Beneath My Mother's Feet Read online

  Beneath My Mother’s Feet

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical

  events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other

  names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the

  author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or

  locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Amjed Qamar

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Michael McCartney

  The text for this book is set in Perpetua Standard.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Qamar, Amjed.

  Beneath my mother’s feet / Amjed Qamar.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When her father is injured, fourteen-year-old Nazia

  is pulled away from school, her friends, and her preparations

  for an arranged marriage, to help her mother clean houses in

  a wealthy part of Karachi, Pakistan, where she finally rebels

  against the destiny that is planned for her.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-4728-8

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-4728-0

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4424-0705-3

  [1. Family life—Pakistan—Fiction.

  2. Household employees—Fiction. 3. Pakistan—Fiction.

  4. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction.

  5. Sex role—Fiction. 6. Poverty—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.Q13Be 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007019001

  Acknowledgments

  In loving memory of Ammijan (my courageous

  mother-in-law), Dadajan (my brilliant

  father-in-law), and Munir (beloved little brother,

  an angel among us). We miss you so much.

  Thank you to all my friends who offered their

  support and enthusiasm during this entire process.

  From start to finish, you’ve made it fun.

  And finally, I dedicate this book to my family,

  especially Mom, my siblings, my children,

  and to Adnan, who is everything.

  The musky scent of mustard oil intensified in the early-August heat. Nazia ran a hand across her tightly braided hair, then wiped the oil on the front of her rumpled kameeze. A yellowish-orange stain seeped into the cotton fabric of her shirt, and she regretted it immediately. Less than a week into the new school year, and already her starched white uniform was permanently stained. She grabbed a handful of sand from the side of the road and rubbed it in, hoping the earth would soak up at least some of the dense oil and save her from Amma’s scolding.

  She stood at the edge of the Gizri cloth bazaar, the afternoon sun pressing against her bare arms, face, and neck. Her house was in view just across the street, past the cricket pitch where a group of boys ran back and forth between the wickets, stirring up the dust. The bazaar was on the outskirts of Gizri colony, a working-class neighborhood in southern Karachi, and just a few kilometers from the Arabian Sea. Because the bazaar was two blocks long and adjacent to the Gizri School for Girls, it was nearly impossible to walk by day after day without getting drawn in by the enticing apparel.

  Maleeha and Saira moved from stall to stall, tugging at silks and chiffons that fluttered from overhanging displays. Nazia shuffled along behind them and turned her gaze toward the main road that separated the bazaar from the cricket field. Beyond the steady rumble of cars, bicycles, buses, rickshaws, trucks, taxis, and the slower animal-drawn vehicles, the fielders scrambled forward to catch a high ball, their bare hands cupped together to ease the impact. She sighed when Maleeha called out to her. Why couldn’t she be the batsman on the cricket pitch, poised for the bowler’s next pitch, instead of looking at clothes she couldn’t afford?

  “This one.” Maleeha unraveled a bolt of cloth and held a corner of the sheer material in the air. The gold brocade shimmered against the pink chiffon. “It’s perfect for your jahez.”

  Nazia wrinkled her nose. “Amma could dress the entire school with the all the clothes she’s made for my dowry. We don’t need to add another.” The strap of her backpack cut into her shoulder. She winced and shifted the weight to the other side. “Come on. I have to get home or Amma will be worried.” She turned back toward the busy road and began walking.

  “You’re always so afraid of your mother,” Saira complained.

  “She’s not afraid,” Maleeha said. “She’s just a good beti, a dutiful daughter.”

  Nazia lifted her chin higher and quickened her pace to escape their playful jabs. She’d known the two girls since Montessori; she knew their lives were no different from hers.

  Maleeha dropped the cloth onto the cart and followed Nazia to the main road. The stall owner wrapped the material back into place.

  “Once you get married, it won’t matter anymore what color you like. Your mother decides now, and when you get married, your mother-in-law will take her place.” Maleeha looked pointedly at Nazia but kept walking. “And you, Nazia, will agree to everything. Just like you always do.”

  Nazia looked at her friend sharply. “You know that’ll never change. Our lives will always be in the hands of our mothers, whether we like it or not.”

  Saira hurried to keep pace with them, her schoolbag constantly falling off her thick shoulders. “My mother always says that you can eat whatever you like, but you have to wear what others choose.”

  Maleeha snorted. “You eat everything in sight.”

  Nazia remained silent, having heard the same words from her own mother time and again. She stopped at the edge of the street, squinting to avoid the flashy sunlight that bounced from car to car. She waited for an opening to cross. The street was teeming with Suzuki trucks, compact cars, and ornately decorated buses. An occasional tonga clattered by, the driver and his passenger perched atop the two-wheeled wooden cart pulled by a donkey daring enough to brave the traffic. The day’s pollution had settled, and a haze hung over the city. Nazia pulled out a scarf from her backpack —the dupatta that should have been on her head — and pressed it against her face to keep from breathing in the exhaust fumes.

