But the angels, it seemed, forgot about the baby after the birth because his health began to deteriorate after about a week: he became increasingly irresponsive to noise and other sensations, and seemed deficient in strength, so much so that eventually even the act of crying seemed to defeat him. As the days passed he lost weight despite regular breast-feeds and the minor infections he had developed began to give the doctors cause for concern despite the medicines prescribed. One afternoon, after he had been fed, Kaukab brought him to lie next to Shamas and he had leaned over the small soft heap and stroked the head, the nap of short hair on the pate like some kind of moss under the touch. Shamas’s little finger hovered closed to the baby’s lips and when the tiny mouth moved to take in the tip of the digit and began sucking at it forcefully, everything suddenly became clear. His legs shook as he went into the next room, the kitchen. She was cooking the children’s lunch, pale steam rising from the pan like morning mist from a pond.
“He is still hungry, Kaukab.”
“That’s very strange. I’ve just fed him.”
“Perhaps you should feed him again. He suckled my finger: you should’ve seen how he reacted when the finger got near his mouth. He was electrified.”
“I am empty and raw. I’ve just fed him.”
“Have you remembered to give him his medicine?” For a moment he thought he was going to black out.
“Of course I have.”
He was clenching and unclenching his fists, the palms feeling cold. “I just thought you might have forgotten: you are after all fasting, and people become forgetful when they fast. Or are you making the baby fast too? Not giving him anything — milk or water or his medicine — from dusk till dawn?”
“I don’t know what you mean. And don’t raise your voice, please.”
“What I mean is that I think you have been making the baby — your holy baby! — observe Ramadan. You have been starving him during the daylight hours.”
“If it’s true — which it isn’t — then it’s because he himself insists on it. He refuses to let anything pass his lips during the daylight hours. And don’t make light of my beliefs: he is an exalted infant. Must you talk like a heretic in this house? I blame father-ji for marrying me to a Communist.”
“Get your head out of the clouds and come give him milk right now.” He was trying to speak quietly because he could sense the other two children — the nine-year-old Charag and the four-year-old Mah-Jabin— on the staircase next to the kitchen. A few moments ago a yellow-and-green striped sweet the size of a sparrow’s egg — slipped from the hands of one of the children — had fallen and landed at the bottom of the staircase, alerting him to their presence. They must’ve been up there, listening, and now he could hear the small movements they were making.
“No I won’t come. It’s my milk. He and I will break our fast at sunset. It’s just a matter of changing the routine: I give him everything he needs during the night.”
“Has someone stolen your ears? I said come now.” The world had become stark, the colours harsh in his eyes.
“No. I have just fed him and have nothing left.”
“Show me.” They stared at each other until neither of them knew who the other one was. By grabbing hold of the neckline he tore open her kameez with both hands to reveal a soaked brassiere which he pulled at here and there until one of the cups ripped and spilled its load like weights in a sling. She had resisted and he had dragged her across the floor, her exposed breast bloody from his fingernail. In the next room he lifted the baby in its sail-white blanket and placed it in her lap where she sat on the floor, milk beading bluishly at the tip of the chocolate-coloured nipple. Inert and apparently insensible, she hadn’t moved to connect the baby to the breast and he had slapped her face:
“Feed him, you haramzadi!”
The pale steam that had been rising from the pan in the kitchen had become black smoke as the unstirred food had begun to burn, the dark tendrils choking the house. He went and turned off the gas. The acrid smell had replaced the lime-and-rosehip perfume that the geraniums in the kitchen had released when the two of them had stumbled against them in their struggle. As he turned off the gas he was aghast to see her step into the kitchen, her wide open eyes the size of rose leaves, the baby screaming in the other room. His disbelief and desperation grew fuller, becoming its own organism, out of control. He was he but less and less with each passing moment. With one jerk she freed her wrist from his grip when he grabbed hold of her to take her back. As though she were walking in a howling storm, she staggered to the sink and washed her hands:
She had been cutting up chillies earlier and didn’t want to touch her baby with those hands.
With safe hands she picked up the baby and nursed him, despoiling his fast, wincing at the pain breast-feeding had always caused her.
They didn’t speak to each other for the next six or seven months. One day he decided that he should talk to her: she listened to his apology, listened as he hinted that an apology from her too was required — and later, to convey to him that she hadn’t forgiven him, and had no intention herself of asking for forgiveness, she burnt the wedding dress on to which she had embroidered his verses years ago.
He moved out of the house within the week, having rented a small room two bus-rides away on the other side of town. Each month he posted most of his wages into the house through the letterbox. One year passed, and then two; two-and-a-half. He lived in squalid conditions and days would at times go by without him having talked to anyone. His world was so reduced that half an eggshell would have served as sky.
He met her and the children only a handful of times, either by chance or very reluctantly. When he saw her coming up the stairs one day he locked the door from the inside and pretended to be out: she banged to be let in, aware of his presence perhaps, and was eventually forced to say out loud through her tears that she was bringing him the news of his mother’s death back in Sohni Dharti.
Although they both wept in each other’s arms for over an hour, and although he sent her back with the reassurance that he would be there in the house with her and the children before the week was out, he was still not there months later. One day in the snow-buried March of 1978 he came to leave his wages for her at the little seafood shop where she had started work not long ago; he had made sure that it was an hour when she would not be there — the other shop assistants would pass the money on to her. There was no one at the counter and he sat down to wait in the warmth. Outside, the day was as white as a new page, and there were icicles as long as spears. As he dozed and half-dreamed, the shop turned into a kaleidoscope brightly filled with black-and-cobalt-blue fragments whose reflections produced changing patterns on everything, including himself.
The winkles had escaped from their tank.
They were roaming because the urge was on them: on the coastline a hundred miles away the tide had come in, and things of all kinds were emerging from the sand to feed on what the sea had brought in. The small shelled creatures in the seafood shop had not been away from the beach long enough for their internal rhythms to adjust yet, and they had begun to explore, having lain motionless till now as they would on the beach— retreating underground and sealing the entrances to the burrows as though holding their noses shut at the low-tide stink.
The other life of the planet had broken through into the one being lived by the human beings, that immeasurably vast life for which the humans were mostly an irrelevance.
Shamas watched the nightsky-blue creatures surrounding him. The tide had come in far away but the sea had flooded the interior here. He let the beautiful lapis lazuli creatures leave the tank and make their magnetized way up the walls, explore the windowpanes like a child’s eye losing concentration and beginning to roam the page of the textbook, paint wet trails on the foliage of the plants like a tongue on a lover’s skin, and climb onto the tables to go on slow voyages.