In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

by Daniyal Mueenuddin

  They slept together for the first time only a few weeks before the wedding, tenderly, gravely – clumsily, both of them, after having resisted so long. She had bought new sheets, took down the bright embroideries hanging from the walls of her room and covering the furniture, instead decorating with white handwoven cotton, a new bedspread, new covers for the chairs, and in that setting she removed her clothes by candlelight, passing herself to him.

  ‘There,’ she whispered to him, as they lay in bed afterward. ‘Now we know all the pieces fit together.’

  From Bahawalpur Airport they raced to the farm through the twilight on bad roads, Lily falling asleep, waking in a bazaar, the jeep stopped in a tangle of traffic beside a stand piled with cigarettes, the owner staring at her through the window as if she were on display, until she covered herself with a head scarf.

  A crowd of men lined a drive half a kilometer long leading into the heart of the farm, saluting as the car passed, the chauffeur not slowing down, Murad responding with a wave. As they approached the farm he had become quiet – she sensed the weight of his responsibilities settling on him, and she too felt this weight. Their income derived from this place, and hundreds of men worked on the farm, all looking to Murad and now in some degree to her for their livelihood. People in Islamabad marveled that Murad could spend such long periods at the farm; how then would she do here, a city girl to the core? She would be dependent a great deal upon him, and even more upon herself, upon her resources, as Murad would put it.

  A series of archways had been built of bamboo and tree branches, the final one illuminated with an electronic sign that signaled in flashing green and blue lights, happy marraj sir well-come madam.

  ‘The poetry of arrival,’ joked Murad, breaking the silence, taking her hand and squeezing it.

  They drove through an orchard, then through a heavy wooden gate that closed behind them, leaving the crowd outside. It was calm, the house servants offering garlands, men she had never before met, and who would now always be part of her life. The simplicity of the house at first surprised Lily, a plain wooden door leading from the car park, then only eight rooms, built in a U around a grassy courtyard. The lawn opening out from the top end of the courtyard, however, was truly immense, decorated with hundreds, no thousands of oil lamps in little clay dishes, burning along the walls, sparkling in the trees, making geometric designs along the edges of flower beds, disappearing in the far distance. The garden had been his mother’s one contribution to the farm – a legacy to a woman, to me, thought Lily hopefully – six acres enclosed by a wall, with rose beds, groupings of jacaranda trees, flame-of-the-forest, thick banyans with their suckers planted like proliferating elephants’ legs. A lily pond, the lily pads two feet across. His mother would come in the season and herself prune back the roses, hands which did no other work, as Murad had told her.

  Two dogs of the local bhagariya breed, resembling wolves, capered around Murad, jumping up, licking at his hand, not quite daring to leap up on him, while he said, ‘Bad dogs, no, no!’ – but playing with them, patting away their paws.

  Her perceptions blurred from sleeping in the car, wishing she had a moment to reflect, to arrange herself, Lily knew how much her response to the house and the place mattered to Murad. Petting one of the dogs, which licked its lips with a shy tongue, its creamy yellow snout pricked with black whiskers, Lily felt the place resounding within her, strange sharp smells, servants wearing village clothes bustling past carrying the bags, so many people. The lamps arranged in the lawn blinked and flared as a breeze came up.

  ‘This is our room,’ said Murad, opening a door. And in a shy tone, ‘I had it fixed for us, see. It was my father’s bedroom.’

  It had been redone tastefully, the new-laid rosewood floor gleaming with fresh varnish, rosewood shutters, doors, windows – ‘The wood came from our own trees,’ he told her. A pale blue Persian carpet cooled the room and made it feminine, as did the modern white furniture, arranged too formally in front of the fireplace. He made her sit on the sofa, bounce on the new bed. ‘Do you know, I’ve never slept a single night in this room. I didn’t want my father to come here and find that I’d stepped into his place. Until a month ago his farm clothes were still in the closets. I asked his permission. Now it’s you and me, darling, now it’s our turn.’

