When the fires rage towards my home, I turn in bed, dreaming of you. You are calling me from your usual place, this nameless airport morphed into a hotspot where all my dreams of you converge. ‘Mein kalli reh gae aan.’ You accuse me in the handle of a payphone, a swarm of strangers blurring past you, you reverting to the tongue of your childhood that escaped your mouth only in pain, war and dreams. How many times will you reach out to me? Where did you find the coins to drop in this payphone that stands in the same place, dream after dream?
Remember the time, when I was walking away from you to board my flight? You had taken my hands in yours – your palms still smooth against your decades-long reign over the kitchen – and whispered in my ear. ‘If a stranger offers you something to eat, say no. No. Say go feed it to your mother. Your sister.’ The index finger on your right hand traced violent circles in the cup of your left hand. ‘It will have something mixed in it.’ A swarm of strangers blurred past you but this advice you had preserved solely for me, your granddaughter. ‘No, don’t say anything. Keep your mouth shut but your eyes, your eyes keep open, and turn away.’ You held onto my hands for moments that stretched beyond themselves; you stared ahead in thin air as if your greengrey eyes were peering into the future and were fearful of what they glimpsed. I reclaimed my hands from yours, and when the time came for a stranger to make an offer, I threw behind my back all those love lessons that you spent your life distilling in me, all those lessons of caution concealed in bite-sized stories so I would swallow them whole without pocking questions through them. I turned my face to the stranger, closed my eyes, and opened my mouth. I knew by then that a kiss could paint a tableau of a bridge in flames.
I woke up today to a yellow-filmed sky, the world on the cusp of an end that threatens to arrive, has been threatening to arrive. The air inside the house is puckered with the images of dead birds on TV; kookaburras, magpies, cockatoos, eastern rosellas, and lorikeets, their wings charred and their small bodies limp, washing up on the coastlines of this continent down under on the righthand side of the map.
I bought a map a week before my departure, just for you, so you could see the route I was to embark on for yourself. You traced a finger between the Indian subcontinent and the Australian continent in a straight line, the shortest line you could muster, and asked, ‘Saat samunder par?’ I was impatient with you, with my time, with this map that I knew to be a bauble even back then. The eighteen-year-old witch that I was conjured a wall between us with the flick of my tongue, forgetting that you were the one who taught me my first words. ‘Not seven, Nani, only two. I’ll cross only two oceans.’ I replied in English and went on to fold the map in a half and then a quarter of its size till it rested like a glossy envelope in my hands. I knew words were surging up in your throat by the way the loose skin in the bend of your neck first constricted and then expanded; I knew, by the worried creases on your forehead, that your mind was racing through the distance between two languages. You said in English, finally, your words exclaiming, look, look, we can still measure distance in the same tongue. ‘Far far away,’ you shook your head, ‘long, long time.’ I was quick to sniff the smoke rising in your words and stubbed the conversation to an untimely end. ‘I’ll be back soon, Nani, I promise. Just know that I’ll be back, and be happy.’ So desperate was I to escape I didn’t realise then that I was setting down the sole clause of a pact according to which your happiness hinged upon my return.
The news people are announcing on repeat a mantra suffused with an English lilt in their mouths, that the fires haven’t gorged themselves on the rainforests like this in over half a century. When the yellow haze first rolled in, I pinned my eyes to the lambent blue of the mountains on my horizon; I held onto the linear trajectory of my hope. ‘Euc trees regenerate over time, Eucalypt trees regenerate over time, Eucalyptus trees regenerate over time,’ I chanted to Ali each time our paths collided until, one day, he pierced his silence to make room for me to shelter in it with him. ‘Rainforest trees don’t regenerate, Jahan. A fire like this, they burn to nothing.’ Ali, my husband, the keeper of books and stars and horses, the bearer of good news; Ali, who had the heart to handle the stick after I had pissed on it, the spine to read the pink lines on the pregnancy test when I closed my eyes so tight the world turned black. Ali had ceased looking towards the horizon long before the luminous blue of it became a mock memory.
