Typhoon

by Shahraz, Qaisra

  The fog cleared in a flash. And something died inside her.

  ‘They thought that I … I …’ Blushing, she rushed on stumbling over the words, her tongue guarded and twisted once again, afraid to utter them. ‘That I was a bad woman.’

  ‘A bad woman? Why, Naghmana?’ Jahanghir’s voice was icy.

  ‘Because … Because …’ She stopped, unable to continue, colour flooding her cheeks. ‘His second wife found me in his arms during the night.’

  Total silence. Naghmana looked up at her husband. He was no longer her beloved professor. Bitterly it dawned on her, that it was now her husband’s kacheri she was attending. Not the old man’s. Now Jahanghir was the judge.

  ‘What were you doing in his arms, if you weren’t a whore?’

  Aghast, ‘Jahanghir!’ Naghmana murmured, as if he had punched her straight in the chest with his hard fist. ‘He was my husband, Jahanghir!’ her voice broke, betrayed. Did he not understand?

  ‘And he is still your husband, you wretched woman!’

  Before her dazed hurt eyes, she saw her beloved husband stride out of the courtyard. Naghmana stared at the empty space around her. A strange sound buzzed in her head and she sank against the pillar, her body doubling over. From far away, she heard a car engine start up. Eyes closed, she wrapped her arms around her waist. The snakes were still watching, sliding steadily towards her with their long, sleek bodies, their beady eyes, dark green and menacing – their flickering tongues taunting her with their venom of hate. Closer and closer they crept. Naghmana cowered further against the pillar, its hard uneven surface digging into the lawn fabric of her dress.

  ‘Allah, Akhbar!’ The muezzin’s call to prayer from the mosque rang through the village. Naghmana’s eyes opened. The empty, derelict surroundings mocked her.

  Stumbling to her feet, she ran across the courtyard and out through the large gates, into the open space of the world outside. Far away, along the winding road, her husband’s black car meandered through the fields before disappearing from sight. ‘He has gone!’ her heart and eyes cried out in disbelief. ‘He has left me! My professor has abandoned me!’

  FORTY ONE

  HEADS SWAYING FROM side to side, Sardara’s herd of black milk buffaloes rounded the corner of the madrasah courtyard wall. Their large mud-caked bodies trundled heavily on the cobblestones, the steel bells hanging from chains around their necks merrily signalling to anyone on foot to step aside and let them pass.

  A puny-looking young man, with a slender stick raised in his hand, neatly shepherded them along from the side and behind by touching them gently. He tapped the young baby calf on its rear, as it turned its head up to stare at the woman standing perfectly still against the madrasah gates. The young man glanced at the older woman with interest, his eyes shy as they rested on her bare head and shoulder-length hair swinging freely around her face. Without a doubt she was a stranger.

  ‘She won’t hurt you, Bibi Jee!’ Smiling and blushing, he reassured Naghmana, gently guiding the young calf along to follow its mother out into the open space outside the village.

  Naghmana watched the black beasts trot past her, saw their swaying large bodies cross one field and then another as they headed for the village tube well for their afternoon drink and a cool bath.

  A middle-aged village woman with a sturdy straw basket stacked high with vegetables propped neatly on her head, also patiently let the buffaloes pass – standing pressed against the wall. As she approached Naghmana she glanced up, frowning from beneath the heavy burden on her head. Noting the woman’s attire and its stylish cut, she decided that the stranger was definitely from the city. No village tailor could manage stitching like that. A respectful smile playing on her lips, she greeted her, ‘Assalam Alaikum, Bibi Jee!’

  ‘Walaikum Salam.’ Naghmana was looking far beyond at the fields. Her professor’s car was nowhere in sight.

  Feeling faint, she leaned against the wall. The village sounds and smells floated around her. The chugging sound of the flour mill chugged on. The whirring noise of the grass-cutting machine in the nearby garden stopped.

  Naghmana found her legs running across the field, trampling the young carrots and other vegetable plants. Her white chiffon dupatta trailed behind her, its one soft end sweeping the ground. She was unaware of the tiny pebbles and dust grains chafing her feet in their elegant open sandals. Panting, she crossed another field and climbed onto the path that she knew led to the village cemetery. Earlier it had been lined with hundreds of mourners for Baba Siraj Din’s funeral.