  They ate dinner in the bedroom, starting with the last bottle of excellent wedding champagne, which they had brought from Islamabad – Mino had given them several cases as a present, unobtainable from the bootleggers in Islamabad, smuggled on a launch from Dubai into Karachi. Lily went to her suitcase, which a servant had carried in, and removed a packet of tea candles. She lit them all over the room, then turned off the lights and lay down on the sofa, feeling her muscles relaxing. In a moment she would unpack, finding places for all her things, shoes, shirts, her jewelry in a drawer, her toiletries in the bathroom, which also had been entirely redone, a parquet floor and an antique bathtub lacquered royal blue. She needed to make the room hers, to start with an ordered center and work her way out. Murad sat patiently watching her, didn’t press her to go out and see the house and the garden, which Lily knew had absorbed so much of his love and imagination when living here alone.

  The breeze had turned to wind, servants going around closing the shutters all over the house, making a clattering wooden sound.

  ‘It’s a dust storm,’ he said, when she had finished organ izing her things. ‘Come on, I’ll show you something that you’ve never seen before.’

  As she came out of the room, forcing open the door, climbing a circular staircase up to the roof, the wind struck her, bent her over, snatching away the words they shouted. The sand peeled over them, fine but hard, spattering, liquid in its movement. Before they went up Murad had wrapped cloths around their heads, leaving just a slit for the eyes, muffling them.

  When they were up on the roof, above the treetops, he lit a powerful searchlight and placed it on the ground, then led her forward.

  ‘Look,’ he shouted.

  At first she didn’t see anything, just the motes of sand streaming past in the light, like snow caught in the headlights of a car racing into a snowstorm. Then, in front of her, twenty meters tall, her shadow projected onto the dust flowing horizontally through the air. She waved her arms, the shadow mimicking her up in the sky, fuzzy, long-limbed. Running forward, right to the edge of the roof, balancing against the wind, she watched her shadow become tiny, diffuse, armless, headless. A line of eucalyptus trees close to the house waved and bent wildly, leaves being stripped away, leaves from distant trees in the garden swirling past, and she thought, in exultation, This is life, this is real and actual. This is ours. Facing into the wind, she took the cloth from her head, held it fluttering like a pennant for a moment and then released it, letting it sail away, attenu ated, white, flashing into the darkness.

  ‘Be careful,’ shouted Murad in her ear, coming up and taking hold of her elbow. ‘Don’t fall!’

  ‘Dance with me,’ she said. She would always remember this sandstorm, this eerie yellow light. Taking his arm, putting it around her waist, she held him very close, her face buried in his neck, eyes closed, the wind singing and fading.

  Everyone spoiled her, everyone smiled on the young pretty bride. A month passed, then six weeks. The servants studied her with wide-open eyes, wondering what role she would play in the household, cooked elaborate meals, quail pilau, veal in a thick brown curry, grilled lamb, carrot halva. The orchard manager sent the first guavas, pink-fleshed and sweet, another time an enormous honeycomb, still attached to the branch on which it had grown, carried to her on a broad plank, the comb sopping. Like the chicken at the farm, the eggs, she had never tasted such good honey, spiced sharp by the clover that the bees fed on. In those first weeks she slept as if making up for months and years, waking in the morning, kissing Murad as he went off to the fields, then falling asleep again. Her fibers loosened, her mind settled to the pace of the farm.

  Murad and Lily alway
s had their breakfast on the lawn, the air soft, birds calling, babblers, lorikeets, bulbuls, thrushes, hoopoes, the brain-fever bird, from the orchard the booming call of the coucal – Murad knew all the names, of the plants, the birds. Mongooses played in the road sometimes when they walked in the fields, through lanes of sugarcane, or in the orchard, being flooded now with water, so that the thick black soil newly turned by the plow glistened and gave up a ripe odor.

  ‘Do you know why they sent you the honey?’ he asked her at breakfast, as she devoured her second slice of crisp toast with quick little bites, finishing and licking her fingers.

  ‘Because they think I’m too thin?’

  ‘Because they think it helps you get pregnant.’

