While Ruki, Zara and Joyce tried to calm Aunty Julie down, holding sugar water to her lips, the residents slowly made their way back into their flats to pray Fajr, promising to also pray for the return of the bridal bling.

  When something is stolen, it leaves a void. Some voids can be filled with something new. But many voids, like this one – a sentimental, meaningful void – can envelop everything around them in darkness and doubt. In Summer Terrace, a creeping tension made its way into some of the flats, sitting between the madams and their maids, who were now watched with new eyes.

  Suspicion has a way of drawing certain people together and widening the cracks between others. One by one, doors that were usually open all day were shut. The voices that echoed through the doughnut hole reduced to whispers. The madams wondered if they’d been too trusting, if their conversations on the intercom between each other and with Robert, or their chats across the corridors, had given away too much of their daily lives.

  Like gangrene, mistrust set in between maids and madams. Some of the madams questioned their maids about having seen any jewellery or anyone suspicious. Some madams took to searching their maids’ bags before they left. Some, like Rabia, simply locked their bedrooms, cutting off access to the private area of their homes.

  Boundaries went up between the women, like elastic bands that could sting or snap if stretched for too long. Maids were on the outside. Literally.

  The usually boring building WhatsApp group was injected with new life. What was once a space run by the men for funeral notices and reminders about loadshedding became a site of conversation for the women. Into the night the ladies of Summer Terrace chatted to each other about safety, pledging to check that each other’s gates were always locked and making sure any strange activity was reported.

  Aunty Julie: Slmz ladies. Tnx for checking on me.

  Ruki: Typing …

  Mrs Hassim: Make shukr. A big bad luck went away. Thank Him.

  Shirin: Yes but we need to find out who did this.

  Laila: I am so worried about the children, we feel very safe here, but we actually aren’t. Ladies on each floor must just keep an eye on each other.

  Ruki: Typing …

  Shirin: Yes we may have our disagreements but this place is our home. We must keep it safe.

  Aunty Shaida: I didn’t want to mention it but someone’s been stealing my biscuits.

  Laila: Has anyone else had something go missing?

  Ruki: U most welcome.

  Mrs Hassim: I also noticed an old ring I had was missing. I thought I must have lost it. But now I wonder.

  Rabia: Something like this was bound to happen. Everyone leaves their doors open, and the maids come and go.

  Ruki: Jzk Shirin.

  Aunty Julie: This is scary. I will talk to Mr Bhoola. It’s late now.

  Mrs Hassim: Just concentrate on the wedding. These things are material. Slmz.

  Mr Bhoola was furious when he heard that a theft had occurred in his building. He wouldn’t let the reputation of Summer Terrace be trampled on by some thief. He insisted on personally checking the building security cameras, and the maids’ rooms. While Thandi, Violet, Hlengi, Sibo and Kadija stood outside, humiliated, Mr Bhoola made Robert turn over their mattresses, search their cupboards and check the toilet cistern. As he rifled through their belongings, he couldn’t look them in the eye. They were his elders, his mothers. But this was his job.

  Nothing was found. Nothing was seen on the grainy visuals of the camera footage.

  When Ruki and Aunty Julie heard how Mr Bhoola had disrespectfully barged into the maids’ rooms and searched them, they were furious.

  ‘We pay for our maids to live there,’ Aunty Julie said to him in the foyer. ‘If you wanted to search the rooms, you should have asked us first!’

  ‘I agree,’ Ruki said breathlessly. ‘We have to work together.’

  The mistrust between madams and maids blackened their relationships as fast as Zaina’s bracelet, which was turning her entire wrist green.

  It infected Zaina and Rabia too. The morning after Zaina’s post-midnight meander with Imraan, Rabia had wondered how her daughter’s hoodie was so damp and, more importantly, why her room door had been closed. It was something she and Zaina never usually did. The suspicion crept under her skin. Her daughter was hiding something.

  Zaina’s overly loving demeanour only served to heighten her mistrust. It reminded her of seven-year-old Zaina, who’d broken her mother’s lipstick and then tried to cover up her mistake by showering her with handmade snowflakes she’d cut from light-blue crêpe paper.

