The World Unseen Read Online Free PDF Page A

me?” asked her bhabhi .
     
    Miriam rinsed the meat. She knew that Farah had never gone without her portion of anything, and that if there were a shortage, it would be Miriam herself who missed out.
     
    “Maybe,” Miriam said quietly, “we should buy more meat and more flour for the rotlis … ”
     
    “We don’t have money for anything more,” Farah said. “It’s amazing that I manage to put enough food on the table at all with what they give me.”
     
    Miriam began to skin and chop the rotting tomatoes which Sadru brought back from the markets, and which were too soft for anything but cooking. She knew that Farah was lying and that she took part of each week’s housekeeping money to buy clothes and trinkets for herself and her children, but there was no way for Miriam to protest. Omar had refused to give his wife their share of the money – it was Farah that ran the house, he told her, and he did not want to cause problems.
     
    Later that evening, while the men sat down to eat together at the table, Miriam quickly rolled out balls of loose, elastic dough into perfect circles. She picked them up lightly, passing them back and forth between her open palms, and placed them onto the hot cast iron pan. She waited patiently as they cooked, shifting from foot to foot to try and ease the pain behind her knees. She had been standing up since five thirty that morning. Only her few trips to the bathroom had given her a moment to sit down. She turned the rotlis now and then with fingertips that had long ago become accustomed to the heat of the stove’s flames. As soon as brown patches began to form and spread across the surface, the bread was removed from the pan, placed onto a plate, and the surface rubbed with butter. Whenever two or three were ready, she would carry them in, still hot, to the men, and to Farah, who had by now joined them.
     
    “Come and eat,” Omar told her. Miriam nodded slightly, but before she could sit down, Jehan began calling out from her room. She screamed loudly, long delirious streams of words. The men looked up, but Farah continued eating.
     
    “Have you fed her?” Omar asked. Miriam nodded, and went to see what hallucinations or dreams had disturbed her husband’s elder sister.
     
    Jehan was easily placated for once. Miriam stayed with her for ten minutes, stroking her forehead and murmuring vague replies to the nonsense that she spoke. When she returned to the kitchen, Farah had already placed the empty dishes in the sink for washing. The serving plates were empty, so Miriam stood at the pot, and wiped the remaining sauce from the sides with a cold rotli and ate. Once again, nobody had smiled at her; not Omar when he arrived home from work – not even Sadru, who had a kind streak beneath his large, uncouth exterior, and who was often the most deferent to her. She pressed the aching lower part of her back. She had carried her son too much today, but he had been scared of Farah’s girl, older and tougher than he. She dreaded having to bring up Sam and Alisha amongst her sister-in-law’s badly behaved children, but she saw little way out. She had learned, though, through listening to the talk of other women, and from Farah herself, that there were ways to stop becoming pregnant, at least for a while. Omar’s demands on her had lessened as they both became more and more exhausted, but nevertheless she had been trying these since her second child had been born.
     
    The following day, the oppressive atmosphere of the windowless bathroom was making Miriam feel nauseous again, as she moved over the floor with a scrubbing brush, her knees cold against the tiled floor. She worked quickly, and was almost at the door when it burst open, nearly hitting her in the face. She looked up. Farah’s eyes were wide, and her hands clapped together as she spoke.
    “They said we can go! To the Bazaar café. For lunch!”
     
    “Both of us?” Miriam asked, hardly daring to believe that she could