Imran slid open the screen door from the dining room and stepped out on to the terrace with the newspaper and an envelope in his hand. ‘This just came for you –’ he said, handing the envelope to the Widow. ‘A driver delivered it, but he’s gone now.’ His thumb and forefinger still gripped one end of the envelope. ‘It’s urgent, but not so urgent that you can’t first finish your tea. I asked.’ He relinquished his hold on the envelope and walked back to the kitchen, the muscles of his body conveying utter disdain for people who interrupted the sacred ritual of morning tea.
The Widow put the envelope aside and picked up her cup. Ami pushed the rubber band off the newspaper, stared at the front page for a few seconds and dropped the paper. ‘Another strike today,’ she said, her voice flat.
‘ACE?’ the Widow asked.
‘Who else? They’re protesting the death of three of their party men in police custody.’
The Widow set down her cup of tea. Now both cups of tea were on the table and Zehra was balancing her toast on the tips of her fingers, but Hasan wasn’t feeling particularly leonine any longer.
‘You sound less than supportive of the grand cause,’ the Widow said. ‘What would your brother say?’
‘Damn my brother,’ Ami said, picking up the paper and slapping it down on the table. ‘Damn the whole bloody mess.’ She cupped her face in her hands and began to cry. Hasan pressed himself against the wall and inched away.
The Widow, her arms around Ami’s shoulder, said, ‘Saira, you haven’t slept properly in days . . .’ and Ami started laughing in a way that made Hasan want to run. ‘Oh Wid, if it were only that simple,’ she said.
Less than fifteen minutes later Hasan and his cricket bat were staving off a barrage of imaginary balls in his back garden when Zehra strode into view. ‘So come on, we’re going,’ she said.
‘Go away,’ Hasan said, hitting a lofted cover drive. Zehra stretched out her arm, fingers curled. ‘Got it,’ she yelled. ‘You’re out.’
Hasan rolled his eyes. ‘That shot went about a zillion feet above your head,’ he said, walking towards her, bat in hand. ‘And we can’t go anywhere. There’s a strike.’
‘Hmmm . . . Thought I heard someone in the bushes during breakfast,’ Zehra said. ‘We’re going with the Widow on a rescue mission. Some married guy died. And it’s just nearby, next to Javed and Omar’s house, so we won’t have to cross any main roads to get there. No one will see us.’
‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m observing the strike to show solidity with ACE.’
‘You mean solidarity. With POTPAF. Come on, you’ve been dying to see the Widow in action. And your mother says you can go.’
Hasan thought again of Ami crying. ‘I’ll come,’ he said. His step became bouncier as he approached the Widow’s car. It was true, he had been longing to see the Widow chase away evil brothers-in-law for almost three years now, as had Zehra, but the Widow had never allowed them to come along with her. ‘Houses of mourning are not cricket fields,’ she said whenever Zehra broached the subject. ‘No spectator seats.’
‘So suddenly there are tickets available?’ Hasan said, reaching in through the front window of the red Honda Civic to unlock the back door.
Zehra shrugged. ‘Your mother asked Wid to take us. Hey, not so glum, chum,’ she went on, in a perfect imitation of Uncle Latif. ‘It must get tiring trying to look cheerful for your sake.’
‘Yeah, well I wish she was doing a better job of it,’ Hasan said, crossing his arms and leaning back against the leather seat. Khan and the Widow got into the front seats, and Hasan pressed his lips together and looked away from Zehra.
‘Make sure you stick to the back roads,’ the Widow told Khan.
‘Why?’ Hasan asked.
‘There’ll be ACEmen patrolling the streets to ensure the strike – why don’t they be honest and call it a curfew? – is observed,’ the Widow said.
Khan nodded. ‘Their situation is getting desperate,’ he said. ‘They need to show the government they still have enough support to bring the whole nation to a standstill.’
‘Maybe you children shouldn’t come along,’ the Widow said.
‘Oh come on, Wid!’ Zehra said. ‘It’ll be fine. Khan will stick to the back roads.
Hasan tried to make sense of all this. Why was the Widow worried about running into ACEmen? And how could the ACEmen ‘ensure’ that the strike was observed?
