Chained To Reality
By Amrita Mukherjee
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Content Warning: Rape and violence
Fatma
The darkness was darker than her skin. The white robe that Fatma was wearing and the thin sliver of light coming through a chink of the barred window did nothing to dispel the darkness that had engulfed her life. Her mother always said slaves should remain slaves and this was how it was meant to be. Fatma, although born into slavery and without an inkling of what freedom could be, never for a moment believed her mother.
Fatma smelt of her own faeces. They had forgotten to open the door at the time she was allowed to go to the toilet, so she had no other option but to defecate where she was sitting. She cleaned herself with her own clothing, her Melahfa. As a child she had often come to this same room to play with other slave children. It was an abandoned shack at the edge of the courtyard, never used because of some superstition that the Master harboured. She didn’t know then that same room would become her living grave one day.
Sara Shamma - Age10 (2022), Oil on canvas, 100 cm x 120 cm
Image description: A painting is vertically bisected by an orange line. Two faces, both rendered up-side down, are painted on either side of the line, slightly overlapping each other. Above each face is a hand. The face on the left is rendered in thick shades of purple, red, and orange. Sweeping, swirling brushstrokes in dark colors make up her hair. Her right eye gazes straight at the viewer. Diagonally above her, the hand on the right is painted with a similar color palette of purple and orange. The hand is wrinkled and veined; it reaches upwards. Below it, the face on the right is rendered in gray-scale, with thin, subtle brushstrokes. She has a solemn expression; both her eyes look out at the viewer. Diagonally above her, on the left, a monochrome hand, wrinkled and veined, reaches upwards. The faces and hands are painted against a hazy, purple-gray background.
All those men guarding her now were like her too, born in the same house, slaves for three generations. They enjoyed the only power they had – not letting her out of the darkness. Sadistic pleasure was written on their faces when they dragged her to the Little Master’s room when ordered. Fatma had known them since she was born but that did not do anything to lessen the depravity that they felt toward her. Only Ibrahim cared, she knew. But he was helpless. He couldn’t go against the Master. He was a slave.
Apart from their difference in power, there was no difference between Fatma and these men. They also survived on the meager food given by the Master, slept on the hard beds, never went to school, never knew that a reality existed beyond those red-brick walls and beautifully painted white gate. Also, they weren’t as tactless as she turned out to be. They played the survival game by its rules, she chose to be the glitch.
Fatma had hoped her parents would move out of this house in Idi village when they were freed by their Master in 2007. That year, Mauritania, the last bastion of slavery in the world, had finally passed a stringent law that slavery was illegal in this African country and would be punished by imprisonment and heavy fines.
Their Master had told her parents they were free to leave. He wasn’t a bad man except for the fact that he expected her mother to visit him and his friends in the night – often. Her father had no say in the matter because he was his slave, a Haratine, like her mother. He was born in the same home like her and their wedding was organized by their Master. Fatma believed, like two of her other sisters, that she was the child of the Master. Their features and even her sisters’ lighter skin colours matched his. Probably he knew too. But that never entailed any special privileges for them because that would mean acknowledging the fact that the White Moor had Haratine children.
Fatma always regretted the fact that her parents did not leave when they were freed, solely because they felt settled in a life of minding sheep and two square meals in a home where their earlier generations lived. They did not know how to start life afresh.
They felt a free slave was a misnomer in Mauritanian society. Those who didn’t have a Master anymore had another Master called society telling them that they belonged to the slave caste, which made it so that they needed to live on the fringes of the village, needed to stay uneducated and poor, and only speaking by keeping their eyes on their toes.
Fatma’s parents preferred to continue with their Master and stayed in the red house. So, for fifteen long years, since the age of ten, Fatma was free, yet not free. She worked in the kitchen, did the household chores, milked the goats, and ate the food her mother cooked. She was chained to a reality that didn’t exist anymore – at least not in the laws of the country.
Her lot changed when the Master died and his son took over. They had played together as children but he was sent off to study in Egypt. When he returned, he was a different man. He didn’t speak much, his lips were always curled up. He didn’t think twice before kicking, beating or withholding food from his slaves. He was just twenty-four, a man of the new generation, a man who had seen a world without slaves, yet who firmly believed that his father should never have freed his slaves. They were born in servitude and that was their destiny like it was his to lord over them.
The first time he called Fatma to his room at night, she said she was in her red and avoided it. Her mother told her if the Master called, she had to go and there was no way of saying no.
