by M G Vassanji
And where does Ferangi live now? he retorted. England. And was there anyone under forty at the meeting? QED.
But no, QED or not, she had won the day. She had started to go out, and that was good.
Abid called her to thank her for coming—”for condescending to grace us with your presence,” was how he put it.
“What do you mean, ‘condescending’? It was such a wonderful opportunity to meet a genuine, living Urdu poet! Thank you for inviting me.”
“You are most welcome,” he told her. “You were truly a blessing there.”
Typical Urdu flattery, said that voice in her mind, typical India-Pakistan—even when a dagger is being thrust at your back, in front is all honeyed talk, You first, aap pahele, please, there’s no one such as your gracious self, all ’umble Uriah Heep—
You’re jealous! she retorted.
A couple of weeks later Aseema said to Yasmin, in her usual manner, “You know, sweetie pie, I believe brother Abid is smitten with you—don’t tell me I haven’t warned you, kiddo.”
For the next few days Yasmin’s nerves were on tenterhooks. What to do? What to think? This was totally unexpected, she was completely unprepared for it. Then Abid called.
“How are you?”
“Fine,” she answered, “but don’t tell me another Urdu event is coming up so soon!”
“No … well there is, but that’s not why I called. I would like to take you to a concert, of the Toronto Symphony—you do like Western classical?”
“Yes, up to a point, I’m not really an expert—”
“Neither am I—”
“And I can’t stand the modern stuff.”
Which Karim would sometimes take her to, saying, Listen with the mind sometimes, Yas, these days even the hip-hoppers are humming Beethoven’s Ninth—
“Neither can I,” Abid told her. “This is an all-Beethoven concert, with the Ninth Symphony, and it is my favourite!”
She hesitated. Was it right? Was this a date? What did Abid expect of her? There was a moment’s silence while she quickly reflected and he let her.
Then he said, “I had two tickets given me by a client and I thought you might like to come. It’s discreet, our people don’t usually go to these events—though I believe your late husband did. You know he was highly respected in our Asian communities, though I didn’t quite agree with some of his comments—he struck me as … angry.” He caught himself and said, “Come on, Yasmin, I’m quite harmless, really—”
She laughed, and she agreed to go.
And so eventually she agreed to marry him; and the ghost of Karim, if there was one, became a glowering bitter face in the background, occasionally erupting but more often silent.
What she liked about Abid’s people, his community—which consisted of friends and some near and distant relatives—was their gentility, the grace and respect they showed to each other. Of course this was only external form and etiquette; nevertheless, she realized that she had never been accorded such treatment before. In return she lived up to the expectations implicitly demanded of her. She now wore the sari or shalwar kameez, attires which she liked very much, with all their colour and grace, though there was the odd occasion when she sensed a qualm within herself and wished she had the pluck to look different—come out for instance in a khaki skirt and red tank top, or (God forbid) shorts, during summer. At parties she was pulled toward the women, away from the men. She had already learned to defer to the elders of her new community in the formal, elaborate, and quite charming ways expected, which reminded her of the Indian movies of her childhood. She felt a bit hypocritical after such displays. Abid himself was a soft-hearted, genial sort who rarely raised his voice, which was strange for her because she had been used to shows of excitement or anger from a husband. The whole tenor of her life had become orderly and calm, if a little constrained.
You’ve sunk, said that voice once. Don’t you have an iota of a sense of who you were, who you really are?
What was I? she retorted. You made me!
She and Karim had met twenty years ago when she was a new assistant librarian in the history department of the University of Toronto and he a quiet professor. Even then he exuded that darkness of soul, though she saw it only as a romantic, somewhat Keatsian trait. They got to talking once about a journal recently discontinued by the library, then about other excellent journals guillotined by university cutbacks, and over the weeks gradually became intimate. She had no doubts when she accepted to marry him. He was charming and easy to be with, vastly educated, and slightly mysterious. She liked the fact that he was westernized, refreshingly different in his thinking from what she was used to seeing in men from their background. He took her to a whole new world of the opera, music concerts, book readings, and museums, the thrill of living in the city, away from the suburban developments filling up with immigrants. The kids came and put a new twist on their existence. He spurned religious education for them as a regimen cooked up by a bunch of ignorant, uncultured managers to keep their people in line. She more or less agreed, but (as she sometimes argued) what was wrong with the kids spending time with their own kind? Her reservations arose mainly because she was losing friends. They were all professionals, married to other professionals or businessmen, and all observant community members—a class Karim had contemptuously dismissed as the “Markhamites” and the “Scarberians,” suburbanites spending their nonworking hours on the highways and in mosque. He was so passionate in his beliefs, she simply went along with them because ultimately she didn’t quite care as much, and she wanted him happy. But she had her qualms and she had her guilt. She needed her God in small doses, like normal people.
He was, of course, a professed agnostic—all that meant was that he battled against God all the time, worried about all the problems ailing the world. What had seemed like a darkly romantic trait, a soulful detail in his character, had grown into a hopeless view of the world and an anger simmering beneath his surface. Deep in his heart, she believed, he missed being a suburbanite, happy with his people and happy in his simple, blind faith.
