by Ali Sethi
He sat on the bed, his elbows on his knees, his fingers on his temples. He said, “We will see when you have another child.”
She said, “Yes. We will see. We will see. That is what you always say.”
But it was a boy.
Seema said, “Now is the time. Now is the time.”
And her wish was granted: her husband bought a two-canal plot in an area that had once been a mango orchard and faced the canal. She hired a contractor and took him to the site to discuss the possibilities.
Seema showed her the picture of a French house in a magazine: the corners curved, the lines sloped elegantly, and the windows were round like windows in the cabins of a ship. Seema said, “It is a new style called Art Décor.”
Daadi summoned the contractor to her parents’ house and said, “Art Décor.”
He was an old man. He wore a checked blue-and-red lungi over his legs, which were covered in sores, a white turban on his head and misted-over glasses on his face. Most of his teeth were missing. He said, “What?”
She said, “Art Décor. It is a new style. In France.”
He didn’t understand.
She took him to the site and said, “Round, round, everything round.” And she showed him the picture of the house in the magazine.
He nodded thoughtfully and said, “It will raise the cost.”
She said, “You think we have sugar mills? You think we are sitting on a gold mine? What are you thinking in that head of yours?”
She went herself to the brick kiln to select the bricks. There was a cheaper variety of yellow brick.
“But I want the red bricks,” she said to her husband.
And she went to the office of a cement factory, bought the cement at a discounted rate and counted the number of bags that were loaded onto the taanga.
The contractor said they had to start building before the monsoon. “Otherwise the walls will become soft,” he said.
She said, “You have seven months.”
He said, “The laborers will have to put in extra hours. It is not in my control. If it was a question of my hours you know I wouldn’t ask you for more.” He was looking at her plaintively and licking his lips.
She said, “I will see who is working overtime.” And she sat on a charpai in the shade of a mango tree and oversaw the construction. She noted the white insects on the bark of the tree; and she noted that with the approach of the summer their numbers increased.
Seema said, “Mango bugs,” and shuddered theatrically.
Daadi told the contractor to take out the tree.
“You must have a tree,” said Seema. “It brings good luck.”
Daadi said, “I will plant it myself.”
And so began the project of her garden. She demarcated a patch at the front of the house, and planted a tree she had seen in other houses on the part of the lawn that abutted the gate. It grew slowly. She was tired of waiting for the small white flowers, and she dug out a line of soil around the lawn and planted it with marigolds. She had learned from the man at the nursery that it was a resilient flower, needing only water and light, and grew quickly.
She strung the orange flowers on strings and hung them around the house. They hung from the pillars in the veranda, from the handles of the cabinets in the kitchen and on the knobs of the bed. They looked pretty but gave no fragrance. On the third day they had shriveled, and were brown and soggy. She thought it was deceptive.
Seema came to the house and said, “But what is there to celebrate?”
She acquired a car. Her husband took it with him to the factory in Lyallpur but brought it back at the end of every month. And every morning she took the garden hose and stood before the car, her shalwar raised to the knees, the sleeves of her kameez rolled up to the elbows, her dupatta tied into a knot at her waist, and shut her eyes and turned away her face and heard the water crashing against the windshield.
Seema said, “It is not a thing for the mistress of the house to do.” She was grave.
Daadi said, “Who will do it?”
“A driver,” said Seema, and added that in Rawalpindi they had two. “There are lines of them,” she said. “You won’t even have to look far. You just have to build a quarter at the back.”
One day, with the new driver, in the new car, they went out of the house. Seema and Daadi sat in the back and looked out of their windows at the world.
“Must say,” said Seema. She was impressed.
“Drive it slowly,” said Daadi to the driver.
They went first to Daadi’s parents’ house. Daadi and Seema went inside and came back with Daadi’s younger sister, who was made to sit in the middle.
“I can sit in the front,” said Daadi.
“No, no,” said Seema. “Not the mistress. Never.”
The car took them to Anarkali. They stepped out into the sun and shut their doors, and went into the cool shops, their dupattas over their heads. Inside the hosiery shop they saw a woman with her head uncovered. She was talking to the salesman without restraint. In the car Seema said, “Did you see her? And she was buying stockings! Next time she will appear in the shop wearing only those on her legs.”
Daadi laughed.
Chhoti was quiet.
They went to a restaurant in Neela Ghumbad and parked the car outside the bicycle stalls.
Seema said, “It is a bakery. But the food it serves is very high quality. Very high. It is always serving the gentry.”
They pushed past the glass doors and went in like the gentry.
“Table for three,” said Seema to the waiter.
They didn’t have to wait.
“I know what I am having,” said Seema. Still she raised the menu and frowned at it from behind her glasses.
Daadi said, “I will have a black coffee.”
An actress had said it like that in a film and had settled her arms on the table.
Daadi returned her menu to the waiter and settled her arms on the table. It was sticky. She lifted her arms and settled her elbows on it instead.
