Honor

by Thrity Umrigar

“My body did not die the night of the fire,” Ms. Mustafa says. “But my life ended then.”

Smita Agarwal looked out of the car window onto the streets of a city she had once loved, a city she’d spent the last twenty years trying to forget.

“Sure. Definitely. But I’m trying to make you understand something. That your Mumbai isn’t the same as my Mumbai.”

“No,” she said slowly, her eyes fixed on the older woman’s face. “But is this how you Indians treat your children?”

She had been a journalist for too many years to not know how easily people made excuses for their past misdeeds. Nobody was the villain in his or her own life story.

Every time there was a mass shooting in America, for instance, there was a rush to label the shooter a crazed monster, rather than place him within the context of a culture that fetishized guns.

“To set a precedent. To issue a warning to the next bastard thinking of burning alive a woman. And hopefully, to lock these monsters up forever. That’s all. Not to improve Meena’s life. She knew this when she agreed. And that is why she’s the bravest woman I know.

“This poor woman,” he said. “Her . . . those scars. Her face looks like a map or something.” That’s it exactly, Smita thought. Meena’s face was a map created by a brutal, misogynistic cartographer.

Everywhere she went, it seemed, it was open season on women. Rape, female genital mutilation, bride burnings, domestic abuse—everywhere, in every country, women were abused, isolated, silenced, imprisoned, controlled, punished, and killed. Sometimes, it seemed to Smita that the history of the world was written in female blood.

Anjali was the one who came to the hospital to give me the news that Abdul was dead.

And Anjali was the first and last person who said that loving Abdul was not a sin that I should be punished for.

Besides, my neighbors said, how could I win against my brothers when nature had made it so that no woman can prevail against the might of a man?

So Anjali told me something I didn’t know before. She explained to me how steel is made. Steel, she said, is forged from fire.

“What to do, seth?” she said. “With my own eyes I watched my son burn to death. Every day I ask God why He didn’t pluck my eyes out first before letting me witness such a heartbreaking sight.

What a fossilized country this was, with its caste and class and religious bigotries. Smita took in Meena’s disfigured face and knew that her distaste for these customs was itself a sign of privilege. Did she really think India had changed so much just because she herself had managed to escape it?

“Man plans and God laughs.” Papa used to say this all the time.

And it seemed to me that everything—every stalk of wheat, every stone on the ground, every bird in the sky—had its place in this world. Except me. That my true home was inside this loneliness.

“You ask them why they did such evil. Why they stole the only sun in my sky.

Radha took my hand and held it to my breasts. “Feel those two mangoes,” she said. “Do these grow on a man’s body?”

Because traditions are like eggs—once you break one, it is impossible to put it back inside its shell.

“Yes. After a week in the hospital. His pastor-father refused to visit him because that would’ve meant ‘condoning’ his sexual orientation.”

wtf

But memsahib, when the crops in my field go bad and don’t give the good-proper yield, you know what we have to do? We must burn the fields to the ground. Then, the next year, the crops grow back stronger. That is what had to be done—the land had to be cleansed. I just regret that two of the crops are still growing.”

Today I know the truth: The true color of the world is black. Anger is black. Shame and scandal are black. Betrayal is black. Hatred is black. And a roasted, smoking body is Black, Black, Black. The world, after witnessing such cruelty, goes black. The waking up to a changed world is black.

Fear and hatred have turned my heart black. But with his love, Abdul wrings my heart clean every night. His love. Abdul’s love for me.

Years ago, a Christian priest visited our village, telling us tall stories about a man and a woman and an apple and a snake. Radha and I went to the meeting because they were giving free ice cream, but we left early after we realized that the priest was talking rubbish. Why should the woman be punished for eating an apple? Or for taking it back to her husband? This is what women are supposed to do—share their food. “Didi, instead of blaming her, the husband should have been happy that his wife shared the fruit with him, na?” Radha said. I agreed with her. But after Abdul died for my sins, I understood what the priest was trying to say. I should never have taken a bite of that mango.

He gave me such a long, sad look, it ruined my heart. “I wish. I wish I could find her. But it is too late. Because from the first minute I saw you, my heart was in your hands.”

I thought: Are Abdul’s hands Muslim? Are his fingernails Muslim? Is his skin? What made him a Muslim? What made me a Hindu? Just the family I was born into?

“It’s nothing,” Meena said. “These scars are nothing. It is these scars that gave me the four months of happiness with my Abdul.” “What do you mean?” “They are what gave me the courage to run away.”

I will have the peace to do the only thing that brings me peace—dream of my Abdul. It is only in my dreams that I can still see his face properly. He is beginning to fade from me, like the moon rising higher in the sky. I am ashamed of myself for such faithlessness. What kind of wife forgets her husband?

Because a woman can live in one of two houses—fear or love. It is impossible to live in both at the same time.

As the smoke rose from my hissing feet and just before I fainted, I said to myself: I am a woman who has walked on fiery coals and lived.

I looked up to see Abdul running toward me, calling my name, running zigzag, his arms opened wide, like the protective wings of a giant bird. A big smile on his face that called me home.

Zeenat nodded, her twelve-year-old face flooding with comprehension. She would always mark this moment as her initiation into adulthood—the knowledge that only anger could cover up her brother’s humiliation and shame.

The children, too, had learned firsthand the limits of their father’s ability to protect them. Sameer, especially, was furious at his father: for his chosen profession, for his foolhardy area of scholarship, for leaving them at home alone—and most of all, for the abject way in which he had fallen to his knees and begged for mercy.

Maybe he can do in death what he couldn’t do in life: save me from the devils I must face in court.

For a moment, in the flickering light of the torches the men carried, she thought she saw a large, bloodied creature they had killed for sport. And yet, she knew at once that it was Meena. Meena.

Abru was crying for her mother. But she was staring into Smita’s face.

But as Cliff had reminded her, it was a fine line they walked between journalism and voyeurism. Poverty porn. Is that what she did, ultimately, in her travels to the far-flung places of the world—sell poverty porn to her white middle-class readers back home?

Grief was the great leveler. The dark stripped them of language and inhibitions and doubt. They clung to each other in this fashion, each pulling the other in.

“Everything okay?” Mohan said quietly, looking straight ahead, and Smita knew that he was aware of her agitation. “No,” she said, pretending to misunderstand his question.

“I’m sorry. You have to remember, this is what I do for a living—solve problems. And somehow, I can always figure out the solution. So it’s easy for me to think that life is just another puzzle to solve.”

But then she looked down at the coffee stain on her pants. She had been burned. A girl named Meena had knocked hot coffee on her pants and burned her.

Home? Had she just thought of Mumbai as home? The city that she had resented and feared for most of her life? A city filled with evil men like Sushil. But then, she argued with herself, hadn’t the same city also coughed up a Mohan? Hell, hadn’t it birthed and shaped the bones of a good and honorable man like Papa? How could she have let a man like Sushil blind her to this essential truth?

“It’s okay,” Smita said. “I—I am leaving.” The woman looked at her, confused. “Leaving, madam?” she said. “The plane will be departing soonly.” “I know. But I will not be on it.” Smita turned around, then looked back. “Give Meena a kiss from me.”

“Home. I’m going home.”