5
THE WRONG MIRACLE
Bilquìs is lying wide awake in the dark of a cavernous bedroom, her hands crossed upon her breasts. When she sleeps alone her hands habitually find their way into this position, even though her in-laws disapprove. She can’t help it, this hugging of herself to herself, as though she were afraid of losing something.
All around her in the darkness are the dim outlines of other beds, old charpoys with thin mattresses, on which other women lie under single white sheets; a grand total of forty females clustered around the majestically tiny form of the matriarch Bariamma, who snores lustily. Bilquìs already knows enough about this chamber to be sure that most of the shapes tossing vaguely in the dark are no more asleep than she. Even Bariamma’s snores might be a deception. The women are waiting for the men to come.
The turning door-knob rattles like a drum. At once there is a change in the quality of the night. A delicious wickedness is in the air. A cool breeze stirs, as if the entry of the first man has succeeded in dispelling some of the intense treacly heat of the hot season, enabling the ceiling fans to move a little more efficiently through the soupy atmosphere. Forty women, one of them Bilquìs, stir damply under their sheets … more men enter. They are tiptoeing along the midnight avenues of the dormitory and the women have become very still, except for Bariamma. The matriarch is snoring more energetically then ever. Her snores are sirens, sounding the all-clear and giving necessary courage to the men.
The girl in the bed next to Bilquìs, Rani Humayun, who is unmarried and therefore expects no visit tonight, whispers across the blackness: ‘Here come the forty thieves.’
And now there are tiny noises in the dark: charpoy ropes yielding fractionally beneath the extra weight of a second body, the rustle of clothing, the heavier exhalations of the invading husbands. Gradually the darkness acquires a kind of rhythm, which accelerates, peaks, subsides. Then there is a multiple padding towards the door, several times the drum-roll of the turning door-knob, and at last silence, because Bariamma, now that it is polite to do so, has quite ceased to snore.
Rani Humayun, who has landed one of the prize catches of the marriage season and will shortly leave this dormitory to wed the fair-skinned, foreign-educated, sensually full-lipped young millionaire Iskander Harappa, and who is, like Bilquìs, eighteen years old, has befriended her cousin Raza’s new bride. Bilquìs enjoys (while pretending to be scandalized) Rani’s malicious ruminations on the subject of the household sleeping arrangements. ‘Imagine, in that darkness,’ Rani giggles while the two of them grind the daily spices, ‘who would know if her real husband had come to her? And who could complain? I tell you, Billoo, these married men and ladies are having a pretty good time in this joint family set-up. I swear, maybe uncles with nieces, brothers with their brothers’ wives, we’ll never know who the children’s daddies really are!’ Bilquìs blushes gracefully and covers Rani’s mouth with a coriander-scented hand. ‘Stop, darling, what a dirtyfilthy mind!’
But Rani is inexorable. ‘No, Bilquìs, I tell you, you are new here but I have grown up in this place, and by the hairs of our Bariamma’s head I vow that this arrangement which is supposed to be made for decency etcetera is just the excuse for the biggest orgy on earth.’
Bilquìs does not point out (how rude it would be to do so) that the minuscule, almost dwarfish Bariamma is not only toothless and blind but no longer has a single hair on her ancient head, either. The matriarch wears a wig.
Where are we, and when? – In a large family house in the old quarter of the coastal city which, having no option, I must call Karachi. Raza Hyder, an orphan like his wife, has brought her (immediately after descending from the Dakota of their flight into the west) into the bosom of his maternal relations; Bariamma is his grandmother on his late mother’s side. ‘You must stay here,’ he told Bilquìs, ‘until things settle down and we can see what is what and what is not.’ So these days Hyder is in temporary quarters at the Army base while his bride lies amid sleep-feigning in-laws, knowing that no man will visit her in the night. – And yes, I see that I have brought my tale into a second infinite mansion, which the reader will perhaps already be comparing to a faraway house in the border town of Q.; but what a complete contrast it affords! For this is no sealed-off redoubt; it bursts, positively bursts with family members and related personnel.
