Chapter 8

MARYAM AND THE IMAM

21st Sha’baan 1417

(January 1, 1997)

Never be fooled by how much a woman can take, for half of a woman’s composition, half of her feminine fiber constitutes that moment when she dares to leave a man she loves and the same man who abuses her.

On the morning Queresh lay sleeping, she knew her husband initiated a cycle of violence which could only be broken, not by fixing breakfast the next morning, not by accepting the abuse and then lamenting, not by dismembering his manhood. She responded simply and astonishingly.

She pulled the blinds so Queresh would sleep through her quiet packing. She set all the clocks three hours behind. After her packing, she took money from her husband’s wallet. She carried the baby Imam downstairs. They first stopped by the bank. She withdrew all of their funds from a joint account amounting to some five thousand dollars. She asked for cash, and the bank official presented her with a vinyl bag full of one-hundred dollar notes. The official lent her a telephone and the yellow pages. She found a room on the West Side. She arrived at the hotel tired and a bit confused. She asked for a room with an additional bed where the baby Imam could sleep.

She questioned the abruptness in which she left. She wanted no part of her husband. Her bruises still hurt where he had beaten her. She hurt between her legs. It all happened too quickly, and she searched for reasons to return humbly to the apartment and ask forgiveness. It wasn’t pride which stopped her. An uncertainty kept her in the hotel room. She was near certain her husband would beat her again.

She had five thousand dollars and a small infant. She rushed downstairs and found a local bodega. She purchased baby food and milk and diapers. Not only did she need a job, she also needed an apartment. Most of all, she wanted independence from her husband. But she had no one.

Although the baby was with her, she noticed how alone she was. And within the void of loneliness and uncertainty the mind wanders, not forwards far enough, but backwards, as she asked herself: ‘where did it all go wrong?’

She remembered her father and how he always sheltered her and her small brothers. Then she thought maybe she should return to Surat, as her five thousand dollars would go a long way there. With five thousand dollars she could buy a small house and have her son grow up on familiar earth. Instead she found herself in the middle of a swarming city with swarming people, and of all things she looked like a woman cast down and vulnerable. Nevertheless her will remained strong, and she decided with an obdurate determination to raise the child on her own.

She revised what she knew about her husband. She never loved him but only tried to love him. She had clung to him not for love but for shelter, food, clothing. ‘Is this what becomes of all marriages,’ she asked. Besides an initial attraction and an initial love, do two people woven together eventually use each other as love grows tired, lonely, and cold? She had been arranged to marry Queresh by her father. Is this what becomes of such an arrangement: bare knuckles across the cheek, a penis plunging in and out of her like a knife, cutting and slicing and robbing her of womanhood?

Like the man, a woman also suffers from self-doubt which is more a crime of circumstance. She moved beyond self-doubt in her decision-making. She could see only so far, and instead of the maternal dream of having a home on some clear lake or cooking food for the father and her child, she was locked so suddenly into finding a decent job and an apartment. Sure she had ideas. She wanted to build a life with her son. Funny how dreams remain so simple, and yet to arrive at those dreams one has to cross streams of complexities, seas of conflict and confrontation, and oceans of uncertainty. There is no grander, more illustrious, and more farfetched dream than the simple dream, and most of us, through the course of our temporary lives, save those dreams like ships in a bottle, wasting our time, our years, not in pursuit of our simple dreams, but coping with realities.

On the short walk to the bodega, Maryam saw along the street corner a woman bundled in a torn jacket, a woolen muffler tied around her head. She held a mangled coffee cup with a few pennies at the bottom, her blue eyes, cloudy and dull, looking into the distance of lost dreams, broken and savagely severed, as though her dreams kept her alive while the wind petrified her hands and burned her face. She too had dreams, thought Maryam, and still this woman must be dreaming. Maryam had passed the woman without giving her a penny. She had hardly enough for herself and the baby. Maryam would never know her name or from where she came, only that this woman still dreamt.

She checked out of the hotel and moved into a fully furnished apartment on Riverside Drive after three days. She thought periodically of calling her husband but decided against it. She never forgave him for what he had done. She promised to protect and nurture her child. She remembered what the bavasaab had said about returning the child should she ever separate or divorce. She ignored the order. She wanted the small child all to herself.