Salmah Ahmed
Two sisters navigate redemption, revenge and courage in this short fiction by Salmah Ahmed, accompanied by art from Zafar Ali.
TW: contains mention of physical violence against women.
Razia Sultan found herself on the battle ground, in the middle of a scorching field against her enemy Malik Altunia. There was no turning back. She was the first and only female Muslim ruler of Delhi Sultanate, named by her father Sultan Iltumish, as his heir apparent just before his death in 1213 C.E, knowing his pleasure-seeking sons were useless for such a demanding task. In the heat of battle, elephants draped in blue and gold caparisons trampled over her foot soldiers. She could hear horses’ hooves in the distance generating a slow rumble: dhrum, dhrum, dhrum. She steered her horse, weaving herself into the thick of conflict, her sword ready and searching for the enemy’s throat. In the sword-fight that followed, her right arm was wounded, warm blood gushing out of it, and her sword fell from her grip. She dug her heels in, and her horse galloped forward, losing her opponent but stumbling on a heap of dead bodies. Razia leaped down to avoid being crushed under its graceful white body, searching for a sword to defend herself.
“No place for a woman on the battlefield or the throne, Razia.”
She looked up to see Malik Altunia, seated on his black stallion, pointing his sword at her chest. Death and disgrace had joined forces to claim her. Malik Altunia’s sneer made the realisation clear. She couldn’t win. The odds were against her.
*
Your sister’s body is pale white in some parts, hardened and red in others like a part-peeled lychee. You avoid her eyes as they scare you the most: an empty bottomless chasm has opened where once there was light and laughter. Your furtive gaze flits over her face, a moth orbiting a flame that is too bright, designed to annihilate it, and comes to rest on her gnarled, broken fingers. The doctors talk about nerve damage in both her hands where the men stomped on them with their boots… genital trauma and infection… multiple fractures all over her body… you tune out their morbid words after a point. Her lips are torn. Her swollen eyes cannot open. Numerous tubes are twisting out of her chest, throat, mouth, and arms. You cannot help the guilt that this is all your fault, that your secret envy, your evil nazar, has finally got her. In your childhood, the fingers you’re looking at now were expert at a game of five stones, or meer ghatte as you both called it. You remember the deft movement of those fingers as she threw a stone in the air and scooped another one lying on the tiles by her feet just in time to catch the one falling, and on she goes until all five stones are nestled in her palm snug as kittens against their mother’s belly. You always lost to her, your movements jerky, nervous and awkward. She was your parent’s pride, the stunning, obedient, sweet-natured first-born who had ticked all her requisites: an architectural degree and engagement to a handsome rich man who owned half the high-rise buildings in Karachi. She could do nothing wrong. Meanwhile, you were mocked with the nickname Razia Sultan for your propensity to bicker at non-issues, while haggling in bazaars or at traffic transgressions. All of it changed afterwards. It felt like one never-ending requiem of a life torn apart and then magnified in the glare of harsh clinical lights. You had just started your house job in Dow medical college and the senior doctor overseeing your work was a foreign tyrant. He growled and fumed, and when he wasn’t doing either he was sulking in his office.
You are at work that night. You stand back to observe Dr Holmes as he conducts the precordial thump procedure on a heart attack patient. At the same time, your sister is travelling back from her friend’s birthday party. Maybe fate has rolled the dice against her that night. She is discovered by a lorry driver in the outskirts of Karachi off the M-4 Motorway, prone, naked and barely breathing, behind the cover of some bushes. He calls the police. The police, moved by your sister’s request to kill her on site and not tell anyone about it, keep her identity secret. However, the news finds its magic carpet and solidifies into a million wasps reaching social media before your sister reaches the hospital.
She tries to slash her wrists with a fruit knife as soon as she gets some strength back in her limbs. Her attempt is averted by a vigilant nurse. You are awkward around your sister now. When they discharge her from the hospital after three months, she limps towards her room and cocoons herself in her quilt.
