Love Across Borders (10 page)

∞

ABOUT
PERVIN
SAKET

Pervin Saket writes poetry, short fiction and
screenplays. She is the author of a children's
series 'Adventures @ Miscellaneous Shelf Four' and of
a collection of poetry ‘A Tinge of Turmeric’. Her work
has been featured in 'Breaking the Bow', 'Page Forty
Seven', 'Kalkion', 'Kritya', 'Perspectives', 'Katha',
'Sampad', and ‘Ripples’, among others. Pervin conducts writing
workshops for children at the British Council and also works with
teachers to integrate stories within classrooms.

Pervin engages with stories that are subversive,
allegorical or give voice to those silenced by history. She is
particularly drawn towards the politics that underlie what is
personal and private. ‘Twelve Months’ was written to explore a
quiet love stretching across volatile borders, hoping to eventually
transcend the boundaries we draw around ourselves.

***

What Kind of Book…

…do you read late at night, undisturbed and
from cover to cover? An Indireads’ novella, of course!

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An Unlikely Romeo

M M GEORGE

Romeo. What kind of a name was
that? When he had first walked into her little shop and offered her
his services as cleaner, deliveryman, general dogsbody, anything,
she had asked him his name.

‘Romeo,’ he had said unblinkingly,
just looking at her with that passive brown gaze.

She had quelled a smirk at the
sheer audacity of the name. Romeo? And this small, brown-skinned
man, looking patiently at her with his ancient eyes? A more
unlikely Romeo it would have been hard to find, she had thought as
she handed him the mop.

But now, as she strived to shorten
her stride to keep two paces behind him, the name irritated her.
She couldn’t have said why, but the irritation persisted all the
way to where they were going.

***

Nafisa had come to the UK as
a young bride of seventeen. She and her family in Pakistan had been
overwhelmed by her good luck at having been chosen by a
vilayati
family for their son. Simply put, she was plain looking.
Her parents had despaired of ever getting her married. It was only
when she reached London that she learnt that it was her cooking
skills that had earned her the ‘Missus’ tag. And she was made to
work hard to hold on to it.

Mazhar’s family ran a takeaway shop
and they desperately needed a cook, a cheap one. UK immigration
rules did not permit them to import a cheap cook from Pakistan, so
they brought Nafisa instead. Nafisa cooked from morning till
evening and then worked late into the night, cleaning up. For
years.

Nafisa hardly ever saw
Mazhar. He did the deliveries for the takeaway. She stayed in the
kitchen. She knew his smell though, from the rough, awkward nightly
couplings that left her sore and hurting. When he was arrested and
then put away for delivering more than just
biryani
to his
clients, she was not really troubled. All she thought was that she
could now, perhaps, enjoy a few hours of untroubled sleep. Till the
day Mazhar’s father summoned her and told her to pack her
things.

“Get out!” he said, tersely. She
had been divorced, he told her. By then, other daughters-in-law had
arrived, the wives of Mazhar’s brothers. She had become
dispensable, a burden, just another mouth to feed.

She wept a bit and then
mused, it could only get better. After all, thanks to her marriage,
she had acquired a British passport. She looked at the gold bangles
on her wrists. She could buy a ticket to go back to her parents in
Pakistan. But she shrugged off the thought. She would no longer be
welcome there. She decided instead to set up her own shop. She
pawned her bangles and rented a small poky little shop in an alley
set off from the main road, as far across the city from her
ex-
sasuraal
as she could possibly manage. There was just
enough space at the back for her to put in a narrow sofa that could
double up as her bed at night, provided the local Council did not
catch on. The day her shop opened, Nafisa sent up a silent prayer
to Allah.

That was when Romeo walked into her
life.

Slowly, the shop had built up
a reputation. At first, it was mainly local people who wanted a
cheap dinner. Then Nafisa found that people were coming back for
the food she cooked. Her
biryani
and
haleem
were very
popular. Romeo was soon spending most of his evening on the rickety
cycle he had acquired, she did not dare ask him from
where.

