Книга - Trespassing

Trespassing
Uzma Aslam Khan


A world-class tale of love and deceit, rivalry and destiny from the Lahore-based writer Uzma Aslam Khan.'Standing in a room with eight thousand tiny creatures, witnessing them perform a dance that few humans even knew occurred; this was life. Everywhere she looked, each caterpillar nosed the air like a wand and out passed silk… When Dia watched one spin, she came closer to understanding the will of God than at any other time.'Dia is the daughter of a silk farmer, Riffat – an innovative, decisive businesswoman. Like her mother, Dia seems at first sight unrestricted, spirited and resourceful. She seems free. But freedom has its own borders, patrolled by the covetous and the zealous, and there are those who yearn to jump the fence.Daanish has come back to Karachi for his father’s funeral, all the way from America, a land where there are plenty of rules but few restrictions. When Dia and Daanish meet, they chafe against all the formalities. It is left to a handful of silkworms, slipped inside a friend’s dupatta, tickling skin, to rupture the fragile peace of both their houses – to make the space in which Dia and Daanish can create something together…







TRESPASSING

Uzma Aslam Khan























for Dave




‘To look is an act of choice.’

JOHN BERGER




Contents


Cover (#u5bd27f21-2412-501c-a492-7a2303217f88)

Title Page (#u697dae53-2c6a-5a37-9a45-cadb6223c4aa)

PROLOGUE: Death (#u1f38d6cb-8908-5372-8262-cd6b426dde64)

Part One (#u4d69c74f-85b2-57d5-b837-47e427625441)

DIA (#u1d5b0f2e-04ad-5fd2-b1d1-1e6e5db2c71b)

1 Detour MAY 1992 (#u4adb9fa8-1aee-5f6a-be8b-096a559f52b3)

DAANISH (#u1023167a-1056-57f8-a545-3ef8322d29f3)

1 Toward Karachi (#u7fb77bae-14e1-5303-9625-e7b561a8ff65)

2 High Volume OCTOBER 1989 (#ub31dbfaa-a490-53fc-9a00-4c9d91deac9b)

3 Choice January 1990 (#u0d3afce9-79ee-50db-964e-5f7f3ec6f2b6)

4 Toward Anu MAY 1992 (#u4a2ddd82-beb1-5b95-ba7f-682adf2c1ff0)

5 RecessAPRIL 1990 (#u554a9864-24f5-587d-a217-f1d817cb7b1e)

6 ArrivalMAY 1992 (#ub00448a8-e58a-5c38-b498-7119cbc1e051)

7 The Order of Things (#u17f1f854-197b-5801-b2b6-eee5a8a3acc7)

ANU (#u2e4c38c5-2caa-5e3a-830b-2b1c76a317be)

1 Guipure Dreams (#uf73d4584-a010-51dd-bb05-4d769c4b7314)

2 Argonaut (#u88aa14b5-ecc9-523d-b299-33f5c4b6843c)

3 Girls MAY 1992 (#u5f507db6-6a44-5798-99cc-bec27b2aa3db)

4 Shameful Behavior (#uc6413743-eba7-5184-8343-f786cfcc6e42)

DIA (#u407cec3c-e731-50a8-8727-733867f49cf5)

1 More Apologies (#ub1656ee1-7882-54b1-bd4b-0a4239fffd6d)

2 Numbers (#u95ba417b-2a61-59d1-aff0-144d0583b73c)

3 Life at the Farm (#u5ad66b8d-6731-519a-8c1e-4f923e47894e)

4 Choice (#litres_trial_promo)

SALAAMAT (#litres_trial_promo)

1 Sea Space MARCH 1984 (#litres_trial_promo)

2 Look, But With Love APRIL–JUNE 1984 (#litres_trial_promo)

3 The Ajnabi JULY–DECEMBER 1984 (#litres_trial_promo)

4 In the Picture MAY 1985 (#litres_trial_promo)

DAANISH (#litres_trial_promo)

1 The Gag Order SEPTEMBER 1990 (#litres_trial_promo)

2 Revisions JUNE 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)

3 There, of course! (#litres_trial_promo)

4 Every Thirty Seconds JANUARY 1991 (#litres_trial_promo)

5 Khurram’s Counsel JUNE 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)

6 The Rainbow Parade (#litres_trial_promo)

7 The Find (#litres_trial_promo)

DIA (#litres_trial_promo)

1 Metamorphosis (#litres_trial_promo)

2 Not Clear At All (#litres_trial_promo)

3 Inam Gul For Ever (#litres_trial_promo)

4 Examination (#litres_trial_promo)

5 Assembling (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

SALAAMAT (#litres_trial_promo)

1 Here JULY 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)

2 The Bus JUNE 1986–FEBRUARY 1987 (#litres_trial_promo)

3 Blue MARCH 1987 (#litres_trial_promo)

4 The Fire (#litres_trial_promo)

5 Ashes (#litres_trial_promo)

6 Brother and Sister APRIL 1987 (#litres_trial_promo)

7 The Witness (#litres_trial_promo)

ANU (#litres_trial_promo)

1 The Doctor Looking In JULY 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)

2 The Clue (#litres_trial_promo)

3 The Doctor Looking Out (#litres_trial_promo)

DIA (#litres_trial_promo)

1 Turmoil and Bliss (#litres_trial_promo)

2 Rain (#litres_trial_promo)

3 The Blending of the Ways (#litres_trial_promo)

4 Darkness (#litres_trial_promo)

DAANISH (#litres_trial_promo)

1 News AUGUST 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)

2 Ancestry MAY–OCTOBER 1991 (#litres_trial_promo)

3 Rooms AUGUST 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)

4 Thirst (#litres_trial_promo)

5 The Authorities (#litres_trial_promo)

6 Open-ended (#litres_trial_promo)

SALAAMAT (#litres_trial_promo)

1 Schoolboys MAY 1987 (#litres_trial_promo)

2 Discipline JUNE 1987 (#litres_trial_promo)

3 Fate (#litres_trial_promo)

4 The Highway (#litres_trial_promo)

5 Remains AUGUST 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)

6 Fatah’s Law (#litres_trial_promo)

7 A Visitor (#litres_trial_promo)

RIFFAT (#litres_trial_promo)

1 A Usual Day (#litres_trial_promo)

2 Awakening APRIL–MAY 1968 (#litres_trial_promo)

3 Her Job, His Fight JUNE 1968 (#litres_trial_promo)

4 Parting JULY 1968–JULY 1972 (#litres_trial_promo)

5 What Sumbul Says AUGUST 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)

DIA (#litres_trial_promo)

1 Fourth Life (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE Birth (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

also by Uzma Aslam Khan (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




PROLOGUE Death (#ulink_7d821d42-5a1a-573e-9f0a-89490df39285)


The fishing boats dock before the dawn, while the turtle digs her nest. She watches with one eye seaward, the other on the many huts dotting the shore. The nearest is just thirty feet away. She burrows fiercely, kicking up telltale showers of sand, recalling how much safer it had been when the coastline belonged to the fishermen. Now the boats sail in like giant moths, and though she wonders at their catch, it is for the visitors from the city, hidden in their huts, that her brow has creased beyond her age.

She is ready. The first egg plops softly in the hollow beneath her womb, and the rest follow, unstoppable now. The fishing nets glisten in the moonlight with small fry. How long before she dips into the waters again?

A boy, not yet fifteen, lights a K2 and leans back into the ridge of a dune. Long locks tumble over his shoulders and flare in the wind. Between puffs, he kisses the end of the cigarette, so content is he. The turtle watches him watch her when most defenseless. But she knows him; all the turtles do.

Her eggs are smooth and oval, like a naked woman’s shoulders. The boy caresses his cheek, wanting really to caress the eggs, wanting really to caress the shoulders.

His locks billow and his mood is suddenly ruffled by thoughts of his father and uncles, who did not go out tonight. They say the foreign trawlers have stolen their sea. They trespass. Fish once abundant close to shore are now disappearing even in the deep. And the fishermen’s boats cannot go out that far, even for the fish still left to catch. An uncle tried. It was he who was eaten. His family mourns the brave man’s drowning, and his father’s decision to break with tradition. They will move to the city. The boy will go first. But he is afraid, as afraid as the turtle is, of the men in the huts.

He pulls on his cigarette and wonders at the turtle. She meets his gaze with the soothing, crackly wisdom of his grandmother. He shuts his eyes and drifts into soft sleep.

Then he jolts awake: voices. Glancing quickly at the reptile, he sees her still giving birth. But dawn is tinged with foreboding. The shadow of a man stretches upon the dune beside him and creeps forward. The boy ducks. Squinting toward the huts, he sees a woman, naked below the knees, waiting. The intruder walks into view, stumbles and farts. He will not even rob the turtle gently. The boy bristles with anger, wondering what to do. He decides quickly. If the man takes a single egg, he will take the woman.

A shaggy arm crooks toward the nest, and waits, ripe fingers nearly scraping the reptile’s orifice for a gift. The boy dashes. The woman screams. Others emerge from the hut’s interior. The intruder hurtles back. The egg drops safely into the sand a fraction of a second after he is gone.

Their first kick dislodges a knee. Long hair is a hindrance, he thinks, as they use it to drag him over the line of rocks circling the hut’s porch. If I live I’ll never wear it below the chin again. There is salt in his mouth. Salt and gravel. His blood and his teeth. He swoons, but instead of their blows, he hears shells split. Thud! Crack! The men are pelting him with the eggs.

A moan rises from the pit of his groin, up to an empty cavity below his chest, shrugging its way higher, out of his nose, his ears, and mouth. He vomits oyster-white albumen and curdled vitellus, bloodied placenta, and something green. Liver?

Though blind with pain, it is he alone who sees the mound of the mother meandering silently back home.



Part One (#ulink_5e72466e-6b92-54bb-a87e-d64b7e4549df)



DIA (#ulink_9d39347e-7766-592d-ad4b-6d9ac95553ad)




1 Detour MAY 1992 (#ulink_ed6e1775-c14f-5c96-a0cc-1b87999744fb)


Dia sat in the mulberry tree her father had sheltered in the night before his death. A large man, he’d been limber too. Squatting had come easy. The crowd below had included journalists, neighbors and police. They’d asked if it were true: was he getting death threats?

Her father weighed ninety kilos and hunkered like a gentle ape, shuffling about in the foliage, appraising his audience with two small brown eyes that flashed like rockets. Every few minutes, he mustered up enough nerve to shake some berries. When they struck a particularly distasteful newsman or auntie, he slapped a knee with glee. Then he wept unabashedly.

The tree had been planted the day Dia was born. Her father had said the sweet, dainty, purplish-red fruit was like his precious daughter when she slid howling into the world. So when he tossed the berries at the throng, Dia, watching from inside the house, knew he was calling her. But her mother insisted she stay inside.

‘He’s gone mad,’ she whispered, clutching Dia. ‘I shouldn’t have told him.’

Told him what? Dia wondered.

Today, up in the tree, a book of fables pressed heavily in her lap. The weight was partly psychological. She should have been studying. She’d failed an exam and ought to be preparing for the retake. Instead she flipped through the book’s pages, where lay miscellaneous clippings about history and bugs. She found a page ripped from a Gymkhana library book and read it aloud:

‘Silk was discovered in China more than four thousand years ago, purely by accident. For many months Emperor Huang-ti had noticed the mulberry bushes in his luscious garden steadily losing their leaves. His bride, Hsi-Ling-Shih, was asked to investigate. She noticed little insects crawling about the bushes, and found several small, white pellets. Taking a pellet with her to the palace, with nothing but instinct she ventured on the best place to put it: in a tub of boiling water. Almost at once, a mesh of curious fine thread separated itself from the soft ball. The Empress gently pulled the thread. It was half a mile long. She wove it into a royal robe for her husband, the first silk item in history. Since then, sericulture has remained a woman’s job, in particular, an empress’.’

Dia tucked the stolen page back into her book. The best episodes from history were of discovery. She liked to slow the clock at the moment before the Empress thought to drop the cocoon into the water – just before she metamorphosed into a pioneer. What had moved her not to simply crush the little menaces, as most people disposed of pests today? How relaxed and curious her intellect had been, and how liberally she’d been rewarded!

The setting fired Dia’s imagination too. It would be an arbor at the top of a hillock, with plenty of sunlight, a long stone table, basins, and attendants ready with towels and disinfectants. When they’d made a circle around the Empress, Dia commanded the minute hand to shift. The Empress dropped a cocoon into the water.

It shriveled and expelled its last breath: a tangle of filament the Empress hastened to twist around her arm like candy-floss on a stick. The attendants gawked. Their mistress was sweating. The wind was soft. The sun snagged in the strand, a blinding prism growing on the arm of the Empress, as if she spun sunlight. When the sun went down she’d cooked all the cocoons from the imperial garden. Miles of thread hung in coils around both her arms. The attendants dabbed at her brow and helped her down the hill, back to the palace. The Emperor called for her all night. But she couldn’t sleep beside him with arms encased so. The maids burned oil lamps, dias, and she sat up alone, occasionally looking out at the moon and down at the mulberry trees, making a robe for her husband that by morning would reflect the rays of the sun, and by next evening, the moon.

Dia smiled contentedly. Now she’d play What If, and retell the story.

If, for instance, the Empress Hsi-Ling-Shih had suspected how her discovery would shape the destiny of others, would she instead have tossed away the threads, never to speak of them again? If she’d known that a thousand years later, several dozen Persians would pay with their lives for trying to smuggle silkworms out of China, would she have made that robe? If she hadn’t, perhaps one of the many innocent daughters of those murdered men might have one day stood the chance of discovering something else.

Would the Empress have squashed the caterpillars if she’d known what would happen twenty-five hundred years after her find? If so, the Sicilians who’d been trying to make silk from spider webs wouldn’t have kidnapped and tortured their neighbors, the Greek weavers, to elicit their knowledge. Instead, the Greek weavers might have lived to a ripe old age, and one of them would perhaps have borne a great-great-grandchild capable of unraveling … the mystery of Dia’s father’s death?

Or, what if the Empress had seen even further into the future? Seven hundred years after the agony of the Greeks, history repeated itself. Now it was the Bengali and Benarsi weavers who suffered. If she’d known how the British would chop off the nimble thumbs that made a resham so fine it could slip through an ear-hole, perhaps the Empress would have trampled over the maggots. Then the subjugated nation’s exchequer would not have been exhausted importing third-rate British silk.

If all that wouldn’t have stopped her, then would the death of Dia’s father?

Dia stopped the clock and reconstructed the scene.

His mangled body drifted down the Indus, past one coastal village after another. The villagers had seen too much destruction to care about yet another corpse. They stood with sticks pressed into the muddy banks and stared in silence. Finally, after four days, word reached a coroner. Mr Mansoor’s bullet-ridden remains were heaved out of the river like sodden fruit and the village psychic swore that for five hundred rupees she could wring him back to life. She demanded one toenail, a dot of his saliva, another dot of his sweat and one of his seed. At the latter a few onlookers snickered. Dia recognized two reporters from the night her father was up in the tree. She lunged for them, but was gently ushered aside by the cook Inam Gul. But she’d already seen the only part of her father left uncovered: his bloated feet, themselves a blue and branching river. Inam Gul tried to cover her ears but she heard the rumors: his kidneys had been shot through with electric currents, his thumbs snapped, arms sliced, and he’d been made to walk on spikes and broken glass. Because of his weight, the barbed bed had cut through bone.

If four thousand years ago the Empress had never discovered silk, where would Dia be now?

The elders tried to teach her that Fate could be postponed – maybe by a year or several hundred, by his naughty sister Chance – but not altered. How one’s destiny unfurled was not to be second-guessed. Perhaps it would take a longer story, with unexpected players, but eventually, it followed the course that it was meant to take.

Eventually. The timing nagged. Who could tell actual time from postponed time? If all detours lead to a predetermined outcome, it hardly mattered, then, if one was early or late, if a meeting was held today or tomorrow, if a letter was couriered or the stamps pocketed. People talked of how the country was in a state of transition. Soon the dust would settle, and miraculously, the violence in Sindh that had claimed her father, among others, would vanish. But they couldn’t say when, how, or who would bring about the course that was ordained. In fact, they liked to add, come to think of it, the dust hadn’t settled anywhere – even the industrialized West had problems. In fact, it had never settled. What else had history shown? The river always flowed into the sea. Which branch entered first was irrelevant. Leave tomorrow, they advised, in God’s hands.

