They met twice a week, once at a seminar they both attended on post-colonial theory, and once, by accident, on the stairs or in the refectory. Accidental meetings became a habit. They never made an appointment. She found out Danny was six years younger than her. He told her he’d been married eleven years. He lived with his wife in Guildford.
Nusra and Danny took to drinking a coffee or two or sometimes a beer on those accidental days, especially when it rained. Nusra wasn’t much of a drinker and she didn’t like the taste of beer, so once in a way she’d sip wine.
The third week, or was it the fourth, they got very late. Danny was a little tipsy. He worried about keeping his wife waiting, though he said they had a very relaxed relationship.
– I hardly see her these days, he said. She works in an Asian bank and rises before daybreak. She needs her sleep.
Danny missed two of the seminars and when Nusra met him again he said he’d been in Yorkshire and Amsterdam. She didn’t ask if he’d gone alone or with his wife. They went for a drink after he’d taught his lesson. Then Danny had another beer and another, and he talked about his life.
– I changed my name from Danarto to Danny and left Surabaya for Yogyakarta when I was nineteen. I sang English songs with a band in a bar because my parents were poor. I sent money home. Then I went to work in a hotel in Bali because the money was better and I spoke good English. I met my wife in Sanur. Her name is Lisa. She was on her way back to London from Australia. She proposed to me in the third week because she was expected in London and she didn’t want to leave me behind. It took me several weeks to arrange my papers. I’d always wanted to come to England. I thought I was in love. I wanted to leave Indonesia then, wanted to continue my studies. I’d been in trouble once or twice, street protests and brawls, the army was hard on us. I came here and did the degree I’d always wanted to do at the Slade. Much good it’s done me, I hardly get time for my prints. You know I’ve never talked so much to anyone before.
– As you talked to your wife?
– No. As I talk to you, Danny said.
Then he told her he’d suddenly felt so sick and dizzy the last time he’d gone out with her that he’d fallen off a bus and got a black eye and a twisted ankle. He couldn’t remember getting home. He’d woken up on the sitting-room floor and when he looked for his new shoes he couldn’t find them.
Nusra and Danny took to having long conversations on the phone in the mornings or afternoons of days they didn’t meet. They saw each other three times a week. Weekends were hard for Nusra because Danny went riding in the country with his wife. She’d go to the college on Saturdays and spend a lot of time e-mailing her son in San Diego and her daughter in Atlanta. Once she rang Danny on a Saturday. She found him vague and elusive. She thought his wife must be there.
– This is how it is, for us, Nusra told Danny. I think sometimes I should arrange a seminar for Asian women called ‘Nora is alive and well and still living in the doll’s house.’ I know a woman who paints and dances and teaches, she’s a Bangladeshi who lives here, in London. She can’t get away for a week without permission from her husband and on the fifth day he can’t cope with the kids and is summoning her back. Zuhayr never allowed me to do anything away from home until this year and I lost so many opportunities – in America and Canada and Australia. It’s not that I don’t like it at home, I do, but I felt I’d done everything I could in Islamabad, which isn’t my city anyway. I was hitting my head against the glass ceiling. When he said I could take up this offer I felt – almost hurt, you understand? As if he didn’t need me. Then I guessed he’d been seeing someone else. How hard it is, to leave the doll’s house – that’s why so many of Ibsen’s women commit suicide, and he never tells us where Nora goes.
– Right now I feel I’m in a cage as well, Danny said. Even if you let me out and my wings grow back I’ll have forgotten how to fly.
One day Nusra went up to Danny’s department to look for him and someone said he’d left for the day. Nusra didn’t have anything to do for the next hour so she went down to the cafeteria. Danny found her sitting there a little while later, smoking alone. There’d been a mistake, he said, he was teaching all the time. When they said Nusra had been looking for him he’d gone to the stairwell and shouted her name out so loud they’d had to tell him, You must never do that again, shouting here is against the regulations.
– I can say I love you in your language, Danny told Nusra. Mujhe tum se pyar hai. I learnt it from the movies.
