Chapter 9: Asma (1989) - The Daughters of Rosebud

Asma walked to the front of Mamoo and Aunty’s house and called hello. She had come to expect a candle burning, flowers on the counter, cookies warm from the oven. But tonight, the house was completely dark, except for one lone light shining from an upstairs window.

“Hi, darling. We’re upstairs,” Mamoo called.

The chandelier in the entry hall flipped on, temporarily blinding Asma.

“It’s getting dark so early. We totally lost track of time,” Aunty said from the upstairs landing.

Asma squinted while the white-marble floor and white carpet on the curved staircase came into focus. Asma caught sight of herself in the hallway mirror. Her hair lay flat on her head, her flannel shirt was misbuttoned, and the shirt underneath had a visible stain at the neckline. Salma stood next to Aunty, her expression undecipherable.

“We were going to order pizza, but I wanted to wait for you to see what toppings you wanted.”

Asma rebuttoned her shirt and hugged Mamoo as he descended the stairs and then Aunty, as though she was a receiving line. “I only like cheese. Salma knows that,” Asma said.

Salma stood in front of Asma. Neither reached out to the other.

“I wasn’t sure what you like anymore,” Salma said.

“What were you doing upstairs?”

At this point, Mamoo and Aunty’s house felt like her own, even more than Rosebud, and Salma was in her space. She had become accustomed to being the sole focus of Mamoo and Aunty’s attention, and this weekend, more than ever, she didn’t want to share them. She wanted blind empathy.

Also, she knew that Salma would want to pick at the wound that was the night of the play, and she just wanted to forget the entire thing. As irrational as it sounded, Asma was convinced that Salma would be able to pick up on her messy feelings for Ruby. The crack that had first opened between her and Salma on the steps of the dorm was now a chasm. Asma felt small and immature for withholding, but who else could she shut out and know, with absolute certainty, would still love her?

“I was helping Mamoo build a cat tower for Mippy. It’s got a cute little house at the top.”

As if on cue, the cat appeared, throwing her personality around the room. Asma and Salma both leaned down to pet her, but she settled in between Salma’s legs, just out of Asma’s reach.

They crowded around the small breakfast table. Asma picked the few olives that had made it onto her slice of pizza and piled them in a little mound. Knowing how much Salma loved their brininess, she would have normally put them on her sister’s plate. Not today.

“I’m on call all weekend, but we should definitely plan our time,” Mamoo said. He sounded like an excited child.

“I’m up for anything. I just need to get my take-home assignments done,” Salma said, practically dancing in her seat.

Mamoo threw out a range of ideas, movies he wanted to see, restaurants he wanted to try, maybe a dance performance or a road trip. Asma remained quiet; their enthusiasm was so annoying. The phone rang, and Mamoo rushed to answer it. The clicks and clacks, loud enough to be easily heard at the kitchen table, told them it was a call from Pakistan and not the hospital.

Mamoo returned to the table, clearly distracted. “That was your mother. They’re there. They’re staying at your aunt’s house. Your grandfather is surrounded by his children. It won’t be long now.” He stared out the family room window. He turned to Asma and asked, “Did you talk to your parents before they left?”

Asma pulled a string along the floor while Mippy lunged at it. “About what?”

Salma started to say something, but Asma cut her off. “Let’s build a fire and make some brownies.”

Mamoo stood up straighter and pulled his cardigan down. “Right then. You know what we would do in England on days like this? We’d play games.”

Salma groaned. Asma skipped down the basement steps to get a game. The fact that Salma didn’t like games pleased her. Maybe Salma would opt out, and she and Mamoo could play a game of chess instead.

The family room was warm and cozy. On one side it opened into the kitchen, and on the other side it was banked with glass windows that looked out on a large lawn. There was a long sofa in front of a stone fireplace with a big square coffee table in front of it and chairs on each side. Built-in bookshelves flanked the fireplace, and all around the room there were side tables with lamps casting their warm little glow in pockets. They set up the game board on the coffee table. Their reflections, disjointed and garbled, bounced back from the darkened windows.