“But we are not slaves anymore. We are free. His father freed us. It’s by choice we are living here.”
Her mother’s eyes widened in fear.
“Never say that. We are always slaves.”
“No, we are not. We are free. I am free. It is my choice if I will go to his room or not.”
“Are you mad, Fatma? Have we ever chosen?”
“You have not but I will. I will tell him what I think. Let me see what he can do.”
Fatma hurried up the stairs to escape the desert storm that was raging through the courtyard. She stepped into the room and quickly shut the door.
The Little Master was sitting on the bed in his white flowing Daraa. He smiled. A rare smile it was. Fatma thought how the gangly teenager with large teeth had become a man in control of all that he owned, the man who’d learned to hide his buck teeth behind the pursed lips. Fatma stood in front of him looking at her toes.
“Come sit here,” he said, patting the bed sheet he was sitting on.
“I want to go to school. Like you.” She blurted out.
“Has a slave ever gone to school?” he asked quietly.
“I am not a slave anymore. Your father freed us. Please help me, I want to study.”
The next moment Fatma found herself on the floor, her face pressed down by the gazelle-skin sandals of the Little Master. Then she could feel her hands being tied up with a rope and her robe was no longer on her body. She struggled desperately but he was far too strong.
When Fatma regained consciousness, her mother was washing her with warm water, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her bed looked like a battleground with blotches of blood everywhere.
“I never resisted, the Master never hurt me. Why did you resist? What were you thinking? See what the Little Master has done to you.”
Fatma was aching all over, she couldn’t move her legs. The bruises hurt terribly. Fatma never realised that she was making the same mistake her parents made. She was choosing the security extended by a demon.
Two nights later she was called again. Her mother’s constant chiding kept ringing in her ears when she walked up the stairs. The defiant girl looked demure. Her feet felt leaden as she walked up the last steps, but when she entered the room and saw the Little Master sitting in exactly the same way as the previous evening, something happened inside her head.
She picked up the whip hanging in a corner of the wall and kept lashing him with it. He started screaming and by the time the slave-guards broke down the door to rescue him, Fatma had managed around a dozen lashes.
Fatma’s rage never allowed her to think of the consequences. At that moment she didn’t care as long as she could hurt him. If she had the ability to think prudently, she would have left home after the first night. The dark room became her world after that. Ibrahim, while bringing food to her, had told her the Little Master was in bed for a week after what she did. She felt a halo of light invading her darkness that day, but she had no idea what was to follow.
There would be days when she would be dragged to the Little Master’s room for beatings, there would be days when she would be washed and given new clothes and presented to Little Master’s friends as their plaything. The dark room, the starvation, the beatings took away her will to resist. She became a puppet in their hands as they played with her body, ravaged her skin and sought pleasure in her misery.
In her mind she roamed the sand dunes of her Idi village, plucked the dates from the date trees and dipped her feet in the ocean she longed to see. In her mind she was free. As a slave she was never allowed to watch TV because that would mean a glimpse into the world outside, but as a child she often peeped and saw the world had moved on. She held the hope that new world, the world where slavery did not exist anymore, would come to take her one day.
Sara Shamma - Hiding in plain sight (2019), Oil and Acrylic on canvas, 255 cm x 150 cm
Image description: A painting depicts two human figures against a dark-red backdrop. A red panel stands between them. On the left, a figure wears a maroon shirt. Their right hand grips the red panel; their face is hidden behind it. On the right, a female figure is seated with her knees up. She grips the panel with both hands. She glances to her left with an anxious expression. Her own reflection is rendered in the background. Both figures are rendered in thick layers of colors and free, swirling brushstrokes.
Fatma was surprised at the time spent in bathing her that day. She hardly ever had the strength to take a bath herself and the slave women did it for her hurriedly. But now they applied soap a number of times, washed her hair with shampoo, something she saw for the first time. Using soap on the hair was the norm. After the darkness sunlight still troubled her and she squinted as she looked at the blue and white Melahfa that they held up. She was unable to comprehend what calamity was to befall her next.
A photographer took her pictures. Fatma braced herself for more ‘friends’ and more pain.
Little Master looked at her with a smile and didn’t make any attempt to hide his hideous teeth.
“I have gifted you…” he said.
Fatma for a moment had the audacity to think that he was talking about gifting freedom. But she didn’t allow hope to make a place in her heart yet.
