by Abda Khan
For there, in the far corner, sat next to the range cooker, visible between the gap between Zaheer and Aneela, cowering on the cold stone-tiled floor, was a young woman. She was dressed in traditional salwar kameez, both of which were a dirty brown in colour, covered with stains, and pretty much creased from top to bottom. Her mismatched scruffy-looking black chaddar was draped around her head, shoulders and chest, and she was wearing tatty plastic green sandals. Her hair was scraped back off her face, and mostly hidden under the chaddar. Her complexion was dark brown in tone, and completely plain, lacking any make-up; tears were running down her cheeks. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old.
‘Please, Sahib!’ she mumbled, in a tiny voice, in a dialect of Punjabi that was not Farah’s mother tongue of Potwari Punjabi. She seemed to be begging, with both her hands clasped together in front of her, like a prayer pose. ‘Everything else is fine; it’s just the murgh musallam, I’m not sure what happened, but I think I became confused with the timer, and I must have set it wrong. I am still finding these electrical things difficult to understand. Please forgive me, Master!’
She sobbed quietly, but her brown eyes were painfully strained; they exuded fear. The scene unfolding before Farah seemed to be happening in some sort of cruel slow motion. The girl reminded her of a cornered, helpless animal. The girl’s eyes darted continuously and desperately from Zaheer to Aneela and back, in an agonising search for some sort of a reprieve.
‘Kameeni, how many times have I shown you how to set the timer properly, you can’t get such a simple task right!’ shrieked Aneela.
The girl let out muted sobs.
Zaheer raised his hand. The girl immediately untied her hands from the prayer pose, and spread them over her head. She hid her head in her lap, as if she was certain of the inevitable. However, before Zaheer could make contact, his wife yanked him back.
‘Not now, Zaheer,’ she urged him. Zaheer stood up tall, straight-backed. He looked down with sheer disdain.
The girl very slowly raised her head out of her lap, inch by inch, and looked up at the couple; her body trembled, and her tears continued to seep, but she didn’t make a noise.
‘We have guests, or have you forgotten,’ continued Aneela, in a hushed tone. ‘This is not the time. Leave her be. She will keep.’
Zaheer let out a grunt, as he screwed his hands into fists by his sides.
‘She’s just like the rest of them. They are always bloody good for nothing. I did say this from the start,’ said Zaheer in an exasperated muffle. ‘Once a slave, always a slave!’
Farah closed the door and stepped away from it. She moved into the corner of the room, and placed one hand firmly over her frantically beating chest, and the other over her mouth. She closed her eyes, and concentrated hard on trying to calm her uneven breath and stop her hands from shaking. She felt her heart pound. Slave … slave … she repeated in her mind. She had heard enough. She needed to get out of here. She took another long, deep inhalation, and headed back to the door from which she had entered. She stepped out of the room and into the hallway, and tried the door next to it, and found that this was in fact the bathroom. She quickly went in, and locked the door.
3
When Farah re-entered the dining room, Zaheer was already back in his seat at the head of the table. He was laughing and joking, and making small talk, just as any dinner host would be expected to do. He had just scared a young girl half to death, almost physically assaulted her, shouted abuse at her, reduced her to tears, called her a slave, and yet here he was the life and soul of the party. He was utterly carefree. How could he switch from evil and sinister one moment to happy chappy the next? What sort of a person could do that?
Just as Farah took her seat again, Aneela walked in with a large tray in her hands, which she placed on the table with great pomp and ceremony, as she announced, ‘I hope you all like lamb biryani. And not only that; there is also chicken shashlik, malai koftas, and of course dhal and sabzi. And I will fetch the fresh rotis too, shortly. Nothing beats the taste of piping hot, home-made chapattis, especially mine; they are always soft and fluffy, just as they should be. It is after all, I think, the true taste of Pakistan, and the real touch of home cooking, to serve home-prepared rotis with the meal. Of course, you can get them ready made from the shops nowadays, but the taste is nowhere near as good.’
She was exactly the same as her husband, thought Farah; such deceit!
The freshly prepared, piping hot food was served in elegant bowls and platters. It smelled divine, and was pleasingly presented, but eating was the last thing on Farah’s mind. She was trying really hard not to look at either of them, but she was convinced that the more she tried, the more her eyes kept straying towards Zaheer, and then Aneela, and then back to him, in some sort of repetitive trance-like motion that she couldn’t control.
‘Is the food to your liking, Farah?’ asked Aneela.
Farah looked up and met her deer-like eyes. ‘Yes, it’s delicious. But really, I don’t know where you find the time to make all this fantastic food. I know from when my mum prepares feasts like this for dinner parties, or on Eid, that it takes a huge amount of time and effort to make. She normally ropes me plus one or two of the relatives into helping her. Did you prepare all these wonderful dishes by yourself?’
Her question, which was a deliberate pry, prompted a brief exchange of glances between the couple. Aneela suddenly appeared nervous, or at least that’s how it seemed to Farah. Zaheer jumped in and answered for her.
‘Seeing as you ask, we do actually have some domestic help; we employ a housekeeper who assists Aneela with the cooking and other household chores. This is a big apartment, and we do a lot of entertaining. All of this would simply be too much for Aneela to do all by herself.’