‘They still live in the old village way,’ Raza warned Bilquìs before depositing her in that house in which it was believed that the mere fact of being married did not absolve a woman of the shame and dishonour that results from the knowledge that she sleeps regularly with a man; which was why Bariamma had devised, without once discussing it, the idea of the forty thieves. And of course all the women denied that anything of ‘that nature’ ever took place, so that when pregnancies occurred they did so as if by magic, as if all conceptions were immaculate and all births virgin. The idea of parthenogenesis had been accepted in this house in order to keep out certain other, unpleasantly physical notions.
Bilquìs, the girl with the dream of queenhood, thought but did not say; ‘O God. Ignoramuses from somewhere. Backward types, village idiots, unsophisticated completely, and I am stuck with them.’ Aloud, she told Raza meekly: ‘Much to be said for the old traditions.’ Raza nodded seriously in simple agreement; her heart sank further after that.
In the empire of Bariamma, Bilquìs, the newest arrival, the junior member, was of course not treated like a queen.
‘See if we don’t have sons,’ Raza told Bilquìs, ‘In my mother’s family boys grow on trees.’
Lost in the forest of new relatives, wandering in the blood-jungle of the matriarchal home, Bilquìs consulted the family Quran in search of these family trees, and found them there, in their traditional place, monkey-puzzle groves of genealogy inscribed in the back of the holy book. She discovered that since the generation of Bariamma, who had two sisters, Raza’s maternal great-aunts, both widowed, as well as three brothers – a landlord, a wastrel and a mental-case fool – since that sexually-balanced generation, only two girls had been born in the entire family. One of these was Raza’s deceased mother; the other, Rani Humayun, who could not wait to escape from that house which was never left by its sons, who imported their wives to live and breed in battery conditions, like shaver chickens. On his mother’s side, Raza had a total of eleven legitimate uncles and, it was believed, at least nine illegitimate ones, the brood of the wastrel, philandering great-uncle. Besides Rani, he could point to a grand total of thirty-two male cousins born in wedlock. (The putative offspring of the bastard uncles did not rate a mention in the Quran.) Of this enormous stock of relatives, a sizeable percentage was in residence under Bariamma’s short but omnipotent shadow; wastrel and fool were unmarried, but when the landlord came to stay his wife occupied one of the beds in Bariamma’s zenana wing. At the time of which I am speaking, landlord and wife were present; also eight of the eleven legitimate uncles, plus wives; and (Bilquìs had difficulty with her counting) around twenty-nine male cousins, and Rani Humayun. Twenty-six cousinly wives stuffed the wicked bedchamber, and Bilquìs herself made forty, once the three sisters of the oldest generation were included.
Bilquìs Hyder’s head whirled. Trapped in a language which contained a quite specific name for each conceivable relative, so that the bewildered newcomer was unable to hide behind such generic appellations as ‘uncle’, ‘cousin’, ‘aunt’, but was continually caught out in all her insulting ignorance, Bilquìs’s tongue was silenced by the in-law mob. She virtually never spoke except when alone with Rani or Raza; and thus acquired the triple reputation of sweet-innocent-child, doormat and fool. Because Raza was often away for days at a time, depriving her of the protection and flattery the other women got from their husbands on a daily basis, she also attained the status of poor-thing, which her lack of eyebrows (that no amount of pencilled artistry could disguise) did nothing to diminish. Thanks to this she was given slightly more than her fair share of household duties and also sligh
tly more than her fair share of the rough edge of Bariamma’s tongue. But she was also admired, grudgingly, because the family had a high opinion of Raza, the women admitted that he was a good man who did not beat his wife. This definition of goodness alarmed Bilquìs, to whom it had never occurred that she might be beaten, and she raised the subject with Rani. ‘Oh yes,’ her cousin-in-law replied, ‘how they all hit! Tharaap! Tharaap! Sometimes it does your heart good to watch. But one must also watch out. A good man can go bad, like meat, if you do not keep him cool.’
