“But … why?”
“Because Nazir won’t agree to the wedding otherwise. What difference does it make? Selma says Zabo is ready.”
“Yes, Zabo is as ready as she ever is likely to be,” she said. Why would Nazir insist on changing the timing? And why would Rahim agree? Of course, she thought, the wedding would be less conspicuous in the country, where the family and all the clansmen would rejoice. There really was no need for a big city celebration…
Rahim turned and left before she could say anything else, and Shabanu ran into the dark, hot hallway to find Zabo. Selma caught her there and held her by the arm.
“I’ve already told her,” Selma said. “She’s not happy, but she’s resigned. Samiya will come with me to help at Okurabad. Don’t worry. Zabo wants to see you. She’s in my sitting room. I’ll be along in a minute.”
It was the first time in a week that Shabanu felt something other than grief. It was as though she had wakened from a deep sleep.
She ran to the second-floor sitting room next to Selma’s bedroom. Zabo looked pale and stunned, but she came to Shabanu and hugged her.
“Don’t worry,” Shabanu whispered fiercely. “I am going to Aab-pa the hakim now to send word to Sharma. She will come as soon as it’s safe. We have a plan, and it will work. But we must be cautious. I’ll leave the money hidden here. It’s too dangerous to carry it. Don’t worry,” she whispered again, holding Zabo at arm’s length and giving her a gentle shake.
“Someone will find it!” said Zabo.
“No,” said Shabanu. “It’s hidden where no one has been for fifteen years. I am the only one who knows the place.”
“Everything will be fine,” Zabo said softly. “I trust you. I won’t worry.”
Mumtaz was the only one happy to return to Okurabad.
“Choti needs fresh air,” she said, stroking the fawn’s ears. Choti blinked serenely.
“Mumtaz, please go with Auntie Zabo to pack,” Shabanu said. “Tell Zenat to be sure to get all of Bundr’s clothes. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Zabo took Mumtaz by the hand, and Choti followed them. Before Zabo turned to go, Shabanu looked her in the eyes. Her friend smiled faintly, and Shabanu smiled back. They would make it, she thought. Somehow she had to keep her wits about her and, God willing, they would all survive.
Selma came in then and dropped herself wearily into one of her threadbare chairs.
“I’ve been worried about you, child,” Selma said as soon as she’d caught her breath.
“I’ve been very strained,” Shabanu replied carefully. “But I’m feeling better now.” She was certain Selma knew untruth as well as she knew truth, and Shabanu didn’t want to make the older woman suspicious and set her to guessing.
“The hard times are just beginning,” Selma said as she clicked open her rosewood fan and moved it back and forth in front of her large, pale face. “You mustn’t lose heart now.”
Shabanu felt a twinge in her chest, as if the great gaping blackness inside her had begun to contract, as if her heart was healing.
“Why is the wedding to be now?” Shabanu asked.
Selma sighed and smoothed the ever-unruly wisps of grey hair into the bun at the back of her neck.
“I only know that was Nazir’s demand,” Selma said. “It fills me with foreboding.” She clicked her fan shut then and hefted herself to her feet. “It’s time we got ready,” she said.
Shabanu went to her room. First she reached into her cupboard for her worn canvas suitcase and filled it with the shalwar kameez she’d been embroidering for Zabo’s wedding.
Then she went to the stairway that led from the courtyard to the roof. The mali was scattering one last handful of maize for Selma’s spotted courtyard chickens before wandering off for his afternoon nap. His thin ankles were the last part of him to disappear into the hard-edged shadow of the first-floor balcony. When he was gone, Shabanu ascended out of the lazy afternoon heat through the stifling, cobwebbed stairway up to the pavilion, which sat shimmering on the roof.
In the doorway Shabanu paused for a second to savour the cool, calm interior that she had created. She crossed to the milk jar, which stood in one corner of the room. She removed the lid and lifted out a tray of thread spools, a bundle of letters from her father, her diary, and a flat piece of round baked mud that made a false floor in the jar, which stood as high as Shabanu’s waist. Under that were the bundles of five-hundred- and one-thousand-rupee notes, all stitched neatly in muslin bundles.
