My father, Hassan Bhatt, was the youngest of five sons and a member of a prominent family in Lahore. He was tall enough, rich enough, and of decent enough character-all of which seemed to qualify him as the perfect candidate for the job of my mother’s husband, a position that many other men were supposedly vying for based on our family’s legacy of exceptional beauty in our women.
Only, as was the way things were done back then, Hassan Bhatt never saw my mother until the wedding ceremony was about to begin. He had never thought to assume that she would be anything less than stunning, because no woman in my family ever had been. He admitted later that he might have heard someone comment, as the engagement was being announced, that my mother was “not quite as lovely as the other sisters, but not bad.” For Hassan Bhatt, “not bad” was good enough, and surely would still be divine. Perhaps he should have been tipped off by my mother’s name. Where her sisters were given appellations that spoke of loveliness, my mother had been christened Ayesha-named after the wife of the prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. It was a noble name, no doubt. But Hassan Bhatt, as it turned out, was not in the least bit interested in nobility.
Aunt Sohalia told me years later of the look that appeared on Hassan Bhatt’s face when the red chiffon bridal scarf that covered my mother’s head was first lifted. She described the look as one of “severe disappointment,” but nobody said a word, not even the bridegroom. And in my grandfather’s mind, there wasn’t even an inkling of a notion that this sudden and rather unseemly revelation should be an impediment to my mother’s marital happiness, given that, after all, Hassan Bhatt was far too decent a man, and from far too upstanding a family, to abandon a marriage simply because he didn’t like the way his wife looked.
For one of the few times in his life, Nana was wrong.
There had been a honeymoon planned, in Ooty, a snow-capped vacation resort in India, but that had been abruptly cancelled when Hassan Bhatt announced that he had some pressing business to take care of in Lahore. Although he tried to convince my mother otherwise, she went with him, assuming that the rest of her life would be spent by his side, being his wife.
Two months later, she was back in Mahim, at her father’s house, with me in her belly, no larger than a grain of rice.
Nineteen years later, my mother had yet to recover from the humiliation of being left by a husband because of the way she looked-or didn’t. I would catch her occasionally looking at their wedding photograph, a bland black-and-white shot framed in gold that she kept in the bottom drawer of a chest in our bedroom. I had often snuck in there to look at it myself, to gaze at the wide-eyed nervousness on my mother’s face and the momentous sadness on that of Hassan Bhatt’s, my nana standing cautiously behind them.