The anxieties had been many. The sense passed on to him during his upbringing was that the differences between the whites and the Pakistanis were too many for interaction to successfully take place; many marriages ended. The cleric at the mosque had advised the boys to stay away from the “faeces-filled sacks” that were earthly women and wait for the houris of Paradise. He said the boys should handle their members with tissue paper when they urinated, that it was a disgusting appendage. And, of course, intercourse was so dirty that the body had to be made pure afterwards by bathing. Charag had once heard one of the women assembled in the blue kitchen tell the others about how she had had to lie when confronted with the inquisitive innocence of her young son that day because he had wondered why her hair was wet so early in the morning: “I said his little sister had urinated on the bed and I had to purify myself with a bath at dawn to say the dawn prayers.” He heard the women laughing and offering variations of the incident as he sat naked from waist to knee in his room, stopping with an elbow the trembling slippery magazines from sliding off the bed. The jingle of the belt buckle had to be silenced in a fist when the trousers were pulled up afterwards. He had built up and discarded and built up again caches of girlie magazines during his adolescence, the pages crossed with white splintery creases where they had been folded double to keep a combination of favourite images before the eyes during the moment of orgasm. He threw them away in moments of self-disgust, timing this cleansing carefully with the bin men’s visit, so that they may not lie outside the house for days. Each visit to the newsagent for the purpose of beginning again was a defeat: he was weak and corrupt.
The following weekend Stella decided to take matters into her own hands, and they became lovers. His mouth was winter-chapped and dry while hers was cared-for and soft: her tongue felt like a hand going through the ripped silk lining of a pocket and scraping against the coarse fabric beyond.
His hand deposited a glowing impression on her belly as the net of capillaries sank away from the cold. He erased it by licking, warmly coaxing the blood back to the surface.
Her breasts were flattened under their own weight as she lay beneath him, her nipples the colour of her pink lips — his own were the dark tawny colours of his own lips.
At the tip of the penis, the dot of starlit ache — which had to be kept in place and referred to periodically to maintain the erection, but was never to be dwelt on because then it would spread and lead to climax — was growing larger.
His mouth looked for the oiled berry. Her taste came and went tidally salt and sour in his mouth, as eloquent as weather.
When he fell through the sensation and opened his eyes he was surprised to find her there.
And he could not hold her close enough.
The smell of his armpits was on her shoulders — a flower depositing pollen on a hummingbird’s forehead.
They detonated the remains of each other’s orgasm with fingers and tongues, areas of their bodies sticking together with sweat that was like the weak glue that holds segments of an orange together.
And all through the Christmas break — in a distrust of memory which upon reunion proved itself unfounded and thereby intensified the pleasures of reunion — he thought he would not remember her face when they met again. The house in Dasht-e-Tanhaii was silent that winter. Icicles dripped outside like washing. The nights brought a chill from the lake that added to the cold and stayed all day in the air that did not move. Mah-Jabin had married a few months earlier and gone to live in Pakistan, and Ujala had no one to quarrel with.
He could not have given Stella his phone number, and longed to talk to her, to touch her. A fear had been breathed into the house once when a girl from school had telephoned Charag about homework: he hardly ever left the house after school but his mother had suspected a girlfriend behind that one phone call. She didn’t know (nor would he himself for a while yet) what it meant to have a girlfriend, that a relationship was replete with subtleties through which intimacy and commitment were demanded and demonstrated, that you were supposed to meet regularly, even daily, introduce each other to the parents. Kaukab extended what she knew of Pakistani women — who were drenched in patience, and were grateful that they had found a man no matter what his behaviour — to cover all women.
The magnifying glass through which he was kept in sight was burning him.
The hook of Stella’s bracelet had given his penis a small wound: when it began to heal the scab rubbed against the fabric of his underpants and whispered her name.
Back in London in the new year, he burnt matchstick after matchstick into an ashtray as he told her about his wish to paint. She listened as the sticks continued to burn, each flame sucking the thickness out of the wood and growing fatter itself; they went off and bent and remained luminous at the tip, looking like streetlights. She was wearing the jacket of his pyjamas, he the bottom half.
She told him he had to abandon his Chemistry degree immediately. “Simple.” How light the burden of one’s life became in the hands of a lover! She told him what he had to do and made plans for contingencies, showing him he was several moves away from disaster — he who had always thought that he could make one wrong move and sink.
After Easter he went home more and more often, wishing to tell his parents he was no longer a student, but came back to London without having had the courage to tell them. He heard Kaukab say to Shamas that the boy is probably being bullied by racist thugs at university and is coming home to escape them.
He would reveal the truth to them several months later, at Christmas, the house smelling the way it always did in winter, of fabric conditioners and washing powder because the day’s washing was drying in the kitchen.
“A painter is not a secure job. When we came to this country we lived in broken-down homes and hoped our children wouldn’t have to,” Kaukab said.
“Mother, I am struggling because I am young. That’s all.” The skin above her breasts sagged, a funnel of wrinkles narrowing to where the division between the two breasts must be — nothing like Stella’s new precisely stretched silk. This evidence of his mother’s frailty and helplessness made him want to reassure her. “Mother, please don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
“At least Allah is smiling on me as far as my daughter is concerned. Her husband loves her and she’s happy.” There was not an hour in the day when a letter was not in progress to Mah-Jabin from Kaukab, in blue aerogrammes or on loose sheets in fat envelopes that bore the stamps on the left corners — Kaukab always forgot that the stamps were fixed to the right-hand corner. Mah-Jabin’s own letters were happy when not ecstatic.
Even though she was many thousands of miles away, Mah-Jabin was closer to Kaukab than Charag, who was only a train journey away. She could imagine Mah-Jabin’s life, against a background she had thorough knowledge of; Charag’s life, on the other hand, was beyond her imagining — he was lost to her.
Stella remained a secret from everyone at home until Jugnu came to London to visit him while he was at art college. Charag hadn’t wanted to tell him because he knew Kaukab wouldn’t forgive Jugnu if she ever discovered that Jugnu had known about Charag’s “sinning” and kept it from her. He was sure that his father wouldn’t have a problem with it either but he couldn’t confide in him due to the same fear.
The sky is so blue it appeals to the sense of touch. Soon it will be blue and gold. He rounds one of those small reed-covered islands that drift about the lake’s surface and now discovers that he has swum straight into another swimmer, also naked, badged with a small leaf above the left nipple, her hair floating in the water, curly and heavy-looking like seaweed. Her breasts are supported high by the water as though being cupped by invisible hands. “My Allah,” the woman whispers, and he can see that her pubis is shaved clean like a Muslim woman’s is supposed to be. She cannot swim away and simultaneously conceal her breasts and groin with her hands, and so she splutters and goes under, her foot brushing his penis where there is a dab of aquamarine from when he had had to urinate whilst painting yesterday. In trying to assist her he loses the rhythm of his own stroke and now it is he who’s underwater, amid the silt and rotting foliage, fingers tangled in her long tresses. All bubbles and olive-coloured skin, she manages to break away and swims off as he comes up and expels the water from his windpipe and nose, blinking away the grit in his eyes. He treads water as he watches her arrive at the shore in the distance: she stands up and turns to look in his direction, the sheath of liquid swinging off her arms and hips in long tassels, dripping brightly from the tips of the breasts.