Promise Me, O Women by Sadia Khatri

A deeply moving and measured piece of life writing, which lays bare the experience of abortion and its aftermath. With an arresting narrative voice, Karachi-based writer Sadia Khatri explores questions around gender, ritual, and remembrance amid the refrains of grief.

  I fall into the sound of the men’s black sea. I don’t want the maatam to end. More than anything, I want to be a part of it. A new longing. I feel it first in the edges of my skin. In the starchy stillness of my black cloth. Eventually this black cloth should come off; eventually, all of us should mourn with skin alone. I look at the men and desire their nakedness. If I could stretch myself somehow, become one of the waves of the rising black sea. What does it feel like? Submitting yourself so fully in love, in rage, in remembrance. What does it feel like, wounding yourself towards a deeper body knowledge, in the knowledge that this is your blood’s doing — the night graced, the air charged. This headiness born of repetition. The sea of black moves, and sings, and this is what its song means: the way to grief is repetition. The only way to remember, is to repeat.

  You can’t let a wound close in tatbir. You can’t let it seal. If it seals, how will you repeat? Each cut must land upon itself. Upon its own memory.

  I have no memory of the dead ball of cells, the secret blood. It was probably an embryo, my biologist friend says, what they plucked out of you. Not a lot of blood, hardly a few drops. Most of the blood would have been yours. The procedure involves a thin steel instrument called a curette, used to scrape out your uterine wall. A thing of clean steel, playing God. The talwars flash before me, glinting Gods. I never saw my blood. In the memory of a lack, desire grows. So I wait for the men’s blood hungrily. Sword lands upon skin, and my eyes become the glinting Gods now, taking it all in. Again, and again, the men repeat, wound upon wound, gash upon gash. Don’t let it seal. If it seals, how will you remember? You must repeat yourself to exhaustion. Exhaustion is good for grief. The mind exits. You become all body, seeing the grief through without knowing what it is you see. Moving only to sound. At the sound of the men’s sea, my hands move. I don’t want the maatam to end.

*

  My best friend says I am in a dead-end phase. Another word for it is regression. It means that something is so unbearable that you shut down.

  You have to address the feeling, not the story.

*

  With Zainab it is all about the story. Not just the story she tells, but the story of Zainab herself. Imagine, a woman, at that time and age, carrying all that grief and fire. Imagine now that she has to walk down and face the person responsible for murdering her whole family, keep her composure, let out her anger, echo her father, be rightful and just, be sentimental and proud. Imagine footsteps weighted with all that. And your sons have died. And your brothers have died. And your nephews; and the nephews you raised as your sons. Surely, whole parts of you have died. Each footstep you take is in resurrection of their memory. The stories have it incomplete. It is not the chaadar, nor your wild hair — it is their last words that wound you. Always before someone died, there was a shout, a declaration, a parting sound — some final cry delivered to the sky’s care. Parched, bleeding, grief-struck … what words did the sons of Ali muster? Had to muster? Ali Akbar’s final call, to Hussain: Father, accept my last salaam. These sounds haunt you, wound you, embattle you, as you walk towards Kufa. And now you face Yazid. And you have to open your mouth to speak to him. Have you been thinking, all this while, how you should begin? Your body ringing with their memory. What is the first thing you should say?

  In the name of God …

*

  I am three hours away from home, one year from the grief, and self-tricked miles away from naming the thing. You can see I am having trouble naming things. Let me try again. I am three hours away from Karachi. I am at Bhit Shah, the mazaar of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. I have brought myself here for Ashura. Last year in Muharram, I had an abortion. Last year, my body was hit twice: once, by the stories of the Ahl e Bayt, then by three doses of misoprostol and a D&C. I am not sure what wounded me deeper. The stories that happened, or the ones that would not.

  Every corner of Bhit Shah is lit in remembrance. The blue darbar turns red; surrenders, so easily, to red. Red and black everywhere, and the stories alive. You can’t escape the stories. In the water's cool touch by the sabeel. Under your feet, the rain collecting. The kaafila marching in, the alam high and unyielding. The Zuljanah’s undefeated eyes. The fakirs’ wailing, the azadars beating their hearts, the nohas playing from every shopfront and qinqi. Karbala’s story assembling through sound and ritual.

  I turn towards the heat of the stories, the heat of the marble, desiring some raasta, some door, that will let grief run. But nothing, nothing is making me cry.

*

  You know when an old song, one you’ve known for years, starts fully ringing with sense? A song opens, and it has nothing to do with meaning — only listening. That’s how my body felt when I was briefly pregnant last year. Six weeks, to be exact. Six weeks during which new songs landed upon my body, opened in me. Never, I said to my friends, have I felt so connected to this shell that holds my being. I felt like I was raining inside. Like every cell of me was producing a mind-numbing ringing, the sound of a thousand bells. I felt like — I’d break through with light. Sometimes I did.