  When she saw an opening, she clutched her backpack and dashed across the street, jumping over the median to the other side. “Come on!” She looked back to make sure her friends had made it, then headed down the street that ran alongside the cricket field.

  A horn blasted loudly behind her, and she jerked to the right. A truck rumbled past, the flatbed crammed with men, their bodies jostling as the truck sped over bumps and craters in the unpaved road. She spotted her father. What was he doing home at this time of day? He was half sitting, half lying down. It seemed as though the men were cradling his body. The truck sped on, leaving behind a cloud of dust.

  She broke into a run, her bag bouncing against her back. Maleeha and Saira scrambled to keep up. The game of cricket stopped, and Nazia knew that the players were wondering if one of their fathers was on the truck.

  By the time Nazia reached the house, Abbu was already inside. Maleeha and Saira came in behind her, panting heavily. Nazia moved behind the men gathered around her parents’ mattress on the floor of the cramped room, where her father lay. She stepped in closer and wrinkled her nose at the stench of their sweat. Their clothes were covered with dirt, their thick hair
matted. She cupped a hand over her nose and watched two men adjust the cushions around Abbu in an attempt to make him comfortable. But she knew, from the way her father clenched his teeth and kept his eyes squeezed shut, that comfort was far off.

  His left arm was wrapped in a scrap of cloth, leaving his wrist hanging limp. A bandage covered his left leg from foot to mid thigh. The white gauze was smeared with dirt, and large patches of blood seeped through, glistening wet.

  He must have gotten injured at work. Abbu was a construction worker at a building site just outside Karachi. He never came home before dark and often stayed overnight guarding the machinery whenever there was a strike or curfew. After losing his previous job a few weeks earlier, Abbu had moved around several times before settling with this one.

  Isha and Mateen were on the floor beside Abbu clutching his soiled kurta. Their small hands were indifferent to the mud smeared all over his long shirt. Nazia wanted to push her way past the men to sit beside her younger brother and sister, but she felt too old to cry with everyone watching. Just then Amma bustled forward carrying a pitcher of water and a glass. She called Nazia to the front.

  Amma’s mouth was a firm line, but her eyes were round and watery. “Hold the tray so the men can drink.” Before Nazia could reply, Amma shoved the tray into her hands and then knelt beside Abbu, speaking words in a whisper too soft to hear.

  Nazia shuffled through the crowd with the tray, eyes cast downward, as each man turned away from her father and drank warm water from the glass. She could feel their gaze on the top of her head, and some men passed a hand over her hair, blessing her as if she were their daughter.

  Later she heard the men explain to Amma that bricks from a new section had fallen from the building under construction. Abbu had been leaning against a high wall, believing the cement had hardened. The cement was tainted, though, and the shaky structure had given way, crumbling onto him. Pieces of concrete had fallen on his leg and some on his arm. It would be months before Abbu could work again.

  Three weeks later Nazia was bent over her school desk, her stomach grumbling as she struggled to finish her assignment. She felt a sharp jab in her back and turned swiftly to glare at Maleeha. “Stop it!”

  “Well, if you don’t hurry up, we’re going to eat our lunch without you.” Maleeha nodded toward Saira, who was just turning in her paper to their teacher, Ms. Haroon.

  “Go on, then,” Nazia said. She gripped her pencil tighter. The assignment was based on last night’s reading about Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, but Nazia had been so busy helping her mother that she had been too tired to do her homework. She pressed a fist against her stomach to quiet the gurgling.

  Since Abbu’s accident they had gotten by with money Amma had tucked away from her sewing. In the first week neighbors had brought bowls of curried daal, samosas, and boiled rice. Now the pantry was nearly bare but for the half-empty tin of flour and the square bucket that held broken — nearly crushed — grains of rice. Even the daal consisted of yellow lentils watered down to stretch through the week.

  Amma had counted on Bilal finding work, but Nazia’s older brother had done what he always did when the family needed him — he had disappeared. At sixteen, he’d completed his diploma last spring, and now he spent his days roaming the vast city with friends instead of going on to college. He often disappeared for days at a stretch, claiming to be looking for work. None of his excuses ever made sense, but somehow the teasing way he said it, and the gifts he brought home when he returned, made the stories irrelevant to Nazia. When Bilal bhai was home, she could be a little sister again. Only this time he hadn’t come back.

  Maleeha nudged her shoulder. “Just write anything! You’re Ms. Haroon’s favorite — you know she’d never fail you anyway.”

  The sharp click of heels echoed down the hall outside the classroom. “Uh-oh,” Maleeha said, and slid back into her seat.

  Ms. Haroon snapped her fingers. “Everyone in your seats quickly.” She took her dupatta from behind her chair and draped the lengthy scarf over her shoulders.

  By the time Madam Qureshi arrived, the room was silent but for the whir of the overhead fan. The class greeted the principal by belting out “Good afternoon, Madam Qureshi” in unison. She gave an almost imperceptible nod of her head before whispering something to Ms. Haroon.

