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We Were Four

We were four. Like the Pevincie siblings, only we didn’t find Narnia hidden in a wardrobe. We did play hide and seek though, and cricket, and spelling bee. And we all had middle names, something that is not very common in Pakistan, not really.

In class seven, when I read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, I felt like we were the Randall children. Have you ever read it? It’s a wonderful book, and all the children have middle names. Hannah Lucy Randall, Rebecca Rowena Randall, John Halifax Randall, and I cannot remember the rest. Those children lived on a farm by a brook. We lived in Lahore near a tailoring shop and a convenience store. Zohra Sultana Khan, Ali Hamza Khan, Mariam Sabah Khan, and Hassan Hayat Khan. Quite a mouthful to say any of those names, really. They told me mine was the easiest, Mariam Sabah, sometimes Mariam, Maria, Saboo, Sabee, and for a few months, Hassan picked up the habit of calling me MS until Mama had to yell at him to stop calling his sister a disease.

I sat down today to write about us, how we were before everything changed. But somehow my mind refuses to go back to anything before the accident. It is unfortunate, really. We always used to marvel at all the wonderful memories we had of our childhoods, forever frozen in pictures and home videos. It was Papa’s passion, photography, and we were his favorite models. Papa is cold in his grave, too, after the slow unraveling of first his sanity, then his marriage.

I sit now staring at the black and white, eleven-by-seventeen shot nailed to the living room wall. Papa and Mama sitting on the couch, Zee, Ali and I behind them, and Hassy, the baby forever, even at eighteen in that picture, sitting on Mama’s side. It was supposed to be a posed shot with us flashing our expensive orthodontic smiles, but just before the flash, Hassy called me MS and giggled, Mama looked at him, Papa turned to calm her, Zee put a hand on Papa’s shoulder to steady him, Ali nudged me, I laughed, and the camera clicked. What was supposed to be a perfectly posed shot is imperfect but beautiful. Mama has an irritated smile on her face, Hassy looks cheeky, Zee has her hand on Papa’s shoulder and she’s bending toward him, Papa is watching Mama, Ali is smiling at me, and I am laughing at the camera. We did have relatively formal pictures after that, but we decided to mount the honest one on the wall. We were an imperfect family, I suppose, but there was so much love in us. This picture shows perhaps a fraction of it.

Mama comes into the living room now as I write. “Do you want a glass of milk, honey?” she asks. She has forgotten again. I hate milk. “No, Mama, I’m good, thanks,” I say. “Don’t stay up too late, Zee,” she says and walks away. I want to nurture her illusion, protect her mistake. I don’t have the heart to tell her that she is talking to Mariam, not Zee, and Zee was the one who loved milk. I always hated it.

Lately she has been calling me Zee a lot. Before the accident, I felt like I lived in Zee’s shadow. I told her once that I felt like an incomplete poem she had written. She used to write a lot of those, you know? She would start a villanelle and get bored after the third stanza and it would stay pinned on her bulletin board for weeks, sometimes covered by scraps of newspaper, opera reviews, comic strips, and she would unearth it one day after I would beg her to clear her damn clutter off the desk, and she would say, “Look Mariam, I completely forgot about this one. Oh, it’s bloody atrocious,” or “Look Mariam, I completely forgot about this one. There are some pretty good lines in here. Hey, I’m not half bad.” And my usual response to both sentiments was “Oh, shut your face.”

The truth is she wasn’t half bad. She was actually brilliant. I know, you must be thinking I am saying this because she was my sister, but really she was very talented, and rather shy about her work. I always loved it. She used to hound me for comments now and then, and I used to tell her that her work was so lovely that I couldn’t define it in my words. She told me I was biased. I told her she was fishing for compliments. And so the game went on.

And Hassy. My poor Hassy. My baby. Sometimes I round a corner in the house and I catch a fleeting glimpse of a basketball, and my heart shudders. You know how you get overwhelmed with love, and it is as if your heart will just melt, and you feel it jumping down to your stomach? I get that feeling, and I think if I just close my eyes, and turn around he will run down the hall and pick me up into his arms and twirl me around three times and I would yell at him to stop being a silly boy and grow up. And you know, I do close my eyes, and I think come on Hassy, let’s play this game one more time, come on, play with Mariam, play with Mariam Aapa. Oh, he hated calling me Aapa because that meant he would have to acknowledge me as an older sister, and I was really just his buddy, was I not? I whisper into the empty corridors, I whisper his name, call out to him, and there is only silence. I sit down and cry for him then. For him and his laughter and his love for basketball, PSP, his family, and life.

They said when they found them, Zee and Hassy in the carnage of the car, it seemed like Zee had thrown her body over Hassy’s to protect him. He was her baby, too.

