Ameera was told she would leave prison today. She signed wherever the female Dubai prison official asked her to, scribbling her name down in Arabic, her hands trembling. Then she found a chair and sat down wordlessly. The clock on the wall across the room read five minutes to six. They had informed her yesterday that officials from the Indian embassy would come to see her at six.
Beyond the undrawn curtains the sun was beating down hard. Summer. It wouldn’t grow dark till 7.30. She looked at the telephone on the table and almost instantaneously banished the thought. They certainly wouldn’t allow it. What if I get into trouble for asking to make a call, why mess it up just as I am about to leave? She tried to resist the thought again. But she just could not stop thinking about her five-year-old, Saif.
Even as her fingers worked the tasbih beads, her mind was racing. She didn’t know what the papers she’d signed said she couldn’t read. She knew just about enough Arabic to sign her own name. Was the woman official right? Was she really about to be released? Had her mercy petition been accepted? Had the Indian embassy official who’d been trying to have Ameera released been successful? She had no way of knowing. She slipped back into prayer.
When she had been sentenced, he was just a year and a half old, and in the four years she had been in prison they had let her see him just once. He might even have started school by now. Did he remember his mother? Would she ever see him again? When? Maybe one day, as a grown up, he would come looking for her. She felt her stomach churn as she thought more and more about what might happen. “Ya Allah,” she sighed.
As she sat there weeping, unable to even wipe away her tears, eyes trained on the floor, they called out to her, those Indian faces. That salwar-kameez-wearing person with the big-bindi-on-the-forehead face, the one who’d fought hard for her release. Payal Sharma, who had come to meet Ameera countless times in prison.
“All that praying of yours was not in vain, beti. Today’s your release. You’re going home to Madras. Ready? Shall we leave?” Payal said in Hindi, smiling. Ameera, still in tears, hugged her.
“Shukriya,” she finally managed to say.
Ameera got in the car and turned around to look at the prison she had been lodged in, punished for no crime of her own. She couldn’t believe she was free, just as she had begun preparing to be sentenced to death. Then she grew agitated again. She wanted to see Saif one last time.
Who could she ask though? She remained quiet instead. She looked out as the vehicle moved through Dubai’s busy, busy roads and reached the Indian embassy. A few people at the entrance turned around to look at her as officers rushed her into the building. Inside, another officer was ready with all her paperwork.
“Your papers and your ticket are in here. We will go straight to the airport now and will leave you after we hand you over to the officers there. They will be with you until you are seated safely inside the aircraft. Once you reach Chennai, our colleagues will receive you and do everything they can to help you. You don’t have to talk to anyone about anything,’ he said in Hindustani.
Ameera nodded, still speechless. Just then, another woman about Ameera’s age entered the room looking utterly flustered. Her face was red, she must have cried a lot.
“Mohan Sir, is my duplicate passport ready?” she asked in Tamil, and Ameera turned and looked at her. How long it had been since she had last heard Tamil. When the officer asked the other woman not to worry in that familiar tongue, Ameera finally found her voice and asked if she could make a phone call. Tamil, an informal dialect, with hints of Urdu, from a woman who could pass as an Arab, that’s how fair Ameera was, veiled in black – the entire room turned to look at her.
“My son, he’s only five, my baby. Before I go back home let me see him once,” Ameera asked, her voice breaking, her eyes begging.
“The number?”
Ameera thought for a bit and finally remembered a neighbour. She gave the officer a phone number and a name. He dialled and handed the phone to her. When she said her name she got a “wrong number” and a rude response in Arabic. Then the line was cut. She had two more numbers. Both times, just as she said her name they hung up.
Finally, the officer picked up the phone, dialled the number she had first given him, and said in a stern official-sounding tone that Ameera was out of prison, that she was going home to India that very day, and that she wanted to see her son one last time. This time the voice on the line seemed accommodating. The officer gave them a brief summary – her release from prison, her flight details – and hung up.
Ameera went and stood by the window, looking at a twinkling Dubai, its many night lights, and the cars that went up and down the road. Before she knew it, she was crying again. Then she remembered something and made another call. This time she was lucky. They heard her story, their voice tinged with sadness, and the answers from the voice on the phone gave her some confidence.
Excerpted with permission from Unmoored, Ramachandran Usha, translated from the Tamil by Krupa Ge, Zubaan Books.