  Nazia stiffened as her teacher stared at her, all the while nodding solemnly. Was she in trouble? This wasn’t the first time she hadn’t done her homework. But the principal knew about her father’s accident. Knew that there was little time after school to study. She had kept up as best she could, and unlike Bilal bhai, she found schoolwork came naturally to her. Except when she didn’t do her homework.

  Ms. Haroon called her name and motioned her forward. Maleeha’s finger dug into her back, and her singsong voice taunted, “Nazia’s in trouble.”

  “You are such a baby,” Nazia muttered. She stood up, pushed in her chair, and strode to the front of the class, feeling all eyes upon her. It’s nothing, she told herself. Just tell them you’ll make up the assignments and take on extra work to keep up with the class. Since it was only a month into the school year, the assignments were still fairly light.

  “Yes?” Nazia stood with her hands clasped behind her back, trying hard not to crack her fingers so the other students couldn’t see how nervous she was.

  “Your mother is here. She is withdrawing you for the day.” Madam Qureshi peered at Nazia. “Is everything okay at home? Is your father better?”

  From the corner of her eye Nazia saw the first row of students lean forward. Why was everyone so nosey about her father? A wall fell on him, she wanted to shout. “Abbu is still in bandages,” she mumbled instead. “Not the same ones,” she added. “Amma changes them every day.” The principal and teacher stared at her. She felt her classmates staring, and all the eyes bored into her flesh. “We have to change them every day so his wounds don’t get infected.”

  “Well,” Madam Qureshi said with a sigh. “Gather your things. Your mother is waiting.”

  Nazia turned to her teacher. “What about my assignment? I’m not finished.”

  Ms. Haroon smiled. “It’s all right. I’ll take what you have.”

  Nazia’s throat constricted. “But I could take it home and bring it tomorrow.” She was trying to keep the whine out of her voice.

  “No, beta. There’s no need for that. I’ll take it as it is.” Ms. Haroon rubbed the sweat off her face with the corner of her dupatta. Even with the fan, the room was unbearably hot.

  Why had Amma come? She never came to the school, and now it meant that Nazia would fall even more behind. She could always get the next assignment later from Maleeha or Saira, but she had no idea when she’d find the time to finish it.

  She went back to her desk and began shoving books inside her bag.

  “Where are you going?” Maleeha whispered.

  Nazia shrugged. “My mother’s here. I have to go.”

  “Do you think something happened to your abbu?”

  Nazia grabbed the unfinished assignment on her desk and shook her head. “No. He’s much better now. He just can’t work yet.” She looked over at Saira and waved good-bye. “Maybe I’ll see you later tonight. We can play cricket.”

  Maleeha wrinkled her nose. “I’m not playing cricket,” she half yelled, half whispered.

  Nazia hurried to catch up with Madam Qureshi, who was already clicking her way down the hall.

  “Amma! Wait for us!” Nazia called as she jumped down from the bus that had brought them from the Gizri School for Girls to the Defence Market. The market was a sprawling cluster of upscale shops just on the outskirts of the Defence Housing Society, a section of residential homes for Karachi’s elite.

  Nazia was always awed by the transformation that occurred as they moved away from the narrow, trash-filled streets of the housing developments behind the Gizri commercial area toward the palatial mansions that lined the main thoroughfar
e when they entered the upper-class housing society.

  The Defence commercial area sat at the base of Phase 5, the section known for its lavish homes and proximity to the Arabian Sea. The buses never went into the residential streets, so outsiders had to walk through the commercial market, where tailors, toy shops, bookstores, meat stalls, restaurants, and bakeries catered to the wealthy. Here the upper class bought their goods, rather than having to brave the inner city of Karachi.

  Defence was, for all practical purposes, a self-contained city for the elite socialites to shop at the trendiest stores, eat at the best restaurants, and have their hair and makeup done at beauty salons owned by celebrities featured on Pakistan Television.

  Nazia helped Isha and Mateen off the bus and herded them toward Amma, who was already far ahead, walking purposefully toward a thin woman standing in front of a meat shop.

  Slabs of meat hung from metal hooks at the open-air shop. Whole chickens, plucked and skinned, were strung from a bar and dangled upside down by a single limb. The butcher swatted lazily at the dense layer of flies, but it was a useless gesture. The flies rose up in flight, only to return and settle immediately on the slabs of warm meat.

  “Amma, what are we doing here?” Amma refused to offer any information. All she’d said at school was that she had something important to do, and Nazia was to watch Isha and Mateen while she did it.

  “This is your daughter?” The woman at the shop smiled at Amma. She wore jewelry that clinked and sparkled with her every movement, drawing attention from the crowd of men around the stall. Her dupatta was draped casually over her head and slipped back farther every time she moved. Her body seemed to dance in waves, even though her feet were planted firmly on the ground. Her clothes were worn, and her face had the weathered look of someone who spent day after day toiling under the sun.

  Amma wiped her round face with the corner of her dupatta. Sweat dripped down her neck and plastered the front of her kameeze to her chest. “Yes. Nazia is fourteen. She’ll be married at the end of the school year. Isha is ten and Mateen is four.” Amma nudged Nazia forward. “Where are your manners? Say salaam to Shenaz!”