“Mamoo, tell us about England,” Salma said.

“There’s not really much to tell, I’m afraid. It was cold, dark, and I studied a lot. Oh, and the food was not good.”

They set up the board, taking out the pieces and the money. The smell of smoke and the crackle of fire made Asma sleepy and relaxed. She stroked the smooth pewter pieces and put them in the middle of the board.

“Didn’t your parents die while you were there?”

Mamoo’s face flushed, and his eyes stayed glued on the board. “Mmmm.”

Mippy moved restlessly from the floor to the couch and back again.

Salma counted out the money slowly, doubling back and recounting, a divot between her brows.

Asma reached for the top hat at the same time Mamoo did.

“How?” Salma asked.

“I’ll thumb wrestle you for it,” Mamoo said.

Asma won best out of three. Mamoo touched each game piece, trying to figure out which one he wanted, until Asma pushed the dog into his hand.

“I’m just going to run to the loo,” Mamoo said.

Aunty brought a bowl of popcorn and a plate of brownies and set them down on the end table and kissed Mamoo as he returned to the room and sat back down.

Asma asked, “Do you want to play, Aunty? We just started.”

“Thank you, darling, but no. I’m going to catch up on my magazines and then go call my mom.” She curled into the corner of the couch and pulled out a Cosmopolitan. Cindy Crawford, airbrushed to perfection, gazed out at them. Mippy sat on Aunty’s feet.

Salma took a turn. “So Mamoo?”

Mamoo’s jaw worked. “You should have been a lawyer,” he said dryly.

“Do you still want to play, Mamoo? I can see why you wouldn’t want to.” Asma shot Salma a dirty look.

Mamoo patted the air between them, trying to appease both. He rolled the dog between his fingers. “Has your mother not told you about this?”

“No,” they both said in unison.

They each took a turn, and for a few minutes, it sounded like Mamoo wasn’t going to answer the question and Salma would permit him his silence without further badgering him.

“We were best friends growing up. Always. I loved her completely. I mean, I still do love her. But I wish you’d known her when she was your age. She was curious, funny, and really smart.”

“Who are you talking about?” Asma asked.

“Your mother.”

Salma rolled her eyes. Asma snickered and let herself feel a moment of camaraderie with Salma.

“Your mother was not always . . .” He stopped. “I don’t know where to start.” He paused for a long time and finally said, “My father was the fifth son of a prominent landowner from a village in Rawalpindi. My mother was the only child of a poor tailor from a nearby village. They moved to Lahore after they were married for our father’s job. They used to say that they were lucky in their marriage. In part, because they had an easy relationship based on genuine affection and because they were alive at a moment in history when anything seemed possible. Most people were part of extended family units that lived in insular family compounds, full of petty arguments and infighting. But because my mother had no siblings and my father’s family remained in the village, they really got to create an independent life for themselves. Not all of those marriages found love, you know?”

They had stopped playing the game. Salma’s face flushed bright. Asma sat cross-legged on the floor, the fire breathing hot against her back.

“Your mother was a voracious reader. Don’t scoff. She was. She was every bit as good at school as I was. We’d have these great conversations at the dinner table with our father about Arabic mathematics and the inventions that came out of the Song Dynasty or the Enlightenment. He was an amazing man. He came from nothing, and yet the more he learned, the more he wanted to know.” Mamoo’s face was slack, and his eyes, even though he was looking at the board, were far away. There were stories that had been polished into smooth rocks through their telling and retelling, effortless, familiar, rote. This was not one of them. “We spent all our time together because our cousins were back in the village. Once—this is when we were older—a great-aunt in the village told my mother that she thought I needed to get married because it wasn’t natural how much time I spent with my sister.”

“Gross!” Asma said.

Mamoo shook his head. “Because a brother and sister were close, it was assumed that they were ready for marriage. Can you imagine that time?” Even though he framed it as a question, it was clear he wasn’t looking for an answer.

