Andleeb Shadani
New Voices Award Winner
The Eyes of Women
I would always look at the things kept on Amma’s dressing table. When she was asleep, after crying for two nights when Abba hadn’t come home for a very long time, I would sit on that little cushioned table, whose cover was like a leopard’s skin. The mirror table was always crowded with lipsticks, red and maroon, Parachute coconut oil, two combs, which had a few strands of her hair, the medicine box, a box of talcum powder, and in the corner, a bottle of kohl. It was a transparent glass bottle with a black cap, a white label wrapped around it. On the cover was a woman’s portrait, a woman with two fish-shaped eyes, applying kohl in the mirror. For a very long time, I thought that woman was my mother. Sometimes if Amma didn’t wake up for very long I would enter inside that world, that room which was on the kohl bottle’s cover. It was another world, a parallel world, a world made of mirrors. And I would see that woman, with two beautiful eyes, like pieces of mirror, the mirror of heaven, she would be humming a song, I think in Aramaic. She would look at me, and extend her hand, she would put me in her lap, and apply kohl first to my eyes, then to the whole face. My mother was a young woman, a fresh graduate of history. And my father, a banker, and a good caring man. In that world, he loved my mother, he would stand at the door and watch her apply kohl in her eyes and sing songs. In that world, he didn’t have any lover, no second wife. In that world, there was no clock, no time. Sometimes I would stay for very long inside that world, running up and down the stairs, looking at my many faces in the mirrors everywhere. Sometimes I would have only just entered inside and Amma would pull me back. “What are you doing here?” she would cry. Her eyes would be smudged with kohl and tears, her hair disheveled like a ghost. She was like that on most of the days—sad, angry, depressed, and sometimes even violent. Sometimes when she wasn’t any of those things, she would call me to her room, and make me sit on her lap, and she would comb my hair, and put some coconut oil. She would notice that my eyes were on the lipstick and the kohl bottle. “Amma please let me apply some kohl to my eyes.” “Sheeba, how many times I told you those things are for married women. When you get married you apply anything you want to your eyes and lips. You know Abba gets angry.” “But he is hardly home, he won’t get to know.” She would become cold again. Her face would twitch. She would look at me helplessly, and do her best not to lose her temper. She would ask me to go. She would have her eyes on me, as I would leave the room, and go hide behind the courtyard’s pillar. I would stare at Abba’s portrait on the wall when he was in college. I would stare at his Turkish mustache. Even in that lifeless portrait he could wiggle them, and move his eyes, like a pendulum, hidden behind an old black spectacle. I would go close to take off his spectacle so I could look at his eyes. I had never seen the eyes of my father. Before I could do anything, I would hear Amma’s voice, “Bring the bottle,” she would say with a heavy heart. I would run and stand at the door of her room. And then she would take out the little mirror from the drawer. She would apply the kohl to my eyes. Then she would let me apply kohl to her teary eyes. It was hard to apply kohl to her eyes. It would all get smudged. She would look like a night’s ghost. I would climb to her back, and we would look at each other’s faces in the round mirror. “See Amma, aren’t we the two most beautiful women of this world?”“No, we aren’t. We are two ghosts, living in the ruined house of Nawab Kaleem. We all are dead, and so is this city.” She would invert her eyelids, and take out her teeth. “Amma please don’t do it.” I would run and hide behind the courtyard’s pillar. I would keep hiding. I am coming. I would see her shadow coming towards me, like a camphor’s smoke. And then there would be a knock on the door, just once. We would know it was Abba. We knew him by the way he knocked on the door. That’s what we knew about him. He didn’t tell much. He was a medical representative. He roamed around the city selling medicines. Amma belonged to the family of Agha Mir. Abba said he was also from the family of Kings, the grandson of the great Nawab Kaleem Kaiser. Amma said they weren’t real Nawabs. They were the children of cooks and courtesans. Amma said Abba cheated her. He said he was a doctor. He even ran a fake clinic in Lalbagh—Dr. Laiq’s Dispensary, A Place where the Suffering Ends. He even got a signboard and rented an old barber’s shop, just to let Amma believe that he was a doctor. She knew he wasn’t a doctor, she knew he was nothing. She said she still married him. She got to know about it before marriage. “I loved him,” she would tell her friend Sughra. “All lovers are fools,” she would say. “He married you for your money.” They would talk. She would console her. I never concentrated on what they were talking about. I never concentrated on anyone with what they were talking about or wanted to talk about. My eyes would always be on the eyes of others. Sughra’s eyes were big, strangely big. They weren’t black like mine or yellow like Amma’s. They were white and strangely big. She was one of the few women who didn’t apply kohl to her eyes. I asked Amma. She told me she was a widow. A young widow. She was mourning her husband’s death. I didn’t know what was a widow, though I knew what was mourning. We mourned every year on Muharram’s arrival. Maybe for Aunt Sughra the whole year was Muharram. But she didn’t wail. She was laughing all the time. She and Amma would talk in whispers about the private lives of other friends. She knew the sexual lives of every one of their friends. They would talk and laugh. I knew about what. She was the one who told Amma that he saw Abba with a college girl at Mayfair. Abba said he never went to Mayfair, he was too busy selling medicine. “It’s all in your head,” he would say. It was through Abba I got to know that there were things in Amma’s head. Men and women. Young college girls. A whole college. She was the principal. She punished them even if they completed their homework and passed exams with good grades. She didn’t like college girls. She said they didn’t study and sat against the mirror table applying kohl to their eyes. And then they go in pursuit of other women’s husbands. She said every college girl was after her husband. They would fight and cry. I would see Abba locking the door of his room. Abba didn’t apply kohl to his eyes. But many men did. Like that social science teacher at Colvin. He looked like a post office clerk, always in a white shirt, with a thin mustache like a line of kohl, blue and red pens in his breast pocket. He used them to correct our papers. The girls were mad for him. They said he looked like Reza Shah of Iran. I knew it was all because of the kohl. Many girls were in love with him. They proposed to him. He loved them all. I didn’t like him. I don’t like men who love every girl. I don’t like men who apply kohl to their eyes. That was one thing common between me and my mother. We didn’t like kohl-eyed men and college-going girls.
