Останься, дочь / Stay, Daughter

And all her female relatives Fathuma Aunty judged by a single, unyielding standard: can she read a jam label?

Umma asked Fathuma Aunty to take me to places where it helped to know the language of the Marshazi really well. So it was that my aunt took me to Mrs. Bartlett, the Burgher dressmaker on Middle Street, whose skills even Umma, who was an excellent seamstress herself, held in awe. No one could match Mrs. Bartlett in making replicas of the outfits that appeared in Weldon’s Fashions for All, the English magazine Galle Fort women passed around before Ramazan.

“My mother, you know, never went to places like this when she was young,” Fathuma Aunty told me as she held my hand and walked up the steps to the dressmaker’s house.

This was true. By the 1950s and early 60s, much had changed in the Galle Fort. Hardly anyone now wore the full burkha when they stepped out of their homes. There were even some women, if people could believe it, who hardly bothered to cover their heads at all. A woman would still never sit in the front seat of a car, not even if the driver was her husband or son. But the days of automobiles curtained at the back to seclude female passengers were fast receding. No one would ever mistake a Muslim woman for a Parangi. Not yet. Her dress and manners would immediately identify her as vastly different. Yet, some deep-rooted changes were setting in, and it was perhaps recognizing the threat of the slippery slope that had made some of the traditionally faithful react as they did to what was going on in Rohani Cassim’s home.

“They threw stones at the house,” Kaneema Marmee said.

“People threw stones at your mother’s house?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“They were angry.”

“About girls going to school?”

“That too, probably. But what they said was, they were angry about the piano.”

“The piano?”

When little Thalha Cassim and her sisters went to school, Miss Lucy Vanderstraaten, their teacher in kindergarten, had not only taught them to read, but also to clap hands to “Ring a Ring of Roses,” “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down.” And the little girls, enthralled by the sounds that tinkled out of the big wooden box with ivory keys, asked their father to get them a piano.

This caused a problem since some Ulemas had said music is haram. Even those who concluded that it was permitted didn’t think of it as anything to be encouraged. It was the kind of activity that seduced people into dancing and drinking and all manner of bad behavior; one thing could lead to another and you couldn’t predict where it would all end up.

Music in the Galle Fort certainly came from the Marshazi, not anyone else. Every Sunday, from the Dutch Presbyterian Kirk on Upper Church Street and All Saints on Middle, bells pealed and hymns spilled out into the streets. Alongside the harbor, the grand bands of visiting ships regularly played dance music while crowds stood by to listen. The most religious of the infidels’ songs came too, once a year to people’s very doorsteps. On Christmas Eve, Portuguese carolers dressed in colorful clothes walked the streets and stopped every few yards to sing. While violins played, the young among the spectators intertwined their arms and danced on the streets. Muslim men stood on the verandahs to watch, while their women peered from behind wooden screens.

Perhaps, on such nights, Great-grandfather Cassim carried his daughters out front so that they could lean over the verandah wall and look at the man who turned the Nathal lantern around and around, spinning the images of the Virgin Mary, Baby Jesus and the Star of Bethlehem. Perhaps the little girls got on the floor and twirled right along to these seductive sounds.

“The sounds, that’s what they said bothered them,” Kaneema Marmee nodded. “The piano distracted the pious on their way to the mosque.”

“But the house is so big. You almost can’t hear from one end to another! How could it disturb anyone?” Here again was the uneasiness that had been aroused in me: even when you didn’t think you were doing anything wrong at all, it was possible to get into trouble. What were the rules, and even more, who had the right to make them?

Kaneema Marmee paused. “We were called the Parangi koottam, the Parangi clan. People complained that our women crossed their legs when they sat and carried handbags like nurse ladies. That the men had become London kungees, London brats. But the reason they threw rocks was the music. So they said.”

The changes that were overcoming the community would eventually have happened with or without the prompting of the Parangi koottam. Hardly anyone who lived in the cities and towns in twentieth century Ceylon was able to resist, or even wanted to, the forces of westernization. There were too many social advantages to becoming modern.