“Our father was the local administrator for the boys’ school, and every morning we all took the bus together. It was coed at the primary school level and then split into a boys’ and a girls’ school at the secondary level. We were different than the other kids who were either English or children of important government leaders. While Abu, Sadia, and I stood at the bus stop, gathering dust from every passing bus and tonga, they were dropped off in cars with drivers. That time, together at Cathedral, made us close.”

“Cathedral?” Asma asked.

“That was the name of our school.”

“It sounds like a church,” Salma said.

“It was a Catholic school. Most of our teachers were nuns and priests,” Mamoo said matter-of-factly.

Asma was dumbfounded. “What?”

“What? You didn’t think there were any Christians in Pakistan? The British brought their schools. The reality is that life is far more complicated and diverse in these countries than is made out in the Western news.”

Mamoo shuffled his money distractedly.

Asma could see the picture Mamoo painted, that long-ago world just visible beneath the surface of his words.

Salma asked, “So how did your parents die?”

Mamoo took a turn.

Then Asma took a turn.

Salma held the dice on her turn. “Mamoo?”

“Jesus, Salma. Let it go,” Asma said. Her voice sounded as harsh as her father’s when he spoke to her.

Mamoo tapped the table and said, “You must understand. We . . . Sadia, grew up in a different place and time. Women, girls, just weren’t given the same opportunities.”

Asma wasn’t particularly interested in hearing an unasked-for defense of her mother and stood up to stretch.

Mamoo went on. “Just watch, you’ll grow up, get married, have children. And you’ll understand your children’s experience because you’ll share the same cultural fabric. But what I’m talking about, when I’m talking about, it was a different world. There were more horse-drawn carriages on the road than cars. There were no grocery stores; people came by your house to sell you food. In a million years, I could never have imagined that this is what my life would look like. I didn’t even have the words for the things that are now my everyday. When I look back on that time, it feels like that life was someone else’s.”

She was not of Rosebud, and yet she understood its language, its ways, and was nostalgic for it. After all, those were still the memories of her childhood. Maybe she understood what Mamoo meant.

“How did you come to England?” Salma asked, redirecting.

“As it turned out, I was smarter than the rich kids. Or at least worked harder.” Mamoo smirked. “I was an excellent student, and the headmaster thought I should apply to universities in England, which accepted students of promise from former colonies. Once the headmaster suggested it, that’s all my father could think about. His only son going to England to become educated. As he said, ‘to learn the best of both cultures.’ I think he thought—hell, I thought—that after school I’d return to Pakistan and help build the country. Pakistan was recently independent, and there was this air of hopefulness that permeated everything. Like now, we could fix our own problems.

“I got accepted at Oxford. My parents sent me on the plane with one thousand rupees, which, at that time, converted to a bit more than one hundred British pounds. That was a lot of money for my parents, but not much money with which to send a sixteen-year-old across the world by themselves. I was scared but ready to get out of there and see the world. To do my part. But the details and realities of living in England, in a country where I knew no one, where food was provided only during the weekdays, where I didn’t know how to do the most basic things, like how to get milk delivered, where to buy socks for the cold, find a doctor . . . all of that I had to figure out on my own.

“I also felt horribly guilty for leaving Sadia. By that point, she’d moved on to the Pakistani girls’ school where the curriculum was not what it was at Cathedral. In secondary school, I brought home all the books assigned to me in English class because she insisted on reading them too. If I couldn’t find a book, I knew where to find them.”

Asma shared a look with Salma and, without saying a word, knew that they were recalling the same memory. In elementary school and middle school, when they couldn’t find their books, whether assigned in school or checked out from the library, invariably, they found them stashed in their mother’s room with her bookmark.

“I was her ticket to a bigger world. After I left, my parents, because of what was expected of young women at that time, could only do so much.”

He was talking about things that Asma had never thought about asking her parents. The world he conjured was completely unfamiliar. It was like a thread of memory. The more he pulled it, the more the garment came apart.

