Taha Kehar
Excerpted from Taha Kehar’s short fiction from The Aleph Review, Vol. (2022).
1.
Tara sniffed the contents of her teacup and took a long, pensive sip. Within seconds, her face twisted into a scowl. She coughed and nearly spat out the tea. Amma rose to her feet, intuitively grabbed the cup from her daughter’s hand and placed it on the coffee table lest it were to slip and clatter against the marble floor. Having rescued her vintage porcelain teacup, she exhaled sharply and sat down on the sofa. When Tara’s coughing fit began to subside, Amma gave her daughter a quick, ineffectual pat on her shoulder.
“Allah khair karay, what happened?” Amma asked. “Is something wrong? How can I help?”
“Don’t bother, Amma,” Tara replied in a voice that dripped with sarcasm. “Feel free to rescue more of your expensive tea sets while I choke to death.”
Unfazed by her daughter’s remark, Amma rolled her eyes and quietly slurped her tea.
“Stop being so melodramatic. These are collector’s items. I’ve had them longer than I’ve had you.”
Ignoring her mother’s jibes, Tara wiped her mouth with a napkin and steadily regained her composure.
“There’s too much milk in my tea,” Tara said. “It’s not good for me.”
With a frustrated sigh, Amma raised her hands and looked heavenwards.
“Of all the things you could have inherited from your deceased father’s family, you had to get their lactose intolerance,” she said. “What do you expect us to do? Throw out all the milk because it makes you sick? Imagine, my only daughter is depriving her mother of milk. What has the world come to?”
“Cut the melodrama, Amma,” Tara grumbled. “I’m not stopping you from having milk in your tea. In fact, there would be a lot more milk for you if Shabnam followed instructions and added only a drop of milk to my tea. But your maid never listens.”
“You call that tea?” Amma said with a disdainful grin. “It looks like a cup of warm cola. You know what my mother used to say? Tea without milk is like a woman without marriage. Marriage adds flavour to a dull life in the same way that milk gives colour to your tea.”
“If we go by this logic, I’ll remain a spinster forever on account of my lactose intolerance. Though I should remind you, I’d found a perfect man who Daddy didn’t approve of.”
“Oho,” Amma tapped her forehead. “Are you still upset about that? Daddy didn’t allow you to marry that long-haired buffoon from Karachi University because he was left-handed.”
“Leftist, Amma,” Tara let out an exasperated groan.
“Same thing,” Amma said, dismissively waving her hand in the air.
“Why would it matter if Sabir had been left-handed?”
“It’s the devil’s trait,” Amma said, wagging her finger in the air with grim determination. “These leftists are known to have terrible handwriting because they don’t use their right hands. Consider yourself lucky.”
“Indeed. How could I possibly live with a husband who lacks perfect penmanship?”
“Don’t be cheeky. You know what I mean. That Sabir was a worthless nobody who would have amounted to nothing.”
Tara smiled to disguise her rage over Amma’s efforts to slander the man she still loved. She breathed noisily and suppressed the urge to retaliate.
“It wouldn’t be too drastic a change since I have plenty of practice living with you,” Tara said with a chuckle.
“Don’t be mean,” Amma said, feigning outrage. A deep despair welled up within her as she watched her thirty year-old daughter laugh at her comment. The old matriarch sighed heavily as a fresh fear lodged itself in her heart.
“What will become of you?” she cooed. “This is why men and their mothers keep rejecting you. You’re too sarcastic.”
“That’s not true. They just don’t have a sense of humour.”
Amma clicked her tongue in frustration, knowing well that she would gain nothing from arguing with Tara. “Did you hear?” she said, promptly changing the subject. “A new family has moved into the neighbourhood. They’re decent, well-to-do people. The lady of the house is looking for a wife for her son.”
Tara sneered at her. “It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a mother with an unmarried daughter must always be in want of a son-in-law.”
“Obviously,” she blurted, without detecting the sting in her daughter’s voice. “I really hope they like you.”
“Amma, how many times are we going to go through this Pride-and-Prejudice routine? Every time a new couple moves into the house next door, you insist on inviting them over for dinner and parading me around like a desperate spinster who can’t wait to snag a husband. Three families have moved out of that house because you kept forcing them to have their sons marry me. Accept it, already. I don’t need to find myself a Mr Bingley or a Mr Darcy.”
Amma raised a finger to silence Tara. “Who needs Mr Bingy or Mr Dassu when you can find yourself Mr Farid?” she said with a glint in her eyes. “His name is Danish Farid, if you haven’t guessed already. He’s the only son of our new neighbours. The family will be visiting us at six o’clock. Be prepared.
“You’ve invited them over already?” Tara snapped. “How could you, Amma? You hardly know them and expect me to marry their son.”
“That’s how it works, beti. I said my first ever salaam to your Daddy on our wedding night, mere minutes before you were conceived. Besides, I’ve already had one of our mutual friends show your picture to Mrs Farid. The family likes you a lot.”
