As the days began to lengthen, Rahim noticed the change in how the child looked. He stopped now and then to speak to Mumtaz in the courtyard, and she curtsied to him.
Still Mumtaz played by the canal and climbed thorn trees in her new shalwar kameez. Every afternoon when she came back for her nap, Shabanu undressed and bathed her and sat down to mend the rips in the knees and sleeves of the soft cotton garments as Mumtaz slept.
One afternoon Rahim returned from a hunt in the desert, the jeeps dripping blood from their floorboards. Mumtaz stood watching as the men unloaded the dead deer, their delicate hooves crossed and pointed towards the sky.
Her father saw her and went to the back curtain of his big four-by-four, returning with something in his arms. Mumtaz stood her ground, unaware that the small, angular bundle was for her. He stooped before her, and the first thing she saw was a timid face with large, brave eyes shining brightly from it.
Rahim held out the fawn, and Mumtaz lifted her hand gently to touch the velvety place between those beautiful eyes. The fawn struggled, kicking out its legs, and Mumtaz withdrew her hand quickly. Rahim set it on its feet. Its legs were so slender that Mumtaz was afraid they’d break as the fawn bucked to get away from them. Its soft pink tongue licked out at its shiny black nose, and Rahim let it go.
“She’ll be back,” he said. “She’s looking for her mother, but she won’t find her. Go and ask Zenat to warm some buffalo milk with sugar, and get out one of your old nursing bottles so you can feed her.”
From that day on, Mumtaz and the fawn were inseparable. The tiny hooves followed her, tak-tak-tak, across the courtyard and down to the canal. The child tied coloured ribbons around the fawn’s neck, and the animal’s coat became thick and shiny from the rich buffalo milk. The mali fed her grain in the mornings when he tended the birds. Mumtaz was totally absorbed in her pet, and it lifted Shabanu’s spirits so that Rahim noticed a new warmth in her.
In the dead still afternoons the heat began to accumulate, and Shabanu and Mumtaz napped. The air shimmered up from the dirt in the white light outside their door. The mosquito netting hung heavy and limp around them as they lay side by side, sleeping behind leaden eyelids. The air felt too hot to breathe, and the charpoy strings prickled their shoulder blades through the rough cotton sheet.
They had been napping for more than an hour on such an afternoon when a shrill scream pierced their heat-drugged sleep. Shabanu pushed aside the mosquito netting. At the doorway she paused to grab her chador, and as she emerged into the shade of the tarpaulin that Zenat had stretched over the doorway, she saw two men scuffling, their feet raising clouds of dust from the parched earth. One of the men wore a smartly starched turban.
The screaming went on, and Shabanu saw a veiled figure slip away to the edge of the stable yard as other menservants came in their undershirts from doorways behind which they’d been asleep. Some wrapped limp turbans around their heads as they ran.
“I saw him in her room!” the voice shrieked, over and over. The voice was strange but familiar. Shabanu knew it was the voice of Leyla, though the veil and dust muffled the sound. The voice quavered, and its pitch seemed oddly higher, as if Leyla was trying to disguise herself.
“The mosquito nets were heaving! I was afraid he was trying to strangle her!” The voice trailed off, thin and ghostly.
Through the dust Shabanu saw the twinkle of mirrors on Ibne’s vest. His proud white turban fell from his head in the scuffle and was trampled in the dirt.
He struggled silently with the other men, who grunted and wheezed as they fumbled to pin his arms to his sides and pull him to the ground. Ibne’s eyes slid wildly from side to side until they found Shabanu’s in the shaded doorway.
She thought of the times Ibne had brought Rahim’s gifts to her in the desert, he riding his shining white horse, and she sitting with her father astride a camel.
In all the years Shabanu had known Ibne, this was the first time their eyes had met. His held an urgent plea as the servants wrestled him to his knees. He didn’t make a sound as they dragged him away. When the dust cleared, the dark veiled figure had disappeared.
Zenat came to take Mumtaz in the early evening so Shabanu could dress for dinner, and Shabanu asked what she knew about the commotion in the stable yard. The old woman worried her long, widely spaced teeth with her tongue and kept her eyes lowered. She pulled at her stained white chador.