Mamoo smiled wryly. “Here’s something. I didn’t eat any kind of salan or curry for more than a year. And that was only after I met a married couple from India who had me over now and then for a vegetarian meal.

“During the five years I studied in England, I only had two phone calls with home. The first was when I arrived. The wonderful Mrs. Cobberly, my housemother at Oxford, insisted I call home to let them know I’d arrived safely. She said there were funds for that sort of thing.” He stopped for a long minute and took a deep breath like he was going to jump into a pool. And then, his voice went monotone. “The second call was after I received a telegram . . .”

Just then, the pager clipped on his waistband beeped and snapped him out of his reverie. He stood up quickly and, when returned from the phone, said abruptly, “I’m needed. I’ll be back late.” He did not look unhappy.

Asma spent a long time in the bathroom getting ready for bed in the hopes that Salma would be asleep by the time she was done. She tiptoed quietly into their shared bedroom. When they had been little, Aunty had commissioned an artist to paint a jungle scene on one wall. The tiger’s gold eyes glowed softly by the light of the lamp between their twin beds.

She and Salma had always freely undressed in front of each other, and even though Salma had witnessed everything that night, the thought of her sister seeing her undressed made her uncomfortable. She could sense that her secretiveness registered with Salma, hitting some thin nerve. It’s not that Asma was in denial about what had happened and having Salma see her stomach would make it more real—there was nothing more real than seeing the bruise continuing to erupt on her stomach like a slow-motion video of a flower blooming. It’s that the events in the parking lot felt like a divider between them, not a uniter.

If Asma had spent any time thinking about it, she might have understood that she was simply embarrassed at having been checked by her father. She walked through life with a gum-popping swagger, and her father had stripped her of that veneer, reminding her of who was really in control. Salma was her mirror, and seeing that knowledge reflected in her face brought it home in a way that was impossible to avoid.

She stared long and hard at herself in the bathroom mirror and remembered Ruby. She hadn’t thought about her for at least two hours and felt relief from the unsatisfying ache of fixating on her and, at the same time, guilt, as though she had abandoned a sentinel post.

Salma’s eyes were closed. Asma switched off the lamp softly and snuck into bed, between the cold sheets.

“We need to talk,” Salma said quietly.

Asma exhaled dramatically. “About what?”

“You know what.”

The dark air seemed hazy with movement. “Why do you care? You did nothing to help.” Asma’s voice flattened a beat. “I’m not sure why you did that, by the way.”

“Did what?”

“Mamoo. He obviously didn’t want to talk about any of that stuff, and you forced him to.”

“What do you mean I did nothing to help? What could I have done?”

“It’s not like ‘How’d your parents die?’ is a comfortable question.”

“Okay, fine, maybe I shouldn’t have pushed Mamoo. Who made you his protector?”

They lay there silently, and for a moment, Asma thought Salma may have fallen asleep or gotten tired of trying to make her talk about her feelings.

“So? Are we going to talk about it or just pretend like it didn’t happen?” Salma asked.

Asma kicked off her covers noisily. “What do you want to talk about, Sal? Huh?” She was irate that Salma was intruding on her privacy, the quietness of her mind, which was now reserved for dreaming about Ruby.

Salma spoke very slowly, reminding Asma of their mother. “Why do you do this? Why do you shut people out?”

“I’m not shutting you out. I just have to be careful to not corrupt you.” In the dark of the bedroom, she made quotation marks with her fingers.

“Knock it off. What Abu did is fucked up. Okay? It’s not exactly been easy for me.” Salma took a deep breath like she was going to dive into deep water. “But you knew how upset he’d be. You knew! And you did it anyway.”

“You’re blaming me?”

“Of course not. But I told you it would be a big deal. I tell you not to do things, and you do them anyway.”

“Jesus, Sal. You sound exactly like him! Are you really excusing him?”

In the dark, Asma could tell that Salma had bolted upright in bed.

“You sound just like him! Always trying to twist the situation and words to your advantage. No! Of course I’m not excusing him. I’m only saying your need to poke the wasps’ nest can get you in trouble. I mean, what did you think was going to happen?”

