the pressure of her fingers on my shoulders. “Her mother is very ill, and
she will be staying with us until your aunt gets better. InshAllah,” she
must have added, “God-willing.”
This is the way it was—unconditional hospitality to family was an
obligation. It was our duty to make our house Mariya’s until her mother
could care for her again. Though my father drove a battered car and wore
second-hand suits, for the time Mariya stayed with us, she was bought
toys and chocolate cookies on every excursion, and given ten dollars instead of my five to spend at the book fair. It was Mariya my parents asked
for suggestions before preparing dinner—chicken and lamb curries, loaves
of fenugreek roti—Mariya they served first.
But if Mariya spent much time worried for her mother, if the
experience had left her fragile and volatile, she rarely showed it. Mariya
shook me awake in the middle of the night to play games with our stuffed
animals, to leap from the bed to the desk to the dresser drawer and back.
I chased Mariya up and down the stairs at bedtime, tried to match her
leaps toward the ceiling fan. And because Mariya carried the immunity
of a pathetic child—Mariya whose own mother was almost deathly ill
and whose father was already dead—my parents could only scold us with
their laughter: their brief, disapproving head shakes. And so, though
Mariya received the most special treatment from my parents, and though
she was never asked to do dishes or tidy up the room, in the first few
months I began to follow her every step. I let her play with my dolls and
my dresses, I brushed and braided her hair, longer than my own. When
Mariya asked me for something, large-eyed, chocolate-voiced, I gave it to
her in an instant.
In return, Mariya told me violent, magical stories, ones her Daadhi had given her in Pakistan: tales of jinn entering good human beings
and turning them evil, of girls stolen from their mothers at birth to work
for witches, of jogis that trapped princesses into treasure chests and threw
them into the river. I listened to her, burying my head in her shoulder at
the climaxes. She would pause and say, “Is it too much Aisha? Should I
stop?” And though I shivered and covered my ears, I begged her to finish.
Sometimes she did; sometimes, she closed her eyes and pretended to fall
asleep.
That summer, we visited Mariya’s mother every weekend. She
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