Mah-Jabin opens her eyes and slides herself upright against the wall, the pull causing the safety-pin at her throat to open up and the point to enter the soft hollow between her collarbones.
Sometimes the right question can be as difficult to come by as the right answer. Yes: Mah-Jabin has spent the last nine years, and most of the two years of her marriage before that, looking for the question that has come to her only just now. She remembers that Kaukab, on catching Jessye Norman on television once — singing a lyric Kaukab did not know the significance to, in a language she did not know — had risen to her feet slowly as though in homage to the grandeur of the heart-breakingly beautiful goddess standing proud as a mountain against the Paris sky, and afterwards had managed to articulate only a few words:
“I love people who accomplish great things.”
The sentence had startled the girl; and there were other similar occasions. Sometimes an idea would seem to come to Kaukab and disappear immediately so that her face was dark once again but not as dark as before, this being the darkness left behind in the flight-path of a firefly, a darkness aflicker with the knowledge that something had happened here recently, some illumination, the brain cells vibrating in the lucid wake of an insight. She would sigh, and talk to her daughter wistfully for a while.
Mah-Jabin remembers Kaukab telling her she regretted not having been able to have had an education, that she had wished to own a bicycle as a girl but it was out of the question even within the confines of the courtyard because her mother feared she would fall off and break a limb and no one would marry the cripple, so that she had bought herself a tiny pendant in the shape of a bicycle and put it around her neck on a chain, just as real bicycles are secured to trees or pillars with real chains.
And yet this same woman who had allowed her daughter to leave school at sixteen, hadn’t allowed her to ride a bicycle lest she be ruined for life. Why?
“Why don’t you hit me harder, Mother? Like this. .” Mah-Jabin strikes her own face as she walks towards Kaukab. “Like this. . this. . this. . Hit me harder. . harder. .”
Kaukab takes the cutlery from lunch and the knife with which Mah-Jabin had prepared the red peppers and drops them into the soapy water, standing solid as stone while the girl shakes her violently from behind with both hands. “You must be a moral cripple if you think what you did to me wasn’t wrong. Didn’t you once tell me that a woman’s life is hard because you have to run the house during the day and listen to your husband’s demands in bed at night? So why didn’t you make sure I avoided such a life? Answer me. . Answer me. . Why do you people keep doing the same things over and over again expecting a different result?”
Kaukab’s hand searches for and finds the handle of the long steel knife inside the water covered with the lace of bubbles.
“What was it you said to me once, Mother, that the first two decades of marriage belong to the husband, the rest to the wife because she can turn her children against the husband while she’s bringing them up, so when they are grown up they’ll make him eat dirt while she reigns over them all for the rest of her days.”
Kaukab stands immovably while the girl pulls at her shoulder to make her turn around, she the most intimate of her enemies.
“How fucking wise you are, Mother, such wisdom! Victory awaits all the beleaguered Pakistani women but what a price, Mother, two decades of your life wasted. . What a waste when instead of conniving for all these years you could just walk away. .”
Drops of water slide off the blade slowly as the knife rises vertically through the air. “Get away from me, you little bitch!”
The hungry steel slices an arc as Kaukab swings around and then Mah-Jabin stumbles backwards with one arm raised and the other across her stomach.
“How dare you throw questions at me like stones!”
Dazzle explodes on the blade — like blood spurting from a vein — when the weapon enters a beam of sunlight. The air itself seems to contract away from Kaukab as a school of fish twitches itself to safety at the approach of a predator. The bowl that had held henna falls to the floor, spinning on its edge like the silver cups that revolve around the lights on top of police cars to make them blink.
Eyes dilated as though lost in darkness, Kaukab lowers the knife, that diamond-hard tip that had very briefly become the sharp point of her despair and defeat.
Her own jewelled eyes flashing, Mah-Jabin throws back her head and laughs for the third time today, face tilted up to the ceiling.
“Here we have proof that Chanda was murdered by her brothers, that a family can kill one of its own. I wonder if this will stand up as evidence in court so that those two bastards can be put away for life. My god, for all of you she probably didn’t die hard enough: you would like to dig her up piece by piece, put her back together, and kill her once more for going against your laws and codes, the so-called traditions that you have dragged into this country with you like shit on your shoes.”
The knife falls from Kaukab’s lifeless grip. “Oh God, Mah-Jabin. . I didn’t know I had the knife in my hand. I just tried to push you away with my hand.”
“Please don’t come near me, Mother. And you would love me to go back to Pakistan to my husband, wouldn’t you, back to my ‘earthly god’? Or find me someone new like they did for poor Chanda. How many times had she been married before she met Uncle Jugnu? Twice? Three times? Yes, if it doesn’t work once, try again, because you are bound to hit the target eventually, as long as it’s you who decides what to do: if the bitch decides to take matters into her own hands and finds someone herself then raise the fucking knives and cut her to pieces.”
“Not everyone has the freedom to walk away from a way of life,” Kaukab says quietly. “The fact that you have managed to do it easily has made you arrogant and heartless.”
“It was not easy! It is still a torment. What hurts me is that you could have given me that freedom instead of delivering me into the same kind of life that you were delivered into. I want to go back into the past and tell that young girl who was me — and whom I love — what not to do, but no one can return to the past. But it was easier for you because I was there right next to you: if you loved me you would have prevented me from doing certain things—”
“I did not have the freedom to give you that freedom, don’t you see?” Kaukab is pained and broken at the realization that someone as close to you as one of your children can make so many mistaken assumptions when they take it upon themselves to evaluate your life.
“Don’t lie. You would have done it if you wanted to. You still want me married because you still believe a woman must have a husband. Please, don’t come near me, I said.”
But Kaukab walks by her and begins to pluck the rosary beads off the floor.
“Yes, I do want you to go back, because in the eyes of Allah you are still married to him. You may have divorced him under British law, but haven’t done so in a Muslim court. My religion is not the British legal system, it’s Islam.” Snatches of sentences are coming to her from the past few timeless minutes like waves returning to a shore and she deals with them as they come. “When I said a woman’s troubles are over within twenty years of marriage because now her grown-up children will defend her against the father and in-laws, I didn’t mean you have to connive and tell your children certain things deliberately. You need someone to talk to, to tell your troubles to, and her children are the people closest to a woman. You don’t connive to bring about that situation, it happens of its own accord.” She is on her haunches, weeping, as she lifts the beads off the linoleum like picking shells off a beach. “And what is this talk about me taking a knife to you: do you really think I could harm you?” There is a sense of consolation to the activity her fingers are engaged in, almost as though contact is being made with the dead: as a child she had seen her mother and grandmothers, and the other women in the house, similarly bent over the myriad daily tasks of the day, and sometimes — but not today, not now— the feeling is close to celebration, a remembrance and a praising of those now dead and absent but still living in her mind, unsung elsewhere and otherwise. Gone so thoroughly it is as though she had dreamed them.