  Rabia resolved to sort this out this evening, once and for all. She left work early, leaving a hopeful Reggie in her wake. ‘I’m rushing home,’ Rabia shouted into the wind. ‘Please come tomorrow, okay?’ Reggie nodded and gave her a thumbs-up sign, the wind threatening to blow him away.

  The 4.30 p.m. bus was strange. It was quiet and sparse, almost peaceful. Rabia took her time walking through the park and up the stairs, looking forward to talking with her daughter. An eerie silence greeted her as she opened the door. Zaina wasn’t home.

  Panic struck Rabia’s heart. She immediately prayed for Zaina’s safety, images of her daughter being in a taxi accident or stranded on campus flashing through her mind. With a shaking hand, she dialled Zaina’s number. No answer.

  Just as Rabia was about to check for Zaina at Ruki’s flat, the door handle turned and Zaina stumbled in.

  ‘Mom!’ she said, shocked. ‘What a surprise!’ Zaina’s mouth went dry, her eyes unwilling to believe that her mother was home early.

  ‘Oh, Zaina, where were you? I’m so glad you’re okay! I thought something had happened to you,’ Rabia said, hugging her daughter.

  ‘I forgot to message you, Mom, I’m sorry. I … I was with Billy.’ The tiny hesitation made Rabia doubt her. Zaina looked incredibly guilty.

  A strange look passed over Rabia’s face as she realised that her daughter was standing in front of her, being untruthful. ‘Don’t lie to me!’ Rabia said coldly.

  ‘Mom, how can you think I’m lying? Honestly, I was with her!’

  ‘Hmph. Something is going on with you and I will find out, Zaina. Don’t forget who raised you. I know when you’re lying.’

  DATE CRUNCHIES

  ½ cup butter

  ½ cup brown sugar

  3 cups pitted dates, chopped

  1 egg, beaten

  1 packet Marie biscuits, broken into bite-sized pieces

  1 cup Rice Krispies (optional)

  ½ cup pecan nuts (optional)

  1 cup dessicated coconut

  • In a large non-stick pot, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the sugar and stir until it has dissolved.

  • Add the dates and stir occasionally until they’ve softened, 10–15 minutes. Remove from the heat.

  • Mix in the egg quickly to avoid any white streaks.

  • Mix in the Marie biscuits, and the Rice Krispies and nuts if you’re adding them. Combine well.

  • Spoon the mixture onto baking paper or wax wrap and roll it into a tight long log, or a few small logs. Sprinkle with coconut and enclose in the baking paper or wax wrap. Put in the fridge to set, about 2 hours.

  • Cut into slices. These are best served chilled, with a glass of water, as you break your fast.

  Makes 36

  13

  WHILE RABIA KEPT A WATCHFUL EYE ON ZAINA when she could, in small ways, Zaina tried to rebel against her mother. Rabia needed to see her as an adult, with her own mind.

  One morning, Zaina bleached the last few centimetres of her hair. Then, carefully following the instructions that came with the cheap Renaissance Permanent Colour: Violet Rave as she hunched over the bathroom sink, she covered the blonde until she resembled a nerdy superhero. Her graceful mother was horrified at the scene when she entered the bathroom that morning, and Precious had to clean up the sink and the sprays of fuchsia and violet on the floor as if it were a murder scene.

  Rabia said nothing.

  Next, Zaina veered from Rabia’s schedule of laying out the next day’s clothes the night before. If anything would shake Rabia’s world, it would be the sudden puncturing of her punctuality.

  Rabia clenched her jaw reserving her retorts, while Zaina rushed around in the mornings trying to figure out what to wear.

  But when Zaina became complacent in her daily prayers, Rabia snapped. As the Maghrib azaan melodiously called the believers to prayer after sunset, Rabia automatically made her way to the bathroom to make wudhu, and then laid out her prayer mat. Zaina stayed put. Rabia cleared her throat loudly, hoping Zaina would take the hint that appointments with Allah couldn’t be missed. Zaina continued watching a video on Facebook.

  The heat of anger boiled up in Rabia. ‘Zayyana, what’s going on?!’ she shouted, a diminutive figure in her floor-length burqa.

  ‘Nothing, Mom. I’ll pray when I feel like it.’