For the Muslim women of the Galle Fort, perhaps it was advice from their prophet himself that was hastening change. He had insisted, and not once but many times, that we treat our neighbors well. A generous family – and generosity was a cornerstone of the faith – during Ramazan, shared with the Christians next door a mutton biryani topped with fried raisins and cashews. At Christmas, they received in return a cake decorated in delicate pink roses, frosted over with crystalized sugar. In the inner rooms of her home, a girl said: I’d like to learn how to make icing flowers just like that, and a mother or father, seeing the longing in a daughter’s eyes, decided it was not so outrageous that she would go to a Parangi lady’s house to learn this exquisite art – wasn’t she going out of her home anyway, when she went to school?

There were many advantages, even for girls, to learning the language and adopting the manners of those who ruled the country. All over Ceylon, privileged children were wearing western clothes and speaking English, and the Galle Fort Muslims did not want to be further behind the times than was absolutely required by the rules of the religion.

Our girls could not, like their brothers, go away from home for higher studies, or hobnob with the ruling elite by playing tennis at a Gymkhana Club – that was going too far. But they could take on some Western fashions and manners, and they did. They wore knee-length frocks and court shoes with heels. No longer did they wait patiently while their mothers oiled their hair and combed out the tangles in long black strands. They cut their hair short, stood before mirrors and patted a fashionable bob into place. Under their sarees, women wore a chemise, and their little daughters, under their dresses, bloomers trimmed in Nottingham lace.

Families in the Fort who had once arranged their days around the rhythms of the Islamic year began to keep track of a child’s birthday on the English calendar and celebrated it, too, with a ribbon cake made by the Burgher Miss Jacotin. Soon, a girl was considered a desirable daughter-in-law only if she could make such a cake herself, and only if she could sew a tailored dress after the fashion worn by Parangi children.

Chaperoned maidens in the Galle Fort veiled their heads, walked the back alleyways and dashed across ten feet of road to places where someone would teach them how to make marzipan violets and sew Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, complete with lace collars and knee-breeches. A little Muslim girl setting out on Ramazan day, fitted in a frock that Mrs. Bartlett had made, with an “Alice band” on her head and Clark’s buttoned shoes on her feet, could almost be mistaken for an English child – which was the whole point of being taken to the Parangi dressmaker’s house that her grandmother would never have considered entering.

Because Umma had little experience with the institutions that had become part of her children’s lives, she took Fathuma Aunty along when she needed to talk to the Irish nuns at my school, Sacred Heart Convent. Watching Fathuma Aunty among these white people, I thought she looked more like them than like us. With her very light skin, short hair and lips colored red, she could have been mistaken for the lady in the advertisements for Pears Transparent Soap.

Like the Parangi ladies in the Galle Fort, Fathuma Aunty played “A Maiden’s Prayer” on the piano, and, like them too, hung paintings on her walls. She had done that in the 1930s and 40s when no one else had considered such a thing. This was partly because such decorations were an unknown, foreign custom, but also because people took seriously the preaching of the Ulemas, who had said no one would be tormented in hell more than the painters of images. Fathuma Aunty obviously disregarded their warnings: The Blue Boy, in his satin jacket and trousers, with one hand at his waist and the other holding a feathered hat, looked out into the world from above her sideboard.

Like foreign ladies, Fathuma Aunty called her husband by his given name, which, as any elder among our people would have explained, was not the thing to do. Not at all. The name of someone so revered was not to be bandied about, and when a properly respectful wife wanted attention, she was supposed to say, “Look here,” or “Listen,” or “Are you there?” In his absence, she could refer to her spouse as “The house person,” or “The children’s father,” or just “Him.”

Years ago, women whose husbands were away or dead would come to Great-grandfather Magdon-Ismail, who was a Justice of the Peace, to ask for help with legal matters. As they stood modestly behind a screen to answer his questions, an inevitable one would come up.

“What is your husband’s name?”

“His… name?” the woman would stammer.

“Yes, his name.”