“There’s a man from Dubai who is my business associate. You are my gift to him. Do not create any trouble. If you do you will be brought back here and given worse punishment. Remember that.”
Fatma didn’t know where Dubai was, but she felt life couldn’t be worse than her dark room, the beatings and the rape. Just the thought that she would be leaving this house filled her with excitement.
The man who came to take her was also dressed in a white robe, but it was tighter and tailored and looked different from the robe the Mauritanian men wore. Fatma came to know later it was called a Kandura.
“I have your passport, habibi. Are you ready to go?”
Fatma looked at him questioningly. She did not know what a passport meant.
He made a gesture of a plane with his hands.
“We will be flying in an aeroplane to get to my house,” he said with a smile.
Fatma thought he spoke kindly, but she couldn’t tell if he was actually kind. It would be better for her if she expected the man to turn into an ogre as soon she entered his home. She didn’t want disappointment to add yet another stone to her heart.
Fatma thought it was strange. She was a slave, yet she could fly. She planned to ride the wind and spread her wings like the birds she knew.
Lakshmi
The bird was black with a blue beak, red and orange wings, and a yellow plume. Lakshmi had grown up seeing all kinds of birds but she hadn’t ever seen anything like this before. It perched itself on a rock and kept pecking at the water forming puddles at her feet whenever she was still. It was totally nonchalant to her presence and almost ended up pecking her feet a few times. Superstitious as she was, she kept looking for a sign, a positive message, something the Heavens could have sent through this exotic bird.
Lakshmi was bathing in the waterfall. The cold water gushing down her skin and disappearing into the transparent pool below created sensations on her skin that made her forget her troubles. Her three daughters of ages nine, six and four were playing in the green meadow that rolled into the plungepool. She sat at a vantage point on a rock and kept an eye on them. From there she could also see her one-room cottage with the thatched roof and thought about the bliss she had enjoyed even a few months back.
There was never enough food on the plate but there was peace. Their mornings would be spent working in the fields and the evenings dancing to the beats of the drums and drinking mahua. Lakshmi lived in Riri, a small, picturesque village in Chhattisgarh with green meadows, a beautiful waterfall, trees laden with fruits and lush paddy fields that had become quite a tourist attraction in recent times.
Like the others from her village, she belonged to the Gond tribe. Her name wasn’t a usual Gond name, but her father had worked in the city for a long time and felt his daughter would bring him prosperity if she was named after the Hindu Goddess of wealth. Lakshmi never knew if that worked for him. It certainly hadn’t worked for her.
Lakshmi, her husband, his two brothers and their wives tilled the Mukhia’s land. They had been doing this for three generations. They did not have any land of their own except for a garden where they grew a few vegetables. The daily wage they were paid for tilling Mukhia’s land was lower than it should have been, with money docked to pay for the loan that her husband’s late grandfather had taken from the Mukhia’s late father. Lakshmi found it strange that two generations of hard labour had not repaid the debt.
From time to time, the Mukhia showed them some papers and some calculations showing they still had a long way to go before they could repay the entire debt along with the accumulated interest. Till they could pay back every penny, it was a given the whole family had to keep working for him.
The payments from Mukhia were sporadic and hardly helped them survive when the tilling and harvesting was over. When there was no food at home, they somehow managed something from the kitchen garden. No one ever complained except for her husband.
He felt life could not go on in this perpetual state of paucity, so with a bunch of others from the village, he took up a job at a brick kiln. He worked at the kiln all day and drank and gambled in the evenings. He came home agitated and drunk, and the doting father to the three daughters overnight had become their greatest fear. Lakshmi was aghast how her mild-mannered, smiling husband quickly became as hard-hearted as the bricks that he made all day.
“Saali,” he would address Lakshmi through bloodshot eyes. “I want a TV, a fan, trousers, a shirt, a son. Can you give me these?” he would scream.
Then his fists would come down on Lakshmi’s face. She doubled over to cover her children. He was too strong for her. He would drag her by the hair.
He would stand hissing in front of the terrified girls.
“Because of you they think I am not a man.”
Lakshmi told him feebly, “Why do you care what the men at the kiln say? In our community no one looks down on you because you have daughters.”
She nursed a black eye for days after that.
Lakshmi had always enjoyed a lofty status in her home because she was very hard-working. In the tribal society they lived in, people rejoiced as much when a girl was born as they did with a boy. She was aghast at her husband’s changed attitude. She was sure it was a passing phase, and he would go back to being the person he was when he started working in the fields again.
