His wife died yesterday. And tomorrow he would sit in a line at a government hospital, waiting for his diabetes medication. Life goes on. The need to fuel life is stronger than the need to die with the dead. Today, he would clean his shoes. He would scrape off the mud off her rain-soaked grave mound from his ungainly brogues. It is all he would do. Today.

His mourning for her had been swift. It shocked him how quickly he had finished his own private goodbye. It took only one fitful sleep. The long night after her funeral, he had been too consumed by his own mortality, his own creature comforts. Why wallow in thoughts of why she had gone first?

His frets at midnight took him into his own failing body. The constant urges to pee when nothing came out, the itchy diabetic skin on his feet, a blurring glaucoma. Those were the important things. More poignant than the slippers of the dead that sat in their usual place at the far corner of the room, asking him to mourn their loss. Somewhere in the middle of the night, poised like a falling tree, having returned from yet another futile toilet trip, he kicked the pink slippers away under the heavy curtains. They tripped him up, and he lurched forward, grabbing the velour curtain fabric to steady his body against the attack. He swore. Those slippers with their worn out faded soles. They laughed in his face. She was gone. He was the one left behind at the bus stop.

Somewhere, bubbling right on the surface of him, he resented her for leaving him to face his own daily care alone. It was selfishness. Nothing else. Worries about simple things, like who would cook his food, darted across his restless mind even at her funeral while the Imam invoked her place in the Gardens of Paradise.

He recalled asking himself that self-same question as they lowered her white shrouded body into wet, loamy earth. Who will do for me now? Now that you are gone.

Men always went before their women. Wasn’t that the usual way, the decent way? But he survived her. A left-behind man was a flailing man. A barely-surviving man. A pitiable, nobody-man who nobody wanted to care for. Though he had to survive. His body betrayed his fleeting lust to go along with her into a dark grave. His body whispered to him that it would fail and choke him, and blind him, and take away his balance, his taste buds, his bowel movements and his sight.

It would cling to him like a tenacious vine. His own body’s prisoner, he knew it would throw him onto the cripple-bed long before it gave up his ghost. No one would plant frangipani trees, to bloom their erotic smells into the mound of his death.

At her grave-site he had been gripped by a strong fear. What would happen to him? Who would care for him? Who would cook for him? Who would lay out his clothes every morning, and clean his toothbrush and plastic comb?

It made him reel forward as if he wanted to fall into her grave. A strong hand pulled him back and he peered myopically at the fresh young boy who held his shoulders and supported his stooping frame.

His nephew. He had nodded at the boy, telling himself that the youth of this boy should somehow melt into his own aging body. He craved for youth. He craved for life. Even here, as they came to bury his wife, he craved it more than anything.

Sara. She had been his wife for fifty-five years. Years of no consequence. Years of no arguments, no disagreements, years of nothing. She was a silent sylph that simply inhabited the vacant corners of their rooms, always stooping forward in her gait. As if walking tall made you stare death in the face as though to say, come, take me. Her downward slope, her downcast gaze, all done so she could pretend that Death would never find her looking into its eyes. A wanton woman.

Dutiful wife and mother, no challenge to a man. The only legacy she left behind was service. She did for him. No one could remember who she was otherwise.

She never failed him his comforts. His food would always arrive on the kitchen table, on time, food placed on a warped tin tray painted with pink cabbage roses. His vests would be ironed flat like paper love letters stacked on shelves, only to find themselves laid out every morning, next to trousers with perfectly straight-ironed flat fronts and matching shirts with crisp collars.

Sara – the silent, silent wife. His mirror, his anti. While she involuted into stale silence, he ranted, raved and raged. Fighting with the wind, living in the past, the ugly-beautiful past, a whole dance hall filled with swirling skirts and smoke from bootlegged cigars.

If Sara ever knew where he went on Friday nights, she never mentioned it. He said the word kaam and she understood it as a word: “work.” Yet Sara knew, it never was work that made him use cologne.

