by Ali Sethi
Barkat looked in the rearview mirror.
“O Naseem!” said Daadi from the back.
Naseem pointed at the stopping cars ahead and said that we had lost our chance.
Daadi said, “He is the driver. He will drive.”
Naseem said it was regrettable.
“Don’t give answers to me,” said Daadi.
Naseem laughed.
“Don’t answer!” cried Daadi.
And Naseem grunted and gave a shorter laugh, and said that it was regrettable and then withdrew with a casual chewing motion of her jaws.
The one TV in the house was kept in Daadi’s room. It had a bloated screen and stood on odd thin legs, and was capable of being dragged on its small, whining wheels into the other rooms. To switch it on we had to first connect the wires at the back, which Daadi had disconnected to prevent excessive electrical consumption. (She believed in physical isolation, in full severance of physical contact between things.) The TV was old and lacked a remote control; it had to be approached for adjustments, for the color and the sound and even for the channel. In those days there were two channels, Doordarshan and PTV, and we called them India and Pakistan.
“My India is not coming!” Daadi cried in the evening.
She had said her maghrib prayer and then gone across the room to switch on the TV, and instead of the channels she had found a gray gushing, which showed flashes of color when she changed the settings, and caught snatches of music from a program called Chitrahar, which was presently showing the new Indian love songs she had intended to watch; but the settings had failed and the gushing had gone on.
“O Naseem!” she cried. “My India is not coming!”
And Naseem was sent in a hurry to adjust the aerial on the roof.
We stood downstairs in the doorway and relayed messages from room to roof until the link was struck, color showed on the screen, and the position of the aerial had been found and was held. Then the Indian songs were watched, and the Indian news, and then the Pakistani news; and after the news came the televised songs of Madam Noor Jehan, who wore colorful saris and stood in shiny settings with her hands clasped at her navel and moved her mouth around to the words of her own songs, which Daadi said had been recorded many years ago in the studios, where real face-distorting expressions were allowed.
Friday was then the weekly holiday in Pakistan. On Thursday night we went in the car to Main Market, to a shop called Tom Boy’s that rented out pirated videos of Indian films. It was a small, damp shop: the walls were stacked with titles that began with Abhimaan near the entrance, went around the room in a U and culminated in Zanjeer on the opposite wall, a world that began and ended with Amitabh Bachchan, who was the male lead in both films and was said to be the most famous actor in the world.
There was a story about his fame. It was about the time he was fighting the villain in Coolie and got punched by a real punch. It burst his intestine and he fell into a faint; an ambulance arrived; its doors opened and closed. For days the people of India sat in temples and prayed, and the doctors in the hospitals removed their glasses and shook their heads. The people prayed and prayed, but Amitabh stayed fainted, and the people prayed more, and the doctors said they were sorry, but the people still prayed. They went into temples, struck bells and lit fires, sat on the floor and prayed with their eyes shut, their palms pressed together and their bodies swaying. One morning they opened their eyes and were told that Amitabh too had opened his, and the news spread quickly and the temples emptied and there was singing and dancing in the streets.
But Amitabh was ordinary, not fair or quick or clever like the other heroes of Indian films. He was a tall man, dark-skinned, with drooping, bloodshot eyes, hairy on his arms and on his chest; the hair densely swirled behind his shirt buttons, which he opened, one after the other, in slow, deliberate movements, when he committed to a fight. Even then his temperament was unaffected: he preferred to lean against barrels and sacks and walls, and fought with resisting thrusts of his long legs. And afterward, wounded, he staggered on his legs, but disguised the pain with humor, which was dark and sour and tended to attract the shadow of tragedy.
There was nothing remarkable about him.
“You can’t see it,” said Samar Api.
“What is it?”
“I won’t tell you.” She was lying in bed and writing inside a school notebook, turning her head from side to side.
“Why?”
“Because you’re a kid and you’ll go and tell people.” I was wounded.
“Will you tell people?”
“I already said I won’t.”
“So say it again.”
“I won’t tell people.”
“Say ‘Godpromise’.”
“Godpromise.”
She went on writing in her notebook. “Godpromise!”
“Fine,” she said, and came forward and whispered it in my ear: “His Vee Oh I See Eee.”
She was madly in love with him. The picture frame on her bedside table was made of two small hearts that touched when they folded, uniting her with Amitabh. And the walls were swarming with posters and stills from his films, including images from the very early years, which were culled from cracking magazines bought in secondhand bookshops and continued to fill the darkness beneath her bed. Every month she returned from the market with fresh supplies of Stardust and Filmfare and Cine Blitz and Movie Magic and flung them lavishly on her bed. The magazines contained lively articles with titles such as “The Old and the Beautiful,” and used a recurring stock of terms to report on the Indian film industry, of which “vixen” and “half-baked” were Samar Api’s favorites. “Oh, please,” she would say to the mirror, “you’re nothing but a half-baked vixen.”