Mornings dawn like the colour of old bruises and Ali drives away from the house for over half an hour to reach his farm and spend the longest part of the day with the horses. Colo River runs by the farm, Nani; I know you heard me when I told you about it even as you played deaf to the serendipities of my life away from you. The river runs wild; it is generous and bestows enough water to quench the thirst of the twenty Arabian horses sweltering in the paddocks. But Ali remains fretful over the animals’ lives. He has abandoned his study; his books with medieval diagrams of planets and astrolabes, and complex scribbles in the margins, now lie closed on the bookshelf. The assortment of bookmarks some of which I’ve gifted him – a peacock feather with an indigo heart glowing faintly against the dust, a scrap of paper with Ali’s hastily drawn selfportrait that I had had laminated, a bamboo stick with a lion head carved at one end, a lanceolate leaf browned and brittle by now – are all stacked on top of a neat pile of papers on one corner of his desk. Ali’s study has taken on the air of a bookshop, ready for sale. At night, I glimpse the light of Ali’s phone reflected on his face, cool and mercurial in the dark, and I know he is scrutinising the screen for any hints of flames on the distant cam that streams live images of the farm on all four sides. The horses smell war in the air. All through the heavy nights, they stand guard, their hides damp and their foals huddled close against their flanks, bracing for the moment they must gallop through flames. Gone are the days when the horses tossed their manes in the air, strutted from one end of the paddock to the other teaching their children the graces of their kind; gone are the nights when they staged fights amongst themselves. Last night, I worked four fingers under the neckline of Ali’s vest, hoping for his heartbeat to punctuate the silence that lay between us.
In the evenings Ali returns with mercy hedged in his arms; small water tanks from the only gas station still operating near our house. Perhaps the water supply would cut off soon. But listen to this, Nani: yesterday morning Ali stepped out in the slow simmer of the early dawn with a cardboard box to his chest. He squatted down and retrieved plastic boxes and styrofoam cups from the box, blackened pans and pots, glass vases and ice trays and lined them up on the ground before placing each container, one by one, under any wisps of shade that he could locate. He poured water into his makeshift bowls to the rim. I watched him from the window, darting between his bowls, my mind still numbed from the countless painkillers I ingested the night before.
Remember how you and I lined the boundary walls of the house with candles on Thursday evenings, Nani? You said the dead returned to their homes on Thursday nights and the candles served as signposts, illuminating their passage between this world and the other. You struck the first match, and lit a single candle. Then you handed it to me, the flame flickering, to ignite the rest. I lit each candle, imagining a greying bulk of a man, his outline set in rot, floating towards our house with its borders lit up in trembling flames.
Thursday nights, between tosses and turns, I sensed my bed empty of you. I burrowed deeper under the heavy quilt, imagining the ghost of a grandfather I knew only in the stories you told me of him. My sleep-gorged eyes caught glimpses of you, your silhouette standing and bending in prayer, your whispers threading through the dark, and wished for your return. One Thursday evening, sitting by the window, my chin pressed against the study table, I watched you outside, fiddling with the candles in a plastic bag. Something caught in my throat. It felt like I was gagging on a slick strand of hair. I now know it was pity I felt, razor-sharp in its precision, unlike all the other nameless emotions I had begun to feel for you; I’ve written enough term papers on Hamlet to know about the denial of death in all its metamorphosing forms. That day, I jolted out of my chair, grabbed the curtain, and drew it shut so fast it hissed. It wasn’t long after that I invented math tests scheduled on Friday mornings, a small lie I told to put an end to my part in our shared ritual.
Today, Ali walked out in the dawn with the look of a man walking to war, his mop of black curls plastered to his neck. Outside, all his water bowls were cracked and dry, their rims warped by the heat, and not a flutter, a whistle, or a hum in the trees. The news people in the background rasped their way through the numbers on the screen: 16, 17, 18 million hectares, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 buildings, this many thousands of homes, that many millions of lives, all burnt to nothing. Ali walked back in, the silence a new language we are still learning to speak. He cradled two giant-sized bottles in his arms, the ridges pressed into his skin. Around his neck, a turquoise rhinestone Pegasus hung on its silver chain, still. A child’s plaything, a cheap trinket, given to a grown man by his wife as his wedding gift. I wonder if he felt my gaze tracing the outline of the Pegasus on his skin.