In her society, women could make their choices. They could choose their husbands, choose to get them reprimanded by the headman if they misbehaved with the wife. She chose to tolerate and bank on hope.
Lakshmi did not know how long she sat under the waterfall but when she dried herself and wrapped the saree around her slender and strong waist, she realised she hadn’t managed to wash off the fear and the sadness that had taken over her being.
Her eyes kept darting to her girls who played gaily in the greens, unperturbed by all that had transpired between their parents the night before. Her eyes welled up looking at them and she looked away. She sat by the pool trying to wipe away her tears. She didn’t want her daughters to see her distress.
The bird had followed her. It kept looking at her and she felt it was trying to tell her that her husband hadn’t meant what he had said the night before. He hadn’t meant to send her away. Lakshmi just hoped that when she returned, she would find him sober and repentant. He would tell her to forget everything he had said.
When Lakshmi reached home, he wasn’t there. He had said he had his weekly holiday from the brick kiln and wouldn’t be out for work. Lakshmi bit her lips and wondered where he was.
He returned in the evening with a huge pack of sweet goja from the haat. He made the youngest daughter sit on his lap and fed her goja. The other two sat close to him and devoured the sweets, happy at their father’s thoughtfulness. Lakshmi’s fears dissipated. The black bird with the blue beak had indeed brought good news.
She kept preparing vegetables with kodo and kutki feeling less anxious. Then she caught on to shreds of their conversation that turned her heart into ice. A cold sweat assaulted her body. Her fear had become a monstrous reality.
“Why will mother go away?” the eldest one asked.
“You will have a problem staying with me?” the father countered.
She kept quiet.
“Where will she go?” asked the middle one.
“To a far-off country. She will earn a lot of money. She will send it to us and we will buy whatever we want to. Don’t you want that?” he asked.
“I don’t want anything. I want her to be here with me,” said the youngest.
“She will be gone for a couple of years only. I will be here with you always. We will become rich. You don’t want toys?” asked the father again.
The girls didn’t answer.
Sara Shamma - In & out (2019), Oil on canvas, 250 cm x 200 cm
Image description: A painting depicts a nude figure crouched in a fetal position, with their head to the ground, their knees against their chest, and their arms lowered at their side. The figure’s face is obscured. Their body is rendered in thick, swirling brushstrokes and painted in shades of beige, purple, and green. The figure seems suspended in mid-air. Above and below them are monochrome reflections of their own body. The monochrome depictions of the figure are bare-boned. On the sides of the painting are bright-green, ghostly figures emanating horizontally from the central figure. The left figure has their eyes closed, and their arms raised as if in surrender or in prayer. The figure on the right is in a similar position, but rendered in abstract, distorted swirls. The background of the painting echoes the colors used in the figures—varying shades of blue, green, and purple.
Lakshmi’s passport came within a month. Her husband said that he had borrowed Rs 90,000 from the kiln owner to pay an agent who would take her to a place called Dubai where she would earn Rs 30,000 every month working as a maid. He would pay off the agent with three months’ worth of salary and then they would keep all the money she would keep earning.
His eyes glowed. Lakshmi’s eyes died.
“You will be flying high up in the sky. No one in our village has ever been on an aeroplane. Aren’t you excited?” he asked.
Now Lakshmi understood the message the bird came to convey.
Fatma and Lakshmi
Lakshmi nursed a cup of tea. She was squatting on the kitchen floor, shivering. Cold air was coming out from the slits in the ceiling that ran around the kitchen. The salt from her eyes escaped into the teacup. She let out a long sigh. A very dark lady, thin to her bones, handed her a bottle of water. Lakshmi looked at her eyes. She felt kindness.
Lakshmi looked so disoriented and sad that Fatma didn’t know how to pacify her. She wouldn’t let go of a photograph of three little girls.
Fatma spoke Arabic and was doing fine with her New Master and Mistress because they also spoke the same language, although nuances differed here and there. Lakshmi only spoke a spattering of Hindi and the Indian Chef, who worked in the New Master’s kitchen, was the only one who could make out what she implied since she arrived the night before.
Fatma made a gesture to ask Lakshmi if she was feeling cold. Lakshmi moved her lips but before the words came her eyes were drenched again.
“Feeling cold hah?” the Chef asked, sarcastically.
