by Nadeem Aslam
‘In all the years I’ve known her she’s never missed Mass,’ Zébun said, drawing the ivory comb through the curtain of grey and silver hair. The stole covered the other half of the head. She held up before her a small mirror, its bright reflection dancing on the wall behind her. The circular spot darted up towards the ceiling as she set down the mirror on the counterpane to receive the money.
Mr Kasmi had got to know Zébun soon after his arrival in the town, where he had come to make inquiries about a teaching post that Yusuf Rao – his friend since university – had written to him about. He had spent the first few days as a guest at the lawyer’s house, and after securing the job – he would be teaching all subjects – had asked around for a room he could rent. He was told about Zébun and the upstairs room she had recently added to her house. Mr Kasmi still remembered clearly that one of the first things he had noticed about Zébun was her great delicate beauty. Other more subtle characteristics – patterns that needed the passage of time to make themselves clear – had been revealed over the twenty-four years that had elapsed since then. An irreverent combination of strict religious practice and blind superstition gave structure to her day. She prayed five times daily, regularly recited the Qur’an, said her rosary and never failed to observe Ramadan. And she never threw away her old clothes, clippings from her nails, or her loose hair.
‘You must ask Alice to put up the mosquito nettings tomorrow,’ Mr Kasmi said, following Zébun with his gaze to the other side of the room.
She placed the money in a small trinket box carved with writhing vines and returned across the room. ‘I too heard mosquitoes last night,’ she said, taking up the mirror and comb once more. ‘I’ll get her to buy some fumigation coils from the bazaar.’
Mr Kasmi looked across the courtyard at the front door. ‘I don’t think she’s coming.’
‘She’ll be here. A talkative person is always late. She must have stopped by to chat at someone’s house.’
Mr Kasmi smiled at the exquisite logic of the comment. He nodded. ‘By now the whole town should be humming with the news about the nightwatchman.’
‘Gul-kalam?’ Zébun said with a puzzled look. ‘What about him?’ She was carefully removing the fine silvery strands caught between the ivory teeth and winding them around her finger until the tangle resembled a miniature bird’s nest.
While Mr Kasmi spoke – repeating what he had heard last night from various people on his way back from Mujeeb Ali’s house – Zébun, listening intently, pulled the comb through her hair, giving tentative tugs whenever the flow was hampered by twists and knots.
‘No wonder they were able to walk in like relatives,’ she said when Mr Kasmi finished. ‘They’d arranged everything so carefully beforehand.’ And she asked: ‘Why did he do it?’
Mr Kasmi gave a shrug. ‘The obvious reason, sister-ji.’
She nodded. ‘Riddles appear so simple once you know the answer.’ During the last elections Gul-kalam’s brother’s wrists were broken on Judge Anwar’s orders because he had painted a banner for the opposition. The bone setter’s treatment had gone wrong and both arms had shrivelled right up to the elbows. The crippled man who had once made a living by painting houses and caravans and carts was now dependent on his brother. Zébun said, ‘These people from the mountains never forget an insult.’ She collected the tiny hummingbirds’ nests from her lap and stood up. ‘To us outsiders, all that seems such a long time ago.’
‘You’re right, sister-ji. It does seem a long time ago,’ Mr Kasmi said from the door. ‘But don’t forget that that man was reminded of it every day.’
Reaching under the bed Zébun had pulled out a small cardboard box and was placing her hair inside. Once full, the box would be buried in the flowerbeds. She pushed the container back under the bed and stood up.
Mr Kasmi was watching. ‘You’re still doing that, sister-ji?’
Zébun gave a nod, her eyes downturned. ‘You yourself have just finished telling me what hate can do to people, brother-ji,’ she said. ‘I know they’ll use my hair to cast a spell on me, do something evil to me.’
