Shamas warned Kaukab to be careful and not lay a hand on the girl, because otherwise tomorrow the local newspaper would be carrying the headline BRITISH-BORN DAUGHTER OF PAKISTANI MUSLIM COMMUNITY LEADER BEATEN OVER MATTER OF MARRIAGE, bringing into disrepute, in one fell swoop, Islam, Pakistan, the immigrant population here in England, and his place of work, which was — in the matters of race — the officially appointed conscience of the land.
“How will I bear it, Mother, seeing him with his arms around someone else?” They were in the bathroom and Kaukab was shaving off the hair at Mah-Jabin’s groin while she stood in the tub with her legs spread: the girl had lost all sense of herself, but the religion demanded that pubic hair must not go beyond the length of an uncooked grain of rice. “I don’t want to live here, here in this neighbourhood, this town. Let’s move away.”
Kaukab dried the girl’s legs with a towel and looked for the box of sanitary pads: “We’ll think of something, baby.”
The wife of Shamas’s elder brother had died recently in Sohni Dharti and the olive-green house was without a woman (a fate that may not befall even an enemy’s home); Kaukab and Shamas had felt it their responsibility to somehow come to the aid of the devastated husband and son the dead woman had left behind: they asked Mah-Jabin if she would marry her cousin and move to Pakistan; she said yes. Life for her had become wandering from one dark room to another. As she was looking into a hand-mirror one day and had turned it around — to the side that gave a magnified image — she realized that she had been looking at the magnification of her face all along: she was wasting away.
She begged forgiveness from Allah for her charade of piety over the previous two years, and now, addressing Him in her prayers, said that she would put to rest all her doubts about His existence if He were to perform a miracle and make her his bride, see to it that she was rowed across these turbulent waters.
But miracles came from faith, not faith from miracles.
Kaukab had never lost faith that Allah would find a way of helping her widower brother-in-law — a man whom she loved and respected like a blood-brother, difficult though he was — and she was pleased when Mah-Jabin unexpectedly agreed to marry his son and settle in Sohni Dharti to run the house and look after her ageing, grief-stricken uncle. Things had worked out for everyone, and in the girl’s silent fantasy of the past two years — her silent and extravagant fantasy, misguided, innocent and unbounded — Kaukab saw the proof of how Allah blinds His creatures when He needs to further the designs of destiny.
It’s stopped raining so that out there everything that can sparkle is sparkling. Mah-Jabin lowers her ear to the opening of the conch shell that is a one-third open orchid or lily in bone, a stone vulva, a book warped and soaked double by rain, and listens to the sea that is not there with her eyes closed.
The henna has imparted a reddish darkness to her hair, a tone of black found on photographic negatives. Each night the stars seem a little further away. This house is almost not a building but an emotion; every last surface here bears scars of war. Through glass and water-beads she looks down at the front garden, the lilacs bathed clean, the roses newly shattered like china in the rain, the front gate where on arrival she had smelled a cloud of the perfume her mother always wears, the vapour of jasmine telling her that she was out here only moments ago — and now she knows how her mother found out about her planned trip to the US; she had told the taxi driver about it, and he must’ve called and told his wife, who had then stopped by to tell Kaukab that her daughter was on the way, calling her out to the gate. The Indian and Pakistani taxi drivers are known for spreading news to all corners of Dasht-e-Tanhaii through their radios— who was seen when and with whom and where — and she always avoids a conversation with them, letting them listen to their Hindi music or taped sermons of Muslim clerics, but today a song whose lyrics are meant to be misinterpreted had come on—
Choli ke pechay kya hai, choli ke pechay? Chunri ke nechay kya hai, chunri ke nechay?
What are you hiding behind that blouse?
What is being kept covered under the veil?
The flustered driver had switched off the music to begin a conversation with Mah-Jabin, not allowing the singer’s question to be answered by the other singer in the lilting duet—
Choli me dil hai mera,
Chunri me dil hai mera:
Yeh dil main doon gi mere yar ko, pyar ko.
The blouse contains my heart,
The veil conceals my heart:
The heart which I’ll give to my lover, to my beloved.
She lowers the conch shell onto the table surface, and remains there, recalling how as a child she had wanted to fish in the sea that she heard surging within the red petrified folds and ruffles freckled with archipelagos of white stains, giddy at the thought of the fantastic creatures to be found down in the depths below the waves that weren’t there, in the coves that edged its slow silver, the illusory sea that is the equivalent of the sky in a cupped-handful of water.
She leaves the room, her forehead burnt by the thoughts in her mind.
Outside, a male starling is carrying a flower in its beak to decorate the nest it has built for the female somewhere, and in the empty room the sea and all that it contains sloshes and echoes silently in the shell’s red cone.
LIKE BEING BORN
Charag steps into the lake, naked, and scoops water onto his head, bending his neck to let the falling drops flatten his hair. The water reaches the scalp and begins to pour down the face, getting into the eyes where the rich brown irises are an arrangement of suede-splinters — like the gills of a mushroom. A good deal of the light from the moon seems to be reaching the earth but without first lighting up the intervening sky and air— the earth is as though glowing itself. It’s half an hour or so to dawn, and in the predawn light the world appears as though newly formed, softer on the eye, as exalted as a vision. Leaves float around him as he swims in the lake, one or two curled at the tips as in botanical illustrations, the oaks lobed like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. His clothes lie on the shore among the stones while he moves through the water that is a skin trying to contain a deep-blue light which seems to come to the surface from somewhere down below, the colour of the blue vein on the pale inside of his elbow.
He is still undecided about whether he will visit his parents. He has driven all night to be back in Dasht-e-Tanhaii but now isn’t sure why he has come.
He was the elder son and, throughout his boyhood, was always accompanied by the sense that the family’s betterment lay on his shoulders. Nothing was ever made verbal but this expectation had been inhaled by him with each breath he had taken during those early years. His parents wanted to return to Pakistan: he would become a doctor and go back with them — this was understood by him. They — all of them — would be free of England when he finished his studies. He was troubled by the guilt of truancy every time he did something he enjoyed, every time he picked up his drawing pad. His art teacher came to the house one day when he was fourteen, to plead with the parents to let him continue with the subject. She had secured a place for three of the paintings in the little art gallery above the public library in the town centre, and his photograph had appeared in The Afternoon. The art teacher’s letters had been ignored at home — the mischievous attempts of the whites to lead the boy astray, said Kaukab, an attempt to prevent the Pakistanis from getting ahead in life, encouraging them to waste time on childish things instead of working towards a position of influence. When the teacher came to the house Charag had felt humiliated, screaming at her inside his head to go away, wondering whether the parents thought he had asked her to come, that he had betrayed them somehow.