One Saturday Nusra was working on a paper she was supposed to write for a seminar but instead she started to write a story. She translated it for Danny when they met on Tuesday. They were sitting in the park.
– It’s about a little boy called Danny, she said. He’d been very ill. He was new in town, and while he was getting better he wandered around a lot on his own. There was a lake near his house. One day he met a wild child by that lake. The wild child had blue eyes and wore a string of turquoise beads around his neck. He taught Danny about anthills and flowers from which you could suck honey. He showed him how to impale mating frogs on thorny twigs and catch grass lizards by their tails. One blazing afternoon Danny went to the lake but he didn’t find the wild child there. Then he heard a voice calling to him from the water, Come on in. It’s cool here and there are pebbles like marbles in the sand at the bottom of the lake. But I can’t swim, you know that, Danny said. I’ll teach you, the wild child replied. Danny took his hand and stepped into the blue water. He’d never seen so much blue before. Swimming was like flying. And the stones at the bottom of the lake were like the jewels in the Simsim cave. But then the wild child let go of his hand. He was foundering, his mouth full of water, he couldn’t breathe, his hands lost their strength, he was falling, falling. And when he woke up, he found himself in his bed again. His father’s sticky hand was on his forehead. His mother was saying, We nearly lost you. You’ve been ill for three weeks. God knows who fished you out of the water. You mustn’t ever go near that foul lake again...
– What a beautiful story, Danny said. What happens next?
– I can’t say. I haven’t finished it yet. But it’s for you.
– You’ve seen through me, then? I’m a sick child alright.
– But you’re not the Danny of the story, Nusra said. I’m the one who swam in a lake when I was a child in Karachi and got diphtheria. I guess you’re the wild child from the lake.
– No. You’re my wild child. And you’re also the lake.
– I’ve been fighting with my wife, Danny said. She’s mentioned divorce. I can’t afford to live in London on my teacher’s salary. I might have to go back to Surabaya. I don’t know if I did the right thing, staying here so many years. I should have gone home long ago. Now I feel it might be too late.
He sniffled a little and Nusra shed a tear too. It was June. She laid a hand on his. The sun shone till ten that night. It seemed sinful to be so sad when the sun was shining.
– I might have to move out of the Guildford house, Danny said. It was July. I wonder if you know where I can stay for some days till I get settled.
That night, he came to her house for supper. Nusra made chicken and rice. Danny brought his own red wine. At some very late hour Nusra told him he could sleep on the sofa.
In the morning he’d left for work before she came down. She was having her second cup of coffee when her mother-in-law rang to say that Zuhayr had been taken ill with meningitis. He was alone in Islamabad with no one to take care of him. She didn’t have time to talk to Danny before she left. Her daughter flew straight to London and they went back home together.
She made several decisions while her husband got better.
On her way to London Nusra stopped for ten days in Karachi. She put her house, which tenants had just vacated, in order. She was back in London in late September.
She didn’t run into Danny till the Christmas celebration. She knew she looked good in her dark winter clothes. She’d pierced her nose a
t home, and streaked her hair. She crossed the room to say hello.
– I haven’t seen you around for a while, she said.
– I took Lisa to see Jogja. Then we flew to Bali. We stayed in Indonesia two months.
Danny looked tired, with very dark lids and shadows below his eyes. He’d grown a beard. He’d had quite a few glasses of wine.
– You didn’t answer the e-mails I sent, Nusra said.
– I didn’t get them. You could have called.
– My year here’s up. I’m going home this month. Zuhayr’s coming over to spend the milennium here. Then we’ll leave together. We’re moving back to Karachi.
– Ring me before you go. We’ll have lunch. I’m in a hurry just now. I’ve got to get back to Guildford. We’ve got something else on tonight. Lisa’s waiting.
Nusra, made bold by one glass of red wine, followed Danny to where he was checking out his coat and suggested they go somewhere for a drink.
– Just one, she said. She knew they wouldn’t meet again.
