Amal Unbound(23)

I glanced at Hamid. He covered a pot with a metal lid and rested his cooking spoon to the side. He gave a small nod.

“But I might not be able to learn,” she continued. “My mother used to say I wasn’t very bright.”

She said it without any affect, as though it was simply fact.

I picked up a butter knife and held it out to her.

“What is this?” I asked her.

“A knife.”

“What kind of shape does it have?”

“Long. Straight?”

“That’s the first letter in the alphabet. Alif.”

“Alif,” she said slowly.

“See?” I said. “You’re learning to read already. I can teach you whenever we have time. It’s not so hard, I promise.”

Her eyes widened. She took the butter knife from me and rushed off to show the cook.

I finished the dishes and wandered out onto our verandah. With Jawad Sahib back, it was empty. Fatima’s words kept coming back to me. Why would any mother say something so cruel?

Something moved in the distance. I squinted. It was a cat. Orange and white. I walked over to where it was stretched out under the sun.

“Peaceful out here, isn’t it?”

Nabila stepped outside and joined me in the garden bordering our verandah. She set down a metal bowl filled with milk on the grass. The cat walked over to Nabila, brushed herself against her, and purred.

“She’s a stray.” Nabila petted the cat. “She wandered over my first week here. Been giving her milk ever since. I named her Chotu.”

“She’s pretty,” I said tentatively.

“She is,” Nabila said. “When I first came here, I sat by those flowers any chance I got.” She pointed to a flush of purple in the distance. “I don’t know their names, but they grew next to my parents’ house. I would look at them, really fixate on them, and for a little while I could pretend I was home.”

“When did you come here?” I asked her. These were the first words she’d spoken to me not laced with malice.

“I was nine years old,” she said. “As old as Fatima is now.”

“To pay back debts?”

“There were no debts until they brought me here.” Her expression darkened. “I was traded in for the price of six goats and a cow for my eldest sister’s wedding. My parents promised they’d come back to get me as soon as they repaid him.”

“They didn’t come?”

“They came, all right. Borrowed more money. Maybe they could have paid it all back, but then there was the money we owed for living here.”

“What do we owe for living here?”

“Don’t you know? Nothing is free. Not the stale rotis, the bed we sleep in. Not for you and me, anyway. It’s different for Mumtaz, Hamid, Toqir, and some of the others. They choose to work here. They get paid for the work they do and can live here or with their families. You and me? We aren’t free. We work off our debts by working here, but the food we eat, the sheets on our bed, and the roof over our head are all accounted for and piling upon the original debt.”

“But that makes no sense. If he charges us to live here, how can we ever pay it off?”

“We can’t.”

I thought of my father. He promised to bring me home as soon as he paid back the debts, but how could he pay back Jawad Sahib if every minute I spent here made the balance higher than the day before?

I sank onto a bench and tried to steady my breathing.

Nabila was wrong. She had to be.

But if she wasn’t, did this mean I would never be free?

My chest burned with the unjustness of it all. Until that moment I didn’t know heartbreak was a real and physical breaking.

“It gets easier with time,” she said. “Look at me. Look at Fatima.”

“Fatima has her father,” I said.

“Hamid isn’t her father.”

“What?” I looked at her. “What happened to her? Why is she here?”

“The youngest of seven girls is what happened to her,” Nabila said. “Dumped her here when she was six years old. Still remember the day,” Nabila said. “She curled up in a corner of the servants’ quarters. I think Hamid must have looked like her father, because out of all of us, she went running straight into his arms and clutched him tight. Called him Baba. Never saw him crack any real emotion until then. He’s watched over her like she’s his own since then.”

It wasn’t fair, I wanted to say.

But didn’t my father always say life wasn’t fair?

Now I understood just how right he was.





Chapter 25





I stepped into the garden as the sun was rising. Flecks of pink and violet streaked across the sky. I’d spent another night pressing Nasreen Baji’s head. She was finally asleep when I slipped out, the dark eye mask covering her face. My own eyes burned from exhaustion. Nabila’s words kept playing in a loop in my mind since yesterday.

A gray sparrow landed steps from my feet. Safa used to chase any bird that dared to land near our house. Omar teased her with a reward if she ever caught one. Until now, I didn’t realize how memories clumped together. Remembering one unlocked another and then another until you were drowning in a tidal wave threatening to sweep you away.