Ok, I feel like rambling and reminiscing today so here is the recollection of a razaee (quilt) that’s notorious in our family. I’m sure every household has similar razaee lagacy.
We used to have this one big and real heavy quilt that my brother and I used to share when we were kids. Man! the razaaee was so heavy that it would suffocate you just by the weight.
The story of that razaaee goes as far back as the day when one day my mother suddenly decided that we needed an additional razaaee to add to the vast array of already available quilted cotton collection in our household. It was either that or the fact that one of our hamsaaee had told her about this other rooee dhunanay wali place which supposedly had better machines and she wanted to try it out. Who knows how women get these ideas. It’s like sweater weaving phenomenon. Whether or not someone is gonna wear it, you’d sure to try out this new design pattern to knit a sweater that some woman came up with in the mohalla to test and prove your knitting skills.
So my mother made me carry the rooee (cotton) she bought from dukaan to all the way over to razaaee stuffing place (they have a name for such place that I can’t recall now). Being out of breath under the heavy bojh on my shoulders, I thanked God the labor was over once we got to the place. Little did I know that that was just the beginning. We were doomed to breathe under that load of cotton for years to come!
The next phase of the years-to-suffer-labor was to get the razaaee back home once it was finshed. We had days of congressional debates between my brother and I (with my mother acting like a mediator) that who it was gonna be. It was a conflict between justice and common sense. Justice said since I took the rooee to the dukaan, it was my brother’s turn to get the razaee. But common sense said since I was the younger one, it didn’t matter. My father observed the whole issue silently like a totalitarian authority for days and then finally decreed to me one day that he loved me more but I’m the younger brother of my older brother. I’m telling you, there is always this conspiratorial relationship between older son and the father that somehow works agains the younger males in a household. Once again, justice was blind folded by the weight of razaaee whilst carrying it over on its back (Chann ji, no “bare back jokes” please!).
What followed was a sewing circle of a group of women coming to our house and sewing the razaaee in our sehan, whilst passing the word on what was going on in the neighborhood and who cooked what the other day and how it smelled and/or tasted. Later on, the razaaee was spread under the sun for few days to air out the odor and fuzz. Once the razaee was ready to torture and suffocate the selective males of the household, a decision was needed to be made who was gonna suffer first and foremost. This time around, my mother acted as the totalitarian body and declared with finality that it was gonna be my brother and I.
It’s a very complex and strange phenomenon with women in our culture. If they knit a sweater with a new design pattern, it will always going to be the father in the household to wear it first. Any subsequent variation in the design resulting from the creative ingenuity that every woman takes on once she’s passed on with a secretive “recipe” is befitted upon the other males (sons) in the household. For other women in the household (daughters), they’d simply go to Anarkali and buy a ready-made jersey. You guys have no idea how many times I had to wear jersies and sweaters that had one longer sleeve than the other. But this doesn’t end with sweaters alone. When it comes to home-sewn (or should I say “home-strewn”) wear-ons, our women have this mythical sense of who-fits-into-what-clothing metaphysics which doesn’t have any logical or comprehensible “subtitution of bodies” basis but rather work like a spontaneous neurotic decision and once the decision is reached upon, size doesn’t matter. HaaN, gender does.
We had a little kothri (a small back room) in our house where we had a bed that my brother and I used to share. The kothri was big enough for a bed but small enough for a razaee of that magnitude and weight. Before we both got used to the weight, life was like a child-labor camp for first few days. Every night we’d come back home after daylong of streneous playground activities like playing baantay, kamas kori, engaging in fights, gulli danda, Cricket, flying kites, more fights, and climbing on the roofs and trees to peek into neighbor’s ghusal khana every time a certain chick decided to take a shower (well, bath really), we’d be ordered to go to bed after we’d run out of excuses not to go to sleep early enough on a school night just to avoid being trapped under that razaee.
So my brother and I suffered for years under that razaee until the day when it was dawned upon us by the unevitable forces of nature and adolescence that we didn’t have to take that **** anymore as we were grown ups enough to decide which razaee to use. Mother argued persistently that we were making a big mistake and would suffer from endless nights of freezing cold if we’d to ditch that razaee. But eventually she gave in to our rebellion and we finally took a breath of fresh (and yes, tad bit colder) air. But the legacy of that razaee didn’t end there. The razaee was passed on to my sister like rest of the other worldly stuff we inherited from our parents (except that damn chaarpaaee which is a different story altogether) and is still being used. Last time I visited Pakistan, my nephew was laboring it. One day while he was complaining about it the zillionth time to his mother, I took him aside and said, “baita, it’s of no use. You’re not old enough. You’ve to go through this like your mamooNs did. It runs in the family.”
What really boggles my mind about that razaee is that the damn thing never wore out. It still looks like new (Well, almost). I know what kinda cotton was stuffed in it (trust me, I do) but I have no clue what kinda leecher, stupid clothing ghalaaf it got. It freakin’ never wears out or fades out the color. But knowing the women of my family, even if eventually does, I doubt if my sister would just throw it away. I have a feeling money can’t buy a new razaee to replace that one!
ok bad guess. so what, they keep that stuff? if so, what’s it used for?