Sakina - The Maid (I)

(This is my first attempt on anything in real ficiton. I will post it in chunks just to make it easy enough to slip through your throats. I hope you will like it. Please give me a critical feedback for my own learning. I would be grateful.)


She was rubbing the saucer uselessly in her hands for the last ten minutes. She would have continued that had she not heard the mistress’s shrill voice. She looked up and saw Begum Sahiba standing there with one of the most horrifying of her looks.

“Aray kya thaali ko ghisa ker choray gee? Kabhee pehli awaz mein bhee sun lia ker.”

Begum Sahiba was totally out of her mind.

“Go and get some tea for Chotay sahib and his friends”, she ordered.

“Jee acha”, she replied under her lip, washed her hands and turned the electric kettle on with some water in it. She knew that Chotay Sahib doesn’t like the normal mixed tea. She let the water to boil and returned to the saucer she was washing. It wasn’t for the saucer actually. She was a time machine. Whenever she is working somewhere, she would go down her memory line to escape from the reality of the present. Usually it was quite a pleasant experience, as she would select only those of the moments which she considered the best of her life. But today it was quite different. She was unable to harness her thoughts despite continuously trying. But she was still enjoying it. It seemed like a challenge to her and yet the sadness which was overcoming her was equally delightful.

She had very fond memories of her mother. She could still hear the echo of her mother’s voice calling her.

“Sakina baita mujay aata la day, tandoor tap gya hay.”

She left her only friend promising to get back as soon as possible and brought her mother flour which she had already kneaded for making bread. She was only three then but she used to help her mother in anyway she could. She used to do the little errands her mother would ask her like, bring her things she needed, help her cleaning the house, plucking the mustard twigs from the farms. She would even see to it that the wooden fuel in the stove keeps on burning. She never knew that this was going to support her for the rest of her life. She was the only beloved child of her mother. Yes mother only, because her father had died when she was still being nurtured in her mother’s womb. So for her it was her mother who was the whole world to her but still there was a deep longing for a man’s nearness in her heart. She would see with awe the children of neighborhood, being carried in arms, caressed and kissed by their fathers and sometimes even when their fathers would beat them.

Even now when she is a mother of six children, she was still in the awe of men. The thoughts reminded her of the water boiling in the kettle for Chotay Sahib, the only man in this house where she was working. She made tea and headed to the lawn where the guests must have been sitting. When she reached there, she approached from the back of her mistress’s proclaimed Chotay Sahib. However, she never called him Chotay Sahib.

“Farhad Bhai! Tea is ready.”

“How are you Halle Berry?” he posed.

She remembered, when she was new to this house and he was in his teens, he called her one day and showed her the cover page of the Vogue magazine and told her that she was even prettier than this American top actress. Regardless of her complexion, she was indeed very beautiful, rather the darkness in her skin has added to the mystery in her. While going back to kitchen she imagined her present self and a sigh expelled out of her deepest inner crevasses bringing more out of the Pandora box of the memories.

At the age of twelve, her mother refused to let her out of the house without her own supervision. The reason was her splendid youth. The only time when she would see the outer world would be the time when she would go with her mother to their village’s Malik (the godfather of the villagers) to help her in the house work and after that she had to be inside the house. On Sundays she would go to church with her mother. Her mother would be everywhere with her, wherever she would go. She would feel strangled with nothing much to do at home and her thoughts would torment her. From the very childhood, she had big dreams. Dreams of a big house, which must be equipped with every technological facility like TV, all those CD players and music systems that she had seen in Malik’s house, and servants (like her mother and herself) working around for her. Later in her early teens, she began to think for her a lover and a husband too, a longing like every other girl.

Not all and not in their true essence but her dreams started to come true. Her mother was old now and her health was continuously deteriorating. She would go less and less to the Malik’s house. She would send Sakina on work to keep the house running. In this way Sakina was getting more and more freedom. She realized very soon that her dreams are not going to come true. So she began to take the Malik’s house as her own. The wife of the Malik was kind enough to let her access to the luxuries of the house. She would let Sakina to relish on the Cable TV, movies and all the stuff available when she used to be free. This gave her imaginative mind even broader horizons. The last of her fantasies came true when one day she saw a male servant of the house gazing at her.

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