‘Oh my God, these people!’ Mino waved dismissively at a couple nosing off to the bar after saying hello. ‘Did you see those two? Daddy-O and his little girl. You’d need dynamite to get him off her.’ Mino wore an embroidered cashmere shawl draped over his well-fleshed arm, his look finished with an extravagant diamond ear stud – a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear, he said when asked about it.
Leila, or Lily as her friends called her, sat perched on a stool, her slender legs held in her bare arms, chin on her knees, looking out at the water. Not yet thirty, she was unusually pretty, her hands and feet and small upturned nose – her high cheekbones, her lips – sharply defined and yet giving the impression of softness, as if she had been trimmed out of soft brown velvet with fine scissors. Her hair, worn long and with bangs, and skin that turned reddish brown in the sun, gave her a sleek appearance, the whole effect being that of a fastidious cat, tail wrapped around herself in repose, independent.
‘Seriously, Mino,’ she said, flicking the stub of a cigarette far out into the water. ‘You’ve got some real prizes on your guest list. She’s about sixteen, and he looks like he breaks kneecaps for a living.’
‘Oh, chill out. It’s not like I invited them, he’s probably some film producer, and she’s about to be a star. Let the kid enjoy herself.’
‘That’s your solution to everything, my love. You always tell me to chill out.’
The sun had just gone down over the distant line of the dam, leaving a pink band on the horizon. Light flashed off the waves blown up by a slight breeze, chip chip chip, silver. The light seemed familiar – when had she been here before, on a night like this? – and then it came to her, a memory of an entirely different place. As a girl her father took her to the mountains once, to the Kaghan, where he fished for trout with a retired English brigadier, an old colonial. She remembered the dry spice of the pine trees in the air, the valley falling vertically down to the river, and the shallow curve of a stream, an eddy, with trout rising at dusk, pockmarks on the still water.
That winter she had been in London for a wedding, not a close friend but the wedding of the season, the daughter of some bureaucrat who made a crooked pile on the privat ization of a steel mill and couldn’t return to Pakistan because of cases against him in the National Accountability Bureau – ‘nabbed,’ as they called it, almost a mark of distinction. Late at night after the mehndi, riding through London in someone’s hilarious car, she’d been in a bad accident. She woke at dawn in the hospital, severely concussed, and watched a rare snowfall from her bed, a thin drift on the sill, perceptibly gathering as the large flakes settled out of the gray first light and pressed against the window. She couldn’t remember anything at first, where she was, why she was there, sleeping all through the day, until it began to come back, but changed, the experiences of another person.
She had a dream. Flying alone in an airplane, high above the clouds through an ice blue sky, the wing caught fire, orange and flickering. Metal flew off in sheets, the machinery coming apart. A panel above her opened, crumpling back, throwing her out into the slipstream, and her parachute shook out like hair falling loose, streaming lines, then a canopy overhead. The plane spiraled away below her, until it became a speck and hit the ground with a burst of flame, as she drifted down alone through an enormous sky. She woke at dusk in the little hospital room, the snow still falling quietly outside as the sky grew dark in the window, so cold outside, so warm inside.
For the first time, painfully, Lily got out of bed and went over to the window, the ridiculous hospital gown not hiding her nakedness. A visitor had brought candles, and now she lit one and turned off the lights. It seemed to her that the jet falling away was her past, and that she had been forgiven, believing it with all the intensity of the dream, like the intensity and purity of love in a dream. She would forgive herself, for the wrongs she had done and the wrongs done to her, the pain she had caused her parents, who maintained the proprieties on her father’s Burma Shell pension, forgive herself for money she had thrown away, the men she had slept with, refusing intimacy, imagining there would be no cost. A few others blamed her, friends she had abandoned or guilelessly betrayed, friends thrown over, and acquaintances treated cruelly. She might not have survived the car accident. Only her barest self had gotten through, and for a while she absolutely believed that she had been freed.
She lay in the hospital bed at twilight after a day of snowfall and allowed a change to come over her, absolving herself.
That was two months ago. Since then she had given a total stranger a blow job after taking Ecstasy at a party – several years earlier a wave of Ecstasy swept through Islamabad, and still hadn’t crested – and had another time quite tenderly slept with an old lover, who was visiting from his new home in Mississippi, of all places. But she held on to a little bit of that cleansed self, for evenings when she stayed at home, though she had places to go, sitting in front of the fireplace in the cool of a winter night, looking into the glowing orange flames and seeing mountains and valleys, storms, horses, huge crowds of men, in the flame that burned her cheeks and face. She had slowly begun to turn away from her friends, looked at them, at their conversation, their jokes, from a slight distance.
Her parents left her alone, as she had so harshly taught them to, although she lived in a cottage built in the large garden behind their house. They had almost no money – worrying about electricity and gas, about the car breaking down, and kept only a cook and a bearer – but her father had bought this large plot in Islamabad in the 1960s, when they were to be had for nothing. Today worth eighty or ninety million rupees, on Margalla Avenue, the most fashionable place to live, this property allowed them to maintain a position in the world of their birth, one of the old feudal families from Lahore, but with the land all sold in the previous generation.