Lakshmi nodded.
“Then go to the garden and water the plants,” he chuckled.
Fatma gave him a vicious look. Laksmi couldn’t fathom why.
The moment she stepped out she realised the reason for Fatma’s reaction.
Heat was a way of life in Chhattisgarh,but Lakshmi wasn’t prepared for anything like this. The sun tore into her skin and within two minutes of working with the water hose she felt parched and tired. But she didn’t dare go indoors. The Chef had told her to be at it for half an hour.
Lakshmi continued her task as the merciless sun rose above her head, striking her with pitiless precision. She suddenly felt her body was on fire and the world around her was reeling, then it turned black.
Lakshmi didn’t know how long she was unconscious, but she found herself in a comfortable bed with cold air coming out from the slits in the ceiling. Fatma sat next to her and the Chef towered over her.
“Why do you even come to work in places like this when you don’t have the strength?’ the Chef said angrily the moment Lakshmi opened her eyes.
Fatma caressed Lakshmi’s forehead although the crevice between her own eyebrows had deepened.
“Mistress will not like this,” he told Lakshmi.
The image of the witches that her grandmother told stories about started sailing in her mind.
Lakshmi occupied the other single bed in Fatma’s room. Unlike Fatma, who had felt so liberated and free in this new place and had voluntarily shoved away the past in the dark recesses of her memory so that it could not torment her any further, Lakshmi kept on lamenting about the life left behind.
Fatma drew back the curtains. The sun was rising from the sea. She let the beauty of this hour surround her every single day. It reminded her of the light she had walked into from the darkness she was used to.
Lakshmi stirred in her bed and opened her eyes.
Fatma smiled. They had become quite adept at communicating in sign language in a matter of three days. The flood that ravaged Laksmi’s eyes showed no signs of receding. She felt heat stroke and tears could keep Laksmi down longer. Fatma placed a bottle of water next to her.
She could understand she pined for her children, but she could never identify with the feeling because her parents, sisters, the other slaves, her home, already felt like a distant nightmare. Fatma strangely felt no emotional attachment to anyone back home. Her parents, sisters, Ibrahim – all belonged to another planet now.
She pulled the blanket up to Lakshmi’s chest and gestured that she should sleep a little longer. Lakshmi closed her eyes again.
Fatma ran into the seagulls sitting on the beach. They took to the sky together. She felt exhilarated. She dipped her feet in the blue-green water of the Arabian Sea and like the waves that came and went at their will, Fatma felt unbound.
She never knew a world like this existed. She had never stepped beyond the sand dunes that unfolded beyond the courtyard of her Master’s House in Idi Village. She had always wanted to see the sea which she had heard was located on the other side of her country. Now she could keep staring at the blue whenever she wished, right from her window on the first floor. She could touch the sea. She closed her eyes and imagined she was adrift in a boat in the middle of the ocean. It gave her an exhilarating sense of freedom.
She never imagined the world beyond Idi would be so beautiful. With broad clean roads lined with colourful flower beds, snazzy cars and beautiful houses, a sky that remained azure all the time and sands that rolled into the sea, Dubai to her was like Paradise.
The villa of her new Master, Omar Al Obaidi, on Jumeirah Road had gates that opened to a huge garden and through the rear of the house the beach could be accessed. Her Little Master’s house was big too, maybe bigger, but the beige-coloured walls of this residence spoke of an opulence that the red bricks in her home in Mauritania clearly lacked. She was now a member of an entourage that had smiling people in clean clothes. She didn’t know if they were all slaves like her, but this much she realised that they weren’t festering inside like the slaves in Idi. They did not have angry, emaciated faces.
Fatma had clapped her hands and twirled in glee when she saw a TV in her room. Mistress Obaidi had laughed. Fatma thought her white teeth glistened like diamonds next to her flawless fair skin. Her curly blonde tresses fell to her hips. Only once in her life Fatma had seen a fashion magazine. She felt her Mistress had walked out of those pages.
“You didn’t have a TV back home?” she asked.
“There was one in the house, but we were not allowed to watch,” said Fatma, looking distracted as she kept admiring the beautiful shiny pink on her nails.
“This TV is yours. Watch it after you finish work,” Mistress smiled again.
Lakshmi was lost in a Hindi movie when this beautiful lady in a satin gown entered her room. Fatma leapt up from the bed and was at attention immediately. She gestured at Lakshmi to do the same.