  It was also weird those six weeks. I would walk around the apartment like I was tripping, some state of heightened awareness. Feet tiptoeing, body aware of its edges. It knew to anticipate danger. Danger here being the corner of the desk I was about to bump into, or the cat’s toy on the floor. My body would alert and straighten itself even before my mind knew it.

  Instinctive movements: like the palm lifting to beat the heart, when the sea of black sings.

*

  Half of maatam is in the spine’s refrain. Folding in, then rising up. Arms synced in opposition to the person in front of you, the angles made and unmade, the mouths turning together, singing …

  It’s no fun in the women’s section. Women do maatam with less fervour. There’s always a few, eyes closed, head swaying, lost in the ritual and therefore the most present to it. But most women do a reluctant, mechanical rotation of the arm, a slow rotation, and keep their voices low. Everyone faces stiffly one way, towards the men. You have to stand on your toes if you want to see the centre of action, since rows upon rows of men block your sight. In the women’s section, it makes sense to close one’s eyes. To enter the ritual through sound alone, because limbs are always demanded elsewhere.

  For where are the children to go? The men are too busy raising their forefingers towards the maulvi, too busy wounding themselves in remembrance. The women have to remember the children, take care of them, their food, their diaper changes, their tantrums. More than once I wanted to snap at a woman next to me, tell her to keep her child in line. He was climbing up the flagpole, sending banana peels flying onto the floor, and on my head.

  And the chatter. How is one supposed to listen to a majlis with a pile of shrieking children who are not getting along? They keep tussling, flinging themselves at each other, sometimes at me. Some like to stare, a lot. With that guiltless abandon only children have. They are trying to place me, they know I am out of place somehow. I remember what my other biologist friend said. Eyes never grow once outside the womb. Forever remain the same size. So when a child stares at me, and I look back, we are seeing each other’s womb eyes.

  So, this is my lot. If I am to steer my boat towards the divine, these are the arrows of my compass: shadeless quarters, the smell of leftover lunch, and always a crying baby.

*

  Sometimes I think I should just take off my bangles and earrings, hunch my back, and hop over to the men’s side. But I can’t take off my bangles. Jewellery anchors remembrance. A beloved’s memory, a guru’s oath. Other times it is instructive, brings attention to a part of my body. Chokers make me attentive to breath; black thread, to the breath’s promises. When I wear glass bangles, I cannot forget about my wrist. The lightest pressure on it, and they will break. I am beholden to their fragility. Like that thing I carried inside me.

*

  One starts looking harder, I suppose, at what one can. Shadows, paan stains, light flickering. One doesn’t have a clear view of what the men are up to, but one has a clear view, an enlarged view, of the ground. The stains on the marble, the dust, the drops of blood. Freshly fallen, from a distance, you could mistake them for rose petals. You could mistakenly remember, God is seen through the eye of the heart.

*

  There is always a small group getting up to go kiss Ali Asghar’s jhoola. I hover along with them, though I don’t know what I am expecting. I am annoyed whenever a child wants to befriend me but never refuse. One named Rida starts holding my finger and following me around. I let her. When she curls her finger into mine, I am numb. I can’t feel it, but I imagine a trust so final it scares me.

  That thing that I killed, never knew my touch. But it was fed with my skin, my breath, and, I now believe, with all my feelings. I am sure all my feelings were stored in that uneven, growing clump of cells. Because when my cells went, my feelings went with them.

*

  Stuck grief is fearful grief. It doesn’t trust that the world will be able to hold its intensity. So it appears in dreams. Only dreams can contain a grief like that. All Muharram I sleep a lot. My friend says, Yeh thakanay wali raatein hain. I dream of someone I have lost: finally exhausted of the hatred they had towards me, that old fondness is back in their eyes. I dream of a child I must teach to swim: I’m perplexed, not knowing how to swim in deep water. But it turns out she doesn’t need me at all, has already found her way into the sea. Because she never left it. Once, I dream of a baby bird.

  It is the embryo, paying me visits.

*

  There is another dream I have, a recurring one. I am standing before an endless ocean. I long to enter it, I am terrified of entering it. Sometimes it is night: a friend stands knee-deep in the tide, motioning at me, Come in, Come on, but I am frozen. Sometimes it is day: another friend has just come from a swim, her skin luminous with the sea’s song, and I am so jealous.

  The dream interpreter tells me nothing I didn’t know. She says, You are afraid to plunge into the unknown. You want to express your emotions, but you are uncertain how to enter, whether to enter.

  Then she says, But the women in your dream want to help you.

*

  These are the sounds I remember from the six days: Beside Bhitai’s turbat, a woman’s salaam, each word a palm outstretched towards the sky, not in prayer, but in forgiveness of it. The little boy leading a line of azadars in the rain, mouth singing noha, feet splashing rainwater. The opening of sur Kedaro, 'The perfect members of the house of the Prophet have arrived in Karbala', so I imagine Zainab standing mightily above them, in pride, in fear, in wait of their death. The wind around Tamar faqir’s grave, flinging the shadow of the diya towards me, its clear whiplash. The woman at the majlis, 'Everyone does not have the same way of crying'. The aalaps from the sozkhwani at the men’s majlis: how they lengthen time, so you imagine each moment longer, the moment they are singing about, and your imagination knows exactly what to do, it does not tire, because its stretch is the painful but gratifying stretch of remembering, of trying to return to more than what you already know.

