The Sweetness of Tears Read Online Free PDF Page A

jamun tree was. His mouth was watering so that he could hardly wait to eat her heart. When they reached the bank, the monkey flew off the crocodile’s back and ran up the tree.
    “The crocodile said, ‘Well, my friend, be quick, for I can hardly wait to taste your heart.’
    “ ‘Foolish crocodile! My heart was with me all the time. You have betrayed our friendship and I lied to you in order to save myself. Now, I will no longer be your friend and will never share my fruit with you again!’
    “The crocodile was shocked. ‘So, you tricked me, my friend?’
    “The monkey said, ‘Yes, I did. Just as you tricked me. But your deception was out of greed. And mine was to save myself.’
    “The crocodile thought about what his greed had cost him. His friendship was lost, and because of it he would no longer receive the fruits he loved and craved. He began to cry and ask for forgiveness. But the monkey refused to ever forgive and never trusted him again. She was lonely once more. But at least she was safe.”
    After the story was done, my mother and I would be silent—listening together to the sounds of the neighbors’ houses on either side of us: a mother calling out to the young girls who lived on one side of us, the lady of the house shouting for the servant on the other. Before sunset, the last of the street hawkers would roll down the street, calling out the merits of their wares in a song they sang from morning till sundown, pushing carts filled with everything from toys and sweets to fruits and vegetables.
    We never purchased any of the latter. Instead, several mornings each week, my mother would take me with her in a rickshaw to Sabzi Mandi, the vegetable market, drawing her chiffon dupatta over her head as we left the house. We walked to the nearest intersection to hail the putt-putting motorized tricycles that are everywhere in Karachi. There, venturing out of the small world of our home, I sensed how happy she was to be out and about in the hustle and bustle of a major metropolis. At the market, she would touch and smell the fruits and vegetables, as I clung to the hem of her kameez, answering the salaam s of the vendors who recognized her and who laughed heartily when she shook her head at the prices they quoted, saying to me, in a voice they could hear, that she would have to make ek pyaza instead of dho if the cost of onions continued to rise, using half the number of onions for the recipe that called for an abundance of them. They called her “sister” or “daughter,” and she called them “brother” or “uncle,” and I saw how my mother enjoyed these interactions, anonymous acquaintanceships that must have felt safe to someone who spent most of her life in a state of social seclusion that I was oblivious to. I don’t think my mother had any friends apart from these gentle men and Macee.
    I was an extremely shy child and rarely spoke to anyone outside the walls of our home. When a favored vendor, the one whose prices my mother trusted the most, tried to talk to me on occasion, “Eh, Baba, what vegetable will you help your mother prepare today?” I remember pulling on my mother’s dupatta, sharing the veil so that it shaded my head as well as hers, stretching the long scarf over my face, looking out through a grainy lens of chiffon—gray, dark blues and greens, brown, or white, depending on the colors of the shalwar kameez suit that my mother had donned that day, cotton lawns in summer and linens in winter, tailored from
sober-colored and subtly printed fabrics, widow’s colors of mourning, dull but not black, which was a ceremonious color reserved for only one season for Shia Muslims, which we were. I would cautiously assess the man’s friendly eyes against the fearsome growth of hair above his lips—a thick, dark mustache, curled villainously at its ends. The vendor would laugh at me, revealing brown, betel nut–stained teeth and smile at my mother, who would turn away, also smiling, and