And the World Changed

by Muneeza Shamsie

  Shortly before Dina Lal’s party, Dina Lal recalled, Smithson had returned from Murree, the famous hill station from which naked Himalayan peaks could be glimpsed on a clear day. Dina Lal loved Murree, the snow scattered on the distant mountains, the roads built on the edges of cliffs and the bazaar that wound back and forth with the sway of the hills. Smithson slapped Dina Lal on the shoulder when the two men discovered that Dina Lal’s favorite place to stay was a short walk from Smithson’s summer retreat. A few weeks later he received Smithson in his office, when the land in the vicinity of his ancestral village was needed for the possible extension of a railway line. When Dina Lal accepted payment in exchange for the land, he’d had in mind that he would invest the money for his sons. Much to his dismay, his sons did not turn out to be serious students. They played far more than they studied, so he had put the proceeds from the Railways sale in a bank to wait for a day when the two boys might calm down long enough to find their way in life. With that day yet to come, Dina Lal still had a big pot of money in the bank.

  “What’s he asking for it?” Dina Lal said suddenly, interrupting Janoo. The amount that Janoo mentioned was identical to the sum set aside in the bank. Although Dina Lal was not a religious man, the coincidence had him thinking that the gods were at work. Much later he thought the gods, whether it was one grand one or limitless smaller ones, were responsible for his next words.

  “Let’s buy it,” he declared. When Janoo stopped speaking in midsentence and her mouth opened so wide that he could see the sinking gap where her largest molar had been pulled out, he added, “For you. A gift for you,” as if this clarification would somehow help mitigate his wife’s astonishment.

  Dina Lal’s decision not to leave for India had Janoo questioning her husband’s sanity. But when he spoke of buying a big yellow house far too grand for its own good, owned by an Englishman in a city being ravished, she thought him completely mad. For her own peace of mind she resolved to think of him as yet another victim—albeit a different kind—of the Partition that was breaking her land and heart into two.

  “No, thank you. Nothing good can come of anything they leave behind,” she said, repeating her earlier words a little less gruffly. “Don’t say that,” Dina Lal added in irritation. “Good riddance to them. Besides, they’re leaving us behind. You think nothing good can come of that? Why, we’ll be free!”

  But Janoo wasn’t listening. She’d turned to leave the living room of the spacious home that had been theirs for twenty years. A few months earlier she wouldn’t have heeded her husband’s words. But each day news from the temples rattled her further. They’d entered a new age, the times were different, unlike any other, and nothing, absolutely nothing, was the same. Including the man standing behind her, going on about the wisdom of his proposition. She needed to find her sons. Even if they pulled away from her when she tried to touch them, she would know there was something she had made that was still true.

  A few days later, based on Janoo’s information, Dina Lal called on John Smithson. Unknown to him, John Smithson had already compiled a list of prospective owners of 5, Queen’s Road, and respectable man that Dina Lal was, he was on the list. Before Dina Lal could bring it up on his own, Smithson revealed his hopes.

  “My house, 5, Queen’s Road,” Smithson started, “I’d like to sell it.”

  “I see,” Dina Lal replied, caught only slightly off guard and feigning ignorance. “The Railways are selling it?”

  “Right,” Smithson responded. “But we’re looking for someone very special indeed to take the place. Someone, you understand, who would know enough to value what they’d got.”

  Smithson paused, then, as Dina Lal, schooled in showing the kind of modesty the English appreciated, answered, “Certainly, certainly. Such a lovely house you have.”

  “I wonder,” Smithson asked, “whether I could interest you in my house?”

  “I have one,” Dina Lal replied, the bargaining side of his landlord character surfacing through no fault of his own. Then he clarified himself, remembering all his properties. “Plenty of them, I mean.”

  “It’s a good price,” Smithson countered.

  “Real estate . . . it’s in quite a slump these days,” Dina Lal replied consolingly.

  “The price is very, very fair.” After revealing the exact amount (“nonnegotiable, you understand,” Smithson had added), he went on to list all the items inside the house that would be included. The billiards table, the dining table that sat twenty-four guests with plenty of leg room, the Railway crockery, sofa sets and beds, chandeliers bought in the most prestigious London stores, the verandah furniture. “Bloody hell,” Smithson finally said, sweeping his arms wide. “You’d have everything left behind.”