  With wild bushes and rows of trees protectively circling it, the large open space allocated to the village’s dead had a conspicuous landscape of earthy mounds of all shapes and sizes in neat rows. Some were tall. Others flattened with time and rain. With over an acre of land devoted to it, the cemetery stood apart from the rest of the village and the surrounding fields.

  Naghmana’s eyes went straight to the far corner. She hopped over the gentle bumps of old forsaken graves, some going back generations. Whilst some had only dried tufts of weeds growing on them, others had been lovingly cared for, and were distinguished by their marble or concrete structures with matching headstones. The latter graves were those of well-off inhabitants, or those who enjoyed a certain status within the community.

  As befitted his family’s status, Baba Siraj Din’s plot of land stood apart from the rest. It was a cemetery within a cemetery. A three-foot high concrete wall had been erected around a small plot, providing seclusion for Baba Siraj Din’s four sons, his grandson Jafar and Zulaikha, his beloved wife. She had died nineteen years ago from a heart condition. They all lay side by side. The land had been reserved for his family thirty years earlier. Only one space had been left. That, too, had now been taken this morning. With its neat mound of freshly piled soil, Baba Siraj Din’s grave stood apart from those of his family, towering above their flattened concrete bases and marble headstones. As a religious man he had insisted on a simple traditional grave, with no marble decorative structure. ‘I have lived in marble all my life, Shahzada. I want a simple humble – humble world for my next life,’ he had quietly informed his daughter-in-law a long time ago. Dutifully she had obeyed. The old man was buried in all simplicity.

  Naghmana passed through the small gap left in the wall and tiptoed up to Baba Siraj Din’s new eternal home. Pink and red flower petals garlanded neatly the shape of the entire mound. The headstone had not yet been put in place, but Naghmana knew it was the Buzurgh’s grave. Even in death he stood apart. Dominating and superior.

  She stared down at the grave for a long time. Finally her body fell on top of the mound of soil. Grabbing a handful of it and the flower petals in her fist she cried down to him, ‘You evil man!’ The harsh words startled the small sparrow hopping lightly on Zulaikha’s headstone. ‘You wrenched me from the arms of my first beloved husband. Now you called me back to your evil village to rob me of my second! He has left me – do you hear? I have lost my beloved Jahanghir! May you rot in hell!’ she hissed down to the village’s most revered Buzurgh, her tears falling on the fistful of soil.

  Shocked at what she was doing, Naghmana dropped the soil, getting unsteadily to her feet, asking in self-disgust, ‘What am I doing?’ She looked down at her white designer cotton outfit, badly smeared with soil. In a daze she glanced around the cemetery. No living soul was in sight. Apart from the gentle humming of the happy sparrows on the trees and the noisy crickets on the ground, peaceful afternoon silence greeted Naghmana all around.

  She gazed up at the mature tree with its low full branches of leaves casting a generous shadow over the old man’s grave. Hysterical laughter rumbling through her chest, Naghmana cried down to the old man once again: ‘The shade of this tree will not save you from the fires of hell, you evil wretch!’

  Somehow she knew, just knew, that the cobra of her dreams had heard her.

  Blindly, she criss-crossed the narrow spaces between the grave mounds, stepping over some, jumping
and stumbling over the others, until she found the opening to the outside world. To fresh air, green fields and life.

  Her hand grazing accidentally on a wild thorn-bush, Naghmana didn’t feel the pain. Thorn-bushes were grown abundantly around the cemeteries as a means of keeping out wild animals, including wolves, lest they trample on and desecrate the graves. Once outside she gulped in air and stood in the wide open space of the village path, with its gentle dry slopes of land on either side and semi-burnt wild grasses growing around it. One path led to Chiragpur, the other to the neighbouring village. The sun was now high up, reaching its scorching peak. Its shooting rays beat heavily on Naghmana’s bare head.

  A twelve-year-old schoolgirl, carrying a heavy satchel of books under her armpit, walked up the path from the village. She was on her way to her tutor in the neighbouring village. An uncertain smile on her face, the young girl stared in surprise at the older woman’s bare head and grimy white clothes. It was as if she had fallen into a dusty ditch. The girl’s curious eyes fell first on the woman’s beautiful hands with their dirty nails, then crept up to her face. The stranger seemed to be looking right through her.

  Nervously the girl picked up the woman’s scarf, which had fallen behind her on the ground and politely held it up to her.

  ‘Bibi Jee, your dupatta!’