“Are you okay now?” Mistress asked in Hindi.
Laksmi’s mouth was agape. She hadn’t expected the witch of her imagination to be so beautiful. Neither had she thought she would speak Hindi.
Mistress could understand Lakshmi’s confusion.
“Most Emiratis doing business in Dubai understand and speak Hindi. I have a lot of Indian clients for my jewellery designing business.”
She extended her shapely fingers, a jade butterfly sitting delicately on one of them.
“I make these.”
Both the women had seen nothing like this before. They felt Mistress was some kind of goddess with superpowers who could create something as extraordinary as that.
She withdrew her finger and suddenly became businesslike.
Looking at Fatma she said, “I will pay you Dirhams 500 a month.”
Fatma stood in silence. She was a slave who had never called a single penny her own and now she was being offered Dirhams 500.
Misinterpreting her silence the Mistress said indignantly, “If you are comparing it with Lakshmi’s pay then you are making a mistake. She has been sponsored as a maid from India. But God knows who had told her she would be paid Dirhams 2000. She doesn’t have to pay for stay and food so we feel Dirhams 1000 is a great salary. Converted to Indian rupees that would be around Rs 22,000. I don’t think she has seen that kind of money ever in her life.”
“I am not comparing, Madam,” Fatma mustered the courage to say. “This is the first time I will have my own money. I didn’t know how to react.”
The Mistress now smiled but didn’t linger on the subject.
“I will get you comfortable clothes to work inside the house. Wear a hijab if you want and an abaya when you go out. But I will buy both you and Lakshmi new clothes.”
Lakshmi never had more than two cotton sarees in her life. When Mistress bought her five sets of salwar kurta from Meena Bazar she was overwhelmed. Her newly acquired clothes quickly cut through the sorrow that had been crushing her soul. Lakshmi tucked her feet into a new pair of shoes. She had managed with a pair of rubber slippers on the flight, which was actually her first introduction to footwear.
Fatma was determined to throw off all inhibitions and went for a pair of tight jeans and a couple of formal shirts. With her hair falling over her shoulders she liked what she saw in the dressing room mirror.
The Mistress went for the latest fashion trends. Sequined dresses, off-shoulder gowns, lacy tops and some high-heeled shoes. Fatma and Lakshmi pushed her filled-to-the-brim shopping cart and at the same time looked after her two little girls, buying them ice cream and exploring Candylicious at Dubai Mall. In the first few months, whenever they went out, the glitz and enormity of Dubai had overwhelmed them, but six months down the line they often behaved that they had been born into this.
Lakshmi sometimes picked up clothes for her daughters that she would take for them when she returned. She spoke to them once a week.
Sara Shamma - Double motherhood (2019), Oil and Acrylic on canvas, 255 cm x 150 cm
Image description: The painting depicts three figures against a dark-red background. The leftmost figure gazes out at the viewer. She extends her arms around the other figures. Her head rests on the shoulder of the figure next to her. The central figure, whose eyes are closed, leans against the rightmost figure—a young child—and holds their head against her shoulder. The three figures are dressed in the same shade of purple, making it hard to discern their bodies from one another’s. Their faces and skin are heavily textured, rendered in thick layers of colors and swirling brushstrokes.
Back home they now had a TV, her husband had a smartphone, a new bed and a cycle. He seemed very happy. He had quit his job to look after the children, he claimed. He never forgot to remind her to send money on time at the end of every phone call and harp on the fact that she should stay on in Dubai for a few years more. Lakshmi did not disagree, although her whole being wanted to.
Fatma was more judicious with her money, saving every penny, hoping her savings would propel her to real freedom one day.
The Mistress was strict but kind. As long as the two women did their duties she didn’t interfere in their interactions or in how they spent their leisure. In fact, she appreciated the care the two women gave to her daughters. The five females in the house had become like a unit now bonded by need and a bit of love.
Fatma and Lakshmi had never seen a woman in control. Mistress ran the home, barked orders, ran her jewellery designing business in another wing of the house, sat with her daughters for their homework in the evenings, drove like a man and wore what she wanted. She never forgot her prayers and came home late from parties. She holidayed with her friends and returned with expensive gifts.