I hear a key in the lock. It is 12 30 a.m. and Ali is home early tonight. “Ali,” I call out. “Mariam, you’re still up?” he calls back. “Yeah. Want something to eat?” I ask. “No, I think I’ll sleep. Have an early meeting tomorrow,” he says. “Hey, come in here a sec, and give Aapa a kiss,” I call out without thinking. He comes in, kisses me on the forehead and says “Don’t stay up too late, Zee.” We both realize that in this moment he has become Hassy for me and I have become Zee for him, because I am not Ali’s big sister, his Aapa. Ali is a year older than me and he used to be a year younger than Zee.

I think we have all started living in a daze. Sometimes I call Ali by Hassy’s name, and he replies, completely in character. Sometimes he calls me Zee, and I play the part of his big sister. The truth is we have both become part of the two that are dead. We are the ones left behind, and we have filled the void with ourselves, believing that it is really them somewhere inside of us.

Papa couldn’t deal with the two young deaths. Mama became stone. Sometimes I fear she has lost her mind. I swear I can see her deteriorating gradually, in pieces, like a collage. When Papa started talking to himself shortly after the burial, I thought it was normal. I tried to have conversations with him. I tried to let him talk his grief out. But it was slowly eating at him. One day he started running through the house screaming, “Zohra! Hassy! My children! My children!” Ali had to physically restrain him and I rocked him gently until he calmed down and then broke down like a baby, and sobbed in front of his grown son, who left the room because he wanted to give his father a moment of grace, or perhaps he didn’t have the heart to cry in front of me. He wanted me to know that he was still sane, he would take care of me, he would be the man of the house, now that Papa was bawling and Hassy was dead. Mama just watched us from the settee, father and daughter, howling, our hearts breaking, and closed her eyes after a while, but kept beseeching God because I saw her moving the beads of her rosary.

Papa continued to have breakdowns. One day the convenience store manager brought him home because he had soiled himself in public. Papa had no knowledge or awareness of this. I took his hand at the door and thanked the man. I looked at my father whose strong back and sharp eyes all four of his children had inherited. He was bent between the jasmines in the lawn, plucking the flowers carefully. His pants were wet and he reeked of urine. He extended a handful of jasmines to me and said “Zee, take these to your mother.” He never called me by name again, only by Zee’s. That was the day Mama began to bathe him, and for the next three months he did not have a lucid conversation. He didn’t speak at all after that and died at the end of the year. Mama did not talk to him. To my knowledge they never spoke after Papa started having his episodes. It was as if he was already dead to her. Perhaps she was preparing for his death. She didn’t speak or cry when he was carried away on Ali’s shoulders. I wonder how Ali slept that night. He had already shouldered two coffins earlier that year. He probably became an insomniac after he buried Papa. Even now, I know he lied to me about sleeping. He is probably working in his room.

Zee and Hassy died in an accident on a beautiful spring morning. I still haven’t told anyone except Ali that I talked to them just before the accident. In all likelihood, I heard their last words. Zee was driving and Hassy was on the phone with me. I was telling him to buy some tube-roses for the vase in the drawing room. He was telling me he didn’t give a damn about my stupid tube-roses and that I better stay off the phone because he was expecting a call from a girl when he got home. Then he said “Zee, watch for that truck.” I heard Zee scream “Hassy!” Then the line went dead. When Ali took me in his arms after I had screamed myself hoarse upon seeing their bodies, I kept whispering to him over and over again “I heard them, I heard them. Zee, Hassy. I heard them, I heard them.”

Now Zohra Sultana Khan and Hassan Hayat Khan are buried in the same graveyard. The graveyard is segregated so Zee could not rest beside her baby brother. She is next to a woman named Sughra who died at eighty-seven. Hassy is buried next to Papa or Papa is buried next to Hassy, depends on the way you look at it.

I began writing this because I wanted to remember us as we were before Zee and Hassy got taken away. I wanted to remember us as we were in the picture that hangs above my head. I wanted to remember Papa in his suit jacket and tie, and Mama’s arm around his, and Zee with her beautiful black hair, always long, always curly, and Hassy, oh Hassy, I hope it didn’t hurt, angel. He was never good with pain. I wanted to remember Ali and Mariam when they were just Ali and Mariam, and not proxies for their dead brother and sister. I wanted to remember that we were four, the perfect Khan children. But I ended up getting lost in their absences again. I ended up drowning in this house, where my voice echoes now, because it seems like there is no one living here. I ended up being cornered by death even though I had resolved to commemorate life. Three lives. Zee’s, Hassy’s, and Papa’s.

We were four. Now we are two. And this will never be the story of us, the ones left behind, because our story ended on a beautiful spring day with two young deaths.