On film nights we extracted the VCR from Daadi’s cupboard and set it up with the TV in Samar Api’s room. Our places were on the floor, before the TV, on cushions taken from beds and sofas. And the films were often familiar and contained songs and dances and dialogues we already knew by heart. But we watched them with a peculiar excitement, anticipating and also inhabiting the culminations, which we re-enacted afterward: I lay on the floor and held an empty 7UP bottle and waved it about like an inebriated Amitabh. And she gasped with surprise and shrugged her shoulders like Parveen Babi in Namak Halaal, then wrapped herself in a bedsheet and stood on the bed and wept, the lonely Jaya Bhaduri of Abhimaan, her hands repeatedly drawing the veil over her head. She was suffering then, a woman in pain; she settled in a chair before the mirror and began to touch her face, her neck, recovering from her sadness. And then she was running down a staircase and the lights in the ballroom were coming alive and the guests were all turning now to look, and she was Jayaprada in Sharaabi, her dress billowing in the wind, and she was arriving at last to end the long wait of the night:
O mere sajna
Mein aagayi!
She danced and she danced.
And she danced and she danced.
Until she fell to the floor in a tangle of exhausted limbs, sweating and out of breath.
“One day,” she pledged to the ceiling between breaths, “my Amitabh will come.”
“How do you know?”
“I know it.”
“You never know where life will take you.” It was something my mother had said.
But she was adamant. “You’ll see,” she said, seeing it in the ceiling, in the stars beyond. “I’ll find him.”
Samar Api’s parents lived in the village of Barampur. Her mother, my great-aunt Chhoti, was married to a man called Fazal. Uncle Fazal was very serious. It was Daadi’s description of him. And it was a compliment, because seriousness was a trait Daadi associated with virtue. But in Uncle Fazal that seriousness was a barrier to communication, a way of establishing his indifference to children. There was no cheek-pulling or coochie-coo with him, none of the appreciations that usually came from elderly relatives. His visits to the house were rare; he came only when he had business in Lahore. And even then he was distant
, forbiddingly impressive, a fair-skinned man with a rounded, puffy face and thick eyebrows that merged in a frown, creating an expression of persistent regret. He declined sweets and drinks and watched them closely when he did accept, never finishing his portions and considering them with his fingers like a man attuned to the subtleties of poisoning. In his presence this abstinence was fussed over but was later explained as the habit of an important man, a man who had served on zila- and tehsil-level councils and had twice won an election to the Provincial Assembly; in the village Uncle Fazal was seen frequently in his jeep with his subordinates, driving on dusty roads and dismounting near the banks of canals and ditches, walking with his hands behind his back, and stopping to ask questions about the water that was going into the fields. He was seen at the offices of councilors and magistrates, sometimes at police stations, where he went to get people released or to file the reports that got them arrested. It was explained as the nature of his work; it was what men like him were expected to do in the village. And it brought people to his house in the mornings, people who waited on chairs in his courtyard with their requests and their complaints.
My mother said he was a feudal.
“What’s feudal?”
“Feudalism,” she said, “is one of the oldest systems in the world. It’s when a small group of people own a lot of land and make other people work on that land but eat up all the revenues.”
“What’s revenues?”
“Money made from doing work.”
“Is Uncle Fazal a bad man?”
“Not bad,” said my mother. “He just follows a very old system. Most of our country is rural. All rural areas are run by feudals. For them everything is property: land, labor, women. They have a lot of power. You have to see it to believe it.”
“Is Uncle Fazal a rich man?”
My mother thought about it and said, “He’s not that rich. He’s got a few hundred acres of land.”
Daadi laughed and said, “It’s more than some other people have.”
My mother said Daadi was materialistic.
“What’s that?”
“It’s when people go after money. It’s a historical concept as well. You should read about it when you’re older.”
“Why can’t you tell me now?”
“I’ve told you: it’s when people go after money, when they want money above all else.”
I said, “What happens in the village?”
She said, “Agriculture. And exploitation.”
And I didn’t ask for the meanings.
Samar Api’s descriptions of life in the village were unimaginable. She said she wasn’t allowed to sit with her male cousins, she wasn’t allowed to speak until she was spoken to, she wasn’t allowed to step out of the house, not even to go into the garden unless she went with a servant. “We have to wear chadars when we go out,” she said. “Even when we’re sitting in the car. And I can’t even see through it. And it’s so bloody hot in Barampur, like a bloody oven. There are goats and cows everywhere. Sometimes, when our car goes through the town, strange women come out on the balconies and stare at us.”
Chhoti didn’t complain about the village when her husband was present. But afterward, alone, she expanded on opinions she hadn’t expressed earlier, and gave reasons for things that had only been mentioned, things that had appeared to be of no importance until she had talked about them many times and revealed their enduring significance. My mother said people behaved like that when they became self-conscious. “It’s a feeling,” she said. “It comes to people who feel like they don’t belong somewhere.”
