One of Shamas’s eyes is looking into the ground and the men vacate the second eye’s view, moving away. There is a red pricking in both his eyes, both have caught a fresh glimpse of the humiliations Suraya went through with him in order to be united with son and husband. How she must have loathed him during the hours she spent with him, he who was under the impression that she was with him out of her own choice, had yet to be told the truth about her circumstances by her!
He lies there with an ear pressed to the ground (down there where Chanda and Jugnu are turning into clay) as though trying to listen out for something, as though he’s a traveller in a fairytale who’s heard someone call out to him while he was crossing a forest, someone buried alive by a sorcerer who will be freed and jump out of the hole when the traveller digs deep enough.
He feels the sun creep up on him. Someone with a stick-crazy dog will come upon him soon, he reassures himself; those animals and their masters are constantly taking each other places, the dogs’ fur covered in inch-long bits of grass like wrong-coloured stitches on a garment; the dogs wrapping their leads around their owners, revolving and describing circles like a lighthouse’s beam. Or one of those figures he always sees from a distance, busy with a boat and its triangular sail at the edge of the water, their legs spread like a wishbone, ripples of breeze running across the material of the sail like the flank of a cow twitching away flies, in Pakistan.
Shamas lies on the grass after the voices of his assailants have receded into the distance, the newspapers rustling around in the descending silence, touching his skin, a ripped-up piece dyed crimson red with blood — his, for he can taste the salt in his mouth. He cannot keep his eyes open and feels very sleepy all of a sudden, very tired, eyes heavy and unable to focus. He makes an effort to move his legs but is unable to and closes his eyes. .
And then with a great lunge of effort, like a hosepipe whipping into an arc of frenzy as water enters it at great pressure, he makes his body stand upright in tearing eagerness, jerking his head up away from the ground with a burst of energy: in a congestion of tender impulses, he tells himself that they are definitely on their way to harm Suraya — she who is so gentle and careful that she touches everything as though it were a part of her— and he must stop them.
Suddenly life matters again.
He can see the three of them walking towards the car and is surprised that he hasn’t been lying here for longer. He limps after them in enthusiastic dizziness, everything a blur and everything perfectly clear. His progress wavers because he cannot walk in a straight line. He has to alter his direction every other second to bring them to the centre of his vision. They slide in and out of view periodically, in unexpected directions and diagonals. He drops and picks up again the torn bundle of newspapers that he had obviously felt compelled to collect and bring with him, not wishing to waste them, not having any memory of the time he made the decision to gather them up from around him before setting out. Perhaps he has vomited — his breath smells — but he has no memory of that either.
He steadies himself and moves towards them like a bubble flowing helplessly towards a drain. His heart clubbing away inside, he is not sure whether he is groaning but they do become aware of him eventually and stop and turn around.
AUTUMN
IRIS’S WINGS
Kaukab feels herself being watched from above.
The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that whenever a man’s earthly wife makes difficulties for him, his seventy-two houri wives — waiting for him up there in Paradise — sigh regretfully. If ever her man wishes to copulate with the earth wife and she makes excuses or shuns him, the houri wives curse her all night.
The houris reserved for Shamas are cursing Kaukab from up there, because she has just stumbled out of the room where Shamas is lying, a month after his beating. Twenty-five of the past thirty days he has spent in hospital. He still gets delirious sometimes and has attempted to undress her just now, asking her to touch him between the legs, fondling her breasts, wanting her to show him the scattering of moles on her upper thighs that he loves. More than once over the previous weeks while she was visiting him at the hospital, he asked her — in delirium — how she feels about another baby. And several times he called out to someone or something called “Pleiades.” And twice he tried to struggle out of the hospital bed saying, “I have something urgent to attend to at Scandal Point.” The one in Shimla?
She has of course refused him intimacy before, but each time she has pretended — yes, pretended, she admits tearfully — that it was not a sexual advance, a request for access to her body, and has therefore remained relatively free of guilt, and free of the fear of Allah’s retribution, but the recent touches and caresses have been explicit.
Shamas is bruised everywhere on the surface and there are innumerable internal injuries, the doctors saying he is lucky to be alive, and his fae ces has been quite liquid like bird droppings since the attack that he has failed to explain to anyone, not remembering anything about it, some people in the neighbourhood saying that without doubt the perpetrators belonged to Chanda’s family, that it is their revenge for the fact that, come December, their sons are facing a life sentence because of Shamas’s brother.
A woman from the neighbourhood — who recently has been accompanying Kaukab to the gynaecologist because Kaukab has reached that age where her womb is slipping out of her vagina and must be either surgically removed or stitched back to the inner lining of her body — said, “When I heard the news my heart was as a porcelain plate dropped from a high terrace. May these bad times be short-lived and Allah take you both into His compassion once again soon.”
She has just given him lunch and is now bringing the tray downstairs, the plate glowing in the enclosed staircase: it is part of an old set and she knows that bone china is partly bone, and goes yellow with age due to the phosphorus in the bones. That afternoon a month ago, when he came home clutching tattered newspapers to himself, he looked as though he’d been in a room full of glass cases when an earthquake had struck, and that those cases had contained venomous snakes. His face was swollen and when she saw him there was a split-second of confusion as to his identity before she recognized him — by his clothing. He was dribbling as though an egg had just cracked in his mouth.
Her womb — the first dress of her daughter, the first address of her sons — is a constant source of pain these days and she comes down the stairs carefully. She tells herself that she must bear up patiently, that a person is like a tealeaf: drop it into boiling water if you want to see its true colour. She reads verses from the Koran when the pain looks as though it is about to increase.
By the white forenoon
And the brooding night!
Thy Lord has neither forsaken thee
Nor hates thee.
Since midmorning there has been a distant buzz in the air from the grass-cutting machines at work on the meadow-like slopes behind the house. The wildflowers there are receiving their second cut of the year, and, all afternoon, a scent which is a compound of sap and shredded petals has been swirling down the hill, having a leavening effect on the atmosphere.