The anonymous, beautiful maiden, now ruined, is lamented with teary emojis and impassioned posts on her behalf on social media. She gets a grand requiem. The Prime Minster steps into the debate when a reporter asks him what he thinks of the high incidents of sexual assault happening in his country. You must understand this is not the West, in a country like this, modest and conservative attire matters and is instrumental in the way men treat women. You watch the interview and feel like taking off all your clothes and running down the street naked, yelling at all the men to try it if they have the guts. Instead, you throw off the hijab you’ve been wearing since you were a teenager.
She could do nothing wrong. Meanwhile, you were mocked with the nickname Razia Sultan for your propensity to bicker at non-issues, while haggling in bazaars or at traffic transgressions
You rage and take fright in turns. In the day, you pick a fight with anyone who contradicts you. At night, you jump at any sudden sound. You know your turn is next. The grim reaper is coming for you, but you don’t know when. You summon the courage to visit your sister in her death chamber. Your mother has been the only one to go into her room. She gives your sister food, water, and medicine, nudging her to wash up and act normal. Her instructions are met with resolute apathy.
The blackout curtains are left shut, the room has a musty, rotting smell, it reeks of medicine and your sister’s unwashed body and hair. Bongo, her pet Rottweiler, lays by her bed, whimpering. You slide beside her in bed, and she turns to you, her dry, cracked mouth trembling to form words before the sound trapped within escapes the prison of her throat. The medicine bottles stacked by her bedside are partly for her injuries and pain, and mostly to keep her sedated so she won’t try taking her life again. She whispers Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry in her delirious state, from somewhere between hell and purgatory.
“Kitni hasrat thi anjaam badal jaye ga,
Akhri warq kayi dafa palat ke dekha.”
(I yearned for my ending to change,
I turned the last page many times.)
You shudder and walk out of the room.
“Is everything au’ight with you?” Dr Holmes asks as he pours himself a cup of coffee from the dispenser in the break room at the hospital. His Rs are soft, barely there, just like his gaze that you didn’t know was hovering on your face and your uncovered head. You shrug your left shoulder and rub at your reddened eyes. You haven’t told anyone at work. You try and stay at the hospital as much as you can, even when you’re not needed. You doze off one evening in the breakroom. You hear your sister scream your name. You jerk out of your nightmare and stumble out into the hall. You see Dr Holmes walking out of the building. His footsteps echo on the vinyl floor tiles. Some unexplained urge pushes you forward. You follow him out of the hospital gates as if he is a beam of light in a labyrinth cave. The street outside the hospital is deserted except for the sickening yellow glow from the street lamps lining the broad walk.
Dr Holmes makes his way to a decrepit building nearby with the paint peeling off. A large board hangs from askew nails with a misspelt ‘Phenix Dogo’ painted on it. Hot on his heels, you run up the betel leaf-stained stairs and walk into a dim studio that looks empty at first sight, with a few mats thrown around. As your eyes adjust to the low light you notice lean, muscular men in white martial arts robes, or Gi, too engrossed in combat to notice you. You lose Dr Holmes as he ducks into the men’s changing rooms. He emerges a few minutes later, attired in his Gi. From your vantage point behind a pillar near the entrance, you observe Dr Holmes punch and kick an opponent in the ring until he taps his hand on the mat, giving up. Here Dr Holmes is not a saviour and messiah of ailing bodies here in the dark recesses of the night, he is a destructor of the human life he has sworn to heal. You want the power, fluidity, and skill he has in his limbs. During your observation, you lose yourself to despair as you stare into space. You contemplate the futility of your existence, and all the women you know. You feel a tap on your shoulder and turn around.
“How can I help you, Dr Khan?” Dr Holmes asks. Your eyes flit back to the training mat where you watched him tackle and kick his opponent flat many times.
“Can you?” you challenge him.
“Is this about your sister?” He asks, his blue eyes turn into weighing scales. He knows. “I overheard you talking to your parents…. and what’s on the news, it added up.”