“They said he was caught in your room, Begum,” she said.
“They!” Shabanu said. “Who are they?”
The old woman kept her eyes on the floor. “The women, Begum,” she said.
“Was it Leyla?”
“I don’t know, Begum,” Zenat muttered. She was rescued by Mumtaz, who came in with her dolls and Bundr tucked into the wicker pram. The fawn trotted behind her, raising and lowering her velvet head.
When they were gone, Shabanu sat in the corner of her room, where she could keep an unseen eye on the dusty haze in the stable yard. It turned golden as the sun sank over the walls. Flies darted in and out of the doorway, and someone walked Rahim’s stallion past on its way to the stable. Birds twittered in the trees.
Amina and Leyla had trapped Ibne. Shabanu saw it as clearly as if she were watching the plot of a film unfold. Amina had arranged the incident to cast suspicion on Shabanu.
Amina set the tone for the other women’s attitude towards Shabanu. She enlisted the servants, her daughters and the other wives to wage war against this unwanted member of the household. If Amina was the general, Leyla was her field commander.
Amina and Leyla said she manipulated Rahim. They believed he protected her while she seduced him into misappropriating property and possessions that rightfully would be theirs when he died. They would have been shocked to know that what Shabanu really wanted was to be gone from them, away from this place, rid of everything that would remind her of it, and alone, when Rahim was gone.
Shabanu stood and crossed to the rough wooden cupboard, where she moved stacks of bright-coloured tunics and saris until she found a silver shot-silk kameez and tight-fitting churidar pyjamas in the same silver, striped with black. She flicked the tiny silver bells embroidered into the pattern on the bodice, and her heart lifted with their delicate rings.
She wouldn’t let them cast their shadow over her life. She would show Rahim exactly what had happened. She would shine a light so bright over herself and Mumtaz that there would be no darkness in the world.
5
Rahim questioned Shabanu about Ibne that night almost as if he didn’t want to know, so anxious was he that she not be hurt by the accusations he’d heard. She told him the simple truth, and he nodded while he listened.
“He never entered your room?” he asked when she had finished. “Could you have been too sound asleep to know?”
“Ibne would never come into my room alone, even if he knocked first. Not even if I asked him to! It was a lie planned to make you distrust me.”
“Ibne said the cook sent him with a message. And the cook said he sent no message. The cook has been with me for twenty-five years.”
“And so has Ibne. And his father before him.”
Rahim rubbed his chin with his forefinger and tightened his lips over his teeth.
“You don’t think he’d risk everything – his job, his dignity, your respect – by trying to hurt me? It doesn’t make sense.” She spoke calmly, keeping all urgency from her voice.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Shabanu. Never underestimate a man with desire in his heart.”
She threw up her hands and let out her breath in an exasperated puff. Forgive me, Ibne, she thought. I can’t let him think I’m trying to convince him. He must decide on the truth in his own heart.
“Will you let your most trusted servant go because of a foolish screaming woman?”
“Leyla is not—”
“Ha!” Shabanu said, and folded her arms. “So it was Leyla!” He stiffened at the coldness in her voice. “And you believe h
er?”
“I know you think Leyla and her mother have tried to hurt you, but they’re good women, Shabanu. You’re too sensitive about your background…”
“I’m proud of my background! I wouldn’t trade my family or growing up in the desert for a crore of rupees!” she said. But she allowed him to soothe her and tell her how honourable her father was.
Shabanu spent the night with Rahim, and although she was very tired, she took special care to please him, giving him jasmine tea and rubbing scented oil into his skin until he fell asleep.
The next morning she was up early. In the low-lying haze she and Mumtaz walked beside the canal, the fawn following behind, ducking her head and throwing out her feet in delicate kicks. A bell jangled from the red braided collar around the animal’s neck, and Mumtaz stopped for a moment and watched her speculatively.
“Uma, why is she so small?” she asked. “Her ears get bigger, and she eats a lot. I want her to grow as big as Guluband so I can ride her!”
