And just as he is about to walk away, she becomes resigned:
“You are an artist,” she says. “Tell me, can you paint this.”
He knows that by “this” she means the humiliation she’s just suffered, the despondent clumsiness to which her circumstances have reduced her, and the longing she must feel for her son and husband.
“Can you?” Her pain stares out of her eyes.
“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I can try.”
She nods, wipes her eyes with her veil, and slowly walks away from him.
He goes back to the car and sits there for a few minutes.
Soon the rays of the sun would go in through the windows and ignite consciousness in every house of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, the caterpillars climbing the milk bottles on the doorsteps to drink dew off the foil tops. He’ll stay here, looking out at the sun on the lake for a while, and then go into the town centre for breakfast — before beginning the journey back to London.
THE MANY COLOURS OF MILK
Shamas, on his way back from the town centre to fetch the Saturday papers, very soon after dawn, sees countless single threads of spider silk shining on the riverbank, sagging between tall reeds like lovers holding hands. They gleam and the eye wishes to return to them like favourite verses in a book of poems. A swarm of grey insects spins in the air, keeping to a funnel shape almost as if it believes itself to be trapped. He is crossing the bridge, and the river — down there — seems to drink the sunlight, sucking at its warmth. The grass is so rich there that it would creak underfoot. Down there was where the two lovers were looking for the place where the human heart was found: Kaukab says that the girl’s mother is convinced that she has become possessed by the djinns — that is why she won’t accept her new husband. Shamas has been careful not to tell Kaukab about his chance encounter with the girl and the Hindu boy — their secret trysts must remain a secret.
This river is a recent stream compared to the rivers of the Indian Subcontinent: the Indus, its far bank wedded to the horizon, is an ocean-wide stretch of water that remembers thousands of years of history. And the river of his childhood — the Chenab — could rise by several metres during the monsoon.
He built a small boat for himself during his early teens, naming it Safeena, which meant both a boat and — in archaic use — a notebook; and he would take it out to sit in the cattails and the narkal reeds and the pan-grass of Chenab’s shallower regions, reading, the sounds of the migratory waterfowl coming to him from the other side of the green curtain if it were winter, the flocks arriving from the Himalayas at the beginning of October in minute-long V formations.
This year’s butterflies would soon begin to emerge — a season heaving with life, the air above the river slightly fragrant like a garment still carrying the odour of its vanished owner. And now a piece of red cloth with a silken sheen, giving off a pronounced honeysuckle scent as though it had been used to swab up spillage from the perfume flask, floats across his vision, about to fall into the water. Instinctively he reaches for it before it disappears, and as he’s bending over the low wall towards it the newspapers slip from his grip and fall into the water below, changing colour instantly as the water soaks the paper. He’s suddenly lighter, his muscles relieved, the fingers holding nothing but that scarf which has butterfly blue lozenges along its crenulated edges. He looks around. The sun laughing in her glass bangles, a young woman is looking at him from a few yards away. He holds out the scarf towards her.
“Thank you.” She whispers quietly. “I am sorry about your newspapers.” And immediately she turns and begins to move away from him, twisting the retrieved scarf and using it like a ribbon to collect and secure her hair in a loose ponytail at the base of the neck, her skin that pale rust-brown colour that white jasmine flowers take on at the end of the day.
Propriety dictates that he should not attempt to detain her but he hears himself say abandonedly, “It’s a beautiful morning.”
She stops — no doubt as staggered by his boldness as he himself is— and, turning around after a while to face him, nods her head which is a mass of curls, a few of which are already escaping the scarf and tumbling onto her shoulders. Small, fine-boned, she is perhaps in her late-thirties and is wearing a primrose shalwar-kameez with a wide length of see-through chiffon draped about the body to serve as a head veil when required. Her expression conveys a mark of consternation and she looks around, perhaps to make sure that this encounter is being observed by someone, that she is not too alone here with him, or perhaps to make sure that they are not being observed.
Feeling ashamed for having given her cause for concern and irresponsible for not keeping in mind the risks to her honour before addressing her, he raises his hand part way to his forehead to bid her farewell in the courteous Subcontinental Muslim manner and quickly turns around to go back into the town centre and get more newspapers.
“I was on my way to the lake. There is an Urdu bookshop there and I wanted to know the opening times,” he hears her say. Her face awaits him with the polite hint of a smile when he stops and turns around, the face that only seconds ago was tortured by doubts and dark considerations. She takes the edge of the veil and covers her head in a gesture of infinite grace, handling the fine material gently — one of those actions that reveals a person’s unspoken attitude to things; the thin sun-flecked fabric settles on her hair in a wonderfully slow yellow wave. “I think the shop is called the Safeena. It is, if I remember correctly, a poetic Urdu word for ‘boat’ and also for ‘notebook.’ ”
Like a matchstick struck on the inside of his skull, spilling sparks, the ecstatic torpor of adolescent summers comes to him in a brief warm illumination, and he experiences a thrill which is very close to happiness. “It was the name I gave my rowboat during my boyhood on the banks of the Chenab. And the shop, the property of a friend, was named by me after my boat.”
The bridge between them is made of glass and so he takes one very tentative step towards her.
She’s considering him, as though thinking deeply. “My name is Suraya.” She smiles, more openly than she had the first time, and a very pale apricot-brown mole (if it were surrounded by others like it, it would be called a freckle — it’s that pale) on the side of her mouth gets pulled into a fold in the skin, vanishes into a laugh-line.
“The shop is open in the afternoons on Saturday and Sunday, if you would care to visit,” he says. He is concerned for her safety: she shouldn’t be seen talking to a stranger. A Pakistani man mounted the footpath and ran over his sister-in-law — repeatedly, in broad daylight — because he suspected she was cheating on his brother. I only fear that by dying you will pollute the dead just as your life pollutes the living. This was here in England and, according to the statistics, in one Pakistani province alone, a woman is murdered every thirty-eight hours solely because her virtue is in doubt. He should withdraw; and he bows slightly at the waist towards her: “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must leave.”
Touching her scarf, she says, “Thank you for this. The wind kept it just out of my reach as I ran after it; but Allah had planted you in my path to help me. I nearly caught it once but it seemed to fly at the speed of thought. And I am sorry for the newspapers.”
“I’ll go into town again and get some more.” He recriminates himself for vainly thinking that she’s delaying him on purpose, that she wants his company. And yet she is looking at him intensely, and since he doesn’t know what to say, is standing here silently, her eyes roam across his body as though searching for the slot to put coins into to make him operate. Suddenly self-conscious, he raises his hand and touches his hair to see that the breeze hasn’t dishevelled it too much. With an agitated heart he turns and walks away, feeling suddenly very old, exhausted, leaving behind the pale gold English river, the glittering continuity of it, and those countless single threads of spider silk that are shining on the tall reeds, sagging in bright curves. It was there on the bridge that Chanda’s mother had approached him a few weeks ago to tell him Jugnu had been spotted in Lahore; he shakes his head and frowns to dispel the memory. Before him the columns of the flowering horse chestnuts stretch either side of the road that climbs the hill; the town centre is situated at the top. The pale shadows of the horse chestnuts are combed across the road, a white butterfly again and again turning an iridescent bluish-pink as it flies across them.