He seldom spoke. But Nafisa could
feel his eyes follow her as she bustled around the tiny shop. And
she knew when the gaze changed from curiosity, the simple need to
focus on another person, to something deeper. She would be
flattered, she told herself, if only he weren’t such a non-descript
little man. But flattered she was, even if she didn’t admit it. It
had been years since a man had looked appreciatively at her. In
fact, Romeo was probably the only man who had looked appreciatively
at her. She had never been good-looking and the years had added
ballast to her figure.

One night, Nafisa closed the shop
and sat on the sofa in the rear, poring over her accounts. She
found numbers difficult, but once you open a shop, you have to do
the accounts.

There was the sound of a scuffle
outside, loud hammering on the shutter of her shop. Alarmed, she
got up and opened the window to the side. There were two men. And
Romeo. Wrestling with each other. Till Romeo picked up a piece of
brick and aimed it at one of them. The man gave a yelp of pain and
raised his face. Nafisa drew her breath in sharply. It was Masood,
one of her erstwhile brothers-in-law. Romeo picked up another
brick, but the two men decided they had had enough.

“
Hindustani ka
bistar garam karti hai, saali haraamzaadi
!” Masood flung at her silhouette in the window as he and
his companion fled. “She is flourishing on our money and whoring
with an Indian!”

Nafisa put up the shutter and let
Romeo in. “How did you get here?” she asked him.

He pointed to the doorway of
her shop. “I sleep there,” he said. And sure enough, she saw a
well-worn blanket that had been kicked aside in the scuffle. “I’ve
seen them here before. It’s not safe
. For
you.”

“You sleep out in the cold to
protect me?” she asked incredulously, but he had already moved
outside and was pulling down the shutter.

Nafisa sat on the sofa,
thinking deep into the night. Masood had called her a Hindustani’s
whore. Did he mean Romeo was an Indian? Romeo had never given any
indication of being an Indian. She shuddered. Could he be a Hindu?
The thought made her queasy. He had to be a Hindu. She had never
seen him perform
namaaz
. But if he was a Hindu…she
shuddered again as all the stories she had heard about Hindus
flooded her mind. She gazed towards the closed shutter. It held no
answers for her.

Romeo hardly ever spoke. Not
a word. Not when she handed him his money. Not when she handed him
his meals in one of the battered aluminium
thals
that she kept for her
personal use. She supposed he spoke when he delivered the food. But
she seldom heard his voice.

Till one day, he came running into
the shop, terror streaking his face, pulverising it into a
grotesque mask. “Please help me,” he begged. “They’re coming for
me.”

Nafisa turned around from
the
kadhai
, where she was stirring a
dal makhni
, to ask, “Who?” But he
had already slipped behind the curtained area to the rear of the
shop. There was a door to the back, and he slipped out of there.
She heard the door settle back into its frame with a slight
thud.

No one came in after Romeo. But he
did not appear for a couple of days after that. Nafisa had to
refuse all delivery orders.

Then one day, he slunk back, dirty
and begrimed from wherever he’d been holed up. Nafisa studied him
for a moment, then handed him a towel and pointed towards the small
bathroom in the curtained off area.

When he came out, she sat him down
on a chair. “What?” she asked him.

He hung his head. “I’m
a
kachcha
,” he whispered. “I have no right to be in this
country.”

Nafisa did not say anything.
The day took on its usual hues, like countless days before it,
before Romeo had run away. In the evening, when he had washed the
aluminium
thal
, she asked him, “Will you
marry me?”

He looked up at her in
disbelief.

***

And that’s where they were headed.
To the register office. To be married. To legalize his existence in
the UK. Only Nafisa could not shake off the irritation that gripped
her. She should have thought a bit more about this crazy idea. Was
she actually going to marry a man called Romeo? An Indian at that?
She was still trying to measure her pace to his. He might be a
half-inch taller than her, she conceded, but he was not brisk. And
this was adding to her infuriation now.

