“A heart was found here yesterday, uncle-ji,” the girl tells him — she has obviously decided to believe her lover and trust Shamas, understanding that he is not the kind of adult who would report this sighting to others and make trouble for the pair. “About half a mile in that direction, beyond the pine trees. There were detectives everywhere. We came just out of curiosity. .”
“A human heart,” says the boy. “Some children went home talking of something they called a ‘beat box.’ The parents called the police.”
Shamas looks at them without understanding what he is being told. A heart? The lovers stand facing him, still as if painted in a picture, though the fronds of the bracken they had walked through are still moving from that disturbance as though ghosts are passing through. His words, when he speaks, come out ragged from the throat that has remained unused for a while: “Whose heart was it?” Chanda’s? Jugnu’s? He hears himself give out a small cry. A wren on a tree that overhangs the boulders has been watching Shamas and now flies away with a shrill whistle. He turns and begins to walk away.
The soft distortion of tiredness polluting his blood, Shamas moves under the high nave formed by the pine trees, the trees occasionally shaking drops of yesterday’s rain onto him, the clusters of needles dripping like saturated paintbrushes, producing a mud thick as mayonnaise. No, it can’t be Jugnu’s heart or Chanda’s, he tells himself as he hurries, his breathing settling somewhat.
He is embarrassed by the manner of his departure from the two lovers, and looks back to see if he can locate them. In love with a Hindu, she was married off against her will to a cousin brought over from Pakistan, but the couple divorced because she remained distant from him — the cousin moved out as soon as he got his British nationality, no longer having to put up with her. Though she was still young, no one was willing to marry a girl who was not a virgin—“Why not marry a blue-eyed English blonde if virginity is not an issue?”—and the parents could only find an older man for her, who, it has now turned out, has three other wives: one is under the British and also the Islamic law, the other three are under Islamic law only. He wants a son but they keep producing girls, so he has married again and again. The fertility clinics run by Pakistani doctors often place advertisements in the Urdu newspapers, saying, We tell you the sex of the foetus while you wait; this is innocent-seeming, yes, but Shamas knows what message is being conveyed—so that if it’s female you may have it aborted quickly. He wonders if the husband of this particular girl has used these services.
Shamas gives a final glance in search of the lovers but they are nowhere to be seen. When her mother discovered that she had refused to consummate the marriage with her cousin after sharing a bed for almost a week, she took the bridegroom aside and told him in a whisper,
“Rape her tonight.”
He goes past Kiran’s house. The sight of the young girl’s flesh — the soft brown body, bright in the sunlight, glimpsed in sections — is hard to shake off. There have been times over the past few years when he has found himself visiting Kiran and her invalid father, but each time he has known— the guilt lying heavy as lead on his thoughts — that he had set out in that direction with the initial intention of encountering and, perhaps, beginning a conversation with, the prostitute who lives next door.
SPRING
THE MADONNAS
Mah-Jabin’s train, bringing her to Dasht-e-Tanhaii, passes through tunnel after tunnel like a needle picking up beads to thread a rosary. Their number increases as the valley draws near and the ground corrugates to resemble a tempest on land, heaving, convulsing, the troughs deeper with each turn of the rails, the peaks higher in each new view.
And as the air caught between the stiffened waves pours into the compartment — filling it to the brim with England’s warm April — a moth the size and shape of the cursor arrow on a computer screen also enters, to loop and spiral against the window.
She’ll be twenty-seven this year and lives and works in London, divorced from the first cousin she had gone to Pakistan to marry at sixteen, living with him in the pale-green house in Sohni Dharti. Her decision to divorce him had devastated — and enraged — her mother. The two-year marriage is strange to her as though someone is telling her a story.
Kaukab submerges the apples one at a time in the basin of water, rubbing each with her hands to polish away a breach in the slight greasiness on the peel, and then works her way around the fruit until she meets the whistling clean beginning.
The orb of the bunched-up tissue paper in which Mah-Jabin has brought Madonna lilies is continuing to rustle as it expands and opens complicatedly inside the bin out of which dead tulips lean like necks of drunk swans, limp. The Madonnas have replaced them in the glass vase; the shrivelling and the separation of petals that had come to the tulips in drying out has made each cup resemble a live honeysuckle blossom, in size and shape.
“Did you get the flowers I sent you on your birthday, Mother?”
The apples have already begun to yield their fragrance to the warmth in the room, soft and lazy — smoky autumn days. “Yes. They lasted two whole weeks.”
She brings a knife to Mah-Jabin, seeing that she is holding an apple. “Is that how white girls are wearing their hair these days?” Outside, the sun suddenly slips out of a gash in the clouds and lights up the room like magnesium detonated.
Mah-Jabin squints and returns the apple to its hexagonal space among the others, accepts the knife, and gestures with it at the peppers — red as birth — lying on the draining board. “I just felt like a change.” The cutting off is quite recent, and she still finds yard-long strands clinging to the clothes she hasn’t worn for a while.
“It was nearly eighteen-years’ worth of growth.” Kaukab’s lips assume a smile, fixed, as a smiling statue would continue to smile regardless of the violence which might be done to the rest of its face or body. “Eighteen years.”
All the more reason, Mah-Jabin thinks but doesn’t say. Calmly, the blade cuts through the pepper with a hollow sound, creating red hoops that would acquire a wax-like transparency on cooking.
Kaukab nods to postpone the subject, for now. “I saw the peppers by chance yesterday. From Spain, I think. At this time of the year they are the size of tulips so I had to get these big ones when I saw them. A little expensive, but,”—and here she examines the girl’s face for signs of forgetting— “you know your father likes them.”
With the back of her fingers she touches the silk Mah-Jabin has brought her — the green of the dome on Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) mausoleum in sacred Medina — for her to sew a kameez for herself, and which she has rejected because she would not be able to say her prayers in it: it is patterned with butterflies and Islam forbids pictures of living things.
“It is a pity about this,” she says. “Perhaps I could make you a kameez of this, but you probably don’t wear Pakistani clothes these days.” The words are spoken with the back turned; the listener is being tested, to see if she can guess what expression of the face accompanies the words, as a lover would suddenly close both eyes and demand to know what colour they are: the right answer would be a proof of love.