Kaukab continues to weep. “I am sure none of you will come to pray on my grave when I am dead. Sometimes I become so frightened that nobody would ask Him to have mercy on my soul.”
The porous white steam above the pan begins to turn into black smoke. Kaukab swallows her trembles neatly and rapidly back into her body, loosens Mah-Jabin’s grip from her stomach and pushes her away to give herself space. “You are going to have to check for salt again,” she attempts a smile that comes out grotesque in the chaffed face, “because my tears have fallen in.”
Mah-Jabin smiles weakly and, looking for a diversion, says after a silence, “Mother, the hair on the back of your neck is completely grey. Why don’t you dye it properly?” It is like a patch on the fur of a cat.
“Is it obvious?” Kaukab says after a while, twisting her neck as though a glimpse of the back of the head is achievable. “The white people on the street must think we ‘fucking Pakis’ are ridiculous, don’t know how to do anything right. Your father has stopped colouring his hair, you see. Before, we used to do each other’s on the same day but now I do mine myself, not wishing to trouble him or get stains on his hands. . I hope this food isn’t spoiled. . So do you think the hair looks strange? Really? But it doesn’t make much difference at my age: a red harness is not very becoming on an old mare.”
“I’ll put the dye on it properly for you after lunch.” Mah-Jabin plays with her own hair: there haven’t been enough days since for her to have discovered all the possibilities of the new cut. “I’d like to put henna on mine to get rid of its complete darkness, though it’s so black that I wonder if it would take the colour. And, by the way, I bet Father doesn’t think you are an old mare.”
“Hush, you wretched girl!” Kaukab blushes. “Sometimes I wonder if you are mine.” She leaves the cooker and rummages in a cupboard: “I think. . Yes, I have a packet of henna here.” The little sachet lands on the table before Mah-Jabin. “No, wait, there are two. Here, take this one as well. We’ll do each other’s heads this afternoon. And squeeze half a lemon into the henna: that will bleach the hair a little and then the henna will show.”
Mah-Jabin mixes the henna in a bowl. Like four cut-off spectral hands the transparent cellophane gloves that came with the two henna sachets have floated to the floor to lie invisibly on the linoleum arabesques.
“Only one chappati for me, Mother. Your chappatis are heavier than mine: I can usually eat two of mine.” Mah-Jabin had begun to be tutored into making chappatis at about twelve years old, the boys complaining and laughing in brotherly amusement at her efforts, feigning sickness as she removed one misshapen disc after another from the baking-iron, once or twice reducing her to tears, the elder calling her Salvador Dalí, but Kaukab was firm that a girl’s family must endure the earlier efforts so that the husband and in-laws can enjoy the skilled creations in the future.
Having broken three handfuls of dough from the mass in a enamel basin, Kaukab now presses one back. “Your father always says how lovely and light your chappatis are, the way they puff up on the iron. And he’s been saying it a lot recently because I’m still not used to this new baking-iron — the handle came off the last one — and my chappatis have been mediocre at best as a result. I remember when I came to England I had a baking-iron in the luggage: your father had written especially, since they were not available here then. Men used to make chappatis on an upside-down frying pan—”
“Yes I know, you’ve told us. But I think there is a thing called a ‘griddle’ in Britain that resembles Pakistani baking-irons, and of course the Mexican tortillas are cooked on—”
“If we’d had you to guide us during those early years we would have done things differently, and I apologize if I repeat something I’ve already told you but I don’t lead a life as varied as yours.” It wouldn’t tip the scales on a pin, the amount by which a comment has to fall short from the ideal in the listener’s head for it to be regarded an affront, an offence — a crime. “If I tell you something every day it’s because I relive it every day. Every day — wishing I could rewrite the past — I relive the day I came to this country where I have known nothing but pain.” Immediately after taking it off the iron, Kaukab polishes the chappati with a pat of butter that melts and is propelled forward on the hot surface like a snail secreting the lubricating slickness to move on as it goes.
There is a curve of pale-yellow crust — the remnant of a previous meal — on one of the plates Mah-Jabin takes out of the cupboard, on the china so intensely pigmented it seems to stain the air with each movement like a beetroot leaking colour: once it would have been Kaukab who noticed such a flaw in a chore assigned to the girl.
Her mother is getting old.
They sit together, eating side by side, Kaukab letting out a sigh of pleasure and touching Mah-Jabin every now and then. The girl bites off buttered chappati segments and jabs at the limp, endlessly compliant ampersands of the pepper-rings soaked with sunflower oil, the fork marking the sauce like bird-imprints on sepia mud.
“I wonder what that girl was doing on Omar Khayyám Road,” Kaukab says. “Did you talk to her? Was she with someone — that Hindu boy, perhaps?”
Mah-Jabin has been fearing this question. She is unable to control the roughness of her reaction: “Oh Christ, what difference does it make who she was with?”
“You had been quiet for a while so I was just making conversation,” Kaukab says as she pushes her plate away with her hands and her chair backwards with her calves, standing up violently. The three furrows deepen on her forehead; they’ve been there for as long as her children remember, Mah-Jabin wishing to — as a child — write her alphabet on these equally-spaced straight lines drawn on the brow as though in an exercise book. “And do not try to sound white by saying things like ‘Oh Christ,’ because you don’t impress me. Do you hear me?” Her eyes narrow in a blank white glare. “I said do you hear me?”
“I’m sorry. It’s not your fault,” Mah-Jabin sighs. “I was just thinking about Uncle Jugnu.”
She winces inwardly at what she has just said, feeling degraded, that already the death of the two loved people is being used in deceit because she does not wish to hurt this living person by her side, either that or because she is too cowardly to confront her: so will this terrible thing called life extract concessions out of her, teach her to compromise, and force her to become less than her best self, force her to reduce the amount of honour due the memory of her lost ones! One day she is going to wake up and not recognize herself.
They have talked about Jugnu and Chanda on the telephone several times since January, and again on her arrival today — and before January too, over the long anguished weeks and months when they disappeared like two raindrops in a lake, the months of disappearance that led to the brothers’ arrest — and there is nothing more to be said about it: Kaukab is unshakeable that they have not been killed and that they will return one day, that to give up hope is a sin, that the brothers could not have murdered their own sister in cold blood. “I don’t care how many people agree on what has happened to Jugnu and Chanda: a lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it. And I won’t lose faith in Allah’s benevolence no matter how bleak things look: the sun never disappears, it’s the earth that changes sides.”