This House of Clay and Water

by Faiqa Mansab

How carelessly we used words, thoughtless of the trail of slime and sludge they left behind. Mouth, tongue, teeth, all sullied with the rot of misused words.

Being a Lahori had connotations that people in Karachi understood the most. It translated to narrow-mindedness, ostentation and provincialism.

Sasha walked towards me, carrying the obligatory green shawl people bought at shrines and garlands of the chunky, red-brown beads usually worn by qalandars. She was the antithesis of one. Qalandars observed neither ritual nor rules of religion. Their devotion bordered on madness. They were loners, lost in Love. Sasha looked the wrong kind of lost.

I didn’t say anything. Instead, I laughed loudly, the way I do when someone has been rude and has no idea how obnoxious they’ve been. I laugh to help them, and myself, navigate the moment into another, less-embarrassing one.

‘We hope to drown the murmurs of our paralysed conscience by screaming about other people’s sins,’

The human mind, I could tell her, needed myths to understand its own complexities and contradictions. We made myths to sustain ourselves. Familiar rituals became landmarks to assumed sanity, and the myth of normalcy was established daily. After all, tomorrow is another day. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

To annihilate the Self, mustn’t one first determine the Self ? I didn’t have a Self to speak of. I was an utterance in absentia. I was a forgotten word, uttered and mislaid long ago. I was the word that existed because there was another word that was my opposite, and without it I was nothing. I gained meaning only by acknowledging that possible other.

Maybe that was how we all perceived each other: walking stories to read and discard.

It is afternoon that day as I walk out of the dargah’s courtyard and on to the road. Just outside are at least a dozen flower sellers. Rose petals, rose garlands, roses sewn into the sheets that cover the graves. Green cloth imprinted with Quranic verses in gold, edged with gilded gotta, black cloth with the picture of Makkah, the Khana Kaba and aayat printed on them. They sell all for the devotees.

So when he needed to be petted and comforted, when he needed to be reassured that all his feelings of insecurity, his doubts and fears were baseless, he would come to me like a child, and I would transform myself into an all-giving, all-healing source of comfort. I said everything he needed to hear with single-minded devotion. Only at these times did I transform into something sublime, something bigger and better than him. I had stature, power and a sense of purpose.

I had no mind space to dwell on my offhand cruelty to the servants; I was too busy feeling small, a complete failure who’d never come close to the standards of the people closest to me.

Try and do what is good for him. A selfless woman is the most exalted. Ungrateful wives will fill the maw of hell.’

At times I feel that I am wasting my time in the delusional fantasies of a rejected wretch who has dreams of grandeur and fancies himself special, when he is but a pitiful half-creature.

The dargah was less austere than a mosque; and more human, because it was, in the end, the grave of a man sympathetic to human plight.

Life is faithless. It is death alone that walks faithfully alongside each of us, from the day we are born until the day it finally takes us into its cool, dark embrace. Life is exacting and cruel. Death is calm oblivion. Life betrays everyone while death, without fail, always finds us.

A begum was only a little more acceptable in the eyes of such men because she commanded power through her husband or father. This man didn’t know I was rich; all he saw was a simple burka-clad woman.

The cruellest was this: being a mother. No matter how hard you struggled against it, it changed you, this whole business of motherhood.

Decent women didn’t like sex, his mother had instructed when he’d got married. She’d also said that a man tended to become physically weaker if he had sex too often.

Death was only poetic in books. In truth, it was a frightening reality that claimed without apology, without warning, in a heartless swipe. It was an aweinspiring force, a cataclysmic living power that left its cold imprint on the hearts of those it touched as a reminder of what it had taken from them, what they had so helplessly lost to it.

desire and unhappiness are conjoined twins. He said love is the greatest of desires, ji, and hence it is also the greatest of tragedies. Loving someone is the greatest of burdens, yes? Love carries within itself the seeds of betrayal.

Everyone else ignored me. To have acknowledged me would’ve been rude. A man’s gaze was considered covetous when it fell on a woman, so when they didn’t look at me, they were in fact showing respect.

When he faced me, his young-old face still carried the remains of his misery. Misery that my presence had caused. I had brought this particular misery in his life.

‘There are no greys in his mind as far as women are concerned. Women who love and serve their husbands faithfully are Good Women. Those who don’t possess this single-minded devotion are bad. It’s comical. Or do I mean tragic?’

I could not stop looking for my daughter. I searched for her in the silent spaces that should have been filled with laughter. I watched for her in the emptiness that should have been filled with her presence. I sought her in the void that threatened to engulf me every single day.

Marriages are a trap anyway. They’re just a crutch for control. Behind closed doors and within the sanctity of marriage, violence is worse because it is unnamed, hidden, mute. Doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’

men aren’t strong enough to love. They’re either womanizers or slaves to their mothers.’

When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one its futility, its worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.

Is this how a woman feels, ji? Is this why people say that when a woman’s womb is filled, her heart is never empty again?

Freedom. Freedom isn’t given. It just is. If it has to be given, it isn’t freedom.’

She is my prayer made manifest. She is my redemption and I am her sin. Twenty-three years of exile from love, affection, acceptance, tolerance—all that is good in humanity—that has been my fate. Am I selfish? Yes, I am. A monster who wants her, yes.

Oh, Bhanggi, a hijra is doomed at birth too. But unlike a woman, he will never find shelter from his body in motherhood. No tiny hands will wipe his tears away, no spindly-legged boy will grow up to become her shield and sword against the cruelty of his own father. That is not the lot of us hijras.’

Why did a woman’s body have to be taken by another for her to feel that she belonged to herself ?

and I hoped to God he wasn’t there for his conjugal rights. He didn’t know it, but I had given them away in alms.