Omar’s part of the wedding contract stipulated, on his insistence, a meher of twenty-five thousand rupees. Tabinda’s one condition for marriage was that Omar should move with her into the rooms she’d furnished in her rented house. Nasreen, until she chose to do so, was never to leave them. Yes, and Omar was never, ever to touch strong drink.
10
Slowly, subtly, life was changing. Even though most of the work was done by her staff, Tabinda still did the fine embroidery for which she was much in demand and rarely put her needle down before the evening’s prayer. Omar usually came home even later, an hour or two after sunset. But now in the evenings, after Nasreen had gone to bed, they would sit together in a part of the long corridor Tabinda called the gallery, where she’d arranged chairs, a divan and a low table for their leisure moments. Tabinda, who’d always been unused to talking, listened to Omar’s stories of the day, particularly about Ayub’s government, of which she had no particular opinion and he didn’t approve. Tabinda learned new terms: ‘guided democracy’, ‘free speech’, ‘the abrogation of civil liberties’. Omar read out the editorials he was drafting for the following day, in which he took on everything from the adulteration of milk and the price of petrol to the lack of proper schools in the deprived section of the city and the resulting illiteracy of children forced to work at ridiculously early ages. Tabinda also found herself talking: at first about accounts and Nasreen’s future, and then about matters of faith, which Omar, like she did, saw in the same light as the need for food and housing, since both were realities of day-to-day living.
Sometimes Omar’s friends, poets and painters and journalists, came over on a Saturday evening. They sat and talked, among bolts of cloth and unfinished garments, drinking numerous cups of tea and smoking cigarettes until day broke. Omar asked Tabinda to join them and sometimes she stayed to listen to a new poem. But mostly she smiled, greeted them and slipped away.
Once or twice, Omar had taken Tabinda to an all-night performance by a troupe of renowned qawwals who’d also migrated from the Deccan. And she enjoyed their singing so much she decided, I’ll ask Omar to invite them to perform at our house, one day.
At night, Tabinda’s dreams made mischief: now she waded knee-deep in a ditch filled with rainwater, now she was slapping and moulding wet mud into cakes. She was up a tree eating a raw, stolen guava, or squatting in the grass with a slice of water melon in her hand, its illicit red juice dripping off her chin. She’d open her eyes in the mellow dark and Omar’s head beside her on the pillow was comfortable. And – she dared to admit it – comforting.
11
It rarely rained in Karachi, but this year there was lightning and water came down in sheets of silver needles. In the rain-filled ditches buffaloes reclined, still as tombstones. The streets were flooded and the courtyard of Tabinda’s house had become a pond. Tabinda, after forbidding Nasreen to play in the first downpour’s vapours, actually found herself enjoying the rivulets lapping at her bared ankles when she ran out to pull Nasreen indoors.
The rain hadn’t paused for breath that Friday afternoon. It was drumming alien songs on tin roofs, turning flower beds into pools, ditches into boating basins. Tabinda heard the unlocked door swing open and thought it was Omar coming home early after prayers as he often did on a Friday. But instead she saw two uniformed policemen stride into the house. They ransacked the room in which she and Omar slept, turned the papers on Omar’s desk upside down and flung papers on the rug from his drawers, but they didn’t find what they seemed to be searching for, and they left in a rage, without answering Tabinda’s stammering questions.
Omar didn’t come home that night. And Tabinda, for the first time since their wedding, was afraid. In the ten months they’d been married she hadn’t spent a single night alone and now doors and windows banged open and shut all night in the storm wind. Tabinda thought of taking Nasreen, whom she’d told that Omar was away on work, to Bahadurabad, but she didn’t want to frighten Omar’s parents. And she told Shamim, too, to pretend that Omar was away on a job in Sukkur if they asked for him.
Her feet were heavy now, very heavy. Nasreen had been a light burden, but with this coming one she finally understood the meaning of the expression. She had almost no appetite and still, at the oddest moments, she’d throw up the little she did eat.
Omar hadn’t come home for twenty-nine days and Tabinda didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t call the police because she knew they were involved. Ashraf, the editor of the newspaper Omar worked for, had come to tell her how policemen had walked in and frog-marched Omar away from the office. There’d been a crowd outside the American embassy, and a few stones pitched at a minister’s passing car, and both events linked to Omar’s Op Eds, and then after Friday prayers one day Omar was spotted in a mob of protesters... Ashraf and his friends were working on Omar’s release.
– I’ll stand bail if required, Tabinda told Ashraf in the second week, when, head covered with customary grey shawl, she went to meet him in the office near Kutchery Road. Even to the extent of mortgaging my assets.
– That may not be necessary, was Ashraf’s response. But a wad of crisp notes in the right hand...
