“Let me look at you!” Zabo said, taking the old stuffed monkey from Mumtaz’s arms. The toy had been a gift from Zabo. “You look so pretty, and you’ve grown so tall!” The child stretched her neck to look even taller. Zabo slid a large package wrapped in bright green paper across the floor.
“This is for Bundr and you. I’ll hold Bundr while you open it.”
The child tore at the paper and squealed when she saw the wicker pram. Inside were a quilt and a new wardrobe for the monkey.
“Let’s take Bundr out to show Rashid,” Shabanu said, and the two women walked out into the back garden with Mumtaz, who snatched the toy monkey back and pushed it in its pram to find the young son of the servant who would look after her for the afternoon.
Zabo and Shabanu sat on a willow bench under a banyan tree at the edge of the garden.
“I’ve got new boots from England for hiking at Dinga!” said Zabo, clasping one knee with her long, supple fingers. She and Shabanu joined the other women of Rahim’s and Nazir’s households each summer at the family’s summer house at Dinga Galli, in the Himalayan foothills. They hiked and gathered wild flowers along the mountain footpaths while the men hunted panthers among the granite peaks above.
“Zabo, I have something to tell you,” said Shabanu. She couldn’t bear a second of dishonesty with her friend. Her voice sounded formal and unfeeling, and she stopped speaking for a moment. She looked into Zabo’s eyes, and her heart crumpled.
“Oh, Zabo!” Shabanu reached for her friend’s hands and fought the tears that built pressure behind her eyes.
“What?”
“Rahim has come to propose that you marry Ahmed.”
“Ahmed?” she asked with a small laugh, as if Shabanu had made a mistake. Then her eyes widened with disbelief. “He wants Ahmed to marry? Me?”
“He’s offering a fortune. Rahim hates this quarrel with your father. He’s proposing several hundred acres!”
Zabo covered her face with her hands for a moment. Shabanu could hear her friend’s heart – or was it her own? – thumping wildly. Slowly Zabo straightened her spine and dropped her hands to her lap. Shabanu put her arms around Zabo’s shoulders and drew her close.
“Forgive me,” said Zabo. “At least you and I would be together.”
Shabanu sat immobile for a second, then she pushed Zabo’s hair from her high forehead.
“I am so angry with Rahim,” she said quietly, and Zabo looked up when she heard the cold edge in Shabanu’s voice. “All he thinks of is the family name, the family land, the family, the family! He doesn’t care a parrot’s whistle for me, except as his possession. Or for you, except now as a peace offering.”
“Finally I shall escape this prison,” said Zabo, looking over her shoulder at the cracked grey walls of the house. “Since Mother died I have always been afraid I’d never leave here, just as she never left.”
“You won’t even try to persuade your father that it’s wrong for you to marry Ahmed?” asked Shabanu. But she knew Zabo was unlikely to disobey her father. She’d never run away as Shabanu had done when she’d learned her father had promised her to Rahim.
“Don’t waste yourself on the things you cannot change.” Shabanu heard Auntie Sharma’s voice, speaking to her as if it had its own will to come on inside her head like a radio. Sometimes Shabanu felt she’d never learn patience.
“Duty is not difficult when there’s no alternative, Shabanu.”
“Oh, Zabo, I still want to run away sometimes! We could disappear into the desert.”
“My father would hunt us down and kill us,” said Zabo. “It can only be as he wishes.”
Shabanu thought of the armed guards always within a few feet of Nazir. They never smiled or spoke. Nazir had reason to fear so many people that he regarded everyone as an enemy.
Shabanu knew Nazir’s cruelty too well. She thought of a late afternoon six years earlier, when the sun had left a sheen on the canal like sun-ripened melon. She and her sister had been gathering water to take back to their camp at the edge of the desert, where their family had come to plan Phulan’s wedding to their cousin Hamir.