  Strangely, because Dina Lal knew nothing about gardening and had never cared to learn, it wasn’t until Smithson arrived at a description of his garden that Dina Lal leveled his undivided attention to the details being described. The longer he listened, the more fantastic and alarming Smithson’s account became. Unless he’d gone to see it for himself the next day, he might have thought the brandy was at work in Smithson’s rendering. On and on, Smithson went. Much of the garden was imported. The bulbs, for example, the plant food, and the original grass seed from Bengal bred to withstand the heat of the tropics. Smithson had each variety of bougainvillea, hibiscus, sage, periwinkle, lilies, and other plants of which Dina Lal had never heard, at the tip of his tongue. But he was fascinated not only by the account, which might have been drawn from the fantastic fairy tales his wife once narrated to their young sons, but also with what appeared to be desperation. It had majesty and grandeur at its command, but it was desperation all the same. Dina Lal had an inkling that Smithson feared returning to his faraway country. He could think of no other explanation for a grown man to be entirely wedded to details that couldn’t reasonably be expected to survive his departure. Against his better instincts, ones that had recently taken to blaming each and every white man he saw for what was fast becoming the horror of Partition, Dina Lal felt sorry for Smithson.

  “Johnny, Johnny,” he said, confident that their early afternoon brandy would forgive his leap into familiarity. Dina Lal studied Smithson’s eyes, a strained blue, before speaking. If only he’d been teasing Janoo with the prospect of the house, he cast away the joke with a deep sigh. “Let’s settle it, then,” he said firmly to Smithson. The next afternoon, coming up the winding driveway for the first time, Dina Lal thought it was obvious that 5, Queen’s Road belonged to the British. The grandeur of the house, the colonial architecture and the stream of servants made this clear. Halfway up the drive, Dina Lal received further confirmation. In Lahore, city of infinite smells, it was the absence of any smell at all that made the house unmistakably British. Bloody bastards, he thought, how did they do it?

  Inside, Smithson gave Dina Lal a tour, hardly pausing for breath. He pointed out the woodwork on the verandah, the elaborate fireplace mantles, the room with only a billiards table in it, the doorways framed with arches. Dina Lal was shown bathrooms large enough to be bedrooms, with porcelain sinks deep enough for a child’s bath. The oversized living and dining rooms could be divided by intricately crafted French doors. Smithson informed him that before construction on the house had even been completed, the locks on the doors and the decorative fixtures had arrived from England. Dina Lal pretended to listen attentively. Strangely, Smithson reminded him of a new father presenting his child to someone else, drawing attention to the round kneecaps, a neck buried in soft folds of skin, things Dina Lal might have missed about his own children had Janoo not tirelessly pointed them out to him.

  “You’re not married?” Dina Lal asked, interrupting. Smithson shook his head and when he returned to the description of the house, his enthusiasm wasn’t quite the same. In a duller tone Smithson further clarified the offer. Within earshot of his servants he offered Dina Lal not just the house and most of its contents, but the domestic help, including the man who was swee
ping the verandah nearby as they spoke. His name was Yunis and he was a smart man, very loyal. When they finally spoke of the price, Dina Lal knew it was more than reasonable but he couldn’t help trying his hand at negotiating. Dina Lal was met with unexpected stubbornness.

  “Not negotiable,” Smithson repeated.

  “This is India! Why, everything is negotiable here!” Dina Lal responded.

  In the end, Dina Lal was insulted because Smithson refused to budge by even one rupee from his price, if only as a measure of good faith. He didn’t recall Smithson being as rigid in other business dealings the two had had. He was exasperated enough to almost point this out to Smithson, but last minute apprehensions of losing the deal curbed his tongue. Eventually, he agreed to Smithson’s strange figure.

  Smithson, however, was not satisfied.