Tabinda vowed that if Omar came home safely – when Omar came home safely – she’d feed the poor two Fridays a month. No, every Friday. In the evenings she kept her hands busy by working on the bedspread she worked on in leisure moments. Recently, since Omar and she had made a home, she hadn’t had time for such painstaking stitches.
But she worked every rain-coloured day with red and green and gold threads till her fingers were tired and her eyes watered behind their spectacles. She’d cover their bed with it on the day Omar came home. She brightened the wings of the birds and the petals of the flowers. On the borders of the bedspread she embroidered Omar’s verse about the winds of winter and the jasmine in spring. But I should, she thought as she stitched, make something to shield us from the winter wind. Decembers can bring a chill blast from the desert.
Nasreen tugged at her sleeve and said, Someone is calling your name. Tabinda, thinking it was only the storm, unlatched the door for a rain-drenched Omar. Outside, the wind was whipping leaves off trees. Omar’s head was shaved, he had an arm in a sling, and a purpling bruise on his cheekbone. His smile revealed a broken tooth. He’d been away thirty nights.
When he’d bathed and changed into clean clothes, Omar slumped down in his usual chair with a cup of tea on the low table in front of him and a cigarette in his hand.
– They hauled me off to Hyderabad jail, he said to the percussion of the rain on the window. They interrogated me for hours every day. What processions had I walked with, which demonstrations had I been part of, who did I know, did I receive publications from the Russian embassy or read communist propaganda, did I believe in the word of God, why did I write such fiery editorials and what did I mean by the constant references to winter and spring in my poems – do I intend a change of government or regime? In spite of the slaps and kicks they gave me, I said: I fast and I pray like the next good man and as a Muslim I know I have the God-given right to protest against unjust rulers. But I believe in solving problems with pen and ink, not sticks and stones. My poems, if you bother to read them properly, are always and only about love. By the way, I haven’t been married for long. That’s a good subject for my poems and marriage takes up a lot of a man’s time, it keeps him off the streets. That bit of cheek earned me the punch in the mouth that broke my tooth.
They’d let him go home, with a stern warning not to write any more incendiary articles or poems. He’d had to ride rough to get home, with the few rupees he had left in his pocket. He thought that it was someone at his paper, who knew someone high up in the police, who’d got him off so easily this time. Tabinda didn’t mention her meeting with Ashraf.
That night, Tabinda covered their bed with the bright silk spread she’d just finished embroidering.
– Touba, the tree in the paradise garden, Omar said when he saw it. I
always said you were a painter with your needle.
Later, when he lay down again after switching off the light, Tabinda told Omar:
– If you want to leave your job that’s fine, you can stay at home and write poetry till the dust settles. Or you can start your bookshop nearby.
Then she said she was carrying his child, but she hadn’t told anyone yet, not even Shamim. Omar said he hoped it would be a little girl who was as pretty as Nasreen and her mother. But a boy would be welcome too. The baby was coming in April and, though she has never mentioned her wish to him, Omar said: I’ll call the Hyderabadi qawwals to perform here when the child arrives. Then he slid down in the darkness and put his head against Tabinda’s belly, to listen for heartbeats, he said. She laughed out long and loud for the first time in years and tousled his hair.
– Don’t be such a fool, she said. It’s still too early for the baby to make a sound.
12
Storms had washed away the shacks and lean-tos that people who’d once been refugees in the settlements on the city’s edges had been living in for more than a decade. Omar, though he’d sworn to his editor and his parents and his wife that he’d keep the flames out of his verses and his prose for a while, was petitioning the municipality to reconstruct the settlements with mortar and bricks. But nothing was happening in spite of promises and you could see people on the way to Lalukhet scurrying about like ants with baskets on their heads or backs. They were rebuilding their fallen homes.
Shamim still brought Nasreen home from school every day, and lingered for a cup of tea amd a chat before Omar came in. Omar insisted that Nasreen, obsessed as she was these days with insects, lizards and frogs, would grow up to become some kind of scientist. Shamim, in preparation, had taken the child’s education in hand. Since she learnt Tabinda was going to give her a brother or sister Nasreen had started to call Omar ‘Abbu’. Her logic told her that her brother or sister’s father had to be her father too.
Omar had seen an empty stall in the market they called the Nursery just nearby, in which he wanted to open his bookshop. He’d also found a car, a battered Opel, that a garage-owning friend of his wanted to be rid of and was selling cheaply. He’d wanted to buy it with the money his father had given him when he married, but Tabinda insisted on sharing the cost, as she could now travel in ease to Lalukhet.
Green velvet spread over the city of dust and rocks after the five rainy weeks. People wanted gardens: everywhere they were planting red and yellow flowers, and growing trees. Even the poorer quarters were festooned with bright bougainvillea. Tabinda, feasting her eyes on the gulmohar and the green branches in which parrots and mynahs nested, would try to recollect the name of that poet who’d once said that paradise was right here, in this world.
