We don’t know how Abbas finds out: perhaps Nuria phones him, or writes, in her elegant script and stilted English, that she can’t marry him, life changed her plans; she’s sorry for breaking her word, but what can she do? She can’t live a lie. But Abbas won’t tell, won’t hear a word against her, and we’re on Chand’s side, not talking to Mahir or Nuria.
Chand, when she hears, drives down to Mehri’s villa. She’s surprisingly calm. She claims she knows what the old dragon’s up to; using her orphaned niece as bait, to tempt her beloved son away from his foreign wife. She’s not going to stand back and watch. Nuria thinks life is a romance by Razia Butt, does she? She’ll think again when, all too soon, she sees Mahir’s departing back. Nuria, and Mehri, can keep the gifts that Chand had given; all she wants for her brother is the engagement ring, which was reset from melted gold and a ruby left him by their mother. But what had Abbas done to deserve this? And how, she demands, will Nuria ever repay her for so many years of love? After all, blood was thicker than water, and there was no tie of blood to bind her to Nuria.
12
When Chand took back the ring to her brother, Abbas said:
– You should have left it to me. I’d have made her see the light. She’ll never be happy with that swine.
He put the ring in his pocket and took off on his motorbike. He didn’t come back that day.
– When he came home, Chand told us, he said he’d seen Nuria, though he didn’t say where. Then he wept like I’ve never seen him weep before. Every year at the processions he flays his chest till he draws drops of blood for the love of Hussein and Abbas and Kasim and sometimes he even uses little knives but this time the blood seemed to flow from his eyes.
13
Abel and Cain – the war has fallen on our necks like those fighting brothers and one of them will have to die. Shiploads of boys transported across land and sea to fight, to keep a country they’ve never seen, for the glory of a nation split at birth. Abbas is out east already, by the Burma border. He’s in a guerilla-breaking squadron. Chand says: Why are we sending our sons and brothers across enemy territory to stop foreigners from speaking their own language and a strange faraway land from changing its name?
Karb o bala. Agony and affliction.
News from the frontlines is bad, then worse.
14
The telegram came at night:
WE HAVE THE HONOUR MADAME TO ANNOUNCE THE GLORIOUS MARTYRDOM IN ARMED COMBAT OF YOUR BROTHER LIEUTENANT SAYYAD ABBAS HAIDAR
And Chand didn’t act, as we’d expected, like a hero’s sister, with dignity, in silence. She tore her hair and her clothes and beat her breast, she threw herself on the floor, and she didn’t have to say a word, but we knew that in her heart she was cursing the leaders and the war, and cursing Nuria, again and again, for bringing bad luck to her beloved dead brother.
And my eyes are no longer grey.
15
And Nuria: when she heard the news they say she bent and smashed her green and red glass bangles on the stones. She spent three nights in her room, praying. She didn’t even leave a message for Mahir when on the third day she walked away from her aunt’s house, leaving Cactus Town where flowers wouldn’t grow. She never turned back. She stepped out in the clothes she’d had on since her morning shower and walked alone in Clifton until she found a rickshaw by the old shrine. Chand’s house was full of mourners that day, but it wasn’t from Chand she sought asylum: she knew she no longer had a home there, and after all there were no blood ties to take her to the house of mourning. She went back to her mother and brother, to the life she’d left nine years before, the shabby flat, the city’s outskirts. Some say she was pregnant and the first child she gave her husband was Mahir’s son. Others said she was made, like Chand all those years ago, to have an abortion. She accepted the first proposal she got. A few weeks later she was married off, we heard, to an aging widower her mother had found in the matrimonial columns, with several children of his own: the number reported varies according to the teller. None of us attended the wedding but some sent gifts. Mahir went back to his wife in Ilford, where he lived for many years, until Brenda, keeping their money and their growing daughters, threw him out, and he flew back across the sea to live with Meher Taj. He gave up accountancy and turned Cactus Town into a tutorial college. Chand, Mahnur and Mehriyar never spoke to Nuria again, not even when Chand, at barely forty, died of a terrible flowering in her brain. Mehri, too, chose silence. We heard, years later, that Nuria’s husband kept her jewellery and sent her back to her mother. She had some hard years after that, bringing up two children alone.