“Guluband was a camel,” said Shabanu. She thought of herself at Mumtaz’s age riding the majestic Guluband among the dunes, his feet lifting in rhythm to her songs. Shabanu turned to look at the fawn, and both she and Mumtaz watched as the animal gazed back at them with her long, graceful ears pitched forward.
Mumtaz is right, Shabanu thought. The fawn had not grown at all in the month since she’d come to Okurabad. Perhaps losing her mother at such a young age had shocked her, or her confinement within the courtyard had stunted her growth.
“This little one will never be big enough for you to ride,” said Shabanu. “Shall we name her Choti, and she’ll always be your little one?”
Mumtaz nodded solemnly and took her mother’s hand. They walked on without speaking.
A little further on they met Tahira, Rahim’s third wife, a slim woman with fair skin and a deprecating air. Tahira had deep-set eyes and a gentle sense of humour. When Shabanu had first come to Okurabad, the women would summon her to tea each afternoon. They would assemble formally in the parlour and catch up on the household gossip. They’d watch her carefully, and after she left them they’d talk about her, inventing things they claimed she’d said to them.
In those days Shabanu had wanted to befriend Tahira. But Tahira would have no part of her. If Shabanu spoke to her, she would look at the floor and pretend not to hear. Never in her life had Shabanu felt so alone.
Tahira adjusted her shawl studiously, not looking at Mumtaz and Shabanu as they passed on the canal path. Her daughter, a few years older than Mumtaz, turned and ran back to pet the fawn. Tahira came after her quickly and grabbed her by the wrist, shaking and scolding her as she dragged the girl away.
It didn’t matter whether Rahim decided Ibne was innocent or guilty, Shabanu thought. It was her guilt that Leyla and Amina hoped to prove, as surely as crows are drawn to a corpse.
Ibne and Zenat were the only exceptions within the household at Okurabad, where the attitudes towards Shabanu ranged from indifference to viciousness. The longer Shabanu lived in Rahim’s house, the more clearly she saw how cancerous the relations between the family and the servants had grown.
At first they had seemed rather normal to her, if intricate and fragile, shaped by traditional codes of behaviour of which she was thoroughly ignorant. She decided not to even try to understand. She would never fit in with the family women, and even the servants regarded her as beneath their station. Instead, she approached each person on his or her own terms.
These were some of the things Shabanu observed:
While the family rooms were kept in good repair, the mud interior walls plastered and repainted in their original Mogul designs, the walls of the rooms where the servants worked were cracked and bulging. The furniture in the front rooms had been repaired, the springs retied, the horsehair fluffed, and new covers sewn. In the house’s interior, derelict chairs and tables slumped in corners.
During rest periods, the male servants dragged their charpoys from their rooms into a circle in the courtyard, where they sat gossiping and drawing on their tall brass hookah pipes. The servant women spread basketfuls of neem leaves over the grime on the floor so they could sit and talk behind the kitchen. If anyone not included in the conversation approached, the group fell silent until the intruder had passed.
In the family’s quarters the windows were opened during the day to air out the rooms. They smelled of sunshine, jasmine, lime trees and roses from the gardens, and sometimes of burning sticks of incense. The interior stank of years of rancid ghee, animal blood, the droppings of rodents and more than two centuries of dust. To Shabanu it smelled of evil.
In the family’s quarters, relations between the wives seemed placid on the surface, with the women cooperating, socializing and even commiserating among themselves. They shopped and gossiped together, laughed over their triumphs, and wept over small injustices. Their communion seemed innocent to Rahim, who surveyed his family with the satisfaction of a shepherd.
But in the world of the servants, alliances were drawn and plots were hatched openly. Relationships were what they were, without pretence or hypocrisy, and at times the servants’ quarters had the atmosphere of a battlefield.
But the women’s gentle camaraderie and the laughter that rang out from the family zenana in truth covered something else. Behind their veils the women also plotted and schemed, usually one against another, often several against one or two, occasionally all united against one, and that one most frequently was Shabanu.
In the servants’ quarters much of the scheming was done on behalf of members of Rahim’s family. Some servants plotted also for their own gain.