Only her mother believed otherwise. She said the elders wanted to saturate the world in indifference, to wrap a bandage around it that would hold back all the things that could move the country forward. It was all a ploy to keep things working in their own favor. Take marriage, for instance. They wanted it to remain a union that suited them, not the couple. She told Dia the worst thing she could do was listen to that, and perhaps was the only mother in the country to repeatedly warn her to marry only out of love, not obligation.

* * *

With the book in hand, Dia made her way swiftly down the tree.

The garden exploded with the twittering of tufted bulbuls and squawking mynas. Jamun and fig trees were in bloom. She turned down a path that led to the pergola beyond which her family had taken tea every evening, barring rain. With one brother in London, and the other in love and computers, now only she and her mother were left to keep the tradition.

The thought of visiting the silkworm farm tomorrow lifted Dia’s spirits. The caterpillars had begun spinning their cocoons. Though they were notoriously private when conducting their artistry, in previous years she’d learned an art of her own: stillness. She could freeze even in a room with humidity of over seventy per cent, with sweat dripping from her brows, and binoculars swiftly fogging up. She’d watch tomorrow.

But then Dia remembered a promise to a friend. Opening the kitchen door she stopped in mid-stride and cursed, ‘Damn that Nini! Why am I so nice?’

The cook looked up. He hadn’t covered the chapaatis to keep them warm. Dia scowled, wrapping the bread herself, while the cook pretended not to notice. ‘Why am I so nice?’ she repeated for his benefit.

Inam Gul shook his head in agreement, adding, ‘Mahshallah, you are so very nice.’ He was toothless, benevolent, and instantly forgiven.

‘That stupid Nissrine wants me to accompany her to a Quran Khwani tomorrow. She’s going just to look at the dead man’s son. Says he’s supposed to be good-looking and is studying in America. Can you imagine how shameless she’s become?’

He commiserated, ‘You’re too nice.’ A dribble of yogurt hung on his chin.

‘Wipe your chin or Hassan will get angry – first you let his chapaatis get cold, then you finish all the yogurt.’

The cook licked away the evidence. ‘I had just a teaspoon.’ His arthritic fingers stuck a point in the air, indicating the size of the spoon.

‘That’s the second lie you’ve told today. Since one was for me, I’ll tell one for you too.’

Grinning, he opened the refrigerator and began scooping up the last of the elixir.

Dia continued, ‘I’ll go for exactly one hour. If Nini wants to stay longer, she’s on her own. I can’t believe it! If she has no respect for herself, at least she should respect the dead. What’s she going to do, pick him up, with his father still warm in the grave?’

When the plastic yogurt pouch was empty, the cook chucked it in the wastebasket, hiding it deep among the waste. ‘The dead will be watching.’

‘Maybe you could send her away when she comes to get me. You know, say I’ve got diarrhea or something. She wouldn’t want me embarrassing her by running to the toilet every few minutes.’ The cook enjoyed that. ‘Or maybe I should embarrass her?’ He enjoyed that even more. His fingers caressed the air as he tried to picture it. Dia was inspired. ‘Yes, that’s what I should do. But how? What should I do? Help me think of something to mess up her plan.’

The cook licked his lips and thought seriously for a while. He scratched the white wisps of hair that puffed up around his head like down and hesitated, mumbling again, ‘The dead will be watching.’

‘Tomorrow, I promise, a lot more yogurt,’ Dia urged.

He whispered the scheme in her ear.



DAANISH (#ulink_75a80784-90db-5722-bf25-74d770d3c6f8)




1 Toward Karachi (#ulink_61d4408a-dcf5-5a17-a805-b06fc7645125)


At the time the cook plotted against him, Daanish awoke some thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic. Once sleep receded, he returned to his earlier occupation of churning over the same conundrum as Dia: the passage of time. Neither would ever know they churned simultaneously. He didn’t know her. He could hardly say he knew himself, strung as he was atop a plump canopy of clouds that glittered red and gold, the sinking sun bobbing along beside. Below, hidden from view, tossed the ocean once before traversed, in the opposite direction. That had been three years ago.

Twenty-one hours earlier, he’d been boarding the Peter Pan bus from Amherst to New York City. Liam had seen him off. He’d said, ‘Going home’s jarring enough for me and mine’s just a few hours away.’

Liam was not given to gloom and Daanish wished he’d bid a more reassuring goodbye. ‘You sound like the angel of fucking death.’

This elicited an equine grin. ‘I mean: going home means facing you’ve changed. Listen to yourself. You never swore before coming here.’

‘I did. You just didn’t understand.’ Daanish nudged him fondly and saluted farewell.

‘Write if you can. Don’t be a stranger.’ Liam stepped back as Daanish mounted the bus. ‘And,’ he caught Daanish’s eye, ‘I’m really sorry, man.’

On the ride to Port Authority Liam’s counsel wove in and out of the dogwood branches lining the interstate, the square suburban yards dotted with plastic bunnies and dwarves, the stores with names like Al Bum’s and Pet Smart, the clockwork efficiency with which passengers embarked and disembarked. Don’t be a stranger, said the disheveled porter who shuffled after him on to the frenzy of 42nd Street. Don’t be a stranger, frowned the driver of the taxi Daanish flagged down halfway to Grand Central. Don’t be a stranger, repeated the manhole covers bouncing under the weight of the fastest cars Daanish had ever seen: Mustang, Viper, BMW, Lexus. And when he finally reached his terminal at Kennedy Airport, the rows of angry travelers turned to him and gestured, Don’t be a stranger. The flight is twelve hours delayed!

Khurram, the passenger assigned the seat next to his, returned from the toilet. He reeked of in-flight cologne and other treats. ‘Luckily, not too bad,’ he exclaimed, beaming. He was referring to their prior discussion of whether, nearly seven hours into the flight, the toilets would be tolerable. Normally, within the first hour, they became open gutters in the sky. The toilet vomited chunks of brown, yellow and red, with the flush serving only to chop up the chunks. Reams of toilet paper poured out of the waste disposal and twisted across the cabinets as if the passenger who sat on the toilet seat had suddenly discovered graffiti. Used diapers filled the sink. However, those who braved this torture could always be assured a generous supply of cologne.

‘I think it’s Givenchy,’ Khurram continued happily, patting the fragrance deeper into his round cheeks.

He must have poured an entire bottle on himself, thought Daanish, feeling his chest contract. ‘You mean you think it was Givenchy.’

In the aisle seat sat Khurram’s small, self-contained mother, with feet neatly tucked under her kurta. The son, easily twice her girth, leaned across Daanish and pointed at the sun bleeding scarlet over the world. ‘So beautiful,’ he shook his head approvingly. ‘You getting best view.’

Was this a hint? Should he offer to swap? And be wedged between a bursting rumen and piercing female eyes? Not a chance. He looked out the window and said, ‘Somewhere in the world, the sun is just waking up.’

Khurram leaned further and raised a hand as if to exclaim, Wah! Just imagine!

Daanish was thinking that there were some people who rode the subway all day simply because they had nowhere to get off. He was beginning to enjoy the length of his journey. He was afraid of landing.

Had his father ever felt this way on one of his numerous voyages around the world? Had he dreaded returning to his wife and son? Did travel do that? Daanish couldn’t say. He’d become a traveler only three years ago and then been grounded: classes, work-study, papers, girlfriends. Now he was jolted again. In eleven hours, he could have all that he’d left behind. No, not all. Not his father.

Down in Karachi, at this moment, was the Qul. Perhaps his father’s spirit dwelled among the scarlet clouds, and would drift through this very plane. The inch-long plane bang in the middle of the Atlantic floating in the screen of the satellite monitor. Daanish was inside it too. He could wave to himself. He did.

Khurram looked up and grinned genially. He was happily consumed by a slew of fancy gadgets purchased in the land left behind: a discman, hand-held Nintendo, mobile phone, talking calculator. He warmly demonstrated the marvels of each invention. The talking calculator in particular amused him, so Daanish punched numbers and a deep voice announced them legato for all those too moronic to know any better: one-thou-sand-nine-hun-dred-and-nine-ty-two mi-nus one-thou-sand-nine-hun-dred-and-eigh-ty-nine e-quals three.

‘Well,’ smiled Daanish, ‘I’m glad someone else can verify how many years I’ve been away.’

He was offered the discman and pocket disc album. Most of the CDs were country, a few pop, and one rap. He pictured Khurram first in cowboy gear, then gyrating with Madonna, then dissing mother-fuckers. He laughed. Don’t be a stranger. Well, Khurram in costume was no stranger than American yuppies chanting Hare Krishna, or smacking the sitar like a percussion instrument. No stranger than Becky inviting him to a party because he made her look ethnic. ‘My friends think it’s about time an exotic face entered our circle,’ she’d casually explained. No stranger than Heather and her girlfriends dancing around corn crops to beckon the earth-god, ‘just like the American Indians did’. She was an atheist, she equated his religion with fanaticism, she could not explain the origins of the name of her home state, Massachusetts, but she really understood those Indians.

‘Your choice?’ he enquired of the Ice-T record.

‘Oh no, my niece’s. She said it is very good and I would like.’ As a second thought, he added, ‘My mother and I were visiting Bhai Jaan in Amreeka. He has a business. Very successful.’

‘What business?’ asked Daanish. But Khurram, lost in his toys, didn’t answer.

The satellite monitor showed Daanish in a bean-pod gliding over the Bay of Biscay. He looked out the window but it was too dark so his full-grown self had to believe the miniature self.

His father had flown over this very shore nine years ago, to attend a medical conference in Nantes, France. He’d spent his last hour there doing what he always did on a visit to any coast: combing the beach for Daanish’s shell-collection. He’d not found much: a few painted tops, limpets and winkles. The real treasures came later, on his trips to the warmer Pacific. Some of those beauties were strung around Daanish’s neck. He twirled them in a habitual gesture Nancy likened to a woman playing with her hair. The larger shells he’d left in Karachi. In about ten more hours, he could see them again. This filled him with more joy than the prospect of uniting with anything else at home, even Anu. Then it terrified him. He’d hold his shells in a house that no longer held his father and where he’d hold his mother for the first time since she’d become a widow. He feared she’d cling.

He tugged at the necklace. Khurram’s mother, with a face as crumpled as a used paper bag, leaned across Khurram exclaiming that the shells made beautiful music. Daanish unclasped the necklace and offered it for her inspection. The woman’s thin, serrated lips sucked and pouted while she fingered the shells as if they were prayer beads.

When she paused at a tusk-like one Daanish told her a story about a diver who’d been paralyzed by the sting of a glory-of-the-seas cone, shaped just like the orange cone she was rubbing. Seventy feet beneath the surface of the sea, he’d hovered in total darkness, knowing he could never kick his way back up to life. When the body was found the oxygen tank was completely empty. Daanish tried to imagine the terror of hanging in a frigid dark sea without air. As if watching myself diminish, he thought. As if the dying could actually see their fate: it could shrink into a two-inch cone in their hands. He shuddered, wondering what his father had seen in his last hour.

The woman was nodding sagely. Her fingers wrapped around each piece, the grooves of her flesh searching new grooves to slide along.

He offered her names. ‘That one that looks cracked my father found in Japan. It’s a slit shell. Those two dainty pink ones are precious wentletraps. They used to be so rare the Chinese would make counterfeits from rice paste and sell them for a fortune. But now the counterfeits have become rare.’ Daanish had been given both the real and the false. He asked the woman to tell them apart.

She smiled but wouldn’t play along. Daanish’s names and histories mattered little to her. It was enough that the shells felt good and made beautiful music. After rubbing each one, she returned the necklace and abruptly asked, ‘What do you do in Amreeka?’

‘I study.’

‘Are you going to be a doctor or engineer?’

‘Um. I don’t know.’

Her shrewd eyes darted across his face. Then she turned away, back to her silent place. Occasionally, she looked around the plane and boldly examined the others as if chairing a secret inquisition.

It would have served no purpose telling her he wanted to be a journalist. She’d question the profitability of his choice. He’d been questioning this himself. Like Pakistan, the US was not the place to study fair and free reporting. In the former, he risked having his bones broken. In the latter, his spirit.

But journalism intrigued him for the opposite reason his other passion, shell-collecting, did. One kept him in tune with his surroundings while the other demanded dissonance. One was beautiful on the outside while the other insisted he probe into the poisonous interior, like a diver. He’d tried to explain this to a father who’d grown increasingly unhappy with the choice. In one of their last discussions, Daanish retorted that the profession was in his blood.

His soft-spoken, introverted grandfather had been the co-founder of one of the first Muslim newspapers in India. The paper had played a major role in advocating the cause of the Pakistan Movement, and been praised by the Quaid-i-Azam himself. Daanish was taught early that in British India, when it came to the written word, Muslims lagged far behind the Hindus and other communities. Prior to the 1930s, they didn’t own even one daily newspaper. His grandfather had helped establish the first. As its maxim, it quoted a member of the All-India Muslim League: To fight political battles without a newspaper is like going to war without weapons. The paper sharpened its weapons. The British responded by banning it, imprisoning Daanish’s grandfather, and leaving the rest to the Muslims themselves: the co-founder was shot dead by a fellow-Muslim in his office.

After Pakistan’s birth, his grandfather was released and the family moved to the new homeland. But ten years later, for reproaching the country’s first military coup, he was again imprisoned.

Decades later, in his last letter to him, Daanish’s father wrote, ‘Do you want to throw away the opportunity to educate yourself in the West by returning to the poverty of my roots? You will fight Americans, only to find you also have to fight your own people. This is not what your grandfather languished in jail for. He once warned me, “Only the blind replay history.” Think.’

Daanish hadn’t answered him. He hadn’t explained that when it came to a Muslim press, it wasn’t just the subcontinent that was impoverished. He had only to dig into the reporting on the Gulf War to know it was won with weapons that exploded not just on land but on paper. Yet few fought back.

Next to him, Khurram snored. His Nintendo showed a score of 312. The discman was turned off. Daanish considered borrowing it, maybe listening to Ice-T. Freedom of Speech … Just Watch What You Say. When he’d first heard those words he knew they must reach Professor Wayne. So he included them in a term paper. Wayne slashed out the citation in thick red lines and added no pop references. Daanish argued that the coverage on the war was at least as pop as a rap song. Later, foolishly, he wrote about it to his father. The doctor advised him to change to medicine or risk a life of regret.

They were entering Germany, journeying through a tunnel of shifting darkness, now black, now thin sepia. Frankfurt in twenty minutes. The ladies and gentlemen of the bean-pod were requested to kindly fasten their seatbelts and extinguish cigarettes.

‘We’re landing,’ Daanish’s companion awoke and beamed.

‘Sleep well?’ asked Daanish.

‘Oh yes, I always do.’

The bean-pod slanted downward. Daanish’s stomach lurched. The lights of Frankfurt danced outside his window. Mini-wheels grazed the runway. Lilliputian engines slowed, and then there was another announcement. Only those ladies and gentlemen holding American, Canadian, or European passports could disembark for the duration of the stopover. Those naughty others might escape, so they must stay on board.

For the first time during the flight, Khurram appeared crestfallen. He was not naughty, wouldn’t they believe him? No, explained Daanish. Khurram’s mother looked away. She needed no explaining.

And then the bean-pod did a funny thing. It swung to face the direction from which it had just come. It nosed upward. It increased altitude. It sped back across the Atlantic at such speed the hair of the naughty passengers blew this way and that. The sky turned from sepia to gold. The sun bobbed alongside again. On arrival, the passengers brushed their hair into place, collected bags, and stumbled out on to a sunny college campus. Daanish consulted his watch: 4.35. He was late for work.




2 High Volume OCTOBER 1989 (#ulink_1e4a6436-6ec6-58a2-beb3-fe0d395d5f37)


‘You’re late,’ barked Kurt, manager of Fully Food. He had a football-shaped head on a boxer’s body gone soft, like Lee J. Cobb in Twelve Angry Men. To him his workers were Fully Fools.

‘Hey Kurt,’ Daanish muttered. ‘I got held up.’ He swiftly brushed by before Kurt could get started. ‘Held up? This is a high-volume job.’

Daanish hung up his jacket, bound the knee-length apron, adjusted his cap, and entered the dish room. The kitchen reeked of sweat, bleach, stale greens, ranch dressing thrown in vinaigrette, cheese dumped in orange juice. Wang from China and Nancy from Puerto Rico said hi when he took his place at the sink but no one else bothered.