She counted more than enough for Mumtaz, Zabo and herself to live into their old age in the desert with Auntie Sharma.
She folded the treasure back into the jar and replaced all of her other treasures with a silent prayer. “Allah be praised,” she whispered. “With this wealth waiting for us in Lahore, we will make our plan work and stay in Cholistan until it is safe to return.”
Then she put an old black chador over her head and climbed back down to the courtyard. She took off her sandals and held them in one hand as she ran lightly as a breeze to the back gate. It was deep into the time for afternoon naps, and she heard loud snores from the servants’ quarters. She had no trouble going unseen out of the rear gate into the small alleyway behind the haveli.
Shabanu bent to put on her sandals and picked her way through the alley, the chador wrapped around her face loosely in folds that covered all but her eyes.
At the intersection of the lanes she stopped and untied the corner of her chador. She withdrew a many-times-folded paper on which Sharma had drawn a map. It led her down an alley where shirtless men sat stirring large kettles of milk over open fires as if in slow motion, and down another alley where men sat hammering sheets of copper into flat pans for making kulfi, and down another where men sat before machines that clanked and whirred, and down yet another where men welded small bits of metal over gas jets.
In the midst of this lane she stopped before an open doorway. The green paint that identified it as the place she wanted was worn to a faint tint embedded in the wood grain. She knocked lightly.
“Come in,” said a sweet, soft voice.
She stooped through the doorway into an unremarkable brick hut with a roof of corrugated metal that seemed held on more by hope than gravity. It was surprisingly cool and dark inside.
“Come in, come in,” the voice said again, from a room beyond a black curtain. “I won’t bite.” The voice was mild, with a humorous, kindly impatience.
Shabanu pulled back the curtain and bent to pass through the tiny doorway; she entered a small room with a high window that admitted some of the hot white light from the lane without letting in any heat.
Aab-pa sat in the centre of the room on a red satin-covered cushion surrounded by fat embroidered bolsters. The opulence of the fabrics seemed oddly out of place against the smooth dirt floor and the rough brick walls. Strewn about him were yellowed, curling charts, unrolled and anchored with bits of broken pottery and pieces of stone, teacups and amulets.
He was a rotund little man in a white lungi with a robe thrown across his shoulders. He wore an angelic expression on his face, which was so smooth and round it looked like the face of an infant, except for startlingly wise and compassionate eyes that peered out from under a loosely wound turban.
The walls of the small room were lined with jars and bottles of various colours, sizes and shapes. Overhead a canopy of dried plants gave off a musty smell.
He asked Shabanu to sit, and with one foot he pushed a small flat cushion towards her so she wouldn’t have to sit on the bare earthen floor.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he said before Shabanu had even said who she was. “I can get a message to Sharma tonight.”
“Please let her know that Zabo will be married at Okurabad in three days,” she said. “It’s much earlier than we’d expected. Please tell her we need her before the time we’d agreed on.”
“It will be done,” he said simply. He had neither written down what she’d said nor asked q
uestions. The hakim then shifted his whole attention to Shabanu for the first time since she had entered the room. He asked about Mumtaz and about Choti. He questioned her closely, as if the small deer somehow was the key to solving a very serious problem.
Then just as abruptly he stopped asking questions and took out an old wooden box and lifted its lid. He removed small round bottles with square bases and glass stoppers that were filled with different-coloured liquids, powders and grains. He arranged the bottles in a cluster before him.
He withdrew a long, clear crystal on a fine gold chain from the fold at the top of his lungi and twirled it in slow circles, letting out the chain bit by bit as it swung over the vials. He concentrated on the crystal and the vials, eliminating them one by one until only two stood from the cluster, one containing a white powder, the other grains that looked like lavender sand.
“The stars show trouble for you and your daughter,” he said finally, his rosy cheeks pouching as he pursed his lips. Even his voice was childlike.