But all of the servants, regardless of how well or ill they were treated, derived their own power from the master or mistress they served.
Zenat was the oldest and weakest among the servants. She had nowhere else to go. When there was trouble she ducked her head, took blows as she had to, then dived for cover. Because she was nearing the end of her days of usefulness, she was assigned to work for Shabanu and Mumtaz.
Zenat would come scuttling into the room by the stable, looking over her shoulder like a ground squirrel being chased by a fox.
“What is it?” Shabanu would ask.
“Nothing, Begum,” the old ayah would reply. “I’m too old for trouble.”
And that was how Zenat got along.
Sometimes the servants favoured by Amina tormented Zenat beyond reason, simply because she was Shabanu’s servant.
One day when Mumtaz was an infant, Khansama, the cook – who was Amina’s creature, body and soul – asked Zenat to fetch some ghee from a cupboard in the courtyard. The entire kitchen staff watched from the doorway. Zenat was afraid, but she dared not disobey, for Khansama stood, arms folded over his chest, to see that she did as she was told. An angry buzzing vibrated the cupboard, and Zenat raised a trembling hand to the rusted latch.
Through the crack, swarms of angry bees darted out into the sunlight and stung her dozens of times on her face and neck. She flailed her gnarled hands, and the little furry creatures flew up the loose arms of her tunic and stung her there, got inside her bodice and stung her chest.
Khansama and the kitchen servants laughed until tears of mirth streamed from their eyes; they bent at their waists and slapped their knees until they were weak. Then one by one they grew bored and drifted back to gossip on the charpoys on the veranda by the kitchen door.
Zenat sank to her knees, the bees still swarming about her. Shabanu heard her cries and ran to the old woman, swatting the bees as she helped Zenat to her feet. She tore open Zenat’s tunic and freed the bees trapped inside. Then she half carried, half dragged the servant to her room, where she stayed for three days, with Mumtaz on a cot beside Zenat’s bed.
Shabanu bathed Zenat’s swollen face and chest with spirits of ammonia and eucalyptus oil and held her head, forcing spoonfuls of ginger tea between her lips. Slowly Zenat began to mend. While her body improved, her spirit seemed to have retrea
ted to a dark place within her, and the old ayah was never the same again. But she remained loyal to Shabanu and Mumtaz for ever after.
Later in the morning, after their walk along the canal, and after Zenat had brushed Mumtaz’s hair and taken her out to play, Shabanu covered herself with an old chador and crossed the courtyard to the main house. A guard stood at the corner of the veranda, and when he turned his back Shabanu slipped through a side door. Once inside she turned immediately down a narrow passage and climbed the iron stairway to the dark balcony just under the painted and mirror-encrusted ceiling of the great baithak, the men’s sitting room. The balcony, which was part of the zenana, was enclosed with walls, and carved screens covered the narrow, curtained windows that looked out over the room below.
In the old days, the ladies watched from behind these screens as the men below celebrated harvests, hunts and battles. The women laughed and gossiped, their perfumed breath trapped within silken veils, falling silent only when the dancing girls entered the baithak to entertain the men to the rhythm of tiny brass bells strapped in rows around their slender ankles.
Shabanu went to the furthest corner of the musty balcony and pulled aside a curtain, brushing a cobweb from the cracked shutter.
In the crowded hall below, men stood facing the doorway through which Rahim would enter. The room had been built more than two hundred years before, and its grand proportions reflected the significance of the life-and-death decisions made there over the generations.
But it was a public place and, like most public places these days, bore evidence of profound neglect. Moss grew in the cracks of the damp tiled floor, visible between the ancient threadbare rugs. A grand chandelier hung from a gilt medallion in the centre of the ceiling forty feet overhead, but the crystal was draped with cobwebs and dust, and fluorescent tubes blinked at intervals around the mostly dim room.
Rahim’s secretary had collected a dozen petitions from people whose cases would be heard that morning. He stood waiting with them in his hand – crumpled pieces of paper carried with care from every corner of the tribal land by men who could not read but trusted in the saving grace of the signatures the slips of paper bore.
Under the Same Stars Page 4