  He said this with a little moue, knowing that the subject irritated her. Perhaps it would be better, to leap into childbearing in this first surge of their marriage, to begin the new life with a new life beside her. She tried to imagine herself loving the child, but could think only of the pain, her body torn and stretched, the body that she cared so much about, which she had entirely lived for, its pleasures, wine and intoxication, clothing herself, pleased by herself in the mirror, undressing in front of men, silently expectant. And then, to be hostage to the child, fighting against it, finally with a sigh of relief becoming absorbed in applesauce and feeding, adoring its little feet and hands, buying it costumes printed with bunnies and ducks. Murad certainly wanted her to become a mother, to be mothering, even at the cost of losing interest in fashion and appearance, making baby talk, finding her joy in a child’s first tooth and its first words.

  Before the marriage they luxuriated in their plans, at parties ignoring the other guests, during long picnics, making lists of things to buy, apportioning responsibilities, making resolutions. She saw that now the plans must be renegotiated, reconceived. She had believed that her personality would be subsumed in their larger personality as a couple, living into each other, but already the strangeness of the initial engagement wore off and she went back to being – exactly – herself. A little crack opened up as if in the perimeter walls of the compound at Jalpana, through which a poisonous scent, like very strong attar, overpowering, overripe, musky, seeped into their life together – the pull of her old life, of other lives. Why did he have to speak so slowly, to explain in such detail the mechanics of the sprinklers in the greenhouses?

  Already, just three months since they first slept together, she found herself pulling away when he began to touch her. He always did it the same way, on top, and became shy when she suggested, by her movements, not even in words, that they try other positions. The persistence of his shyness, which placed a limit on their physical intimacy, had disappointed her – when they first met she had thought him piratical and dominating, and had imagined that as they became closer and freer with each other that spirit would come to the fore, energy that would master her, but playfully. A friend had given her a bachelorette present of stockings and a garter belt brought from America. As a surprise, thinking to break up the routine of their lovemaking, one evening before Murad came home from walking the fields, she put them on, lying on the bed otherwise naked, candles lit. He said, ‘So that’s how you wear those!’ and then, instead of joining her in bed, he brought a clipper from the bathroom and trimmed a broken fingernail, sitting on the windowsill and speaking of a problem on the farm, a woman in the village whose husband beat her, and who had come to Lily asking for protection. Coloring, mortified, she had pulled the covers to hide herself, and when he left the room angrily threw the stockings in the fire. Accustomed to rush and passion, to first times, making love with Murad became a chore, something she wanted, but that required effort and planning.

  They had been too long on the farm, a month, then a month and a half, then two and a half, but neither had yet raised the question of returning to Islamabad. Neither could bear to leave the farm now while matters stood as they did – Lily knew this of herself, saw it in Murad. She would lie in bed and dream of food, of steak tartare at Ecotex, a restaurant in Islamabad run by a young Spaniard in his own house, or of foie gras and duck rillettes, which a shop in Paris sent to Mino. The two of them would wolf it down on buttered toast, to line their stomachs before going to a party. She missed Mino, missed the life of the city.

  One evening Lily and Murad sat in the living room where they now usually had dinner, eating while reading or watching Lily’s television shows – they joked about being like an old married couple. Restless, Lily kept piling more and more wood into the fireplace, poking and shifting the logs. Her colored pens were scattered on a table, she had been making impossible elaborate designs for dresses, fantasies. Now she sat down again and began doodling. They had been flirting all evening, Murad serious and busy, reading a book about greenhouse farming, Lily making excuses to disturb him. Idly wanting to startle him, oppressed by the hot room and his methodical studying, she wrote in large red letters on a sheet of paper, Anal Sex at Noon Taxes Lana, drew hearts all around the script, folded the paper into an airplane, and fired it at Murad.

  ‘Let me guess,’ he said, reading it, putting his book down and smiling at her. ‘You’re bored.’

  ‘It’s a palindrome. Mino taught me. It’s the same backwards and forwards, get it? Anal sex? Works both ways?’