Amidst the carnage: hope. A koala, grey coat scalded to the skin, rescued on the screen; a joey tucked inside the singed pouch of its mother, one of the two, still alive; a flutter of a wing, like a sudden eye blink, in a wave of dead birds washed ashore. I climbed off the sofa that overlooked the front yard, ignoring the flint of pain that shot through my pelvis. I walked out on soft feet. From those days after my miscarriage, I remember one thing with clarity: sitting on my bed, knees drawn to my chest, rolling the leftover eucalyptus seeds in my palms, the way you would roll the beads of your tasbih on Thursday nights, invoking the name of Allah on each bead, praying for a visit from your dead.
You will believe me when I tell you this: eucalyptus seeds are tricked into life. You saw room for life where others saw only brick and mortar. Once the seeds escape their pods, they are kept in a cold and wet place, inside a make-believe botanical womb, before they are returned to the soil under the earth’s natural heat. The shift in temperature translates into a false spring, lures the seeds to crack open; without this deception, the seeds refuse to sprout into life.
I was sitting on a rickety chair in a small nursery an hour’s drive up in the Blue Mountains, nursing a cup of Earl Grey tea, when this snippet of knowledge made its way to me. It should’ve been a quick trip to pick up an aloe vera plant and a few blueberry shrubs for my backyard, involving no cups of tea or shoddily wrapped candies. But Ali had come along, and like most of his encounters with strangers, he was treated like a friend. The conversation became one between men, their words swelling in the air. Perhaps the owner caught on to my silence, sensed my resentment watching Ali’s attention stray. He excused himself, disappeared into the shed, and returned holding a small, home-sealed pack of seeds. ‘Here you go, doll,’ he said, extending the pack. ‘These are native plants – eucs. Bush fires and all, they regrow on their own. They’ll take a while but I reckon you’ll have koalas feeding off them in no time.’ The word doll made me flinch. He winked, chuckled, pink spreading outwards from the bridge of his nose as if he’d said something clever. His palm smoothed over the wisps of sandy hair clinging to his scalp, his bright blue eyes fixed on me. I held his gaze. He shifted his eyes to Ali, who leaned forward, ready to listen, and the man launched into a tirade about native trees in native soil, about the menace of exotic plants, about the need to cull out weeds before they took root. I sensed Ali’s dark eyes on me when I placed the bag on the table, and left it there.
It wasn’t until I asked to use the toilet, and the man led me through the doorway to his house that he shared with his ailing father that I decided, on a whim, to clear a space in my garden for a tree that would bring itself back to life.
Inside the toilet, my eyes roamed over the clinically clean white tiles: a sturdy sidebar fixed in the wall next to the seat, ready to bear the weight of a body too fragile to lift itself, a packet of denture glue in the toothbrush cup, adult night incontinence pads peeking out from beneath the sink. I caught a whiff of a salty stench rising from the pile of clothes spilling out of the laundry basket in a corner. My stomach flipped, and I shot out of the toilet, wiping down my unwashed hands on my thighs. I was shaken by the bluntness of age, by a phase of life that self-terminates.
Beneath the canopy of vine leaves, I paused, reaching out for the pack of eucalyptus seeds. I slipped it into my bag before Ali noticed. Later, as Ali loaded the back of our ute with the potted plants and I was about to step into the cab I heard the man call out, ‘You need animal guts! Ox hearts. Sheep livers. Go see the butcher, get fresh goat blood. Mix the blood with soil, and you’ll have yourself a living garden.’
