Mah-Jabin moves towards the stairs, on the floor coated with dried-up or drying henna that she had shaken loose when she hit herself, and from the powdered layer under her feet it is as though she is in a room in Pakistan after a dust storm has just passed through. “Don’t worry.” She pauses by the bottom step. “It’s not the first beating I’ve taken from you. Your husband beats you and you beat your children in return.”
“I cannot understand why you constantly pluck this one string. I wish to Allah I had never told you about him hitting me and I’ve told you a thousand times since that it only happened that one time and that I didn’t speak to him for many months afterwards. He begged for my forgiveness and when that didn’t work, he even moved out for nearly three years.” Kaukab comes to the stairs, obstructing the flow of light into the well, and watches the girl’s ascending back. “Have you never made a mistake? Remember if you ever go back in time, make sure you choose to fall in love with the right person at fourteen, so that when he marries someone else two years later you wouldn’t have to ask your parents to arrange a marriage for you somewhere far-away — somewhere like Pakistan, for instance. We sent you to Pakistan because you wanted to go live in a place where you wouldn’t have to witness that young man leading a happy life with another woman.”
A moth pressed to a window-pane, Mah-Jabin stops on the staircase as though air has suddenly solidified ahead, but she doesn’t turn around. She rubs the point of pain at the base of the neck where the safety-pin has broken the skin, rubs it until it is lost in the smudge of heat the friction creates, and then, when the light rises a tone higher to signify that Kaukab has returned to the kitchen, she continues up the stairs, breaking free of the chains that her mother’s words had briefly become around her ankles, head bowed like a lily on a broken stem.
He, a stranger, had smiled at her for a few moments and held her eye. That’s all it had taken. Over the next few days she re-imagined and revised those first moments. He had paid her a compliment by noticing her and she had fallen in love: it was that easy because she had never been an object of curiosity, a scrutiny other than the kind that was openly intrusive, always aggressive, usually hostile. But what was deadlier was that she believed he too was in love with her, that he contrived to run into her here and there. She imagined herself beside him as his lover, naked, her tresses parted in a two-panelled robe along the front of her body, playfully identifying on his person the thirty-two signs of excellence in a man: deep in three respects and broad in three as well; glowing a healthy red in seven; fine in five and long in four; elevated in six, and shapely and short in four. He lay with his head in her lap, and she kept up a commentary as she ticked these off to him, both of them attempting to suppress their giggles, “It is said that it is a mark of excellence in men if the navel, voice and breath are deep, and the thighs, brow and face are broad; if feet and hands, the corners of the eyes, palate, tongue, lower lip and nails have a rich red hue; according to the ancients it augurs well if fingers and finger-joints, hair, skin and teeth are fine; in the rulers of the earth the jaw-line, eyes, arms, and the space between the breasts are long; happiness is said to be ensured if chest and shoulders, finger-and-toe nails, nose, chin and throat are raised and prominent; and if back and shanks and the male member are shapely and short — oh dear! Well, thirty-one out of thirty-two isn’t bad. Alright, I agree that it should be thirty-one and a half because it is shapely.”
Each day she found another justification for her obsessive belief. He didn’t have to speak: she felt. He gave no sign but she thought he was being prudent because in this neighbourhood, and in the way they had been brought up, the things that were natural and instinctive to all humans were frowned upon, the people making you feel that it was you who was the odd one out. Everyone here was imprisoned in the cage of others’ thoughts. She and he were born here in England and had grown up witnessing people taking pleasure in freedom, but that freedom, although within reach was of no use to them, as a lamp with a genie was of no use to a person whose tongue had been cut off, who could not form words to ask for the three wishes.
She had been brought up to be patient — because for every thirst there was a cloud — and so she had waited, waited for their wedding night when they would come together at last like the two halves of a deck of cards cut and pushed back into each other with a forced ease, merging with a hesitant avidity. And may that night be longer than all nights.
Girls frequently sighed with relief when they got married because the husbands were less strict than the mothers had been, with whom it was as though they’d been handcuffed to dangerous lunatics at the moment of birth. Mah-Jabin, however, learned that the women of the family in the vicarage — the women whom she had to win over to gain access to the man of her life — were at least as traditional in outlook as her own mother, and she covered her head so quickly it was as though she was standing under a bird-filled tree, stopped wearing the few Western clothes that Kaukab had allowed her, and prayed five times a day.
A year and a half passed in the hopeful torpor, the single-mindedness, and the apparent masochism that had to be made intelligible to her white schoolfriends, there being no need for explanations when it came to the Indian and Pakistani girls, most of whom were trapped helplessly in similar webs of their own.
And then one day Kaukab mentioned in passing that so-and-so’s boy was getting married. Mah-Jabin ran upstairs before Kaukab finished speaking and bolted the door as though it could shut out that news from her life.
The boy had not been able to get into a medical college within commuting distance and would have to move away in the autumn: the parents suspected it was a conspiracy of the white people to get Pakistani children away from their culture, to make them have sex before marriage and every day as though it were a bodily function, and to eventually make them marry white people, it being a neighbourhood curse to say may your son marry a white woman; Mah-Jabin remembers being sent into her brothers’ room by her mother to look for condoms, and addresses, photographs or phone numbers of white girls, and remembers being told about a family that was tragic because the father had cancer and the daughter had just married a white boy.
And so — after telephone lines had burned between England and Pakistan — it had been decided that before he left for medical school the boy would marry his cousin from Pakistan; the parents had made sure he was ambitious and a high achiever — if he gained 90 percent and stood first in class then that was fine, but if 95 percent meant only a second place then it was not good enough. And they were not about to lose their prize of a boy to some white girl who most probably wouldn’t be a virgin.
The two doctors in the surgery at the end of the road — Dr. Lockwood and Dr. Varma — who had taken an interest in the boy after learning that he was applying to medical schools and wasn’t just another young nohoper from around here, warned him of the dangers of inbreeding, but the father had gone to the surgery and reminded the Englishman that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins, and told the Hindu woman that before lecturing the Muslims on the dangers of genetic defects she might want to do something about her own gods, who had eyes in the middle of their foreheads and what about those six-armed goddesses that were more Swiss Army knives than deities.