by Bapsi Sidhwa
‘They would never let it crash,’ Rick said. ‘It would cause an international crisis.’
His last stop had been in Bangladesh and he had brought her a fine Dacca-silk sari. It was a pity she didn’t wear saris. After a while she would give it to one of her friends and Rick would never recognize it. She had given away quite a few. Or she would have Imam Buksh stitch it into a formal skirt and top. Rick would be pleased. The rich pallu end of the hand-woven sari would make a gorgeous stole. The dour, middle-aged tailor circulated among the expatriate women. He brought his hand-cranked sewing machine and other paraphernalia and, sitting cross-legged on a white sheet on Ruth’s veranda, worked from the house. It made fittings convenient.
After the hectic round of social activities and the sub-inspector’s disturbing visit, Rick’s down-to-earth and steadying presence was a relief. She knew, however, if he stayed for more than a month she would be impatient for his next tour. Rick had changed. Always inclined to be New-England reserved, he had become almost chronically sombre. His work and frequent tours didn’t leave him the time to make the close connections she did. At parties, when the other men became jovial after a few drinks and put their arms around each other the way Pakistani men were wont, Rick sat around forcing uneasy smiles. She knew he attended the parties for her sake and would have much rather stayed home going through his papers or watching television. Ruth declined many invitations. Even a ‘small dinner’ meant consorting with a hastily thrown together list of fifteen or twenty guests. They went instead to the homes of close friends for informal, spur-of-the-moment get-togethers where Rick could be more at ease and watch TV if he chose to. Often they stayed home.
Rick laughed at the way Billo had dispatched sub-inspector Junaid Akhtar and at Shahnaz’s calling the fellow an asshole.
‘I wonder who she picked that up from?’ he said, looking playfully at her with a lopsided grin, and Ruth coyly agreed: ‘Who else!’ She hadn’t heard him laugh or seen him so lighthearted in a long time. She hugged him fiercely that night and he responded with an ardour that reminded her of the earlier days of their marriage. Before she drifted off to sleep it occurred to her she hadn’t thought of Raj since Rick’s arrival—she felt a vague sense of annoyance that she had allowed him to intrude so much upon her thoughts.
Ruth realized how troubled Rick was by the Secret Service man’s visit only when he hired an armed, daytime chowkidar to man the gates. Like the night gate-keeper he was a Pashtun tribesman from the maze of mountains bordering Afghanistan. These men were known for their fierce loyalty; everyone they knew employed them as guards. Jungi Khan, Ruth thought, was the spitting image of Sean Connery, and Rick, after having a closer look at him, agreed.
Jungi Khan was instructed not to permit strange men to disturb Memsahib when Sahib was away.
This caused a crisis as soon as Rick took off on his next tour. Bewildered friends called to ask Ruth if she was all right. The gate-keeper had refused to let their cars in. Holding his gun upright he had saluted smartly and in halting Urdu politely told them: ‘Sir, Sahib is out of town.’ When asked: ‘Is Memsahib in?’ he said: ‘Memsahib cannot be disturbed when Sahib is away.’
Ruth sensed her friends were more hurt than they let on.
Ruth asked Billo to explain to Jungi Khan that it was all right to let her friends in, even if they were male and not accompanied by any women. She wanted to cover her bases in case Raj showed up unannounced. She liked the idea of leaving her life open. Billo said: ‘Tell cook,’ and disparagingly added: ‘He’s fresh off the mountains of Tora Bora. They don’t take instructions from women like me.’
Ruth requested her friends to call before coming, a formality rarely observed in Lahore, and took pains to introduce them to Jungi Khan.
Sensible of the code of honour regarding women the haughty tribesmen lived by, her friends understood her predicament. They took to greeting the guard by name. A few of the men even got out of their cars to take both his hands in theirs in the customary Northern Area handshake. After that Jungi Khan would recognize their cars and quietly open the gates.
Rick was touring again. It was March and the balmy days already hinted at the paralyzing heat that would put a stop to most activities by May. Many of their friends would migrate to the hills for the summer or travel to Europe and the USA. Ruth planned to visit her daughter, who was in high school and lived with her mother in Boston. They had not wanted to disrupt their children’s education as Rick’s company posted him around the world. She would also visit her son who was at West Point.