“Are you telling me that you knew he was going to hit me?”

“No.” Salma’s voice was shaky. “I was as shocked as you were.”

“Then what? What do you want me to say to you? Am I supposed to take care of you, make you feel better?”

“No, I don’t expect you to make me feel better. I expect you to acknowledge that every time you push him, every time you act out, I’m the one who suffers. Not you!”

There was a quiet knock, and the bedroom door pushed open. Aunty’s shadow filled the doorway. “Girls? Is everything okay?”

“Sorry, Aunty,” Salma said.

“Sorry. Yeah, we’re fine,” Asma said.

The door clicked shut, and Asma debated whether to go sleep on the couch. It would trigger questions, but she didn’t care. Anything to stop this conversation. It’s not that Asma was unmoved by Salma’s feelings. It’s just that she didn’t care. Salma was making this about herself. Like somehow, their father’s act of rage was a tragedy she had to co-opt. She was dealing with this the best way she knew how. Besides, she was basically an adult and didn’t have to live like this for much longer. With enough time, her parents would forgive her or forget about it, like she was trying so hard to do.

“Did you tell Mamoo?” Salma whispered.

“Why would I do that?” Asma said sharply. Briskly, she gathered her pillow and duvet.

“What are you doing?” Salma asked.

“Sleeping on the couch.”

Salma started speaking quickly. “I’m sorry about what he did to you. I wish I could have stopped him. I didn’t see it coming, and then it was all over so fast.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Sal. It happened. To me. Not to you. I don’t want to talk about this shit. You don’t get to force a conversation because you need to talk.”

“I had to drive home with them in the car and be alone in the house. And then, stuck at home with them with the news that Dadaji is dying and then rushing to leave . . .”

Asma opened the door and said, “Besides, I’m doing this for us.” She couldn’t help but get the last word in.

As she closed the door, she heard Salma say, “Please. You’re doing this for yourself.”

Almost immediately, Asma wished she hadn’t stormed out. She knew she wasn’t being fair to Salma. She wasn’t used to holding things back from her, but what was there really to say?

She settled in on the couch, facing out the back window. Slowly, she felt her body leach its heat into the duvet and the duvet warm her in return. Her imagination reached out to Ruby, bouncing between what had happened and the sweet, tormented possibility of what might have been. Mippy jumped up on the couch and watched her with her apex predator gaze. Asma kissed her, and she settled on her chest. The night had become clear. A full moon shone over the expanse of lawn. It reminded her of the first time she had experienced something she wanted but knew she would never, could never, have.

The summer she was thirteen, there had been a full moon at the Thresher’s Fair. Held annually in late July, it was part county fair, part carnival, and something all its own. With old-fashioned tractors, threshers, and other farm equipment on display, it was a celebration of rural culture, a time and place that seemed largely unknown or forgotten. There were nightly dances under the picnic pavilion with live bands, food booths, barbecue, and potluck dinners. People came from the surrounding fifty-mile area. It was the biggest event of the year in Rosebud and what her family had quietly observed from across the street shortly after their arrival.

Her mother always signed up to set up dinners, before the heavy drinking began, and contributed some kind of fried Pakistani snack, made not too spicy. The rule of being home by dusk was suspended, and Asma and Salma were given free rein and five dollars to spend as they wished over the course of the weekend, with warnings to Asma that she was in charge and responsible for her sister.

The highlight of the fair was the hayride. For a quarter, a tractor, pulling a trailer with hay bales for benches, drove around town and the dark woods for fifteen minutes. At sunset, parents with younger children dominated the rides. At twilight, grandparents struggled their way up the three metal rungs and held hands and giggled while suffering the bumpy ride and hard slat-backs. Once it was fully dark, it was time for the teenagers and young adults. The first twenty people got a space on the trailer, and when the tractor returned, everyone filed off and got right back in line. In the late-July darkness, vestiges of velvet indigo hung on the horizon, and stars popped like a garland celebrating youth. Everyone in the wagon was in a collective state of anticipation. Fifteen minutes on a dark wagon with no adult supervision felt like a night of freedom. Girls giggled. Boys preened. And everyone tried to not stare at the brave couples making out.