When their pots were full, the girls walked down the canal path, talking. Phulan was saying how handsome Hamir was, and how if she ate plenty of lentils and butter she would have fat and healthy sons that would look just like their father. Shabanu was daydreaming about her own approaching marriage to Hamir’s brother, Murad, and thinking this might not be such a bad place to live after all.
“Who is this?” asked a deep voice from the bottom of the bank. Shabanu looked down to see a fat man in a silk tunic and drawstring trousers leaning on a hand-carved shotgun. This was her first glimpse of Nazir. Laughter boomed out from the bushes.
A second man, younger and slimmer than Nazir, stepped out from behind a tree. He also had a gun. Both men wore elaborately embroidered caps, finely woven vests and gold watches. A third man appeared, and a fourth – a young man, still part boy.
“How about this one?” Nazir asked the youngest man.
Phulan stood defiantly before them, shaking the glass bangles back on her brown arm, a water jar and a basket of wet laundry atop her head. Her face was uncovered and lovely, her nose disc glinting in reflected sunlight, her graceful pale fingers moulded around the curve of the water jar on her hip.
“Yes,” said Nazir. “The one who bags the most quails gets that one.”
“What about me?” asked one of the others. “I shot the only blue bull. I should have her. Give the boy the other one.”
“I’ll pay you handsomely,” said Nazir, turning back to the two girls. “Land, jewellery, money – anything you like.”
Shabanu’s heart had raced. Some families would be grateful for the payment and would willingly forget the indignity. But Shabanu had been certain her father and Hamir would not. The thought of Nazir sweating over her sister made her ill, and she snapped her head forward, tossing the water jugs down the embankment. The men scattered as the jars broke, splashing mud onto Nazir’s silken trousers.
Shabanu swung up onto the neck of their camel and pulled Phulan up behind her. Nazir spluttered with rage, and the other men bent double with laughter, slapping their knees and choking on tears as Shabanu and Phulan escaped to the camp at the edge of the desert.
After dark, Nazir and his men came in a jeep to the house where Hamir and Murad lived. Hamir was overcome by anger. Blood was the only redemption he could see for the insult to his honour. He took his father’s old country-made shotgun outside, where darkness had settled around the farmyard.
The landowner and his friends sat in the jeep, laughing and talking. They had been drinking. Their voices were loud, their words slurred.
“Where are they?” Nazir demanded when he saw Hamir.
“They’ve gone into the desert,” replied Hamir. He brought the gun up in front of him and held it under his arm, the muzzle pointing casually towards the jeep.
Nazir was silent for a moment, and the other men sobered.
“Then bring us your sister,” said Nazir.
Without moving a muscle, Hamir squeezed the trigger and a shot exploded into the side of the jeep. Nazir’s friends scrambled out, falling over each other into the dirt in drunken disarray.
Hamir’s mother and brother came running round the corner of the house just in time to see the flash from a large foreign-made shotgun – much louder than Hamir’s. Hamir flew from his feet like a puppet being yanked from a stage. When the dust cleared, Hamir lay in a bloody, tattered heap, his body nearly halved at the waist. His family buried him in the floor of the house before they too fled into the desert.
It was true, Shabanu thought. Nazir would kill his only daughter if she did not obey him.
She and Zabo sat without moving from the garden bench through the warmth of the afternoon. The ayah brought them lunch, and Zabo sat quietly, picking invisible crumbs from her lap.
Shabanu talked about the things they’d do together in Okurabad after Za
bo’s marriage to Ahmed. The leaves sparkled and danced in the spring sun, then the shade thickened around them.
Shabanu talked until her throat was scratchy, and she felt drained dry as the Cholistan sand at the height of summer.
“I wanted to say something wise – something to comfort you,” she said at last. “I want you to believe we will be all right if we are living in the same household. The truth is, I don’t know what to say.”
“There is nothing to say,” Zabo said quietly. “Truly, I do just love to hear you talk. I love to hear what we will do together. The other things can’t be helped. We may as well speak of the blessings.”
“Perhaps Rahim will allow me to go with you to Lahore to shop for your dowry,” said Shabanu. And they talked of that for a while.