He started hosing down a copper pot that reached halfway down his thighs. Particles of ravioli sprayed his eyes and lips. The fare tonight was pasta and meatballs, mince pie, mashed potatoes and gravy, pan pizza, and the usual salad bar. Daanish learned each day’s menu not to prep his palate but to prep his muscles and olfactory nerves. Starch and gravy were the meanest to clean. The crust of that pan pizza would be a bitch. He chuckled at how readily he’d picked up such phrases, though barely two months had passed since his arrival. Turning off the hose, he started scraping off the glutinous residue of Reddi-Mash from the pot’s interior with a knife. The smell made his stomach weep. He’d skip dinner again.

His mind replayed the day’s events: woke at seven after a bad night (his roommate came home drunk at three in the morning again, and with his usual timely expertise, proceeded to vomit once inside the door); breakfast (tea and an English muffin) alone as usual; Wayne’s class at nine; bio at eleven; lab at two. After work he’d go for a swim and march straight to Becky’s. His family kept calling to ask, ‘So, how is it?’ What did they expect? What did he expect?

Nancy passed behind him with a stack of plates. She nearly slipped on the sodden floor but caught herself in time. ‘Pendejo,’ she hissed. Then to Daanish, ‘Better wear those rubber gloves, pretty boy, or your woman won’t have you.’

He gave her a mischievous grin. ‘She will.’ Still, he briefly examined his bare hands. Steam and bleach were turning them to flakes of goose meat. Nancy slapped the gloves beside him. He slipped them on.

When the student diners finished their meal they piled the trays on a conveyor belt that rolled inside to Wang and Youssef. Wang, square-framed and sticky, emptied the contents of each plate into a massive trash can, whipping thick colors inside it. Youssef, a sleek Senegalese, scoured the silverware and glasses. Nancy piled the plates and carried them to Amrita from Nepal, who soaped and rinsed them. Ron, an African-American, loaded dollies. Vlade, Romanian, did too.

Daanish hadn’t told Anu that his scholarship entailed spending twenty-five hours a week under Kurt. Let her think he was asked to do nothing but bend over books, to become a man of letters. Why confess he bent over sinks, scouring away letters – of alphabet soup? In Karachi, he’d only entered the kitchen to be fed. Becky teased that mommy spoiled him. She could talk. She sat outside in the dining hall, worrying about her waistline while daddy paid the bills.

Once, over the phone, Daanish had told his father about the job. The doctor had little to say. He’d given him advice once and only once on the drive to the Karachi airport, when seeing Daanish off. His warm smoker’s voice asked his son to remember it. Then he added, ‘Hold your head up high. Life is yours to build. One day you’ll look back and laugh at the spaghetti in your hair.’

Daanish battled with the pizza tin. His back was to the others but he heard Ron swear. Turning, he saw Youssef struggle with several glasses drenched in blue cheese dressing dribbled generously with strawberry sauce and strewn with granola. In one of the glasses a napkin shaped like a wafer carried a message from the other side of the belt: Eat me.

‘Sick mother-fuckers,’ said Ron, sealing the trash and slinging it over his shoulder.

Kurt hovered over Amrita, his favorite prey. She was slow with the washing, especially when attempting not to be, but never missed a crumb. Kurt rested knobby knuckles on his hips and thundered: ‘How did I get this far? By working. You think everybody gets the chance to work, Anna? You know how many people bang on our doors begging for this? This is a high-volume job. You’re lucky to have it.’

She bit her lip and dropped a plate.

‘Would you believe it!’ He threw his hands up. Amrita gathered the broken pieces but instead of disposing of them in the bin reserved for shattered ware, she quickly thrust them in the recycle bin. ‘Would you believe it!’ he repeated. ‘Is it any wonder they call it the developing world?’ He followed her from the wrong bin to the right one, insisting the first hadn’t been cleaned out properly. Then he trailed her back to the dishes. ‘A high-volume job, Anita,’ he continued. ‘How do you think we built this country?’

Ron stopped wheeling a dolly of Mayo-Whip and glowered. Nancy gave Daanish a look that said: Kill Kurt and I’ll love you for ever. Everyone else merely chugged along. Like machines, thought Daanish, wanting badly to touch Nancy.

Kurt continued, ‘We didn’t do it by standing around, that’s for sure. You can keep hoping the work will go away the way they do back where you come from, but it’ll only pile up.’

When he finally left the dish room, Nancy said to Amrita: ‘Don’t worry girl, he couldn’t find his dick with two hands and a map.’

Daanish wanted to console her too but didn’t know how. Instead, when Vlade wheeled silently by, he was suddenly reminded of bullock carts on the streets of Karachi. The soulful Masood Rana resounded in his ear: Tanga walla khair mang da. The cart-driver asks for contentment.

At 9.45 he removed his Fully Food gear, picked up his jacket and stepped out into the crisp mid-October air. He ought to go home, shower, and work on a paper. Instead, he walked up the hill to Becky Floe’s house.

They’d met just over a month ago at the gym. He was lurching out of the swimming pool and on to the sopping tiles when he saw her lime-colored swimsuit and tadpole-like toes inches from his chest. The nails were painted pink to match her freckled flesh. She was broad, heavy-bosomed, about five foot six, and proclaimed: ‘You’re so graceful, Day-nish.’ His chlorine-blazed eyes blinked. He’d never seen her before, but she even knew his name. He’d forgive her inability to say it. For the first time in his life, he’d been sought.

She held his hand as he walked her home. The weather had become suddenly warm – Indian Summer she called it. Her potato-colored hair dripped onto an aquamarine T-shirt that read Choice. He wondered if that was the name of a band.

She wanted to know all about where he was from. Was it just like India? He wasn’t sure why she needed this reference because she’d never been there either. She’d left her country just once, last year, for a month in Mexico. When he described his food she said it sounded, ‘Just like in Mexico.’ So did the climate, the traffic and beggars. The people, the passion, the politics. The music, corruption and drugs. That month, she explained, had been priceless. It made her understand all that was authentic.

‘So, did you grow up in, like, a palace or something?’

‘Oh no,’ he laughed, ‘my father’s a doctor.’

She eyed him quizzically, as if unable to believe the Third World had doctors. The look quickly turned to disbelief when their conversation progressed to his job at Fully Food. ‘You’re a doctor’s son but you need financial aid?’ In the sunlight, her unshaven legs changed from blonde to strawberry.

‘Well, yes.’ Realizing she wouldn’t be convinced till he quoted figures, he clarified, ‘In Pakistan, on average a physician earns about ten dollars an hour. While this is extremely high compared to the national average, it’s not enough to send a child to America on, is it?’ In the following years he would come to repeat these figures numerous times. He’d say, with far more exasperation than the first time, ‘Not everyone who’s brown or black is either dirt poor or filthy rich. There are in-betweens.’

Becky continued to look uncertain. Then she kissed him lightly on the cheek and sent him back down the hill.

He’d never expected to be pursued by an American woman. Walking to his room he wondered if he had been, might have been, would be again, or should he forget it?

Two days later, she invited him into her room. It was littered with books like The Woman Warrior, Sexuality and American Literature, and Intercourse.

While she talked, he kept wondering if this was a date. If so, what should he be doing? All his previous encounters with women had been hasty squeezes in Karachi, inside jammed cars while a designated watchman kept an eye out for the police, who had a radar for unmarried couples. So his interactions with women were feverish and clumsy. He’d never talked to a single one he’d kissed and barely even seen what he’d touched.

Becky abruptly ended her chatter and said, ‘You know, you dream too much. You’ve got to take hold of your life, grab it by the neck and let it know who’s boss. They haven’t learned that in Mexico.’

He didn’t doubt that she’d grabbed her life by the neck. And he did concede that back at home, daydreaming was a favorite pastime. ‘It can be soothing. Life takes its course, and you become a spectator. Sometimes you really have no other choice.’

‘You always have a choice.’ She began stomping noisily about the room, doing he wasn’t sure what. Today she wore a pink T-shirt that said Take Action. Her hair was wet again, from swimming. It dripped on to her shirt so the top halves of the letters were darker, as if taking action. She started drying her hair. ‘You have a choice about every step you take, and if you’re ever doubtful, you should choose to do something about it.’ The hair dryer droned as she waved it about.

‘Sometimes,’ he shouted over the dryer, ‘you’re faced with obstacles that are bigger than you. When there’s no electricity and you can’t turn on the water pump, and it’s a hundred and ten degrees, what choice have you but to sit and let the sweat pour off?’

Grrr, went the dryer, woosh, wap, ee. She appeared not to have heard. In an instant, she was done with drying and shining a mirror.

In their ensuing encounters, Daanish never saw Becky idle. Even while peeing, she crammed her senses with the numerous glossy hair and make-up magazines stacked under her toilet sink. He found the collection odd for a Women’s Studies major, remarking also that it was not displayed with the books on feminism. But he thought it wise to keep these observations to himself. In general, he let her talk, waiting eagerly for the day their kisses would culminate in more. He was nineteen. These days especially, his virginity was making him feel ninety.

Perhaps it would happen today.

He knocked on her door. He could hear furniture screech. She shouted, ‘Who’s it?’

Daanish tried hard to infuse desirability into one small word: ‘Me!’

Nothing for several seconds. Then at last: ‘Can you come back?’




3 Choice January 1990 (#ulink_b41ddf74-968d-50dc-bd4c-f71743025b2a)


Back meant more than two months later, for the New Year’s party where she wanted to appear with someone ethnic. But when college resumed, Becky never opened the door again. So two weeks into Winter Term, he crawled into another.

It was 4.30 in the afternoon, twilight, when he trudged up the hill again, this time to Penny’s dorm. Temperatures had plummeted to sub-zero. Daanish had never known such cold. His winter boots had cost him nearly all his savings from the first term, and he grew anxious. Would the glue dry? The stitching tear? Leather thin? Shoes were notoriously short-lived in Karachi. Here they seemed to wear well. This cheered him, even though he couldn’t stop shivering, despite the thermal vest and leggings, the doctor’s black turtleneck from his London years, two wool sweaters and a down jacket. The jacket he’d purchased only yesterday with the birthday check his parents had sent. He pulled it closer to his chin and felt their presence.

He stepped where the snow was solid, not merely to save his shoes from leather-munching slush-demons, but also for the sound of snow crunching under his boots. Good, sturdy boots. Around him, icicles hung off branches, changing to russet gold in the setting sun. Two crystals suddenly rose upward and grew in size. One sported a handsome cap. They flew into a large dogwood that slouched over the gym where he and Becky had first met, and began to whistle.

It was the high-pitched call that made him realize he’d been looking at a pair of cardinals, and not a flurry of possessed hail. The birds considered him, breasts forward, the male’s crest erect, the female singing again. Daanish paused. His father would have enjoyed this – the frost, the birdcall in the starkness. Back at home, he was probably in his study, smoking Dunhills. Daanish sank lower into the doctor’s woolens. Beneath all the layers, a string of seashells pressed into his flesh.

He’d skipped lunch again – it was hard for him to eat at Fully Food even on his days off. His stomach rumbled. If he’d had an extra five dollars, he’d have walked straight into town and ordered one of those delectable melts he’d seen his roommate eat.

Passing the house where Becky lived, he casually glanced in its direction, hoping she’d see him walking to another building. It was on one of his many hikes up to Becky’s that he’d bumped into Penny last fall. She was, in her own words, a poetess, dancer, and nurturer. Not as trim as Becky but in her own way, just as spry, and though she too favored authenticity, it was secondary to circularity. Actually, she clarified, authentic was the offspring of circular. Or was it the other way around? It didn’t really matter, since it all came back to The Beginning. She liked her own explanation so well it became a poem. In fact, it always had been a poem, she was just the medium. Like Becky, she too believed in taking action, but, she cautioned, always listen to your body first.

Fine advice, Daanish had mused several weeks ago, when she led him to a forest of birch and maple, stripped from the waist down, and jumped into a pile of golden leaves. At last! He undressed, nearly screamed when the chill hit him, and rushed in after her. They rolled on the thick mattress of fallen leaves, Daanish trembling and ecstatic. But why was it taking so long to find her?

‘You’re a virgin!’ she giggled as he plunged into her belly for the fifth time. He thrust up her Amazonian thighs, poked the crack of her buttocks, and went full circle (just as Penny knew one always went), back to her belly. She was both irritated and amused, and at last said, ‘We’ve got to stop. This is beginning to hurt.’

He was mortified. She sat up, fingered his penis till it grew stiff again, and encouraged him to listen to his body.

‘What does it say?’ she whispered.

His eyes nearly fell out of their sockets. What do you think it says? he wanted to shout, the color in his cheeks horribly like the sanguine leaves beneath them. He was harder than the trees smirking around him, and began to despair. He was going to climax in her hand.

‘Let it happen,’ she encouraged. ‘Don’t hold back.’ She prepared to lie down with him again but it was too late. His semen sprayed her knees. The forest shook with mirth, dropping yet more leaves.

The color rose again to his cheeks as he trudged up the hill, remembering that day. Disturbingly vivid about it all was the sound of their bodies on the mattress of leaves. It was not like crushing paper, nor like rubbing two starched shirts. Not quite like a voile dupatta trailing on grass, but maybe closer to a child’s rattle or iron shavings sliding at the bottom of a can. It was a sound that lowered Daanish to the sinking depths of shame. Every walk he took that fall brought the memory back stronger, and when a chipmunk bounced or bird hopped in the blanket of leaves that covered the campus, he heard the chorus of the laughing trees.

Fortunately, snow covered the campus now. And Penny had very kindly decided to downplay the event – thank God it hadn’t been Becky. He was successful at last in the early morning after their first night together. Perhaps he’d been too sleepy to panic, and had instead, as Penny advised, listened to his body.

She was waiting for him in a flowing pastel skirt and coarse purple sweater. Her thick legs were wrapped in mauve tights. She warmed his lips with her own. Her room smelled of lilacs and cooked fruit, a result of the candles burning on the windowsill. On the bed and loveseat were piles of pillows. The ceiling was covered in a deep purple sheet on which she’d drawn her galaxy: crescent and circular moons, and stars. In a corner sat a covered dish. Daanish eyed it hungrily. She lifted the cloth: cheesecake with two pencil candles.

‘I’m starving,’ he drooled.

‘How long are you going to reject dorm food?’

‘As long as the sight of it makes me puke.’

‘Then you have to come up with something else, Day-nish you poor thing, or you’ll get sick.’ She kissed his nose and lit the candles. ‘Happy Birthday!’

‘Thanks, Penny.’ He blew the candles out and waited impatiently for a slice of cake. He wolfed in silence, suddenly depressed. She was the only one in this college of three thousand who knew he turned twenty today. She ruffled his hair while he ate. She was giving, kind, and yet he could think of nothing at all to say to her. He sat on Penny’s bed, under Penny’s galaxy, in Penny’s candlelight. If she snuffed it all out, where would he go?




4 Toward Anu MAY 1992 (#ulink_c3401dd0-7dbb-5dd3-9b16-dbefe0219771)


Daanish sat down with a thump. He’d made it back to his seat just as the Fasten Your Seat Belt sign lit up. The water acquired from a pleasant stewardess for himself and Khurram spilled over them both. But as usual, his companion was delighted. His eyes danced, ‘Now we are having fun.’ Though water had fallen on her too, in the aisle seat Khurram’s mother stayed rolled up in a deep sleep.

Khurram said, ‘You don’t talk very much. You are like my mother, but not my father. I got his tongue. And when he jabbered on, she did just that.’ He pointed to the blanketed bundle. Only a shriveled nose and closed eyelids poked out. He slapped his chubby, Levi’d thighs and laughed heartily. ‘Now I am insisting you tell me what is going on in your brilliant mind. I know you are like my brother in Amreeka. Always thinking. Never enjoying life. One day you will be so successful, and by the grace of Allah, support your jolly younger brother!’

Daanish laughed. ‘I have no brothers.’

‘Ah! That is first thing you are telling me.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It is taking fourteen hours.’

‘I’m glad I’m not the only one keeping meticulous track of the time.’

Khurram rubbed his hands. ‘No brothers? Your poor parents. Sisters?’

‘No. Only cousins. And too many.’

He swiveled around to better face Daanish, and his stomach torqued under the seatbelt. ‘How can you say that? There can never be too many.’

