"Aliza" by Meher Manda

by Meher Manda

P and Aliza fought often, and in these battles P always managed to leave reminders of himself. Like the time I found her with three of his fingers imprinted on her right cheek. Red, engorged, the fingers had distinct boundaries, and touching her right cheek meant you climbed up an edge over the echoes of his fingers, and then wheeled over downwards for her face again. Long welts for long fingers. Really showed his hands. A worker’s hands, Aliza would say. Great for pleasure. 

I was instructed by Ami to dab warm coconut oil on Aliza’s cheek to ease the burn. All while Aliza grinned at me stupidly, delighted at being fussed over. 

“I bet you’ll have a lover as passionate as mine,” Aliza said. It scared me, the possibility of this passionate lover, his passion imprinted on my cheeks.

She pinched my tiny right breast with the tips of her fingers and whispered, “Give it a year,” and laughed her laugh, a cackle that brought tears to her eyes and shot such rough tremors through her spindly frame that you could never be sure if what travelled in her body was joy or grief. 

Aliza had told us that her name meant the joyful. Ami, my mother, told me that Aliza wasn’t necessarily happy all the time, but that she took great joy in everything. There was nothing understated about her. Even her grief was a whole theatrical production. My name, on the other hand, meant the solemn one, which was why I felt uprooted every time a wave of Aliza passed me by. 

While Aliza was always a bit whimsical, the summer that P came into our lives she torpedoed whatever dynamic had come to settle over our household. It all happened very quickly. Only a year earlier, Aliza and Nilofer had come to live with my parents and me. They were two young women from home, Ami told me. While Nilofer kept to herself, did her share of the housework, and generally proved to be a non-objectionable housemate, Aliza’s shrieks and laughter pierced through the silence that had wedged itself comfortably into my parents’ marriage, becoming a reminder for all that was missing in our family: joy. Apa, my father, found her serpentine and brutish. Ami was enthralled. 

Perhaps it was a long time coming, and Aliza was only the switch that set the plan in motion, or perhaps her growing friendship with Ami, the kind of companionship that unfolds in hushed tones and closed embraces, that neuters hope and erases the past, was what did my parents’ marriage in. Apa left, and not in a clean break sort of way. He left without his clothes, his belongings, his wooden box with miniature carpentry tools for his miniature furniture. He was that desperate to leave. And something happened when he left: he took with him Ami’s hair. My mother, who had famously long, black hair with thick curls that she straightened with oil into a single braid, chopped it all off into a messy, uneven bob. She swept the fallen hair off the floor and dumped it in the trash bin like an orange peel.

“What if he comes back?” Nilofer gently suggested. 

“He’s never coming back,” Ami said with finality. And that was that. She began wearing the shirts my father had left behind and took up a job at a local Indian restaurant. She got quieter and angrier. It was as if she’d sworn to become unrecognisable to him. 

P half-moved in not long after, and Ami generously gave him what was left of my father’s wardrobe. We never really met, P and I. Ami’s maternal instinct kept me away from him, and he never stayed long enough for me to run into him. It was because he had another house, with a wife and a small child, Nilofer told me. The child wasn’t very young, Aliza said, but he was as small as a tree stump. I wondered if the child feared P, as I did. I wondered if he knew how his father left imprints on cheeks.

P and Aliza met at the mall or the seaside. Aliza worked nights back then, but he held her arm one night and said, “I don’t want you doing this nomore.” So she stopped working, and on rent day would have little but excuses and pleas. Her clients would turn up often, miserable in her absence, and knock on the window to the right of the basement where she set up base. But she would stay firmly inside, and giggle loudly as they begged her to let them in.

“They need to know I’m alive and have moved on,” she said.

“Why don’t you have the decency to tell them you don’t work anymore?” Nilofer asked her.

“Hey, it’s not my fault they mistook sex for love,” Aliza replied. She loved this: men hankering for her attention, while she loved only one. Only P. 

P, who had promised to pay Aliza’s share of the rent for as long as she loved only him, would leave her every so often with nothing but his imprints. Ami would get really angry with Aliza then. They would lock themselves in Ami’s bedroom (which was mine too) to ‘sort their issues.’ If you stood by the door, as I often did, you could hear their screaming, their hands attacking each other, skin against skin, arms flying. But soon the yelling would be traded for something softer and more considerate. Aliza could be heard sobbing, prompting Ami to sing to her softly, to abandon her broken English for a folk song from her childhood, overwrought with lilted enunciations. Our bedroom would cocoon them for hours, where they found each other like reunited twins. They would emerge hours later, happy and spent, and scatter off in different directions. Because Aliza made no money from these transactions, P never learnt of them. 

