what the big deal was then, but now watching Nani scream about her precious roses with their special food and seeing the poor gardener’s shoulders slump dries up all my giggles like the bushes below me. Are Nani and Nana also pretentious old people who live in big mansions? And if so, what does that make me?

  Dear Dad,

  Do you ever get angry? Not annoyed or irritated, like most people, but a deep angry that makes you throw something at the wall and watch it crack. I know I’m not supposed to talk like that. I’m supposed to be a grateful girl who has all of life’s blessings.

  Sometimes I don’t feel like that. Mom says several weeks in Pakistan will give me perspective and a new sense of gratitude. Doesn’t that sound just like her? Everything she says is so neat and tidy, as if she’s read it in a magazine. She does read lots of magazines, though!

  I wonder what you like to read. I found a few Spider-Man comics in an old box under Mom’s bed recently. Mom just snatched them from me and threw them in the trash, so I’m guessing they must have been yours. Or maybe she was just worried they were dirty from being under the bed for so long. Doesn’t matter. I like to imagine you sitting in an armchair reading a Spider-Man comic book.

  I much prefer Wonder Woman myself.

  Until next time,

  Mimi

  In the afternoon, after a huge lunch and a short nap, Nana calls me to the TV room to sit with him. I’ve changed into black capri pants and a lime-green T-shirt with a slice of cake and the words I EAT CAKE BECAUSE IT’S SOMEONE’S BIRTHDAY SOMEWHERE on it. Mom is already there at a rickety wooden easel in the corner, testing some paints. “Where did all this come from?” I ask, amazed at how quickly she’s created a space for herself in this house. Then I have to remind myself that this is Mom’s house; she lived it in forever and ever. Before America. Before Dad and me.

  Sure enough, she replies, “I found these old things in the closet in my bedroom,” and a peaceful little smile creeps onto her face, making her look beautiful.

  “This mother of yours used to be always painting, always painting,” Nana tells me cheerfully. He’s setting up a small wooden table in front of his armchair. “One time she even won a competition at school. Do you remember, eh, Samia darling?”

  I sit down next to him, intrigued. Mom is bent over her easel, her hair falling onto her face, acting as if she can’t hear us. “How old was she?” I ask.

  Nana takes out a slim rectangular black box from a drawer and opens it. It’s a chess set. He begins to carefully set up the pieces, talking as he works. “She must have been your age, I think. And do you know what her prize was?”

  I rack my brain. “A paint set?”

  He looks up at me sharply. “Did she already tell you this story?”

  I have to laugh at his aggravated expression. “I guessed. We have an art competition in my school every year, and the winner always gets something art-related. Like paints or a gift card to a craft store.”

  “And do you ever win, like your mother?”

  I look over at Mom again. She’s painting a face, but it’s too soon to tell whose. She always takes the longest to complete faces, sometimes days or even weeks. I shrug. “Nah. Mom’s the artist in the family, not me.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe you just never tried.” He gestures to me to move a chess piece. Apparently we are going to play a game of chess, whether I like it or not. I move a pawn two spaces forward.

  “Classic rookie move,” he tells me with relish, and moves a knight. I stare at the board, trying to remember what I know about the game. Almost nothing. I move pieces randomly until Nana shouts with laughter and says, “Did nobody teach you to play chess, little girl?”

  I shake my head. “Mom’s too busy painting all the time, as you can see.” I push out my lip and pretend to sob.

  He shakes his head and laughs some more. “Well, then, consider this your education.” He sets up the pieces again. “I’ll go easy this time.”

  Mom shakes her paintbrush at me. “Serves you right for complaining about your mother!” But she gives me one of her little smiles, all warm and cheeky. Besides, I don’t really mind playing chess with Nana. It doesn’t seem so bad.

  Halfway through the third game, a loudspeaker crackles to life, and a melodious sound fills the air around us. Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar. God is great. God is great. “What is that?” I ask Nana, looking around me for the source.

  He waves his hand. “Oh, it’s just the azaan from the mosque down the street. Very loud, I know, but it can’t be helped. You’ll get used to it in a few days.”

  “Azaan?” I know this word, although it’s a hazy memory in my mind of visiting a mosque in Houston a long time ago, watching the worshippers prostrate themselves in a steady line in front of me.

  “The call to prayer. The mosque puts it on the loudspeaker five times a day, every day.” Nana adds, “In Urdu, we say azaan. The Arabic word for it is adhaan.”

  I decide I like azaan better. The word flows smoother, like caramel over ice cream. Mom closes her eyes and leans back against her chair, breathing deeply as if she’s listening to some long-ago song from her childhood. I gaze at the chess pieces, letting the azaan
wash over me like a soothing balm. It reaches deep into me and pings my chest.

