I hold my breath at once. I have known there was more. My heart leaps. I am so afraid she will speak and it will not be enough.
“A few years ago, when Abbas was about five, I came downstairs after putting Tahira down for a nap, and Abbas was on the phone. Just talking and talking. I took the phone from him. The person hung up as soon as I spoke. Who was that? I asked Abbas.
“He wouldn’t tell me. No one, he said. Okay, I asked him, what did you talk to him about? Abbas didn’t correct me, didn’t say it was a she. About me, he said. And about Tahira.
“I knew it was Amar. How could it have been anyone else? He just asked questions, Abbas said. What kind of questions, I asked, can you try to remember for Mumma? How old Tahira is, he said, what you are like with us, what you do with us, if you are a good mummy. What did you say? I asked. He said yes, I was a nice mummy, that sometimes I took them to the park.
“He could tell I was trying not to cry. Please tell me, I said to him, you’re not in trouble, I promise, just try to remember everything you can for Mumma. He eased a little. He asked a lot about Nana and Nani, he said, he wanted me to talk about them. Anything specific? I asked. No, he said, I told him what food they make and about Nana’s gift drawer, what Nani likes to do and Nani’s flowers. What did he say, I asked, when you told him all of this? He said, ‘Keep going.’?”
I do not know what to say. I turn my face away from Hadia, unable to look at her.
Hadia sits up straight and continues. “There are times, every year or so, when the phone rings from a blocked number and I answer and say hello. Hello? Salaam? Then I say, is it you? And the caller hangs up. After that first time, I noticed Abbas would perk up when the phone rang, and he would look at me when it did. Just a few months ago, Tariq also came upon Abbas on the phone while I was at work. When Abbas saw Tariq, he hung up immediately. Tariq asked, who was that, Abbas? And Abbas just gave Tariq that look of his when he lies and said, I don’t know.”
* * *
FOR YOUR SIXTH birthday your mother baked a cake and tried to make blue frosting but it turned out teal, and you said to her, I like it, it’s like the ocean. I charged the video camera upstairs, and downstairs I could hear the hum of you all. We had invited a few family friends over. Blue and white balloons. Clear goodie bags filled with tiny packets of M&M’s and dollar-store bracelets and tiny notebooks and pencils and those little aliens that you kids liked to throw at the ceilings, the ones that left an oily trace when pulled from the wall. Your mother made trays of biryani. Your sisters wore matching frilly dresses. Your mother’s parents were visiting us from India at the time, and maybe because of this, I was thinking of my own parents, who would never see you. Who had gone before I could show them what I had made of my life, how I had succeeded in a way, a job and a house in California, three gorgeous children, a wife who made biryani and teal-frosted cake and pinned streamers and balloons to the walls.
“Baba,” Huda said, standing in the doorway, “Mumma wants to light the candles now.”
I stood, walked downstairs, found you all surrounding the kitchen table, where the candles had been lit, little drops of blue and white wax staining the cake and becoming solid, and you were standing right before it, surrounded by children who were struggling to find a space, pushing past one another and standing on tiptoe to see the action that was hardly exciting, hardly new.
“Baba’s here!” you said, stomping on the ground, alternating one foot then the other, lifting them up a little so you looked like you were shaking from excitement.
I held the camera up, I put it to my eye and focused on you, and suddenly you were a tiny face in a tiny square bordered by darkness, and you said, “Baba’s here!” to the kids around you, and I hit record, the little red dot began to blink where your shirt was, and I missed it just by an instant, you saying that. Hadia looked up at me—she too fit in the frame—and she began to sing “Happy Birthday” and it spread until all the children joined in singing it, and you beamed, and I concentrated on keeping my camera steady and focused on your face, as you looked around at everyone, smiling wide. You were missing a tooth then. Your mother’s hand was on your shoulder. She was wearing the same ring she wears now. The Ali girl you would one day grow to love and be devastated by was standing in the frame too, her hand in her mouth, her big eyes turned up to the light fixture. You leaned forward when the song was done and a boy shouted, make a wish, and you paused, closed your eyes, your face in deep, sincere concentration, focused in a way it never was when we would ask you to pray with us, and you inhaled a giant breath and released it theatrically, so forcefully that spit flew from your mouth and onto the surface of the teal cake and I cringed, hoping none of the adults had caught that. And all the flames were spent. And a little smoke rose into the air, slow and meandering, and Hadia leaned forward and sniffed it, and Huda extended a finger and poked it into the cake, licked the frosting off her finger, and smiled. Your mother’s face appeared in the little square then, and she held on to your cheek and pulled your face up to hers and she kissed you, and your grandfather took a spoon and fed you from your cake and you wiped the teal frosting on your mouth with the back of your hand, and I pulled the camera away from you then, zoomed out, and scanned the room. The HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign we used for every birthday for years tacked on the wall, the children that had begun running from the kitchen into the living room, the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game taped up, a disarray of sticker tails all over the body and one on our wall, the adults talking again, and then I pulled the camera back to you, and you were still standing by your mother, still beaming, your lips and teeth now tinged blue.
Sometimes I come home and know your mother has been watching the videos. Sometimes she forgets them in the tape player. I turn the TV on to watch the news and there it is again—a moment from our life paused on the screen, how our backyard looked years ago, our children frozen in it. We don’t watch them together as a family anymore, as we used to when you kids were all still under the same roof and one of you would ask us to watch them. You would always insist we only put on one that you were in, a video from after you were born. As a child, it was hard for you to imagine us having a life without you in it. Hadia would say it wasn’t fair, that we never got to see videos of her as a baby, we only saw the ones with you as a kid, you as the center of attention. And that by the time you entered the videos she had already begun her ugly stage. And I would tell her not to be silly, when I should have told her she did not have an ugly stage, and I would put on a video from after you were born, and we watched your birthday, or all of us going to the zoo one day, or the three of you playing in the sprinklers outside one summer afternoon. Sometimes, I watch them again too. I press play and I think, This was the moment right after you said, Baba is here, that is why you were looking up, straight at the camera. When I watch the old tapes and look through the old photographs, it’s as if I wasn’t there at all. But they are mine, I remind myself, they are my memories, they are exactly how I stood and saw them.
* * *