She’ll make some rice pudding for Shamas this afternoon because he has asked for something sweet, and goes to check that there are pistachios in the cupboard. And maybe she should taste Shamas’s food— despite the fact that it is Ramadan and she’s fasting — to make sure that the things like spices and salts are in proportion. Allah — ever kind, ever compassionate — says that if you are a slave, a servant or a wife, and your master, employer, or husband is a strict man, you are allowed to taste the food you are cooking for him during your Ramadan fast to see that the salt and spices are according to his preference, to prevent a beating or unpleasantness. Shamas doesn’t mind, but — since he is not well— perhaps her violating the fast would fall into the category of wifely devotion and love, and be excused.
There are no pistachios, and she wonders if she should go to the shops to get them, though Shamas’s claw managed to scratch her painfully between the legs before she escaped; as it is, nowadays it’s hard for her to even stand up sometimes.
Kaukab hasn’t informed her children of their father’s beating because she is afraid they would believe the rumour of Chanda’s family’s involvement and do something improper or illegal. Her children are mild-mannered with the exception of Ujala, but that sight upstairs will move anyone to do something drastic. She imagines various horrible scenarios like one of her boys ending up in prison like Chanda’s brothers for having committed a violent crime.
“O just think how that girl Chanda managed to destroy her entire family,” a woman said recently — the day Shamas got beaten up, in fact.
That the man who was equally responsible for the ruin of the shop-owning family was dear to Kaukab did not prevent the woman from saying this out loud in front of her, because everyone knows that Kaukab had disapproved of the two sinners. Kaukab and the women had been sitting in Kaukab’s front garden — which is the sunny side of the street in the afternoons — and peeling and preparing vegetables, discussing various matters. Just then a bird had started to shriek somewhere nearby, so that Kaukab and the others had had to cover their ears; and then realizing that the bird was in the lilac tree beside the garden gate, a woman threw an enraged slipper in that direction. They were stunned when a rose-ringed parakeet—“Here in this country?”—emerged and flashed away, the slipper getting stuck in the branches, a few heart-shaped lilac leaves falling out onto the ground. The bird paused for a few moments on a telephone wire to smooth its plumes, sprang up and then disappeared into the sky. “They were said to be flying about on the edges of Dasht-e-Tanhaii but now they are spreading into town, it seems.”
And then suddenly everyone had their mental activity arrested for a few seconds because they had seen Shamas standing at the bottom of the garden, past the lilac tree, his face and hair bloody, clutching torn newspapers to himself. The women sat as if painted in a picture, wonder settling on them in layers. There were a dozen or so flies around his blood and wounds. And then Kaukab, her tongue feeling dry down to its very root, rushed to the gate and opened it to let him stumble in, the others running forward to assist or staying behind to clear a path for him through the bowls and platters of onions and chillies and potatoes and spinach, the sparrows flying away where they had been pecking away at the peels and the discarded coriander leaves.
Someone ran into the blue kitchen with its yellow tables and chairs to call 999 in rudimentary English, speaking to a white person for the fourth time in her life, wondering whether she should add the word “fuck” into her speech now and then to sound more like a person who belonged to this country, because she had seen her English-speaking children use that word with great confidence, whatever it meant. Kaukab hadn’t been apprehensive at Shamas’s absence from the house: she had gone to sleep after reading the Koran until one o’clock the previous night and she had slept through the alarm that should have awakened her for the pre-fast meal and the dawn prayers. She woke up at ten minutes to nine and saw that Shamas had bathed and gone out. She hadn’t missed him at all, it being a habit of his to spend time in the town library on Saturdays, or take a bus out into the woody areas of the county, or go into his office to do some work — sometimes do all three.
Kaukab cannot find any pistachios in the cupboard. Of course, to make rice pudding without the avocado-green and hot-pink of the pistachios is like making the children wear clothes without colours and sequins on a festive occasion, a festive occasion like Eid which everyone in Pakistan must already have started preparing for, the way people here start getting ready for Christmas weeks beforehand, almost everything in the year planned with that festival in mind.
Pain shoots between her legs, and so she needs to hear Ujala’s voice on his answering machine and moves towards the pink room where the telephone lies; but there is a knock on the door and she finds a neighbourhood woman holding a bunch of roses wrapped in a newspaper, the strong thorns sticking through the paper here and there.
“I have just pruned my roses, Kaukab, but I didn’t want to waste these blooms. I thought they would brighten brother-ji’s room, may Allah give him health. How is he? Be careful, they are sharp.”
Kaukab exclaims with delight and takes the spiky package from her. “He’s resting. But isn’t it a bit early to cut back the rosebushes? I don’t do mine until the middle of October.”
“It is early, but the builders are coming to do some work at my house and I don’t know if I’ll get a chance later on. You know what they say about builders and djinns: once they’ve entered a house they are hard to get rid of.” Instead of a gardener’s leather gauntlet, she is wearing oven gloves for her pruning task, and the cloth they are made of looks Pakistani to Kaukab: a web of embroidery studded with little mirrors like dewdrops. She must have made the gloves herself because there is no home oven-cooking in Pakistan and so no oven gloves of any kind have been conceived.
Kaukab remembers from her childhood the cakes that Shamas’s father used to bake with live coals heaped around the pan, may he rest in peace, remembers how the vanilla perfume would roam through the winter streets of Sohni Dharti and find all the children like someone expert at hide-and-seek.
“I would like to smell these roses,” Kaukab says, “but I won’t. Rose essence is used in several sweetmeats and I am afraid Allah might think me a conniver, think I am smelling the fragrance of these roses just to get closer to food during my fast.”
The woman is sitting at the table and, having taken off the oven gloves, is helping Kaukab remove some of the leaves from the rose stems and arranging the flowers in the vase of water. “Allah is compassionate, Kaukab, and in any case He knows everything in our heart.”
“He dictated it all to the angels who jotted it down in the Book of Fates.”
“I was just thinking of that Book earlier in the morning, Kaukab. I thought if only I could get a look in its pages I’d know how long I’ll have to wait for any news of my son, or I could flip back a few pages to go into the past to see what happened to him, where he is.” She breaks off and twirls a rose in her hand, blinking fast to prevent tears.
Gently, Kaukab rubs the woman’s shoulder. “You mustn’t despair. Allah will come to your aid.”
“I told him that if he wanted to go on holiday he should go to Pakistan and stay with his uncles. But he said he wanted to go to a different place, telling me that the point of travel was to ‘discover new things’—whatever that means. In the end I was happy that he was going to Turkey, a Muslim country.” The woman stares at the pink roses. “He disappeared almost on arrival in Istanbul a week ago. The police found a body in the Bosphorous yesterday and tests are being carried out to discover the identity. It is possible he was killed for his passport.”