16
But when I told my sister I was writing this story she remembered:
Ten years ago. An April afternoon. A hand touched her shoulder on the lawn of the Sind club where she was running after her three-year-old daughter. She turned around to see a woman in her late thirties, elegant, blonde and discreetly bejewelled. Don’t you recognise me? she asked. I’m your cousin. Nurafshan... Nuria. They kissed. Before her chauffeur-driven car came up the gravelled drive she introduced my sister to her husband, a handsome man slightly older than her. As many tales as there are heads to tell them. He wasn’t a widower, only divorced; he spent a lot of time in Dubai, but he’d never sent her away.
And later, when she thought about it, my sister wondered who it was that Nuria had begun to remind her of.
17
Sometimes I dream I’m in Abbas’s place: I’m the one Nuria turns down. She comes up to me, face ashy with tears, kneels in the garden, takes my hands in hers, asks her childhood friend to forgive her, to remain her friend. She places my hands against her damp cheeks. She reminds me of butterfly songs and echoes and shadows. But I’m a sea rock; I turn my face away. Forgive me Nuria, I say in silence, I don’t understand these things, I’m too young, I can’t be your friend any more. Then I ride off into the night on my motorbike, ride it right to the edge of the sea, leave it there and walk into the waves.
That’s how the policemen, when they find it, know where to look for Abbas, and when fishermen haul his body up from the sea days later his face has been disfigured by crabs. Nuria’s ruby ring is still buttoned into his pocket. But that’s another version, in which Abbas never went to war: he wouldn’t have understood what he was fighting for, why he should give his life to stop a strange country from breaking away or changing its name and keeping its language.
Too grey an ending for me. I’m a teller of stories. I want to dip my finger in a war wound and spell the name of a hero. I have no time for an insignificant boy who mourns lost loves and gives his life to the sea. So why is salt water seeping through this page?
Electric Shadows
Don’t think I haven’t changed. Who said
absence makes the heart grow fonder?
Though I watch the sunset redden
every day, days don’t grow longer.
Mimi Khalvati, ‘Don’t Ask me, Love, for that First Love’ (after Faiz Ahmed Faiz)
ACT I
Night Music
This I remember of the rest of ’65:
Dining in a garden of light. We had picked fallen frangipani, jasmine and hibiscus from grass. They’d lie in crystal swans and silver boats that night. Garlands of red, green and yellow bulbs were intertwined with branches of tall trees. It was a holiday, Easter probably, because we hadn’t gone to school. I turned ten that day, though my birthday had been celebrated, along with my younger sister’s, ten days before. Tonight’s invitation read:
To bid farewell to HE the Ambassador of Belgium
Nawabzada and Begum A... H...
Request the pleasure of your company for dinner
at 8 pm
on 8.4.1965
at 43/4/B-Block 6
P.E.C.H.S.
When we went in after dinner, the American Ambassador’s daughter Drusilla sang Dylan’s songs on her guitar. Then my mother, dressed in white edged with old rose and gold, performed selections from her reperto
ire of traditional songs. The sounds of sarangi haunted the air.
Planting corn and petunias. There were flowers everywhere, black roses, orchids, bluebells, orange blossom, hydrangea, hibiscus. And things you could eat. Black wild berries beneath clusters of pink and yellow flowers. The sweet-sour flesh of almond, crack the reached shell for the nut. Corn cobs wih their long flaxen tresses. Green coconuts for sweet water. Some flowers have stems you can suck honey from. Then there’s the bitter hard fruit they call caronda, radish red concealing white unripe but it ripens to deep red and it bleeds, you can pretend you’re wounded, you can cry.
Beaches. Ochre or white, in light and shadow. Bubbly blue transparent creatures cling to your calf, their sting sharper than a bee’s bite. Starfish, I think, are dead, purplish hard bodies more strangely structured than a star. Crabs scuttle by. The smell of camels, like rain-washed dogs. Sand flecked with glittering mica, so hot beneath my soles I can’t get my swollen feet into my black suede shoes. They say there are sharks further out to sea, they tell us to beware: we can’t swim and deeper in the water there are shelves. Sand slips from under your feet. The waves will carry you away. My sister Safinaz and I hold hands when we walk in. Waves lash out and we jump. But for a moment, we let them engulf us, for the terror, for the thrill.