“What kind of trouble?” Shabanu asked quietly. Something in his eerie high voice and his ethereal looks made her believe there was a special connection between the hakim and the world of the unknown – something to be regarded with gravity. She trusted him.
“I cannot be one hundred per cent sure,” he said. “It may be that both of you will fall ill.” He leaned over the vials again and poured a bit of the contents of each onto small white squares of paper and folded them into two neat packets.
“Mix these with your tea. The white in the morning, and the lavender in the evening. Divide them into equal portions, one for each of the next five days. Both of you drink this without fail. When you return to Lahore, come back to see me.”
“Can’t you tell me the nature of the danger? Perhaps I could be more vigilant…” she said.
“Just do as I say, child,” Aab-pa said, working his lips over his small, even teeth, which were stained red with betel juice. “Keep the child with you. Sleep with her. Don’t let her out of your sight. And her pet deer, too. And tell nobody about any of this. These are dangerous times.”
Shabanu was alarmed. Her heart thundered. He had helped her without her having to ask. She must concentrate only on keeping herself and Mumtaz safe.
She hurried through the lanes on her way back to the haveli. She wanted to be back before she was missed at teatime. She felt light-headed and slightly ill as she let herself in through the back gate.
It’s good we’re going, she thought. It’s time for a return to reason.
But reason was not so easy to come by.
On the drive from Lahore to Okurabad, Shabanu, Zabo and Mumtaz sat in the back of Rahim’s European car. Rahim drove, and Omar sat in the front seat. The air conditioner cooled the air to a frigid stillness, keeping out the smells and sounds of animals and vehicles on the roadway. The bodyguards rode in cars in front, clearing the road as they went. The other servants followed in the van behind.
Omar and Rahim were engrossed in talk of politics and crops. Zabo stared out of the window, and Mumtaz begged Shabanu to play a game of cat’s cradle with her. Shabanu concentrated very hard on the string in order to keep her eyes from Omar.
There was a loud thump, and Shabanu felt a jolt to the side of the car. Rahim jammed his foot on the brake, and Mumtaz was thrown against the front seat with the suddenness of the stop.
A woman standing at the side of the road threw out her arms, and horror twisted her face. She raised her hands fluttering to her mouth.
On the road beside and slightly behind where the car had come to a stop, a child lay sprawled on his back, his arms flung wide. Blood gushed from a terrible wound in his head. A young man rushed to the child, and a crowd gathered around him. A moment later another man sped off down the canal path on a bicycle.
Rahim slapped the wheel with impatience. The bodyguards emerged from the car in front with their guns, and the crowd moved back a step.
The crowd fell silent. People stood beside their animals, cars and bicycles along the road, some staring at the child, others at the bodyguards.
A few moments later the bicyclist returned with a beldar, still wearing the red turban from his job as tender of the canal, behind him on the seat over the rear wheel. The beldar jumped from the bicycle before it stopped and ran to the boy. He knelt, gathering the small form against his chest. When he stood, the boy’s arms dangled lifelessly from his shoulders. The man looked up and walked towards Rahim’s car, his bare chest heaving with sorrow. The bodyguards stepped forward to stop him, but he brushed past them, tears wetting his face. His wife wailed and struggled against the women who restrained her.
Rahim stepped from the car. Shabanu opened the back door to go to the mother. All she could think was how grief-stricken she would be if the dead child were Mumtaz.
“Stay in the car!” commanded Rahim, and Shabanu froze for a moment, then pushed the door open wider. Rahim whirled around.
“Get back inside,” he said, his voice flat and hard.
Shabanu looked at Omar, who sat immobile in the front seat. Slowly she got back into her seat. Omar did not turn round, nor did he return her look. A muscle twitched in his cheek.
Mumtaz sat with her nose pressed to the window.
“What happened, Uma?” she asked.
Shabanu picked up Mumtaz and resettled her on her lap, hugging her close.
“It’s OK,” she said. “Papa’s taking care of it.” Mumtaz looked up, and Shabanu realized that she had spoken with such bitterness that even the child recognized it. She rolled down the window to listen.
Still Omar sat facing forward, saying nothing.
