Mazin, our first, arrives in 92. He comes out at three and a half kilograms, which the doctor tells me is normal. Cleaned up, he looks like an angry eggplant, irritated at being roused from the steadiness of the underwater world of my body to a room that is glaring and discordant. I hold him and he quiets down. The nurse tells me he’s responding to my touch, but I can tell he’s just tired. He grips my fingers, and his tiny legs exhaust the last of his energies beating against my breast. Nothing seems to be wrong with him so far. ‘Bilkul theek hai yeh,’ the lady doctor sighs when I ask her if everything’s okay for the twentieth time. She’s seen this behavior play out so often that at this point it can only seem ridiculous: first mothers worried that something has gone wrong, that they have done something wrong. But she doesn’t know how often I’ve called this clinic’s number in the months leading up to this day. Growing in my body, Mazin has felt alive only in so far as a cancer feels alive—multiplying and accreting, ready to disintegrate me into nothing. The last time I think about getting rid of him, I get as far as the main gate of the clinic. Its old guard watches me loiter outside for half an hour before he walks over and calls me a rickshaw. ‘It will still be here tomorrow,’ he says, placing a reassuring hand on my head. I never go back, but I wonder if the thought alone, the idea of not having Mazin, has turned my body against him. If so, it seems not to have caused any harm. He remains healthy and we bring him home the next morning.
*
The first few months after we bring Mazin home, I feel the void in my chest creep up only at certain moments, but eventually it consumes everything. By the end of that first year, I am filled with dread and annihilation. This has happened once before, at sixteen. My mother catches me carving lines into my thigh with a sharpened bobby pin. She slaps and throws me around the room, but doesn’t tell my father. Crying, she asks me what I will do when I marry and my husband finds out? I have no answer to this. Four years later, when Azhar finally takes off my clothes two nights into our wedding, I am frozen with fear. His fingers brush against the ridges of healed skin on my thigh, but he doesn’t stop kissing my stomach. I draw him up to my mouth and try to move his hand up to my breasts. He keeps his fingers between my legs. I wait for him to stop, turn the lights on, ask me what I’ve done to myself, call my parents, and drive me back to their place like an angry customer returning a faulty item, but he stays flush against my body and my neck. The whole thing ends more quickly than I anticipate, and he rolls over to his side of the bed. I am submerged in relief and begin to sob. He holds my hand and asks if everything is okay. I see the humors from our bodies glisten on the edge of the carved lines on my leg. I tell him it’s nothing and kiss his hand. Six years and two kids later, he goes down on me one morning before work. He stops and rubs the scar on my leg. ‘When did you get this?’ he asks.
Mazin is loud, and his cries feel like an accusation. Rotten, barren, terrible. The milk I have to offer is not enough, and whatever little there is leaves him fussy and irritable. My left breast hurts, which the doctor tells me is a blocked duct and I only need to get the milk flowing again for the pain to subside. If my body wasn’t rejecting him before, it is certainly rejecting him now. Eventually, we put him on formula, and my sister-in-law, Asma, comes over to help us take care of him. In a few years, she will become an anesthesiologist and move to the United States, but right now she is finishing her third year of medical school and saving money on hostel fees by coming to live with us for the summer holidays. From time to time, she walks in on me sitting in a corner, looking abjectly at nothing. Mazin wails on the bed beside me, hungry or needing to be changed. She asks me if everything is okay, and I tell her it’s nothing. One afternoon, while I’m in my bed with my head turned away, she rushes in with a yelp and lifts Mazin onto the bed. He’s coughing and choking, tears coming down his purple face. I watch him as if he’s an eternity away, lightyears upon lightyears between us.
When Asma fishes out the cap of a marker causing the blockage, Mazin begins to cry with relief. She lifts him up against her chest and observes me, scared. She says I need to see a doctor. I begin to sob and plead. I tell her I can’t go to a mental hospital, that it will end my marriage. She rocks Mazin until he is calm and then holds me while I cry next. I tell her I want to kill myself. Later that night she tells Azhar that he needs to move into the guestroom to give the baby and mother their space. He goes sullen, as if this exile is a rejection of his fatherhood, but he complies just the same. For the next two months, Asma and I sleep in the same bed, taking turns watching over Mazin. The dread is never that bad again.
*
It shocks me how quickly his limbs pick up energy and his brain wraps itself around new words. He calls a loudspeaker a bara baja and doesn’t like it when I ask him to stay close. The world is all sound and information to him and he likes running out and touching things and going, ’Ye kia hai?’ Azhar says his indignation is identical to mine—the scrunched nose and the impassioned protest, but truly he looks like his father when he feels slighted, chin raised and arms folded, scolding me for not taking him out to play. When he’s angry at me, he will occasionally grumble out a Papa achay, which doesn’t bother me but strikes Azhar as a victory of his methods over mine. His parenting is largely pointing to objects and mirroring Mazin’s baby-babble. This pleases both father and child. A few months later Mazin gets a brother, Arif.
