And so, it was done.
Zenobia accompanied Asif back down to the street and was informed about her husband’s vow. Not a single neighbor came out to see the Rizvis being escorted back into their apartment. That night, Boss had two of his men stay in their apartment to keep an eye on them. He also made sure that their house phone was “confiscated for one day only, okay?” (They never saw that phone again.) Boss, whose real name was Sushil, returned the next day with a Hindu priest. Several of their neighbors were invited to witness the rites of conversion.
“Listen,” Sushil said, just before the ceremony started. “I myself will bestow upon you your new Hindu names.”
Henceforth, he proclaimed, Asif Rizvi would be known as Rakesh Agarwal. Zenobia would be renamed Madhu, after Sushil’s own sister. They could choose the children’s names themselves, he declared benevolently. He would give them a few minutes to decide.
The priest lit a fire in the small urn that was placed in the center of the book-lined living room. He chanted the Sanskrit hymns. Zenobia wept throughout the entire ceremony, but Asif stared resolutely ahead.
Sushil thumped Asif on the back when it was over and shook his hand heartily. “You have assured me a place in heaven, sir,” he said, as if the conversion had been Asif’s idea.
After their stone-faced neighbors had departed, Sushil produced a box of sweets. “Come on,” he said, winking at Asif. “Let’s go around the building, distributing the sweets. Now, the building is pure, one hundred percent Hindu.”
Seeing Zenobia’s head jerk back in revulsion, Asif cast a warning glance at her. “Let’s go,” he said to his wife.
The three of them left together, leaving the children behind with the old priest, who sat cross-legged on the floor, chewing his tobacco as placidly as a cow chewing cud. Zeenat looked over at Sameer, who had barely said a word since the events of the day before. “How are you?” she said.
“Fine,” he said.
“But are you—”
“I told you. I’m fine. Leave me alone.”
Zeenat nodded, her twelve-year-old face flooding with comprehension. She would always mark this moment as her initiation into adulthood—the knowledge that only anger could cover up her brother’s humiliation and shame. At that moment, with terror and guilt coursing through her, she was in no position to reflect on her own trauma.
Later, when her parents returned to the apartment—the box of sweets empty, their eyes vacant—they looked ten years older. After Sushil left, her mother said, “They all looked at us as if we were strangers. Pushpa said”—and then she began to cry—“Pushpa actually said that it was our fault. For putting them in danger.”
“Don’t ever mention that woman’s name to me again,” Asif said bitterly. “That woman, whom you considered your closest friend. She’s the one who told them where we were hiding.”
“Pushpa?” Zenobia cried. “That’s not possible. How would she even know? Did someone see us?”
Asif looked at Zeenat in silence. She stared back, her nose turning red.
“We were bored,” Sameer said. His tone was hostile. “It’s not Zeenat’s fault. You shouldn’t have gone out.”
Zenobia dropped to the sofa, smacking her forehead as she did. “Ya Allah. I never knew my children could be so stupid.”
“Darling,” Asif said, “don’t blame them. Sameer is right. I let my vanity get the better of me, to go chasing after a stupid prize. We never should’ve left them alone at home.”
Zenobia rose to her feet. “I agree. It is your fault.” She was almost out of the room before she turned to look back on the three of them. For a moment, Zenobia’s face softened. Then, the bitterness came back. “Don’t call me Zenobia again,” she said to her husband. “You may as well start calling me by the new name that animal gave me. Madhu.”
Asif was, by nature, a happy, optimistic man. For several weeks, he kept assuring his family that things would eventually go back to normal. Zenobia scoffed at his reassurances. The children, too, had learned firsthand the limits of their father’s ability to protect them. Sameer, especially, was furious at his father: for his chosen profession, for his foolhardy area of scholarship, for leaving them at home alone—and most of all, for the abject way in which he had fallen to his knees and begged for mercy. For weeks, the boy was rigid with mortification at the thought of his friends and neighbors looking down from their balconies and seeing him with his pants down, his dick hanging small and pathetic for all to see—and at the realization that they had seen his father prostrate himself before a common lout, the kind of man who normally wouldn’t have dared look someone like Asif in the face. Out of all of them, Sameer embraced his new identity most fervently. The shedding of his Muslim name, his Muslim past, seemed to come as a relief, as if his small, humiliated body was a pebble he wanted to lose in the roaring waters of their new identities.
But even after the riots ended, things didn’t blow over. Sushil took a proprietary interest in them, acting like a scientist who had discovered and named a new planet. He insisted on accompanying them when they went to formally register their new names. He drove them to a temple for the first time, making sure they had front-row seats during the pooja ceremony. He took to stopping by their apartment whenever he wanted, referring to their mother as bhabhi, or sister-in-law. Zenobia’s hair began to fall out. She began to grind her teeth at night.
All invitations to the bridge tournaments and the kitty parties stopped. One afternoon, she knocked on Pushpa’s door and gave full rein to her rage at Pushpa’s betrayal.
“You put my children at risk, Pushpa. For what? We were like sisters.”
“You lied to me. You told me you were going far away.”
“I didn’t. I just said we were going away temporarily. And even if you were angry at me, why would you take that out on my children?”
“Don’t blame me. Blame that stupid husband of yours, for not knowing his place.”
Zenobia was about to turn away when she remembered something. “In any case,” she said, “I have come to take my jewelry back.”
Pushpa stared at her coldly. “You will have to wait until my husband comes home. He has the key to the safe. I will send your bag up with my servant. Now, if you will excuse me.”
Zenobia stood outside the woman’s apartment, blinking in disbelief over the fact that Pushpa had shut the door on her. She heard the doors to the elevator open. Three of her former bridge partners walked out, along with a new woman she didn’t recognize. “Hello, Zenobia,” one of them said stiffly.
She took in their flawless hair and crisp linen clothes and suddenly was aware of her own damp armpits and stained dress. “I’m no longer Zenobia, remember?” she spat out. “Now I am Madhu. We were forced to convert against our will. While all of you watched.”
“Oh, stop being so dramatic,” one of them said before being shushed by another.
Zenobia’s eyes were wild. “Dramatic? My daughter was molested in the middle of the street. My son was . . .”
“Yes, it’s very unfortunate,” said Priya, a slender, fair-skinned woman who had two children of her own. “But I don’t know what you were thinking. Pushpa says she pleaded with you to get out of town for a few weeks. But you didn’t listen. And honestly, if your husband wants to jeopardize his own family with his stupid newspaper articles, that’s one thing. But he put all of us in harm’s way. Those goondas would’ve come for our children next for associating with you people. And still you stand here and blame us.”