It was hard for me to understand how my mother had come to befriend Aliza so dearly. Before he left with her hair, Apa would call Ami a village rat, a precious simpleton who wouldn’t survive the shores of Jersey—much less New York City, which glittered across the river. But she had, better than he could imagine. She had brushed off her prayer-books, her simpleton past, her hair. And she’d always had a taste for the desolate, the abysmal. With Aliza she’d not only invited it into her home, but embraced and loved it. 

We could have lived an entire lifetime in perfect disharmony, had blood not become so central to the story; the blood that bound mother to child and assailant to victim; that decreed whose love ran thicker and who’d stay with whom.

Now that Ami had a job, she would leave me behind with Aliza, who had none, and we would spend hours in the basement, listening to the radio and chatting away. Under the low ceiling Aliza had decorated the space with all the miniature furniture Apa had left behind. The walls were covered with boldly painted pictures of fruits that Aliza would buy from the Dollar Store.

‘Strawberries, Naturally Sweet,’ one said, under a framed red, juicy clot of strawberries. 

‘Pineapples. Better Sour,’ said another under yellow chunks of pineapple. 

The captions were so Aliza. She stood gargantuan and proud in her childish room. 

On the days P would come, he’d signal his arrival by knocking on her basement window thrice. Three distinct knocks, each separated by a consuming second of silence. Aliza would quickly scoop me up, lock me in my bedroom—the one she and Ami shared some afternoons—and leave for him. I would hear them through the thin, cracked floor: their squabbles, their lovemaking. Most days it was hard to differentiate the two. They fought and loved with ferocity, gnawing and biting at each other. The thought of a passion like that awaiting me in the future sliced my heart into two.

On days when P was not expected, Aliza could talk, breathe easy, be almost charming. 

“And, remember that time that guy, Deepak cried outside our house! Threatened to set himself on fire if I didn’t meet him? Don’t you… don’t you remember how funny that was?” 

I remembered it not being funny at all how upset Ami was that day, how she’d threatened to kick Aliza out if she couldn’t get a handle on her men, how long they’d stayed shut in Ami’s and my bedroom, and how Nilofer and I had teetered in the kitchen, waiting for an explosion to land. I didn’t tell Aliza how I decided then that loving was not such a great thing after all, that too much of it was destructive, and could wreck whole people in its path. I didn’t tell her how alone I felt when my mother left me behind to nurse her heart in our bedroom, how none of these women once held my flailing body together to tell me that no, Deepak wasn’t going to immolate himself in our front yard, that I would not be passing a charred corpse on my way to school the next morning. But I just chuckled, gave Aliza what she wanted: an audience.

Suddenly, Aliza’s phone buzzed. “Must be an old lover!” she squealed. 

“Hi.” Her somber tone suggested it was Ami.

“Oh no!” she screamed, rising from the sofa. 

“Are you okay?” she enquired.

“She’s right here. Oh no… is that? Right, of course. The blood? Oh god… yeah, yeah, I can… what, just leave her? Lock it, right. Now? Which hospital? Good. Yeah, I’ll be on my way.”

She looked at me, her eyes twinkling with fear and adventure. “Okay, it’s nothing serious and I don’t want you worrying, okay? Your mother’s had a small accident. She chopped three fingers off her right hand with a knife, and she’s lost a ton of blood.”

“Is… is Ami okay? Where is she?” I asked.

“She’s at Gloria Hospital. And I’m going to go be with her, make sure those doctors don’t get her to sign costly bills and insurance forms while she’s unconscious. She’s lost a lot of blood, you know. She told me it sprayed.”

I said nothing. 

“Anyway, I’m going to go for your mother, and I’m going to lock the door from outside. I don’t want you to go out anywhere until Nilofer returns at 7pm. Stay indoors, okay?

“Okay.”

“Stay safe, okay will you,” she said—as if any one would willingly choose to not be— and walked away, leaving me alone. The thought of Ami’s fingers-less hand finally began to sink in. She would certainly be unable to hold onto her job. I sat upright on the couch and turned up the radio, to fill the room with noise, to drown out the anguish in my head. 