She looked to someone who could answer that question and if no such person was available, went back home only to return with a child in tow. Taking her position behind the screen once again, she instructed a young son or daughter, “Tell the gentleman your father’s name.”

“Zain!” Fathuma Aunty called out to her husband. “Zain!” No matter how many times they had heard it, Umma and her cousins whipped their heads around. When she walked breezily into a room, crossed her legs on the divan and asked, “So how are your hubbies?” they probably choked on their tea.

Nobody threw rocks at Fathuma Aunty’s house as they had done at her mother’s. It had become more acceptable to not hold so rigidly the lines that divided the Marshazi from us. And, in any case, how much could anybody control from outside those boundaries between them and us that people might have crossed in the recesses of their minds? All I knew was that if I had to spend time at a relative’s (and the Ulemas said it was always good to spend time with your relatives), I finagled a visit to Fathuma Aunty’s. I hankered after the books and pictures she owned that had come from across the seas – that seemed the principal enticement. Or so I thought. Looking back, I realize that what drew me most strongly was being around someone who had made an inner journey to a place far from where she had been born, and didn’t seem to much care who knew about that.

Chapter IV

What leads to the forbidden is also forbidden.

Principle of Sharia law as expounded by Imam Malik

Besides the time I spent at Penny’s house, my most frequent dealings with the Marshazi happened at Sacred Heart Convent, a girls’ school established by Irish missionaries. Situated a little outside the Fort, it was the educational institution of choice for middle class Muslim girls in Galle. And almost from the first day I set foot in this place full of people unlike us, I had questions.

Was a nun a girl or a boy? That’s what I wanted to know when I was in first grade. Sister Bernadette wore a dress, which was like a girl. But her hair – I saw through a gap in her bonnet – was short and stubbly, and that was like a boy. So which was it? It was no use asking Wappah, he said he knew nothing at all about the people in my English school. So I asked Penny and she said nuns were girls, definitely.

From Penny, I also learned about the pictures that hung in the classrooms and hallways. The baby in the box of hay? That was Jesus – his mother and father were too poor to get him a proper bed. The man in a brown robe with a sparrow perched on his shoulder? He was St. Francis – who loved birds and animals. Why were there so many pictures of a heart covered in thorns and blood? That was how our school got its name – it was the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When Penny wasn’t around, I tried to figure out a story myself.

I shared her Sunday school books. In The Illustrated Children’s Bible, I discovered Jonah who had gotten himself swallowed by a whale, Pontius Pilate who was a very bad man, and Moses who went down a river in a basket. Soon, I knew exactly how to fill in the coloring pages: the shepherds’ robes in stripes of brown and yellow; the plumes on the Roman soldiers’ hats, in the deepest, darkest red.

There were no pictures in the madrassa where I learned Islamic religion. On Saturdays, during Ahadiya lessons, we sat on wooden benches and shouted out the answers when Razik Nana, our teacher, asked his questions.

Who are we?

We are Muslims.

What is our religion?

Our religion is Islam.

Our voices reached the rafters and bounced off the walls, white and bare except for the splotches where the paint had started to crumble.

Razik Nana continued:

Who is our prophet?

He is Muhammad, peace be on him.

Who is his mother?

Armina, peace be on her.

There were no statues or pictures in the Galle Fort mosque either. Being a girl, I had never been inside, but once, when I balanced my toes on the parapet wall surrounding the outer garden and peered inside, I saw there was nothing except prayer mats: no statues or pictures or decorated glass windows. A single bare lamp hung from a chain in the ceiling and swayed from side to side when a breeze blew through the wide arches.

One day, in madrassa, Razik Nana told us how, when the prophet was saying his prayers in a cave, the angel Jibreel came down from Heaven to give him the Quran.

I knew that angel. Penny had called him Gabriel in the picture where he wore a long white dress, had wings, and a golden circle over his head. He was telling the lady in blue that she was going to have a baby. I wanted to jump up and tell Razik Nana that I knew all about the angel. But if I had, Razik Nana would have swung his cane in midair and made it come down on the table with a “thwack!”