  ‘Oh, yes? Allah will wait for you, isn’t it? Come now! Stop this nonsense and pray quickly before time runs out.’

  Zaina didn’t budge.

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed you’re hiding things from me. I’m trying to do it all for you, to give you a good life. I work so hard for you.’

  ‘Well, thanks, but I didn’t ask you to,’ Zaina said stubbornly.

  ‘What’s gotten into you?’ Rabia said, taken aback. ‘You’ve never spoken to me like this, ever! It’s that boy, right? You’re willing to sacrifice your relationship with me, with Allah, for some dumb boy who can’t even introduce himself to me? If he was really interested in you, he would come here.’

  ‘Oh, my God, Mom, it’s not that. I just want to see where this goes. Stop trying to control everything I do!’

  ‘Look, Zaina, I know there’s no father in this house. Some people only respect a woman if she has a husband or a father. But I am your mother and your father. I will lay down the rules for you, since you don’t seem to get it. You tell that boy he needs to treat you with respect. If he wants to see you, he can come home while I am here.’

  Rabia wasn’t being unreasonable. In fact, she was being more generous than many strict parents Zaina had heard of. But, deep down, she couldn’t bring herself to ask this of Imraan. It was sure to scare him away. He hated it when authoritative figures, especially women, told him what to do. He’d learned well how to persuade people to see his point of view and outwit them. It was part of the reason he was so proficient at political debates and persuading organisations to donate their funds to his campaigns. Sure, he loved giving back to the community, but the even greater payoff was the feeling of power he got from it.

  Zaina resented the way Rabia made every situation about herself. What does her not having a husband have to do with me being in a relationship? she asked herself, outraged.

  Still, when your mother tells you something you’re not ready to hear, her voice may echo through the vacant corners of your mind and disappear, but the sentiment of her message remains. It lingers in your mind, burrows under your skin and tugs at your heart like a petulant child until you give it some attention.

  Zaina hadn’t gone out with Imraan since the day her mother had come home early. It was too risky.

  That day, they’d met in the S aisle of the City Library. It was where Zaina had first fallen in love with words – in the pages of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Imraan waited for her next to the book, as if he were the manifestation of the title.

  She’d taken the bus to Smith Street and hopped off opposite the library, staring at it for a few moments to soak in all its grandness. Grey and sprawling, its British elegance pointed upwards towards the carvings of noblemen and horses, and the pigeons that perched on their heads from time to time. Inside, the building reached twice or three times Zaina’s height to the ceiling, from which a heavy crystal chandelier hung. Maroon carpeted stairs led regally up to the museum on the first floor.

  There’d been few people in the ground-floor library on a Monday morning. She’d taken her time, inhaling the musty scent of old books and the leathery fragrance of newly bound ones, before she found Imraan. When she’d seen him standing with his hands in his pockets, the thought had occurred to her that she could be walking towards her husband-to-be. One day. She’d committed that picture of him to her memory.

  They’d strolled up the plush stairs together and through the quiet museum, her hand in his. Their words had echoed off the marble walls and floor tiles, amid dinosaur skeletons and elephant footprints encased in glass. She’d felt her anxiety creep up into her fingers too, wanting to tell him that she didn’t like hiding their love, to ask him to please come home and meet her mother. But she’d wanted to remember these moments and had swept the subject to a corner of her mind.

  But now her heart was being tugged by a nagging doubt: what if her mother was right? If he was really interested in her, why wouldn’t he agree to meet her mother?

  She had to see him. Plz come see me. In Archi, she texted him one afternoon on campus.

  ‘Zaina, what’s bugging you. Are you okay?’ asked Imraan, slightly flushed from striding up the stairs to the architecture studio. He held two steaming cups of hot chocolate in his hands.

  Zaina smiled faintly at him. No matter how determined or confident he was speaking at his campaigns, he had this childlike hot-chocolate habit that made him endearing.

  He handed her a cup, then followed her to her worktable in the corner by a large window. There was the design for Elif Shafak, sketched in charcoal. He’d never seen one of her charcoal drawings. It was delicate, as if her fingers had brushed across the page so lightly that the sketch looked like a memory.

