No problem, said Sultan. She went upstairs to change.
Last night she and Donald had quarrelled. She had made a fuss about going to some cocktails at the Weatherbys’, saying how boring all the people were.
‘You don’t have the wives,’ she said.
‘You needn’t have the wives. We’re not Muslims.’
‘But the division’s just the same. All you men talking about your work.’
‘Back home all your friends were women.’
‘Not women like these.’
‘Christine, I wish you’d learn to adapt.’
What she really meant, though had not said, was how boring they made Donald seem to her. How little any of them had been changed by this place. The English were so closed, hemmed in by their fixed beliefs and their fear of germs.
‘They just see this place as a threat,’ she had said. (They, not you.) ‘Everything’s conspiring against them, it’s all falling to pieces in their hands, the biros aren’t like the English ones.’
‘They aren’t.’ Donald shook his pen. It was after dinner and he was sitting at his desk.
‘It’s a wartime mentality; they’re locked in. No room for doubt or change. Duke getting all his stuff from the Commissary. I bet he couldn’t tell a tandoori from a Toblerone.’
‘That’s English. He eats Hershey Bars.’
‘Don’t be pedantic.’
‘And he eats curries. He was having lunch today at the Welcome Tikka House.’
‘You know what I mean.’
Did he? She had looked at Donald’s face in the lamplight. Before you could not have described it. Now, with his new moustache it was defined; he was a man with an identity. He looked heavier.
‘They bring their cultural baggage with them,’ she said.
‘But isn’t that what you’re doing?’
She had ignored this. ‘I try to be open, Donald. I want this place to change me through my bloodstream. You see these hippies just sitting and experiencing.’
‘Darling, it’s something else that’s changing them through their bloodstream.’ He had sipped his coffee and remarked mildly: ‘Anyway, I don’t really see what’s so ethnic about working for an advertising agency.’
She had shifted in her armchair. She wished he had not put it like that. ‘It’s only because there’s nothing else. Anyway probably nothing will come of it. It’s a week since I saw them and I haven’t heard.’ She meant: it was a week since she had been photographed, but she had not yet informed him about the precise nature of the work. That nobody had phoned both relieved her and rebuffed her vanity.
He had gazed down at his pile of Scientific Americans. He had become so preoccupied of late. Near by smoked a mosquito coil; it gave the desk a sacred air. No doubt he was getting more involved in his work but could speak less of it, now that it was growing daily more complex. She felt the same about her letters home. After the first few wide-eyed ones filled with local colour and travelogue cameos she had relapsed into near silence. Her life had become both more ordinary and more subtly different. She could no longer remember what was unusual about this place.
She had gazed at the lamplit profile. ‘Anything worrying happened at the office?’ she had asked. ‘You’ve been seeming so withdrawn.’
He paused and turned, rubbing his finger back and forth across the moustache. This was a new habit, grown wih the growth. He had said gently: ‘Nothing for you to worry about, darling.’
She had tensed to speak, but she stopped. Nothing, in other words, that she would understand. Don’t bother your little head about it. She had not replied. They must not quarrel. If they did, they would feel too drained and sad to in all decency make love later. And they ought, tonight being marked with a star. A trivial squabble would have been all right, in fact often proved pleasantly inflammatory – both of them, she suspected, realized this. A spirited discussion about whether she fancied David Weatherby despite his booming laugh had resulted in a playful start to something which could otherwise be far from ecstatic. Could be, in fact, a barren rubbing of flesh against stubborn flesh; the polite mutual moans, the damp separateness and private griefs.
To avoid more words she had gone into the garden. The lamplight shone across the lawn; from the bushes came the whirr of some insect or frog she still could not identify. The sky was bright with stars in foreign configurations. Travel sounded so liberating. From England, Pakistan seemed a blood transfusion of the spirit. But here they were, the two of them 3,500 miles from home, damper and hotter but heavily mortal.