*

  I know this of previous grief: the intensity — the overwhelm that takes over when you are mourning is a welcome overwhelm, the last thread between you and the person you lost. The more you feel, the greater the relief that something still chains them to you.

*

  In the Imambargah at my friend’s village, the men move in slow circles around the alam. There are two drums, and the third is the heart. The heart is always percussion. The men spin. The circle becomes a spiral. One hour, two hours, three hours. Through the filigree I see my friend’s gently lilting back, moving forward, backward, hand to heart, away from heart … I long for such a surrender.

  His mother wants to know why I have come. What does the raag make me feel? I don’t understand it, I inform her, meaning the raag, which is in Sindhi, but also everything else.

  Samajh aa jaye ga, she said to me, kindly. You will understand. Raag darya hai. Bharay ga thori. The raag is a river. Can you contain a river in a book?

*

  Grief is not just about mourning a person, but also their metaphors. I learn this from Agha Shahid Ali, the poet who keeps changing everything for me. When I come back from Bhit Shah, I read Rooms Are Never Finished again. Shahid wrote it in memory and remembrance of his mother. It holds his metaphors, but also hers: the story of Karbala, the story of Zainab. And I realise, that in order to mourn his mother, Shahid must also mourn Zainab. 'Over Husain’s mansion what night has fallen?' Husain’s house is also his house.

  I am not stupid enough to be suggesting, to be comparing my grief to Zainab’s, or to Shahid’s, at losing his mother. That is not the parallel I am drawing. I am suggesting … I am suggesting that all grief needs metaphors. Not because metaphors make grief more comprehensible – it has little to do with meaning, actually – but because, in the absence of a thing lost, you need things of the imagination, threads of the imagination to take its place. Nothing real, nothing material, could take its place for you. And all stories are metaphors.

  So perhaps, I want to say to my friend’s mother, I bring myself here because I need the metaphors.

*

  The men clear out of the Imambargah. The women cross the filigree, go in. The cool marble on my feet is a longing met. The tazieh are assembled in a circle around the alam. Are lit up. Now it’s our turn to spin, slowly. The women move, kissing each taziya in turn, kissing the red velvet, the golden gauze. They fill each manifest memory with offerings, with money, with sweets. They lower their foreheads, they pray out loud, lift their heads. And they weep.

*

  My friend’s mother stays barefoot all forty days. On my fourth day at the mazaar, I start doing the same. It is tricky at first. Between rainwater and gutter water, you have to watch out, not with your eyes, but with the skin’s touch. I step on pebbles all the time, gather a few splinters. Ninth day, it begins to feel liberating. I forget I even need shoes. Ground on skin feels like a simple, obvious desire come true.

*

  And the women weep.

*

  On Shaam e Gareeban, the night that is endless and black, the night when it is not important to see anything because all lights are quiet, the maulana – the back of his chair to us – is saying something about the house of Muhammad, Inn ke ghar maut ijazat le kar aati hai, when I realise that the thing I am leaning on is a taabut.

*

  And the women weep.

*

  God light, shining in the distance, my gaze wrung with longing; then the distance dissolved. That’s how a sajda feels. In sajda, I find God. In that touch of forehead on earth, the earth becomes a metaphor: God placing her fingers upon me.

*

  And the women weep.

*

  I categorise colours. Sozkhwani: red. Nohas: black. Majlis, red; marsiya, black. Masaib, red. Maatam, black. Sur Hindi Barvo, red. Sur Kedaro, black. The grief of the woman beside me: red. My own heart: black.

*

  And the women weep.

*

  That man sitting with a rehel and a Quran. Running his fingers across the text, right to left, not left to right. Humming Bismillah, Bismillah … I realise he doesn’t know how to read. Is using sound to touch the words. He does not understand it, but he keeps going.

*

  And the women weep, and the women weep, and the women weep.

*

  It is only on the last day, at the women’s majlis. The darbar red like I’ve never seen it. So red that I realise: it’s actually red all the time, if I look hard enough.

  At the majlis, the red is women’s lament. Women’s remembrance, Zainab’s zikr. We sit, not in rows, but in circles. All during the day I see women circling the one male caretaker, moving with him wherever he takes them, as winds carried by the eye of the storm. Here they became eye and wind at once. Centred around themselves only.

  When their voices rise, I see the red so clearly.

  I don’t know what they are saying. I don’t know what the words mean. All I know is that their message is grief, and their promise eternal. Their song is an answer to the night’s question: Oh yes, we will keep coming here. Oh yes, we will always return.