That year, the tractor had started its rumbling engine, and the strangely appealing smell of gasoline burst in the air. The wagon lurched, and the hayride pulled out of the shadows of the light cast from the dance floor. As the tractor drove into the darkness, the sound of banjo music, plaintive and soulful, trailed them. Asma sat with her friends. A boy she had never seen before moved from one side of the trailer to squeeze in next to her. His name was Roger; he was from another town, and he was cute. He had said he thought she was pretty. She had been stunned that an American boy would think she was attractive. They had held hands discreetly, and in the light of the moon he had leaned over and kissed her quickly, his lips landing on the side of her mouth.

The memory felt so childish now, except for that feeling of her heart racing and the thrill of desire. The intensity of wanting something that was not permitted and the secret furtiveness of longing felt as true and pure now as they did on that hayride.

The next morning, Asma woke up on the couch to the smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen and the sound of rustling newspaper. She considered pretending like she’d gotten up early to study on the couch. But she was too tired for all of that; most of her life already felt like she was acting.

“Let’s get outside and breathe some fresh air. I think we could all use it,” Aunty said pointedly, looking at Asma on the couch. “It’s a beautiful, crisp morning.”

Asma had gone on plenty of walks in the woods in Rosebud, and some of her most pleasant memories were smelling the fecundity and green of the woods, lush, sacred, cool, and protected. She was happy in the wild. But not today. She just wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

“It’s cold,” Asma said.

“A hike will be invigorating,” Aunty said.

The parking lot at the trailhead was empty. Aunty and Salma set off. Mamoo, huddled inside his jacket, followed, and Asma dragged along behind them. It was cold in the shade of the trees but warmer in the sun. The leaves crunched with every step. Asma breathed deep the smell of campfires and dying things.

“Everything okay between you two?” Mamoo asked.

“Yeah. Fine.”

They hiked in silence for a few minutes, marching uphill. She stopped. Salma’s nagging rang in her head. She wanted to tell Mamoo about Ruby. She wanted to speak her feelings out loud, to make sure they were real and not just something she was making up in her own head.

Mamoo turned around. “What’s going on, darling?”

She started walking again, and they came around a bend in the trail. Salma and Aunty were standing on a jutting rock at the top of a bluff a hundred feet above the river. The moment had passed. She couldn’t say anything now. Instead she asked, “Do you have any pictures of your mother?”

“Uh. I think a few,” Mamoo muttered.

“Can you imagine being Lewis and Clark and coming upon this?” Aunty asked.

They were close enough to see rippling eddies on the water’s surface and tree branches tumbling in the muddy green-brown water, but high enough to see the grandeur of its scale. The river extended to the east and the west, wending a ribbon of hammered metal to its vanishing points. It was a majestic and humbling sight.

Asma looked down and was disappointed to see staggered layers of gray-white granite, the immediate drop less than a foot. She would have liked to hang her legs over a sheer cliff. They sat on the rocks, cold on the backs of their thighs. The sun fell between the trees on their sunny spot, and Asma slouched a little, feeling her body relax. In the middle of the night, on the couch, she had realized that she had been arguing with herself. She was drawn to Ruby and had been trying to make the feelings she generated fit defined and acceptable parameters. She could be a friend. She could be a mentor. But that hadn’t felt right. She had found the phone book and looked up Ruby’s phone number. The heavy book lay open on her lap, and she had finally named it, admitted it to herself. She was drawn to Ruby because she was attracted to her, wildly, irrepressibly, uncontrollably attracted to her.