4
The wick on the candle sputtered, and Shabanu looked at Rahim. His face was quiet on the pillow. The silk whispered as she drew the coverlet down, and his eyes opened as she reached for her shawl. He raised himself up on one elbow and caught her hand as she stood to draw the shawl around her shoulders.
“Come back,” he said softly.
“I can’t,” she said, trying to tug her hand away.
But he held her fast. “You must,” he said, and pulled her back towards him.
“You’re hurting me!” He said nothing, but neither did he release her wrist. He pulled her down to lie beside him again.
“Mumtaz will be frightened when she wakes.”
“I’ve already told Zenat she’s to spend the night with Mumtaz.”
“You have no right!” she said. “I make the decisions about Mumtaz.”
“No right?”
She propped herself on her elbow and turned to face him.
“She’s too small to be shoved off with servants…”
“I won’t have you spending all your time with her!” A diversion of Shabanu’s attention from him when he wanted her was the only thing that made Rahim unreasonable. She knew better than to argue with him now.
“You’ll see her in the morning,” he said, taking her into his arms again.
Shabanu barely acknowledged her resentment. She stuffed it back into her heart, just as she and her sister had once stuffed feathered quilts into camel bags before they travelled to a new waterhole in the desert.
Rahim’s hot face scraped against hers, and she reacted lazily at first until her body responded to the rhythm of his passion. But her eyes stared into the dark, at the ceiling, and, as they turned in the bed, at the wall, at the pillow. All the while she murmured sweetly against his ear, and her plans took shape in her mind.
She thought about the incident with Leyla. If Amina had not yet brought complaints to Rahim about how Mumtaz dressed and ran freely about the farm, no doubt she would soon. Shabanu decided to make a change in her daughter’s daily schedule.
She thought about how to make dressing Mumtaz and combing her hair every morning into a game. It wasn’t as if Mumtaz’s half-sisters were so well turned out every day. In fact, Mumtaz looked no worse. It was her spirit of adventure – her fearlessness around the animals and her interest in climbing trees and playing in the sand, heedless of snakes and scorpions – that set her apart from the others and intimidated them.
But Shabanu decided to see to it that her daughter looked better than the older children without limiting Mumtaz’s freedom to play. That might defuse Amina’s complaints.
Shabanu felt pleased with her decision and turned her thoughts to her first trip to Lahore to shop for Zabo’s dowry.
Her mind buzzed with excitement long after Rahim had fallen asleep again.
She had already decided that she and Zabo should stay at the haveli, the family’s ancestral house in the old walled city of Lahore. Rahim had lived there with his brothers when they were boys in school. His sister, Selma, a widow, lived there alone now.
Rahim’s elder wives hated the draughty old wood building. They all stayed in modern stone and glass bungalows in the more fashionable Cantonment area of Lahore. Selma looked after the haveli, and Rahim often stayed there when the provincial assembly was in session.
Shabanu had never seen the haveli, in the heart of the Mogul city. But now she imagined herself sitting at a window high atop the dilapidated old house, with trees and ferns growing out of drainpipes outside the third-storey windows. She would look out through the carved wood screen onto the street, watching the horse-drawn carts as they clattered over the cobbles below.
Long after the candle had flickered out in the tiny silver stand on the table beside her, she breathed softly and stroked her arms under the crumpled linen of the sheet. But she never closed her eyes. The thought of Lahore and the haveli electrified her.
Before first light, she slipped out of bed and wrapped her shawl tightly about her. Rahim lay snoring, turned on his side, his shoulders lifting with each breath. She spread her jewels on the table beside his pillow, then folded her sari and left it on the floor under his shoes. She scrubbed her face in the basin and whipped her hair into a knot behind her head. She put on an old shalwar kameez she’d left in his cupboard, and slipped out.
Mumtaz had not been afraid in the least the first night Shabanu had spent away from her. In the morning when Shabanu came back from the big house to bathe and breakfast with her, she found the child asleep with her arms around Bundr’s neck.