He always thought he would die young, and when he finally did so, in his fifties of stroke, it was almost with relief in his eyes, in all his demeanour—the world had been too much for him; and she too felt a semblance of relief, for he had made her so conscious of his impending death. But then, after he died, he started to haunt her—or, what was the same thing, she began to recall his presence. She heard his voice in her mind, felt his presence looming behind her, whenever she felt she was straying from the path the two of them had followed together.
Of their three children, the two eldest were on their own, the first, a son, working at a downtown brokerage firm, and the second, a daughter, in university in the States. The youngest, a son, was eleven and had come with her to her new life; he was reserved but polite with Uncle Abid. Her husband’s attempts to teach him Urdu or interest him in the tenets of Islam had been to no avail.
Yasmin felt loved—by Abid; by his friends and their wives; by her stepdaughter Rabbia, who occasionally came to visit them with her young family and had taken an immense liking to Yasmin.
“Amma,” Rabbia said, “you are an angel, you’ve come like a farishta into my father’s life. He gave up so many years of his life out of respect for my mother, worrying about me—but you know what, the wait was worth it. I’ve never known him happier—never, if you get my meaning.”
“I get your meaning, thank you,” Yasmin replied, with a smile. “And I’ve also … never been happier….”
Never? And that pregnant pause, that sharp breath you took there for a moment before that glib remark … never? Not when the first child, Emil, was born? Not on that trip to Acapulco, or Spain—in Andalusia, in Cordoba—that second honeymoon?
I am happy as I’ve never been in a long time. I am respected as a woman and a wife, not as a mere companion and sex partner. I am the lady of the house and a lady in a community. My husband is calm and gentle; he rar
ely gets annoyed, and I have yet to see him at full boil. He is not at war with the world, he is a meditative, a spiritual man.
Visiting Pakistan was the most wonderful event of her life. Yes, it eclipsed all those memories of Andalusia, strolling with Karim through fields of orange and bougainvillea, hand in hand staring up at the awesome ceiling of the Great Mosque in Cordoba or at the palace of Alhambra, the two of them picking up their lives again when the kids were older. Of course on this trip there was no dearth of the frustrations typical of the Third World—long waits at the airport, people jumping queues, dimwitted or sleazy officials, murderous traffic. But there was such warmth in the people she met; she had never experienced anything like it in Canada. You knew these were your people, in spite of the differences; and all the history of the country, going back two thousand years, was part of your history, too. They spent most of their time in Lahore, which was Abid’s hometown. To his family, Yasmin was royalty; she was greeted by them with embraces and tears of joy, with gifts of clothing and jewellery. There were elaborate family feasts in her honour, she went shopping and sightseeing, was invited to private music parties with blood-curdling qawalis by the best singers—that makes you envious, doesn’t it, Karim, all authentic and real, the way you wanted everything. Young women, older ones, confided in her, their new bhabhi or bahu from Canada, young men called her Auntie and teased her.
Abid had two brothers and a sister in Lahore. He also had Aseema in Toronto and another sister in Chicago. The family’s business in Lahore was transportation. They also owned land. Abid’s father was dead—Yasmin was taken to pay her respects at the grave—and his mother, tall and bony with grey eyes and a wonderful smile, was the matriarch to whom all paid respect. Nothing was done without consulting her. The family had a spiritual adviser, Sheikh Murad Ali, who also advised in worldly matters.
When the family took her to see the Sheikh, Yasmin had to tie a plain black scarf around her head—the Sheikh was insistent, they told her with a twinkle in their eyes, he had to be humoured. A loose dupatta, with wisps of hair blowing at the forehead, just wouldn’t do in his presence. He was liable to produce a rough cloth himself and tie it firmly around your head if he didn’t like your covering. He didn’t care for jeans either, even on men.
He turned out to be a small-statured man with a radiant pink face and a long white beard, attired in a shimmering silk kurta of a pale colour and an embroidered cap. His cold grey eyes made her look away the first time he laid eyes on her. The walls in his study, where he received them, opening the double doors himself to let them in, were lined with books and bound manuscripts and hung in places with framed Arabic calligraphy. There was an odour of faint perfume and recent incense in the air. He bade them sit on the carpeted floor, from which a small prayer mat was first rolled away, and a large silver tray of offerings was placed before him, piled with presents—a pen and a Palm Pilot, some dried fruit, and cash in dollars—which he received without much ado. The talk soon turned to serious matters, and as his guidance to them the Sheikh warned them about Western materialism, which people everywhere in the world were blindly emulating while losing their own spiritual values. The men enjoyed discussing world politics with him, but they did this with due deference to his views. The women listened silently to this discussion or spoke to each other in whispers.
To Yasmin, the Sheikh’s beliefs seemed narrow and rigid, and it was a trial of patience to keep sitting there on the floor meekly listening to them. She lost her control finally and sprung to the defence of her gender, saying, “But women are not men’s property, and they are not half the worth of men.” The Sheikh, at first startled into a pause, gave a look of amusement and replied, “They are worth more than men, Béta, that’s why Murshid-ul-kameel has given us all these elaborate laws regarding men and women.” Her in-laws explained to her what was meant, and Yasmin dutifully said, “Oh.” But that fooled nobody.
