“Then you should’ve kept moving along.”
Mohan’s face turned red. “Excuse me? You’re going to tell me how to behave in my own house? What I should do and not do?”
“I’ll leave,” Smita said immediately. “Just call me a taxi, and I’ll leave. I don’t have to take this.”
Mohan stared at her, as if he was seeing her for the first time. “Smita, what is going on?” he said, bewildered. “What just happened? Why does your father think you’re in the Maldives? Why are you lying to him? And to me?”
She shook her head, stiffening, unable to respond. Could she trust Mohan? Could she count on him to understand? And then she thought: When has he been anything but kind and trustworthy?
Still, she hesitated, her heart racing. She wiped her clammy hands on her pants, trying to slow down her thoughts.
“Smita?” Mohan said.
Then, relief nipped on the heels of her apprehension. Relief at the thought of untying the secret that had stayed knotted for over twenty years. She had carried the burden of a double life for as long as she could. Here, at last, was the thing she’d welcomed and dreaded—the end of the road.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you.” She moved toward the living room couch.
Mohan followed her slowly and sat across from her. Smita’s heart hurt at the wariness she saw on his face. “Who are you?” he said. “Why did you lie . . . ?”
She held up her hand to stop him. “I’m trying to tell you. I’m going to tell you.”
She took a deep breath. “My birth name is Zeenat Rizvi. I was born a Muslim.”
Book Three
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Smita Agarwal was born at age twelve.
Before that, she was Zeenat Rizvi.
Zeenat’s family lived in a large, airy flat in Colaba. Her parents had met in 1977 when Asif had gone to visit his college friend at his home in Hyderabad. Zenobia was the friend’s first cousin, a gregarious girl who had immediately captured Asif’s slightly melancholy heart. Upon his return to Mumbai, called Bombay back then, he wrote Zenobia passionate love letters. After a year of letters, Zenobia, knowing that her parents were determined to marry her off to a distant relative, left for Mumbai and eloped with Asif. A small scandal ensued until it was determined that the couple would live with Asif’s parents while he finished his PhD.
If Asif’s father thought it was strange that his son intended to be a scholar of Hindu history and religion, he never said. Perhaps he held out the hope that his only child would eventually come to his senses and join him in the family construction business. Perhaps in the Bombay of the 1970s it was still possible for a father to not worry too much about such cultural hybridity. In any case, good fortune continued to favor Asif. Zenobia proved to be loving and kind, and within a year of marriage had become an integral part of the Rizvi clan. Both his parents doted on her. One of the happiest gifts of Asif’s life was listening to his wife and mother chatting away as they cooked in the kitchen while he wrote his dissertation.
The apartment in Colaba, perhaps the most cosmopolitan neighborhood in the city, was a graduation gift from his father. Asif and Zenobia, who were more than content to continue living with Asif’s parents, protested such extravagance, but the old man insisted. “It’s your money in the end, na, son?” he’d argued. “Who else am I going to leave it to, the sweeper’s son? At least I’ll have the satisfaction of seeing you enjoy part of your inheritance while I’m alive, isn’t it?”
The Rizvis’s first child, Sameer, was born after they had shifted to the Colaba apartment. After Sameer’s birth, Zenobia continued to spend part of each day at her in-laws’. She’d bathe and dress her son and leave for her in-laws’ home by midmorning. “A child needs his grandparents,” she’d say, a wistfulness in her voice that only Asif heard. Zenobia’s parents had come around to the marriage, had even visited them once in their new apartment, but still, the humiliation of her elopement lingered.
Asif was hired as a professor at Bombay University soon after he graduated. Some of his former professors had expressed unease at the thought of a Muslim professor of Hinduism, but Asif had so distinguished himself as a doctoral student, that there was no real argument against the hire. Also, Asif was no bearded, praying-five-times-a-day mullah type. He was a modern, secular man and could hold his liquor. He spoke disparagingly of Pakistan as a failed state and believed that Kashmir belonged to India. It was easy to forget his provenance.
By the time Zeenat was born, two years after Sameer, her father had made a name for himself as a scholar. She grew up in a happy, close-knit family, distinguishing herself at school with her strong writing skills (a fact of which Asif was inordinately proud), popular with the neighborhood kids, protected from schoolyard bullies by Sameer, and secure in her parents’ love. On weekdays, she’d come home from school to the small snack her mother had prepared for her, finish her homework, and then go to play with the other neighborhood children until she was called up for dinner. In the summer, there were trips to Goa and Ooty and Dharamsala.
When Zeenat was eight, her grandmother was killed when a tree limb fell on her during the monsoons. Asif’s father was so brokenhearted that he sold his business, took to reading the Qur’an daily, and went to the masjid every evening. Asif and Zenobia tried getting him to move in with them, believing that their children might mend his broken heart, but he declined, politely at first, and then with increasing vehemence. “My place is here,” he insisted, “in this house where I lived with my beloved.”
A year later, he passed. The doctor wrote Natural Causes on the death certificate, but Asif knew the truth: his father had died of a broken heart.
Asif missed his parents terribly, when, six months later, his second book was published. In the past few years, his research had focused on Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior-king, who had fought so valiantly against the Mughals. Asif’s book, The Myth of Shivaji, posited that the king’s contemporary cultlike status among Hindus paralleled the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment in India. The book was published in 1994, the year after the Bombay riots, during which Hindus and Muslims had slaughtered one another following the demolition of the historic Babri Masjid by Hindus. Its publication proved to be timely. Asif Rizvi’s star was ascendant; a leftist magazine in India ran an excerpt from the book. A few months later, a small college in Ohio invited him to its conference on the global rise of religious fundamentalism.
Still, other than a few of his colleagues, no one in their circle paid much attention to what the professor-sahib wrote. Their upper-middle-class Hindu neighbors remained friendly with the Rizvis, the only Muslim family in the building. The men watched with approval as Asif downed pegs of Scotch with the best of them. Zenobia played bridge with the women in the building every Saturday and chaired their kitty parties. Her best friend, Pushpa Patel, who lived two floors below, was vice chair.
Bombay was convulsed by another riot in 1996, and this time, the flames spread to their affluent neighborhood. Asif and Zenobia watched in disbelief as Muslim-owned cars and shops were vandalized and burned by mobs wielding kerosene cans. Still, they kept quiet and laid low, putting their faith in their Hindu friends and the impermeability conferred by their wealth. “Arre,” Asif would say, “I know every bloody person up and down this lane. Nobody is going to hurt us.”