After Mr Kasmi had gone, Zébun performed her ablutions and took down the Qur’an from the top of the wardrobe. ‘Poor man,’ she said under her breath. With a clarity that defied the passing of more than three decades, the image of Gul-kalam as a twenty-year-old, leaning against the doorframe of her bedroom, remained with Zébun. She was alone in the house: the man who had had the house built – intended as a family home – had abandoned her two days before they were to be married, having decided at the last minute that the honour of his family, stretching back decades, was more important to him than his love for her, a woman of the hira mundi, the diamond market. She had turned around from making the bed and seen Gul-kalam – then unknown to her – at the entrance to the bedroom with his gaze fixed on her. The young man was not under the influence of hemp as she first thought but had drunk half a bottle of turpentine. For the next twenty minutes both of them had stared at each other across a distance of two yards without moving from their positions. The silence rang in Zébun’s ears like the noise of cicadas. The room became saturated with the metallic smell of turpentine. Then he turned around and – swaying and gently stumbling – crossed the courtyard into the street.
Zébun shook her head to dispel the memory and opened the holy book.
Rain seeped in, in regular pulses, through a crack in the roof and grew into triangular drops. Azhar had been watching the ceiling for several minutes, half asleep; now fully awake he yawned and sat up. In another cot set by the opposite wall a policeman was asleep in his underwear, using his clumsily folded uniform as a pillow. His brass whistle and beret lay beside him.
Azhar rested his feet heavily on the floor and looked around. The skull-faced barracks was a relatively recent building. Before it opened there had been no police in the town. Minor fights and scuffles were resolved by the intervention of elders; and the consequences – always bloody – of vendettas and feuds over matters of honour or land were dealt with in the cities. Politics itself had not touched the town fully until a few years before. There had been no adult franchise until the beginning of the last decade; and the five months of unrest that had forced the first ever ruler to resign had been confined to the cities. It was only when the country’s third chief martial-law administrator sentenced to death his immediate predecessor – the only democratically elected prime minister since independence – that police stations began appearing everywhere, even in the remotest towns and villages.
Azhar opened the door by the sleeping man’s feet and went into the lock-up. A damp, dark silence seemed trapped inside this part of the building. The cells received no natural light and a dense smell – of urine and of the monsoon – hung in the air. One cell was bare except for a bucket lying on its side and a length of iron cable undone into asterisks at either end. In the centre of the other cell Gul-kalam lay hunched, his knees drawn up to his chest. His head hair and moustache had been shaved off. Azhar stared at him through the bars, trying to locate the familiar face behind the newly transformed features. Gul-kalam had bled from his ears and nose and both corners of the mouth. An electric wire hung from the ceiling but there was no bulb. Azhar yawned deeply and, shooing away the flies, came back into the office.
‘Where are the others?’ Azhar kicked the leg of the cot.
The policeman awoke. The inspector had gone home during a let-up in the rain, and the other sergeant on duty was at the tea-stall across the street, eating breakfast.
‘Were you working on him last night?’ Azhar gestured towards the door to Gul-kalam.
The man nodded. He yawned and shook his hairy shoulders, dispelling sleep.
‘You should learn to be less noisy,’ said Azhar. ‘I couldn’t sleep for all that noise.’
The man smiled, revealing a gold incisor. ‘Lying is a sin, deputy-sahib. You were snoring like a whirlwind. I could hear you clearly through the walls.’
Azhar went outsid
e. The rain was stopping. There were tiny water lizards – slimy, sinewy or, depending on the light, glimmering and prismatic – in the mud. Standing with his legs wide apart Azhar urinated on to the tyre of the police van. It was just past midday and between the arches of the courthouse typists were setting up their tables and chairs, machines, letter-writing manuals and almanacs. Yusuf Rao was coming along the street to open his office, his game leg lending a graceful rhythm to his hurried trot. Behind the courthouse, above the roofs and the tops of trees, were the minarets of the two mosques holding up the drizzly sky.
‘I don’t snore,’ Azhar said when he came back inside. He walked around the desk and settled in the swivel chair. Behind him there were three rifles and cartridge belts studded with rounds. The old desk sagged creakily to one side, legs diagonal, like a puppy resisting being dragged along by schoolboys.
‘Nobody believes they snore,’ the policeman said, smiling. He was still in his shorts and vest.
The second policeman came in bearing a tray with an earthenware teapot and a small heavy cup. There was a plate of kulchas and a boiled egg. He cleared a space on the desk by pushing aside the telephone and the folders and files, and set the breakfast before Azhar.