As the officially designated poor-thing, Bilquìs was also obliged to sit each evening at Bariamma’s feet while the blind old lady recounted the family tales. These were lurid affairs, featuring divorces, bankruptcies, droughts, cheating friends, child mortality, diseases of the breast, men cut down in their prime, failed hopes, lost beauty, women who grew obscenely fat, smuggling deals, opium-taking poets, pining virgins, curses, typhoid, bandits, homosexuality, sterility, frigidity, rape, the high price of food, gamblers, drunks, murders, suicides and God. Bariamma’s mildly droning recital of the catalogue of family horrors had the effect of somehow defusing them, making them safe, embalming them in the mummifying fluid of her own incontrovertible respectability. The telling of the tales proved the family’s ability to survive them, to retain, in spite of everything, its grip on its honour and its unswerving moral code. ‘To be of the family,’ Bariamma told Bilquìs, you must know our things, and tell us yours.’ So Bilquis was forced, one evening (Raza was present but made no attempt to protect her), to recount the end of Mahmoud the Woman and her nudity in the Delhi streets. ‘Never mind,’ Bariamma pronounced approvingly, when Bilquìs was shaking with the shame of her revelations, ‘at least you managed to keep your dupatta on.’
After that Bilquìs often heard her story being retold, wherever one or two of the family were gathered, in the hot lizardy corners of the courtyard or on the starlit roofs of the summer nights, in the nurseries to frighten the children and even in the boudoir of jewel-heavy, hennaed Rani on the morning of her wedding; because stories, such stories, were the glue that held the clan together, binding the generations in webs of whispered secrets. Her story altered, at first, in the retellings, but finally it settled down, and after that nobody, neither teller nor listener, would tolerate any deviation from the hallowed, sacred text. This was when Bilquìs knew that she had become a member of the family; in the sanctification of her tale lay initiation, kinship, blood. ‘The recounting of histories,’ Raza told his wife, ‘is for us a rite of blood.’
But neither Raza nor Bilquìs could have known that their story had scarcely begun, that it would be the juiciest and goriest of all the juicygory sagas, and that, in time to come, it would always begin with the following sentence (which, in the family’s opinion, contained all the right resonances for the opening of such a narrative):
‘It was the day on which the only son of the future President Raza Hyder was going to be reincarnated.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the audience would cheer, ‘tell us that one, that’s the best.’
In that hot season, the two newly-partitioned nations announced the commencement of hostilities on the Kashmiri frontier. You can’t beat a northern war in the hot season; officers, foot-soldiers, cooks all rejoiced as they headed for the coolness of the hills. ‘Yara, this is luck, na?’ ‘Shit, sisterfucker, at least this year I won’t die in that damn heat.’ O backslapping camaraderie of the meteorologically fortunate! Jawans went to war with the devil-may-care abandon of holiday makers. There were, inevitably, deaths; but the organizers of the war had catered for these as well. Those who fell in battle were flown directly, first-class, to the perfumed gardens of Paradise, to be waited on for all eternity by four gorgeous Houris, untouched by man or djinn. ‘Which of your Lord’s blessings,’ the Quran inquires, ‘would you deny?’
Army morale was high; but Rani Humayun was most put out, because it would have been unpatriotic to hold a wedding reception in wartime. The function had been postponed, and she stamped her feet. Raza Hyder, however, stepped contentedly into the camouflaged jeep of his flight from the boiling insanity of the summer city, and just then his wife whispered into his ear that she was expecting another sort of happy event. (Taking a leaf out of Bariamma’s book, I have turned a blind eye and snored loudly while Raza Hyder visited the dormitory of the forty women and made this miracle possible.)
Raza let fly a yell so swollen by triumph that Bariamma, seated indoors on her takht, became convinced in the confusion of her sweating blindness that her grandson had already received news of some famous victory, so that when such news did in fact come through, weeks later, she replied simply: ‘Did you just find that out? I knew it one month back.’ (This was in the days before the people learned that their side almost always lost, so that the national leaders, rising brilliantly to the challenge, perfected no fewer than one thousand and one ways of salvaging honour from defeat.)
‘He’s coming!’ Raza deafened his wife, causing earthen pitchers to topple from the heads of womenservants and frightening the geese. ‘What did I tell you, Mrs?’ He set his cap more jauntily on his head, slapped his wife too firmly on the stomach, joined the palms of his hands together and made diving gestures. ‘Whoosh!’ he shouted. ‘Voom, wife! Here he comes!’ And he roared off into the north, promising to win a great victory in honour of his forthcoming son, and leaving behind him a Bilquìs who, being washed for the first time by the solipsistic fluids of motherhood, had neglected to notice the tears in her husband’s eyes, the tears turning his black eye-pouches into velvet bags, the tears which were among the earliest pointers that the future strong-man of the nation was of the type that cried too easily … in private with the frustrated Rani Humayun, Bilquìs crowed proudly: ‘Never mind this war foolishness; the important news is that I am making a boy to marry your unborn daughter.’