Khan reversed the car out of the driveway and was greeted outside by the putt-putt-khrr-khrr of a rickshaw engine that seemed to be remonstrating against not having been retired to a junkyard years earlier. Actually, the engine and the rest of the wedge-shaped rickshaw had been on their way to a junkyard, years earlier, but before they reached their destination Khan had intercepted their owner with a bagful of mangoes; three days later, with the aid of yellow paint, masking tape, rubber bands, prayer and abuse, the Bodyguard had turned the rickshaw into its official transport unit. Of late the rickshaw’s accelerator and brake pedals had been jamming in place when pushed with just a fraction too much force, which could explain why Mariam-the-Immaculate-Conceiver was sitting cross-legged in the driver’s seat while Masood/Masooda-the-Transvestite was lying across the floorboard, hands hovering over the pedals.
‘Have they ever actually protected you?’ Hasan said, twisting around in his seat to watch the rickshaw with its five passengers follow Khan down the street.
‘They loom,’ the Widow said. ‘That seems sufficient.’
Zehra’s hands slapped a tattoo on Hasan’s knees and, without too much faltering, she and Hasan sang out:
‘Oh watch the Bodyguard loom
In a rickshaw with just enough room
To accommodate
Three whose husbands are ‘late’
Plus a hijra and Jowly-Haroon.’
This was definitely better than being at home, wondering what the adults had been saying the second before he entered the room, Hasan decided. And it was a good thing that today was a strike and the streets were deserted, otherwise Masood/Masooda’s propensity to press the accelerator each time Mariam yelled ‘red light’ could have had unhappy consequences. Oh watch the Bodyguard loom, Hasan whistled. Khan pulled up to a marble-pillared house.
‘Widow, activate super powers,’ Hasan said.
‘Oh dear,’ said the Widow, opening the car door with her little finger and a slight pressure of elbow. ‘You’ve been listening to rumours.’
She rapped on the gate of the marble-pillared house and, when the chowkidar slid open the porthole like the gatekeeper in The Wizard of Oz, the lift of the Widow’s eyebrows left him no choice but to open the gate without question and let her in. The mali watering the flowerbeds stared slack-jawed as the Widow strode past in her multi-hued sari of swishing silk, followed by Hasan, Zehra, Mariam, Haroon and Masood/Masooda. The remaining members of the Bodyguard stood watch outside.
‘You’re drowning the roses,’ Masood/Masooda said to the mali, and threw him the burlesque of a kiss. The mali jumped back and slipped on a wet patch.
‘We hear she is a Wiz of a Wid if ever a Wid there was,’ Hasan sang. Zehra nudged him quiet, but she was giggling too.
The Widow swept inside through the front door, paused for a moment on the chequered marble floor and then walked a diagonal across black squares towards a curving staircase. There were voices drifting down from the second storey of the house, and Hasan was glad to follow the Widow up, away from the formality of the ground floor with its suggestion of air that was never gulped into or sighed out of lungs, but only inhaled and exhaled in quantities that met the minimal demands of the human body.
Upstairs, a door was slightly ajar, and the Widow pushed it open to reveal a dark-panelled room in which two men with sheafs of paper in their hands stood over a woman in an armchair. The men swung around to face the door as it groaned open.
‘You!’ the shorter of the two men said, taking a step towards, and then away from, the Widow.
‘Did you call
her here? Did you?’ the other man said, his index finger slashing the air inches away from the seated woman’s face.
‘There was a shift in the equilibrium of things,’ the Widow said, looking around distractedly, as though she had heard the men’s voices but could not see them. ‘It ruined my morning cup of tea. That’s what brought me here.’
O-kay, Hasan thought. This is better than the movies.
‘Do you know everything you should know about inheritance rights?’ the Widow asked the seated woman. The taller man moved towards the Widow and at the same time, amazingly, the three members of the Bodyguard loomed. How it happened, Hasan couldn’t say, but it was as though all the muscles in their faces which allowed them to smile or soften disappeared, and what remained was a tautness of jaw and single-mindedness. Masood/Masooda-the-Transvestite, Mariam-the-Immaculate-Conceiver and Jowly-Haroon, were suddenly unsuited to their playful nicknames. The only name that fit them was the one which, through overuse, had almost lost its meaning: the Bodyguard.
The tall man looked from face to face and then threw up his hands and walked towards the door.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Come on, Abbas. Let her take that attitude.’
‘Just a second,’ said the Widow. ‘If those papers pertain to her inheritance, I think you should leave them here.’
The men flung the papers at the Widow, and stormed out.