  While Dina Lal listened in disbelief, Smithson outlined his conditions for the sale. Dina Lal could only own 5, Queen’s Road if he promised to retain the crew of malis Smithson had hired and trained, and who would continue to care for the garden according to the schedule Smithson had devised. For example, the rose bushes would be pruned early in October so that they would bloom one more time in December. The miniature waterways that irrigated the garden were to be redug after the annual monsoon season, but not too soon after the rains. The last thing Dina Lal heard before he stopped listening was that Smithson was planning to move a model of the railway route into 5, Queen’s Road, where it was to become a permanent fixture.

  Excessive as this and the numerous other conditions were, Dina Lal vigorously nodded his head.

  “Huh, huh, huh, huh, jee,” he said, agreeing to all of Smithson’s conditions, impatient to expedite the sale.

  Finally, the two men shook each other’s cool, damp hands to finalize the deal. Soon! Dina Lal thought as he descended the long driveway where green grass was groomed to grow between bricks laid in a careful zigzagging pattern. Soon you will be far, far away, Johnny, in your own country—nothing but an island!—and I will live in your house any damn way I please.

  The first time Dina Lal walked into 5, Queen’s Road after it became his, Smithson’s ship was sailing the Indian Ocean. If Lahore had been seething before then, it was exploding now. Days earlier, the first trainloads of massacred bodies had rumbled down the intricate tracks of Smithson’s railway system from one side of the border to the other and back again. As far as Dina Lal was concerned, there was only one way to explain it. Madness had descended when the line of Partition, inexact and incomplete, was penciled in on the Englishmen’s maps. Any hope of it lifting had all but faded.

  Standing in full view of the spectacular garden Smithson had left behind, framed by purple bougainvilleas climbing their own way into the astonishingly cloudless sky, Dina Lal’s wife tugged at her husband’s shirt. Only barely out of earshot of their two sons, almost grown men already, she spoke.

  “But we don’t need this!” she pleaded, as if she could still change her husband’s mind, despite the deed already signed and transferred to her husband. “Where we live—it’s fine. Please, my love, please.”

  Dina Lal loosened himself from her grasp and paid her no mind.

  Upon entering the house, Dina Lal was annoyed to see that Smithson had done as he’d promised and placed his railway model on a table in the front parlor. He recalled what Smithson had said about the delicacy of the model, but Dina Lal didn’t stop his servants from pushing it to one side and piling boxes on it, as if the slopes and ridges of the topographical model comprised a flat surface. Late that night, as he walked by the table on his way to bolting the front door, Dina Lal noticed an envelope taped to the corner of the table. In the dim yellow light he recognized his name on the crisp stationery. Squinting, Dina Lal slit the envelope with his thumbnail and began to read Smithson’s first letter to him.

  Dina Lal, my friend, I’ve entrusted you with my house and, grand as it is, it will require a bit of work to maintain. We’ve gone over the specifics and I needn’t, I’m certain, trouble you with them again.

  But even more than this house, I hold dear my model of the Empire. (If you look closely, you will see Murree, the dot painted in red near the upper right. No lines lead to it as the Railways—which in my opinion was our largest failing—could never figure out a way to reach the quaint town we both love at the bottom of the sky.) I had hoped to donate the model to a museum, but the chaps at Lahore Museum couldn’t find the time to look at it. I will continue to pursue finding a permanent home for it from England, but until then I ask you to care for it. (If it develops a slight crack, you can mend it with the gypsum powder I’ve left in the bag below. Dab it with a bit of water and rub the powder into it, that ought to solve the problem.) Should you be interested, the various colors of lines denote different routes: The green one shows the places I visited during my years in British India. I request you to leave the model in the front parlor of 5, Queen’s Road. It will be safe there, and when I find a place where it can be properly exhibited, it will be easy to move through the front door.

  I do hope you enjoy this house as much as I have. One day (if things ever return to normal), I might visit. We’ll be in touch, and may God bless you.

  Dina Lal was ready to dismiss the letter as a poorly conceived (filthy, even) joke until he read the last line. Had Smithson no respect? As if it were the Englishman’s goddamned God who watched over 5, Queen’s Road and not the abundance of other ones whom Janoo had already made a mantel for, that heard his prayers and blessed him instead. Idiot, Dina Lal thought as he crumpled the letter and dropped it on the floor for Yunis to sweep the following morning.