Daanish didn’t have the heart to tell him that as of three days ago, he didn’t even have a father.

The ride was markedly smoother now, and the seatbelt sign switched off. Khurram returned to Nintendo. After a while he said, ‘We’ll be in Lahore soon. Then Karachi, at last. Who is to picking you up?’

My father, thought Daanish, his absence hitting him.

They touched Karachi four hours later.

‘We’re here!’ Khurram unfastened his seatbelt. There was a bustle of activity: bangles ringing, babies screaming, the overhead storage compartments snapping open and banging shut, briefcases and shopping bags bludgeoning bottoms. Passengers were preparing to dismount before the plane had even halted. The withered voice of a stewardess asked them not to, but then she and the crackling radio together gave up.

Finally the door opened and Daanish followed the others down to the runway. The sky was a light gray haze and the leaden heat immediately stifling. Not a star shone through. He adjusted his watch to local time: 3.30 a.m.

‘The car is waiting,’ said Khurram, when they’d made it through the tangle of immigration, baggage and customs.

‘Which car? I haven’t seen my family yet.’

‘Oh ho, don’t you remember? You are the forgetful type! How did you manage alone in Amreeka for three years?’

‘Khurram, it’s been great, but I should stay where my chacha can see me.’

‘You really don’t remember calling from my mobile when we landed in Lahore? Are you sick?’ They were wheeling two carts each, though only one suitcase was Daanish’s.

Daanish frowned, ‘Remember what?’

‘Arre paagal,’ Khurram’s cart tipped. He wrestled with a suitcase bursting at the seams. The lights were too dim to know if anything was lost, so he pawed around the gravel. ‘I told you your house is so close to mine, and since we have a driver, what is the point of disturbing your poor chacha? The flight is delaying already. We called him, and even talking to your mother. Everyone finally agreed. Nobody likes driving alone in the middle of the night these days. Kooch to yaad ho ga?’ Khurram’s old mother zipped ahead with purpose. All those leg curls on the plane seemed to have rejuvenated her thoroughly.

Daanish was speechless. He had absolutely no recollection of the phone call. He wanted to know if he’d spoken to Anu or if Khurram had, and how she’d sounded. But he couldn’t shock Khurram any further. He followed him, feeling suddenly that he was the bumbling child and Khurram the adult.

The parking lot was strewn with men idly wandering about and yawning. The drawstrings of their shalwars dangled like goat-tails. They smoked, hawked, and watched families re-unite. Two little children ran up to Khurram and boldly squeezed his midriff. ‘Khurram Bhai! Khurram Bhai!’ they squealed. The girl had stick-like legs that skipped under a golden dress, while arms bedecked in bangles and fingers finely tipped in magenta nail polish waved excitedly. The boy climbed into Khurram’s arms and was attaching a balloon to one fat ear, when all at once there appeared half a dozen others. Each began vying for Khurram while his mother, with whom he’d barely conversed during the entire flight, zealously orchestrated the grabbing and pinching.

Daanish stood apart, eyeing the baggage, wondering how they’d all fit into one car – or were there several? His attention was suddenly caught by another man obviously affiliated with the party, but like himself, not quite a part of it. He was a striking presence: dark, with cheekbones women would extract teeth for; coal-black, oiled ringlets that brushed a prominent chin; eyes an odd, bluish opal; soldierly stature; shoulders straight and solid, with curves decipherable enough through a thin kameez in the dim light. He seemed aware of cutting an impressive figure and turned his head, allowing Daanish a view of his haughty, chiseled profile. Daanish raised an amused brow.

The cluster began to move. Daanish followed. Khurram introduced him to the others. The men and children hugged and kissed him too, the boy offering to tie his ear to another one of his balloons. The handsome man pulled Khurram’s cart. Daanish decided he was the driver.

‘We are dropping him first,’ Khurram pointed to Daanish. ‘He lives on our street.’

‘Is that so?’ an uncle smiled while the others nodded amiably.

‘Yes,’ Daanish replied. ‘Thanks for squeezing me in.’

Khurram was now the star of the show and Daanish swore he’d even begun to look different. Gone was the chubby boy with toys. He walked erect, thrusting his belly forward like a beacon. He described with great authority his knightly escapades at supermarkets where he could, blindfolded, name every variety of cheese-spread and crackers just by taste. He spoke of bank machines that spit money by touching buttons impossibly convoluted. And all the while, he punctuated his stories with orders to the driver – ‘Be careful with that suitcase, it has tins.’

There was only one car, a metallic-green Honda Civic. ‘Where’s mine?’ Khurram demanded of the driver.

‘Your brother-in-law took the Land Cruiser today,’ explained an uncle.

While Khurram cursed the missing relative, the driver began loading the trunk. Khurram sat in front with a child on each knee and two duffel bags at his feet. The others piled at the back with the remaining luggage. When the handbrake was down, an aunt put a bag on top of it.

The balloon hovering above Khurram burst with a bang and the boy started howling. The little girl clapped her lady-like hands. ‘Cry-baby!’

‘Come to me,’ said the boy’s mother, admonishing the girl. Everyone shifted and craned while the boy attempted to soar like Superman to the back. For this cleverness he was awarded with ching-um and forecasts of future prowess. He settled happily in his mother’s lap, his head propped against a bag his father held. The bag slowly drifted into Daanish, already balancing three others, and with a spine being rhythmically sawed by the doorjamb. The little girl wondered if she’d been dealt the short shrift and began to weep. She was promptly told to be quiet.

They were on Drigh Road. A thin light pierced the haze and the sky turned smoky purple. To the south, Daanish could see service lanes ripped out. He’d heard about this. It was part of the Prime Minister’s development scheme: yellow taxis, a new highway, and a computerized telephone system with seven digits instead of six. But the new lines hadn’t been implemented. The roads lay clawed and abandoned like old meat. Once the city awoke, pedestrians would scoop the dirt in their shoes and kick it into the sooty air, to resettle on the next passer-by.

When he’d lived here, he’d rarely been one of those pedestrians. Karachiites walked out of necessity, not for pleasure. Till now, he’d simply accepted this. Beauty and hygiene were to be locked indoors, adding to their value. No one bothered with public space. As if to illustrate, the little boy, tired of the ching-um wrapper, bounced over the bags on Daanish, unrolled the window and tossed the paper out. He then proceeded to empty his pockets on to the street – more wrappers, a Chili Chips packet, and fistfuls of pencil shavings.

No one noticed. The family was filling in the absentees about local events. Since the start of the year, more than three thousand kidnappings were reported and now at least as many Rangers prowled the city. ‘They stop anyone,’ said the mother to whom the boy, now bored with littering, had returned. ‘Shireen told me they were blocked by these horrible Ranger men, but her driver very cleverly kept driving. Anything could have happened.’ She shook her head.

‘Never stop for them,’ agreed her husband.

‘There’s been a curfew in Nazimabad,’ she added.

Another man piped, ‘Dacoits are now attacking everyone. Not just the rich. Just this month they raided a fishermen’s village. I can’t imagine what they took, there are hardly even any fish left!’

‘Oof,’ said a young woman, ‘the price of fish! Don’t even talk about it.’ She promptly gave Khurram’s mother minute details of the quality, size and price of the seafood in the market. The other woman interrupted with her own wisdom.

Amongst the men, another discussion was rapidly rising in crescendo. Khurram was declaring, ‘This street is the longest in Karachi and that is a fact.’ Daanish wasn’t sure how they went from Rangers to road lengths, but he was once more struck by Khurram’s newfound confidence. Even his speech was clearer.

Suddenly, just about every street in Karachi became the longest. ‘No,’ said one man. ‘It is M.A. Jinnah Road.’

Another shook his head, ‘Abdullah Haroon Road – the longest in all of Pakistan.’

‘Nishtar Road,’ said the first, suddenly changing his mind.

‘How long?’ challenged Khurram. ‘Give me facts.’

‘Oh what does it matter how long? As long as Karachi!’

The discussion would take place altogether differently in the States, thought Daanish. There, first a printed page had to be found. This established objectivity. Then an opponent located another printed page defending his position. The result was that debates took place only in writing, while in person, people seldom argued. As the written debate was limited by the availability of material, more original points of view were less likely to be favored. He learned this the hard way, in Wayne’s class.

Here people frequently argued with each other; usually everyone spoke at the same time, and hardly anyone could sustain interest in the debate for very long. The men had ceased disputing the status of the road’s length. Conversation progressed to its original name – was it Shara-e-Faisal or Nursery Road? Khurram insisted it had always been Airport Road while another swore on Highway Road. Then it changed to the distance from one point to another, the time it took to reach one point from another, the likelihood of traffic between the points, the time of day traffic was heaviest, the importance of the time of day in gauging the traffic, the overall increase in traffic, the necessity of cars, the necessity of two cars, and the overall decrease in time, especially time to spend with your friends and family doing just this: chit-chatting. They laughed heartily, agreeing on basically one thing, that the purpose of the match was not to win or lose but to exchange the maximum number of words, for words carried sentiments like messenger doves.

Daanish’s mind wandered no less than the talk around him, only his had a center: his father.

When the doctor had driven him down this stretch three years ago, he’d spoken of himself as a youth newly returned from England, newly titled a doctor. He’d pointed to the dense smog choking the city and frowned. ‘It was a different country then. Barely twenty years old – roughly your age. Cleaner, and full of promise. Then we got ourselves into a war and were cut in half. What have we done?’

Daanish had felt bleak currents swirling around them, and wished the doctor would offer a more savory parting speech. Suddenly, he’d stretched his arm and patted Daanish’s knee. ‘But it’s reassuring to know that you will be a finer mold of me. You will go away and learn how to come back better than I did.’

Daanish shuddered. It was not how he wanted to remember him. He preferred the way his father had been at the cove. Daanish held the picture an instant, and then willed himself there.

The cove was a deliciously isolated respite several kilometers outside the city. Though silt and human waste had destroyed most reefs off Karachi’s shore, just around the bend of the inlet was a small forest of coral where the doctor took Daanish snorkeling.

The first shell Daanish ever came to know was a purple sea snail. It was a one-inch drifter, floating on the surface of the sea, traveling more extensively than most anything alive – or dead. The doctor rolled in the waves on his back, his stomach dipping in and out of the water like a whale’s hump, his hairy navel a small blue pool. Daanish slunk in after him, peering at the shell bobbing like a cork in the curves of a soft tide. His father explained that if disturbed, the mollusk oozed a purple color that the ancient Egyptians had used as a dye. Daanish plucked it out. While his fingers curled around the fragile violet husk, the animal ducked inside. The eight-year-old Daanish tried to understand where it had been, and how much time had lapsed between the Pharaohs, and him.

Later, they scrambled over the boulders that hugged the cove at each end, and walked the length of the beach, his father poking and prodding the shells swept at his feet. He found an empty sea snail and handed it to Daanish. It would come to rest around his neck.

* * *

He touched it now, back in Khurram’s car.

His house would be swarming with family. They’d have flown in from London, Islamabad and Lahore. He could picture his aunts wiping tears with dupattas, picking rosary beads, reciting from the Quran in a weeping chorus. The doctor had cared nothing for such rituals, yet Daanish knew Anu would want them. He could see her teary, kohl-smeared cheeks. He could feel her pulling him, through Drigh Road, past Gol Masjid, down Sunset Boulevard. She was calling for him to make up for her loss.

He looked up at the haze, yearning for yet more interludes.




5 Recess APRIL 1990 (#ulink_baf8a3b0-ad3f-573b-967b-7b97cc0d8b29)


It was spring break. Most of the students had gone home for Easter. The campus, devoid of human life, was ceremonious: the lawns burgeoned with bluets, buttercups and black-eyed susans; the trees with chickadees, titmice, and the plaintive phoebe. Daanish spent his time walking and listening, absorbing the grounds in a way he’d never done before.

He wandered off into a far corner, down a long, narrow path flanked by two straight rows of enormous oak and cedar trees. Behind one rank of trees rose a short wall stretching all the way from the start of the path to the far end. It was the only boundary wall of the campus. Daanish inhaled deeply, delighted to be walking on land that needed only one demarcation. There wasn’t a single house, school, university, park or office in Karachi that was free of four encircling walls, though the US Consulate there had the tallest four walls of all.

He soon approached a rectangular, sunken garden, nestled thickly in the trees. Egg-smooth pebbles littered the circumference of the hollow. Wild thyme sprang from between the pebbles. The patch had been planted with tricolor pansies, bluebells, and cowslips.

Daanish stepped down and stretched beside the flowers. He saw faces in the gnarly old trees. Some uprooted and changed places with one another. Bluebells rang. Cowslips sneezed and a shower of gold dusted his cheek. Up in the sky, white clouds drifted. No haze, no smog. No potholes, beggars, burning litter, kidnappings or dismissed governments. Such beauty in a country that consumed thirty per cent of the world’s energy, emitted a quarter of its carbon dioxide, had the highest military expenditure in the world, and committed fifty years of nuclear accidents, due to which the oceans teemed with plutonium, uranium, and God alone knew what other poisons. It had even toyed with conducting nuclear tests on the moon.

The plump sparkling clouds whispered: We’re dumping it on them, on them.

It was bloody seductive.

Blossoms fell in his hair. He yawned and felt like Alice, tumbling from one chasm into another. Would he too wake up in the safety of his own? His eyelids began to flicker. An oval nuthatch scrambled down and around the length of a bole. He spun with it. The nuthatch became a smooth, round medallion of pure gold. It bobbed on the end of a chain. On the other end of the chain was a key. The key was in a car’s ignition. The doctor drove the car. The medallion swayed like the hands of a clock gone haywire, backwards and forwards, turning minutes into seconds. Inscribed on its one side was the word Shifa. Healing. Underneath, the doctor’s name: Shafqat. Affection. His own father had presented it to him when he returned from England. On the medallion’s other side was the Pakistani flag. Daanish belonged to that flag. He’d come back to it, the doctor declared, better than he had himself. The key-chain bobbed when he said it.

And it danced down the tree, tapping uproariously as it went. The grass was fluorescent and a touch moist. He ran his fingers through it and the pores of his skin opened as he welcomed each sensation. A barn owl swooped across his vision. The moon began to rise. He slept soundly till dawn.




6 Arrival MAY 1992 (#ulink_9277b95e-1850-57d1-be49-9b4f21b514c1)


Her fair skin set off a head of dark, crinkly hair. She held him close, thanking Allah for bringing him home safely. Had the scene occurred under a street light in his college town, passers-by would be faintly embarrassed, if not repulsed. He thought if she said, ‘Thank you Jesus for returning him to me,’ instead of ‘Thank you Allah …’ people would smile or snicker but not think her a fanatic.

He shut his eyes. Never before had he stood in this house plagued by how others might see him. He tried to clear his head, to instead enjoy Anu’s welcoming arms, flabbier now than when he last embraced them, three years ago.

Khurram and his family waved goodbye. The handsome driver’s eyes pierced his own, turning a hint green. ‘You are my friend now,’ Khurram called out. ‘Anything more I can do for you, I am just down the street.’

‘Such a nice boy,’ said Anu as the car drove away.

Lurking behind her, Daanish now saw, was the shadow of his father’s eight sisters. It grew closer, a single mass with sixteen tentacles, pawing and probing like Siamese-octopi. He was being welcomed just like Khurram had been at the airport, but he did not desire it.

One arm caught his throat. ‘You poor poor child! How your father loved you!’

Another tugged his hair, fighting with the first, ‘How exhausted you must be! Come into the kitchen with me …’

A third whipped his cheek and cried, ‘You look sicker than our own! Were you in Amreeka or Afreeka?’

A fourth spun him from the waist, ‘You’re just like he was at your age!’

A fifth yanked his shirt-tail, ‘Who did you miss the most?’

A sixth, ‘Me!’

Seven, ‘His father, ehmak.’

And eight, ‘Look how his jealous mother keeps him all to herself!’

It was true. While they jerked and pinched her only child and hurled insults her way, Anu still held him, and now they were all entangled, resulting in a chorus of loud protests from small bodies in the arms of each aunt, small bodies with wills and suckers of their own. He fell headfirst into their lair.

‘Ay haay,’ shoved Anu. ‘Let the boy sit down at least.’

She gripped what little she could find of Daanish’s arm, disentangled it from the others, and with determined possessiveness, led him into the kitchen. The others followed like a school of squid. ‘Sit down, bete.’