Even out here you could smell the city. It was always with you; it was in your nostrils as you stepped off the plane. It was indescribable. ‘Humanity’ was the nearest you could get. Behind the house a baby cried. She looked into the sky. Two bodies rubbing together in the dark. Stubborn flesh. Between them no chink of infinity; no other life beginning.
An hour later that morning she was standing at the gate while Mohammed waited in the porch, grave as her father seeing her off on a doubtful date. If Sultan was so busy, had he broken appointments to arrive so promptly?
The sky was overcast today. After two months of unbroken blue this closeness was almost more uncomfortable. In August the monsoon weather arrived. This did not necessarily mean rain; just a weighed, pregnant grey.
On an impulse she had put on her yellow dress, obscurely both to please Sultan and to keep him at a distance. She sat down beside him. Today he wore crisp cream pyjamas. He was freshly scented. The doll bounced as they drove down the potholed streets of Phase Four; beside the doll jigged a spangled motto sewn on to cloth – no doubt a Koranic saying. In England she would have considered such things vulgar toys; here they were magic talismans, bouncing and jigging and leading them there.
He was in high spirits. He switched on his radio; a woman’s voice warbled and swooped. He pressed the police siren. A bearer, wobbling on his bicycle, regained his balance. They passed the familiar bungalows of Phases One and Two and the Chief Minister’s residence with its sentries outside. There had been riots again yesterday, Sultan informed her. These had not been reported in the newspapers, the spaces being reserved for the Prime Minister’s hand-outs, but Sultan said that there was increasing trouble at the top; reshufflings were about to happen, with ministerial replacements, even imprisonments. They drove into town, past the hotels and the Playboy Night Club.
‘Young lovebirds come, with their slacks, and do cheek-to-cheek dance.’ He leant to point, scattering her lap with ash. She glanced at him, picturing being pressed against his cheek. They were driving down the highway now. Up above the kites were circling. (Not buzzards, she had learnt this.)
‘Are we going to the shrine or the beach hut?’ she asked.
He lifted both hands off the wheel. ‘As you wish.’
‘You’ve found us a beach hut?’
‘Ah yes, no problem.’
She persisted. ‘Do you have a key?’
‘No key. If you are wishing, we go to shrine.’
He did not change direction; this must be the route to the shrine. She tried to relax and accept. He had no plan about this; his voyage was not her voyage. In all their shared journeys it never had been. Like the kites, the usual vague questions circled in her head. Did he want her company as a business venture, herself a female kind of real-estate to be leased for her looks? Did he perhaps want her sitting beside him for the status she gave him, or for her unique self? Perhaps it was not prestige but lust. Inflamed by magazine stories and reports from Kensington Market he knew that English girls, even married ones, were only good for one thing. The car had slowed down behind a lorry; he revved the engine, his baggy leg pumping, and swerved to overtake. Or perhaps he was just being kind: the diligent host showing her his country at some inconvenience to himself. Ashamed, she realized this was the one motive that had not yet crossed her mind. She wondered, as always, what he looked like under his clothes. She had touched no Pakistani, except to shake hands.
The woman san
g, eerily high. The sitar, weaving up and down, cast a spell on these dingy factories. Ahead lay the hills, flat against the pewter sky. She imagined vaguely that the shrine was in some cave, as in A Passage to India – that book haunted her, it was written for her. A hole where little would happen but where some change, oh at last some change, would take place. She would emerge from it altered through the blood and the spirit. She felt grateful to Sultan for knowing her destination and taking her there without question; likewise she herself should not keep querying this disappearing trick with the beach hut. Sentences rolled around her head. The arrival is the beginning, not the end. Or: it is the voyage, not the destination, that is important. Did that make sense? These voyages with Sultan through the sprawling, centreless city were the nearest she had felt to some inner reshuffling. Each time her destinations had not been as expected. Nothing had arisen from her meetings with Mr Khan and the photographer. But the voyages and the waiting had been somehow more dense than their supposed result. A journey without an arrival; it was like walking into a mosque, with just an empty niche to face you on the innermost wall.
