Mah-Jabin was allowed to wear “Western” clothes to school but only if they mirrored shalwar-kameez in cut and style: the shirts had to be long-tailed and had to remain untucked whenever she wore trousers. Aswirl with pleats like the ghagras of Pakistani desert women, and because it was floor-length, a skirt had been allowed her once, though skirts on the whole were forbidden because they were an easy-access garment. When someone they met at a wedding ceremony was considered “skimpily dressed” by Kaukab, Mah-Jabin had said, “She was wearing a sari! Six and a half yards of fabric.” “The number of yards in itself is immaterial when it comes to modesty,” had been Kaukab’s response. And so she intercepted the secret codes and signals before they could be transmitted and understood. She saw it all as cats’ eyes see in the dark. Despite the fact that Mah-Jabin said she had lost the receipt, she was made to return to the shops a blue sweater that had a broad paler stripe running from armpit to armpit, calling attention to the chest.
Mah-Jabin — chalk-green suede trainers at one end and an uncovered head at the other, black trousers gently fluted at the ankles, and a dazzling purple-collared shirt made out of a marigold sari fabric — brings the plateful of pepper rings flecked with ivory seeds to Kaukab. “I once cooked myself a meal of what my friends at university were about to throw away — the stalks of the peppers, the seeded heart. They were astonished, but you’ve taught me well.” She is afraid of sounding casual about her new familiarities, anxious not to hurt Kaukab by presenting herself to her in any capacity other than a daughter, her daughter. There is so much outside the house that may not be brought into the house, and the mother is quick to construe any voicing of opinion or expression of independent thought by the girl as a direct challenge to her authority.
After almost twenty years of doing without, Kaukab had found a friend when Mah-Jabin reached puberty. “My Allah,” she would say, biting the corner of her veil to stopper her laughter, “I didn’t tell even my mother or mother-in-law half the things you’ve coaxed out of me, you wretch. How can you ask me what was the first thing your father said to me on our wedding night? Have some shame.” They could discuss and dissect anything with ease once Kaukab’s feeble protests against her impropriety had died down.
Mah-Jabin would ask questions about Grandfather Chakor: she wondered why it was not considered strange by the other Muslims at the shrine that the little boy in their midst was uncircumcised, as he must have been because he was born a Hindu. Kaukab explained that during those early days of the century, when disease and infection were rampant, it wasn’t uncommon to find a Muslim boy of that age with his foreskin intact because he was deemed too weak from the smallpox he had caught last year and the typhoid of the year before, and then the cholera the following year would cause yet another postponement: “They circumcised him at that shrine he found himself in, and that was that. In Sohni Dharti there was a twelve-year-old in my time whose mother had eight other children and therefore had never had the time: afterwards he walked around with a hole in the front of his shorts like an elephant in a balaclava, and what am I doing talking to you — and that too of such matters! — when I should be doing something about the bottom of the washing basket where the less-urgent bits and pieces have been lying undisturbed for weeks like an invitation to centipedes and silverfish.”
Once, during a disagreement, Mah-Jabin had shouted, “And don’t come running to me the next time those sons of yours upset you or Father says something you consider contrary to Islam”: these three had been within earshot and Kaukab’s eyes had boiled over with tears at the shock and humiliation of the betrayal.
The kettle shrieks like a squeaky toy caught underfoot, and Kaukab takes two cups from the six hanging at regular intervals from the hooks at the edge of the shelf, like ripe pears on a branch, or an arrangement of bells. “I usually cook in the evening when your father gets home — he doesn’t like reheated food — but today we’ll cook now. I remember when I was a girl my mother used to say that when it comes to food a woman should neither end something nor begin it: meaning, she must never take the last of something in case someone else needs it, and she must never take the first helping or cook something especially for herself because it indicates an indecent lack of restraint. But these ideas are considered old- fashioned now. People are different these days.” She brings Mah-Jabin the cup the colour of a lotus bloom.
“Mother, I think we should cook at six o’clock, but since I left without breakfast this morning, and it was such a long journey, I would like to eat something for lunch — a sandwich perhaps.” She takes the tea and catches again the scent her mother is wearing and which she had caught earlier, on arrival, in a pocket of air above the garden gate: by it she had known that her mother was outside only moments earlier, either leaving the house or returning.
“I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind: let’s have the peppers and chappatis now.” Kaukab opens the door to the back garden, propping it in place with the lobster-buoy from Maine, and suddenly heat-veined air is being breathed into the kitchen.
Hugging the narrow lane that is full of moist shadow and that lies between garden and slope, the blue-and-pink trickle of the stream will dry to brilliant-white stones by midsummer. It flows from right to left like Urdu.
“You make the chappatis, Mother, and I’ll do the peppers. How shall I cook them?” She can already sense the pleasure of the flame-cored spices on her tastebuds like atoms dancing in a reactor, but her mother’s reply sears her heart:
“Whichever way you cook them at university.”
Kaukab stands facing the back garden, the green grass that only a month ago was the orangey-gold of the foil that orange-flavoured chocolate bars come wrapped in, listening to the stream’s mother-tongue that is constant in the house like the babble of blood in a human ear. When she arrived in England all those years ago she had thought the reason this country lacked blossom-headed parakeets, lorikeets, mynahs and bee-eaters was that its inhabitants did not plant the correct trees and vines in their gardens, did not know that acacias were needed to coax weaverbirds out of the skies, that grapevines were required for golden orioles, that rose-ringed parakeets had a penchant for mangoes and jamun. She knew that paradise flycatchers were heartbroken when coral trees were cut down and that the tiny sunbird would quarrel with a butterfly to feed on the lustrous hibiscus bloom that dwarfs them both.
And so she had written back home to ask for seeds, and seedlings and cuttings, none of which had flourished here, leaving the hoopoes and the blue-jays and the red-vented bulbuls circling above the clouds of England for want of somewhere to perch, and later she had wondered whether this country’s soil itself hadn’t been responsible for the failures and contemplated requesting sacks of Pakistani soil which was hospitable to everything as the century-old public parks and gardens of Lahore — planned and opened during colonial times — were said to testify, containing as they did every plant from every country the British had ever ruled. This land is warmer now however, and she knows someone not far away on Benazir Bhutto Road who had raised a banana tree successfully, though it never survived the denuding it suffered when — soon after a television programme on Madrasi cooking was aired — some schoolgirls followed the recipes and decided to eat their dosas off banana leaves for added South Indian authenticity.
Mah-Jabin rises, stretches her body until she feels the spine pulled taut as an iron chain, goes to rinse her cup and hangs it from its empty hook. She notices that there is a dead moth like a pinch of powdered gold in one of the other cups (undiscovered by her mother because there has been no occasion to use all six for a while?), and now recalls seeing, earlier, on the curtain close to where the vase is set, the stale discoloured pollen from the Madonna lilies she had sent Kaukab for her birthday.