*
He’s a talker and a hugger, a leader, his third-grade teacher tells me. ‘The other kids really like him,’ she says. I ask her how he’s done on his exams, and she tells me he’s done well on urdu and english, ‘but maths mein thora sa weak hai.’ I think of his uncles, uneducated and unemployed, great at charming people, but with no skills to offer and no follow-through. I come home and tell Mazin he’s no longer allowed to play outside until his marks in math are up there with the rest. He protests and I tell him that my word is final. He fumes—actually goes red and huffs because this is what he has seen as anger on television—and calls me a kutti. My hand goes up and catches him across the face. He stands up silently, teary eyed and red faced, and leaves for his room. He throws Arif out and locks it. I do not go to tell him I’m sorry.
*
By twelve, all the promise of his early years is gone. He fails physics and math and his current school deems him unfit to continue on to O ’Level’s. Azhar is between jobs and trying to shift from marketing to sales. We are three months away from running out of our savings. One afternoon, Azhar comes back from an interview and catches Mazin working furiously at his crotch. He comes into our room and throws the confiscated magazine onto our bed. I see a woman with sharp makeup and a ridiculous perm cradling her breasts. He tells me he can’t worry about Mazin on top of everything else and a week later he tells me about starting Mazin at a cadet college. I flip through the prospectus he hands me—white pt-shirts and military khakis with bright, colored epaulettes— children playing at being soldiers, a farce upon a farce. I ask Azhar if sending Mazin to a military school is truly the only option we are left with. ‘He’ll become useless at this rate, Sana. He’ll be like my brothers, sitting home watching Indian songs all day,’ he says. I picture Mazin in a military uniform, gangly and long limbed, an awkward little giraffe of a boy, pretending to be a serious adult. ‘Plus, it’s cheaper than this current school he’s going to. And this way he will learn some discipline, be a good example for Arif.’ Azhar and I are still young enough to believe that the way to prepare Mazin for the world is to make him necessary to it. We see the world, with its unceasing cruelty and need for young bodies to keep the furnace of civilization going, winnowing Mazin down to nothing if he isn’t prepared for it. We see the accusation in his eyes years from now. ‘Why didn’t you prepare me? Why didn’t you know better?’ That night I go to his room and tell him about the cadet college. He listens carefully and nods as I tell him how and when the move to his new school is going to take place. He asks me if his papa is mad at him. ‘I won’t do it again, I promise,’ he says, and hugs me. I kiss him on the head and tell him we aren’t punishing him, that this is for his future.
*
The full extent of what it means to be in a cadet college doesn’t dawn on any of us until we’re getting ready to leave Mazin. We have dropped his trunk in his dorm and will not see him for the next three months. This, the headmaster tells us, is for his own good. It establishes independence. Let’s them know they can survive on their own. Mazin is sitting on his bed, already in his military uniform, regarding the scene about him with the wariness of a gazelle on a savannah. Around us families are helping their kids set up their mattresses on metal charpoys. There is a cadet not a few years older than Mazin milling about, helping parents set up their ward’s respective space, answering their questions. He gets a mischievous edge to his eye whenever his classmates pass by outside the dorm. It’s subtle, but already I can tell he‘s looking forward to the power he’ll be wielding once the parents have trickled away. When he comes over and asks us if we need anything, I tell him that we can take care of everything ourselves, thank you very much. Arif giggles. ‘Mama is angry.’ I shush him and ask Mazin if he needs some pocket money. He shakes his head. The uniform that the school has issued him has a button coming loose at the sleeve and I pinch it between my fingers and tch. ‘Ab yeh hai koi haal? What is this cloth quality?’ I say and open the needle kit they’ve issued Mazin for his uniform. ‘Ma, leave it,’ he complains. I tell him to sit still while I fish for the needle and khaki thread. He yanks his hand away, with real force, a man’s force, and the button goes flying across the dorm. ‘I’ll do it myself later,’ he says, his eyes shimmering with rage. It’s the first time I’ve felt him capable of such force. I say nothing more about the button. An hour later it is time to go and Mazin does not come to see us off at the gate.
*
When we go to visit him three months later, he looks gaunt and panicked. I ask him if he’s been eating. We sit in the cafeteria where he has his meals. He looks around as if he’s being watched, and nods. He tells me about his routine and his classes. I ask him if he’s made any friends and he says, not yet. He’s never had trouble making friends, but I don’t press. Later that night, I get a call from an unknown number. I hear Mazin’s voice. He tells me he’s on an illegal line. I hear him crying. He says that if he stays there any longer, he’s going to kill himself. ‘Please come get me,’ he says. I tell him that I’ll talk to his father. There is a pause before he tells me he misses Arif, who has always been his favorite, and me. Then the line cuts and he’s gone. When I call the number again, a recorded voice tells me the number is powered off. That night I ask Azhar if he thinks we’ve made a mistake in sending Mazin off to a cadet college. He’s going over his files in front of the television. Between the war on terror and his workload, he mumbles a hmm and says, no, not really. I tell him about the call. I tell him about the crying, but not the wanting to end his life. I do not expect Azhar to understand. He turns the TV down and takes off his glasses. ‘Sana, we can’t pull him out at the first sign of trouble. Bahir ki dunya mein kya karey ga?’ I nod. Of course, he’s right, I think. This is to make sure Mazin’s ready for the world outside. It makes sense, and yet for that night, and for many others after, I stay up, picturing our son at his bed, waiting for a knock in the night, his face turned to the door, expecting to see us.
