She realized her mistake very soon after she walked into the enemy courtyard. She remembers every detail, the time slowing down. The men of the house clustered around her and barred her way when she attempted to leave. People were always losing their way in the thick winter fogs and she pretended she had entered the house by mistake, putting aside her fears about the pregnant niece, her own survival now at stake. Eventually she was allowed to leave the house with her virtue intact; the men did, however, tell her that they were going to let everyone know that they had raped her because it would cast a mark on their honour and their name and their manhood if people thought they had had a woman from the other side of the battle-line in their midst and hadn’t taken full and appropriate advantage of the opportunity.
As it turned out it was as bad as if they had raped her. What mattered was not what you yourself knew to have actually happened, but what other people thought had happened. Her husband and in-laws believed her completely when she said that she was still pure, that nothing irrevocable had occurred in the house of the enemy, but in the end that fact was worthless.
All this pushed her husband over the edge. More and more he began to seek solace in alcohol, saying he needed it to breathe, often coming home knee-walkingly drunk, taking off his cap and waistcoat and attempting to hang them on the shadow of the hat-stand on the wall, his behaviour becoming increasingly volatile so that eventually she was afraid to even let her bangles make a sound, not knowing what would provoke him, though he was always remorseful after his outbursts, telling her how much he loved her, that he just couldn’t get the barbed comments of people out of his head.
There were days when, in his shame, he didn’t want to see anyone: not even himself — he draped the mirror with a cloth. But then there was disgust and rage in him as he handled the veils that came into the house to be dyed because her father-in-law was a dyer: “They are getting shorter and shorter. The women of today are increasingly shameless.”
She could always tell by the sound of the knock on the door at night that he had been drinking and also how much he had had; his language was coarse when he addressed her on these nights, as though he wouldn’t get the full worth of the money he had paid the alcohol-seller if he didn’t call her abusive names.
She tried to resort to her earlier spiritedness, trying to remind him of happier times, but that behaviour now seemed to enrage rather than enchant him, a sign of Western decadence.
One day he slapped her with his coarse rectangular hand. The next day he began to shake her violently: “I know what you did in that house. Admit the truth at once if you don’t want my fist to aid your memory.” He did beat her the next day. And the day after that he waved a knife and shouted, “Your death is hidden in this dagger. . The role of a woman is to give life, the role of a man is to take it. .” The next day he took the final step:
He said the word talaaq three times: I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.
And he pushed her away with his foot. In the morning he claimed he didn’t remember uttering the deadly word in triplicate; and even if he did say it, he certainly hadn’t meant it — but what had been done could not be undone now. The husband — who was the only one in a Muslim marriage with the right to divorce — had uttered the word three times and according to Islam they were now divorced.
There were no witnesses but even then they couldn’t ignore what had happened: Allah had witnessed.
Many drunks were repentant in the mornings when they woke up to find the wife and children weeping at the ruin their life had become a few hours earlier: the husband, intoxicated, had probably had his hands pushed away in the darkness by the wife who was revolted by the smell of alcohol and he had said the word three times in rage. Talaaq. Talaaq. Talaaq. It was as simple as that.
Every day the clerics of the mosques all across the Subcontinent were visited by thousands of distraught couples, and every day the Muslim newspapers — here in England, and there in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — received letters from men who said they loved their wives and children dearly, and that they wanted to keep their family together, that the word talaaq was uttered by them only in anger — but Allah’s law was Allah’s law and nothing could be done.
Nothing except the path Suraya has already embarked upon.
The man — her husband — doesn’t have to marry another woman before he can marry her again. Allah’s law is Allah’s law and cannot be questioned.
Shamas sits in one of the yellow chairs with the newspaper and listens to Kaukab. Having just returned from the neighbourhood shops, she is telling him about the various things she has heard from the women out there as she prepares food in the blue kitchen, keeping up a monologue as she moves from cupboard to dresser to counter to oven. On a tablecloth as white as canvas, she arranges the still life of their lunch. A spring or summer meal is nothing without the freshly beaten coriander-chilli-and-mint chutney, so she had gone to the shops to pick up the mint and the coriander — bushels of the freshest imaginable green secured by stationery-shop rubber bands — and the chillies in polythene bags so finely thin they failed to rustle. She also brought limes that had scars on the peel, made by the sampling pecks of birds, indicating that the fruit had grown on the outside of the tree crown and had therefore been exposed to more sunlight than the ones that had grown concealed within the canopy, the ones with undamaged skins. She halved a lime and rubbed one piece on the plates they would eat out of, to impart a note of zest into each mouthful, and squeezed the other half over the salad of sliced onions and then coated each slice with fiery black pepper so that every curving piece would become as lethal as a sword in the hand of a drunkard.
Mangoes the colour of copper pots have arrived in the shop, she says, £3.60 for a box of five, as have guavas whose flashing pink insides are like a burst of poetry and the red pears which everyone is always reluctant to peel because you want to eat that colour, wishing eyes had tastebuds.
A woman in the neighbourhood has received a letter from the wife of the Bengali family who used to live in the house next door — before Jugnu bought it because the family had decided to go back after their son had been beaten to death in a racial attack by the whites — and in the letter she says that she was totally devastated to hear that her old neighbours’ daughter Mah-Jabin has cut short her lovely long hair.
The Indian and Pakistani mothers of growing daughters are asking the shopkeeper to stop importing a certain English-language women’s magazine published in Bombay. They deem it vulgar and pornographic because in this month’s issue a young Delhi wife had written in to say that she had recently given birth to her first baby and that her husband, saying that her vagina was too loose now, had taken to entering her where she was tighter; the letter was to the medical-advice page and the woman had wanted to know if there was any way she could tighten her vagina, or failing that, perhaps some way could be suggested to make what her husband now does to her not hurt as much.
The parents of a seven-year-old Muslim child — who had recently begun to be educated, at home and at the mosque, about various sins and their punishments — had been summoned to the headmistress’s office yesterday and informed that the boy had been telling his white school-mates that they were all going to be skinned alive in Hell for eating pork and that their mummies and daddies would be set on fire and made to drink boiling hot water because they drank alcohol and did not believe in Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him.