She has given the girl the news of the graffiti scrawled on Jugnu’s house: They lived the life of sin and died the death of sinners and They have been burning in the Fire now for over six months but remember that Eternity minus six months is still Eternity.
Mah-Jabin clears the table in the steady golden light in the blue-skinned room, in the talkative silence of the stream that Kaukab, still angry, leaves behind when she takes her transparent-red rosary lying in a saucer like the circle of pollen grains in the middle of a flower and goes upstairs to say her prayers.
With a loose bulky knot Mah-Jabin shortens the length of the curtain covering the glass in the front door and carries a chair into the burning slice of sunlight, listening out for her mother’s loud end-of-prayer Arabic, when she begins to mix hair-dye in the plastic lid of an old aerosol can, using a worn toothbrush which she identifies from the characteristic disfigurement of the bristles as having once been used by her father.
Kaukab comes down, the cranberry rosary swaying from her grip, the beads larger than those she used in her younger days when the fingertips were nimbler, more-sensitive, just as she needs a large-print copy of the Koran now because her eyes too are beginning to fumble amid words.
Even after the contact and consultation with Allah, her displeasure at the girl, and the sadness which the outburst had caused, is there in her: she approaches the sunlight wordlessly and takes the chair, bending her head forward.
Mah-Jabin — standing ready behind the chair — knows that being unable to dispel her anger before the prayer must have exacerbated her mother, that it must have interfered with the concentration required for the worship — like the intermittent annoyance of a hang-nail during daily chores. The only thing for Mah-Jabin now is to wade upstream and begin the journey anew, this time making sure that the bend leading to the vortex is avoided, but she cannot think of anything to say.
Gently — and in strategy — she wets a knuckle with her spit and touches Kaukab’s earlobe with it: Kaukab sighs to empty herself and speaks at last, “Mah-Jabin, make sure you don’t get any dye on my ears.”
The girl smiles at her triumph. “Stop worrying. There—I’ve wiped it off.”
Nevertheless, Kaukab asks her to keep within reach a rag that is an off-cut from a new kameez she has sewn for herself: “The rag in the drawer, a shade less blue than navy. Yes, I did say to myself when I was buying it that my Mah-Jabin would ooh and aah over this colour. Four pounds per yard. I still haven’t stitched the hem of the new kameez.” And, when Mah-Jabin tells her with a smile that she would be unable to help her in that task as she could never achieve those tiny invisible stitches, Kaukab asks her if she remembers the time she had sat with a new kameez on her lap — working on the hem all day — and discovered at the end that she had stitched it onto the one she was wearing! “I don’t remember doing it but I can believe I did it,” replies the girl. “There. Finished. My turn now. No, hold on. There. Finished now.”
She spreads the blue cloth across Kaukab’s knees and sits on the floor with her hair in her mother’s lap.
The hair does not fill the lap anymore and Kaukab misses the weight; she draws the comb of her fingers along the length and when it ends suddenly — shockingly, as in the dream in which the dreamer stumbles off a kerb — her fingers groping the empty air are an illustration of what is now missing from her life, what was once so palpably there — so palpably here.
She begins to say something but remains silent, simply runs her fingers through what remains of the black locks just for the slippery slipping pleasure of it, how it slides off her fingers, the softest sensation in the world to her, and, once absent, impossible to summon at will.
“Are you comfortable propped up like a rag doll on the floor? Let me know and you can sit on the chair and I’ll stand up.” Kaukab works the wet henna into Mah-Jabin’s hair, scoop by scoop of fingers. “Well, tell me anytime you get tired and I’ll stand up. In Pakistan we used to squat in the toilet and when I came here I thought I’d never get used to the Western toilets. But now, after all these years, those others seem impossible: how did we manage to squat like that every day?”
“The body gets used to things.”
“Even if the mind doesn’t.”
She packs the entire bowl of henna into the girl’s hair, patting it on until the head appears as though coated with a fragrant mixture of mud and moss, tangy as tamarind, sweet as brown sugar; and the pulverised dark green leaf, through each pore and microscopic crack that the drying and the powdering had opened up, begins to release its red sap, diluted by water and made sticky by the lemon.
Kaukab holds the blue cloth firmly at the girl’s shoulders and slides her chair back across the floor so that the cloth is pulled off the lap and rests like a little sailor cape at the girl’s back, a barrier between the henna and the fabric of the girl’s shirt. She takes the front-door key, attached — for want of pockets on her kameez—with a safety pin to her veil, and gives the pin to her to secure the blue cloth at the front.
The back of the house has been moving out of the sunlight at a snail’s pace over the previous hours, and now — now that the sun has vaulted over the roof — it is in total shade, the sodium-yellow warmth directed at the front.
Mah-Jabin makes herself coffee, Kaukab peels an orange and places the segments curved like leaping dolphins onto a plate, and they both go outside to sit on the front step where the breeze turns the lilacs’ pages in the little garden, the shadows beginning to stretch like chewing gum.
Light is gone from the back to appear here as rain soaks into the earth and flows away underground to emerge elsewhere as a spring.
The girl sits diagonally on the step, instinctively turned a little away from the house that joins theirs on the right, to keep it out of sight: Jugnu’s house. But it is there nevertheless, she cannot ignore its presence: the soul has many eyes, is capable of seeing in every direction.
The woman next door on the left has taken advantage of the sunny afternoon and put out a rug to air that releases swinging plumes of fenugreek odour. “She must put fenugreek in everything,” Kaukab says; she is consuming her orange in the Pakistani manner, dipping the blunt-nosed segments in salt first. “The smell penetrates. In Pakistan it gave no trouble because the houses there were — are — big and airy and nothing lingers. But here the rooms are small and closed up, and the smell refuses to shift.”
“That’s not the least of it: if I remember correctly from the few times you used fenugreek the damned thing gets into your sweat and urine after you’ve eaten it.”
“Be quiet!”
“Sorry,” Mah-Jabin laughs, for the first time in weeks, and touches her mother’s knee with her own. The laughter dissolves in the sunlight, while, like a music-box left open beside her, the coffee steams in the dry air.
A voice bursts through like a ball landing in the little garden: “Mother and daughter are enjoying the sunlight, I see. And the daughter-empress wants to lighten the colour of her hair, does she?”
Mah-Jabin looks up: a vaguely remembered neighbourhood woman is struggling with the rusted screeching latch of the garden gate. Kaukab explains how to circumvent the eccentricities of the catch and the woman — acting on the advice — gains entry to advance towards them under the jewelled nets of the lilac branches.
Mah-Jabin — fearing that the woman has come to collect material for gossip — wishes to retreat inside, but the woman flags her down: “I won’t take a seat, beautiful. I’ve just stopped by to remind your mother that Ateeka — the wife of Zafar-who-has-a-clothes-stall-in-Thursday-market and not the left-handed Zafar — is flying to Pakistan on Monday, so if there are any presents that have to be sent back home there is still room in the luggage.”