It was only the radio and my own breathing for a long time, until I heard a faint tap. It was indistinct, like a knock that had lost its way, an underwhelming tap. A mere second passed, and I heard another knock. Harder, more pointed. I turned around instinctively to look up at the mosaic window on the right, Aliza’s window, and found a rounded fist. Waiting for its moment, the fist knocked again, a third time, with a deep boom in its action. It was a large fist, organ-like, almost as large as my head. A worker’s hand.

I saw the hand waiting for a few seconds, deathly still, before it knocked again, more forcefully. “Aliza,” the hand growled. I wasn’t sure I had the authority to speak for her, to speak to him. “Aliza,” P called again, louder. He began to knock the window repeatedly, without pause, without a breath to waste. Like rain thrashing uncontrollably on a clangorous aluminum roof. Loud, with the echoes of a deafening death call. Each thud left behind a cloud of after-noise and the thuds came one after the other. 

“Aliza,” P roared again. “I can hear the fucking music. Don’t you dare ignore me!”

I turned the volume down completely, hoping it would make him go away.

P laughed. “You take me for a fucking idiot? Open the fucking door Aliza!”

I wanted to scream at him, tell him she wasn’t home, ask him to leave. But my voice died on its way to my lips. It gnawed at my throat, but the sooner I opened my mouth, it ebbed away. P persisted with the knocking for a while, and before I knew it, he bent his body to the window. It was an empty gesture because the window was made of glass mosaic. While you could faintly look outside, there was no way P could see anything inside the basement. I saw P’s large head in soft focus, and it was enough to terrify me.

“Aliza,” P cried again, but this time his anger was multiplied with a wail. He was desperate and that scared me. “Don’t make me sorry, Aliza. Stop playing these games!” 

Suddenly P’s head disappeared from the frame, and I heard his feet trudge, snapping apart dead leaves in their path. His footsteps grew weaker and more distant. I released my breath, slowly, carefully. But soon I heard running, and he was back at the window. This time he crouched on the ground and began punching the floor with his fist, crying a slow, loud cry. 

“Aliza, you fucking cunt, you fucking whore, you’re going to be so fucking sorry for this!” P cried. But this time his anger diffused with his sobbing. I began to worry for Aliza’s sake. Knowing P’s deep, red fingerprints, I thought it better to let him know she wasn’t here than to stretch this out further.

I gathered some strength and walked to the window. But as soon as I took the first step, P smashed his fist against the glass, attempting to break it. I ran back to the couch. Apa had told me that the windows were made of unbreakable glass, but I didn’t believe him anymore. 

I waited immobile, handicapped with fear. P’s hammering grew louder and more violent. I looked up and noticed a streak of red on the window, a soft thin line. P’s blood. As P whacked away, I could see the red of his blood growing on the pane, smudging with contact. I began to cry. 

“Stop, stop, please stop!” I screamed, with all the volume I could muster.

P stopped, his fist still through the window’s blurry red. He waited patiently for me to say something more. “Please stop,” I said again, unsure whether he’d heard me the first time. I stumbled to the wall, to the stools and chairs Aliza had strategically placed under the window, and climbed carefully, soberly. I did not want a misstep to tick him off. He waited while I climbed high enough to perch myself next to the window. 

I saw P a bit more clearly up here, his features loosely marked by the mosaic pattern on the window. And the red.

“She’s… not here,” I whispered.

“Aliza! What the fuck Aliza!” P shouted, momentarily knocking my right foot off the chair’s armrest. It swung in the air before I managed to place it again. “Aliza…” P cried, gulping air and uncertain. 

“I’m not Aliza. She isn’t here.”

“Who the fuck are you? Why are you lying to me?”

I told him, about me and Ami. And Aliza, our tenant. 

“What’s your name?”

“Sanjeeda,” I said. 

“How old are you?” he asked, gentler this time. 

“Twelve.”

P exhaled, heavy and spent. “My son’s thirteen,” he said.

We both stood in silence, waiting for something to happen. I hoped that what I’d said was enough to send him away, but P’s head still rested against the window. I gathered some courage and whispered gently, “Please leave?”

P lolled his head on the ground, like Apa when he would pray at the mosque. He reached out, touched the window, and began wiping his blood off. 

“No,” P replied. 

“Please, please,” I begged bravely. “You’re scaring me.”

“No,” P repeated. “I’ll stay. You’re all alone at home.”

For a minute I didn’t know what he meant. Did he mean I was easy prey? Should I have been smart enough to not tell him that?

“Please leave,” I demanded. 