“Haram!” he would have said. “It is forbidden to draw pictures. Forbidden! Angels do not come into houses where there are images. Do not look at such haram things.”

But I did want a closer look at images I only glimpsed from afar. Umma had said I could go anywhere with Penny, except to a church, where, the Ulemas warned, people prayed to false gods. Penny had said that the chapel where the nuns prayed was not exactly a church, and seeing no reason to question her too closely, I promised to help with her arithmetic homework if she would sneak me in.

There was very little light and at first all I could dimly see were colored glass windows, flickering candles, and shiny brass bowls. Up front was a statue of the lady in blue with her arms outstretched and, by a door that led out of the room, a picture of Jesus – he had that golden circle around his head. The large painting showed him with a stick in one hand and a lamb in the other. All around him were groups of sheep, some munching grass, some looking into the distance, and others with their heads turned towards him. They wanted him to look at them, I thought, but he was smiling down at the lamb he held in his arms.

“That’s the Good Shepherd,” Penny explained. The lamb had run away and got lost and Jesus brought him back. Right there, I thought, was a fine story. The lamb running away, Jesus looking all around, perhaps spotting him behind a bush somewhere, and chasing him down, his robe flapping in the wind, maybe those thick sandals tripping over cobblestones. “No! No! No!” Penny said. “That’s not it! Jesus loves the lost lambs best, that’s what the picture is about.”

For weeks after, I tossed that picture around in my head. What did it mean to love the lost lambs best? There was no one else I could ask without letting people know I was taking an interest in the images of a kafir religion. So I figured something out on my own. I decided if I were a lamb, I would run away and get lost every chance I got. There was no point to sticking around and being ignored.

Far different from this educational institution full of Irish nuns was Wappah’s childhood home in Shollai where I often spent Sunday afternoons. Wappah thought it a good day for me to visit his sister where she lived, in their old home with her husband and children. Wappumma was there too until she passed away, when I was about ten years old. My three older brothers Naufel, Sheriff and Bunchy hardly ever came because no one seemed to expect that boys would take time off to make family visits. Besides, they did not have much in common with Marmee’s only son, who didn’t go to the same school or spend time with the same friends. My aunt’s three daughters did not have much in common with me either, but Wappah said I should stay close to them, no matter what.

He never, as far as I knew, asked Umma to come along. Fort ladies who had married outsiders from the towns and villages beyond, generally preferred the company of their own relatives and made only the most perfunctory visits to their in-laws. Ever since Umma, as a bride, had seen Wappumma wipe the rim of a coffee cup with the edge of a saree that had been worn all day, she made any excuse she could not to go to Shollai.

Sunday being the driver’s day off, my father, who had learned to drive late and never took the car out unless he had to, would prepare to get behind the wheel. First, he tightened the belt over his sarong. Then he shook out his handkerchief and cleaned his glasses. Lastly, he slipped off his sandals and put them on the passenger side – he was more comfortable using his bare feet on the pedals – and settled himself behind the steering wheel of our Austin A40.

Our garage, like others in the Galle Fort, was narrow, and the road outside barely ten feet wide. When Wappah lowered the rearview mirror, turned the key, shifted the gear into reverse, and inched out, one wall or the other was usually in the way. He drove back in. Then he turned the wheel all the way around, craned his neck and went back out again. On a rare day, he was able to get the car out on his second try; more often, it took a third or fourth. While he went back and forth, I coughed from the petrol fumes, and our houseboy shouted directions over the roar of the engine.

“Keep straight, you’ll hit the door! No, no, a little to the right!”

“How much to the right? Don’t say a little.”

“I don’t know, just a little.”

“You didn’t warn me about the pillar!”

“I didn’t see it!”

“Move over to the other side. Move over and tell me how much room there is.”

Soon, a group of bystanders, of whom there never was a shortage in the Galle Fort, joined in.

“More to the right!”

“Cut left! Cut left!”