– I wanted to tell you the end of that story I wrote, Nusra told Danny. When the boy who’d been sick rose from his bed a few days later, a servant handed him a twisted parcel made of a sheet of old newspaper and tied up with a bit of twine. The servant said: A beggar boy came to the door. He was asking for you. I tried to chase him away. He wouldn’t leave until I took this. He insisted there was something in it that belonged to you. Danny opened the parcel. In it he found the string of turquoise beads the wild child had worn round his neck. He went back to the lake many times. In autumn, he joined a new school. He never saw the wild child again.
Danny and Nusra said goodbye at the bus stop in December sleet.
The Needlewoman’s Calendar
Husnara said: ‘Mistress, colours for the rainy season: red, orange, pomegranate-blossom, peach-blossom, melon colour, rice-green, maroon; and for the winter: marigold colour, yellow ochre, crimson, grass green, dusky brown, purple, black, dark blue, rose colour, saffron, slate colour, light brown; and for the hot weather: light green, steel colour, campak-colour, cotton-flower colour, almond colour, camphor white, milk white, poppy-seed colour, falsa-colour, sandal wood colour, and bright red. And there are plenty of other colours beside these...’
Nazir Ahmad, from The Bride’s Mirror, 1869, translated by G. E. Ward, 1903
1
Tabinda was embroidering orange flowers on a bedspread for the trousseau of her youngest sister-in-law when suddenly she knew what she would do.
Thoughts had been ravelling and unravelling in her hands since she’d heard the news that her absent husband had come back from London with Charity Bunce, his landlady’s daughter. They were now in Rawalpindi, living many miles away from the shadow of his parents’ ire. In the family conference that had followed the arrival of his letter, her father-in-law informed her that she would, of course, stay on in the family home in Lahore, afforded all the privileges of the first and official wife, and when her husband visited once or twice a year he, too, would treat her as he should a first and treasured wife. She had begged to be sent home to her parents, at least for a while: but her mother-in-law couldn’t bear the thought of losing face, and forbade her to leave. But since Tabinda had heard the news she’d been a captive of corners, hiding her face from the light. Her heavy earrings weighed her down, and when she heard the jangling of the bracelets on her wrists she trembled.
She was sewing on the terrace, in the cool evening air, and with each stitch she reflected on her situation. Two boys were flying a kite from the roof of the house next door. On the watchman’s radio, a woman sang, in a deep sweet voice, of a maiden weaving garlands while she waited for her beloved: I’ll wear black and won’t take a comb to my hair till I hear the sound of your returning footsteps, I’ll cling to your feet when you enter my garden and implore you not to leave. But Tabinda hadn’t been waiting for her husband with rapture of this kind, only a faint fear: she had never known rapture at all. She’d felt only despair when they dressed her in red, braided her hair and covered her face with flowers on her wedding day and then put her in the palanquin – actually a Bentley, festooned with flowers for the occasion – that took her to her bridegroom’s home. Despair had faded to resignation when, day after day, she’d sit alone with her needle and night after night submit to his needs in the marital bed. Her husband Suhayl was a distant relation she’d always disliked: but his mother, her mother’s cousin and ‘sister by affection’, had chosen her because she was a simple, well-trained girl of impeccable Shaikh lineage, whose family traced descent from a saint. She was the most likely candidate to give the family the male heir they required before Suhayl left to continue his legal studies abroad. But Suhayl went back to England after seven weeks. She knew a little later she was carrying his child. She longed for her mother but stayed on in the family mansion with its many rooms and leafy garden. They watched her, cossetted her, fed her fruit and nuts and milky sweets until, in blood and anguish, she gave birth to the daughter they didn’t want. Their disappointment was evident. But never mind, they said, she was young and so was her husband – he’d be back in three years, then there’d be time. But soon the unwelcomed girl child, whom she’d given the name of Nasreen, awakened a love within her as fierce as a swarm of honey bees. Her in-laws had soon become aware of her prowess with the needle and between the moments she spent with her child, or in prayer, and the many spare hours in which she’d sew anything that was required in the house, the months and then the years had gone by, and if there was no bliss in this home so far from her own there was at least, for a girl who’d come from a needy family, the semblance of tranquillity.