On weekends Tabinda and Omar would drive to the leafy suburb where his parents lived with Shamim, who hadn’t yet any plans to marry. Or they’d visit her family in the dustier part of the city. Tabinda’s parents, now that their children were settled, were planning, after all these years, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Sometimes Tabinda and Omar would go for hot chocolate and cakes to the Portuguese cafe near the cathedral in Sadar, or they’d eat biryani in the car near Jinnah’s tomb and he’d tease her for putting morsels in her mouth with a spoon instead of a fork.
–But I’ve always eaten rice with my fingers, Tabinda would say with a laugh.
And sometimes Omar picked up their relatives and drove them over to P.E.C.H.S., where they ate kebabs that Omar, on his way home from his office, had bought at Bundoo Khan’s on Bunder Road. I’ve forgotten how to cook, Tabinda would say. And Omar – well, Omar in the kitchen was a laughing matter.
Sometimes on the drive back at night from Lalukhet to P.E.C.H.S. they’d fall silent, and Tabinda’s eyes would follow the moon through the open window, the late breeze on her face reminding her of the day she travelled all the way back to Karachi from Lahore, when she’d been so afraid even though she was all wrapped up in her stifling white burqa, and after that she’d hardly stepped out anywhere for pleasure, and the months turned into years and lurched across the sandy pages of the earth like a line of twelve great camels on its way to the sea, till that March afternoon had brought her riding on its back to the place where the light skimmed the turquoise waves, that place on the shore of the world where she’d looked out from under her eyelashes and the steady gaze that met her own was bright with time, and even before he said a word she knew Omar was the one who’d brought the fiery seasons she’d waited for to rouse her from her dreamless winter, this man who didn’t need her helping hand to pluck the needles from his body or his eyes, because if he’d ever had them there he’d shed them, one by one, and he’d been wide awake for a long, long time.
Acknowledgements
Two of these stories have been published before: ‘Cactus Town’ in Tank, and ‘The City of Longing’ in The Virago Book of Erotic Myths and Legends. I’d like to thank Malu Halassa of Tank, and my sister Shahrukh Husain Shackle for commissioning a story which made me turn to Nizami’s Haft Paikar for inspiration.
Thanks also to:
Peter Middleton and Sujala Singh (at the University of Southampton where I began writing these stories while I held a Southern Arts Writing Fellowship in Spring 2000), for their encouragement and continuing interest. At Saqi Books, Mai Ghoussoub for her involvement with these stories from start to finish, some tough criticisms and heated discussion, and even more for a decade of friendship; Sarah al-Hamad for inspiring me throughout; and André and Salwa Gaspard for their initiative and flair. At home, my mother, for her encyclopedic knowledge of matters cultural, linguistic and religious, and my nephew Roman, who read and approved of the first few stories. Among my friends, Hanan and Kamila, and above all Mimi Khalvati, whose unstinting affection and belief in me have made writing these stories a greater pleasure as I always anticipate her laughter and frowns as she reads by her window in Evering Road. Last but not least Uma Waide, my lifelong friend, for reading the manuscript with a diligent and critical eye.
For those who care about such things, the excerpts from Urdu are translated by me except where mentioned. The stories are arranged in the order of their writing, but can be read in any sequence the reader chooses.
Aamer Hussein
London 28 April 2002
Praise for This Other Salt
‘Hussein’s stories are about individuals and their countries of exile, where the world itself is seen as a place of transit . . . A moving and highly aesthetic expression of a new sensibility.’
Amit Chaudhuri
‘Whether he is writing of Java, Pakistan or London, his writing, uniquely his own, many-layered and full of references and allusions, imbued with the music of the Gamelan and Persian and Urdu poetry, crosses continents.’
Shena McKay
‘A canvas of memories, divided by borders, political and human ... they evoke the moods of a past left behind, a restlessness with the present, and the displacement caused by migration in the post-colonial world.’
Literary Review
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‘The symbolic and intellectual complexity of Hussein’s collection is undeniable.’
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‘Each story, remarkable in both expansiveness and precision, sings with heartbreak, intelligence and elegy. A stunning collection.’
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‘A book that I would keep for a rainy day, that seems to demand the concentrated attention to reading that a heavy monsoon shower can bring in its wake.’
Biblio
‘Hussein is perfectly at home with the multi-cultural realities of our metropolitan life. His linguistic resources, his lucid, luminous prose, make the act of cultural negotiati
on both a discovery and a revelation.’
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Also by the Author
This Other Salt
Hoops of Fire
Mirror to the Sun
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 86356 325 2
eISBN: 978-0-86356-855-8
© Aamer Hussein, 2002
First published 2002 by Saqi Books
The right of Aamer Hussein to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988
Saqi Books
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London W2 5RH
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