Jaspreet Singh is the author of Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir, which won the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2004 First Book Award. He was the 2006-07 Writer-in-Residence at University of Calgary. 

This story appeared previously in:
SUSPECT (2006, Alphabet City #10, MIT Press, USA) and ATLAS 02 (2007, AARK ARTS, India)

She was short, four foot nine, from the Pir Panjal mountains of Kashmir, and sometimes the sirens on the streets of Dallas reminded her of elephants. She had moved to Texas for the sake of her son, but the sirens terrified her, and it was too late to adapt. The sirens reminded her of the agony of elephants. In A.D. 528 the White Hun had invaded Kashmir. One of his elephants lost its footing on a high pass, and plunged downwards. The Hun was quite amused by the trumpet-like shriek of the falling creature, and commanded his men to drop another one off the sheer cliff, then another. One by one, the men pushed over some four hundred elephants for his pleasure. For days afterwards the villagers could hear the echoes of dying beasts.

But that happened a long time ago; she was not even born then. And now she felt like a ripe fruit – because she was dead. So much time had passed and so suddenly. Texas had meant nothing to her other than her son. She’d left home to be close to him, despite a bad tumor. The doctor had told her nothing else about the tumor other than its shape. Looks like an egg, he had said. But it was all over now. Being dead was easier than she had imagined.
She was waiting patiently in her coffin at the airport for her final journey home.

Only yesterday the airline had delivered the aluminum coffin to her son’s house. A large cowboy coffin, by mistake, and the thing had caused some initial confusion. Then they discovered that the house was not well-designed, the stairwell lacked a coffin-turn. Her son and two Mexicans had to rely on the old rope-and-balcony trick to lift the thing to her room. She felt somewhat naked when he began supervising the maid. The maid washed her with a sponge, cleaned and over-cleaned, bleached her ruined bones as if they were kitchen tiles. She wished she could survey her own self in the dim light of a candle, but all of a sudden light meant nothing, just like darkness meant nothing.

The maid had sneezed while draping her in an embroidered pheran. Then her son surveyed the last fragments of her corpse and found it necessary to use absorbents as space fillers in the coffin. The maid had to transfer little Zainab’s swimming diapers as well, including the one with Bambi, and this brought tears in tiny eyes.

“Where has Gra-ma gone?” Zainab had asked.

“Beyond the mountains.”

Dallas/Fort Worth airport was packed that Tuesday. The airline announced a delay in departure because of an earthquake in Asia. Her son and Zainab stepped into a Mexican restaurant. Planes were visible through the glass panes. Watching them eat, she felt extremely hungry. The worst thing about being dead is not being able to eat. The smell of tortillas spread out towards the lounge and her coffin was not far from there. Tortillas, for some strange reason, never failed to remind her of home.

She watched her son’s sleep-starved eyes, his face no longer hidden in his hands. She was happy he was going to grant her last wish – bury her by the ancestral house. But after the burial how was he going to manage? He ate and read far, far beyond need, whenever unbearable news hit him.

Despite sleep in eyes and food on the table he began reading the paper. Other passengers might have perceived that he began reading abruptly, but it was not abrupt for her – she had even managed to predict it. “Urdu,” she thought, “for my sake, he sometimes reads in our own language.” She wanted to say Urdu was his ‘dead mother tongue,’ but she lost all courage to remind him. He was reading from right to left, and that is why the white woman occupying the neighboring table raised her brow.

The woman looked exactly like an advertisement, more so after food and another coat of make-up. Zainab’s father raised his head from the paper to survey the advertisement. She had never thought him unsatisfied. But the woman’s long hay-colored hair was just like Zainab’s mother’s hair. She was sure her son was searching for the right moment to strike up a conversation.

“Daad-ee,” Zainab asked softly, her tiny finger pointing at the paper, “What is this picture?”

“Zainab, bayteh,” he began. “This is Saturn. Titan -- the moon of Saturn. One point four billion miles away.”

“Further than the moon Daad-ee?”

Your father seems to have forgotten the most essential thing, she almost said to Zainab. There are places closer to us than the moon. He was born on the day our blessed Prophet’s hair was stolen from the mosque, and I feared, even then, some distant Texas would one day steal him away from me. I didn’t want him to study computers. Small, I wanted him to remain -- like that dwarf tree in the garden. Kashmir is only 1.4 days away.

There is no famine of nice girls in the mountains. He should have married a girl from Gilgit – she thought. They wear a fine veil of sacrifice, the women over there. His Cuban wife has brought so much bitterness to the family, and wife is not even coming to the funeral. Who will take care of the dogs? wife had asked. God, I said to myself.

Zainab, your mother drags you to the church every Sunday. I had asked her, What kind of a Cuban are you if you kneel inside the Church? But she had remained silent, because she had no answer.

Her son surveyed the white woman again, away from Saturn and its moon.