The chrysanthemums had been removed and the latticework of canes that supported the bank of sweet peas showed between the ripening pods. But the roses and nasturtium bloomed and the scent from them was heady. Lying in the hot sun, revelling in its heat, she was beginning to perspire. At times like this, recalling the endless New England winters, she felt she needed to soak in all the heat she could get. But her body may have had too much of a good thing and her thoughts drifted to the cool, ethereal heights of the mountains to the north, to her and Rick’s visits to the mighty Hindu Kush and Karakoram ranges.
At Lake Saif-ul-Malook, at an altitude above 10,000 feet, Ruth was convinced she’d had a mystic experience. She had walked to the other end of the lake when she found herself in the grip of a pleasurable sensation that made her body light and her step sure.
Feeling almost weightless, she walked through the stony beds of the icy rivulets and swift shallow streams in her path, bent towards the glaciers that fed the lake. Free of her earthly self, her essence mingled with sky, stone and water. At 10,000 feet, she was already in the snow. She saw herself walk into the grandeur of the majestic Himalayas and tirelessly on and on.
Ruth faintly registered Rick bellow from the other end of the lake: ‘Turn back!’ She pressed forward, guided by the sensation that made her body buoyant, her spirit free. ‘It’s dangerous. Stop!’ Why was Rick telling her to stop? She was in her element, safe, her being one with her surroundings.
Rick clung to her arm. He was panting, bowed in an attempt to catch his breath, dragging her down into the snow. She felt an enormous sense of loss as if she was being wrenched from a natural state of bliss in which she belonged.
They had descended a thousand feet to the beautiful little glass and pine-wood cottage they had rented in Naran.
That night, sitting on the shaggy rug before a log fire, leaning back against Rick’s legs, she tried to describe to Rick what she had experienced. ‘I could have walked on and on—I felt so light—invincible. It was like a calling. I wish you hadn’t stopped me.’
‘The altitude affected you, don’t you think? Made you light-headed?’ Rick suggested matter-of-factly.
Ruth shrugged and kept quiet. She didn’t want to argue with him, nor with the voices of her mother and grandmother and even her father, sternly rebuking her for sullying their staunch Protestantism with forbidden beliefs in alien faiths and mysticism. But she knew she wouldn’t let these voices diffuse the bliss of the spiritual awakening that was still with her. She saw a dim light from the cottage occupied by the only other tourist couple besides them. She heard the Kunhar river hurtle on its perennial course close by and the rustle of wind in the pines. Smoke from the hovels of the locals and the smell of seared trout mingled with the scent of pine-cones. She was at peace.
In Islamabad, when she told Raj, ‘I’ve been at higher altitudes in the Rockies without feeling like this’, the Buddhist validated her experience: ‘Rishis, Sufis, Buddhist monks etc. have meditated in these mountains through the ages: the atmosphere is charged.’ He smiled at her. ‘My dear, I doubt yogis meditated in the Rockies.’
Lying in her deckchair Ruth watched the butterflies drunkenly drift like bits of paper in the still air. Occasionally a bee or an amber wasp buzzed too close and Ruth flapped it away with the neglected New Yorker she had intended to dip into.
Wiping his hands on his apron the cook ceremoniously carried the phone around the deckchair
. Ruth had heard its faint ring and assumed it was Nasira offering her a ride to the Saigols’ dinner. Her husband Javid, too, was out of town. ‘Hello,’ she said.
A deep male voice said: ‘It’s me, my dear. How are you?’
‘Oh, Raj!’ Ruth exclaimed, delighted. ‘How wonderful to hear from you! Are you in Lahore?’
‘Yes. I’ve been here a week.’
‘A week! And you didn’t call me?’
‘I’ve got to earn my living, my dear—I’m not a lady of leisure.’
‘So, when does the lady of leisure see the toiling Minorities Minister?’ asked Ruth, reflexively adopting Raj’s manner of speaking.
‘Do you want to see a bunch of fanatics?’ he said, coming straight to the point. He knew Ruth would be game for the adventure his words suggested, and her enthusiasm and canny responses could enliven the experience for him.
‘Sure,’ Ruth said readily. ‘I’d love to.’
A previous excursion with Raj had been extraordinary. As Minorities Minister his duties included the welfare of the tiny Sikh community in Pakistan and the management of the unruly hordes of hirsute Sikh pilgrims who poured in their thousands across the border from India to attend numerous religious ceremonies. He had facilitated the restoration of a Sikh temple near Nankana Sahib, a two-hour drive from Lahore, and had taken her to its opening ceremony.