‘All bluster,’ the Widow said. ‘The best kind.’
‘Thank you for coming so quickly,’ the woman said.
Now what? Hasan wondered.
‘Tea or coffee?’ the woman said.
That was the most exciting comment anyone made for the next half hour. The Widow declined all beverages, and then there was only the rustle of paper and the Widow’s voice explaining inheritance laws, using words like ‘title deed’, ‘ twenty-five per cent’, ‘claimants’, ‘one-sixteenth’, and no one even offered Hasan a Coke. At length the Widow looked up at Zehra and said, ‘You can tell Khan to drop you home and come back for me.’
The two men who had provoked the Bodyguard loom were in the driveway, discussing manure delivery with the mali. They nodded at Hasan when he walked past them, and one of them tossed a rose at Zehra, who blushed.
So much for rescue missions.
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘Well, what did you want? One of the men to draw a gun? The Widow to knock it out of his hand with a flying kick?’
‘Stop acting so superior, Zehra. You were bored too. I saw you counting your split ends.’
Zehra glared at Hasan and flipped her hair over her face so that Hasan couldn’t see her expression. Clearly, split ends were a touchy issue. Hasan remained kneeling on the front seat, facing backwards, his arms clasped around the backrest, intending to make his gargoyle face and surprise Zehra into laughing the instant she uncovered her face, but Khan pulled at his arm and told him to sit properly. There was an edge to Khan’s voice which warned Hasan not to argue. Perhaps Khan was annoyed at having to leave the rest of the Bodyguard and drop Hasan and Zehra home. Or something.
Khan turned on to Seabeach Street, and Hasan rolled down the window and breathed in the salt air. The street sloped downhill about two miles, all the way to the sea, and trees of all varieties, including one with silver leaves, formed a canopy along the length of the street. It always seemed cooler on Seabeach Street than anywhere else in the vicinity. A beige car zipped across the intersection halfway down the street, and blocked Hasan’s view of the sea for an instant. Khan slammed on the brakes.
‘What? What happened?’ Hasan looked side to side for a scampering animal without traffic sense.
Khan held up a hand for silence. He put the car in first gear, his foot still on the brake pedal. The beige car reversed back into sight. Khan spun the car, ninety degrees, to face a massive black gate and pressed the heels of both palms on the horn. The beige car turned on to Seabeach Street and started moving towards the Widow’s car.
Trickles of sweat were making their way from Khan’s hair to his beard, and his palms seemed affixed to the car horn. Hasan’s teeth bit down on the finger joints of his fisted hand. There was no movement behind the black gates.
‘Behind you,’ Zehra yelled, and Khan screeched backwards into the gateway which had opened across the street.
‘Close it, close it,’ Khan yelled to the chowkidar who had opened the gate, squealing to a stop before he backed into the car already in the driveway.
A man, pipe in hand, was standing in the doorway to the red-bricked house. Khan got out of the car and walked towards the man and at the same instant Khan opened his mouth to speak, Hasan remembered why the beige car seemed so familiar, and both Khan and Hasan said, ‘ACE.’
No doubt about it. The bump on the fender, the weblike cracks in the windshield, things Hasan hadn’t even noticed he had noticed about the beige car until now, but no question of it, he had seen those marks, that car, a hundred times before in photographs, in news reports, at rallies, even once or twice in Salman Mamoo’s driveway, and he had heard, and told, the tale of the car’s driver: Shehzad, who once covered Salman Mamoo’s body with his own when he saw the glint of sun on gun-muzzle during a rally, and so passed into legend, even though the gun was just a child’s toy.
‘You had better go inside,’ the man with the pipe said, opening the car door. Hasan stepped out and was about to explain, Really, nothing to worry about, when he sees who I am he’ll know we support the strike, but the man had already turned back to Khan. Zehra caught Hasan by the sleeve and pulled him up four grey steps to the front door of the house.
A car inched past the gate. Hasan imagined springs under his feet, and jumped up, not nearly as high as he thought the springs could take him, but high enough to see over the top of the gate and see, too, that there were three men in the beige car and one of them was Shehzad. The car engine was switched off. The car rolled back, parallel to the gate, and stopped.
The man with the pipe brushed past Hasan and opened the front door, easing the handle down one millimetre at a time and grimacing at the click of the latch as the door opened. He ushered Zehra and Hasan inside and picked up the cordless phone on a table just inside the door.