*
When he finally comes home during summer, he seems taller and there is a seriousness to him that Azhar welcomes. He says salam to us every morning, cleans the dishes after every meal, and helps Arif with his summer homework. He asks me at least once a day if there is something he needs to get us from the bazaar and when I ask him about school, he tells me only that it’s going well. Already in his eyes is the hard edge that is beginning to see us as outsiders. I ask if he wants me to cook him anything special. I keep waiting for him to ask for fried chicken and fries for lunch, a treat that, up until a year ago, has made him unconscionably happy. Now he just sits at his desk, reading his textbook, and tells me he’ll have what everyone else is having. There’s a placid smile on his face as he says this. I see the delight from knowing he’s never going to need me again.
*
In college, he is hospitalized after having too much to drink. We don’t learn about it until we call his roommate, and he tells us that Mazin has been in National Hospital for three days. He begs us not to tell Mazin that he told me Mazin’s been drinking. Azhar is abroad on a business call and so I drive to Lahore to see Mazin on my own. He is in a room with his friends. His roommate, a quiet, squat computer science major with a round face is in there with two girls. They say salam aunty to me deferentially and, suddenly aware of themselves being present in a room with a boy and his mother, weasel out one by one. The roommate is the last to leave and tells me to call him if I need anything before closing the door behind him. Mazin sits up in his bed and crosses his hands across his chest. There are dark circles under his eyes and a cannula is sticking out over his bandaged wrist. I ask him what has happened, and he tells me it’s nothing. ‘It’s not nothing, Mazin. You’re in a hospital.’ I say. ‘I know. I’m taking care of it,’ he says, a dismissive smirk on his face. ‘Are you?’ My voice is loud. I don’t remember being this loud with him since before sending him off to cadet college. His smile recedes. He reaches for the glass of water on his bedside and downs half of it. ‘Ma, the semester is over. My grades are fine. The doctor said I was just dehydrated. Why are you getting so angry?’ he asks, with a calm so theatrical that I feel my blood rise. ‘You weren’t dehydrated, Mazin. You were drunk and nearly died!’ I say. My ears are pure heat and I feel the bones in my fingers nearly crack from the compressed rage. It takes him a moment to register that I know about the alcohol. He makes no effort to deny it. ‘But I’m not dead. So, why are you here, Ma?’ I stare at him blankly. Because I’m your mother, I want to say, but the words catch in my throat. ‘I am taking care of things,’ he says. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Behind the steel of his eyes, he is no more convinced of this than I am the first time I tear into my skin, or the summer I have him. I realize that my darkness has come for him, and, like me, he has chosen to take it on all by himself. I tell him that I will be staying at the Avari for the week if he wants to talk. He promises that he will come see me at the hotel. Two nights later, he is discharged and leaves for a trip to Rattu instead. I don’t see him again until Eid of next year.
*
He proposes, some years later, to someone he meets at work, which relieves Azhar. Arif, who is engaged himself, but is finishing a Masters abroad, calls and gets testy about how all the dates we’ve picked clash with his internships. Mazin tells him not to worry, that they will come visit him in London during the honeymoon. On a cool Saturday in October, Azhar and I meet this girl, Misha, for the first time at a Chinese restaurant. She is an engineer and about to go for a PhD in the States. She is tall and lively and has a stunning vitality to her words and movement. She speaks rapidly, but with precision, accumulating energy quicker than she can figure out how to dispense. She tells us the story of how they met. He had given her team a presentation on cloud infrastructure. She had emailed him after, pretending to be interested in network architecture and, eventually, after months of dropping hints over the phone and email, she had given up and asked him out herself. Mazin smiles and she fillips him in the ribs. ‘Aunty, you probably know him best. Why on earth is he this shy?’ Mazin looks at me and manages a weak smile. I want to tell her that he’s not shy, that what she thinks is shyness is an inability to truly want or need anyone, a terrifying self-sustenance that has closed him off to people, to the larger world, turned him into an impenetrable fortress that can’t tell whether the person knocking at the gates is a friend or an enemy. Instead, I shrug. I tell her it’s hard to say with military school kids, really. She calls him her dorky fauji and I wish them the best just as our dinner arrives.