They were driving across the desert. She recognized this as the highway that led to Duke’s hotel site. The shrine must be beyond. Those hills ahead might be near or far; they rose up as sudden as theatre props. You could not tell the distance. In the summer they used to send the women up into the hills.
They passed the asbestos factory. A little further, in the shade of some bushes. Sultan stopped the car.
‘This is the hotel site,’ she said.
‘It is more far, you are thinking?’
She paused, the car door still closed. ‘You mean it’s here?’
He indicated that this was correct, and switched off the engine.
‘But I’ve been here before. Duke – Mr Hanson, an American – he brought me here last week. He’s building a leisure complex. We walked around.’ She gazed at the scrub.
‘You have already been visiting the shrine?’
‘He didn’t mention a shrine. He mentioned a boating lake. It was all a great hurry.’
Ginntho Pier, he had said. She had presumed he was mentioning some sort of jetty. Pier?
‘This is the Ginntho Pir,’ said Sultan, spreading out his hands.
She tried to connect the two places: her misty vision of hills, and this. Her head ached as she tried to pull them together into one. Last week four of them had come here – Duke, Shamime, herself and some ministerial aide of Shamime’s uncle. She had met them by chance at the Intercon Coffee Shop and they had invited her along for the ride. Duke, unusually formal and abstracted, had escorted them to the water’s edge, talking in square metres. She had felt intrusive; this was obviously the last and most tense stage of negotiations. They had only stayed a few minutes. She had also felt embarrassed, having just heard from Donald of his involvement with the donkey place.
She climbed out of the car. The haze had cleared and the sun was shining, as blistering as ever.
‘This is where the hot water man is?’ she asked.
Sultan was standing the other side of the car. He raised his hands and shrugged: as you wish, his hands said. He is where you care to find him.
From here she could see the hill with its domed old monument, or shrine, or whatever it was.
‘That’s the holy place?’ She pointed.
He nodded – at least, the oriental equivalent of a nod, a sideways movement of the head, a shrug really. Acha, people said. Acha, tikka, okay. If you want it to be yes, then it’s yes. Either the shrine was there, or he did not know, or he thought she really should not be here, it was too scruffy, or she really should not be here, it was a place sacred to Muslims, perhaps to himself, and she was an intruder. Now they had arrived at their destination he seemed strangely detached.
She hesitated. ‘You are coming?’
‘If you wish.’
‘I’ll go. I won’t be long. Are you terribly thirsty?’
‘Gee-han. You are thirsty? I get us drinks, okay?’ Again the sideways nod.
She walked up past the stalls, the air wrapping around her like flannel. There were stirrings and rattlings as the beggars climbed to their feet and organized their tins. Squatting on the ground, women stared. A turbaned mullah glanced at her coldly, like a robed master who finds a pupil coming to the wrong school. How could you forget yourself in this country when all those eyes reminded you who you were? She pulled out her dupatta and wrapped it around her head. The topmost stall sold garlands. Ignoring the crowd which had gathered, she fished for some money and bought a string of blossoms. Someone tittered.
As she walked on the footsteps followed. Ahead stood the large old building. This must be the shrine; there was only one other building up here, a little whitewashed modern place that did not look important. She must not hesitate too long; several people were giggling now.
She went up to the building, slipped off her sandals and stepped in through the high arched doorway. She could hear nobody following her.
She had expected a grave of some kind; some monument to the hot water man upon which the faithful could scatter the flowers and votive offerings so copiously on sale down in the bazaar. The saint had died, but surely he would have left something to touch? There was nothing: no garlanded tomb. Nothing but a high, domed interior, an empty stone floor and a crumpled chewing-gum packet. There were arched doorways looking on to the bushes outside, with the people blocking the one behind her. There were chipped, crumbling walls and vandalized bits of mosaic. She stood still, willing herself to feel something. She had come so far for this. Only now did she realize how much she had relied upon this place.