He hated her for not putting up a fight. Such discipline, such resolve. Such blindness. Maybe that was the cancer that ate her. The secrecy of tumours.

In her silence, her face turned away from his maddening hunger, she had drowned herself in doing things. Food appeared like miracles in her kitchen, lacy little doilies and ceramic horses prancing in delight, suddenly arrived on shelves and tables. In the cycles of breathe in, breathe out, he struggled with the attempt to keep from running away in the middle of the night.

Two children suddenly grew up before him. Him never knowing how they arrived, how they battled teething and tummy aches, and how they somehow sprang into adulthood. All he knew was that one day he looked up from his newspaper and his son was a man, his daughter a wife.

All the while, he buried himself in world news, jazz music, obscure literature and dreams of the past. The past peppered with languid afternoons, of sneaking into the back row of the Shiraz cinema to watch double features of Bollywood melodrama, of kissing women who were not yours, and burning palms on silk stockings. A man had to live.

The past was the coffin, the place you eventually went to when all the music died. The place Sara could never follow him to. Her coffin was cloth. His became warped woods, riveted together by rusted nails. Again, she had won. The angels would fear to tread her footpath, the pious path of no wrong-footings. As he had kicked and screamed his way through life, she walked its road with grace. A slap in his face.

It was only obvious that she would go first. Fitting, that he would see the clean white muslin sheet that wrapped her. That the sheet would mock the filthy one that would one day cover him.

Love and Fire, the twisted twins were never coveted by her. Hunger did not eat her. She was not that type of woman. Time had ticked on the metronome. Those padded footsteps, the soundtrack to the maddening domesticity drove him into a frenzy. Calm, measured walks, a woman floating over cheap tiles.

Doing and doing and doing. With each meal delivered on time and each lay-out of clothes on the spare room bed, he grew furious.

His thoughts stayed always on beautiful lipstick red girls at the dance halls of the Durban Casbah. The Casbah days, the Casbah nights. That frustrating labyrinthe of alleys and passageways that unearthed gems and hid Freedom’s sons in lattice.

The muezzin calling the faithful to prayer on a Friday noon, men in clean white skull caps parading from The Indian Trading Quarter to touch their forehead to the green carpeted ground of the large mosque. Men who would discard skull caps as night skulked in, donning expensive suits and stylish shoes, walking through the alleys of the Casbah, throwing cigarettes into drains, hearing the band playing scales, warming them up, calling the faithful to dance. To sing. To drink. To drown in revelry with beautiful girls that had shiny blonde hair, and billowing petticoats.

Coming home on a Saturday dawn, he observed his saturnine wife. Always in her long pale coloured tunics, always with a tight scarf around her head. As the latter years took her fingers into gnarled arthritis, the scarf was never tied well. He wondered what her hair looked like. He couldn’t remember her hair. Or her smell. Or her feet.

He only recalled the morning that life had left her, left through her feet, to pool like the limpid eyes of a dog on the floor. Staring at him, begging him to pet Death’s soft head. He had stood next to the death-bed, knowing she was dying. And death had seeped downwards, swept beneath her clothes, down from her chest, away from her legs, and had seeped between her toes as she went.

His daughter had sobbed out loud. And then he had realised. He was a widower. A good day to die, people said. A Thursday was almost a Friday. A day before a holy day, during a holy month in a calendar full of holy months. Ashura, she went.

He needed to forget her, his failing of her. He had to go on.

He had gone on by the necessary ritual. By polishing his shoes. Removing the caked up mud from her grave-site with a thick stick, and then polishing away the dust that had risen as his son and nephews shovelled clods of Earth onto the pine boards that covered her. Now, with shiny black shoes, that he would wear to the hospital waiting lines, he had sat outside in the Winter sun growing drowsy with its sharp warmth. Tomorrow, in the endless snaky lines towards the pharmacist’s hatch, nice women would look at his shiny shoes.