At the register office, she looked
at the form she was to sign. The form he had already signed. She
scrawled her name on it, then looked at his signature. It was neat
and well formed. Her eyes widened as she took in the name he had
printed below his signature. “Abdul Rasheed?” She looked at him in
amazement. But the registrar was already congratulating them and
she had to bite her lip.

Back in the shop, where she had
taken the morning off in honour of the occasion, she looked at him.
“Abdul Rasheed?” she asked.

“
Now you are my wife,” he
said simply, “you have the right to know.” Then the words came
tumbling out. All the words that he had kept bottled up within him
for decades. He told her of the early years in Sarai Meer in
India’s Gangetic belt, in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Of the
shabby-genteel poverty in which they had lived. Of the sudden
chance to go
vilayat
if a certain sum of money could be arranged. The
years of playing tag with borders. The five years spent as Alpha
Romeo, a name that was slapped on him in the universal tongue that
transcended languages, transcended borders, marking him as cargo.
The cities he’d lived in, but never seen. The privations, the
horrors of that endless journey. Losing hope, losing all sense of
being a person. Till being human didn’t matter any more, all that
mattered were the endless journeys with death lurking at each new
border.

He talked of how he
fin
ally reached the UK, the struggle to
eat, to just keep alive. The homesickness that compelled him to
choose a phone call over his evening meal. And the long, one-sided
calls when the other side buzzed with demands for more money, the
repayment of their investment in him.

And Nafisa listened till he’d got
all the words out of him. Till he was spent, done. Then she got up
and wrapped her arms around him. She had never done that before to
a man. “You are safe now,” she told him.

Safe in that cocoon, he smiled. He
hadn’t done that in a long while. She felt the slight tremor of his
smile against her breasts and murmured, “My Romeo.”

∞

ABOUT M M GEORGE

M M George is the pen name of Mimmy
Jain, whose funny bone compels her to write about her family and
other animals in a blog called Living in the Happily Ever After
(mimmyjain.wordpress.com).

Mimmy is also the author of A
Scandalous Pr
oposition, a best-selling
e-romance from Indireads. When she is not living in her head, Mimmy
edits articles for academic journals and other such boring stuff.
She has been a mainstream Indian journalist for the last 27 years
and has worked in senior positions at publications such as The
Economic Times, The Times of India, The Financial Express and
Mint.

In this anthology, Mimmy has set aside
the joker’s mask to write about the futility of borders in An
Unlikely Romeo. People draw borders, but people cannot be confined
within borders. Borders lose meaning when necessity and despair
draw people together. The protagonists of An Unlikely Romeo, Nafisa
and Romeo, are survivors and, in order to survive, they have to set
borders aside.

You can find Mimmy at
www.facebook.com/MimmyMGeorge.

***

A Scandalous Proposition
by M M George

Ranbir’s shocking proposition offends Mira,
but fate keeps throwing them together…

Available on www.indireads.com

The Long Interval

ZAFFAR JUNEJO

Love can be many things—ecstasy, regret, defeat,
treachery. For me however, love equaled only one thing—a secret,
one that was buried deep inside my heart and devoured me. I sought
to tell someone, to unburden myself as an act of catharsis, but the
secret continued to age within me, and with me. Until last
year.

It all started when my grandson Ratan, who
studies at the Imperial College in London, created a Facebook
account for me. Initially, I didn’t understand the point of
connecting with the same people that I met every day, but over
time, I became addicted.

One day I got a friend request from a person who
called themselves ‘Karachi University’ and whose profile photo was
the Karachi University logo—my alma mater. Curious, I accepted the
friend request and looked through the person’s Facebook profile to
learn more. Unfortunately, there weren’t any details on my new
‘friend’s’ profile. Before I could search any further, the old
computer I was using froze and I had to shut it down. When I tried
it next, it would not restart.