You don’t reply. You want to shrug your shoulders, but the world is pressing down on them.
“We can start with some basic Judo, and in time you can learn how to counter an opponent’s attack by leveraging their weight and strength against them.”
“And what if I want to really hurt my opponent?”
“A more aggressive form of martial arts is Karate, but it’ll be harder.” He says, running his eyes over your thin and unfit body. “But martial arts are not about hurting someone, they’re more about mastering control over your body’s limitations, pain and your emotions.”
You don’t care, you want to hurt yourself as much as the whole world.
*
You follow him to the dingy, ill-lit dojang daily after work with rigid discipline for a year and a half, as if this is the only thing that stands between you and an inevitable apocalypse. You learn a set of moves which seem like currents in a running stream, from punches to kicks to blocking, and the right kind of fall. At times you feel the movements are useless, as if you’re talking to the air with your hands. At other times it hurts, like hell. Many times, you don’t have the energy to push yourself up from the mat. In the early phase of your training, you charge at Dr Holmes with feral rage when you get hurt. He easily manoeuvres your fall. “You’re not learning because you cannot master your rage, ego, and frustration,” he says tapping two fingers at his head. “Be here, be in the present, not in the past.”
You come home one day to find your parents gone to a wedding. Your sister is seated in the balcony outside the living room petting Bongo, instead of her usual place in her bed. You grab her in a hug. “Bongo needed feeding, and no one was here.” You remind her that she had always looked after Bongo, and your mother was never happy that she had adopted him from the street.
You try to get your sister to accompany you to Karate training. Dr Holmes talks of martial arts helping patients of depression and even psychosis. “Will you come with me to learn Karate?” You ask her. She doesn’t respond. She has started moving about her room, watering the roses, lilies and monsteras in the balcony, but rarely steps out of it. You catch her beloved pale hands, twisting her healed fingers inwards, and direct her movements for the seiken or correct punch.
“Follow me. Ichi, ni, san, yon, shi, go, roku,” You count in Japanese as you stretch your right fist out, turning your fist level just before you hit your assumed target, fold your arm back against your rib-cage, and repeat with your left arm. She watches you at first with lethargic disinterest, then with mute fascination and at length, with hypnotic imitation. A long-lost light stirs in her eyes as she mimics your movements. You make it a daily ritual to impart each lesson you learn to her. She is an erratic student. You find her unresponsive at times, and at other times compliant. You walk at her pace. As Dr Holmes has taught you, you’re both learning the way. You hope the way leads her out of her prison. She agrees to have regular therapy sessions. A psychologist you hire visits her twice a week.
*
Rehan, your sister’s former fiancé, and his mother, visit your home for the first time after the “accident” as they label it, their heads down, murmuring empty words of condolence. They have brought along a smattering of dresses, jewellery, fruit, and sweetmeat to formalise the second engagement between you and the traitor who abandoned your sister when she needed him the most. You spell out your refusal loud and clear. Everyone ignores it with indulgent smiles and sniggers reserved for childish folly. Your will is a tremulous bird meant to be caged.
You confront your mother after they depart. “Do you realise how sick this is? My sister’s fiancé has broken off his engagement with her and now wants to marry me?” Your disgust and disbelief clashes with stoic silence. “Because of something that wasn’t her fault?”
Your mother pushes herself up from the sofa, holding the armrest to support herself. You notice the deep purple circles under her eyes and her white hair falling out of her bun.
“Please Razia, for once, stop fighting the whole world. You have no idea what your father and I have been through, the shame and horror of it all, our family and friends know, and those who don’t have guessed, not because we were lax at hiding it, it’s because of your sister’s stubbornness, her refusal to clean up and move on, all we want now is some peace and to save the only child we possibly can.”
You laugh and acknowledge it. The blade of visceral fear that resides in your heart has torn your mother’s conscience, pride, and courage to shreds. “But I haven’t started fighting yet.”