Scowling at his aunts in black and the babies in their arms, Daanish pulled a chair up next to Anu. She emptied several plastic food containers into metal pots then lit the burners of the stove. His aunts continued making observations, their children still shrieked, but at least no one touched him.

‘I’m really not hungry Anu, just tired,’ he protested weakly. ‘You haven’t even told me how you are.’ She never shared. Just fussed.

‘What is there to tell? Allah has returned my son to me safely, even if He chose to take my husband.’

Her back was to him but he knew she was crying. Softly – tears never interfered with her work – but steadily.

How differently his father would have received him. In place of his mother’s flurry, a thick veil of smoke would infuse the air as he sucked one Dunhill after another. He’d ask what it was like there. Daanish would only select details that would tickle him: the ghostly reflection of an opossum on clear summer nights; pink-haired waitresses with pierced noses (the doctor would guffaw at this perversion of his most favored female accessory, the nose-pin); having a wisdom tooth extracted to lite music: ‘Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you’; children delightfully camouflaged for Halloween. Anu never absorbed curiosities.

She was saying, ‘I wanted so much to come to the airport but who would drive? Your one chacha has the flu and I didn’t want to trouble the other again. He went twice to the airport already but the flight kept getting delayed. We didn’t know – none of the airline people answered the phone. You must be so exhausted.’ She stopped abruptly. Tears stained her face. ‘How do you like the new table? I got it soon after you left. Your father never even noticed. You can have one just like it when you settle down.’

He frowned. Settle down?

‘Your father took too long to shed his restlessness. That’s why you had him for barely twenty-two years. If you do it earlier your family can see more of you. To settle down is to do the world a favor.’

‘Oh Anu.’

The doctor would call this her logic. He’d say it the way he said her blood. It was the subject of most of their fights, he having migrated from Hyderabad, she from Amritsar. She traced her ancestry hundreds of years back to the Caucasus. Hence her pristine white skin, which, to her dismay, Daanish hadn’t inherited (though she consoled herself that darkness hardly mattered as much in a boy). The doctor said it was pathetic how people grasped at anything to prove they carried foreign blood. And since the foreigners – from the Central Asians to the Macedonians, Arabs and Turks – were conquerors, it was the half-teaspoon of conqueror’s blood that made people like Anu gloat over their pedigree. ‘Everyone here has a master-subjugator complex. No one takes pride in being a son or daughter of this soil,’ he snapped at her once, scooping up a mound of earth from the yard and throwing it back impatiently.

One week later, he was gone again, traveling across the seas, bringing back shells for Daanish.

Anu arranged several steaming dishes before him. Their rich cardamom and ghee scent on this early morning, after Daanish had traveled some seven thousand miles and been sleepless for nearly as many hours, gave him a headache of astounding symmetry. Commencing at the forehead, it cleaved his skull evenly in two, like a coconut shell. It was as if the two halves were trying to find the one-in-a-million combination that could fit them together again. He gazed in agony, first at the dishes, then his mother, then at a baby cousin who’d escaped from his mother, and raced toward him on all fours.

‘I’m tired,’ Daanish muttered again.

‘Boti!’ the child squealed. The mother, delighted by her young one’s forwardness, hurried to the table. Resting her wide hips on a cushioned chair that went pish! she proceeded to feed her child one of the dishes Daanish’s mother had set before him.

‘You’re tired because you’re hungry,’ Anu stressed, scowling at her sister-in-law.

Daanish’s other aunts drifted toward the food. Some of them sat, others stood, all picked at the various curries, kebabs, and tikkas for Daanish. They fed their children generously, but never offered a word of praise. In the doctor’s presence, Daanish’s aunts had never so blatantly used Anu. The doctor had died without ever knowing his sisters. He’d died without knowing Daanish. He’d died. Slowly, and with a soft, defeated eye, Daanish began to eat. Anu dried her eyes, smiling gratefully.

When a faint yellow light washed the kitchen, he rose at last. The sun was rising. He gave his mother a tight hug. ‘I’m falling over with fatigue. Everything was delicious.’

She kissed and blessed him copiously. ‘Sleep well, jaan. There is all day tomorrow to answer me.’




7 The Order of Things (#ulink_cad5018f-6321-5416-a92f-97f8abc98b1a)


Mounting the staircase Daanish scratched his head, wondering what the question was. He threw back the door to his room.

The interior was unrecognizable. Once a warm, moody beige, the walls were now a clinical white. So were the built-in bookshelves that replaced the rickety ones on which his father had placed books for him to read.

The doctor had never presented a gift in wrapping paper with a card. He left it where he believed it belonged. This often meant the discovery wasn’t made for days, even weeks. It was in response to this ‘game’ that Daanish developed a keen memory that gradually evolved into an urgent need for systematic tidiness that Becky termed ‘anal retentive’. By memorizing the exact position of every object in the house, including every book, Daanish could identify a new one. If he could see it, even if, as a child, he was too short to reach it, his father let him have it.

Anu knew nothing of this. When the doctor presented her with gifts that popped up in plant pots, spice jars, lipstick tubes (a meter of resham so fine it fit in the finger-sized cylinder perfectly, so when Anu twirled it, out sprang the cloth, softly on her cheek, exactly as the doctor had envisioned), parandas and petticoats, Anu first gasped, then placed the surprise in a more suitable spot. She never strove to discover the impulse behind what she called her husband’s unsettled ways. But Daanish went along with his every fancy to the point where the father’s imagination became the son’s order. Anu, by changing the color of the walls and replacing the bookshelf, closet, floor lamp, even the bed, had changed for ever the order of things. Without knowing it, she’d eliminated the doctor’s presence from Daanish’s room. The one at college was more his own.

He dropped onto the new bed on which the lovely guipure bedcover Anu had made him years before was now a starched white sheet. When had she made the changes? Not after the death, that was barely four days ago. It would have been a breach of decorum. The family expected her to mourn, not pack or decorate. Then when? Why didn’t his father stop her if she’d done it during his lifetime?

His temples throbbed. The headache had lost its symmetry. He probed around his neck for knots.

Perhaps his father had never entered Daanish’s room while he was away. Perhaps it made him sad to be in it without him.

The new bed was no longer under the window, where he’d spent so many nights gazing up at the stars. It lay beside the new closet, and the landscape outside was mostly invisible. He saw only a patch of sky and an antenna from the roof of a house piercing it. The house was one of the four to have gone up in his absence. Barely ten inches from his window was the skeleton of yet another one.

He lay down, shoes still dangling on his feet. This mattress was soft; the old one had been firm. Every time he switched position, the springs bounced. Finally, he lay on his back, arms stretched to still the movement.

He could hear his aunts puttering downstairs, covering the floors with sheets, piling siparahs on side-tables. Soon pages would rustle and the recitation would commence. He didn’t want to be a part of it; it wasn’t a part of his father. He had to find a way of braving the ensuing weeks.

It was seven o’clock in the morning. Were his father here the alarm clock would sound the BBC chime. A crow perched on the windowsill. It was large and gray-hooded. Our crows are bigger than American crows, he thought, eyelids drooping. They’re the only things we have that are bigger.



ANU (#ulink_07f9d7e3-a4fd-5796-ae0c-d8773ee7858e)




1 Guipure Dreams (#ulink_95b5440b-5867-503d-b130-669660e8768d)


Four days earlier, she’d sat on his bed, fingers tracing the weave of the guipure bedcover sewn at the cove.

Once Daanish’s father had shown him life beneath the sea, it was hard for the child to surface again. Now, it was essential that all the images of his submarine life be removed from his room. Then he might return.

She folded the bedcover into a small square, then spread a new cloth from the market in its place. Then she began emptying his cupboards, removing all his shells and shell boxes. Along the way, she paused to marvel at the careful system with which he organized the pieces. Labels drawn in purple ink recorded where each had been found and when. Sometimes he’d even noted particulars about the shell’s life or collector’s value. The best ones were in the left drawer because, he’d explained, left-handed shells were a rarity. He had only four in his entire collection of nearly three hundred.

She picked up a box the doctor had brought back from a trip to the Philippines. It was the only gift he’d ever placed directly in his son’s hands. He’d been too excited to wait for Daanish to find it. The child had stared into his father’s eyes, exactly like his own, and both pairs of hands had trembled. The box was of finely chiseled, green soapstone but the child had only partially registered its beauty. He’d pulled back the gold seahorse clasp and beamed, stupefied and delirious, at the chambered nautilus inside. That was what the doctor had called it. He’d said it was left-handed and that he’d never even heard of anyone finding a leftie nautilus. But there it was, perfectly intact. The doctor had dabbed it with mineral oil to preserve the pearly coat.

Anu examined the spiraling beauty. It shimmered on the cream-colored cushion in the box, alive even in death. Underneath was the note, written in the smart, controlled handwriting of Daanish the thirteen-year-old: December ‘83, on Aba’s return from the Pacific. Called chambered nautilus because it has many rooms inside. Aba says its brain is very developed, it has three hearts, and its blood is blue. He knows because he’s a doctor. It’s 180 million years old, as old as a dinosaur. What a find!

Also on the cushion was a close relative of the nautilus, an argonaut. Anu clearly remembered the day Daanish had found it at the cove.

She tucked the slip of paper back into the box and put it on top of the pile in her arms. From downstairs, the doctor called. He was dying, and there were things he wanted to get off his chest first. She’d heard enough already. Once, perhaps, she would have heard it all. But gone were the days when she would have worn his confessions like a string around her neck. She put the heap of boxes down on the floor. Then she lay on the new bed and spread the guipure lace around her, remembering the cove.

It was shaped like the round neck of a kameez, some forty feet across. The right shoulder was a cluster of enormous rocks, the first of which Daanish called the shoulder-boulder. When he and his father swam, Anu hoisted herself upon it. Around her spilled yarns of the guipure lace she turned into tablecloths, curtains, and more.

She began the bedcover on a chilly early morning in November as Daanish waded into the sea, shivering. The water was cold and composed. She’d tested it while they cleaned their snorkels. An aquamarine shawl enveloped her shoulders. She’d worn her hair long in those days, and left it loose, though it would take hours to disentangle later. The doctor liked it that way. He’d drape it over her shoulder, then gaze at her profile from the water. He preferred her left side, the one that wore the ruby nose-pin he’d given, not given but hidden, at the bottom of a perfume bottle. When it was noticed, she’d not known what to do: empty the bottle and risk splashing drops of the expensive scent, or wait till it had finished? She ended up pouring Chanel into a jar, retrieving the ruby, then pouring it back, spilling his money all over her dressing table and sneezing uncontrollably.

The shoulder-boulder was naturally pitted to seat her. The doctor hollered for her to come in with him, but she flatly refused to wear a bathing suit. He taunted her modesty because he knew she’d never give it up. If she were the changing type, he would not have married her.

The bedcover in her lap was taking a surprising turn. Patterns unplanned emerged and she obliged by seeing them through. When Daanish kicked around the boulder, heading for the deeper sea, he waved. She waved back. What would he see? For a moment, it pained that she’d never know. But this was nothing new. Her husband often left for voyages to the bigger ocean, where she’d seen islands peppering the globe in his study, and young girls dressed in flowers peppering his photos. He was always irritable upon his return. Once she asked Daanish to ask him why. The son reported cheerfully, ‘He says I’ll understand when I grow up, something about falling into the trap of comparison.’ But she always felt his frustration had something to do with the photos.

One day, he’d send her son to one of those dots on the globe. She prayed for him to return untransformed. Like her, he should not be the changing type.

The sun caught in the heavy lace like anchovy. This year the monsoons had poured into autumn. A river, normally dry by now, still ran along the east end of the beach. Plovers, herons, and even a pair of mighty spoonbills bathed in the waters. The birds she could see. The fish beneath the surface she could not. A mischievous desire suddenly overtook her: before the doctor returned, she wanted the spoonbills to fly away. She knew he’d never seen them before. She could impress him for having noticed and identified them. But she alone would have been the witness. Anu covered her mouth, slyly giggling.

After half an hour, she folded up the lace, tucked it under an arm, and hopped down onto the powdery sand. There was no one about. For the time being, this cupular cove and everything it held – the river, cave, rocks, powdery sand, and pristine isolation – were all hers.

She padded toward the left shoulder of the cove, where a line of jagged rocks gradually grew taller, and sheerer. At the base of the incline the sea and wind had etched a cave that could be entered at low tide. The doctor liked to have his tea there. Turning up her shalwar till it pressed her calves – she’d never have rolled that high for him – Anu minced across the slippery stone toward the cave’s mouth. The sea cooled her ankles. If she tripped and fell into the gravelly seabed, though it would hurt, later that night she’d notice her soles had been scrubbed pink. Now, seaweed caught in the hem of her shalwar. Lemon-colored fish scrambled between her legs, like she was their marker. What did her son and husband see? It must be something like this. Then why didn’t they just stay here?

She ducked into the cave, twelve feet deep, its height very slightly less than hers. She could feel the cold stone press down on her head like the foot of a giant. The light inside was eel-gray. When the sea lapped the cave’s sides the giant above her bellowed.

At the far end, the doctor had arranged slabs of flat rock. On one she began arranging pakoras and quartering fruit. In her estimate, they’d arrive within five minutes. Waiting, she spread the guipure bedcover around her again, carefully avoiding the wet floor. Whatever she’d lost in childbearing floriferousness when her ovaries were removed, she made up in that luscious fabric for her son. It rippled around her like a second sea. As before, the design came unexpectedly. Only she could see beneath it. Let them use snorkels and masks; she had eyes.

At precisely the time anticipated, Daanish’s voice was heard. Her cheeks glowed with the warmth reserved for him. But then she heard his father’s booming laugh. For a fleeting second, her brow furrowed. This was her time, her place. Then, just as rapidly, her irritation drained away. The world was normal again. Her family was safe. They were hungry. She was their marker. It was time to be theirs.

Over tea, Daanish examined the bedcover. He insisted the figures were sea urchins, fan coral, jellyfish, and sea snakes. Names his father had taught him. Names his father would never share with her. ‘Just like you’d been there too, Anu,’ Daanish said. He was so innocent. But there was a new light in his eye. Something forming. A dream or ambition. When it blossomed, he would lose his innocence, and she would lose him.

The doctor asked where her shawl was. She looked about in distress. He laughed, saying it had blown off just as they rounded the boulder, and from the water he’d seen the sun filter straight through her kurta, so she might as well have worn a two-piece and jumped into the sea to get good and wet.

‘Please,’ she tsked, ‘not in front of him.’ Daanish was digging for shells at the cave’s entrance, listening. Smirking, almost. Growing older by the minute.

The doctor held the lace up to her face and grinned, ‘You might as well have worn this.’

Again she yearned, like a shooting pain, to be alone in her world with her dreams.

And again, when it passed, normalcy.

Fourteen years had gone by. Downstairs, the doctor writhed in bed. He was still calling. Once she would have gone to him, believing it would lead him back to her – to the way he’d been when Daanish was born. She would have sat quietly beside him, listened, and consoled. It would have been part of the patient waiting. But she had stopped waiting. She had realized that to wait is to watch yourself grow old. Her future rested not with her husband but with her son.

She rose from his bed, clasping the boxes and the guipure bedcover. It flowed all the way down to her feet like a net with which to get her boy back.




2 Argonaut (#ulink_7ee5368a-29e4-5098-8ef2-3545a821d43b)


Hours after the doctor stopped calling, Anu found him in a cold heap on the floor.

At the hospital, she sat outside Intensive Care while his family arrived, weeping. The nurses would not allow her inside. What did they know about intensive care?

‘Why didn’t you call us?’ the sisters charged, as if she had eight different sets of hands with which to dial the phone. She’d made one call, and that to her brother, which was how the doctor made it here at all. The sisters hugged her, piling on accusations, demanding to be comforted. ‘Why didn’t you bring him earlier?’ another insisted. ‘How long had Bhai been unconscious?’

Anu went through the motions: she’d been upstairs cleaning, how could she have known? She’d heard nothing. One minute he was watching Hindi films, the next he was on the floor. Who can say what the future holds? The Almighty decides.

Privately, she prayed the Almighty would decide in her favor, forgiving her for ignoring her husband’s last call, and for lying about it now.

The walls of the corridor were pasted with gray fingerprints and red paan stains. Two feet away, a man was hawking in a toilet. She could hear the unbuckling of a belt, the pants fall, shit drop. The air was pungent and stale. Not a window in sight.

