Rasangam cut up a sweet lemon and squeezed out the juice. He batted away the houseflies swarming around him with his other hand while staying focused on the task at hand. Hanifa was seated on a hospital bed with his head hanging low, too embarrassed to face his thambi.
“Here, drink this,” Rasangam said, handing the tumbler full of juice to his elder brother.
“Leave it here, I will drink it later.” Hanifa’s voice sounded feeble.
“Flies are all over it, look, they might fall into the juice. Drink it now.” It sounded like an order. A tube connected the glucose bottle to a vein in Hanifa’s right hand. He extended his left hand to receive the tumbler.
Rasangam said, “Take it in the hand you eat with and chant ‘Bismillah’ before you drink up.”
Hanifa carefully shifted the tumbler from his left hand to his right and chanted ‘Bismillah’ before downing the juice. Both brothers fell silent, perplexed. Rasangam sat looking worriedly at his annan, determined not to say anything that might hurt him.
Just then, a nurse entered the room. After a moment of hesitation, she retrieved a tablet from a nearby shelf and handed it to Hanifa. “Take this now,” she said. She stood there for a minute, looking at Rasangam, and smiled brightly. “How much juice will you give him!” she teased before turning around to leave. He returned her smile and signalled towards the door with his eyes, requesting her to leave the room.
“Forgive me, da.” Hanifa spoke first. He was too embarrassed to look his brother in the eye. The guilt of not having paid heed to his well-meaning advice overwhelmed him.
“Forgive you for what? You are alive, that’s enough for me.” Rasangam tried to free his brother from his guilt.
“I caused so much trouble for all of you.”
“Let all that be, you sleep peacefully.”
“I wanted to pursue higher studies. I wanted you to study well and get a job. But our family circumstances didn’t allow it. We’ll get only that which is in our naseeb,” Hanifa said.
“When I think about how abruptly my education came to an end, I also feel like I’ve lost my reason to go on living … so what?” Rasangam struggled to regulate his sorrow and tears, yet continued, “Tell me, who gets the life they want? Family, circumstances, opportunities – all of this comes first. Living for yourself comes much later.”
“From now on, don’t bother with such thoughts. Perform dua that everything in your life goes well, starting tomorrow. Think of your mother and mine. Had something happened to you, would they have been able to walk with their heads held high? Even our own relatives would have made fun of us. Right now, no one knows you poisoned yourself. We’ve told everyone that you were bitten by a snake. The doctor has said that he won’t say anything to anyone either.”
Lying on the hospital bed, Hanifa scanned Rasangam. He was very elegantly dressed. In his trousers, held in place with a belt, and his full-sleeved shirt tucked in at the waist, he looked sharp. Even though he seemed a stranger from a distance, he exuded familial warmth when he was around. “Okay, go to sleep now … I will also sleep for a bit,” he said, walking over to Hanifa to squeeze his hand comfortingly and went to lay down on the cot across from him.
“How is annan?” Aabida asked in a whisper. She sounded tired. Asik was eating his dinner in the kitchen.
“He is fine,” Rasangam whispered and walked towards his room.
He heard the jingle of bangles from behind a curtain. He understood that it was Banu hiding because of him. “I don’t want anything to eat. Let machaan know that I have come back,” he said before entering his room and locking it. Now Banu was free to walk around the hall.
Aabida had figured out that Banu made her bangles jingle to attract Rasangam’s attention. She would say to him, “Banu talks only about you all the time. When I came here after my marriage, do you know how arrogantly she used to behave just because she’s my sister-in-law? But these days, she’s all grins around me. It’s all because of you.”
“Shhh! Pipe down, won’t you?” Rasangam would reply. “I’m telling you the truth. Ever since machaan mentioned that he’s thinking of getting you both married, she’s been like this. Allah has protected me,” Aabida would wink.
“Why, what is the rush to get me married?” he would say wearily.
“He really wants to marry her off to someone outside the village. But do you know what the whole village says? That who will marry a girl with no mother? Who will then cater to the expectations of her in-laws? That’s why.”
He found the way the people of this village talked perplexing. “So even if a girl is wealthy, they wouldn’t marry her if she doesn’t have a mother? Such fools!” he would say with disgust.
“One needs the girl to have a mother to take care of her when she is pregnant, bring up her child, arrange for gifts for all life events, spoil the son-in-law. Otherwise, it all ends with the wedding. You think the girl’s sister-in-law, her brother’s wife, would allow him to bear all the additional expenses on her account for the rest of her life? The girl needs her mother to indulge the son-in-law’s whims afterwards.”
“Ey, you shut up. Don’t talk like an old woman. That too the women of this village. You’ve started sounding more and more like them; it’s sickening,” he would say to shut her up.
“If you come to live in a village that eats fish, you take your share and move on,” she would mock him. Time and circumstance could change anyone into anything, or so it seemed. Even though there was a wide age gap between machaan and Aabida, neither had expressed any discontent on that account.
Amma would say, “Bear one child and you will become all kinds of smart. But what is one to do – such a time has still not emerged on the horizon for the two of them.”
“She herself is a child. Why should she rush into bearing one?” Hanifa would spring to his cousin’s defence.
“Dei, you stay away, what does a man know about all this that you’ve come to speak for her? As though your sister doesn’t know how to bite a finger that’s slid into her mouth,” Mahamooda would chide her son.
Rasangam undressed, hung his clothes from a hanger and lay down on the bed. Thoughts of Hanifa filled him. Oh, the cruelty of trying to end one’s life over the misplaced belief that something impossible was, in fact, true love!
We owe it to someone else’s good deeds that he has survived … Che! Why am I using terms like ‘good deeds’ like the villagers say, like I am a kafir. He bit his tongue wondering how long it would take him to change his ways. Hanifa gets to live another day because of someone’s dua, he corrected his thought.
After Asik machaan finished his dinner and retired to bed, Aabida soundlessly entered her brother’s room, hugged him and began to weep for Hanifa. The night brought with it the worry and anxiety of keeping their sorrow under wraps.
Excerpted with permission from The Binding, Salma, translated from the Tamil by Janani Kannan, Pan Macmillan India.