Still nobody else came in. She remained for several minutes, her flowers dangling. She had expected a holy stillness; instead there was this graffiti’d vacancy. She hesitated, gazing at the cracked plasterwork and the litter swept into one corner.
Outside she put on her sandals and made her way down the slope, past the stalls with their incomprehensible trinkets. Her throat felt tight. Ridiculously, tears pricked her eyes. Her belt arid the prim little sleeves chafed her. It was midday and there was a cloying smell of frying. People were no doubt watching her taking her string of blossoms in the wrong direction.
Sultan’s car was there, but no Sultan. A couple of rickshaws waited with their sleeping drivers. A drinks seller cycled past, his box rattling. She searched around, absurdly disappointed.
Just then a hand touched her arm. Turning, she saw a young boy. He was bent under a yoke, with tins hanging at either end.
She shook her head. ‘No. Non. Nahin.’ She could not even remember the right word. She felt as weary and baffled as she had been in Juna Bazaar, before she had met Sultan. Weeks ago, that was, and she had come nowhere.
He said something in Urdu. ‘Nahin,’ she said, shaking her head and pointing to the nuts in the tins. She tried to shake off his hand but now he was pointing down the road and beckoning her to follow.
She started off behind him, following his dusty feet. They were walking towards the hills. His back was bowed under the pole that sagged as he walked. He could not be more than twelve years old. They passed the monument and the huts down the other side of it. After a few yards the bushes stopped and the desert road stretched ahead. He halted and pointed.
There, set back from the road stood a solid little whitewashed building, its shutters closed. Above the door a sign said Government Rest House. Formerly, no doubt, it had been a dak bungalow for the British. It was shaded by one large tree. Nobody seemed to be about. The only sign that anyone looked after it was a rope bed standing in the veranda.
She paid the boy a rupee and watched him walk back down the road, his load swaying. She felt hot and dizzy. The building was freshly painted; it made her wet eyes ache. The door stood ajar.
Trampled sand led up to it, with trampled thorny plants. She walked slowly. Did the boy presume that this, in fact, was her destination? As she neared the door she heard music from within.
She felt both torpid and alert.
‘Hello?’ She stood on the veranda, speaking rather than shouting. There was no answer.
She stepped through the door, blinking in the gloom. It was a narrow little hallway. Sultan’s radio stood on the floor, playing music. There was a chair, made of woven plastic loosened with use, and a wooden table. On it stood a tray with two bottles of Fanta and a dish of nuts. Sultan’s shiny black shoes lay on the floor. She was still holding the string of blossoms. She laid them over the back of the chair.
The inner door was ajar. She hesitated, hitching the dupatta around her neck. Was somebody in there? She stepped through the threshold.
It was darker in here. She stood still, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. The room was close and stuffy. After a while she could make out detached shapes in the darkness: a cupboard, a chair and a bed, with somebody lying upon it.
She moved closer, quietly. In here it was as still as a shrine. For a moment she thought he was dead. He lay motionless on his back, facing upwards. Sleep made him dignified; his face was calm, its talking ceased. She knelt down beside him, easing off her sandals and laying them on the floor.
He did not stir. Only his lips moved, opening and closing; she heard the small puffs of air from the dreaming life within. One of his hands hung down near her. The other lay across his chest, closed around his packet of cigarettes.
Her eyes were accustomed now to the shuttered dark. She tried to make her mind a blank, and not to wonder if he had expected her to follow him in here. She just remained, hardly breathing, kneeling on the warm concrete. She gazed at his blind face and listened to the sighs of exhaled air. He seemed so saintly in repose. He was no longer Sultan Rahim, he was all Pakistani men, at last oblivious of her. She leant closer; she could smell his hair oil.
Hot Water Man Page 20