An extract from the family’s saga of Raza and Bilquìs, given in the formulaic words which it would be a gross sacrilege to alter:
‘When we heard that our Razzoo had pulled off an attacking coup so daring that there was no option but to call it a triumph, we started off by refusing to believe our ears, – for already in those days even the sharpest ears had developed the fault of becoming wholly unreliable when they were attuned to the radio news bulletins; – on such occasions everybody heard things that could not possibly have been the case. – But then we nodded our heads, understanding that a man whose wife is about to bear him a son is capable of anything. Yes, it was the unborn boy who was responsible for this, the only victory in the history of our armed forces, – which formed the basis of Raza’s reputation for invincibility, a reputation which quickly became invincible itself, – so that not even the long humiliating years of his decline proved capable of destroying it. – He returned a hero, having seized for our holy new land a mountain valley so high and inaccessible that even goats had difficulty in breathing up there; so intrepid he was, so tremendous, that all true patriots had to gasp – and you must not believe that propaganda which says that the enemy did not bother to defend the place; – the fighting was fierce as ice – and with twenty men only he took the valley! That little band of giants, that daredevil crew, and Old Razor Guts at their head – who could have denied them? Who could have stood in their path?
‘For all peoples, there are places that mean too much. “Aansu!” we wept with pride; with true patriotism we sobbed, “Only imagine – he has taken the Aansu-ki-Wadi!” It’s true: the capture of that fabled “valley of tears” made us all weep as uncontrollably as, in later years, its conqueror became famous for doing. – But after a while it was clear that nobody knew what to do with that place where your spit froze before it hit the ground; except Iskander Harappa, of course; – who, dry-eyed as ever, went off to the Tribal Agencies Department and purchased more or less the whole caboodle, dirt-cheap, snow-cheap, for cash money on the nail, – and a few years later there were ski-lodges up there, and scheduled air flights, and European goings-on
at night that made the local tribals faint for shame. – But did Raz, our great hero, see anything of that foreign exchange?’ (Here the teller invariably smites her forehead with the palm of her hand.) ‘No, how would he, that great Army dumbo? Isky always got there first. But’ (and now the narrator adopts the most cryptic, menacing tone of which she is capable), ‘it is being there last that counts.’
At this point I must interrupt the legend. The duel between Raza Hyder (promoted to Major for his Aansu exploit) and Iskander Harappa, which began, but certainly did not end, in Aansu, will have to wait yet awhile; because now that Old Razor Guts is back in town, and it is peacetime again, the wedding is about to be celebrated which will make the mortal adversaries into cousins-in-laws: into family.
Rani Humayun, eyes downcast, watches in a mirror-ring her bridegroom approaching her; borne shoulder-high by a turbaned retinue of friends, he sits on a golden plate. Later, after she had fainted under the weight of her jewellery; been revived by the pregnant Bilquìs who then passed out herself; had money thrown in her lap by every member of her family in turn; watched through her veil as her ancient lecherous great-uncle pinched the bottoms of her new husband’s female relations, knowing that his grey hairs would prevent them from complaining; and finally lifted the veil beside her while a hand raised her own, and looked long and hard into the face of Iskander Harappa, whose overpowering sexual appeal owed much to the unlined softness of his twenty-five-year-old cheeks – around which curled long hair that was already, and freakishly, the colour of pure silver, and thinning on top to reveal the golden dome of his skull – and between which, also curled, she discovered lips whose patrician cruelty was alleviated by their sensual thickness, the lips, she thought, of a black hubshee, and idea which gave her a peculiarly sinful frisson of delight … later, after she had ridden with him to a bedchamber opulent with ancient swords and imported French tapestries and Russian novels, after she had descended full of terror from a white stallion whose sex was quite patently standing to attention, after she had heard the doors of her marriage closing behind her in this other home whose grandeur made Bariamma’s place look like a village hovel – then, oiled and naked on a bed before which the man who had just turned her into a grown woman stood staring indolently down upon her beauty, she, Rani Harappa, made her first genuinely wifely remark.
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