“That’s one side of Pakistan I will never accept,” she said to Abid later, “this treatment of women,” having told him first that she didn’t think she cared too much for Sheikh Murad Ali.
That pleased Karim. Told you so, the voice said. Pakistan, he had always said, was a tragedy on the Indian subcontinent, a non-country that had never worked, never been really independent, never been democratic, was an embarrassment. He could go on and on, making judgments so sweeping, so cruel and unfair—the kinds of generalizations he would swiftly decry in others. Look what you got yourself into, he now gloated, an orthodox soup!
You are jealous, only, she replied. I have a people, a place to belong to, a culture and a faith—and you, you had zip, nothing, and that’s why all your anger at the world. I have your number, Karim Bharwani, finally; I know where you came from, in spite of your Wagner and Beethoven, Marx and Freud—from nowhere, and how you longed for the certainty I’ve achieved. Even now, in death, what do you have? Have you found peace at last? No, you flit round the globe, from one disaster area to another, seeing only famine and genocide, car bombs and smart weapons, raging at the injustice and inhumanity all over. Not satisfied, you return to torment me.
It was only Karim and the Sheikh in Lahore who were the spoilers in her new life. Karim she could manage. She knew him, and he was dead, after all. But the Sheikh?
“He’s an old man, Yasu,” Abid assured her. “He’ll soon be gone—how long do you think he will live? And his heir Salamat Ali is not so old-fashioned.”
“Not so orthodox, you mean. Fundamentalist.”
He laughed. “That’s just a word.”
“Anyway, Murad Ali looked quite healthy to me. People like that take good care of themselves, they don’t die easily. And his son could turn out even worse.”
“Don’t worry,” Abid said. “It’s temporary, this edict. In time, Murad Ali will relent. Remember, he has our good at heart—he is our interpreter of the faith and our agent with God.”
Not two months had passed since their visit to Pakistan, when the Sheikh sent the edict that came like a rock thrown at the boat that was her life. Abid was told about it by his sister, who called late one night from Lahore. He was so stunned he forgot to hide his reaction from Yasmin, who was listening and watching from the bed.
“What? Are you sure … every woman? Even in Canada and US? Think of public relations. He won’t relent? Arré what’s come over him … thik hé, then. But try. Soften him up a bit….”
The Sheikh had pronounced that the moral order in the world continued to decline. It pained him to see that even decent people had begun to deviate from the path of the righteous, dazzled by the attractions conjured up by wily Azazel, beguiled by honeyed words from the forked tongue of Satan. He, Sheikh Murad Ali of Lahore, was exhorting his followers to rectify their habits and come back to the path. Rules regarding halal were to be followed strictly. Personal hygiene was to be observed according to Islamic tradition. And women had to cover their heads with a black or white chador that reached at least to their shoulders.
Yasmin, shocked beyond belief, had little doubt that this edict from afar was the real answer to her outburst in the Sheikh’s study in Lahore. She recalled the old man’s initial reaction when she spoke up—that pause, the stillness that momentarily overcame him before he recovered with the smile and the patronizing comment. His eyes had grazed her neck, met hers, before he lightly dismissed her objection. She had met his eyes again on the way out. She felt humbled and defeated by his power over her now.
“You’ve betrayed me,” she said tearfully to her husband. “You misled me—”
“Yasmin, my life, how can you say that?”
“You expect me to wear that … that tent over my head?”
“Not a tent—” he laughed—”it’s supposed to come only to the shoulders. He’s our Sheikh, my love, he stands between us and God. And it’s only temporary.”
My foot, she wanted to blurt out, but held her peace.
She sulked and wept intermittently all that day, and the next.
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nbsp; The following evening a potluck dinner was arranged at a friend’s house to discuss this new edict of Sheikh Murad Ali, their leader. Ten couples were present, and to Yasmin’s surprise nobody showed any concern about the ruling. A few people even poked a little fun at it and at some of the Sheikh’s ways (for example, he burped loudly and with relish). What could have set him off? the question was raised. Perhaps Benazir Bhutto’s recent antics. Or the recent performance of the Pakistan cricket team. Or the jokes that were made even there about President Clinton’s affair with that girl Monica Lewinsky, a name familiar in every village now, following the recent TV crash course on sex. They discussed ways of bending the new rule: the Sheikh had ordered white or black chador to be worn, but he didn’t specify what material, and hadn’t placed any injunctions on the designs printed or embroidered on it; and surely, they agreed, black meant simply dark, therefore blue would be acceptable; the chador should reach the shoulders, but even a dupatta did that…. There were of course arguments among the men, as there usually were, when the subject veered off toward world politics. There was plenty of food to eat. Poetry was recited, songs were sung. Yasmin was reminded sharply of the sense of community among these people, of their common struggles against life’s crazy contradictions, and the sense of humour they could always call upon to cope with them. She went home immensely relieved.