Rahim reached into his breast pocket. He pulled out a packet of five-hundred-rupee notes and, unfolding it, counted out two bills. He leaned forward and held out the thousand rupees towards the man.
“Will this bring back my only son?” asked the man, his voice cracking. But after a moment he reached out and took the money, which no doubt was more than he’d ever seen at one time.
The crowd dispersed silently, Rahim returned to the car, and they drove off again with nothing more said.
Shabanu’s heart raced with anger. She could keep silent no longer.
“How can you be so callous?” she asked, her voice breaking. Rahim didn’t so much as look at her in the rear-view mirror. A blush crept up the back of Omar’s neck. He too remained silent.
“Don’t you realize that people like the beldar and his wife live simple lives? The death of an only son is the loss of their greatest treasure!”
Rahim’s silence could only mean he was angry. Zabo reached out and put her hand over Shabanu’s.
“It would have been better to offer sympathy than money!” she said, and then through a monumental effort managed to say nothing more.
The car flew over the sun-dappled track, the overhanging acacia branches sheltering the roadway.
16
Back at Okurabad the focus shifted to preparations for Zabo and Ahmed’s wedding.
Mumtaz was cross because Shabanu would not allow her out to play with Samiya’s children. Samiya and Zenat kept watch outside Shabanu’s room, where Zabo stayed with them during the day. At night Zabo went with Selma to the house.
Choti also remained in the room with them, according to Aab-pa’s orders, and she liked the confinement as little as Mumtaz did. She stood in the doorway tossing her head and tapping her small hooves on the floor.
After lunch, Zabo, Shabanu and Mumtaz napped in the room beside the stable, under the limp mosquito netting, their breathing shallow and slow in the afternoon heat. They awoke slowly, their eyes still hot, and folded back the mosquito netting. Shabanu opened the shutters, and the harsh white sunlight was painful to her eyes. There was no breeze, and the air outside was as hot and stale as the air inside the room.
From under the charpoy Zabo dragged two large trunks. She and Shabanu shook out the pieces of Zabo’s dowry and arranged them about the room, examining each
piece minutely.
The floor and the top of every table, chair and cupboard were covered with elaborately embroidered and jewelled saris, shalwar kameez and shawls.
Sitting atop each article of clothing – several suits for each day of the celebration of the wedding – was the jewellery Zabo would wear with it.
Mumtaz stood beside a pink and shimmering yellow-green silk shalwar kameez fingering rows of tiny peridots strung on golden threads and earrings of peridots clustered with diamonds. Beside it a silver silk sari woven with a maroon paisley border was offset with deep, mysterious crystals of wine-coloured garnet set in platinum. Choti stood immobile beside her, as if she too were in awe of such finery.
“This is the real test,” said Zabo as she lifted two identical lamb suede sacks and dumped their clinking contents onto the coverlet on the bed between her and Shabanu. The red sack in her left hand contained solid gold bangles; the one in her right held imitation rolled gold of exactly the same colour and design, created by the finest jeweller in the Anarkali Bazaar. As the bangles mixed together on the coverlet, they were impossible to tell apart.
“Guess which are real,” said Zabo. Shabanu picked them up and turned them in her fingers.
“They weigh the same,” she said. “And they’re exactly the same colour.” She hefted them, one by one, in her palm.
“I can’t tell,” she said.
“Let me see,” said Zabo, bending her head over the gold circles in each of Shabanu’s outstretched palms. “I can’t tell either.”
Shabanu was about to test the two gold pieces with her teeth when the door to her room banged open, and there stood Nazir, his globular frame outlined by the harsh light from the courtyard.
“Why are you hiding in here?” he asked, his voice booming in that still, small room, which until this moment had never reverberated with a man’s voice. “What are you doing? Looking at your dowry? Why haven’t you shown me? I sent you a fortune…”
“Father! I was just organizing it to display in Uncle Rahim’s house for you to see,” Zabo said. A small red dot high on Zabo’s left cheekbone was the only sign that betrayed her fear. Her voice was calm and normal.
Under the Same Stars Page 15