*
It is Chaand Raat, the night of the crescent moon marking the end of Ramadan—the holy month for fasting during the day, and the beginning of the three days of celebration or Eid-ul-Fitr. Your mother has secretly arranged with Rehan to meet with you in the bazaar. After opening your fast, your mother nudges you. “Go on, get our mehndi done with Rehan.” Your mother is too tired to walk and slumps in the cushioned chair of an open-air restaurant. The woman seated at the mehndi stall traces a hurried pattern of vines and buds on both your palms. You cannot pay her, being encumbered by the wet henna. Rehan shoves a stack of notes in her hand.
“Your mehndi looks beautiful, just like you.”
He winks at you, and you want to poke his eyeball out. You gnash your teeth instead and hurry your pace, wanting to lose him in the crowd. You walk on, ignoring Rehan’s calls, as the crowd thickens and then dissipates when you turn a lane. You have a throbbing headache birthed of your impotence to vocalise your angst against your family. Parked cars line a dark street away from the hustle and bustle of the bazaar. The music and fireworks fade in the distance. You can breathe easily here in the still quietness but your instinct warns you. It’s deserted here. Something bad could happen. You walk on, uncaring of your instinct, wanting something bad to happen, demanding it to happen. And it does. You hear the coyotes before they attack. They cat-call and laugh. “Oye, what’re you doing, no place for respectable woman in a dark street unless you aren’t respectable.” You hear their footsteps crunch on the gravel behind you. Dhrum, Dhrum, Dhrum. You turn around to see one of them pointing a gun at you. “Get in that car.” He motions to a Land Rover parked nearby. You notice the powerful engine running and a man seated in the driving seat taking swigs from a bottle hidden in a brown bag.
The odds are against you. There are five men in total, three behind the goon holding the gun, one behind the wheel. You have learned single combat against a benevolent, patient teacher, you have never faced multiple vicious opponents. You know you’ll face the same fate as your sister. You will be found next morning in a deserted stretch of land, half alive, barely breathing. This time the familiar requiem will be held in your anonymous honour on mass media. Your fate will be justified by what you wore and what you did or didn’t do. “Aye randi, didn’t you hear what I said?” he barks, spitting on the floor.
You feel like you’re observing this from afar. The edges of your vision blur. You are at the battlefield where Razia Sultan has just been defeated. You are her. You can hear the clashing of swords and the horses’ hooves slowdown in the distance. You survey the carnage of your soldiers’ bodies, strewn like crushed flowers on the baked earth, their white uniforms stained with red blood. You turn your gaze to the man on his black horse shifting his sword from your chest to your exposed throat. Malik Altunia’s eyes narrow when you don’t reply. “Accept defeat Razia Sultana, and I will spare your life.”
You straighten your body and look him in the eye, without an ounce of fear for your life, the weight of which is paltry against your right to the throne. You raise your voice so everyone around you can hear. “I am not a Sultana and never was. You may address me as Sultan Raziyat al-Duniya wa'l Din bint al-Sultan, and you Malik Altunia, will help me get my throne back from the traitors who snatched it from me.” You see a flicker of fear and respect in his eyes, as the grip on his sword slackens.
“It will serve your pathetic existence to remember me well, so you don’t ever cross my path again.” Razia Sultan’s tone has taken over your voice. Your loud, confident voice echoes in the night. The man holding the gun at you steps back and sputters a nervous laugh. “Pagal hai, kya?”
By instinct you know what to do, your mind takes over your body. You feel a familiar tensing of your muscles for combat. A calculated jerk of your hand throws his pistol out of his hand. It slides under one of the numerous cars parked nearby. You use Moroto-Zuki on him, or the double handed punch, and he stumbles back breathless, almost falling. His friends support him up, stopping his fall. They stand back, glancing at each other. You relish the first look of disbelief that shadows their faces. You had the advantage of surprise in the first instance.