Seema said, “I will also have a coffee.” She told the waiter not to add milk or sugar. Then she said, “There is another place here for coffee. But it is only for men. The big shots are there in the evenings.” She gave some examples.
“What do they do there?” said Daadi. She had unfolded the paper napkins and placed them under her elbows to combat the stickiness.
Seema said, “To get away from their wives. To smoke lots of cigarettes.” She squinted and made a dying face and brought her trembling fingers to her mouth. “They always smoke cigarettes when they are discussing politics. It is all they do. Sit together and talk of politics. What is political now? All of the politics has ended. One solid stick is all you need.” She meant the handling of the religious leaders who had taken out a demonstration against the Ahmadis. They had chanted slogans and smashed windows, and were beaten with sticks and arrested on the same day by the army.
Seema said, “The army is efficient.” And she was speaking as a vindicated Ahmadi but also as the wife of a colonel.
The waiter was still standing beside their table.
“Chhoti?” said Seema.
Chhoti was silent.
Daadi said, “Have something.”
Chhoti was looking at the menu, which was lying before her on the table, its pages closed.
Daadi said, “She will have a coffee also.”
The waiter went away.
Chhoti said, “I won’t have it.”
“Then don’t have it! Don’t come here with me if you don’t want to have it!”
Chhoti got up and went away toward the toilets. The women at the other tables were looking. It was not the way of the gentry.
Seema said, “You don’t have to say it like that.”
Daadi said, “How else will I say it? What else will I say to her fat face?” She thought of the money she had brought in her handbag. She would part with it now for drinking black coffee, for placing her elbows on a s
ticky table and for behaving badly before the gentry.
Seema closed her eyes serenely and said, “You must give her time.”
Daadi said, “Give me that stick and I will set her right.”
And Seema said, “You must be patient. The younger girls are not like we were. They are getting modern with the times. You have to be patient.”
Patience was what she had shown the matchmaker, the families that came to their house and went away, and the lamentations of her own parents, who were enfeebled by resistance and relied more and more on her interventions. Patience had drained her; and patience had led to this.
She said, “I don’t have the patience.” She was wiping her hands with a napkin.
Seema said, “Your approach is wrong. You can’t persuade anyone with ideas. You have to teach by your example. It is the first thing we learn.”
The Ahmadis were energetic proselytizers.
Daadi said, “What example? I have nothing to show her.”
And Seema sealed her lips and sighed through her nostrils, and then said, “This is the problem. It is you who can’t see things. You are the one who has to change your approach, my dear.”
She went with Chhoti to the bazaars in the morning and took her to the children’s schools in the afternoon. On holidays they chopped, cooked and cleaned in the kitchen, and sat afterward in chairs in the veranda and wove patterns into quilts, scarves and sweaters. It was work; it took away the designations of age and made them equals, and brought on a knowledge of potentials, of what they could yet be. Then it was instructive to watch only their shadows on the veranda floor, enlarged diagonally and moving as if of their own volition.
Some evenings they went out in the car to the cinema, and Chhoti came back and sang the songs.
“I am thinking I should learn,” she said one day.
They had seen Qaidi in the cinema. Noor Jehan’s voice had been used with Shamim Ara’s long, forlorn face to pictorialize the main song, which showed the actress wandering by herself in an opulent garden.
“Learn,” said Daadi. “It is a good thing to have in your life.”
But Chhoti said, “I could sing for the radio.”
Daadi said, “You are wrong in the head.”
“Why?”
“You know why.” She was feeling heavy inside, and it was making her smile sheepishly, as though she were suddenly to blame for this misplaced enthusiasm.
“Tell me why.”
“It is for young whores. You are too old.”
Chhoti stared at her and then took herself out of the room.
The sheepish smile stayed on Daadi’s face.
That afternoon they went in the car to collect the children from their schools, and waited first for Sami in the corridor outside the classrooms, sitting on the white wicker chairs with the other aunts and mothers, each with her own failures, and anxious for the flood of merry little boys to burst through the doors.
The war came, and Daadi opened her cupboard and brought out the knitwear. On the radio it was announced that all sizes were needed, so she packed the sweaters she didn’t like—and then, because she felt watched, a few of the ones she did like too—into bundles and sent them with the driver to the collection tent that had been set up in Main Market.
At night there were blackouts. The siren rang and she yelled for the children. They went to stand in the L-shaped trench dug out in the lawn. Sometimes they heard the jets overheard, and one night Sami got out of the trench and went to stand by the gate.
“What are you doing!” she shouted.
“Just looking up,” he said.
“Get back here!”
He was laughing in the dark.
She took off her shoe and threw it at him. “Get back here at once!”
It was announced that India’s prime minister had asked to borrow soldiers from the Russian government.
“She is an evil genius,” said Daadi.
They were sitting by the light of the lamp in her room, preparing mufflers to send out. Noor Jehan was singing a newly recorded song on the radio:These sons of the soil aren’t for sale
Why do you search the bazaars for them?