The reception committee, resplendent in blue or white turbans, flowing beards and bejewelled religious daggers, had welcomed them with garlands of roses and silver tinsel. But the celebratory throng of twenty thousand Sikh pilgrims waiting for the minister to cut the ribbon made access to the gold-domed Temple impossible. Ruth had retreated to Raj’s Land Rover and with a hand from the driver, climbed onto the jeep’s bonnet to watch the proceedings.
After a few muscular but futile attempts to squeeze the minister through, the reception committee abruptly hoisted him clear over their heads. Ruth marvelled as the alarmed dignitary, flower-bedecked and as stiff as a corpse, was transported hand over hand above the turbans of the mob to the temple’s entrance.
Raj Tribhuvan Roy had enabled her to see aspects of Pakistan her less venturesome compatriots would never experience.
‘I’m meeting them tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can come along.’
‘Who are the fanatics?’ Ruth asked.
‘Sikh hijackers.’
‘Oh!’ Ruth had visited a woman’s prison with the International Women’s Club and had been depressed for weeks. ‘I’m not sure I want to visit a prison.’
‘My dear,’ said Raj, ‘would I take you to a morbid Pakistani prison? You don’t trust my judgement!’
Ruth wasn’t sure if he was offended.
‘Above all men, I trust you!’ she declared factiously.
‘Is that so, my dear?’ Raj’s baritone deepened to an insinuating murmur. ‘I think I’ll have to hold you to that.’
‘Any time,’ Ruth said, maintaining her bantering tone even as a familiar heaviness caught her breath and stilled her body.
‘I’ll pick you up at one o’clock,’ Raj said, smoothly shifting gears to once again sound avuncular. ‘Wear shalwar-kameez and cover your head with a dupatta.’
‘Okay.’ Ruth didn’t trust herself to say more.
There was a brief pause. ‘Be ready at one sharp,’ he instructed and hung up.
Raj Roy was a popular figure. Moderately tall, his eyes betraying his Hill Tract origins, the handsome king was a favourite with the women. As a non-Muslim he got away with a playful familiarity with women that Pakistani men wouldn’t dare. He liked to flaunt the licence afforded him and at dinner parties greeted his hostesses with bear hugs and stood with his arms draped around them. The men, aware he belonged to a less stringent culture, envied and at the same time indulged him.
Ruth was alerted to Raj’s arrival by the impatient battery of horn blasts. She glanced at her watch. It was ‘one sharp’. She had forgotten to inform the gatekeeper and Billo was hastily dispatched to tell Jungi Khan to let the Raja’s car in. She stole a quick look in the mirror. She was appropriately dressed; the simple, beige, raw-cotton shalwar and kameez suited her. Billo had pinned her hair back in a French knot. Ruth covered her head with the long chiffon dupatta and draped the loose ends over each shoulder. The russet print picked out the highlights in her auburn hair and framed her subtly made-up face prettily.
When Ruth emerged from the house Raj was standing with his back to his navy blue Mercedes, admiring the garden. The tinted windows, and the small Pakistan flag attached to the mascot, added to the car’s stately appearance. Raj turned his royal eyes upon Ruth and his open look of admiring appraisal made her blush. He bowed slightly to take the hand she extended. ‘You look well, my dear,’ he murmured, and holding his arm out, barely touching her in the forbidding and watchful presence of the guard and the liveried chauffer, gallantly shepherded her to the sedan. He held the rear door open while she drew her garments in. The driver opened the other door and Raj walked round the car to sit beside her. The gun slung from his shoulder, Jungi Khan attempted to surreptitiously peer into the tinted darkness of the car. Raj moved closer to the window and lowered the glass halfway. Nodding reassuringly he told Jungi Khan, ‘Brother, open the gate.’
Once they were on the road he directed the driver to take them to Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s samadhi, where the Sikh maharaja was entombed.
As they wafted down the Mall, Ruth removed her sunglasses and looked out of the windows. Shaded by massive peepal and eucalyptus trees, its wide medians ablaze with flowers, the avenue was at its glorious best.
‘Do you know we are on the Grand Trunk Road?’ Raj said, inaccurately. ‘It ran across the width of India, from the Khyber Pass to Calcutta.’
Ruth exclaimed, ‘I didn’t know that!’