You would lecture me that it was too soon to tell people. That a devil appoints itself to a woman in the first three months of her pregnancy; the devil plays tricks on the mind of the would-be mother, makes her careless of the words she speaks, and attracts the evil eye from all those who hear the good news. I didn’t tell the man from the nursery; you know how I sit like a snake on things that belong to me. I didn’t even show yet, but when he spoke of the animal gore, my hands fluttered to my belly. He saw, the small gesture, and congratulated me.
I hadn’t picked out colours for baby blankets or begun to prepare the nursery, but I confess to you, Nani, that I did start nesting in my own way. I took half the eucalyptus seeds from their pack and wrapped them in a damp cocoon of tissue paper, tucking them into the fridge like eggs. A week later, I planted them under a warm bed of soil in the backyard. Every dawn and dusk, I watered the seeds and after all had gone to shit, when the red storms in my mind refused to relent, I knew Ali would tend to the beginning of my tree. This morning, I went to the backyard, looking for life. I looked for a shoot, a soft stretch of green leaves, but all I found were dead leaves crumbling into nothing. I pulled my lifeless mane in a bun – no, Nani, I don’t oil my hair anymore – gathered the hem of my maxi dress, and squatted through the pain lodged in the gutter of my spine, thick and red, still pouring out of me. My fingers pushed through the dirt, bare and desperate, searching for the roots, any tiny tendrils spelling life. Eucalyptus trees regenerate, I whispered to myself, a chant, a plea. But all I unearthed was soil turned to sand, crumbling between my hands. This is what I learned: life needs roots to regenerate. Perhaps, there are no tricks to spring.
The day you left, your final day, I heard gunshots in my sleep. I had spoken to you on the phone a month before your death. ‘Your cats gather at my window and cry the whole night. It’s a bloody circus here. Not a wink of sleep I get.’ You had accused me in your phlegmy voice, a rising crescendo, trying to trick me into believing that it was the cats and not the pain in your left breast that kept you awake. I remembered the cats, their incessant yowling in heat, and this time, instead of changing the topic quickly, I smiled. ‘Nani, did you throw your chappal at them or not? Don’t be stingy. Throw the chappal, they won’t take off with it.’ I laughed to myself, imagining the mob of strays that fought late into the night, that pissed persistently on the boundary walls of the old house, gathered in a coven on your windowsill. But then, as if the streets were listening, and despite all the water and all the land and all the years I had trenched between myself and you, terror came at me from outside the window of the old house, and like an ancient curse, blazed through the cables across thousands of miles, down into my feet, making my soles buzz as if they were burning. I cut the call short, shoved the mobile phone down to the bottom of my bag, closed my eyes for barely a breath before scanning the street for something ravenous and prowling.
It once came to this: Tell me its name, or I’m going out to see it for myself. You cuffed my wrist with your craggy hand. Out spilled the litany of all the names of all the things you thought I still feared: A big, bad wolf, a two-headed snake, a balding hyena, a beast dropped from the sky, an earthquake, a devil with red bells around its neck. Your words were steady, steeped in the old stories, but my eyes flicked to the window, unafraid. I was too old for easy monsters. You rattled through your drawer with one hand, the other hand still gripping my wrist like a vice. You pulled out a newspaper, moved through its pages with reverence. Your voice shifted, low and deliberate, the tenor you reserved for curses and prayers. You gave the thing new names: A girl’s body found in the rubbish bin, another clubbed to death in a deserted street, a woman acid-burnt to the bone in an open drain. ‘These are not names, Nani,’ I screamed in frustration, my chest expanding and then constricting rapidly around the fear I pretended not to feel. I jerked my wrist free. Sometimes, I look down at my wrist, and wish for a scar to circle it like a bracelet.
When the call came from Pakistan, at last, I had imagined it so many times in the last few months of your life that I picked up the phone and said, ‘Is Nani dead?’ the words uttered in English civil, posing at an amicable end. Only when Jahangir’s yes reached me from the other side of the world did I ask in Urdu, ‘Mar gaen?’ the words, this time, careening out of my chest. I was certain of the end, had been certain of it all those nights after your first heart attack when I was still a child, and I tiptoed to your bedroom door late at night and trained my eyes on the rise and fall of your sleeping belly. And yet, when the time came, I didn’t return.