Usually Shabanu rose early – earlier than the sun, earlier even than the serving women – and went to bathe in the women servants’ bath across the courtyard.
This morning, after checking on her daughter, she took the brass bucket from her room to the pump, and her heart rejoiced at the splash and gurgle as only the heart of a desert woman can rejoice at the sound of water. She loved the way the darkness chilled her, as if she were the only soul alive.
“Why do you want to spend your days in that dusty room behind the stable?” Rahim had asked her again and again. “There’s no water, no heat. You could be here with servants.”
“I’m still a peasant girl,” she’d said, making her smile dazzle.
It excited him to have her come to him in the evenings and leave again in the mornings. It was like an illicit love affair, though he continued to insist she move back into the house. But she held on to the room, and the arrangement continued in the same way, week by week.
Living in the room behind the stable was as close as Shabanu had come to freedom since she’d left Cholistan, and the morning hours before the household awoke were her freest time of all.
Streaks of green appeared on the horizon, outlining the inky-black trees around the courtyard wall as she brought the bucket back and lit the fire in the stable yard pit. The darkness diffused slightly, and stripes of orange appeared beneath the green, and the stars dimmed, and the animals began to stir, and it seemed the day had begun to happen all in one instant.
Shabanu loved being close to the animal sounds in the morning, as if the horses moving about, the cocks crowing, the cows lowing with their udders full, were all intent on letting her know the world was safe for another day.
By the time the water was heated, the light glinted watery and pale from the rim of the bucket, and steam rose as she carried back her bathwater. The rising sun shone purely, for the air was still free of the dust that would gather as activity increased about the farm.
Precious as her time grew as each day wore on, with mending and looking after Mumtaz and cleaning and storing the wheat and rice from the market and a thousand other household chores assigned her by Amina, Shabanu spent a long time in her bath.
Though water was plentiful here at Okurabad, Shabanu still prided herself on being able to bathe in very little. When she and her sister were small, her mother would pour a thin stream of water over each of their heads, soaping their hair, then rubbing the soapy water into their shoulders, backs and bellies. By the time each girl was rinsed, only a single cup of water had been used.
The air felt cold and astringent as Shabanu pulled her kameez over he
r head and, loosening the string of her shalwar, stepped free of her clothing.
She loved the bare austerity of the servant women’s bath, with its swept-smooth dirt floor, whitewashed walls, thick, tallowy soap and rough, wind-dried towels. The baths in Rahim’s house puzzled her – their pale pink tiles, perfumed soaps and soft towels that refused to absorb water seemed frivolous and useless.
She stood on a small platform of thin wood slats beside the drain and scooped the hot water from her pail with a plastic cup. She shivered with pleasure as it ran over her scalp, through her hair, and then splashed cooler over her shoulders and down her spine.
The soap smelled clean and honest, and produced a slippery lather as she rubbed it over her shoulders and chest. She ran her hands over her full round breasts.
As she stood there in the bath, Shabanu thought of her many blessings, the things that brought her pleasure and made her life worthwhile. First, of course, was Mumtaz, who grew stronger and cleverer and more beautiful by the day; then there was Rahim, who treated her well and wanted enough for her to be happy that he allowed her these small freedoms, and who gave her beautiful gifts of jewellery and clothes; and there were the gifts themselves: she loved to wear them, but more important, they gave her a sense of material well-being, as they might always be sold if she needed money; and the women she loved – Zabo, Sharma and Fatima, her mother and Phulan – for, though she saw them seldom, their strength, wisdom and beauty were folded in and around the chambers of her heart, as if they had become an organic part of her.
That same morning, she asked Mumtaz to stand before her to have her hair brushed. In the afternoon Shabanu took her to the bazaar at Multan and let her pick her favourite colours in cotton lawn so fragile and light the darzi clucked his tongue over it when he sat down to cut it into pieces for small shalwar kameez.
Under the Same Stars Page 3