Chhoti said, “It is a blessing.”
Daadi said, “What is?”
“Your children.”
“Yes,” said Daadi. “Yes, they are a blessing for me.”
“For every mother,” said Chhoti.
Daadi looked at her.
Chhoti was knitting involvedly.
“Yes,” said Daadi. “You are right.”
The voice on the radio continued to sing of irreplaceable sons, and their hands, trembling with mutuality and the newfound emotion, went on interlocking the colorful loops.
Seema arrived with a box of jams and squashes. “Not much else to buy in Rawalpindi,” she declared. Then she said, “This army takeover has transformed the country. That whole area used to be a village. Now it has roads and buildings. They say in five years the new capital will be like Europe.”
“How long by train?” said Daadi.
“A few hours,” said Seema. “But you must come. I have been there for so long now and still you haven’t been.”
Daadi said, “I will, I will.”
They had brought out the chairs onto the lawn and were squinting in the sunny stillness.
Daadi said, “At least this war is finished.”
And Seema sighed and said, “You never know with them. It could start again tomorrow. Of one thing I am sure: if it weren’t for the army we would be in the hands of the Indians right now.”
Daadi said, “You are right.”
Seema said, “There is no other way for us.”
Daadi said, “Yes, yes.”
“Force is what we need.”
“Force.”
“Always.”
“Yes.”
The spirit of reinforcement was expiring.
Seema said, “I have brought you marmalade.”
“There was no need,” said Daadi.
“But you must try it.”
“I will.”
Then Seema said, “The children?”
And Daadi was relieved. “Oh,” she said, “they are doing well.” She told Seema that Suri and Hukmi were both speaking like the nuns who taught them at the convent school. “They say ‘May-ray’ and not ‘Mary’ like we say it over here.”
Seema was impressed.
“But Sami runs away from his books.”
Seema was dismayed.
“He runs after airplanes.”
“Airplanes!” said Seema.
“That is all he wants,” said Daadi. “He says, “I want to be in-fallible, invincible, out-standing!”
Seema tittered.
And Daadi smiled. There was another word he had taken to writing again and again in his notebooks: it was reconnaissance. But she feared the pronunciation.
Seema said, “If it is airplanes he is after, you should send him to the academy.”
“Academy,” said Daadi.
“Air force,” said Seema. “Oh, it is top-class. They are giving so many benefits now.”
Daadi was struck by Seema’s confidence.
She said, “Benefits?”
“So many benefits,” said Seema. “I think everybody should have them. If we keep going like this, one day we will have a country in which everyone has benefits.”
Daadi was listening and nodding. She said, “Seema, you have become so confident.”
Seema flapped her hand and said, “Oh, let it go!”
Daadi said, “You have.”
“It is nothing,” said Seema.
“It is everything.”
“Well,” said Seema, whose confidence had now peaked, “if it is good for helping others, then so be it.” And she told Daadi about an idea she had been having: there was a family in a village called Barampur, a landed family with ties to a well-known landowning family in Multan. Seema said she had learned that their son had divorced his wife and wa
s now in need of another. “No children from this marriage,” she said, “so there is no problem of that kind.”
They owned four hundred acres in the countryside, and they lived in a big house. The money that came in from the lands was good. The boy’s sisters had been to see Seema, and she had thought at once of Chhoti.
“Many benefits,” said Seema. “And not many worries. They are old money. But they have values: their women cannot go about in the open like this. I think you should think about it.”
Daadi said, “Let me tell the girl.”
And Seema said, “Tell her and then tell me.”
Less than a year after that, Daadi went for the first time to the big house in Barampur. Chhoti was living there now, and had suffered an early miscarriage. Daadi went in the car with her mother. It took them two hours on the road that led onward to Multan. There was a sharp turning in the road they had been asked to follow, and it led them past saffron fields, yellow in daylight, and then past a buffalo pond to the house. They were shown into a high room where all the windows were shut. And the dust was what she would recall: the dust on the tables, the dust that had colored the white sofas, the dust on the frames of the two pictures of flowers against a black background that were on the wall for decoration. She touched one of the frames, and the darkness came away on her fingertip.
The house was old. And oldness was unassailable, a benefit unto itself. She brought the fingertip near her mouth and blew the trace of dust away.
Daadi returned the photographs to the oval box and switched off the lamp. It was dawn. She could see the light beyond the curtains, a blue burgeoning, and could hear the birds outside, shrill and panicked. She went across to the TV and switched it on. The Good Morning India hosts were setting out their agenda for the day. She switched it off and went outside, walking up and down the driveway, her sandals making the slow and steady smack of someone chewing. There was dew on the grass.
She went back inside and lay on her back on the bed. She watched the ceiling and heard the sounds outside: the car was going; then the van was going. She could sleep. And if she slept now she would still be up before it was dark. She got up once again, drew the curtains, closed the doors and returned to the bed and gave in.