‘Hello, police,’ he whispered into the receiver. He flashed Hasan a smile which was obviously supposed to be reassuring, and disappeared into the next room with the phone in hand, closing the door behind him.
Hasan followed Zehra back out on to the steps leading to the driveway. Khan did not seem to be aware that they had stepped out again. He and the chowkidar were standing in the garden, out of sight of any eye that might peep through the crack between the two doors of the gate. Hasan thought of running over to Khan, or ducking back inside, but there was no reason, he told himself, no reason to be afraid. Outside, a car door opened. A man walked up to the gate, his sandalled feet visible between the gate’s lower spikes. Khan laced his fingers together and pushed at the cuticle of one thumbnail with the tip of the other thumbnail.
Half-moons of fingernails, stars in your eyes, lightning reflexes, cloudy vision, thunderous thighs. Hasan chanted overlaps of body and sky to himself.
‘What now, Quixote,’ Zehra whispered to Hasan.
This was stupid. Stupider than a President’s spirit trapped in a dog’s body. Hasan had only to yell out, ‘Shehzad, oh hey, Shehzada! Seen any good pine-cones lately?’ and everything would be all right. Hasan opened his mouth. He heard, just outside, the slide of steel: a safety disabled on a semi-automatic weapon.
Zehra shrugged, and stepped into the driveway. Hasan reached out, wanted to, would have, intended to, reach out a hand to stop her, but his hands instead covered his heart, his stomach, and his body bent into a question mark, his knees buckled, his hands reached up to the back of his head, his face pressed between his knees, but now his back was exposed and so he rolled on to his side, his back against the door, body a ball, his legs shielding face and chest so that the bullets would hit knee caps, that’s all, and shins may
be and oh, please, life.
Police sirens. Car door. Revving engine and the squeal of wheels on asphalt. Zehra’s arms around him, and his around hers, the movement of her back muscles beneath his palms a miracle beyond sunsets.
‘What’s wrong, Huss? Are you feeling ill?’
‘Zehra. He was . . . Zeh . . . Shehzad. Didn’t you hear the gun?’
Zehra tugged his ear. ‘Idiot. He struck a match, that’s all.’
Hasan tried to stand up. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Not really. But that’s what it sounded like. Come on, let’s thank pipe-man and go home.’
On the way home, Khan said, ‘Shehzad’s brother was one of the ACEmen killed in police custody yesterday.’ Hasan didn’t reply. Shehzad, who Salman Mamoo had once called ‘my right arm, and leg’; Shehzad, who was generally credited with organizing the rain of pine cones every evening into Salman Mamoo’s house; Shehzad, who had proved himself willing to die for Salman Mamoo; Shehzad had terrified him.
Khan pulled up outside Hasan’s house, and Hasan stepped out, then swung back to look in through the passenger-side window at Zehra. ‘When you walked towards the gate and I thought there was a gun . . .’ he began.
Zehra ran her fingers across his lips in a zipping motion. ‘Go find your mother,’ she said. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’
Zehra knew a lot, even for a thirteen-year-old.
Ami’s studio was reassuringly cluttered when Hasan entered it. Canvases, easels, paints, brushes, books about artists, books by artists, flyers announcing exhibitions, tapes, CDs, sketch-pads, empty teacups, poems copied out in Aba’s Roman-font handwriting, and an assortment of art supplies lay scattered across the floor and built-in shelves. The half-drawn rust and beige curtains framed the hibiscus tree outside. Ami was balanced, cross-legged, on a high stool, paintbrush between her teeth, frowning at the canvas before her. A white hair had appeared on her head.
Hasan came up behind Ami, climbed on to the lowest rung of the stool and rested his chin on Ami’s shoulder, his arms around her waist for balance. He pursed his lips in an attempt to look profound, and was momentarily distracted by the taste of apricots on his lower lip before he turned his attention to the canvas. A man sat in a prison cell, one arm raised in a diagonal, tilting the face of a tin plate into his field of vision. A moonbeam squeezed between the bars of the cell window and expanded on to the plate, carrying with it the silhouette of a twirling dancer, the henna of her side-stretched hands gifting colour to the cell. After Hasan had stared at the painting for a few seconds it began to seem as though the tin plate was the moon, beaming light and dance on to the outside world.
In the City by the Sea Page 15