And in the way a person can remember a stubbornly forgotten fact immediately upon ceasing to try and recall it, she knew what she needed to do. The sharpness that came from absolute clarity and truthfulness was bracing. She didn’t want to think about the horrible possibility that Ruby may not like girls, or the even more horrible possibility of how her family would view this transgression. She was simply relieved to have a plan. She inhaled the crisp air and felt her stomach hurt, but it was okay. She was breathless with a combination of relief and excitement.

Mamoo said softly, “My Ami and Abu would have loved you two.”

Asma was jarred out of her musing and glanced over at Salma. In that way they could communicate with nothing overt exchanged, they agreed to stay still as though Mamoo was a wild animal they had stumbled across in the woods and didn’t want to scare away.

“My mother was such a gentle, even-tempered woman. She wasn’t educated and yet supported my father’s belief in education and adopted his goals for me. If I was being trained to be a good student, Sadia was in her own training program on how to be a good wife. Unfortunately, she wasn’t interested in sewing or cooking or knowing how to interrogate the pot cleaner when he came calling to the house. She was just interested in books and what could be felt through them.”

Asma shook her head to clear it. The sister Mamoo spoke of bore no resemblance to the mother she knew.

“We lived in a formerly grand house that some British government official had lived in and that had been divided into four units post-Partition. We were fortunate to have one of the two units that opened up to the courtyard. Our side of the courtyard was teeming with climbing jasmine, a small lemon tree, and flowers. On most nights, we had dinner out there.” Mamoo closed his eyes and swayed with a barely visible movement. “When I think of home, when I think of that time, it is always in that courtyard, fragrant, ensconced. After school, we gathered in there for snacks, chai, spicy pakoras, and jalebi sweet enough to make your teeth hurt. And Ami would say, ‘I want you to tell me one thing that happened today to make me feel like I was doing something more than just negotiating with the thief who sells me chicken.’”

It was as though Mamoo was bringing them midstream into a conversation he was having with himself.

“One day, Sadia said, ‘I want to play field hockey, but we have to wear skirts.’ Abu started saying how that was only a sport for the European girls, but Ami raised her voice over his and said, ‘Then you will play,’ like the matter was decided. Sadia wound up playing field hockey in a pair of salwar, modified so there wasn’t as much fabric bunched around the legs, and the uniform’s white shirt on top. She wasn’t very good at the sport, but she loved it. And the next year, she moved to the local Pakistani school where things like playing field hockey in a skirt would never be an issue. The day I received my invitation from Oxford was the proudest and saddest day of my life. My father was beside himself and kept reading out bits of the letter. My mother couldn’t stop crying. And Sadia just stood there in the doorway, observing it all.”

After Mamoo stopped, they sat in the hush. It felt like they were intruding on his private space, even though they were in the wide, open air. All these years and a whole lifetime later, Mamoo had such tender and vivid memories of his sister. Asma felt slightly ashamed for how she was taking out her confusion and pain on Salma.

After a while, Mamoo slapped his thighs and said, “I don’t know about you lot, but my bum is frozen.”

On the way back to the car, Asma said, “So I think I’m going to head back to school this afternoon. I really need to study.”

Salma stopped in the middle of the path. “You just got here.”

“I know, but I’m so behind because of the play.” She reached out and took Salma’s hands in her own, begging her for understanding with her eyes. “How about you come to classes with me next week?”

Salma tilted her head and furrowed her brows at Asma.

Quickly, before Salma said something expressing skepticism about her motives, Asma said, “I’ll come next weekend. Promise.”

Now that she’d decided what she was going to do, Asma wanted to do it as fast as possible. She felt silly that it had taken her so long to figure out something so simple. She had agency. She had options. She considered driving straight to Ruby’s but thought it better to call from her dorm room. She practiced what she’d say. Something about missing seeing her at practice and wanting to stay in touch. The other feelings seemed too much to tackle right now.

Asma hurried across the quad. Every cell in her body eager and ready. She dug through her backpack for her room keys and heard her name. She turned. Sitting on the bench across from her dorm, arm draped on the back of the bench and long legs crossed at the ankle, sat Ruby. With her big eyes and wide-dimple smile she said, “Hey, Asma.”