  ‘Very witty. You really profited from that boy’s company.’

  She sat next to him on the sofa, kicked off her little embroidered slippers so that they went flying, one into each corner of the room, and lay down with her head in his lap. ‘But I am bored, it’s true,’ she said petulantly.

  ‘You sound like you’re eight years old. Why don’t you read your book, my love?’

  ‘Bo-ring! Don’t tell me – you’re going to say being bored means you have no inner resources.’

  He looked down at her face and stroked her hair. ‘I was going to say something along those lines. It happens to be true.’

  She sat up again, went over by the fire, and threw in another log, then took the tongs and stirred the burning chunks, sparks flying up and popping.

  ‘Maybe I don’t have inner resources then.’ She rummaged around some more in the fire. ‘Murad? I’ve been thinking. Let’s have some people up this weekend. Won’t that be fun? We’ll have the gardeners light diyas all over the lawn when they arrive. It’ll be a housewarming. That’s the best way, instead of us going to Islamabad. They’ll definitely come, those guys all love doing things at the last minute.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. It’s difficult being alone together. You need refreshment – I’m used to this life, and I’ve got the farm.’

  She felt this as a reproach, his lugubrious tone, as if the guests were only for her.

  ‘You make it sound like I’m a baby needing her bottle. We just got married, we’re young. We should play.’

  Not waiting for his answer, she sat down at the table and began cutting a piece of colored paper. ‘Come on, Mr. Lone Wolf. I’ll make a funny invitation and someone can go on the day bus to Islamabad tomorrow and deliver it.’

  Standing up and observing her for moment with his hands in the pockets of his khakis, he walked over and took her face in his hands, kissed her on the lips. ‘Well, I guess that’s decided, right down to method of delivery! Actually I’m glad.’

  She wrote to Mino, inviting him to the farm that weekend – he had promised at the wedding to visit soon – and asking him to bring some amusing people. In the card she giddily called herself ‘the ChÀtelaine of Jalpana,’ and joked about battling scorpions the size of cocker spaniels, living with her husband and the camels for company. An illustration on the front of the card showed her, Murad, and a camel sprawled in planter chairs sipping martinis, all three wearing T-shirts that said, in purple letters, The Home Team!

  They blew in, Mino and the notorious Zora Fancy, one of the Bombay Fancys, who was visiting her family in Karachi after committing some enormity too grave for India to contain it. The security men at Bahawalpur Airport, accustomed to seein
g the same fat politicians and well-oiled businessmen pass through, didn’t know what to make of this bright group, Mino’s ear stud and Zora’s tight black jeans, her brazen cigarette. The party also included a slender and mute and very handsome boy, a jewelry designer, sheltering under Mino’s wing, a new protégé, introduced as such.

  At the back of the group, soft-spoken, tall and slightly disheveled, came Shehryar Salauddin, known as Bumpy. He and Lily had a history together, though she had never granted him the ultimate favors, as Mino would put it. Lily realized that she had tipped her hand to Mino, that he saw through the tone of her invitation, guessed that all was not well at Jalpana, and brought Bumpy to provide a note of interrogation.

  On the drive to the farm Bumpy sat next to Lily and almost too assiduously avoided touching his arm against hers when the jeep swayed. The little jewelry designer, sitting in the far back on a jump seat, looked gloomily out the window into the moonlit night. Murad drove, and Mino sprawled next to him, relishing this adventure, taking possession of the countryside, taking credit for the night air, the canals, the dust thrown up by passing tractor-trolleys piled with enormous loads of sugarcane going to the mill.

  Next morning Lily wandered around the house, slightly intoxicated still on the fumes from the night before, preparing for the day, arranging flowers brought to her by a gardener, into the living room, where the servants had already cleaned up the glasses and bottles, the spills and cigarettes. Sunlight poured through the windows and through the French doors which led toward the swimming pool. She had told the gardeners to fill the pool despite the late-fall weather, thinking at some point they would be drunk enough to skinny-dip, in the depths of the night.