  The child’s soft words penetrated. Naghmana stared at her white chiffon dupatta. Wordlessly she took it, then slung it carelessly over her shoulder and started to walk away. Her mouth falling open, the girl continued staring. The woman had neither thanked nor spoken to her. Her dupatta was hanging down to the ground. Its end snagged on a bush, as the woman jumped down into the field of rape. Without turning to look back, she tugged at it to free it, tearing one end in the process.

  Losing interest, the young girl shrugged her shoulders and made her way to her teacher’s house for private tuition in English. It was the verbs she had memorised – the participles. She must go over them once more in her head before she recited them to her tutor.

  Naghmana walked through the cauliflower field, stumbling over its uneven landscape of bare soil and cauliflower plants. Brushing the tears from her cheeks, she climbed back onto the narrow path.

  Then the old village well was before her, theatrically canopied by a large banyan tree, its mature branches swaying heavily in the hot breeze. Three black crows flew down from the sky and landed on the tree. They hopped from branch to branch. Two sat together, playfully pecking and grooming each other’s glossy black coats with their beaks. Their companion floated down onto the largest branch, hanging straight across the eight foot wide diameter of the well, its round eyes blinking at the woman standing below.

  ‘He was my husband, Jahanghir!’ she shouted to the wind. The two startled crows stopped their playful pecking, nearly losing their grip on the branch, and too stared down at the bent figure of the woman, who was peering into the deep cavern of the well.

  Naghmana noted that two bricks were missing from the ledge. This was where she had sat down with Haroon on that fateful night, twenty years ago. The brickwork on the inside was now thickly caked with green moss sprouting between the damp cracks.

  Her blurred eyes were fixed on the dark surface of the water, twenty-five feet below. The shimmering, mysterious pool smiled up at her and beckoned. She smiled back. At peace with herself. The shadow grew nearer and nearer and then met the welcoming dark surface. The laughing mouth widened happily, gargling and rippling, before smoothing back in to place again. Content, it resumed its sleep.

  The crow’s round, small eyes stared down. Nervously it flew off the branch and stepped on top of the white chiffon dupatta hanging over the edge of the well. As it hopped playfully, its feet got entangled in the soft delicate fabric. Spreading out its glossy black wings, it spun round and flew up in the air. The white dupatta, still entangled in its two sharp feet, sailed high behind it, in the hot afternoon breeze.

  Far away, along the winding village road, a black car wound its way back to Chiragpur. The driver peered anxiously through the dusty windscreen, at the herd of black milk buffaloes, blocking the narrow road ahead, their sleek bodies glistening after their energetic afternoon bath.

  From behind his glasses, the driver watched the crow fly over the car, across the field, and then disappear beyond the horizon, the white dupatta still hanging from its feet, billowing out in the wind.

  About the Author

  Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Qaisra Shahraz is a prize-winning and critically acclaimed novelist and scriptwriter. Born in Pakistan, she has lived in Manchester (UK) since childhood and gained two Masters Degrees in English and European literature and scriptwriting. As a highly successful woman, Qaisra was recognised as one of 100 influential Pakistani women in the Pakistan Power 100 List (2012). Previously, she was nominated for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards and for the Muslim News Awards for Excellence.

  Her novels, The Holy Woman and Typhoon, have been translated into several languages. The Holy Woman (2001) won the Golden Jubilee Award, and has become a bestseller in Indonesia and Turkey. She has appeared in many international writers’ festivals and book fairs, including Abu Dhabi, Jaipur, Ottawa and Beijing. Her award-winning drama serial Dil Hee To Hai was broadcast on Pakistani Television in 2003. Qaisra’s most recent novel, Revolt, is published by Arcadia in 2013. She has also completed two volumes of short stories: A Pair of Jeans and Train to Krakow and is working on her fourth novel The Henna Painter. Several of her prize-winning short stories are published in the UK and abroad, and her work is customarily studied in schools and universities. A critical analysis of her works has been undertaken in The Holy and the Unholy: Critical Essays on Qaisra Shahraz’s Fiction (2011). Qaisra Shahraz has another successful career in education, as a consultant, teacher trainer and inspector.

  Copyright

  Arcadia Books Ltd

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  www.arcadiabooks.co.uk

  First published by Arcadia Books in 2003

  B format edition published in 2007

  Copyright © Qaisra Shahraz, 2002

  Qaisra Shahraz as asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978–1–909807–05–1

  This Ebook edition published in 2013

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