Night falling. Musicians pass our lane in threes or fours. Playing drums and pipes and strings. Their voices tough and torn and tender, they sing: pere pavandisan chavandisan, they sing: mor tho tilley rana, they sing: o man ghure mushtaq san. The songs of Sohni and Momal and Sassi of Bambor. Words and yearnings we don’t understand. But we run to the gate to listen. They drag bicycles behind them.
I think the locust swarm came that year and ate up the saplings in the garden. The gardener cried. No, I’m turning the calendar’s pages too fast: that’ll come later.
The Canadian Cat
Then there was Madeline. From Ottawa. Her hair was yellow, streaked bright and dark, thick, with the rippling look that women, in later years, will pay to achieve. Her fringe fell into grey-green eyes. She wasn’t pretty; her nose was flattish and broad. But she had a wide smile and tan-gold skin. I didn’t choose her for myself: I doubt I would have. The three other boys and twenty-odd girls in class, for once in unison, did it for me. They paired us off. Every day, they’d wait for us at recess and grab us in the cloak room where we went to get our sandwich boxes, push us into each other, knock our heads together, so that in our attempts to escape them and each other we’d be intertwined for moments at a time, arms and legs and eyes and breath, before the bell rang and we got away.
Madeline Weld. We were in the same class at the Convent of Jesus and Mary. In that last year before the capital moved from Karachi to Islamabad, carrying away its cosmopolitan crowd. Most of the foreign boys had already gone. My friends from last term, Raoul Severe and Tommy Kanhai, had left one after the other, for Florida and Japan. Norwegian Helen, who spoke Urdu better than I did, had long since chosen to observe unwritten protocols of segregation and a new deskmate, while I, one of only four boys who stayed on for those final months of co-education, sat with Ashley, Mark and Jamil in the male enclave.
I don’t know how long the bullying lasted, and I don’t think it had started before the summer holidays, because I couldn’t have borne that sixty-day break without seeing Madeline. But maybe I did and maybe I learned then that waiting, and dreaming alone, had as much of a charge as the closeness of someone you love.
You will want me to tell you about the city and the time, paint the house on the hill and the place where we lived. And of course I should mention the poor, who the nuns say are always with us, but they’re half a mile away from my lane and my life. Linger with me, instead, where the light falls. Breathe in the fragrance of freshly cut grass. Taste the tartness of unripe mango on my tongue.
So let’s say it all started after the summer break, in August, when we came back to school. Those cloakroom encounters went on for three weeks – or six? Then I went to Mrs Evans, our Welsh class teacher, and complained. The children were reprimanded and I was up in everybody’s esteem, for having had the courage to protest. I don’t know what Madeline felt.
The first break from her must have been during Michaelmas. I’d persuaded my parents to let me have a white lamb. I called her Snowy. She followed me everywhere I went. We’d always had dogs in the yard, and my sisters kept Lena, a dachschund, in their room, so we’d all go for a walk to the ponds together, children, lamb and dog.
Our house was far from the sea, the marshes and their fetid fishy smell. But there were two ponds half a mile away. One was green and smelly. The other, blue and clear with foliage and wildflowers around: we bathed in it. Near the ponds was a house we’d stroll past. I thought it was Madeline’s because I’d seen a pale-coffee Dodge with a CD number plate, like the one that carried her away from school, sail down its drive. But then someone told me she lived in Clifton, close to school and the sea, miles away, not near me or the ponds at all.
But that I found out later, when my new confidence gained me new friends. The best of these was thirteen-year-old Tina. (Years later, she’d write a confessional memoir that was a success and a scandal.) She sat next to me during our Urdu lesson when Madeline and the other foreigners left our classroom to study French verbs next door. Tina’d had to drop out of school for two years or more because she’d been ill, with meningitis, I think. She wasn’t good at her studies but had instead that peculiar quality so lacking in most of us: you could, I suppose, call it gaiety, combined with her brand of peasant chic. Her skin, hair and eyes were all the colour of amber. Tina and I spent breaks together. Since she had a throng of admirers, among whom were the toughest girls in school, no one dared to tease me about her the way they’d ragged me about Madeline, though this was real and that an invention, and I suppose Tina treated me a bit like a brother.