Everything worked like a well-oiled machine in this Emirati home. There was sumptuous food on the table at every meal cooked by the Chef. Fatma and Lakshmi helped him with the chopping and grinding. The women later dug into the same delicacies and ate till the belch came in full force. They kept the house spic and span, put the clothes in the washing machine on time and rushed to hand over the abaya and sheila to the Mistress every time she stepped out of the house. They never expressed any surprise when the Mistress threw the black robe over her mini dress and drove off in her Lamborghini.
The only thing amiss was the relationship between Mistress and her husband Omar Al Obaidi. He seemed to stay out of the house too much on business. On the rare occasions he was at home, he preferred to have the dinner table to himself. He hardly spent any time with the children and whenever he and his wife spoke, they were arguing.
This time he returned home from a long trip somewhere abroad.
“You are becoming too big for your boots,” shouted Al Obaidi.
A hush had descended on the house. The servants were all ears.
His voice boomed again. “You have such a great life because I work so hard. But that doesn’t mean you get to ask me where I go, what I do.”
“I work too,” Mistress shouted.
“Can your business pay for the Lambhorgini you drive?” he retorted.
Mistress mumbled something.
“You will never ask me a question again.” He was seething.
Fatma stood outside the door with a glass of laban which the Master had ordered. She was hesitant to open the door. Then she heard the crash. It was loud. Fatma didn’t think. She rushed in.
Mistress was lying in a pool of blood. It came from her forehead where the vase had hit and now lay shattered on the floor.
She held the door to steady herself. Old memories had returned, making her unsteady.
Master was already calling the ambulance.
Mistress stayed in the hospital for five days. Master left home after he admitted her to the hospital.
Her parents did not visit her because they were upset that their daughter had behaved like that with her husband. They believed she had no business asking questions of her protector, provider. Her parents believed men should be allowed to do whatever they liked, and women should be happy with home and hearth.
Fatma and Lakshmi visited her regularly doing their best to bring back the sheen in her eyes. She remained listless. She smiled when her daughters sat on her bed but the smile did not reach her eyes.
She just asked one question.
“Has he come home?”
Fatma, Lakshmi and Mistress
Back from the hospital Mistress had started recovering and the house was falling back to its rhythm. A month passed. Mistress only came to know her husband was in America on business. But he still hadn’t communicated with her.
When the Master’s Rolls Royce zoomed into the porch that day Fatma hoped the sun had finally risen.
But she didn’t know it had been already eclipsed by the moon.
Mistress had also rushed to the sitting room, seeing the car.
The lady had alighted from the car with Master and walked behind him when he entered the sitting room.
He looked at Mistress without any emotion.
“This is Alia. She is my new wife.”
Alia smiled. She looked younger than Mistress.
Mistress could not get herself to smile back at her.
“What will I do?” she blurted out.
“You can stay,” he said. “You will run the house as you are doing. She will shift into the bedroom with me.”
Mistress looked away fighting the rage and remorse that threatened to spill out. She locked herself in the bathroom.
When she finally emerged, she had brushed her hair, put on make-up, sprayed perfume generously on her white floral dress.
“I will get my things from upstairs, and I will stay with the girls,” she informed her husband. He was opening the glass sliding door to the garden to show his new wife his manicured patch. He curtly nodded and moved on.
The move took just a few hours but the humiliation of carrying the belongings downstairs stayed forever hanging like a ghostly presence.
Fatma still made her sojourns to the beach every morning. When the ocean gurgled at her feet, she closed her eyes and saw herself in a boat. But a long way back, the boat had stopped moving forward courting the waves and the wind. It just bobbed up and down trying to find its breath, chained to a heavy anchor.
Amrita Mukherjee is the author of the novel Exit Interview published by Rupa Publications, and Museum of Memories, a collection of 13 short stories, published by Readomania. Both the books are Starmark Bestsellers. Her first book of non-fiction The Secret Diary of A Criminal Lawyer has been published by Readomania, recently. An advocate of alternative journalism, Amrita has held full-time positions in publications like The Times of India, The Hindustan Times and The Asian Age in India, and she was Features Editor at ITP Media Group, Dubai’s largest magazine house. She is currently an independent journalist writing for international publications and she blogs at www.amritaspeaks.com.
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Sara Shamma is a renowned Syrian artist living and working in London UK, her practice focuses on death and humanity expressed mainly through self-portraits, The importance of storytelling and narrative is paramount in her work. Shamma has a long-standing interest in the psychology associated with the suffering of individuals and has made work on the subject of war, modern slavery and human trafficking. Her works can be divided into series that reflect prolonged periods of research.
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