Before they shut the door on her, she’d seen the sheets on his bed were stained before he even lay down. Clumps of hair and dust tumbled on the floor like weed. The ceiling fan rattled loud enough to wake the dead – but not the comatose. The nurses had long, black nails. She looked with horror at the unpacked needles and gloves. Bottles of antiseptic lay uncovered.

Anu walked down the corridor. The lights went out. A generator came on. She braced herself for a long wait. To wait is to watch yourself grow old. Earlier today, she’d told herself this. Now here she was, no longer waiting for the doctor to adore her, but waiting, instead, for him to merely live.

Still, there was no harm in remembering those first few weeks after Daanish’s birth, when he’d cherished her.

The delivery had been arduous and she returned from the hospital too weak to cook. Her husband advised complete bed rest. He refused hired help, taking extended leave from the clinic to nurse and feed her himself.

The fare was one month-long meal for he knew only two dishes: khichri and mutton korma. He even thought to prepare the meals in their bedroom, carrying the materials to her dressing table, where, for the first and last time in his life, he allowed her to watch over him. He said it was this opportunity to supervise and not the bed rest that would revive her.

She smiled indulgently at his disorder, as Daanish lay tight in her arms. So complete was the baby’s need that she was washed clean of any desire to direct the doctor. She choked down the coarsely chopped, slippery globs of onion that littered the gravy, the rubbery meat, and glutinous rice that was saltier than the sea. She knew the reasons for all three: he should let the onions char; the butcher was cheating him; when he washed and sifted the lentils and rice, he cleaned with such vigor he removed most of the good grains too, but then forgot to adjust the spices and reduce the cooking time. At times, she worried for the child: how did the milk taste and would it affect his temperament? But the doctor was so earnest in his care his mistakes made him more endearing to her than he’d ever been, or ever would be again. It was while he sifted the lentils that she loved him most. Something in the way he churned the grains with a metal spoon as they soaked, for not long enough, in a large plastic bowl. The chink of wet seed against steel. The snaking drift of liquid as it ebbed and trailed after the spoon. The black specks that surfaced. Him flicking them out, clumsily taking shiny golden ones too. She understood him then, for as a girl, she’d done the same. It was sharing, with him, and the baby, each differently but at once, that eventually revived her, though neither father nor son would ever know.

Many times thereafter, she recalled the happiness of those bed-ridden days. At first, the memory brought intense, private hope, for the fulfillment of which she was determined to wait. But gradually, it filled her with something else. Hope obstructed the passage of the strength she needed to accept the direction her life was taking. She had to make room instead for endurance and God’s will. At what point in her life did this process begin?

Strolling down the grubby halls of the hospital, she paused at one of the dust-opaque windows and smelled smoke. Outside, somebody burned litter. She stood, wondering whether to return to her in-laws or breathe the noxious fumes. She decided to stay here awhile.

If she tried, it was possible to put a date to the day hope left her. In effect, three dates – on the first, almost leaving; then burning brighter than ever before; and at last extinguishing entirely.

The first was during a grand luncheon at an old British-established club. Seated around a table at the center of the dining room were ten intellectuals and their highly clipped, coifed and choreographed spouses. While all the other wives were shown a menu, the doctor ordered for her. It was a western dish she’d had once before and disliked. He knew this. She said nothing.

The club was frozen in time. On the walls hung portraits of Winston Churchill. The billiard room forbade entry to ladies and dogs. Waiters were called ‘bera’ from the British word bearer. They wore the same starched white turban, shirt and trousers as they had under the colonizers. Some of the uniforms were so stained and tattered the doctor would say that one day a delegation of nostalgic British historians would snatch and turn them into antiques in one of their museums. The waiters would never get a penny and they’d be naked.

Six years had passed since the nation’s first polls, which had coincided with the year of Daanish’s birth. The election results had not been honored. The country had lapsed into a civil war and lost half its territory and population. One of the men present at the lunch was a third generation Iranian who still mourned the loss of his tea plantation. He lit a cigar and reminisced.

Anu looked around the table, remarking the pedigree of each. Some had two drops Persian, others half a drop Turk. There was one who claimed his ancestors had sprung from Alexander the Great, and another had roughly one teaspoon Arab. But none had descended from Mahmud of Ghazni, as she had. She bore the stamp of the tribe with pride: the clear, fair complexion and the bloom on her cheeks.

She was momentarily taken aback when the Iranian began bemoaning the very activity that consumed her, and one which the doctor often resented her for. The cigar-puffing gentleman said, ‘We will always be divided. We’ll always be Punjabi, Pathan, Pukhtoon, Muhajir, Sindhi, or what have you. But we will never be united. The Quaid’s dream is slipping from our fingers. Our children won’t even know he had a dream. They won’t know why they’re here. They will be rootless.’ He peeled open a napkin and arranged it over a heavy heart.

‘It’s your weak morale that will tear us apart, Ghulam,’ said another, a Hyderabadi with dark, pockmarked cheeks. ‘You mustn’t let your sons see you this way.’

‘But Ghulam is right,’ said a third, from UP. ‘Things are only getting worse. At least once we had a great university in Aligarh. Now what is there? Will we be forced to send our children away from us?’

‘We have nothing to fear,’ declared a Punjabi. ‘Islam unites us.’

‘That’s exactly what the Prime Minister wants us to believe,’ cautioned the doctor. ‘Why else is he suddenly supporting the Islamic groups? Why else are all the liberals in exile or in jail?’ He pointed to the waiter circling them with a tray of drinks and demanded, ‘Is this to be my last public beer?’ While the waiter poured, an argument erupted.

Amongst the women, the topic ranged from births to beauty parlors to who had been seen at the last grand luncheon where exactly the same three subjects were discussed with equal zeal.

‘You should try Nicky’s instead of Moon Palace, darling,’ said the Hyderabadi wife to the Iranian wife. ‘She gets the curls just right.’ Looking disdainfully at Anu, who wore her hair in a frizzy bun, she sniffed, ‘That is, if you want to stay in touch with things.’

‘Mah Beauty Parlor is far superior,’ said the wife of the Punjabi. She was from Bangalore, and in the past, had confessed her husband couldn’t stand her for it. She was pregnant with their third child. ‘I had my hair set there just yesterday. And you won’t believe who was having hers done beside me!’ She looked around expectantly. ‘Barbara!’ While gasps and exclamations issued, the woman continued, ‘And I found out that her grandmother was my grandmother’s neighbor’s khala’s mother-in-law’s best friend’s sister!’ More gasps and exclamations.

The wife from Delhi, whose husband had taken the doctor’s warning to heart and was on his third beer, piped, ‘I believe it’s her daughter who recently had twins.’ She was not a popular woman. In her absence, the others declared she always overdid it. Anu had to concede they had a point. Today her hair had taken coils to new limits.

But Anu remained silent. Wanting in names to drop, she was fundamentally awkward in high society. She had not been born into it. Nor had the doctor for that matter, nor many of those present, but somehow she alone showed it. She was twenty-three, married at sixteen, educated only till class nine, clever enough to understand English but could speak it with an accent that was hateful to her in English-speaking company. Besides, she would only ever have one child. Soon after Daanish’s birth, her ovaries had had to be removed. It seemed that in her presence, the women always took particular pleasure in repeating the names of those who’d better proven their reproductive worth. But they would never have the pink bloom on her cheeks that her pure blood gifted her.

Across the table, the increasingly incensed doctor was saying, ‘What is the point of banning horse racing? I tell you, people will continue to do as they please but under the table. The Prime Minister is sowing the seeds of corruption with one hand and buying off Islamists with the other.’

‘We’re heading for another military coup,’ sighed the Iranian. ‘Another US-backed martial regime.’

The meal arrived. Hers was placed before her: stuffed shellfish. She disliked eating fish. She preferred them drifting between her ankles, at the mouth of the cave. They were silver and gold then, but cooked they simply stank.

‘Don’t use the fork,’ the doctor leaned across and whispered.

What was she to do, eat with her fingers, here? She flushed. Some of the others heard and laughed – at her.

‘The spoon,’ he urged.

She glanced nervously around the table, and her worst fears were realized: all eyes rested on her plate. She broke the cheese crust with the end of a spoon. It was surprisingly cold. Scooping up a small morsel she began nibbling miserably. Then she noticed something like a bullet where the fish’s belly must have been. She did not want any more.

The doctor boomed loudly, ‘Don’t you like it?’ Laughter.

‘Not hungry,’ she muttered.

‘Just two more bites,’ he urged.

She picked up the spoon again and probed around the bullet. There was another one. And another. Her face would explode with the blood rushing into it. Giving her husband a last, desperate look, she plucked out the first lump with her fingers. Seven more rose with it. The crowd gasped: she held a string of gray pearls.

He helped her wipe them, then fell into a lengthy description of the rarity and size of Tahitian pearls. ‘I’m afraid the meal is uncooked,’ he said more to them than her. ‘I couldn’t possibly have had them bake it!’ Uproar. Applause. Her hands and clothes a sticky mess, smelling putrid. Her insides as hard and lifeless as the gems. He couldn’t afford this. She’d tried to tell him as much each time he gave her gifts. So now he performed in public.

‘How eccentric!’ a sophisticated wife shrieked, eyeing the doctor with a mixture of fascination and horror.

‘How lucky,’ the one who overdid it whooped.

And the one who met the film star at the parlor declared, ‘What an entertaining husband he must be!’

As their enthusiasm grew, she understood they expected her to wear the necklace. She left for the toilet, returning with the polished stones around her neck. Even when dessert arrived no one noticed she had not eaten a thing, though her neck was the object of the ladies’ minute, chilling study, and the doctor of their coquetry and awe.

But then the following morning, optimism returned.

The six-year-old Daanish was in the television lounge with the doctor. She worked in the kitchen, preparing a picnic for the cove. Woozy with the heat, she decided to carry the small tub of lentils she was washing to the breezy lounge. On the television appeared a dusty old white man. His fingers and face were chafed beyond any others she’d seen in his race. Nor did his voice carry the smooth, metallic timbre typical of goras. Most amazing of all was what he did with his hands: exactly what she did! He dipped a crewel-like pan into a river, brought up sand, and sifted – but for what?

‘Gold,’ the doctor explained to Daanish. ‘He’s content to live a life waiting for the odd nugget to fill his cup. Though he’s spent over half a century doing it, he’s still as poor as the dirt that hides his fortune. Some men won’t give up.’

Well! thought Anu, her fingers pausing in the yellow-tinted water. She studied the prospector’s sturdy, startling blue eyes and ropy physique. She followed the cracked gray mouth as it spewed strange, chewy sounds. Her fingers idled pensively. She smiled. For a brief, exciting moment she connected with a man. Not the one stretched across most of the couch (who’d still not noticed her bunched at the end) but the one from a different world. The one who understood that it was the spirit with which she waited that made the effort worthwhile. That commitment itself was reward.

A commercial break. A cheerful Anu packed the lunch and tea. The prospector was a sign of better things to come.

It was time to go to the beach. On the way out, the doctor asked her to wear the pearls. Her face fell. The shame of yesterday threatened to rekindle. Should she ignore him? Deciding against it, Anu hurriedly clasped the string around her neck.

At the cove, the doctor and Daanish cleaned their masks, adjusted their snorkels and were gone. She settled in the cave with her lace, working today on a tablecloth. Once again, she wondered what they would see. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine it. But something was wrong. Her sewing was uninspired. The cave, instead of being the respite she’d known it to be, felt alien. The giant’s foot pressed even closer to her head. She knew what it was. She was feeling the weight of the pearls. They circled her collarbone like lead pellets, each to her what it must have been to the crustacean itself: a blemish, a pustulate growth. Sand in her rediscovered joy. Cysts on her ovaries. She tried focusing on the salt blowing on her lips that was always strangely healing, and on the guipure in her hands, but neither offered any comfort. She thought of the prospector with hands like hers, always sifting, searching. But even he eluded her now. She put away the cloth and began laying out the sandwiches.

Daanish returned, shivering, shrieking, ‘The water’s getting cold!’ She warmed him with a towel. At the mouth of the cave, the doctor dried himself in the sun. Daanish joined him.

‘Come and drink your milk,’ she summoned Daanish. To the doctor, she announced the tea.

He stayed outside. So did Daanish, who began lifting stones, peering into tide pools, digging.

‘You don’t want sand to dirty your milk, do you?’ she called.

He looked at his father, awaiting his direction. The man gazed moodily away.

She repeated, ‘The tea will get cold.’

For a moment, nothing. Then an impatient, ‘Can’t you see I’m not ready yet?’

She waited.

In amongst the neritic clutter around the doctor’s hairy legs the boy declared he’d found a prize. He presented it to his father, who held it up. From inside the cave Anu could see the shell was thin and petal-shaped. The sun filtered right through. It shimmered like a translucent slice of skin.

‘A paper nautilus,’ said the doctor. ‘Aristotle called it an argonaut. I’m uncertain why. Perhaps it had something to do with Jason and the Golden Fleece. Do you know the story?’

Of course not, thought Anu. When it came to questions, the doctor heavily favored the rhetorical kind. Daanish blinked at him lovingly. The child had buried himself in the sand. A hint of his red swimming trunks poked through. He’d washed the nautilus clean with the water in his pail. It glistened like a ribbed eggshell. He took it back from his father gingerly, as if afraid it would slip from his fingers like sea foam. ‘No,’ he whispered, afraid his breath might blow it all away.

‘The Argo was the name of the ship that carried Jason. Those who went with him were called Argonauts – sailors of the Argo.’

Explain, explain. That’s what the doctor loved to do. But only she knew the things he could not explain.

‘And if you look at it this way,’ he plucked it again from his son, who licked his sandy lips nervously, ‘with the narrow end down, then, it looks like a billowing sail, doesn’t it?’ Daanish winked, trying hard to see it. ‘The animal that makes it is an octopus. Riding along with it in her arms she must look like a sailor. What do you say?’

Daanish clapped his hands with delight. ‘Yes! She’d have her own boat!’

The doctor laughed, thumping him lightly on the back.

In the cave, Anu poured out the tea. The pearls around her neck were cold and ravishing. Tears, as large as each stone, welled in her eyes.

He continued explaining. ‘Strictly speaking, this is not a shell. It’s a nest made by the octopus, and it’s at this tapering end that she pockets the eggs and carries the whole thing with her – a purse, cradle and ship all in one.’

‘What happens when the babies are born?’ Daanish asked, his eyes wide with anticipation.

‘Good question. When the thousand little baby argonauts hatch, she rejects the cradle, so children like you can have them. It’s a miracle, isn’t it, that something as flimsy as this can survive the thrust of the sea and surface unharmed?’

The child nodded fervently. Behind her tears, Anu’s guipure blurred into spray.

‘Argonaut,’ the doctor continued, ‘was also the name of those Americans who went West in search of gold. That fellow we saw on TV just this morning could be a descendant.’

Ah, thought Anu, here he was again: the prospector. He’d appeared like a sign to give her hope, but how naïve she’d been! Well then, she would no longer count on signs. If she continued waiting for the doctor, she’d be left behind both him and Daanish.

When they got home later that evening, she took off the necklace and left it carelessly in the hall. He carried it to her saying she did not appreciate the shape of his love. He was suddenly and inexplicably enraged. ‘It may not appear as you want to see it,’ he shouted, ‘but if you weren’t so blind, you’d see it exists!’

Curiously placid, she wondered where. In the trips to the South Seas and places she couldn’t even name?

Where? In his study? Anyone could become an expert just by reading. But she didn’t need a single page to tell her why he never discussed anything he read with her. It would thin his expertise. It would fatten hers. It would mean that she too could explain things to Daanish.

Where was his love? In all those high-society parties he dragged her to, just to embarrass her?

In the food he never liked?

The conversation he never made?

Her lineage? His want of it?

Or in her only child, whom she knew even then would be sent far away, for, pah! education.

Coolly, she fingered the pearls strangling his strong, healer’s fingers and brushed his large pink nails with her own. ‘Give it to the one who sees where. Tell her I send my love. I’m sure she’ll understand the shape of it.’

His mouth opened in momentary shock, snapped shut, and then he was off on an unconvincing tirade. He stumbled and once even stuttered, not having had the chance to look up counter-arguments in a book.

She turned, delighted with the audacity she’d never known herself capable of. She was riding the roiling sea, a panner of gold, a sailor with eight long silvery arms and a purse with Daanish kicking inside.

