“Look what you made me do—” Tahera blazes, at you, at everyone behind you.

32

“Enough, Tahera, enough,” Fiaz says. “We respect your choice—to live according to your strict interpretations of the Quran. It’s not the only way to be a Muslim. You don’t have to insult us.”

Seema has never heard Fiaz this forceful before, or this stern. He stands between her and Tahera. She’s ashamed of hiding behind him, like she hid behind her mother with Bill yesterday. She hadn’t expected she would feel this sick to her stomach even after it was clear how Tahera would react.

A stranger stands before her, a stranger in her stark attire and implacable face, with the Quran in one hand, silhouetted against the light from the floor lamp. She’s unrecognizable as the sister of her youth, or even the sister from just days ago—not the girl in twin plaits who’d looked up to her, nor the woman who’d cried in her lap after braiding her hair. And not even the sister from just that morning, the one who’d reassured her that she’d be there with her for the delivery.

“Seema can speak for herself,” this stranger says to Fiaz. “What you do is no concern of mine.”

“What your sister does is no concern of yours either,” Fiaz says.

Their mother cringes at Fiaz’s tone. “Son, please—” Nafeesa restrains him with a hand on his arm. “Tahera, let it go.”

“Son!” the stranger sneers. “Your son and daughter are birds of the same feather. You must be proud of who they are.”

Even this Tahera, the one with the dark flint inside her, seems to have some power over Seema: Leigh squeezes Seema’s hand, but Seema instinctively withdraws it.

What does my mother continue to want from this sister?

Now that she is on the verge of being deprived of it, my mother can admit it to herself: she wants what that day spent with Tahera’s children promised.

“Will you come visit us?” Amina asked, and even as my mother sought a lie to let down the child, she grasped at the prospect of a permanent mooring, which has eluded her since her exile, where she could access again and again the unadulterated happiness of that day, reminiscent of her childhood where she didn’t have to fight the world for it. Even her happiness with Leigh doesn’t compare, accompanied as it is with the fear that it isn’t meant to last.

Did she conjure up, for herself and for me, the hope of visits between siblings and cousins, like in Chennai, so that it wouldn’t be just the two of us—mother and son—dependent only on each other for any sense of stability and continuity? And had she even contemplated paying the price she’d once rejected, the shameful silence that would enable it, if both parties agreed? With my grandmother’s prognosis, it had felt urgent. And only this morning, with Tahera signing the will, it had felt possible.