Seventeen Things about My Friend Farzana

“I mean, think about it,” she said one afternoon as we lay on her bed, the air hanging still and warm over us. “Ammi and Abbu love Aslam the most, and Aslam loves Aslam the most. Where does that leave me?”

“Why do you say that, Farzi?” I asked, only half-listening. I was leafing through a magazine Farzana had sneaked out of her parents’ room and was distracted by an ad featuring a naked man and woman standing against one another so that their critical parts—just their critical parts—were hidden in the curves of each other’s bodies. It was an ad for shoes. Or perfume. The product was beside the point.

“Because it’s true,” Farzana said, taking the magazine from me and fanning it before our faces. “All day, my mother says to me, ‘Farzi, do this. Farzi, do that. Farzana-khazana, my treasure, I’m teaching you housework for your own good, darling!’”

She lowered her voice to match her mother’s drawl, duplicating the woman’s mannerisms to perfection. I burst out laughing and rolled across the bed to her. She flapped the neck of her t-shirt for air and I noticed a blue undergarment enveloping the swell of her budding breasts. Instinctively, I threw a protective arm across my own torso. I hadn’t started wearing a bra yet and my body offered no suggestion that I might need one soon.

“And that donkey, Aslam,” Farzana continued. “He gets away with everything!”

It was hard to disagree with that. Farzana’s neighborhood wanderings unfailingly ended before sunset because she had to return home and help her mother with dinner. Aslam, however, came and went as he pleased. When the family bought a new car, Aslam wrestled Farzana out of the front seat while their father watched in amusement and their mother concentrated on fitting her complacent girth through the back door. When Aslam pored over some newly acquired astrological charts on the living room floor—a strange and enduring hobby he picked up God knows where—Farzana was expected to bring him snacks. And if he spilled his sticky rose sherbet on the new floor tiles, Farzana was asked to clean up. “Mere chand ke tukde—my beautiful piece of the moon,” their mother would say, breaking into a betel-stained smile and stroking Farzana’s forehead. “He’s your little brother. If you don’t indulge him, who will? Besides, if you learn to take care of Aslam, you’ll be well-prepared to take care of a husband, when it’s time.”

“It’s not going to be that way,” Farzana would hiss. “You’ll see. I’m going to find a husband who takes care of me. Someone who dotes on me.” But her mother, ambling out of the room, seldom listened.

Serendipitously, Farzana inherited Nabeela and Jameela that winter, twin tabby cats the color of dried caramel, half-blind from old age and forsaken by Farzana’s grand-aunt, Samreen Bi. Samreen Bi loved the cats, but in her precarious ninth decade, she felt as though they had started to compete with her in the quest to make the most dramatic exit from this world to the next. When Samreen Bi took to her bed with a bout of pneumonia, Nabeela and Jameela stopped eating solid foods. When Samreen Bi complained of night shivers, Nabeela-Jameela developed arthritis in their hind legs. When Samreen Bi slipped on a spot of oil on her kitchen floor and broke her hipbone—a move rife with all the theatre needed to ensure her triumph in the contest with the felines, Nabeela-Jameela developed mysterious scabs on their paws. Thus it was that the mirror-image twins—Nabeela was blind in the left eye, Jameela in the right—came into Farzana’s care. They could barely walk, and according to Aslam, they smelled like Samreen Bi’s sour yogurt farts. Yet Farzana was happy to have them and they took to Farzana like flies to molasses. They slept in the crook of her knees. They waited for her by the door in the evenings. They even licked her toes with their grainy, old-leather tongues, an honor previously bestowed solely upon Samreen Bi’s furrowed elbows.

They weren’t the husband she had started to dream of. But until he came along, Farzana decided, the unconditional affections of Nabeela-Jameela, the never-dying cats, would do.