  When the azaan ends, the servant girl enters, bringing tea and a plateful of cookies in the shape of hearts, with red jam centers. I lean back and smile at her, but she gives me a serious look and turns away. Rude!

  “Take some chai to Begum Sahiba in her room,” Nana says, but kindly. He’s nice to the servants, unlike Nani. I think of her shouting at the man about her roses. Nana doesn’t look like he’s ever shouted in his life. I wonder how the two of them get along.

  I pick up a heart-shaped cookie and take a bite. Warm and soft, with a hint of sweetness. I munch, wiping crumbs away from my mouth. The servant girl leaves without a word, closing the door after her with a hard click.

  6

  Sakina

  A Little Haven

  Amma’s been having her headaches again, so I spend Sunday morning doing all her chores instead of relaxing on my only day off from Begum Sahiba’s house. Jammy has to be bathed, which is exhausting. I have to keep shouting at him to stop wasting water and settle down. He giggles and splashes me. Oof!

  Abba relaxes on the charpai in the verandah, listening to the news on his ancient radio. Elections are coming up in six weeks, and the local candidates spend Sunday mornings debating each other. It sounds more like arguing, but I hardly listen anyway. What has any elected official ever done for poor people? Our neighborhood still doesn’t have even one fully paved road, and the trash piles keep getting bigger and smellier. The mosquitoes continue to bite us all, making us sick with malaria and Dengue fever.

  “Everyone should refuse to vote for these people until they fulfill their promises from the last year,” I grumble as I wash the floor with leftover bath water. The suds make the stone sparkle and shine, and for a minute I’m pleased, even though I know the heat will dry it all up before I’m finished cleaning.

  “If only our neighbors were as clever as my daughter,” Abba says affectionately. I roll my eyes, making sure he doesn’t see. He’s always telling everyone about how smart I am, how hardworking. It’s embarrassing, but it also warms my heart in a way that few other things do.

  I hum a little tune as I work. I’m not sure what it is, but the American girl in Begum Sahiba’s house was listening to an English song all day yesterday, and now it’s echoing in my head. All I could understand was shake it shake it, the rest was a shrill jumble of musical gibberish. She’s got a small laptop on which she types messages, but she also likes reading books and writing in a little gray book. She keeps smiling at me, and I keep staring back, not knowing how to respond.

  I finish up the cleaning, wash the dishes from the night before, then begin cooking lunch. It’s the usual Sunday fare: spicy yellow daal, plain white rice, and roasted whole wheat roti. Abba will eat only the daal and roti, leaving the rice for everyone else.

  At least that’s what I’ll make him do. He keeps “forgetting” that rice isn’t good for his diabetes. He’ll sneak some onto his plate when I’m not looking, and then I won’t have the heart to make him put it back. “Just a few bites?” he’ll wheedle, his eyes sparkling, his hand out like the beggars I see on the street, and I’ll give in.

  Later, when everyone is taking their daily afternoon nap, I crawl into my secret reading space. It’s a tiny half room right behind the toilet, big enough for me to sit with my knees drawn up. Amma used it as a pantry a long time ago, storing dry items such as flour and sugar, but it’s been years since we had enough money to buy extra. Nowadays, we make do with whatever we can buy, storing it all on a broad wooden shelf over the stove. This little space is now mine. I’d give anything to have a door at its entrance, so I could close it from the peeping eyes and greedy fingers of my little brother. But I have to be satisfied with a long swathe of jute fabric hung from the top of the entryway.

  This room is my haven, my retreat, my paradise. It’s almost completely empty of decoration, except a naked lightbulb on the ceiling, and one shelf on the side with a pile of books Abba’s managed to scrounge from the houses where he’s worked. They are torn hand-me-downs, one dug out from a garbage heap, a few yellowed from age. There’s My First Book of Animals, a class-two textbook for science, and a mystery story about a girl named Nancy Drew, which has a ton of big words. There’s a cookbook from 1978 with a woman in a checked red-and-white apron on the worn-out cover. Her hair is fine yellow like the silk I see in fabric stores in the market. She wears the sort of clothes I could never afford in a million years.

  On the far corner of the shelf, hidden behind the books, is an old tin box. I don’t need to open it to know what’s inside. A sparkly black hair clip that belonged to Amma. A pretty brooch with a bright green gem I found on the street near Begum Sahiba’s house last year. A bookmark with the words Readers Are Leaders. All my saved-up money, which is 243 rupees right now. And the letter from New Haven School. Dear Sakina Ejaz . . .