Aghast at her mother’s insistence on yet another spell of relentless groom-hunting, Tara jumped to her feet and strutted towards her bedroom.
“I’m not meeting him,” she bellowed.
“Haw, why are you being so difficult?” Amma said, taken aback by her daughter’s curtness. “You’ll love him.”
Tara scowled at Amma and slammed the door, leaving her mother in the uneasy solitude of the veranda. With a loud gasp, Amma downed the remnants of tea in her cup.
“Shabnam,” she hollered. “Make sure you fry the pakoras along with the rest of the food. Serve our guests hot tea with lots of milk. I don’t want anything to go wrong today.”
In her room, Tara struggled to devise new strategies to ward off the family of yet another prospective suitor. If only I had more time to plan this, she thought.
Since Daddy had declared Sabir to be an unsuitable candidate for his mollycoddled daughter’s affection, Tara had vowed to never marry. Not out of an unswerving loyalty to Sabir, but because of a desire to protect her personal turf from the machinations of an unwanted stranger. She had triumphantly employed a string of stealthy tactics to spare herself the ordeal of an undesired partnership. Last month, an elderly couple that was interested in Tara for their son received an anonymous phone call about her ‘sinful antics’ and vanished without a trace. Another couple was served a sherbet laced with a generous pinch of laxatives that Tara had lovingly prepared for them. They distanced themselves from Tara’s family to safeguard their bowels from destruction. In all these years, she had succeeded in avoiding unwanted liaisons without getting so much as a scab. But she’d always had time to execute her plans for sabotage. This time, she would have to act fast.
2.
Later that day, Tara scurried into the kitchen and noticed a wooden trolley crammed with chicken patties, pakoras, samosas, Marie biscuits and a large bowl of spaghetti bolognese.
“Oh my,” she said to no one in particular. “This is quite a feast!”
Shabnam walked out of the storeroom with a plastic container filled to the brim with sugar.
“Are you making tea?” Tara asked.
“Yes, baji,” Shabnam nodded with a broad grin plastered on his face. “I’m just taking out the milk carton from the fridge for the chai. I wouldn’t want to spoil the tea on such a special occasion. After all, we’re finally getting rid of … I mean, you’re finally getting married.”
Shabnam lowered her head in embarrassment and hobbled over to the fridge.
“My chachi used to say that life without doodh patti[1] is always a bit plain. No wonder you’re always fighting with Ammaji. Your milk-less tea makes you bitter. I don’t understand how you can take it. I tried it once. It tastes awful and looks like blood. You’re not a vampire, Tara Baji. Stop drinking it.”
Tara gazed coldly at the maid, unsure as to how she should respond to her endless ribbing.
Shabnam was prone to occasional bouts of verbal diarrhoea that could only be suppressed with a severe reprimanding. But today, Tara didn’t feel the need to tell her off for carelessly overstepping her bounds. The maid’s words had fuelled her imagination and allowed a new and mischievous idea to set its parameters in Tara’s mind.
“Oh, don’t bother putting too much milk in the tea,” she told Shabnam. “Our guests prefer their tea with just a drop of milk.”
Shabnam registered the instructions with a grin. “I didn’t realise that there were more people like you, Tara Baji.”
“Do as I say,” she thundered. “Also, tell them that I made the tea.” As Tara walked out of the kitchen, her mind swirled with stories she’d heard of chauvinistic men who rejected nubile women because they made lousy cups of tea. Her current plan wasn’t as concrete as a well-orchestrated character assassination or a beverage spiked with laxatives, but it was all she could pull off on such short notice.
Minutes before the guests arrived, Tara emerged from her bedroom clad in her banarasi sari.
“You changed your mind!” Amma rejoiced. “I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me.”
Tara smiled, exulting in the rare praise she had received from her mother.
“Change your shade of lipstick,” Amma demanded. “Red doesn’t suit you at all.”
With a heavy frown creasing her face, Tara noticed a dark shade of crimson of her mother’s thin lips. “Take your own advice sometime.”
Taha Kehar is a novelist, journalist and literary critic. He is the author of Typically Tanya (HarperCollins India, 2018) and Of Rift and Rivalry (Palimpsest Publishers, 2014), and the co-editor of The Stained-Glass Window: Stories of the Pandemic from Pakistan. Kehar curates Tales from Karachi: City of Words, an Instagram e-anthology that publishes flash fiction from and about Karachi. In 2021, he compiled and edited the first print anthology of the initiative. His third novel, No Funeral for Nazia, will be published in 2023 by the UK-based Neem Tree Press. Wajid Ali Daharkiwalah was born in Daharki, Sindh, and completed his MA (Honours) in visual arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and a PhD in cultural art history from the University of Karachi. He has participated in several ational and international exhibitions, including the Karachi Biennale, and was a key member of Project W11 for the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia. He was also production coordinator for ‘The Great Wall of Pakistani Truck Art’ at the Islamabad International Airport. He teaches at the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Gujrat as assistant professor and is the founding head of the Department of Fine Arts there.
Bios for archival pieces are reprinted as originally published and may be outdated.
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