The repetitive polishing and the heat of the sun made him drowsy and melancholic, reminiscent…

“AK… tell them to play that song I love… AK, did you hear me? AK, dance with me. AK?”

“Abdul Khaled, I am gone.”

He jolted awake. The voice echoed in his ear. Celeste. Was her name Monica? Sheryl or Shanti? Maybe it was Sara.

Where was Monica now? Maybe she too was dead. Shanti too. Dead. A left behind man. Even your dancing partners left you. To sit on the benches and mourn them.

Sara?

Perhaps her name was Annie. Or Francine? Was it Nina?

Sara?

Clutching his thighs to stand up, he groaned and walked into the house. He went to sit at his place at the kitchen table and looked at the clock. The cabbage rose tray was conspicuously absent. The smoke coloured glass of tepid water, the two steaming bowls, the tiny chipped bowl of mango pickle. Absent.

Somehow he convinced himself that by staring at the table, his food would appear.

He shuffled in his chair, cleared his throat loudly, then dragged the chair backwards on the tiled floor making an unpleasant, scraping noise. He stood up, shuffling and rifling with exaggerated noises, finding the cabbage rose tray, clattering it down hard on pale green Formica.

The noise brought Mariam, his daughter-in-law, scampering down the passageway into the kitchen. Her face bloated with sleep. Her mind counting sleeping pills. Did I take four? Or was it three? Did I take too little?

Quickly, as she ran into the kitchen in her bare feet and a black cloak abaya hastily thrown over her, he saw her swing the veil over her face. Something ugly and unhappy came forward to embrace him. Even his son’s daughter hid her face from him.

He stared at her back as she cracked eggs with trembling hands. He heard the clink of a fork beating yolks into whites. As she swung around to grab salt, her veil caught in the metallic claws of a fake purple gemstone on the front of her cloak. She delayed the frying, trying to unhook the fabric. Doing a strange, comical hopping dance attempting to free her face from her breast. The oil on the stove smoked.

“Aneh pachchi, Mariam?” he said gruffly, gesturing at her face veil.

“Babu-ji, hum sumjhawe nahin gailey…” She trailed off, but she understood it all. Every word in that harsh language.

“Pssssht, Samjhawe, Samjhawe! Gujarati Bholo che!”

He twisted his mouth, and rapped the tray with his knuckles growling at her to speak only in Gujarati with him…

“Koy marrie parvaar nee karthu? Oo bho bhookie cho…”

He bemoaned to the stale air, “Doesn’t anyone care for me in this family? I am so hungry.”

“Maaf Babu-ji,” Mariam mumbled.

“Maaf-Maaf ki Saalo.” He muttered a cuss word, and rapped the tray again.

“Kaa cheh maru kawanoo?”

He asked loudly, for his food, knowing she was trying to cook it.

“Maaf Kee Joh, Babuji, hum abhi khaana pakawathe tho khe,” she muttered again, flailing at the attempts of the language, trying to tell him that she was trying rapidly to cook his food.

The fried egg smell surrounded his irritation like an orb, waiting to devour him before he devoured it.

Mariam grew conscious of her face veil. But she didn’t flick it backwards to display her face, even to her father-in-law. Maybe he would notice the puffy depression that ravaged a once pretty girl. She needed to hide that she had forgotten his lunch because she had been crying.

Bloated unhappiness that went beyond the death of a mother-in-law she missed so much, Sara, who she understood, too well.

The language of English never became a bridge, between a mother-in-law who only spoke Gujarati, and a timid daughter-in-law who barely spoke Bhojpuri or Hindi. They often resorted to speaking to each other in Zulu. An African language uniting a linguistic divide, and perhaps the unsaid class divide. Her legacy of labourers, and their aili-gaili, stood meek against the bold Gujarati of the privileged class.