‘For fourteen days, choose an object, person, feeling or experience with which you feel you have unfinished business,’ the facilitator at the grief circle had said. ‘You write to it. You write and write and write. And when you’re done, you don’t back-read the letter. You burn it.’ She droned on, her words smooth, second-hand, but I had gasped. The thrice-repeated command to write had me transfixed, had my mind sprouting into words. ‘I could never do that,’ I had whispered to myself, some sense of blasphemy rising in me.
I tore up a letter addressed to you in the late hours of last night; its shreds looked at me accusingly. We never spoke to each other in written words; that’s not how we do it, you would’ve exclaimed. I gathered the shreds, took them out to the backyard, stood under the jarrah tree, and set them on fire with a lighted match. The brief fire burned incandescent at my feet. We live our lives, speak our stories, you would’ve said, while the angels stand, one behind each shoulder, transcribing everything in our books of deeds. I dug a grave and tried to bury the ashes but some of the flakes escaped and ghosted into the night.
It’s been ten years since I last saw you, six months since you snapped your eyes shut, and died on me. Every night since my miscarriage, my hands scuttle to Google Maps, typing in your new address, my gaze searching for the red dot marking the graveyard where you rest in your manzil. The dot pulses like a heartbeat, posing the question I can’t dodge in your death.
I know that graveyard. I know its bustling business of fuchsia roses and doll-sized jasmine heads, its white marble slabs turned murky with smoke trails from incense; a city of settling hot breezes in the summer and dense fog nipping at the mourners’ ankles in the winter, a city guarded by satiated kites soaring in graceless circles overhead, and below, ravenous black dogs nosing through the tall grass for wayward human bones. This graveyard is its own country, a nation dedicated to the dead.
For a living I teach children how to write stories in this English-speaking country. Story, perhaps, is the only English word I’ve found whole, unsullied by insufficiency; it conjures the other word house, one storey stacked upon another, a staircase spiralling between them. Perhaps, that’s what I’m trying to do here – to build a staircase out of words, to climb towards you to the sky or descend into the grave and lie down beside you.
Many of these stories are old and I’ve told them to you before. Each telling a way to mend the gashes in memory, each telling a chance to colour the details that won’t hold. Each time, a new furnishing, a new nail to pin down the wings of a truth that flutters just out of reach. I remember how you read the Quran in the light of a lamp in your darkened room. Not for the stories, which you already knew in translation, but for the meaning, the way it shaped itself differently each time, revealing something new in the familiar. The ritual, the rhythm, and the sleep that followed – deep and undisturbed.
I can tell these stories endlessly – one after another, threads that fray and drift apart – and still wonder how the angels would write them in my book. Still, hope for a different conclusion, as though the telling itself might bind their shape into a whole, as though this time, the story might save me.
It was here, in this half-way house of a country, on a library floor that smelled of bleach and old glue, that I read Fitcher’s Bird in a book and found the origins of a story my mother once told me. The bird who slathered herself in honey, and stuck feathers to her body until she was something new. These stories lulled me with their false security; they taught me how to look for clean endings, how to believe in the tidy miracle of outwitting fate. But your voice came back to me, low and final: These are not our stories.
You used to say ishq and mushq cannot be concealed, that love and perfume will make their presence known but the air I breathe today is rank with dead things. I know the public school is shut down indefinitely, but I don’t hear the thwack of the nine-year-old boy’s ball next door. The cobwebs under the jarrah tremble in the hot breeze; there are no beetles snagged in the webs today to rescue. The spider has abandoned its home. The birds have flown off, seeking cooler places to nest. All the butterflies are torched to trash, and the bindies, once thorny and stubborn, are scorched clean along with the grass. And still, Ali walks the yard, pouring his denial into makeshift bowls of mercy.
Pity rises in me, for him and myself, and for the ghosts of the lives we lay signposts for.
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From What Kept You? by Raaza Jamshed. Used with permission of the publisher, Giramondo Publishing. Copyright © 2025.