If she’d been afraid of Suhayl’s return, she was even more afraid of staying on in this house without him now. Since she’d heard he had a new wife she’d been thinking of an old, old story.
A prince lay in an enchanted garden with needles covering him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. A banished princess came upon him and set herself the task of removing the needles one by one. But when only the needles of his eyes remained she left him sleeping and went to the river to bathe. When she returned she found the last of the needles in the hand of her servant woman who claimed to be the prince’s true bride.
And Charity, plump-cheeked and blonde, whose photograph Tabinda had once found in the pocket of a jacket Suhayl left behind, was the one who had removed the last of the needles from Tabinda’s husband’s eyes. Contrary to what the proverb derived from the story implied, removing needles from such sensitive tissue was a painstaking task: didn’t Charity, then, deserve the prize – for who, in the circumstances, was the true bride? And had Suhayl ever been much more to Tabinda than a stranger? Let Charity keep him, Tabinda decided. The needle in her hand, which she hadn’t extracted from any part of her husband’s being, would be her means of future living.
2
Tabinda had been planning her escape. She gathered a few – only a few – of the jewels she’d been given by her in-laws, which she felt she deserved in lieu of the alimony she was unlikely to receive, and tied them up in a square of brightly-chequered silk. She dressed up her daughter, pulled on her own white burqa over the light clothes she was wearing, and left a message for her mother-in-law, who was downstairs playing cards, saying she was going out to the family jewellers’ with a broken string of pearls and an earring to repair. She sent the gatekeeper to fetch a tonga to take her to the centre of town.
The jeweller she visited, who was used to the women of her family coming to him to buy and not to sell, was astonished when she sold him two heavy gold bracelets and a gem-encrusted wedding ring for only a little more than the price of a train ticket from Lahore to Karachi. If her mother-in-law followed her trail and wanted to retrieve the lost jewels, the jeweller, she thought, could always sell them back to her.
To save money, she travelled third class. There were only women in the compartment, and most of them, like her, wore the veil in public spaces. But she was
aware that, for the first time ever, she was out in the world, alone, unprotected. She held little Nasreen close to her all the way. The child was often hungry, and she bought some snacks to allay her hunger – chickpeas, potatoes, fried bread and, for herself, milky tea.
After a journey of a day and a night, she arrived at Karachi’s cavernous and chaotic station. She left her burqa behind on the seat of the compartment she was vacating, in a pile of greying white. She took Nasreen’s hands and walked out into the city. Her thin lilac dopatta was hardly large enough to cover her head and shoulders, and her satin clothes clung to her limbs in the heat. She draped the dopatta over her bosom, pulling one end over the crown of her head. She would never cover her face again.
If the passage from Lahore was frightening, the journey through Karachi in a rickshaw with the sea breeze grazing her bare cheek was worse. But it was exhilarating as well. She remembered with affection the little house in Lalukhet which she’d seen only once when she went home to have her baby there, with its lime-daubed walls and the uncarpeted floor which her mother washed every morning with bucket upon bucket of precious water so that it was rarely dry and the rooms remained cool. It was, though small, better than the shack she’d lived in for a few months when her family first reached Karachi, which was the home she’d been sent away from as a bride. She thought of her father, who was always reading the Quran in search of answers to the knotty problems of the day, and of her mother whose greatest pleasure and luxury was the acquisition of white sugar on her ration card to cook halwas of carrot and pumpkin and semolina. She thought of her brother who, as a youth, sat up night after night in a public garden to study for his Munshi Fazil exam in the electric glow of a streetlamp so that he didn’t deplete their house’s supply of light, and of her sister-in-law whose feet, the last time she saw her, were heavy with the child she was carrying, the little boy Tabinda had never seen, who must be three years old now. She passed the swamps where black buffaloes lolled, and little settlements of shacks and leantos, and then she saw and and smelt the dusty squares and lanes of Lalukhet. She heard the muezzin’s voice fill the neighbourhood: she’d reach home in time for the evening prayer.
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