She had learned how to swim.

Anu walked back to Intensive Care. Still no news. The doctor’s brothers too had arrived. His sisters continued to sob and exchange stories from their childhood, all of which proved how they knew him better than she did – the woman he’d wedded, by their own arrangement, twenty-three years ago. She shed no tears. She pictured her son bending over his books in America, his thick brows slightly furrowed, turning page after page, getting excellent marks on every test. He was so bright. He must have put on weight in that land of plenty. She’d memorized every photograph he’d sent, but he’d been clad in so many layers it was impossible to detect any changes. He looked just as sweet and loving as ever. He was going to be a great man.

Suddenly there was a frenzy. Nurses were in and out of the room. She asked why and demanded to see her husband but they brushed by her. She peeped inside the door but was swiftly ushered back. She saw him briefly on the bed beneath a forest of tubes: silver hair, ashen cheeks, thin, wrinkled eyelids. He’d been unconscious now for over nine hours.

‘What did you see?’ demanded his sisters. ‘We should know.’

Perhaps she’d been too harsh that day. She saw the pearls in his fingers. He’d not even looked at her for the following two excruciating weeks, till at last she’d begged for his forgiveness. That was the last time, sixteen years ago, that she’d ever answered him back. Earlier today, when he called her, she’d simply run away. Now she was left alone with the tortuous guilt of watching him die. No, she wasn’t even allowed to watch. Sitting down heavily beside his sisters, she held her head in her hands.

Another nurse stepped out, followed by Dr Reza, a distinguished colleague of the doctor’s. Dr Reza was exhausted and did not have to say anything. The sisters began to howl. So he had died, as he had lived: outside her presence, in another place.

She shut her eyes, resolving to grow no older waiting for Daanish to return.




3 Girls MAY 1992 (#ulink_44efce10-e31a-5d81-832c-9179cd869571)


It was almost noon and the house had filled with mourners. Daanish had still not awoken. It was time to take a break from the Quran reading. Anu brought out tea and sweets. Several stylish wives were present. Many of them, she knew, could not read the Quran. She watched their lips move, feigning recitation, and wondered if the doctor saw it too. She still felt his presence in the house, absurdly, more even than when he was alive. He had probably watched while she finished re-furnishing Daanish’s room. Had probably frowned when she took away all the books he’d given him, right down to the shelves on which they rested. Would he come down from his new other place to stop her? She believed if God disapproved of her actions, He would tell her. But the doctor was rather powerless now.

All he could do was watch her next move.

While the mourners refreshed themselves with tea, she climbed up to Daanish’s bedroom. He slept, as always, on his stomach. A white sheet covered him from the waist down. His suitcase remained unlocked but on the new white rug she’d thrown next to the new bed lay the few things unpacked from his carry-on: dental floss, a razor, socks, underwear, a novel, a ballpoint pen. The bag was unzipped. She snooped around inside it. Another book; the doctor’s Kodak camera that he’d passed on to Daanish; a lovely eggshell and lacquer box the doctor had brought back from his last trip; an envelope. On the new bedside table lay Daanish’s shell necklace. Anu fingered all his things, trying to understand what they meant to him. With some – the necklace, camera, lacquer box – she knew already. But not the books and envelope. She read the covers: Edward Said, Kurt Vonnegut. She’d not heard of either. Anu mouthed each name several times, softly. The Said had been heavily marked.

She opened the lacquer box. A label in block letters read, BIVALVES. There were a dozen different brightly colored shells, some smooth, others furrowed. Daanish’s note was dated June ‘89 – two months before he’d left. Sheer muscle power. By snapping its two valves, a scallop, for instance, can swim many dozen feet per bite. At the cove one day, Aba first told me about giant clams. ‘Four feet long!’ he said. ‘They live right here, in our very own ocean.’

Anu quietly shut the box.

Next she examined the envelope. It contained letters from the doctor and herself and a stack of photographs. She glanced at Daanish: he neither snored nor stirred. The boy would probably not wake up till evening. Settling on the rug, she began looking through the pictures.

The first few were of Daanish and a very handsome boy with golden hair in a beautiful garden. In some pictures the garden was covered in snow. In others it was ablaze with color. She smiled at her son lolling on the grass, frowned that in one he seemed to be smoking, and panicked when in yet another he appeared to be in a tall tree, balancing the way he always had on a bicycle: standing, and with hands in the air. But always, though dark, he was so good-looking: tall, with his father’s wide amber eyes and his suddenly boyish disposition.

Resisting the urge to wake him up with an embrace, Anu continued on. There was the golden boy with a pretty girl. Then there were girls with no boys. Then there were girls with Daanish.

Anu backtracked.

There was a girl leaning against a tree. Red and yellow leaves scattered all around her. Against the strong colors of her surroundings, she looked especially pale, glassy almost, like a fish. A white fish with hints of yellow on its gills, poised before an orange brocade. Her head was slightly tilted to the left so her right eye seemed larger than the other. It looked directly at the camera, a bluish-green eye.

Anu skipped to a picture with the same girl and Daanish. They were seated around a table, at some party it seemed. Daanish held the girl’s waist with one hand and a drink with the other.

She stared hard at the picture, and neither an eyelid nor a finger moved. Only her mind worked. She backtracked to a picture of another girl. This one was almost his height and had stringy brown hair. She seemed to be dancing in a field of corn and was not as shapely as the other one. Anu skipped ahead: there was Daanish and another tall girl in a dark room with candles all around, and tinsel stars hanging from above. She sat in his lap.

By the time Anu had sifted through all the photographs, she counted six different girls in close physical contact with her son. She thought hard. And came to a conclusion: at least there wasn’t only one. He was distracted, but probably not yet committed. His bride would just have to handle that. After all, she had.

Anu collected the photographs, camera and lacquer box. She contemplated the shell necklace but softening, left it on the table. With the three items in hand, she returned downstairs.

As lunchtime approached, the mourners began to leave. Soon she was left alone to feed the doctor’s sisters. They began complaining that no fresh food had been cooked that day. Her son had come back just that morning, what did they expect? She left them grumbling in the kitchen. In her bedroom she regarded the objects fished from Daanish’s life in his faraway world. She did two things. First, she telephoned Nissrine’s mother to say Nissrine should hasten her arrival at the readings. Second, she returned the lacquer box to Daanish’s room, but with some unexpected debris inside.




4 Shameful Behavior (#ulink_4f61b0cb-3f58-54bc-9f10-ad06ad0c39c3)


The following day, Anu wept proudly as Daanish came downstairs to meet the several dozen friends and relatives waiting to grieve with him. He embraced them all, quietly accepting their condolences, winning the approval of the stylish women who continued appraising him as he walked on. Nodding to each other they proclaimed, ‘A spitting image of the doctor.’ Since he’d left for America, these women had ceased snarling at her. Many had sons who’d not received a full scholarship, certainly not to any college as well-known as the one he attended. They knew this. It was the one aspect of her son’s going away that Anu enjoyed.

The men sat apart. Daanish snaked toward them, passing the girl Nissrine, her mother, and a friend of Nissrine’s called Dia. She was pleased to see Nissrine did not make eye contact with her son, but dismayed that the other girl examined him quite boldly. Even Pakistani girls were like that these days.

Anu watched as his bare feet padded over the white sheets. His toes had grown even hairier than before. He picked up a siparah, and settled down to read. His body began to sway with the rhythm of the recitation. Occasionally, he looked up and gestured reverently at a new arrival. Frequently, he caught her gaze and smiled ever so sweetly.

She knew he was not fluent in his reading of the Quran, and the three years away would certainly not have helped. She had wanted him to continue studying with a maulvi but the doctor had disallowed it after the boy turned twelve.

Now she watched as Daanish seemed visibly relieved when arriving at a familiar passage. She could feel it roll over his tongue smoothly like a jingle. At other times, his facial muscles tightened. It was the same with many of the women, including, to her dismay, Nissrine. She seemed quite hopeless really, her accent still British, her Urdu pathetic. But the family was a good one. There were rumors that her father’s business was dwindling but instead of returning to London, where it had thrived, the family was staying in Pakistan for the girls. Of this, surely the doctor would approve. He was probably chuckling as Nissrine struggled over a prayer for him. And what did he think of Anu arranging the meeting so soon after his death? Would he be surprised? Tickled? Was it eccentric enough for his pleasure or was that pleasure only to be instigated by him?

About one thing he would not approve: Nissrine was a distant relative of Anu’s, ensuring that Anu’s blood, not his, would continue. Her grandchildren would have the same fresh mountain glow on their brow as she did, not his swarthy, sea-faring pallor. And there was nothing he could do about it. Except observe.

Nissrine sat quietly with a pale peach dupatta covering her head. The color became her fine, white complexion, almond eyes, and rosebud mouth. She kept her head lowered. Surely Daanish would take to her. She was not blonde like that other one in the pictures, but she was graceful and demure. Every man wanted to come home to that.

The recitation was punctuated by women pulling their hair and crying, ‘Hai, hai.’ One she barely even knew now clutched her, kneading Anu’s head into a massive bosom. Anu choked, trying both to free her windpipe and straighten her neck.

But then something saved her. A scream. A real scream. The keening ceased abruptly. The wrestler released her. She surfaced again, gasping, adjusting her eyes to the light in the room, painfully bright after the darkness of the woman’s embrace. Tidying her hair she noticed most eyes rested on the lady-like Nissrine, who was shifting discreetly with an arched back. There were murmurs and nudges. Then, slowly, eyes still on the girl, the recitation continued and the wailing started again. Anu quickly moved five feet from the wrestler.

But there was another scream, louder this time.

It did come from Nissrine.

Anu gaped in astonishment as the girl reached frantically for the back of her kameez, pulling it away from her skin as if the cloth were on fire. Her peach dupatta lay bunched on the shrouded floor. Beside her, Nissrine’s friend flushed and her mother shook Nissrine admonishingly. ‘Stop it!’ she hissed.

But Nissrine kept coiling like a cat with a tick on its hip. All the other women in the room began objecting. They pulled on earlobes, muttering, ‘Toba toba.’ It was a terrible omen. Anu swooned, wondering if this was the doctor’s doing. Was he trying to interfere with her plans?

‘Stop it!’ Nissrine’s mother commanded again.

Dia whispered something that sounded like, ‘It’s only a cat’s paw.’

Daanish and several other men entered the room. Two uncles, determined to enforce order, began pushing into the circle surrounding the two girls. But the women barricaded them. ‘Go back,’ they shouted. ‘We know how to handle this.’ An argument erupted between the aunts and their husbands.

Dia was now holding Nissrine’s hand and seemed to say, ‘Catch a petal.’ With her other hand, she pointed at three plump white strings close to the wall. Other eyes settled confusedly on the objects.

‘What’s going on?’ an uncle demanded.

‘What’s wrong with those two girls?’ another pitched in.

The women tried again to send the men away. Daanish, Anu saw, was staring at Nissrine’s friend. His lips disclosed a hint of a smile as he inched closer to the circle. Anu rushed in after him.

Dia’s nose was flushed with excitement. Her blue dupatta had fallen off her shoulders. She kept looking toward the writhing objects on the floor, shaking Nissrine and saying, ‘Stupid, they’re only caterpillars. Silkworms.’ Then she looked around her, stuttering to Nissrine’s mother, ‘I’m so sorry. Sorry. Really, very sorry.’

Daanish was moving in closer. Someone stopped him. ‘Ay haay, hato na! It’s not right for you to be here.’

‘I know what’s right for me,’ he answered firmly, causing both girls to look in his direction. When she saw him, Nissrine started weeping.

‘Oh Nini, let’s just go,’ Dia said. They collected their bags and prepared to leave, hastily bidding Anu farewell. Nissrine was sobbing loudly now, Dia apologizing, Nissrine’s mother enraged and incoherent.

‘Shameful,’ Anu muttered to Nissrine’s mother.

‘Please,’ she replied. The rest of her speech ignited in a ball of fire on each cheek.

Daanish picked up the larvae. ‘What should I do with them?’ he called out to Dia.

At the door, she turned around. Her eyes were large and russet, with dark flints of defiance burning at the center. ‘Find out yourself!’ Then her face crumpled. ‘We didn’t mean this. And we’re really sorry about your father.’ She hurried away.

Anu bolted the door behind her.



DIA (#ulink_67252030-8c76-54ec-a728-abd879089b0c)




1 More Apologies (#ulink_3205cfd9-d754-501d-a885-13daadfe9a37)


‘Look. I said I was sorry.’ Dia leaned into the wall of the dining room, popping mulberries with one hand, holding the phone with the other. The cook was in the next room, watching cricket. No, watching ads. Dia tilted her head and saw the TV: two women were waiting to be interviewed for an airhostess’s job. Cut to the next scene. The one who got it revealed her secret to the loser: a tube of skin-whitening cream. Now she could fly!

Nini’s voice on the receiver was weak from crying. Dia chewed nervously. They’d been on the phone an hour, but her friend had unwavering stamina.

It hadn’t gone the way she’d expected at all. The caterpillars were meant to tweak Nini, not cause such a scene. At the thought of the widow, Dia’s stomach ached. She listened to Nini and it ached even more.

The two had put themselves in many ludicrous situations before, often without the other one’s consent, but it had never caused such a rift. She wondered if this was what happened to women on the verge of twenty.

Desperate, Dia popped three spongy berries at once. She exhaled loudly. The hair framing her forehead fluttered. ‘Listen, Nini. Let’s not make the mistake of falling out because of a man. How many times have we seen that, huhn? And yes, it was rather extravagant of me to put not just one but three dozing silkworms down your kameez but you have to admit you only started screaming when I told you what they were. But forget that now. Just say what you want me to do. I said I was sorry. I’ve said it a thousand times. And I mean it.’

‘How did you come up with such a hideous prank, Dia? You know I hate bugs.’ Nissrine blew her nose loudly.

‘Elephant,’ Dia hissed under her breath. Out loud she said, ‘Yes, I know you hate them. And Inam Gul knows too. When you won’t be my partner in crime, he’s always there for me.’

‘Tell him from me: Grow up.’

Dia popped another berry. It was the sweetest of the lot. She chewed loudly, secretly rather proud of the cook for coming through with yet another wicked plot. If Nini had blown it out of proportion, it wasn’t his fault.

In the other room, a milk commercial was in progress, featuring a heavily made-up woman only too delighted to have her day interrupted by a slew of visitors. This way, she got to make them tea!

‘You don’t understand.’ Nini blew her nose again.

‘What don’t I understand? What? You keep saying that but you won’t bloody-well explain what.’

The whimpering subsided into stifled chokes. Finally, Nini cleared her throat and said in a cool, decisive tone: ‘That boy’s mother sent a proposal for me.’

There was silence. Then: ‘God.’

‘Don’t have a heart attack for me.’

Dia shook her head. Then for who else?

‘My mother asked me. I thought about it. And I decided, well, why not?’

Dia spat the pink fruity mass out and screamed, ‘Why not? Why not? Is that all you can say? Nini, who are you?’

Nissrine clicked her tongue. ‘I knew I’d get a lecture from you. That’s why I kept it to myself.’ She sighed and her voice softened. ‘I want more from life, Dia. I’m sick of being stuck in this house doing what I’ve always done. I want something different.’

‘Oh, Nini. Is any change better than none? What makes you think marrying a stranger will give you the kind you need?’

‘Don’t worry,’ she answered bitterly. ‘After what happened yesterday, his mother will probably rescind.’

‘I would never have gone if I’d known.’

‘I know. That’s another reason I didn’t tell you. I wanted you to see him, Dia. I wanted us to gossip. I knew we wouldn’t if you knew.’ She added dreamily, ‘Even after our marriage. If …’ Her voice trailed.

Dia paced, disgusted. Nini needed to be shaken back into her old skin. But it was as Nini said: now that Dia knew her intentions, she’d no idea what to do. Walk around Nini gingerly? How? They’d never been cautious around each other, ever.

Nini waited. Dia decided to use the strategy that had brought them together in the first place, when their math teacher paired them up to solve a sum, advising: ‘When in doubt, count your fingers.’