My obsession with kohl kept on growing. I would get books issued from the library; I wanted to know how kohl is made, bottled, and then sold. The history of kohl making. I learned that kohl is crafted from natural minerals, waxes, and oils. Kohl enhances the eye’s aesthetic appeal and carries a rich cultural legacy that transcends borders. It soothes and protects the delicate skin around the eyes, making it a sought-after choice among modern consumers who seek beautyand holistic care. It is utilized in traditional rituals, ceremonies, and avant-garde makeup trends. The deep black hue, achieved through meticulous formulation, provides a dramatic and captivating effect, offering endless possibilities for creative eye looks. Kohl, or surma as it is called colloquially, is believed to have been worn since before 3100 BCE, in the Protodynastic period of Egypt by Egyptian queens and noble women. Different versions of the word have been found in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, and Azerbaijani, leading to the Urdu word surma, or the Bengali word kajol. But what really was it back then in ancient Egypt? Egyptians used stibnite, a sulfide of antimony. For those of you who hated the periodic table or didn’t have anything to do with chemistry—antimony is an element and its ore is called stibnite. Another compound that was used and is still in use, is galena, a sulfide of lead. Ancient Egyptians are said to have applied the paint of galena on their upper eyelid and green malachite on the lower lid, mostly to protect their eyes from the harsh sun. Safe to conclude that from North Africa to the Middle East, kohl/surma has been used for over 5,000 years now.
I read novels that talked about the usage of kohl. It wasn’t very helpful, they were just descriptions that didn’t lead to any image. A friend at Colvin told me about a film that she had watched at her cousin’s house. It was Farrokhzad’s The House is Black. She helped me watch that film. In it, there is a scene where a leper woman tries to apply kohl to her eyes. I told her cousin that I had seen that woman before, on the cover of that kohl bottle, my mother from another world. Her cousin was impressed by my knowledge of kohl. He helped me watch many films, and together we meticulously watched the eyes of other men and women. We would spend evenings at Mayfair watching the eyes of Julie Andrews and Sophia Loren. He used to say that Sophia Loren had the most beautiful eyes among all mortal women. That summer, he left Lucknow and never came back. My friend said he had gone to Los Angeles to become a filmmaker. She said he would come back soon and we would be cast as heroines in his film. I wanted to become an actress. I thought if I got eyes like Sophia Loren, he would give me a chance in his film.
I learned about a blind saint in Rustam Nagar who they said had stored the eyes of kings and queens in a silver box. He lived in an abandoned house covered with large grass. I can’t tell you what he did with me. I hated myself. I started hating kohl, and kohled-eyed men and women. I decided that even if I got married I wouldn’t apply kohl to my eyes, even if my husband left me for a college girl. I wanted to leave my house, leave the city for a place, a world devoid of kohl.
That winter, Amma died. She was struggling with depression. She didn’t wake up one day. The doctor said she overdosed on Alprax. Her eyes were swollen with incessant crying. Aunt Sughra and other friends washed the corpse. Before the funeral, I went closer and applied kohl to her eyes. The way she used to do it. Then I applied some to mine and brought the round mirror from her drawer and sat behind her. “See Amma, aren’t we the two most beautiful women of this world?”
Author’s Note: This is a true story of my paternal aunt Farida, and Sheeba is my cousin. What is written here has been told to me by her daughter, mostly about her relationship with her mother. I tell the story in first person to maintain the intimacy of the voice, a conscious literary choice.