It was a strange communication dance. English didn’t work. Mariam’s Gujarati attempt didn’t work. And all attempts at Bhojpuri and Urdu poured out with the evening dishwater. But mother-in-law and daughter-in-law seemed to find some way of communication. Maybe because they both loved the same man. Maybe because they both knew the language of a disappointed slipper-walk from kitchen to bedroom and back again, and back again, and back again.

He finished his lunch, a badly fried egg, some microwaved roti. Mariam felt she had failed him badly. It seemed that everyone had left the house on the morning after the funeral. Even the children ran off to steal mangoes from the neighbour’s tree. Even the son of Sara, the husband of Mariam, the Son Irfaan… had rapidly run off to a job that probably didn’t need him there. He did this often. They left her there alone, with an angry old man, the day after he had buried his wife.

Sometime around two in the morning, Mariam was awoken with the loud, shrill wailing of the house alarm. Her husband, Irfaan had not returned home yet. She grabbed a fuzzy nightgown and threw it over her shoulders, rushing to silence the alarm before it woke her sleeping baby girl.

She found her father-in-law standing at an open window, staring at the dark garden, oblivious to the loud alarm, and the window that had caused it.

“Babu-ji! Babu-ji!”

He didn’t turn to look at her. She fumbled with the alarm keypad.

In the silence that follows alarms, the intimacy amongst people is exaggerated. They feel like survivors after a raid. And after Sara had died, every moment was a raid into finality.

“Papa,” she said again, and this time he turned to her. He wore a thin vest; the wind blew his sparse grey hair away from his face. He looked sad.

“Aaina… Khirki… bandh kardey. Bahut tanda hai. Aaina… Kirki, kirki… close it…” She repeated and gestured to the window.

“Jaa yaha thi!” he growled, and waved her away.

“Papa, thu… aap… sick er… bimaar hojayega… Sick. Sick… Bimaar, sardi…”

“Jaa,” he repeated, gesturing angrily for Mariam to leave him alone at his open window, staring into a barren garden. The flowers had died the day Sara’s kafan was borne away.

“Papa…” She trailed off. She could hear the baby crying in the distant room, knowing it would take hours to settle the child down now.

“Marro Poiro kaa che?”

He asked, ignoring her growing anxiety, but persisting anyway, asking for Irfaan the son that Sara’s body and his body had created long ago, in a time when youth had allowed bodies to speak languages.

“Oo chalh gail. Chal gail… Oo kaam karath hai…”

Mariam imposed a lie, one she told often, of how Irfaan was always at his office, working.

Suddenly, he seemed to have heard her voice for the first time. He looked deeply at her with a recognition. He knew. A father knows his son, a father knows the day the son becomes the father.

“Kaam…” He whispered, telling his shivering daughter in law, the one word that was a truth she never acknowledged, truth she did not want to hear. The Casbah Dance Halls had claimed her husband, as they had once claimed his father. They told stories of how these were the ways men restored their power, after feeling powerless in the gaze of the White Oppressor. They took their women to waltz, and they took their women to bed. They could never remain faithful to their own women, their own labourer class women, but they secretly felt crushed against the nobility that their women silently bore.

Mariam tightened the nightgown around her shoulders, hoping that maybe ugly pink cloth would make her body disappear into loamy Earth.

It did not.

“Papa, sleep. Bistar… sleep… soja…” she indicated towards his bedroom.

“Ji, beti. Ji,” he nodded a yes.

Slowly, both in bare feet on cold tiles, the left-behind man and the left-behind girl walked to their own left-behind rooms.

At his doorway, he finally looked at her face. He could tell she had been crying into her pillows. Crying for his son, who was probably at a dance hall with a Monica or a Shanti. And Annie or a… Sara.

“Sara gujri giyo, Mariam. Sara gone.”

He whispered, the final recognition, his Sara, who did and did for him, was dead.

“Jee, Papa. I am here.”

Mariam assured him, and left him at his bedroom door.

First read at Shambaugh House, Iowa City.