Aneela breathed out a tiny sigh. She gave a little smile to her husband, visibly relieved that he had taken charge. The two male guests, meanwhile, were completely oblivious to any tension there may have been during the exchange between Farah and the hosts. Farah wondered how Paul would feel if he knew about this side of his dear friend.
‘Well, however and whoever made this food, it is absolutely delicious,’ said Tahir, in between stuffing forkfuls into his mouth, and gawping at Farah.
Farah endeavoured with all her strength to appear relaxed. She tried very hard to portray an external façade of having a pleasant evening. But everything that Zaheer and Aneela now said pierced her ears, for she could only hear their earlier yelling. Any other conversation in the room seemed to dissipate into the background of her consciousness, like the subdued, slurred sound you hear when you swim underwater. Although she was troubled on the inside, she nevertheless continued to smile on the outside through the rest of the evening. Somehow.
Dinner was rounded off with several desserts which were, once again, like the other courses, made and presented to perfection. The dessert trolley was laden with hot rose-scented gulab jamuns served with cardamom kulfi, creamy white badam kheer and bright orange gajar halwa infused with the mellow flavour and aroma of saffron, as well as a selection of colourful mitai, and an exotic fruit salad. All of this was washed down with traditional cardamom tea. As they tucked into the sweet delights, the men congratulated themselves on the success of their business union, and declared: ‘Long may it continue!’ Farah felt nauseous, as she continued to think about the girl in the kitchen.
She couldn’t head for the front door fast enough when Aneela confirmed that her taxi had arrived.
It was raining heavily when she stepped out onto the street, and Farah stood still for a second just to breathe. She then ran over to the taxi and jumped into the back as fast as she could.
‘Terrible weather we’re having for this time of the year,’ remarked the cab driver in his cockney accent. It was a short while before she even realised that the driver was speaking to her. She looked towards him; he was looking back at her in the mirror, waiting for some sort of a response.
&n
bsp; The driver adjusted his checked flat cap slightly, and his gaze darted from the road to Farah’s face in the mirror.
‘They’re saying it’s gonna be raining for another week yet.’
‘Hmmm,’ Farah said, still deep in thought.
‘Are you all right, Miss?’ asked the taxi driver, ‘Only, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Farah muttered.
‘Eh?’
‘Oh, sorry. I’m fine, really, thanks for asking,’ said Farah.
But Farah was far from fine. She was anything but fine.
When she arrived at her flat, all Farah wanted to do was to get into her cosy bed and sleep. She wanted to stop thinking about that poor girl. But she had no such luck, for she tossed and turned for hours in her bed that night. Her brain was flooded with question after question. Who was this girl? Could Farah have done anything? Should she have gone into the kitchen and said something? Confronted Zaheer and Aneela? Or maybe she should have told Paul or Tahir? She kept churning over and over what she had seen and heard. And one word kept ringing in her ears. Slave, slave, slave …
4
Farah jumped off the tube and dashed past the crowds in a monumental effort not to miss her train. She even ran up the left-hand side of the steep escalators, and she was dismally out of breath by the time she finally reached the top. She ran over and hurriedly inserted her ticket into the machine at Marylebone train station. She darted through the barriers once they flung open. She ran as fast as she could, and only just managed by a whisker to jump on to the train before its 10.05 a.m. departure. She had meant to catch a much earlier train, but had slept through her alarm, and then she had wasted a lot of time looking for her stray earring. Before she had gone to bed last night, she had noticed that one earring was missing; they had been a birthday present from her parents three years ago, and she was mortified. She had been too tired and distressed to hunt for it last night and thought it would probably just turn up in the morning. Only it hadn’t.
As if this weekend wasn’t going to be stressful enough, she thought to herself, as she sat at a table seat by the window, facing backwards, which she never liked to do, but the lack of empty seats left her with no choice. How could she have lost one half of her most treasured possession? And on top of that, she still couldn’t stop thinking about that poor girl. It was all so terribly wrong, but what to do, she asked herself. Her thoughts flip-flopped back and forth between the missing earring, the nameless slave girl and the ghastly day ahead. Her tummy rumbled nervously. Although this could partially be attributed to the fact that she hadn’t eaten any breakfast this morning, the rumbles were probably more likely due to the stress she was feeling about the second meeting today.
Farah was now thirty years old and was the only child of parents of Pakistani Muslim heritage. As she had now reached the dreaded number thirty, the issue of her marrying was becoming ever more urgent, especially in her parents’ minds. But if she was truthful, it played on her own mind too. She didn’t want to appear to be in a desperate rush to marry, but neither did she want to be ‘left on the shelf’, the woman who couldn’t bag herself a decent husband, and was therefore resigned to being talked about endlessly. She wanted, eventually, to marry and have a family, but the task was proving much harder than she had anticipated. The biological clock was ticking, and she wanted to settle down now, but she couldn’t move things along any faster than nature, common sense or good fortune would allow.