  I push the tin can out of my mind. What really matters is that in this little room, cramped and uncomfortable, I can be the opposite of Sakina. I can dream of going to school, of learning all sorts of things from the earth to the stars. I can dream of being somebody else, not a cook’s assistant at a mean old lady’s house. Not a daughter with a checklist of chores and an ailing parent.

  Not Sakina. Somebody else.

  Amma always tells me to stop dreaming. She doesn’t like it when I crawl into my little room to read. You’ll ruin your eyes, and then how will you work? she often scolds me. We need your extra income to survive—you know that.

  Yes, Amma, I know. I just close my eyes and pretend I can’t hear her. Abba tells her to stop scolding me, that everybody needs a little space to dream once in a while. He’s a softie. It was he who gave in and finally took me for the admission test to New Haven School last winter, after I kept pestering him every single day. Just to see how smart I am, Abba, please? I kept begging. So he relented, like I knew he would. He doesn’t know I’m serious about going to school, about spending the whole day studying rather than earning money. He doesn’t know how hard I’ve been practicing my subjects, spending hours at night reading after everyone is asleep. He thinks it’s a phase I’ll grow out of, so he humors me.

  I shift and squirm, trying to find a comfortable space. I’m practicing math problems in a lined notebook I bought from the corner shop, but my legs are getting numb. Better to wait until evening. Sometimes at night after dinner, Abba sits with me and gives me sums to work on: What’s fifty times eight, and what’s three hundred divided by nine? Those are easy, almost too easy for me, but I don’t tell him that. He only studied to class three when he was a child, before his father—my grandfather—died of tuberculosis and Abba had to work in his uncle’s street café to support the family.

  It’s all right, though. I’ve realized that I can work on multiplication, division, and even fractions every single day when I measure ingredients for Abba in Begum Sahiba’s kitchen, or buy vegetables from the man who brings the vegetable cart around every morning. I practice chemistry when I bake cakes and cook curries, and biology when I feed Sahib Ji’s birds in the garden cages. He’s got peacocks and pigeons and mynah birds, and each has a different diet. I watch everyone and everything around me, listen to early-morning children’s shows on the radio, and eavesdrop when I walk past the school in my neighborhood.

  The only thing I can’t seem to master is speaking English. I know what it is: I need someone to speak to, someone who’ll correct me when I’m wrong, tell me what to say and how to say it. I may be able to teach myself the basics, but if I’m to pass the admission test, I need a teacher.

  7

  Mimi

  My Fruit Is Better Than Yours

  The servant girl is chopping a vegetable of some sort in the breakfast area when I go downstairs to get a drink of water. I think it’s a squash, but I can’t be sure. Everything is different in Pakistan. The cantaloupe I ate last night for dessert was white, instead of the melon orange I’m used to, and the taste was al
most tart. The peaches are tiny; the bananas look like smaller, softer, blacker versions of ours.

  So far, America 1, Pakistan 0. Unsurprising.

  The kitchen is big and airy, with windows on the back wall showing glimpses of the garden. Two stoves are lit, each with a pot of something boiling, contributing to the humid air. The servant girl—her name is on the tip of my tongue—has a long braid tied with a yellow ribbon at the end. She’s wearing a faded pink shalwar kameez with sleeves rolled up in a way that make it obvious her clothes originally belonged to someone else. She’s tied her dupatta around her waist like she’s about to wrestle.

  “Good morning,” I offer in English, before I remember that she speaks Urdu. Grr!

  “Assalamu alaikum,” she says at the same time. I want to shout jinx! but I doubt she’ll understand. She couldn’t catch most of what I was saying the first morning we got here.

  I walk to the fridge and open it. I hardly ate any lunch; even the chicken nuggets were spicy. It’s only our fourth day in Pakistan, and I’m sweating tiny streams from my forehead. Mom says I’ll get used to the heat in no time, if only I leave my air-conditioned bedroom.

  No, thank you. I’d rather get used to the little boxy air conditioner under my window that blasts icy air onto my face when I stand in front of it.

  Right next door to my bedroom is Mom’s, the one she used to sleep in when she was my age. She’s shown me every corner of that room with excitement: the wall where she pinned posters of a boy band called Junoon, the closet drawer where she stashed all her cassettes of Indian movie songs, the balcony she used to sit on reading romance novels in the afternoon while her parents napped. Ew to the last one! I can’t get over how rich she used to be.

  Not anymore, though. In Houston, with me, she’s just . . . average. Getting by. “Starving artist,” she sometimes says jokingly. What a change that must be. Does she secretly hate her life? Does she wish she was a rich Pakistani again? Is that why we’re really here?