Inside the coffin, she felt wet, despite the absorbents. Puddles of viscous fluids from her own body surrounded her. No, I am not afraid of death, she said to herself. I will leave them alone, after the burial. Only one thing terrifies me. After they dump my body, this family’s connection with Kashmir will end. The connection will rot. Ab yahan koi nahin, koi nahin ayehga. Only damp earth and worms and foul odor of my barbaric egg tumor. No, I don’t want this little girl to forget her people.

“Open the black bag,” she said to her son loudly. So loud was her voice, it spread like a wave and made the corner of the tablecloth flutter. But the man didn’t notice. The little girl heard her grandmother for a brief second. Zainab’s eyes fluttered like butterflies. The girl kept playing with a fork until it landed on the floor, not far from the bag.

There is a part of me in that bag, she almost said to Zainab. My smell still clings to the clothes, which are no longer mine. The ring that no longer clings to my hands is also in there. The ring will comfort you Zainab – you must have it. I told your Cuban mother so many times: the ring is for Zainab, but she forced the maid to pack it for the poor of Kashmir. The ring belongs to Zainab, the poor of Kashmir will find a way to help themselves. How much you still don’t know Zainab. So powerful your grandmother was. She wove three beautiful carpets to buy this ring. I want you to know that despite all the madness and savagery that has descended on Kashmir, there is still some beauty left, and no one--no one--can take it away from us.

But Zainab couldn’t hear her at all. The waitress brushed past the bag, her legs naked. Naked legs walked past that foreign-looking man who kept reading his paper, and the white woman who kept twiddling her hair nervously.
Zainab whispered in her father’s ear.

“Can you hold it?”

“No, Daad-ee.”

“Let me finish the coffee.”

“Can’t. I can’t.”

The line outside the washroom was long. Zainab was fast losing that last trace of patience left within her. Father and daughter joined the line.

The white woman didn’t notice them leave, but after a while her hands started to twitch, and she looked at her neighbor’s table, at Zainab’s half-empty plate and then at the knives and forks, as if she had never seen steel before.

The woman looked at her watch and then at the bag.

How absent minded my son is, she thought. If this woman steals our bag, how unhappy the Cuban wife would become. And who will take care of the poor of Kashmir?

“This bothers me,” the white woman muttered.

She could not comprehend those words.

She noticed the white woman looking far and near and then at the watch and then at the bag with stealthy eyes.

Thief, she almost cried from the coffin.

Thief. Thief.

The white woman looked terrified, and hurried away from the table barefooted. Her heels left behind. It seemed as if her skin was on fire.

“Bomb,” the woman began shouting.

Bomb. Bomb.

People panicked and rushed wherever their feet led them. Men in camouflaged uniforms appeared, with weapons ready to be discharged.

“An Arab was sitting here,” yelled the woman. “He was reading a paper in Arabic.”

The police-wallahs cordoned off the area.

Time passed, and it passed very slowly until Zainab and her father started their walk back to the restaurant.

“There he is,” said the white woman, pointing her finger. Hundreds of eyes stared. There was a sigh of relief in the air.

“Sir, you come with us,” said the man in camouflage uniform.

Zainab clung to her father.

“Zain, you stay with aunty.”

He had to apply enormous force to separate the girl from his legs.

The waitress held the girl’s finger for a while, and then she lifted her up and even kissed her on the cheek, but the girl was hurt, wounded by the undesired kiss. She began crying.

The guards whisked him away, and half an hour later they whisked him back. When he returned the girl was half-asleep, but she couldn’t resist an interrogation.

“What did they say to you Daad-ee?”

“Zainab, bayteh,” he placed his hand on her brow, “they were curious. ‘Are you a dog?’ they asked.”

“And?”

“‘Do you live on Saturn?’ they asked.”

For once she was glad she was dead. She couldn’t endure the pain her son was going through.

“Funny Daad-ee. Are there dogs on Saturn?”

“You mean life?”

“Daad-ee is there life on Saturn?”

“One day we’ll know.”

He held her finger and hesitantly they walked towards the bag. Two officers escorted them. He opened the bag and one by one displayed his dead mother’s things. The officers touched her things.

Even in death, she said to herself, I have no privacy.

The metal detector beeped only once, and Zainab’s father recovered a piece of metal from his mother’s nightdress.
Zainab, the girl, rubbed her eyes with tiny fists, and when the flight took off, she leaned forward in her seat and examined clouds through the angled window. One resembled Gra-ma. She observed its shifting form until the thing disappeared. “Look, Daad-ee, an elephant.” She scratched the piece of metal against glass. “Daad-ee, listen.” But he didn’t listen. She felt she was alone. No one was listening and everyone was silent. She was alone in the universe, afraid of the silence of immense endless space. One by one all things would disappear in that space. But, Gra-ma refused to disappear. She was with Zainab now, slipped around the thickest finger, and the shiny ring clung to her tight. She could not tell, she could not tell if the plane was headed to the mountains or to some other place, far, far away from Texas. She was curious if boys and girls and dogs and old people lived there, and if they, too, felt the pull to talk to her.