  It was only the first of a stream of letters. But already then, the onion parchment on the floor crumpled into a wad smaller than his fist, Dina Lal suspected greater powers at play. In the years ahead, he often wondered if the gods on his side of the lines had made it their mission to keep ill will flowing into the house he’d bought from the Englishman. His city in shambles, it was hard to imagine that he’d once enjoyed Smithson’s need. As if exploiting it could have set anything right. With more land and houses than he knew how to use, he’d bought 5, Queen’s Road—because he could. Still, if only his father could have seen him in those early days! He’d stood on the roof surrounded by row upon row of planters spilling with endlessly blooming flowers he never learned to name. From above, the city spread out like a map, he’d pretended that his life, already full, was only beginning. Like the country, land of the pure, just born.

  SOOT

  Sehba Sarwar

  Sehba Sarwar (1964– ) is a novelist, essayist, and poet, and her work has been published in anthologies and magazines in Pakistan, India, and the United States. She was born and raised in Pakistan and earned degrees in the United States from Mount Holyoke College and the University of Texas at Austin.

  Her first novel, Black Wings, was published in 2004 (Alhamra). Presently based in Houston, Texas, she is working on numerous writing projects, including a second novel. She also serves as the director of a Houston-based arts organization, Voices Breaking Boundaries, and returns regularly to Pakistan to write and spend time with family.

  “Soot” looks at a younger generation in India and Pakistan who have been separated from each other since Partition, with the gulf widening with each subsequent conflict. Curiosity and then the discovery of common interests and the similar problems that South Asian countries share, draws them to each other. Running through the narrative is the echo of East Pakistan, the majority province that became Bangladesh following a civil war, and which, the protagonist realizes, has been virtually erased from public discourse in Pakistan.

  • • •

  “You must eat our milky rasmalai,” the taxi driver said in perfect English, shaking his head continuously, as if in full agreement with himself. “It is the best dessert in all of India.”

  Tired from a day of travel, Zahra leaned into the back seat, barely acknowledging the driver’s comments with her nods.

&
nbsp; “There is much to see here: the Marble Palace, Nakhoda Mosque, Eden Garden, and all our temples.” Intrigued to learn that Zahra was from Pakistan via Chicago, he had travel advice for her. “My recommendation to you, do not talk about the ’71 war. People are passionate about Bangladesh, so it will be a difficult topic for you. If you stay away from talk of wars between our countries, you should feel very welcome.”

  Karachi to Kolkata was not far, but delayed flight, late connections, and airport security checks had made Zahra’s travel excruciatingly long. Exhausted, she had little energy for the driver’s running commentary. As they entered the city, she stared out at the yellowed buildings, which looked older than the ones she knew in Karachi. The streets, packed with moving bodies, were different too, filled with cars of all shapes and sizes, buses, and two-wheeled rickshaws pulled by thin, muscled men.

  After scribbling down his mobile number for her, the driver dropped her at the youth hostel off Ballygunge Circle. “Yes, if you need tours of our city of joy, please telephone me and I will show you around.” He winked and drove away.

  Tucking her hair behind her ears, Zahra made a mental note to toss the paper as soon as the taxi turned the corner. She rang the bell and the door clicked open. She clutched her heavy canvas suitcase with both hands and clambered up the dark stairwell. In the hallway upstairs, Raj and Shoma, a husband and wife team who managed the hostel, greeted her with smiles. Shoma patted Zahra’s hand, then disappeared through a doorway; Raj silently ushered Zahra to her room. It didn’t take long for Zahra to figure out that he spoke mostly Bengali. He didn’t understand much Hindi, which she could speak since it was so close to the Urdu used in Pakistan.

  After freshening up, Zahra walked up to the third floor balcony, where sunshine trickled in through bamboo mats. In the serene space, far removed from the commotion of the streets down below, two American students settled into cane chairs and sipped tea. Through the introductions that followed, Zahra learned that Melanie and James were doing research for anthropology doctorate degrees at their respective institutions in the United States. They too, like the taxi driver, like the hostel managers, and anyone else Zahra met on the journey from Karachi to Kolkata, asked: “What are you doing here? You’re from Pakistan, you’re studying in the States, and you’re doing an internship in India?”