Now at the party, with a breeze off the lake gliding down the slope of the hills to the east, she rose and took her wrap. The ancient bartender, a retired servant from the regimental mess of Probyn’s Horse, who served at all the parties, and whose leathery glum face made him look as if he had been pickled in gin, poured her a glass of champagne without being asked, taken from the stock being kept for the inner circle.
‘For Madam.’
Presuming slightly, he added, ‘So many new people here, little people. They steal cell phones and cameras and make trouble.’
‘So I hear, Khan jee. Once upon a time we were the new ones.’ Taking the bottle that he had placed on the table, she poured a glass and handed it to him. ‘There, drink that to the way we used to be, old man.’
She walked up toward the swimming pool, which had been built on a headland away from the house, with views over the water and the lawns below. She could be alone there for a moment, to compose the face with which she would meet the evening. A few more glasses of champagne, and she’d be fine, she knew, would enjoy it, people, personalities looming into view and disappearing, characters – and then, dancing. Sitting on a chaise longue at the far end of the pool, she lit a cigarette. Below, in a pavilion by the bar, music played, not yet loud, Cesária E¨vora, the voice calling, the beginning.
She heard a footstep behind her, and a man emerged from the darkness of a verandah.
‘I’m sorry, do you have a match?’
She looked at his face, half visible in the blue shimmer cast by underwater spotlights. Plain dark suit, white shirt. Light-framed, thin lips and a fine long nose with a distinct hump, as if broken and improperly reset, the break offsetting the feminine lips.
‘Tell me that’s not a pickup line.’ She took a lighter from her little beaded handbag and passed it to him.
He smiled, the impression held back for a moment and then spreading across his face. ‘No, I actually needed it. You don’t remember, but we’ve met – at Bugoo Moono’s place. I’m Murad Talwan.’
‘Oh God, not Bugoo’s place. So you must be the son of Makhdoom Talwan. From Multan.’
‘His nephew. And from Muzaffargarh
. You were close.’
‘That’s not close at all.’
‘For a girl from Islamabad it is. I suppose the only time you’re aware of our famous Punjabi countryside is when you fly over it.’
She laughed, cocking her eyebrow. ‘And what do you know about me? Maybe my finest hours are spent giving polio drops to villagers’ babies.’
Looking out at the scene, the flickering lamps below, the lit DJ booth far down by the water, she asked, ‘So tell me, Mr. Murad Talwan, nephew of the great Makhdoom Talwan, friend of the less than great Bugoo Moono – what do you do when you’re not loitering by the swimming pool trying to get a light? Are you exceedingly rich?’
The man sat down, placed his cigarette in an ashtray on a table beside him, and rubbed his hands together. ‘No, that would be my evil uncle, the famous Makhdoom Talwan as you call him. I’m actually a kind of businessman. I have some land, and I’m setting up greenhouses to grow vegetables. There’s only one other man in Pakistan doing it.’
‘So you’re the entrepreneurial type. Gift of the gab and lots of new ideas.’
‘I’m not sure. Probably there’s a reason I’ve got only one competitor.’
‘I was being serious. I like people who actually do something useful, though I don’t seem to meet them very often.’ She allowed that he had crossed the first barrier. ‘But anyway tell me about something else, something interesting.’
‘First, can I get you another drink? And I’ll bring one for myself.’
On the verge of excusing herself, she looked at him, his thin supercilious features and silver-minted look, which she had once admired in young rich Pakistani men and long outgrown – and then against that, the appearance of strength, of vigor, reflected in his posture, sitting relaxed and looking agreeably out into the night.
‘All right. Champagne. Tell the bartender it’s for me, otherwise he’ll say he’s run out.’
He didn't make a pass at her – in that evening’s mood she would have rebuffed it with a jet of ice – and when they had talked for more than half an hour, quite easily, until she found herself laughing, on a whim she gave him her cell phone number.
‘And now let’s go dance,’ she said, putting down her glass, which had long been empty.
‘I don’t dance. I stopped when a girl told me I look like a chicken wading through melted tar.’
She laughed. ‘Well that’s sad, because that’s pretty much all I do. Goodbye then.’ And she walked away, down the steps, and into the crowd, into the party.
She vaguely expected him to call the next day or the one after that – their conversation had been more substantial than such encounters usually are, and she had volunteered her phone number – but when he didn’t she shrugged it off, saying, ‘Tant pis.’
As it happened her phone rang on one of her alone evenings, as she was sitting by the fire, a cup of tea beside her, reading – nothing, chick lit, something easy.
‘Hi, it’s me,’ he began, and she rolled her eyes, simultaneously taking a lock of her long straight black hair and curling it around her forefinger. When she didn’t respond, he added, ‘I meant to say, this is Murad.’
‘Actually I recognized your voice.’
‘That lets me off the hook, I suppose.’ Then, after a pause, ‘Are you busy?’
‘Not really. I’m sitting in front of a fire, reading an extremely bad book.’