“I’ll walk away from you,” P said, “You won’t even know I’m here.” He lifted himself off the ground and paused. “I wish she had told me she wasn’t going to be home. I would never scare a young girl,” he said, before walking away from the window.

It was true. After a while I was unsure if he was still around. But eventually I heard sounds from the backyard. Footsteps, grunting, as if he were tens and thousands of push-ups overdue. 

I didn’t realise when I passed out on Aliza’s couch but I woke up several hours later, at night, to my mother’s bandaged hand swinging over my head as she tried to jolt me awake with her un-bandaged one. The hand was wrapped into a white fist, and I saw no fingers extending from it.

“Did they take them all?”

“All what?”

“Your fingers?” I let out a wail to drown out the dreaded answer. I felt like an orphan, with no father and a mother with only some fingers. A half-mother was as good as no mother at all.

“Stop crying,” Ami said quietly. “The fingers are all there; they are just wrapped up to restrict movement.”

“Oh thank God, Ami, I was so scared.”

“I know, I was too,” she said, and pulled me close. She smelled like metal. I noticed a blotch of blood on her neck and wiped it off with my thumb.

“I’m supposed to let this hand heal for a month, so I will need you to help me around the house until your school begins, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, suddenly remembering my evening. “Where’s Aliza?”

I saw a sadness creep into her face. I hadn’t been paying attention, but Ami had aged a lot in the last year. Tiny creases found themselves in her folds. Her long hair had used to be a soft haze, hiding her wrinkles, but now they were revealed, naked, for all to see. 

“She’s with P,” she replied, and walked away. 

I followed her. “But she isn’t downstairs.” 

Ami sighed and gently replied, “They are outside. Stop asking me questions. I’m tired.” She left me to go into the bedroom, our bedroom, and shut herself in. 

I walked around the house, looking for some distraction. Then bawling beckoned me from the front yard. I opened the door and saw, in the distance, under the fluorescence of a street light, two bodies. I recognized Aliza’s skirt, her frame, the way she stood, with her shoulders slouched, and I recognized the man with her, larger with glaring biceps and strong shoulders. His right hand cupped Aliza’s neck  and was pushing her to the ground. I shut the door and ran inside to Ami in the bedroom. I held her close, but carefully, to avoid touching the bandaged hand.

Aliza returned several hours later. Ami and I were sitting at the dinner table, now cleared. In the pale yellow of the dining light, I could see empurpled bruises on Aliza’s face. The right of her cheek was inflated, as if she were holding in and refusing to swallow a morsel of food. A deep gash underlined her right eye with dried blood. 

“Do you want dinner?” Ami asked. 

“I’m full,” Aliza replied, laughing loudly as big, fat tears trickled down her face. She ran toward the basement, but this time Ami did not follow her. 

The next morning I found out Aliza had left. Like Apa, she didn’t bother taking anything with her. I asked Ami about her for days, but she refused to speak of her. It was Nilofer who told me later that P didn’t want her living with Ami and me, that he had come to suspect a friendship growing between them, that he wanted her without distractions. 

“That’s how toxic relationships work,” Nilofer said. 

Ami let Aliza’s disappearance hang for a week, and then rented out her room to Kumkum, was a sweet girl who cooked at Ami’s restaurant and fed me more food than I wanted. She shared warm, wholesome smiles, and called her parents in Punjab every weekend. She loved her family, she told us. Would do anything for them. A week after she moved in, she told me she loved me, too, like an older sister would love a younger. She made it all seem so easy. 

Two weeks after Aliza left, something else happened. We were woken up to the sound of Ami screaming. She was screaming at Kumkum, Nilofer, and me. She was screaming about how dirty the kitchen was. She was screaming about some white people who’d wronged her at work, at Apa and Aliza for leaving her, and at men, all men. She screamed and screeched and her voice landed on us like a thousand plates of glass breaking at once. She took all of Apa’s clothes out to the backyard and set them on fire. We watched as the fabric crinkled and crumbled to dust, in awe of all the destruction.

Meher Manda is a poet, short story writer, culture critic, and educator from Mumbai, India, currently based in New York City. She earned her MFA in Fiction from the College of New Rochelle where she was the founding editor-in-chief of The Canopy Review. She is one-half of An Angry Reading Series held monthly in Harlem, New York, and the sole writer of Busted Models, a chapbook of poems from No, Dear Magazine.

(Image source: Stone Gate Gallery, UK)