‘It’s been grandly renamed Sharah-e-Quaid-I-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, after the founding father of Pakistan. But old names, like old habits, die hard, my dear—we still call it the Mall.’
Ruth’s tentative nods acknowledged only partial knowledge of these facts. She was accustomed to Raj’s didactic delivery, and enjoyed the courtly old-world irony he injected into his remarks. She had absorbed a great deal of history from him.
They drove past the delicate pink sprawl of the British-built High Court and the coppery Zam-zammah—the cannon better known as Kim’s gun. The traffic increased past the shiny little fighter-jet displayed on the traffic island to commemorate the brief 1971 war, the third Indo-Pak war over Kashmir. This was when East Pakistan, absurdly separated from West Pakistan by a thousand miles of Indian territory at the time of Partition, was finally able to break away and claim independence as Bangladesh.
The Mercedes turned right on Lower Mall and as it honked and nosed its way through the congested glue of scooter-rickshaws, cyclists, bullock-carts, tongas and trucks, Ruth moved nervously to the edge of her seat. A man was frantically herding a small flock of sheep through the dense traffic.
‘Don’t look at the sheep; look at me. I’m better looking,’ said Raj with a wry smile of so little conceit that Ruth turned to him and said, ‘Tell me about the shrine we’re headed for.’
‘Lahore was captured from the Mughals by the Sikh warrior Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1798,’ said Raj. She saw the mischief gather in his eyes as he turned to her and held up a tapered finger. ‘He had only one eye.’
‘Okay,’ Ruth acquiesced, smiling. ‘How did he lose his eye?’
‘One of his wives gouged it out for dallying with a dancing girl. But don’t quote me.’
‘I won’t,’ said Ruth, settling back in her seat, savouring the sudden sense of ease that flooded her. ‘I’m sure he dallied with so many, it’s a wonder he didn’t have both eyes gouged out.’
‘Now, now—don’t judge him so harshly,’ said Raj, turning to her and wagging his finger. ‘Maharajas have to patronize dancing girls. It’s their duty.’
‘Do you?’
‘Me? No. But I would, if they looked like you
.’
‘Stop flirting,’ said Ruth lightly, putting on her sunglasses. ‘So? How did the Maharaja really lose his eye?’
‘Small-pox,’ said Raj.
In Pakistan Ruth had become aware of the ravages of the dreaded disease.
‘His face was pitted. He was a small man and he limped, but he was a great warrior,’ declared Raj. ‘After the Maharaja’s death the city was swallowed up by the British.’
‘And his heirs?’
‘They were weak and quarrelsome,’ he said dismissively. ‘It didn’t happen overnight. Lahore was gradually ingested, like the rest of India, to satisfy the British Empire’s boa-constrictor-like appetite.’
Ruth’s hair prickled at the image he conjured up. She could feel his eyes on her. Her hands slightly unsteady, she lit a cigarette. The driver lowered the front windows a few inches to let out the smoke.
‘The Maharaja died in Lahore,’ he continued, touched by Ruth’s reaction. ‘His mausoleum is set in a complex of buildings that covers three acres. His Samadhi covers the spot where he was cremated. It was built by his son, Kharak Singh. We’ll be there in a few minutes. It is right opposite the Lahore Fort, close to the Badshahi Mosque.’
Raj’s voice poured pleasurably into her ears. She tried not to watch the road as they scraped through the congested traffic and concentrated instead on the small green flag in front as it alternately fluttered and grew limp at their erratic progress. Federal ministers’ and judges’ cars were permitted to carry flags. Raj allowed it out of its leather sheath only when he was on official duty.
As the billowing marble domes of the Royal Mosque floated into view, the driver glanced at Raj in the rear-view mirror and said something Ruth was too distracted to follow.
‘You’d better chuck that out,’ Raj said, turning to Ruth and indicating her cigarette. ‘Smoking is forbidden to the Sikhs.’
It is as well he did so.
The moment the Sikh gatekeeper opened the gate and shut it behind them their car was ambushed by seven or eight strapping Sikh youths. Most of them had their long hair tied in untidy knots and only a few wore turbans. They milled about the Mercedes, talking excitedly. Raj lowered the window: ‘Let the car through, my friends, I will listen to everything you say once we get through.’ Ruth knew he spoke fluent Punjabi. Some of the men caught sight of her and stooped to brashly peer at her through the open slit. Raj raised the darkened window and signalled the driver to go ahead.