‘I’m surprised, I assumed I’d hear pounding music in the background when you picked up.’
‘Not tonight. I’m alone, drinking tea, and generally practicing to be an old maid.’
‘Look, this may seem a bit sudden, but remember you told me about going to Kaghan with your father? Well, I thought about driving to Attock and going for a picnic along the Indus. It’s pretty interesting, the Kabul River flows in, and it’s brown, and for a long way downstream it stays separate from the blue Indus, so they run side by side, like two stripes. Right where we’ll go they start mixing together.’
‘A metaphor, I suppose.’ She said this more evenly, less ironically than she intended. Sitting by the pool at the lake party, she had told him about fishing in Kaghan as a girl – it had been on her mind, and she had let herself go to that degree.
‘You don’t know me very well. But I can bring a certifi cate of good moral character from my grandmother if that would help ...’
‘That’s fine, I’ll take your word for it. I’d love to. When?’
‘How about this Saturday?’
‘How about the next one.’
‘At eight. Or no, you’re probably not up. At ten. I’ll pick you up. I know where your parents’ house is.’
And abruptly, he hung up, just as she was about to say, ‘That sounds a bit creepy.’
Putting down the phone, she cringed, thinking of her old maid comment, which sounded self-pitying, and worse, sounded as if she were sitting alone dreaming of matrimony.
‘This is a rather posh vehicle – for the poor nephew of a rich Makhdoom.’
They were driving along the Grand Trunk Road, under the eucalyptus trees planted by some briefly energetic government.
‘I couldn’t do without it. I live in this thing.’
‘It looks brand-new.’
‘It’s ten years old. My driver takes brilliant care of it. Back and forth we go, to my farm – I stay there a couple of weeks, and then I start going crazy and I drive back to Islamabad for R&R. Ten hours on bad roads.’
‘Ah, the famous vegetables.’
He looked over at her, smoothly changing gears, driving very precisely in the heavy chaotic traffic, buses swaying past with passengers on the roof and hanging from the doors, terrifically overloaded trucks grinding along, painted with elaborate scenes of a mountain paradise, snow-capped peaks like a child’s painting, Shangri-La, or of fighter jets, babies, pneumatic film actresses.
‘Indeed, the famous vegetables.’
She had decided on Western clothes, white linen bell-bottom pants, a fitted emerald-colored blouse, which suited her complexion and her black hair, and sandals rather than something more practical – like a girl in a commercial for Bacardi rum, she told herself, looking in her dressing room mirror. Now she put one foot up on the dash, keeping it there for a long moment, glossy red nail polish, high arch. Rolling down her window, she put her bare arm out, the breeze soft, fragrant with eucalyptus blossoms, fields of yellow mustard blossoming out to the horizon, then the beginning of the hard country, the frontier.
‘So, do you often invite bad girls for picnics along the Indus?’ she asked.
‘Oh no. You’re actually the first bad girl I’ve known well enough to ask.’
‘Very funny. Do you know, I’ve done some research. You went to college at Princeton, where you drove around in a Porsche. Your mother passed away two years ago. Your father and your uncle haven’t spoken for years, your uncle sits in the Assembly – and your father is bedridden.’
‘Not guilty on the Porsche. Even if I had had the money, I’m not quite that much of a twerp.’
‘And you’re either stuck up or shy – I heard both versions.’
‘Or maybe just schizophrenic, playing it both ways.’
‘Not in the report. Though it does occur in the family.’
‘My God! Is this stuff available on the Web or something? Pakidesigroom.com.’
She folded her arms, shaking her head, saying in a kittenish coy voice, ‘That’s it, I’m done. A complete description of the specimen.’ And then, having set it up, slyly, ‘I won’t ask what you’ve heard about me.’
‘Well, that you had a bad accident, and that it changed you.’
‘What a gentleman. Anyway there are plenty of people to tell you lies about me. And truths for that matter. I hope you don’t think I’ve been going around boasting about my near-death experience.’
He turned off the Grand Trunk Road, under the bridge leading to Peshawar, through a little village. Passersby turned to look at them, the large gray jeep with a pretty gi
rl wearing enormous white-framed sunglasses, and a man in Western clothes. They turned down onto what seemed like a streambed, Murad driving with concentration, working the car through difficult sections, backing up and trying a different route. The smell of dust filled the jeep, and soon a fine white layer covered the plastic of the dashboard. Continuing, following a more or less usable track, they came out on a sandbank broad as a football field ceded by a curve in the Indus. Murad drove partway across and turned off the engine, facing out to the water.
‘There it is.’
‘It’s amazing. How did you find this? It’s like a secret hidden valley.’
He had stepped out of the jeep, taken a pair of binoculars from the back seat, and was scanning the hills all around. She noticed the worn strong leather case for the binoculars, earlier had noticed a pistol in a tooled leather holster lying concealed between the seats. She liked that he had well-used solid things, this car, the gun and binoculars, and she liked that he carried a gun, but without making any display. In an emergency he would be solid, would take care of the problem.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Page 16