Tina and our friends had borrowed a trend current among seniors for years, a sort of friendship album called a slam-book, in which each page began with a question. They ranged from the simplest: Where do you live? to the more provocative: Whom would you choose to kiss on the beach? Your friends were compelled to answer with wit and wisdom. With Tina’s help, and lots of responses from her friends, I presented the class with a perfected literary version of myself, the first ever. I was feisty, wise-cracking, I had a life outside school as wayward as a kite on the breeze, I had friends among older girls (true) and listened to the best music (also true, because, courtesy of my sisters, I was singing Francoise Hardy in cod French).
Madeline had a best friend called Fiona Campbell, with frizzy ginger hair and freckles and a Scottish accent, who asked to fill in my slam-book and when it came back to me Madeline had given as much information about herself as I could possibly deal with, including her phone number, which was 51112. It was the first sign that she actually did like me. But there were revelations to follow. Below one of Tina’s more inventive questions, Madeline had written:
For Aamer:
I am a cabbage
Divide me in two
My leaves I give to others
My heart I give to you
Madeline had been brave enough in her own way to respond to my ruse to gain her attention and extract information about her with a clumsy message of love.
The Child Jesus and the Green Man of the River
Was that before, or after, the war?
That spat between neighbours started in September. At school it was cause for excitement, particularly for us Pakistani children, who had only a short while before refused to attend Catholic prayers and now had a room of our own to start the day where we sang the national anthem instead of the Lord’s Prayer.
Safinaz and I had been told by our mother that God was light, He was everywhere, within and without, and I’d read that our Prophet was a man who said he was like other men and less than perfect, only chosen as a messenger by God. But at the Convent the nun’s God, at once Father, Son, and Messiah, was a personification, with
bleeding alabaster wounds. Easy with our own domestic faith, I didn’t like Catholicism, found it guilt-ridden and scary. Latin hymns sung in chorus reminded me of horror movies. I didn’t like our Sister Superior, Maria Gheratti. And she didn’t like me. She’d find any excuse to rap my palms and my soles with her lethal ruler. (Later, when I was just about to leave school, I interrupted a conversation the tough girls in class were having about fast girls and boyfriends to add: The Bible is full of prostitutes. Jezebel, Mary Magdalen. And Salome who sold herself to her stepfather in exchange for John the Baptist’s head. I’d seen that in ‘King of Kings’ in Bombay the year before. Karachi didn’t allow personifications of holy prophets on film in public places. I felt Ma. Gheratti’s hand descend like an axe on the nape of my neck. She must have said, as she always did: the child Jesus weeps when you sin. It’s the sick bay for you. Soap and water for your dirty tongue. I’d wonder how Jesus, who’d died, we were told, at thirty-three, had reverted to infancy after the crucifixion. By then, almost in pursuit of Ma. Gheratti’s persecution, I’d become the only rebellious boy in class, the resident clown, acting out others’ fantasies. I delighted in being thrown out of the classroom, and making the children laugh by pulling faces or dancing in the doorway.)
At home, my companion, close as a twin, was still Safinaz. Our bond was mostly wordless. The best friend we shared was Mehreen. Six months older than me, she was strong and lovely, with silky brown hair and a tough, street-wise manner which saw us through all the hazards of childhood. If you came looking for us before sunset you’d find us three on the rocky steps of the pavilion at the back of the house by the hibiscus tree, seeing who could jump off the highest peak. (Lithe Safinaz, the smallest, was always the winner.) For a season or two we played croquet on the lawn, until the smell of Mother’s baking drew us indoors for shortbread, elephant’s ears, tarts, even, sometimes, a pizza. Oftener still, we’d be elbow-deep in mud with no care for the afternoon sun, building forts, baking our backs and faces. Or we’d be following my sister Shahrukh down the stony paths of hills further away, filling vases and jars with tadpoles which soon became frogs that she’d throw back into stagnant water. (She loved beasts, my sister Shah. Once she rescued a donkey from a man who was beating it, telling him, to his amazement, that she’d take him to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. When finally someone came to our gate and led it to some other grim pasture, she spent hours imitating it bray.)
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