Madras on Rainy Days: A Novel by Samina Ali

tell her nothing?
    We were standing next to the cement railing that encircled the flat roof, staring west across the Old City, toward Mecca. Perhaps it was the view that kept my mouth closed. For before us was an image no postcard would show, yet the one I carried with me, defining my experience of India. A tangle of white structures crammed one next to the other, the monotony broken only by a sudden shooting green of tall ashoka and coconut trees. And the green, too, of those small flags with the crescent moon strung one next to the other on twine to hang up and down the streets, like clothes drying in the wind.
    Surrounding the Old City was a six-mile-long stone wall. The last of its thirteen massive gates stood close behind Amme’s house, its top now visible to us over the trees. It was through this Dabir Pura Gate the Fiat thrust each time I went to and from the airport, each time Ahmed drove me to Henna’s house in Vijayanagar Colony, and, in two days, through which I would be taken to usher me to my husband’s home.
    I could not imagine a life in India that occurred outside these uneven stone walls and impressive double doors, where everything, including the day sliced neatly into five parts by the muezzin’s call, did not hold distinction: who you are, what you could amount to. There was no defying limits here. This was a Muslim neighborhood, where women did not leave the house unveiled, not even girls as young as six, their bodies yet indistinguishable from boys’; and where the center of men’s foreheads held a dark patch from the repeated bowing and resting of the face against the pressed dirt of the prayer sujda-ga. The largest mosque in India, Mecca Masjid, stood at the center of the Old City, its granite dome, in the distance, shimmering like glass in the setting sun, and near it, the four slender minarets of the Char Minar pointed to the four corners of the sky. These monuments had been built in the sixteenth century by the Muslim founders of Hyderabad, the Qutb Shahi kings, who had ruled the area for 170 years from Golconda Fort, ten kilometers west of the Old City The fort’s walls were
so mighty that even when the great Mughal armies attacked, they found it impregnable. So, they besieged Golconda for eight months … until, finally, late one night, a traitor opened a door from inside, quietly, easily. And die enemy invaded.
    I turned to Henna and, as though anticipating my confession, she held up Nate’s letters. Four of them had arrived, spread before the globe of her belly like a fan. I didn’t take them. Instead, I pushed aside the fabric of her golden sari and traced a dark, vertical line down her stomach that hadn’t been there before.
    “Why did you stop writing?” I asked. Henna had gotten married three months after my engagement, when I’d already returned to the U.S. Growing up, I’d always vowed to return for her wedding, yet after the engagement, I found I didn’t want to come back to Hyderabad because I didn’t want to see my fiancé. By the time of her wedding, I had already received twelve letters from Sameer, one for each week we’d been apart. If I had been unsure about him at first, then surprised at my own softening, his letters did nothing but push me away Yet my absence from Henna’s wedding must have hurt her enough to make her stop writing me herself. And my own guilt and embarrassment kept me from persisting. It was the only reason Henna didn’t know about Nate.
    She now set his letters before me on the railing and pulled her long hair up with both hands, twisting it into a high bun. Her fair cheeks had become fuller with the pregnancy, which made her eyes appear even more deep set. There were dark shadows under them I hadn’t seen before. She was staring down the congested alleyway at the expanding houses. Like her husband, young men from the Old City were leaving to work in the Middle East, then sending back money to support their families, aging parents, young