She hasn’t revealed this fact to anyone, not even Shamas.
Her telephone call was probably why the pair had returned to England earlier than expected: they had been asked to leave. They came back to England and. . disappeared.
Kaukab’s anger and distress were beginning to subside somewhat as the time drew closer for the couple’s expected return. But the day of the expected arrival passed. And then another, and another. . When the police eventually forced their way into the house, the passports revealed that the couple had come back to England thirteen days earlier. A peacock and a peahen burst out of a room and escaped to the freedom of the street — this would eventually lead to the talk that Chanda and Jugnu had been transformed into a pair of peacocks. The corpse of another peacock was found in one of the downstairs rooms, the injuries revealing that it had been pecked to death by the other two. A dozen-strong flock of peacocks had appeared in the neighbourhood a fortnight or so previously: they had escaped from the menagerie of a stately home on the other side of the lake, and they would be rounded up eventually — the foliage falling from the trees in the coming months of autumn meaning that they would have no groves or clusters of bushes to hide in. For the time being, however, no one could tell where they were from. They roamed the streets, scratched the paintwork of the cars and attacked the cats and sparrows. How three members of the flock had managed to enter Jugnu’s house and how long they had been in there could not be determined. There were sweeps on the dust on the floors, made by the males’ tail-feathers. On a white plate on the dinner table there was a puddle of urine the pale-green colour of gripe water. The hen had laid an egg in one of the open suitcases that lay on the bed upstairs.
Jugnu had put up a framed photograph of a peacock on one wall and for a moment it was as though the live peacock had left its reflection in a mirror in the house.
She finishes her tea and says, “I am soaking some rice for you to eat with the masar this evening. I’ll have to make chappatis for myself because there is a little dough left over from Friday and it’ll spoil if not used today.”
“Won’t it keep until tomorrow? The weather is cold enough,” Shamas says quietly; it could almost be a thought being passed into her head from his.
“Perhaps you should have chappatis also. You had rice last night too and it’s bad for the bones two days in a row, especially in this cold country.” She pauses, waiting for him to dreamily say that now that he has reached the year of his retirement they would soon move back to the hot climate of Sohni Dharti, as they had planned decades ago. They have discussed the matter several times over the past few months and each time she has told him he would have to leave without her — she would remain in hated England because her children are here.
“If only Jugnu was here, there would be no leftovers—” She stops, having got carried away with her thoughts, and looks at Shamas, but he doesn’t react. Quietly she turns to the work at hand, and sighs:
Dear Allah, if only things had gone another way. Only the other day the matchmaker was talking about one of the young women she had suggested for Jugnu all those years ago, someone called Suraya, who has now been divorced by her drunk husband and is now looking for someone to marry temporarily. Kaukab shakes her head: she doesn’t remember who that woman was, but if only Jugnu had married her the poor woman wouldn’t be in this predicament, and he himself wouldn’t now be missing. Instead, he took up with white women. Kaukab knew that the few nights a week that he spent away from home were spent in the arms of one of his white girlfriends. Kaukab lived in fear of such contemptible and unforgivable behaviour rubbing off on her three children, but there was nothing she could do. He was discreet and she liked him for that — he was secretly colluding with her, preventing her children from seeing immoral conduct.
Years passed and then one day a little boy stopped her in the street and asked her whether it was true that Jugnu’s “place of urine” was also glow-in-the-dark like his hands. She puts the boy’s obscenity and impertinence down to the corrupting influence of Western society, but within hours she learned what some of the neighbourhood’s adults had known for about a week and its children for about a fortnight. A group of boys had peeped into the upstairs bedroom of Jugnu’s house — where the cage containing the female Great Peacock moth had swayed one night with the passionate wing beats of the male velvet clinging to the wires, the bedroom papered with twisted leaves and indigo berries. Those children had dimly seen the two secret lovers in bed, the light from his hands illuminating her skin.
And, just as the king of Samarkand had come upon his wife locked in the embrace of a kitchen boy and set into motion the Thousand and One Nights, what the five young boys espied through the window that afternoon — when they climbed up to the boughs of the purple beech to bring down a kite — became the starting point of another set of tales.
The children told them to each other, adding and subtracting this or that detail, and it eventually reached the adults’ realm. Kaukab was on her way into town when the boy had stopped her to ask about the light-giving properties of Jugnu’s manhood; coming back from the town centre the bus was crowded so she had to sit next to the white woman who had burnt her Muslim husband’s Koran, but when a few stops later a seat next to a Gujarati woman became vacant, she had moved. The Gujratan gave her the news that Chanda and Jugnu were lovers.
She waited for Jugnu to come home from work that night. “I may only be a woman and not as educated as you, but I won’t stand by and let you damage further that already-damaged girl. Have you considered the consequences for her when her family finds out about this? You men can do anything you want but it’s different for us women. Who will marry her again when people find out that she has been engaging in intercourse with men she’s not married to?”
Chanda moved in with Jugnu a few days after that.
Over the coming weeks Kaukab began to time her trips outdoors in order to avoid the girl, because that was what Chanda was, a girl. Instead of the drawstring that adults use, she used elastic in the waistband of her shalwar; Kaukab could see her clothes hanging out on the washing line between two of the five apple trees. She sensed the girl’s own reluctance to let her gaze meet hers.
And it was by that washing line that Kaukab, having crossed over into the adjoining garden, had eventually told the girl to move out of Jugnu’s house.
Chanda tried to pull her arm back but Kaukab tightened her hold: “If truly offered, repentance is honoured even on one’s deathbed and wipes out a lifetime’s worth of sins to deliver the sinner into Paradise along with those who led virtuous lives. Only on the day that the sun would rise out of the west, the Judgement Day, would the gates of forgiveness be barred shut.”
The girl freed her arm with a jerk, her green eyes igniting. “There is no alternative. He says he’ll marry me but I am not divorced and my husband cannot be located.” She flicked the dripping muhaish-work kameez back on the line — like flipping a giant page — and went back into the house, but not before stopping at the doorstep to say to Kaukab: “We love each other deeply and honestly.”
Kaukab had looked her directly in the eyes: “I care about what it is, yes, but also about what it looks like.”
“And I care only about what it is.”
It was Kaukab’s first and last conversation with Jugnu’s lover. His own visits to the house were already dwindling. It was a sin to offer food to a fornicator, and Kaukab — the daughter of a cleric, born and raised in the shadow of a minaret — stopped soaking that third glassful of rice and peeled two aubergines instead of three. And then on a July afternoon heady with the pine-soup heat of the lake, Jugnu and Chanda left for Pakistan for four weeks, and Kaukab busied herself with trying to arrange a marriage for Charag.