Recently, Farah had come to a very important decision. She felt that as she had clearly been unsuccessful in the matter herself, she had decided to delegate the important responsibility of seeking a husband solely to her parents. This ancient method of a truly arranged marriage, as opposed to the horrific practice of forced marriage, had worked successfully for centuries. She had made this resolution soon after she and Tahir had split up.
Despite Farah’s pretty looks and successful career, she felt that she was in severe danger of not making it to matrimony, for, as she had heard it said many times, the good men will all be taken, and the rest will ask why she is still unmarried at her age if she’s such a good catch. Also, to make matters worse, Farah was an only child, and not a son at that. She resented the fact that some people in the family and community had made her parents feel inadequate just for the fact that they hadn’t managed to produce a son. Most of them never said anything directly, but somehow indirect insults always seemed worse. At least if people said something to their face, they could retaliate, have their say, but when an insult was pushed through the back door, when it was suggestive talk, when it was dressed up as something else, and said merely to poke and prod at their feelings, there didn’t seem to be any way to address it.
When her aunts and uncles mentioned their children, and bragged about how their sons would be carrying on the family name and bloodline, and indeed the family businesses, and talked about how they (the parents) would live with their sons in their ripe old age, Farah knew that her parents felt it. They really felt it; especially her mum. Farah’s paternal grandparents had always made her mum feel guilty, as though it was somehow her fault, that she hadn’t given them a grandson. They had passed away now, but that didn’t stop the other relatives from being hurtful, intentionally or otherwise. At times, Farah’s mother would take offence, and let it be known, for unlike her father, who was a quiet and restrained sort of man, her mother could be very straight-talking. This sometimes led to fallings-out with relatives, although these were often short-lived, as there would be hasty reconciliations just before the next family event, if only to keep face, and present a united extended family front to the rest of the world.
It was all of this kind of talk spouted by the relatives, which ranged from mild, idle tittle-tattle, to outright toxic and mean rhetoric, that had spurred Farah to convince her parents, five years ago, to move out of Sparkhill in Birmingham, and relocate to the leafy suburbs of Solihull. She had taken out the mortgage jointly with her father, and after selling their terraced house in Sparkhill, they’d had just about enough money to move to the lofty heights of the very pricey Solihull, regularly referred to as one of the best places to live in the United Kingdom. Farah felt fortunate that her parents had decided to live in England, and not Pakistan; she couldn’t even begin to imagine the disadvantages she would have suffered if they had settled in the Motherland.
Farah’s father was a driving instructor, and had been one for the past twenty years. He was an easy-going, goodly sort of a man. His tall, slim frame and his gentle smile all added to the air of calmness that swept all around him. He had come to England in the seventies on a fiancé visa, and had married Farah’s mother, his second cousin, who was already resident in the UK, soon after his arrival. He had worked in the Cadbury’s factory in Bournville for many years, and he had enjoyed his time there, but had decided to become his own boss some years ago, when he passed the driving instructor tests, and started his own driving school. His calm composure and outlook served him well in this line of work. He never lost patience with his students. He was always composed and focused, and his business was a success as a result.
Farah’s mother, on the other hand, possessed characteristics that could best be described as diametrically opposite to those of her husband. She was not an unkind or unpleasant person. In fact, she had an extremely good heart, and it was usually in the right place, but she was capable of being more than frank, and of displaying a fiery temperament at times. She did not take nonsense from anyone and was even known to swear given half a chance, which Farah found most unbecoming. Her mother dressed in traditional salwar kameez most of the time, which hid her large frame well, and she a wore headscarf whenever she left the house. However, her demure sense of dress didn’t in any way cross over into her personality; here, she was anything but demure.
*
When Farah stepped off the train at Solihull train station, despite the nerves about the day ahead, she instantly felt happ
y to be home. Unlike the weather she had left behind in London, here the sun was shining. Being back here always lifted her mood, whatever the weather. She ran from the platform down the stairs, and out of the back entrance into the alleyway, and took the shortcut towards home.
As she wandered down the street and on to their cul-de-sac, she took in the artist’s palette of colours around her: soft spongy green lawns, iridescent flower displays, rows of shiny yellow daffodils and intense red tulips standing tall, all overlooked by grand old oak trees and glittery tall silver birches. And of course, there were her favourite pink and white cherry blossom trees in full spring bloom, all the way down the road; to Farah it was all such a rich canvas compared to the sometimes immense, blank greyness of London.
When she neared her house, the elderly couple from next door smiled and waved to Farah from their car as they drove past, and she waved back.
Farah’s father answered the door. A wide smile lit up on his face upon seeing her, and he planted an affectionate kiss on the crown of her head.
‘Come in, my darling beti; how are you, my sunshine?’ he asked.
Following not far behind her father, stomping down the stairs with great force and noise, was her mother, and before Farah could answer her dad’s question, her mum pushed past her husband and waded in.
‘Where have you been? Why are you so late? Not a phone call or a text, young lady! And look at the state of you! Dressed in tatty jeans, and a hoodie! Go, jaldi, get ready quickly, we are supposed to be there in half an hour!’ shouted her mum, even though Farah was stood right in front of her.
‘Hello to you too, Mum,’ muttered Farah, as she dumped her bags to one side in the hallway by the coat stand.