  ‘Wow. This is something else,’ he said, unable to tear his eyes away from the subtle lines on the page as he sipped his hot chocolate.

  ‘Imraan. The last time we met. When I got home. My mother was there. I told her I’d been with Billy. But I don’t think she believed me. I … I think we need to tell our parents we’re serious about each other.’ It all came out very rushed, and there seemed to be a time delay between her spoken words and the words Imraan heard, as if one of them was overseas and they were trying to have a conversation on an old-fashioned telephone.

  ‘Oh,’ Imraan said finally.

  ‘Oh?’ Zaina set her drink on the table next to her drawing.

  ‘I don’t know. I just need to figure things out …’ He looked like he wanted to disappear.

  ‘We do want to get married someday, right?’

  ‘Um, yeah … But there’s no rush.’

  ‘I know, but I hate lying. I just want to be together without feeling like I’m committing this big sin.’

  ‘Zaina, I promise,’ he said, coming closer to her. ‘Just give it some time.’ He put his arm around her waist.

  She suddenly realised just how large the architecture studio was, and that they were very much alone. She’d imagined what it would be like to kiss him, the romantic grandeur of it all. But there was something about his grip she didn’t like. It was possessive and playful, like he wasn’t taking her seriously, but at the same time had the potential to hurt her.

  ‘Imraan!’ she said. ‘I’m trying to talk to you about something important!’

  ‘Whoa, Zaina. Relax!’ he said, backing off. ‘Don’t force me. Please. And, by the way, I haven’t been forcing you to come meet me. You’ve been happily coming along.’

  ‘Yes. Because I love you. And I don’t want to lose you,’ she said, gesturing towards him and knocking over her hot chocolate. Her frustration spilled out of her eyes as the sugary brown liquid ate up her drawing.

  He hated seeing her cry and stepped forward to help but Zaina held out her hand to stop him. ‘Leave it. Imraan, this doesn’t seem all that serious to you.’ She wished he would just make a commitment.

  Imraan said nothing. He stood there, looking injured.

  Zaina’s phone rang. She could tell by the ringtone it was Rabia. She answered it, turning away from Imraan. ‘Jee, Ma, I’m just leaving now,’ she said, before disconnecting.

  Turning back to Imraan, she wiped her face. ‘I have to go. The cleaners will throw all this away,’ she said, not able to look at her ruined design.

  ‘Sorry, Zaina. Things are just complicated.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’ll call you later.’

  She did call him that evening – she always kept her promises to him. But their conversation was short and generic, much like her messages since then.

  He’d told her that she meant so much to him, that one day he would do right by her. Now, she couldn’t understand this side of him that seemed so cold and alien to her.

  Zaina sank silently into the mornings that followed. She sat at the table in the architecture studio, designing, while Rabia was at work, and took over the dining table with her designs in the evenings when she couldn’t sleep. Sometimes she just sat in the campus library, staring blankly out the window. In silence, all those quiet feelings floated up to the surface. Unlike many of her friends, Zaina had grown up knowing the value of silence. You could fill it up with the loudest, most colourful characters from your favourite book, or hot tears from a painful memory. Or, sometimes, you could let silence fill you. It could race through your veins, settle into the cracks in your soul and calm you to your very core.

  In the evenings, between the clanking of pots and the chattering of the neighbours, silence visited Zaina rarely. It hid in the damp corners of the madams’ bathrooms and the cold of the maids’ quarters, until the tiny hours, when silence became their mutual friend.

  If Zaina broke her silence and told her mother that she was both in love with and afraid of Imraan, Rabia would ensure Zaina didn’t see him again. And if she carried on seeing Imraan, she would only fall more in love with him, and her lies would create even more guilt.

  Zaina’s cooking became dull and uninspired. Aloo fry. Beans. Mince.

  Sometimes, Rabia would come home tired and take over the cooking. She didn’t expect Zaina to cook, but she’d grown used to it. She wished Zaina would at least tell her in advance when she was going to cook so that she could plan better. But Rabia knew which battles to fight and which to let slide. It would’ve been easy to yell and threaten Zaina in a bid to get her to be honest, but she could tell her daughter was fighting an internal battle – one between her conscience and her nafs. Every girl goes through that in their life.