My grandmother always wore white. Sometimes her shirt had tiny blue flowers printed all over them, but they were very subtle; it was the starchy whiteness that screamed for attention. It screamed the absence of my grandfather who had left a very long time ago – not dead, just gone. Her head was always covered with a thin, white veil, and under it, she hid a tuft of bright, orange hair. Sometimes I would glimpse her snow-white strands, just before she doused them in a pungent mixture of henna that looked like dirt. But it was the bold orange that screamed for attention. When she took me into her arms and rocked me back and forth, the smell of her skin overpowered every other sense I had. It was the smell of old age. Sometimes I could hear her heart beating in my ear and feel her warm breath toasting my skin. But it was that waxy smell that screamed for attention.
Her mornings were filled with an army of young people bustling about her house. They came to her from all over the neighbourhood, and she taught them how to read the Quran. They would sit cross-legged on the floor in all four corners of the room, and rock nervously over their wooden slates, training their tongues to pick out the subtleties of intricately woven Arabic. Grandma would lean over some of them, her glasses perched at the edge of her nose, her eyebrows raised and her stern voice berating them for their mistakes. But sometimes she would speak to them so gently, her voice would morph into a soothing coo. She never asked them for money. Instead, they took care of all her chores. The girls dusted corners and swept the floors. The boys did groceries and took out the garbage. She was never lonely, except at night, when she lay quietly in bed.
Her afternoons were for the budgies. She kept them in a large cage in the middle of her verandah, and dutifully counted six every day – a pair in green, one in blue and one in yellow. They were like splashes of paint on a canvas of white. Their naughty whistles made her eyes light up. She’d try to teach them civilized language, but they’d reply back with profanities learned from visitors that morning. One morning, we found one of them dead in a corner of the cage. It was a sad day that grew sadder every day, as we watched the yellow budgie sitting quietly in a corner, alone. Grandma grieved with him, but I wept for the other four budgies.
In the middle of August, we celebrated my birthday with much fanfare. Grandma’s little helpers made her house dazzle with banners of bright pink and shining silver. An endless barrage of visitors poured in with carefully-wrapped gifts, and the entire neighbourhood witnessed my blowing out the candles. I don’t think I ever made a wish. I don’t think I knew how to make a wish then, or what more I could possibly wish for. Somehow I saw nothing amiss. The sweetness of the cake got stashed in memory alongside the smell of old skin. And the sound of laughter mingled with the smell of candle wax got lodged somewhere deep inside my head.
Grandma died when I was nine. Her heart grew weary of filling in the emptiness, so it stopped beating when she was asleep one night. As if in honour, her house filled with a sea of white – men in sombre faces, women wailing endlessly. They asked in myriad ways how she died, and I kept recollecting all the ways in which she lived. The smell of incense made me sick, so I imagined candle wax instead. I longed for the budgies to whistle again so I could hear her laugh. But instead, the silence of the yellow budgie echoed inside of me, like pennies rattling at the bottom of an empty wishing pond.
Arjumand Ateeq 