But Chhoti did belong to the village, and described the things that happened there with tormented involvement. She talked about the wives of her husband’s relations, women who, like her, lived in big houses in small, poor places and were known to one another because of their seclusion—a requirement for the women of landed families. It was a life, Chhoti said, of waiting in cars and houses, of waiting for occasions that required the playing of roles: the women went to weddings, funerals, milaads, sometimes to watch the ashura ceremonies that were hosted by Shiia families in neighboring villages. They heard stories and told stories that led to new understandings, to engagements and marriages that also broke and caused feuds. There was a tendency for things to get distorted that resulted from people’s unavoidable reliance on one another; there were only so many good families of so many good castes, and it was impossible to break out of some affiliations without imperiling others. Chhoti was grave when she described the things that happened to transgressors: their cattle were stolen, their fields were burned in daylight, their homes were broken into, and their women were abducted and paraded in the streets. She said such things were common in the villages, where customs were old and went largely untouched by the new ways that developed continually in the cities.
Daadi heard the stories but said afterward that Chhoti was suffering from the very ailments she had set out to diagnose. (Chhoti suffered already from the medical problem of diabetes, which was described as a problem of the blood, a matter of highs and lows, and was monitored every few months in the blood tests she came to have conducted in Lahore, the results reflected in the changing colors of her face and in the dramatic expressions of her eyes and mouth.) Even while Daadi listened to the stories and appeared to be involved, she withheld the hum of sympathy, which she said came too easily to those who hadn’t lost things of consequence.
Daadi was of the opinion that Samar Api should live with her mother and father in Barampur. She said it was important for the girl to grow up around her parents and acquire a sense of proportion.
But Chhoti said, “No. I will not allow it. You don’t know what they are like.”
“They” were Uncle Fazal’s three sisters, who had families of their own and lived in different parts of the district. They had each approached Chhoti for her daughter’s hand in marriage for one of their sons, and had later tried to portray her refusal as a provocation.
“They are vultures,” Chhoti said. “They are waiting for me to die. Then they will take everything.” Her eyes were wide and twitching with tears.
My mother said, “It’s a good thing you’ve kept your daughter away from that repressed environment.”
Chhoti was grateful.
But Daadi affected indifference, and said, “Very well. Keep her here. Let her breathe this air. Let it get inside her lungs. What ideas she comes to possess here are of no importance.”
Daadi told the story of Chhoti’s life one afternoon when it was hot and still outside, a dry, dusty day in late spring. The curtains in Daadi’s room were drawn. She was in a mood; she had brought out the oval box of photographs she kept in a locked compartment of her cupboard and was contemplating the days of her youth, moments from the past that were quarantined in black and white and bounded by sharp gray borders. Various relatives appeared, old now and young then, rival truths that were hard to reconcile; a photograph testified to the freshness they had once possessed, their erect postures and their stark, unlined faces. But it didn’t sharpen their gruff voices, and didn’t make them pace the room in youthful demonstration. They remained immiscibly old-and-young, virile bodies with aged souls.
“Look,” said Daadi, “so pretty we were then.”
It was a picture of two girls in a curtained room, both dressed in saris, both rigidly beautiful; the eyes were averted modestly and the smiles were subtle, barely smiles. Daadi stood in the front with her hands clasped at her waist. And Chhoti stood behind her with a hand on Daadi’s shoulder, leaning forward with her lips parted as if about to make a suggestion. The effect was momentous, an artist’s rendering of an interaction between two celebrated mythical beings.
Daadi cooed humorously at the picture and shook her head. “You see it?” she said, pointing to a black dot above Chhoti’s mouth. “She made it with a pencil. Some days on her lip. Other days on her cheek. Above her eye, below her eye—she was very involved with the fashions.” Here she raised
the picture and brought it near her face. “Of course,” she said, squinting, “it didn’t do her any good.” She lowered the picture into her lap and sighed.
“Did it do her any bad?”
Daadi tossed the picture into the box. She said the bad wasn’t a thing as such, it wasn’t an event or an occurrence. It was a way of living in the world, a way of seeing things that did not exist and of not seeing those that did. She raised the oval lid from the table and placed it firmly on the box.
“There are things,” she said, whirling a finger in the air, “things in the atmosphere that start to have an effect on the raw mind.”
Chhoti was only sixteen years old when she came home and made the announcement. It was the Malik boy, the brother of her classmate. They were a merchant family who lived in one of the newly built houses on the canal. Chhoti had been to their house, had seen the boy and had liked him. And she had reason to believe that he liked her too.
“He wants to marry me,” she said.
Chhoti’s parents were alarmed but also bound by convention to consider that a family known to them was involved. And they could do nothing when they heard that the boy’s family was preparing to send a proposal of marriage. Chhoti was confident of her selection; he was studying to be a philosopher, she said, he was going to write books and he was serious and accomplished.
The boy’s family came to the house. The boy wore a blazer, a scarf and trousers, and sat with his knees wide apart. He shook his foot when he talked, and thick folds appeared around his mouth when he smiled. The family had a shoe shop in Anarkali but the boy wanted to publish books. There were ideas, he said, that were sweeping the world and would transform the way of man, and he wanted to prepare the minds of the youth, whose role in the future was going to be important. He became excited and produced a tin of cigarettes from his blazer pocket, opened it and offered the cigarettes to Chhoti’s father, who declined, then extracted and lit one for himself with a match. He said he wanted to send Chhoti to the department of Oriental languages at the university, where she would learn to read Arabic and Farsi. Then she could translate manuscripts for his publishing company.