‘What did you say? Aliya, did you hear? He took on his professor.’
I smiled benignly at my aunt and hid behind a samosa.
‘I told him he should come to Pakistan. See how my family looks after the people on our lands. We’ve built medical facilities; every year we bring in someone from the cities to talk to the women about birth control; if anyone has a dispute they come to us and we resolve the situation without bribery or favouritism. And they are so grateful they want to kiss our feet. But we tell them they don’t have to do that. Then I said, “Professor, sir, has anyone ever tried to kiss your feet?” That really shut him up.’
‘Tell them what you said about cities,’ his mother urged.
‘Hanh. I also said the poor people on our lands are much better off than poor people in the city, who have to rely on the government for justice and medical care and things like that’
This was too much for me. ‘But you are the government! The National Assembly is teeming with landowners. Both on the government and the opposition benches. And incidentally, in all your talk of the largesse you provide to these benighted souls, you never mentioned education.’ Masood so often said he wanted to learn to read and write English, and I never even offered to teach him. Worse, the few scraps of English I threw in his direction were worthless words such as ‘thyme’.
Murtaza shook his head at me. ‘You citywallahs. You don’t understand. I thought at least you, because of your family background … For centuries your family ruled over its people with the same attitude as we have. What happened to you?’
‘Evolution.’
I would have won that point except that, just as I spoke, one of the Ali Shah girls whispered, quite audibly, to her sister, ‘Her cousin married the cook.’
How can I justify the shame I felt at that moment?
‘I should be going,’ I said, putting down my teacup quite calmly. ‘Only stopped in for a few minutes on my way to see Dadi. She’ll start worrying if I’m late. Nice to meet you all. No, no, no need to see me out.’
Khurrum was laughing on the phone, near the front door. ‘Going?’ he said. ‘No, not you, Kishwar. Hang on.’ He lowered the phone away from his ear. ‘But we haven’t even discussed Othello and cultural relativism.’
I put a hand on his arm. ‘Nice to know we’ve got people like you in the National Assembly.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, your vote’s frighteningly easy to come by. Are there more like you? Can you all register to vote in my district?’
‘Only if you treat me like any other voter and bribe me.’
‘I promise you a goat for a vote. See you at the wedding?’
I made some non-committal motion with my hand and opened the door. A hawk-nosed man was striding up the driveway and we nodded to each other as I exited and he entered.
‘Jahangir Bhai!’ I heard Khurrum say.
The Underpants Man? I turned round but the door had closed.
I got into my car and rested my head against the steering wheel.
What did he think of the whole Mariam-Masood affair? In four years we’d heard, either directly or second-hand, innuendoes and gossip and vicious conjecture aimed at Mariam, but none of it originated from Jahangir and, consequently, he’d acquired the status of a demi-god in our house.
He’d been unfailingly gracious right from the start, over four years ago, when Auntie Tano called him up to say that Aba and Mariam Apa were planning a trip to the town adjoining his lands to have a look at a mosque. ‘A mosque?’ Aba mouthed in horror as Auntie Tano chirped down the phone to Jahangir.
‘For architectural purposes,’ Auntie Tano added. ‘A client of Nasser’s wants the tiles of the outside wall replicated in his courtyard. So Nasser’s coming to have a look, and Mariam is going to sketch the tiles for the workmen in Karachi. They’re staying overnight. Do you know of any hotels …?’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Jahangir said. ‘Tell them to stay with me. I’ll have my driver pick them up at the train station.’
It was that simple.
By the standard of the Ali Shahs, Jahangir was just a small landowner without the trappings of feudal power, but Aba was struck from the first by the deference of his servants. ‘It made me think that Masood must be a misfit here,’ Aba told me afterwards. ‘Oh, he was never anything but polite, but you always knew that he knew he could leave and get a job anywhere else if we crossed certain lines. Of course, maybe he couldn’t because of Mariam, but we never knew that.’
They arrived on Jahangir’s lands in the early evening, and before sunset Aba had forgotten his reservations about Jahangir, a man he’d been on nodding terms with for twenty years, but had never spoken to until that day.
‘He looked at Mariam when he talked. Didn’t act as though her silence meant she wasn’t part of the conversation. And he could interpret her gestures, her facial expressions, remarkably well. I thought, I really thought, maybe. But then dinner was served.’
When Aba told the story we all, all of us who’d ever eaten a meal prepared by Masood, put aside our reaction to the elopement to imagine, just for a moment, how it would feel to be in the presence of Masood’s food again. Aba, too, closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, said, ‘Chicken vindaloo,’ and we all sighed.
‘Of course, you know my cook,’ Jahangir said. ‘I would say I regret taking him away from you, but you’d know that’s a lie.’
Mariam Apa did not fall upon the food as Aba had expected, given how long she’d been without eating. She brushed a hint of the vindaloo’s sauce on to her lower lip, and tucked the lip inside her mouth. She held it there for a few seconds, and then smiled. After that she ate with her customary delicacy, but her eyes were bright as she savoured each morsel, and when she finished her first helping she gasped at the incremental burn of the spices on her tongue.
Masood did not appear during the meal; he did not double as bearer here, but stayed confined to the kitchen. At the end of the meal, however, Jahangir said, ‘You’ll stay for lunch tomorrow, won’t you? You can see the mosque in the morning and then come back. We’ll have Masood cook whatever you want.’ He turned to the bearer and told him to call Masood. ‘Stay all weekend, in fact. Longer! I had forgotten that it was possible to enjoy company so much. ‘
Aba was already imagining the wedding, and hoping it wouldn’t be a dragged-out series of ceremonies over two weeks.
‘Nasser Sahib,’ he heard behind him, and there stood Masood. Aba stood up and shook his hand warmly, thereby missing the expression on Mariam Apa’s face as she saw Masood for the first time since he’d left.
Masood turned to Mariam. ‘What will you have tomorrow?’ he said. Mariam cupped her palms and pointed them towards Masood. It’s in your hands.
The next morning when Aba went to see why Mariam was sleeping so late her suitcase was gone and a photostat of a wedding licence was on her bed, the print smudged here and there. People said, ‘She just left a copy of the nikahnama without any sign of goodbye or sorry or take care,’ but I knew the smudges were the only gesture of farewell that would allow me to forgive her for leaving. After all, how could I be angry when confronted with her tears?
Aba had no choice but to show his host the nikahnama, and Jahangir said, ‘If you think it best I’ll send my men to find them. It won’t be a problem.’
‘Thank you,’ Aba said. ‘Thank you for making that optional. No, please, I have no right to make this demand, but please don’t do that, not now, not ever.’
‘Bibi?’
I lifted my head from the steering wheel, and ran my palm along my forehead, trying to smooth away the latticed pattern imprinted on my skin.