The Writing on My Forehead by Nafisa Haji

her finger at me, threateningly, but I noticed that her toes were still tapping and she hummed the rest of the song to herself before saying, “The words still run through my head. Mocking me sometimes, when we seem to take backward steps instead of forward. But I do believe them. That things—in the world—really are getting better. That song played on the radio, on the Hit Parade, the day I sat in one of the cars, with my brother and sister-in-law, on the way to the airport. My other brothers were following us, with their wives, in their own cars. It was 1967. We were going together—the whole family—to pick up Zahida, your nanima . She was on her way in from London for a visit. I was so happy, I remember! And the words of the song were so appropriate. Only that morning I had thought those words to myself, looking around at the faces of the young women in my classroom, reveling in their good fortune. Every year, since I had come back from England, our enrollment was increasing. School and college had become standard expectations for well-brought-up girls—a prerequisite, almost, for a good marriage, rather than an obstacle to it.
    “My good mood lasted all the way until we brought Zahida home, to our eldest brother’s house—the boys lived separately now that our parents were gone—when we realized that this visit of hers was not the family reunion we had all looked forward to. She told us what Kasim Bhai had said and done. That her marriage was over. I looked at my sister’s tear-stained face and saw that she was no longer the beautiful young sixteen-year-old who had cried out of remorse so many years before. She was a mother—a grandmother—now!
    “But the years faded away as I watched her wrestle with the magnitude of what she had lost. Zahida was—bewildered. She had been everything she was supposed to be—an obedient daughter-in-law, a dutiful wife, a caring mother, a pious woman—and she had lost everything. I—who had been none of those things, done none of what I was supposed to—not out of choice, granted—had everything, compared to her. She was still my younger sister, and—oh, what I felt for her! How to even explain it?
    “You will know, Saira. You have a sister, too. That bond, the one between sisters—it is second only to the one between a mother and a daughter. My brothers still did not realize—they hoped that our brother-in-law would come to his senses. But I knew better. I knew that Zahida could not go back to India—not without facing a kind of humiliation I would not wish on an enemy, let alone my own flesh and blood! I would not—could not—wish for my sister what I had managed to escape for myself. A life of dependency. Living off of obligation. So, I asked her to live with me. I had plenty of room to spare.
    “Zahida moved in here. She moped around for several weeks, still in shock. And then, finally, I raised two delicate subjects that sparked the arguments that would rage between us for all the years that we lived together. One—I told her to divorce Kasim. Why should she stay married to him? Chee! After what he had done to her. Yet, in some kind of misguided attempt to save face, Zahida refused, saying what I know she did not in any way believe! That eventually, Kasim would leave his English girl and come back! Hah!” Big Nanima shook her head, still disgusted by her sister’s assertion.
    “And the other argument?”
    “Ah! Well, within weeks, Kasim Bhai sent her a letter and a check, saying he would continue to send them on a monthly basis for her support. Zahida sent the check back! I understand why she did it—pride. But there is no shame in accepting what someone owes you. She insisted —claiming that if Kasim no longer claimed her as his wife, in name and fact also, then she had no claim on any benefits that arise from the title. Every month it flared up between us. Like clockwork, whenever the check arrived.
    “The whole thing rippled down to affect the