‘So,’ Azhar said to the policeman who had brought in the tray, ‘what happened after I’d gone to sleep? What else did he say?’
The man shrugged. ‘I too left soon after you did, deputy-sahib. I couldn’t watch what these cannibals were doing.’
The remark was met with a smile from the policeman with the gold tooth. Still half dressed he was on his hands and knees mopping up water with an inadequately small piece of cloth. ‘He has no balls,’ he said over his shoulder.
The other policeman’s lips were set in a half-smile. He shrugged: ‘I’m a poet at heart really.’ And he unbuttoned the top of his shirt and briskly revealed the left side of the chest. Scrawled across the dark skin, just above the nipple, was Wamaq Saleem’s signature.
‘When did you meet him?’ Azhar asked, dislodging a crumb from between his teeth with his tongue.
‘Years ago in Lahore. I was on duty the night he was transferred from the fort in Lahore to the Montgomery prison. In the van I asked him to autograph my heart and had it tattooed in the morning.’
Outside, the inspector jumped under the shelter of the portico and, turning around, shouted into the drizzle, ‘Don’t swing your hips, son. Walk like a man.’
The small boy at whom the remark was directed looked over his shoulder with frightened eyes, then hurriedly disappeared into a small side street behind the courthouse.
The inspector was shaking his head as he entered the office. ‘He turned into a lane,’ he said as though to himself, loudly. ‘Lanes are for women. Men keep to the open streets and roads.’ He had changed into a clean uniform and his raincoat was draped over his head. He hung it behind the door and carried a stool to his desk. He looked at Azhar and asked, ‘What’s the plan for today?’
Azhar poured himself another cup of tea and broke the second kulcha in half; sesame seeds from the first floated on the surface of the tea. ‘We’ve informed all the stations. I’ll go up to Arrubakook today.’
‘What about Gul-kalam?’
‘Get him cleaned up,’ Azhar said, standing up. He dropped the piece of kulcha into the tea. ‘I’m going home to change. I’ll come back and sign a court order and take him with me. He’ll have to be signed over to them.’
He had reached the outside steps when the inspector shouted after him, ‘Maulana Hafeez has been asking around for you, DC.’
One of the policemen came running to the door but Azhar nodded without turning around; he raised a hand to indicate that he had heard, and said he would call at the mosque before going home.
The police inspector smiled at the two policemen. ‘Any guesses, boys, as to why the maulana wants to see him?’
His subordinates grinned.
Suraya opened the casements on to the courtyard. There was no rain and a breeze stirred the few gaunt leaves left on the arbour revealing their paler undersides. The clouds had disappeared for the first time in two days and the whole house was in sunshine.
Back on the cot Suraya raised the needle to eye level and fed the licked end of the thread through the eye. She tied a knot at the other end and, after leaning towards the window to make sure which was the right side of the fabric, began to make careful stitches. Maulana Hafeez – sitting across from her, rotating the rosary – raised his eyes at the sound of footsteps. It was Kalsum.
She was bringing in a large brass plate on which were arranged, on a lining of hairy fig leaves, dark figs and some bruised apricots. She set the plate before Maulana Hafeez and joined her sister on the cot.
‘From the trees in the courtyard?’ Maulana Hafeez smiled. He reached into his pocket, his eyes hard with anxiety, and felt the compact roll of the three hundred-rupee notes. Hesitantly, he brought the money out and offered it to Kalsum. Suraya interrupted her sewing, needle raised in the air.
Kalsum looked down at her hands and said evenly, ‘He would have been twenty-one this December.’
Maulana Hafeez had relaxed his shoulders. ‘It’s not up to us to question the Almighty’s will.’
Kalsum pulled the edge of her stole down to her eyes. She turned to her sister and said, ‘I knew something terrible was about to happen. The birds had gone quiet in their cages just as they do before a thunderstorm. And then I heard a flutter of Izrael’s wings.’