Beads of sweat collected on Wappah’s forehead. He looked one way and then the other, gripped the steering wheel with both his hands and shouted in his gravelly voice.

“You fellows keep quiet! I know what I am doing!”

Sometimes, a wheel fell into the storm drain and a loud, collective “Aiyooh!” burst out. That was the signal for the houseboys loitering at the Lighthouse Street junction to leap into action. “Come, come,” they hollered, as they tightened their sarongs and ran up. “We have to get P.T. mahathaya’s car out of the drain.”

One Sunday afternoon, when I was about eight, a day when I had even more reason to want to set off without much delay, we did. Ten minutes after Wappah had got into the car, it was out of the garage, facing the right direction, and on its way to Shollai.

We made our way down Lighthouse Street, past the tennis courts of the Galle Gymkhana Club, and out from under the main Fort gate. People who knew us smiled and waved, but Wappah gripped the steering wheel and looked straight ahead. Soon, we were driving by the esplanade where boys played cricket in their blinding white shirts and caps, their arms wheeling above their heads. Across from that field of close-cropped grass was the Pacha Gaha, the “liar’s tree” where street hawkers sold medicinal oil they said could cure every illness and amulets they swore could ward off every evil. Wappah never drove by the Pacha Gaha without a long tirade: “Just because everybody believes something doesn’t mean you should too. Fake healers, bogus holy men, and greedy politicians. Liars all.” He slowed down to take a look at these particular set of fraudsters.

“Let’s go, Wappah, let’s go quickly,” I said.

At last, we turned into the main street of the Galle bazaar. I rolled the window down and put my head out. It was coming up now, on the right side of the road between a dry goods shop and a bakery: W.M.M. Salies Hardware Stores.

Nearly everyone had an interest in Salies Hardware in the Galle bazaar. Women bought their kerosene cookers from there, men dropped by for flashlight batteries, and school children came for fountain pens. For some time now, when we drove to Shollai, I’d had my eyes on what leaned against the bi-fold doors at the entrance: a bicycle with the cross bar angled down, steel spokes glinting, and red and blue plastic ribbons fluttering from its handlebars.

“Can I have a bicycle, Wappah?” I asked as we neared the store.

“A bicycle? Why do you want a bicycle?”

“For riding around.”

“For riding around? What? Girls don’t ride bicycles.”

“My friend Penny does.”

“The teacher’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“She’s a Parangi, that’s different. Our girls don’t do such things.”

“But I’d like to. I would really like to.”

“No… everybody will say you are behaving like a boy.”

People raised their eyebrows at ambula kadijas, tomboys, and disapproved of anything that blurred the line setting girls apart from boys. When our drill teacher at school asked us to wear divided skirts, the Muslim mothers wrung their hands – the girls would be wearing clothing separated in the middle, like trousers. Some came up with a design of pleats that went over the waist so that, though it was divided, the uniform looked just like a regular skirt. Umma got me exactly what the teachers asked for because she had respect for schoolteachers and said we should do what they wanted us to. She didn’t care as much as everybody else, I also suspected, about girls looking like boys.

“Please, Wappah. I told Penny I would get a bike,” I held the back of the driver’s seat.

“Why did you tell her that without asking me?” Wappah’s voice was sharp.

I didn’t say anything in reply as it dawned on me that I had to be careful about blurting out what it was I did with Penny.

Wappah looked at me through the rear-view mirror. “Don’t I get you all the dolls you want?”

This was true, he did. My toy cupboard was full of beige cellulite figures that had once dangled from the rafters in the Galle bazaar. We usually got them on our way to Shollai. I had fancy walkie-talkies too from Colombo. “You spoil her,” Umma sometimes complained when Wappah handed over yet another doll dressed in an organza dress, with a bow in her hair. But when I buried my face in a mass of golden curls or breathed in the fresh smell of new porcelain, he smiled and said, “I like to make her happy.”

We were getting closer to Shollai when Wappah spoke again.

“You can’t do everything the Parangi girl does.”

“Aiyo! Wappah!”

“Do any of your cousin-sisters ride bikes?”