‘Let’s talk about the pros and cons, Nini,’ Dia spoke gently. ‘First the cons. One, you don’t know the boy. Two, his father’s just died. Three, he’s an only child. Four, he’s an only child and an only son. Five, he lives in America. Summary: he’s all his mother has, so she’ll be even more possessive of him than the usual mother-in-law. He’s having a blast far from her in America, probably living it up with women there, while a teeny tiny voice in his brain nags him of his duties to his Ami jaan and country. So, when he’s had his fun, to pacify his guilt, he’ll be ultra-protective of Ami jaan (who’ll symbolize the nation), and ultra-conservative with his wife (who’ll symbolize his authority in the nation). But mind you,’ her voice had risen uncontrollably. This was no good but she couldn’t help herself. ‘He’ll want to keep his American self alive too, just for fun. We all need good times, right? Now the pros.’ She paused. ‘You tell me the pros, Nini.’

The answer was sharp: ‘Have you ever used your delightful powers of analysis to find out why you’re so arrogant? You haven’t met him either, Dia, so your assumptions are just as unfounded as mine. Yes, many men are like that. But maybe, just maybe, he’s different. After all, you seem to think you’re different. Face it Dia, you need a man in your life too, and you won’t ever know if the one you pick is better than the one I do.’

Dia was stunned. It was not simply the hateful tone that stung like a physical blow. It was the knowledge that so many women fell into just this trap: arguing, or just plain fretting, about men. On the other hand, there was an unspoken agreement between men: Woman was not a topic worth mentioning, unless she aroused them sexually. But Man was a topic women devoured from every angle. Dia was certain this was the most obvious yet neglected reason for their disparate positions in society: time. Women spent it on men; men spent it on men.

And now here she was, spending close to two hours today, and several hours yesterday, cogitating emptily about one of them. Didn’t Nini see how silly this was? How typical? How dangerous?

She longed to stop the clock right here. ‘Please let’s not fight. You do what you want. I’m just sorry about yesterday.’

Nini waited. But Dia had nothing to add.

Outside, Pakistan took a wicket and Inam Gul stamped his feet. The screen cut to the milk ad again. The woman carried out the tea from the kitchen looking refreshed and jolly. The reason for her bouncing spirits was that she got to use the milk! The guests consumed the tea in record time. The camera focused on her husband who said, ‘Begum, chai?’ So she scurried back to the kitchen in ankle-wrenching stilettos, her gold bangles ringing with jubilation.

Dia thought: Nini should have auditioned for the role.

Then she ached with remorse again.

After a long pause, which Dia was terrified of breaking, Nini spoke. ‘You asked before if there was something you could do. Well, I’ve been thinking. If his mother decides not to revoke her proposal, well, your support still matters to me. So, will you be here when he visits with his mother? You’re still my sister, Dia. Still.’

Dia smacked her forehead in dismay. ‘Of course.’

In a tremulous whisper, Nini cooed, ‘My mother needs me to acquiesce. You’re lucky your mother doesn’t depend on you to give her life meaning.’ She hung up.

Receiver still in hand, Dia muttered, ‘Let’s hope your daughter is lucky like me.’

Moving to the front of the house, Dia bitterly wondered how many parents had shrunk their daughters’ worlds to fill their own. She stooped for her sandals, eager for the oasis that was her farm. While struggling with the buckle, she glanced up at the wall. The face that greeted her was her father’s. It was framed in ornate gold that was as false as the portrait. His painted jowls did not jiggle, his lordly mustache was reduced to a blanched apple peel, and his eyes seemed to have stepped into the wrong room, where a film about his life was in progress. The reel had gotten stuck right when he was being kidnapped so he’d no choice but to see the moment over and over again. His life was in the painter’s hands and every time she stood here, Dia wished to submit the painter to the same torture.

She hadn’t told anyone, not Nini, nor the cook, that the Quran Khwani yesterday had brought back painful memories. For forty days after her own father’s death, she’d sat like a statue in this house, and learned something valuable: some mourners came to grieve, others to collect gory details. Still others arrived to clutch the frozen Dia and shower her with pity, and yet more helplessness. ‘Allah malik hay. God decides.’ That was the message they’d pounded into her. You’ve no control over events. So why bother making anything of your life, little lady?

Yesterday, when she’d apologized to the widow and her son, she’d meant it.

The cook, who’d been snubbed by his favorite of the three children ever since she returned home yesterday, shuffled woefully toward her. ‘Have you forgiven me yet, my child?’ He stood below the portrait.

‘Oh, Inam Gul, it wasn’t your fault.’

He stroked her head. ‘Then come, let’s watch TV.’

‘The mood’s gone.’

His nose tried to smell the air. ‘What does Nissrine Bibi say?’

‘Have you been eavesdropping again?’

‘No!’ He stared in horror.

‘Then how did you know who I was talking to?’ She watched happily while his lips curved around toothless gums. He seemed to miss his teeth most when cornered. ‘Don’t worry. I have very few secrets. But I’ll tell you Nini’s.’ The cook’s eyes popped with anticipation. ‘She wants to marry that boy she took me to see yesterday.’

‘Oh ho, what a clever girl!’ His head bobbed loosely from side to side.

‘She’s a fool, Inam Gul, don’t you forget it.’ He changed his expression likewise. ‘I’m going to the farm now, to forget about people for a while. If anyone calls for me, tell them I’m in my cocoon and won’t come out for weeks.’

‘Toba toba.’ He tugged his earlobes, but knew better than to argue with Dia.




2 Numbers (#ulink_79b680a0-28d1-5899-a68d-82314d9d219d)


For most of the drive, the land was stripped and parched, dotted with occasional bands of drooping mesquite. The route led straight to the mighty Indus, about 100km east. Riverbeds ought to teem with life, thought Dia, each time she passed through here. Especially a riverbed as old as this. But except for a kingfisher poised regally on a wire, hinting at the proximity to water, there was no evidence of the fabled grandeur of the Indus. Only books and old men like Inam Gul told of princesses like Sassi, dwelling in the glorious lakhy bagh on the banks of the river, surrounded by music, fountains and burnished horses.

Dia herself hadn’t traveled all the way to the river for years. Now its banks teemed not with Sassi’s pavilions, but with some of the nation’s deadliest gangs.

She rode between two armed escorts. Both had greasy pockmarked skin, filthy fingernails and wasp waists. They handled their Kalashnikovs the way nearly all of the city’s convoys did – muzzle pointing not up but back, at the following vehicle. Sometimes, one of the two would give his shoulder a rest and lay the weapon on his lap, with the muzzle at her. In the last five years she often wondered which was the greater risk – going with or without them. She was never permitted to know. It was believed her father had been kidnapped on this stretch.

Three rumors spread after the murder. One: it involved the synthetic dye company that had lost its contract. Two: it involved the cocoon importers who’d lost theirs. Three: the killers were fools to target the man and not his wife.

The sericulture project had been entirely Riffat Mansoor’s. It was she who introduced a silk line in their textile mill, and she who questioned the wisdom of importing the seeds when silkworms could be bred at home. The climate suited the growth of mulberries, the food of the insect, and she owned a large plot of land near Thatta on which to cultivate the trees.

Dia’s childhood was spent shuttling from farm to factory, the one an enchanted semi-tropical paradise, the other a whirlwind of equally enchanting activity. At the mill, she’d walk wide-eyed around the workshops where thread was woven into sheets of shimmering white cloth, dyed in cauldrons of bubbling color, and painted into breathtaking designs. Back at the farm, she danced between the trees, gay with her own version of things. The irrigation canals were the boiling cauldrons. The twigs her reel. She unraveled her cotton dress into a skein of thread, and twisted these over the reel, till a pattern spread. She dipped it in the canal, and tossed it up to dry. It billowed down softly, a puff of her breath. She wore the breath around the farm, and everyone swore they’d never seen a finer silk.

It had taken her mother’s vigor to make the project work but eventually, after several false starts, fifteen acres of mulberry trees successfully yielded the sixty tons of leaves required to feed the one and a half million silkworms needed to produce roughly nine hundred pounds of raw silk. Riffat’s fully self-sufficient side business gave the mill, already successful in cotton, an added allure. Throughout Karachi, women swore only by Mansoor Mills.

Dia was ten years old by the time her mother’s project was a nationally conceded achievement. Her fellow-schoolgirls regarded her as queerly as men and women regarded her mother. Nissrine told Dia that people snickered about Riffat’s appetite being as voracious as the caterpillars she bred – only it wasn’t leafy greens she was after. Her husband may have given her free reign of his business, but could he satisfy her at home, in the bedroom, when she came out of her cocoon?

Dia shut her eyes and leaned back in the car seat, simmering at the gossip.

But when she recalled her parents together, the picture was no consolation. They spoke to each other only about work or children. Dia had never seen Riffat glow or throw back her head and laugh her beautiful, silvery laugh around her husband. The two never touched. They barely even argued. They were business partners, not lovers. Yet, her father wanted Dia to read him stories full of promises of eternal love, of Sassi waiting on the banks of the Indus for her lover’s ship to roll in. Stories of earthly tragedy, but with attainment in the afterlife.

Dia opened her eyes again with a start when she realized her slouching position pressed her further into the guards. She sat up. Her back was beginning to ache, as it always did by this time in the drive. They hadn’t even gone halfway. The land outside was still thirsty and desolate. Not even a kingfisher in sight. She smelled the sweat of the guards. They could probably smell hers. She tried not to wonder if this aroused them.

Whatever transpired between them, her parents became the topic of even more gossip when Riffat decided to discard chemical dyes. They were expensive, hazardous, and not even colorfast. Though organic dying was a method none of the other factories relied on, it had once flourished in the subcontinent. There was evidence enough to support this. Three-thousand-year-old madder-dyed cloth and indigo vats had been excavated in Moenjodaro, barely 300km north of where Dia rode in the car now. The technique seemed right outside Riffat’s doorstep, and had been for centuries. Could it really be lost?

She discovered most colors could be obtained from plants easily grown here. She also learned which part of each plant needed to be harvested, how long this took, and what color it would give. Turmeric and myrobalan produced yellow; henna, madder, and pomegranate red; indigo blue; tamarind and onion black; chikoo brown. So she reserved the remaining five acres of the farmland for cultivating the crops.

Within two years, they yielded consistently and the contract with the dye company was annulled. They began receiving angry telephone calls.

Riffat grew tense. Her temper ran high. The family ceased piling into their Toyota Corolla for weekends at the farm. Her parents went from rarely speaking, to frequently fighting. And still the phone kept ringing. And more customers pledged loyalty to the mill.

On the night before his death, her father climbed up the mulberry tree planted when she was born. Why? Was it to turn back the clock and have her that small in his arms again, back before the threatening phone calls and gossip about his wife?

Dia had huddled indoors, petted by the cook, while her brothers argued with the crowd outside and her mother, for the first time in her life, stood frozen with shock. Her husband cowered in the foliage like a child, while the world laughed. But then at some point in the middle of the night, he must have climbed down and left the house before anyone awoke. He was never seen alive again.

The cook maintained that the answer to her father’s death lay in nothing as obvious as an angry minister with shares in a severed company. According to Inam Gul, Dia’s father was simply unlucky. He was in the way. The province was seething with free-flowing anger. Probably, the killers had known absolutely nothing about him. He was a random target, or a victim of crossfire. There were hundreds of such deaths in Sindh that year. There was no reason for it besides the will of Allah. The same will that had made killers out of some and gentle, caring folk like her father out of others.

But Dia could not accept that the death had been mere fluke – a simple detour. It pained to think that if it hadn’t been his battered and bruised body, it would have been someone else’s. This meant that even when alive, he’d been nothing but a mere number. And so was she. And Nini and Inam Gul. Everybody.




3 Life at the Farm (#ulink_69fcc6d5-d909-5618-b466-2ee1d1b7c328)


A quartet of armed guards paced the farm’s exterior. The boundary wall extended into five rungs of barbed wire. The iron gate was topped by a plethora of slender spikes pointing up at the grayish-yellow sky. Inside the gate sat two more guards, but unlike her private escorts and the sentinels outside, these two were draped in soussi lungis from the mill. The cloth was dyed indigo and mint and shimmered like cock feathers in the sun. Together, they formed a friendly duo: they were two of Inam Gul’s three sons.

Their bare arms and torsos glistened with sweat and the lungis wrapped them so tightly she could see the contours of their very different body types. On Shan, boyish and slight, the cloth rippled around the curves of a small tight bottom. But on Hamid, it hugged a pair of bulky thighs. She noted also his solid, wrestler-like gut. He would have been very handy with a pair of oars on a stormy night at sea.

The cook and his family had come into Dia’s household two years before her father left it. They’d moved to Thatta from their village, driven out by the trawlers that invaded the local fishermen’s zone. Mr Mansoor had seen Inam Gul’s family outside the tombs of Makli Hill, close to the farm, and offered them work here.

As Dia entered the grounds, the two sons lowered their Kalashnikovs to let her through. ‘How is everything?’ she piped, relieved to stretch her legs and be in congenial company again.

‘We’ll have to see,’ said Hamid. ‘Sumbul says there are fewer good cocoons than last year.’

‘And that was worse than the year before,’ Dia sighed.

The yield of leaves had peaked at sixty tons when she was a child. But in the last three years, due to the increasing water shortage, this had begun to drop startlingly. A reduced diet meant larvae either never reached the cocoon-stage, or that the cocoons were thin-shelled, too small, or pierced, resulting in poor quality threads.

The water channels tinkled melodically, reminding Dia, with each drop, how much depended on them. In the stifling, pre-monsoon heat of May she fanned her face with a corner of her dupatta and hoped the year would be a wet one.

Leaving the guards, she took her time strolling between the rows of mulberry trees, carefully planted eighteen feet apart. Ahead of her fluttered a pair of black swallowtail butterflies. They chased each other, landed on a twig, and mated, tail to tail, resembling a single creature with two heads and four wings. The male must have overpowered her with his scent, she mused. In moths, it was the female that produced the aphrodisiac. It could be so powerful that immediately upon her emergence from a cocoon, if a male hovered nearby, she’d lure him. She’d have sex at birth. Dia had tried many times to witness this, but in all her trips to the farm, never succeeded. This season, she was determined to.

She crossed over to the shed. From the outside, it resembled a greenhouse: low-lying and flat-roofed. Adjacent to it was a two-room shack. From here came Sumbul, Inam Gul’s tall, languid daughter and the farm’s most valued worker. A lilac kameez offset her smooth, nut-brown skin, and she looked like a jacaranda tree in bloom. Approaching Dia Sumbul swayed, carrying a baby on her hip and a clipboard in her right hand.

‘Salaam Baji,’ Sumbul greeted her.

‘Waalai-kum-asalaam.’

‘How is Aba?’

‘Oh fine,’ answered Dia. ‘Mischievous as ever. He sends his love. How’s your husband? Is everything okay at home?’

Sumbul smiled, tugging the braid that had slipped over her shoulder. It was so long and thick she’d twisted it in a U-turn. ‘His mother’s gone back to our village for a few weeks. Things are better. But,’ she looked away, ‘I think a fifth is on the way.’

Dia sucked in her breath; Sumbul was only her age. ‘And you still don’t want Ama to give you pills?’

‘What if he finds out?’

‘Keep them here, at the farm. He’ll never know.’

Sumbul sighed, adjusting the baby to her other side. ‘No, Baji.’

Dia shook her head but said nothing; the choice was Sumbul’s.

Together they entered the shed.

The interior was hot and humid, fanned with a continuous stream of fresh air. It was divided into four sections. The first, empty during this season, would soon hold the eggs laid by the current batch. In the second room was a long table with trays of wriggling larvae feeding on finely chopped mulberry leaves. Dia walked past the trays, greeting the women who tended the maggots. As in the days of the Chinese Empress, now too silkworms were bred by women. With the exception of the gardeners and the security guards, the farm was entirely run by them, which was why they were allowed to work at all.

When they first started, the sight of the larvae had made the workers squirm. Touching had been out of the question. But now the insects were handled as mechanically as braids and babies; sliding a handful down the shirt of any farm worker would never produce the effect it had on Nini. Despite herself, Dia smiled.

Sumbul, guessing the reason correctly, asked how the plan had worked.

‘Well, unfortunately Nini overreacted. She has marriage on the brain.’

‘Marriage?’ Sumbul adjusted the baby again. ‘Well it’s no surprise, is it? Nissrine is so beautiful!’

‘Is it her beauty that’s made her change? She doesn’t even know the boy she’s after.’

‘Most women don’t,’ replied Sumbul. ‘Inshallah, she can make it work.’

But why should she?





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