The man who suffers the kick recovers fast, furious at the insult he’s suffered at the hands of a mere woman. He charges at you with an outraged growl. You match the volume of his growl and accost him mid-stride. You use his momentum and strength to throw him over your shoulder. The two men hanging behind tag-team to restrain you. One yanks your hair and the other punches you in the face. You taste the metallic tang of blood in your mouth. They are shoving you towards the car like a sack of grain, but you release yourself from their grip, digging your teeth into one’s hand and stabbing your finger in the other’s eye. You realise you need to avoid being restrained at all costs. You take a deep breath and clear your mind of all emotion. You are there in the moment. You use a well-practiced kata on them, a combination of kicks and punches that leaves them breathless and whimpering on the floor. Their drunken state aids you in combat. They are swaying after a few strong blows. You don’t stop. You do the ignoble. You continue attacking them when they are down.
From the corner of your eye, you notice the driver reverse his car, rev his engine and race down the street. You survey the pathetic pack at your feet. One is clutching at his ribs, the second is nursing his broken arm, the third is clutching his bloodied head that you’ve smashed against a car’s window. You wonder where the fourth one is, did he run or hide? You realise your advantage with dispassionate impartiality. This was easy for you. It wasn’t a test of your skill. The men were unskilled in any form of disciplined combat, besides being drunk. You know it will be harder next time.
You hear a hum of murmuring, and flashing lights. A crowd of women and men, formerly enjoying the festivities in the bazaar, have now gathered around you in a semi-circle. They are whispering to each other, talking about you, clicking your pictures, and making your video. Two uniformed policemen arrive at the scene, their bellies sticking out and holding their pistols ready. “What happened here, huh?” The senior one fidgets with his belt. “Who did all this…” He gestures to the bruised men.
At your silence, they come to their own rational explanation. “Gang fight, Chote, note that down—probably a Shia-Sunni ruckus over Chaand Raat being the wrong night, huh?” He nudges his constable. “Round these men up and take them to the station. Are you alright, Bibi? Be careful, stay with the men of your family.” A round of applause bursts from the crowd and surprises you. The policeman holds his arms up. “Please, please, stop, we’re just doing our jobs.”
Rehan and your mother push through the crowd and rush towards you. Rehan is yelling at your terrified mother. “She has no sense of decorum. She just ran off despite my trying to stop her!”
Your mother grabs you in a hug. You stroke her back in reassuring circles.
“Look at this.” Rehan gestures at the mobile phones held aloft, still filming, and addresses you. “Is this the cheap publicity you want, slinking off into the darkness for God knows what reason and then being discovered with these lowly drunk ruffians. Is this how ladies from good families behave?”
You notice the fourth goon who had held a pistol to your head hiding at the back of the crowd, observing the proceeding. He catches your eye and twists around to make his escape. You pick up a stray stick, a piece of broken dry branch, from the ground, hop onto the cemented driveway ledge and stretch your right arm in a wide arc. The flying stick narrowly misses Rehan’s head as he ducks, yelping in fright, and hits the back of the goon’s head just as he starts running. He stumbles and falls.
“Did you just throw a stick at me?” Rehan eyes bulge and he sputters in shock. You ignore him, as usual, and walk to the policemen who are busy handcuffing the goons.
“You missed one over there.”
Salmah Ahmed is a writer and accountant living in London. She has studied a fiction writing course from Faber Academy and is working on her debut novel. Salmah’s poetry and short stories have appeared in Tell Me Your Story (a print anthology published by the University of Victoria), The Aleph Review, Vol. 7, Adda Magazine and The Indian Review.
Zafar Ali is an emerging artist from Usta Muhammad, Baluchistan. He graduated in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2020 and was selected for the ‘Art Saraye Residency 2023’, where he produced a body of work that was awarded the ‘Art Saraye Artist Grant’ for a solo show in 2024. He is also a first-prize recipient of the ‘Purazm Award 2020’. His works are part of many notable private collections and have been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally.
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