She knew her name and she believed that was all her identity. Growing up must’ve taken care of that. It was a slightly sunny Sunday. The sun almost fought with the clouds for the little space that it managed to look down upon us from. Sitting on the porch, dressed in a flowered yellow frock, I looked up at the sky and almost immediately brought up my hand in defense against the glitters that the rays threw at me. It must have been around the middle of some month for the landlord had already dropped by our house once. He had had his usual cup of tea followed by his routine of an unwanted, dragging conversation. The tea was not the point, nor was the conversation, the point was that he was still the owner of the house and he’d reiterate this point twice every month; in the middle of it to remind us and at the end of it to establish it. There was a hubbub of noise and activity in the neighborhood that day. A huge truck was lying outside our gate and I could hear people from the next door going in and out, shouting at each other and carrying and dropping stuff. My brother having fought with me was standing on a pile of bricks, gazing eagerly through the half broken brick wall, barely balancing himself. Mother had asked us not to step out of the gate until the truck was gone and our new neighbors had settled. The house next door was being rented as well.
Hours after the noise subdued, my brother was now bored for he couldn’t see much happening in the lawns that he had access to through the broken wall. The luggage had been taken in and our new neighbors were probably settling their stuff now. After returning the pile of bricks he had collected from the backyard, he stopped by and looked at me for a second, probably considering playing khaanan with me but decided it was too soon to be in talking terms and turned away. In the afternoon, there was a knock at the gate. The doorbell didn’t work anymore and nobody bothered to fix it. The school kids on their way back home would stop by to ring it, and run away- all that one could hear while hurrying towards the gate was their resonating laughter. My brother and I raced to open it. He reached first. He was three years older and a foot taller. A small girl at the other end, thin and rather timid, offered us a bowl of halwa, pointing towards the house to suggest where it came from. “These must be our new neighbors” suggested my brother while I dipped my spoon in the bowl. The halwa tasted different, not bad, not better; just different. “They are from another state” he later told me, trying to make the missing connections. In the evening, he went up to the hall to overlook the proceedings in their house. They were moving in big boxes and throwing the empty cardboard ones out. He seated himself on a stool near the window and cleaned the glass to have a clearer view.
On our way back from school, my brother would hold my hand while crossing the busy road to the residential area. At times, when we had fought over imli the other day, he would take a second longer before holding my hand and give me a look to convey how important he was to me and suggest that next time I should rather give him the bigger apple. While holding my hand that day, both of us dressed in our now-dirty uniforms, we noticed the little girl, our new neighbor. She was walking a few metres behind us, looking at us timidly from a distance. Seconds later, my brother was crossing the road as two little girls held onto each of his hands.
On our way to and from school, on Sundays and on our way to the Darasgah, we now saw this family frequently and while it ceased to surprise me, my brother always found something new about them. “They are dark”, he once remarked, “and they don’t even understand Urdu”. “Their mother wears a saree” he said another day, “and she smiled at me at the bakery shop”. Sometimes while playing cricket, he would shoot the ball to their lawns and we’d both run to fetch it and if it flew to the street, I alone had to go. His curiosity at the new neighbors and their way of living only grew. When back from school, we were always greeted by an empty house. My parents were both working and would return only after five. My brother would carry the keys to the big lock that our gate wore every morning. At times when he had forgotten to carry the keys in his school bag, we would both go and wait patiently at the bakery shop for our parents to come. And whenever the uncle there offered us a bun, my brother always said “Yes” though he had been taught otherwise. One day after coming back home, while my brother was in the process of unlocking the gate and I was licking my ice cream, the little girl from the next door came running out and got hit by a cycle in the street. She fell down and hurt her leg while tears rolled down her barely formed cheeks. Once inside, my brother washed her knee and applied ointment to the wound and while doing so he told us how important first aid was. He also said that if first aid was not given immediately, the doctor might need to take the whole leg off. With that, he established the significance of what he had done and how timely he had done it.
In our rented house, the fridge was one of our biggest luxuries. It stored frozen chickens, vegetables- both raw and cooked, juice cans and biscuits. My mother would lock the fridge and place the keys right on top of it. This was to tell us that though accessible, the fridge was not easily or readily accessible. It was to be accessed, probably, if guests dropped by at our place in her absence. My brother walked himself to the fridge with an air of confidence, unlocked it and stole some biscuits. I ran behind him to keep a count of how many, so that I could later present the factual details of the theft to my mother. He placed the biscuits neatly on a plate and offered these to the little girl. She smiled and took the whole plate. My brother smiled back; amazed that we could have something in common with the neighbors from another land. Happy that probably we were now friends, he shot another question at her to satisfy his curiosity, “Aap Musalaman ho ya Hindu?” The girl looked up from the plate, confused, her eyes fixed at my brother’s face. Her left leg was still stretched as her right hand held the plate. She distanced the half biscuit from her mouth. Her eyes were still watery and her lips parted, exposing a missing tooth. Her eyes were a sea of innocence that rested at my brother and then at me and then at the plate as if the question had to be correctly answered for the biscuits, and said almost in a mumble, “Mai Saima hoon.
Aadil Gulam Dar , M.A Education, Aligarh Muslim University