Suraya made a clip in the fabric with the tip of the scissors. ‘The lawyer seems convinced that it was Mujeeb Ali who put our boy up to that crime and then afterwards—’
Maulana Hafeez raised his hands in protest. ‘There’s no evidence for that. I’ve talked to Yusuf Rao about this before but it seems I’ll just have to go and see him again.’
‘No,’ Kalsum shook her head. ‘Mujeeb Ali is a good man. He still gives me this money. He knows that my boy was loyal to him and his family. He proved his loyalty by expressing his anger towards the family’s political opponent.’
Suraya completed a stitch and lifted her narrow face towards her sister. ‘I was only telling you what that political opponent himself said to me the other day.’
Kalsum continued shaking her head. ‘I have never believed in rumours. When the boy’s father-ji died everyone said that Dr Sharif had poisoned him, because his business was bad for the doctor’s practice. Do you remember, Maulana-ji?’
Maulana Hafeez nodded.
‘But I was with him when he died. It was a glistening blue viper that came out from under the grass. I saw it myself.’
Maulana Hafeez remembered Kalsum’s husband, a herbalist. He was a short, handsome man who had had an easy laugh and whose habit of always wearing white clothes Maulana Hafeez had taken to be a sign of piety and a becalmed spirit. There is, he would say, for every ailment a plant which you must either take or abstain from. He had planted trees and creepers around their courtyard, along with pots of herbs and ferocious agaves. The first three months of every year would be lush with flowers; and during June there would be fruit by the bucketful from a Kashmiri cherry tree. It was he who had proposed the remedy of loquat leaves to Judge Anwar, and once a year he would send a large vat of loquat vinegar to the judge’s house.
Maulana Hafeez stood up. ‘It’ll be Zuhr soon. I’d better be on my way.’
‘You must take these with you, Maulana-ji.’ Kalsum pointed at the fruit and got to her feet. ‘Apricots are good for the bladder. I’ll give you some honey, too.’
Maulana Hafeez smiled. ‘One year, I remember, the dhrake tree produced so much pollen that the honey was green.’
Kalsum had taken the plate into the kitchen. ‘The bees never really came back after they put up the electricity pole by the trees. They must be afraid of electricity,’ she said from the kitchen. ‘Anyway, Maulana-ji, there isn’t anyone around these days to milk the hives.’
A smile of reminiscence came to Maulana Hafeez’s face. ‘I
helped with the milking one year. And during the next ablutions, when I ran my fingers through my beard, I found two bees there. I suppose it proves that it pays to say your prayers five times a day.’ He had sat down. He looked towards the kitchen and said, ‘Your husband, may he rest in peace, loved his bees.’ And to Suraya: ‘He loved this town. He settled here against his brothers’ wishes. His brothers wanted him to buy land. Why waste money on bricks, they said, when you have a family house in your own village?’
‘I know, Maulana-sahib.’ Suraya nodded from the cot. ‘They’re a backward lot. When Kalsum didn’t conceive during the first year of marriage her mother-in-law wanted her to drink a eunuch’s urine and do Allah knows what shameless things with someone’s first-born son’s faeces.’
Maulana Hafeez murmured, ‘Superstition is sin.’
They remained quiet for a while. Maulana Hafeez leaned back into his chair. He made to reach into his pocket for the rosary but stopped and asked Suraya, ‘When are you returning to Canada?’
Suraya answered without looking up, ‘I’m not sure whether I’m going back, Maulana-sahib.’
Maulana Hafeez brightened. ‘So, you’re thinking of coming back to your own country. And your husband and son? When will they come?’
Suraya shook her head. ‘Maulana-sahib, I’ve left my husband.’
Maulana Hafeez considered the reply for a few moments. ‘You’ve left your husband?’
Suraya remained silent.
The cleric said quietly, ‘But you’ve left a family there.’
‘I left a family here when I went.’
‘But this is unheard of,’ Maulana Hafeez said through a little laugh. ‘A wife’s place is with her husband.’
‘Even if he marries again?’
Maulana Hafeez straightened, but Suraya had not finished speaking. ‘He says a Muslim man is allowed four wives. He wants a Canadian divorce from me so he can marry again in that country. He says in the eyes of Allah we’d still be married since our Muslim marriage is not affected by the Canadian divorce.’