After five years in England, he returned to Sohni Dharti in 1963 and married Kaukab, doing all he could to catch a glimpse of her after the negotiations had begun, and succeeding finally when he knocked on her window one monsoon afternoon to ask for the literary pages of the newspaper. When he learned that he was to be a father, he decided to go back to England, having failed to gain meaningful employment since his return to Pakistan. He was back in England at the beginning of 1965, and Kaukab joined him at the end of that year, wearing a long chocolate-brown coat he had sent her from here, and carrying the baby Charag in her arms.
Shamas was working in a factory and that was when the word of his father’s past reached him. It was 1970. Shamas did not return for a visit until the following year when news came that Chakor was dying of pancreatic cancer.
And as death drew near he became delirious, asking Mahtaab to promise she would cremate him on logs of the flame-of-the-forest tree, like a Hindu, instead of burying him in the ground like a Muslim.
Difficulties had arisen soon after the identity became known but the letters to Shamas had hidden the news of this harassment. He would learn later that a shopkeeper whose hand had accidentally brushed against Chakor’s had immediately washed it, saying, “I wouldn’t touch a Hindu even with a meat hook.” Women began to send back the rose essence Mahtaab sold — in bottles the size and shape of a bicycle’s light-generator — claiming it was contaminated with onion. Things were made difficult for him at The First Children on the Moon until he had no alternative but to resign; the “Encyclopaedia Pakistanica” series was seen by some to be nothing more than his excuse for publishing detailed maps of Pakistani towns and cities which the Indians could use during war — a war with India being always a possibility, the most recent only five years ago, when, to distract the attention of the public who had become disaffected following that election back in 1964, the government had sent the army into Kashmir, and India had retaliated by crossing the border into Lahore.
An Indian Hindu scholar claimed that Anarkali, Pomegranate Blossom — the servant girl with whom the Muslim prince Saleem had fallen in love, and whom Saleem’s father the Emperor Akbar had had buried alive as a result in 1599—was not a girl at all, but, in fact, a boy, a fact the Muslim historians of the Mughul era had suppressed till now: the claim was published in Pakistani newspapers and Chakor was manhandled in the street that week and told that the Hindu gods were “pretty boys,” what with their rouged cheeks and lipsticked mouths.
The cancer of the pancreas was in the last stage when it was diagnosed, and as death drew near, Chakor’s raving became constant, wanting cremation instead of burial. Fearful that Mahtaab might act upon the words of a dying man out of his mind with pain, Kaukab had sent Shamas to Pakistan:
“I want you to go there and see that what needs to be done is done.” She pointed to the one-year-old daughter, Mah-Jabin: “No one will marry her if your mother-ji does what he is asking. She herself never had any daughters so she doesn’t realize how important it is to remain on the good side of society. But you do have a daughter now, and must place her before everybody else. A scandal like that would do irreparable damage to her chances.”
It was November 1971, and the West Pakistani army had been in East Pakistan since March, spreading death and destruction: the general election last December had been won by an East Pakistani leader and the West Pakistani powers had refused to allow him to form the government, sending in the soldiers to suppress the unrest that followed. These soldiers had been told that the East Pakistanis were an inferior race — short, dark, weak, and still infected with Hinduism — and junior and senior officers alike had spoken of seeking in the course of the military campaign to improve the genes of the East Pakistanis: women and girls were raped in their hundreds of thousands. On the day in December that Chakor vomited dark-brown half-digested blood, grainy like sand — the aorta had ruptured and spilled its contents into the stomach so that now his body was consuming itself — the Indian army moved into East Pakistan, and Pakistan surrendered after a two-week long war: East Pakistan was now Bangladesh — India had not only defeated Pakistan, it had helped cut it in two.
At night Shamas would sit beside Chakor, the basket of bloody rags set by his chair leg. Sometimes the twenty-four-year-old Jugnu would be there with them, back from the Soviet Union.
The harsinghar tree in the courtyard, which dropped its funereal white flowers at dawn, had more flowers than usual under it during those mornings, as though the branches had been disturbed during the night. Shamas was no believer, but imagination insists that all aspects of life be at its disposal, the language of thought richer for its appropriation of concepts such as the afterlife. And so as he looked at the carpet of blossoms he couldn’t help entertaining the thought that during the night Izraeel, the Muslim angel of death, had wrestled in the branches above with the Hindu god of death for our father’s soul. Shamas looked up and imagined the branches twisting around the two supernatural beings, the flowers detaching from twigs and forming a thick layer on the ground.
The excessively heavy drop of blossoms was caused in fact by Mahtaab, who had lately taken to chewing the harsinghar foliage: the betel leaves, which were her lifelong addiction, and without which it was impossible for her digestive system to function, grew mainly in East Pakistan, and when their price went up at the beginning of the civil war she had reduced her intake to just a two-inch section at dawn; but now that East Pakistan was another country, the supply of betel had stopped altogether, and while a few people had given up the habit as a patriotic gesture, all over Sohni Dharti men and women were experimenting with any leaf they came across in case it resembled the betel in bitterness and flavour.
“I am sure the government is happy at last,” Mahtaab had said, “now that it has turned us all into donkeys.”
Both Shamas and Jugnu had smiled but their elder brother had taken exception to the comment. He had become increasingly religious in his forties and the news that his father was a Hindu had devastated him. He had accused the man of betraying them all by concealing the secret from them, prolonging the sin he was committing by living with a Muslim woman.
As a young man he occasionally attended the mosque run by Kaukab’s father, his attendance increasing when he fell in love with Kaukab’s young aunt who lived with the cleric’s family beside the mosque. He hoped to catch a glimpse of her each time he went to pray: she was often at a high window overlooking the prayer hall — waiting to catch sight of him, surely? And through his piety he hoped to be seen in favourable light by Kaukab’s father, hoping that one day he would think him an appropriate match for his sister. When he heard that the young woman was soon to be married off to the man to whom she had been betrothed at birth, he was heart-broken and stopped going to that mosque, attending instead another one, one operated along a more strict interpretation of Islam. It was here that he would meet the people who would eventually lead him towards the austere and volatile form of the faith that was alien to his parents and brothers.