The Sweetness of Tears Read Online Free PDF Page B

Elvis Presley’s song.”
    I shook my head and frowned, because this didn’t seem right and the song sounded strange in the baritone of the man whose peculiar name my mother knew.
    There were two months of the year when my mother would not sing the usual songs to me at night. And what she did sing, I had to share with others by day. Suddenly, the boundaries of our sober world would become porous as the social life of all of Karachi’s Shias—a life I didn’t know, of dinner parties and wedding functions, of beach picnics and the constant flow of spontaneous, unannounced visiting, which I would probably not have enjoyed in any case—shifted into a period of ritual grieving so immediate and intimate that it was hard to believe that the deaths being mourned had occurred many centuries ago. Radios and televisions in Shia homes were mute and dark, for the first ten days of those two months at least. Solid black clothing was aired out of closets and donned for those days, giving way to black prints patterned with whites and grays for the rest of those two months. Jewelry was shed, makeup eschewed. During Muharram and Safar, the tales my mother told me in those afternoons on the terrace were different, her words weaving into the rituals and symbols and chanting of those strangely sensual days—the names and stories so tied into the sounds, scents, tastes, and textures that they blend together in my memory.
    We wear black, Sadee, every year, for two months, my mother said . We don’t listen to music. We mourn what happened in this month, almost fourteen hundred years ago. As if it were today. We grieve for the family of our beloved Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, crying and mourning for them more than we mourn for our own troubles and problems. The family of the Prophet, who brought the Quran—a message of unity and justice. With it, he united the savage Arabs who used to fight and feud and kill one another, who worshipped stones and statues and buried their baby daughters alive. They were ignorant people, uncivilized. And while the Prophet lived, under his leadership, they had become one people, one community.
    I remember perfumed wisps of smoke that drifted through the living rooms of people’s homes, where women of the community gathered—my paternal grandparents’ house among them—emanating from the incense sticks that were lit daily during those ten days of Muharram. And the scent of roses gathered and arranged in vases set upon makeshift altars, peculiarly enhanced in the hot, humid climate of Karachi and later, a signal of the end of those gatherings, from the rosewater that was sprinkled on frenzied crowds of women from ornate, long- and thin-necked silver bottles, ready and at hand.
    I remember hushed, whispered greetings exchanged between women as they arrived, dressed fully in black, slipping off their shoes, shuffling them carefully to the side with a gentle clatter before stepping onto the crisply laundered white sheets that covered carpets in rooms cleared away of furniture. Older women were usually the first to arrive, adjusting their dupatta s, or the pallo s of their sari s, to cover their heads before sitting down on the floor—most of them with an audible crack of joints—to take up the coveted space along the walls, which would give their backs rest, admitting the passage of their youth in order to claim one of the few privileges of that loss. Prayer beads clicked softly, accompanying the nearly silent movement of lips as the piety of old age sought expression in the idle moments that came with being punctual in a community that had never submitted to the tyranny of timepieces.
    Within a few years of the death of the Prophet, my mother told me, the Muslims were beginning to forget what he’d taught them. A very bad man, Yazid, was the leader now. The people were afraid of him because he was a tyrant. He was power-hungry and greedy. Cruel and unjust. But he was also a coward with no honor. And