Trespassing

by Uzma Aslam Khan

  And now here she was, spending close to two hours today, and several hours yesterday, cogitating emptily about one of them. Didn’t Nini see how silly this was? How typical? How dangerous?

  She longed to stop the clock right here. ‘Please let’s not fight. You do what you want. I’m just sorry about yesterday.’

  Nini waited. But Dia had nothing to add.

  Outside, Pakistan took a wicket and Inam Gul stamped his feet. The screen cut to the milk ad again. The woman carried out the tea from the kitchen looking refreshed and jolly. The reason for her bouncing spirits was that she got to use the milk! The guests consumed the tea in record time. The camera focused on her husband who said, ‘Begum, chai?’ So she scurried back to the kitchen in ankle-wrenching stilettos, her gold bangles ringing with jubilation.

  Dia thought: Nini should have auditioned for the role.

  Then she ached with remorse again.

  After a long pause, which Dia was terrified of breaking, Nini spoke. ‘You asked before if there was something you could do. Well, I’ve been thinking. If his mother decides not to revoke her proposal, well, your support still matters to me. So, will you be here when he visits with his mother? You’re still my sister, Dia. Still.’

  Dia smacked her forehead in dismay. ‘Of course.’

  In a tremulous whisper, Nini cooed, ‘My mother needs me to acquiesce. You’re lucky your mother doesn’t depend on you to give her life meaning.’ She hung up.

  Receiver still in hand, Dia muttered, ‘Let’s hope your daughter is lucky like me.’

  Moving to the front of the house, Dia bitterly wondered how many parents had shrunk their daughters’ worlds to fill their own. She stooped for her sandals, eager for the oasis that was her farm. While struggling with the buckle, she glanced up at the wall. The face that greeted her was her father’s. It was framed in ornate gold that was as false as the portrait. His painted jowls did not jiggle, his lordly mustache was reduced to a blanched apple peel, and his eyes seemed to have stepped into the wrong room, where a film about his life was in progress. The reel had gotten stuck right when he was being kidnapped so he’d no choice but to see the moment over and over again. His life was in the painter’s hands and every time she stood here, Dia wished to submit the painter to the same torture.

  She hadn’t told anyone, not Nini, nor the cook, that the Quran Khwani yesterday had brought back painful memories. For forty days after her own father’s death, she’d sat like a statue in this house, and learned something valuable: some mourners came to grieve, others to collect gory details. Still others arrived to clutch the frozen Dia and shower her with pity, and yet more helplessness. ‘Allah malik hay. God decides.’ That was the message they’d pounded into her. You’ve no control over events. So why bother making anything of your life, little lady?

  Yesterday, when she’d apologized to the widow and her son, she’d meant it.

  The cook, who’d been snubbed by his favorite of the three children ever since she returned home yesterday, shuffled woefully toward her. ‘Have you forgiven me yet, my child?’ He stood below the portrait.

  ‘Oh, Inam Gul, it wasn’t your fault.’

  He stroked her head. ‘Then come, let’s watch TV.’

  ‘The mood’s gone.’

  His nose tried to smell the air. ‘What does Nissrine Bibi say?’

  ‘Have you been eavesdropping again?’

  ‘No!’ He stared in horror.

  ‘Then how did you know who I was talking to?’ She watched happily while his lips curved around toothless gums. He seemed to miss his teeth most when cornered. ‘Don’t worry. I have very few secrets. But I’ll tell you Nini’s.’ The cook’s eyes popped with anticipation. ‘She wants to marry that boy she took me to see yesterday.’

  ‘Oh ho, what a clever girl!’ His head bobbed loosely from side to side.

  ‘She’s a fool, Inam Gul, don’t you forget it.’ He changed his expression likewise. ‘I’m going to the farm now, to forget about people for a while. If anyone calls for me, tell them I’m in my cocoon and won’t come out for weeks.’

  ‘Toba toba.’ He tugged his earlobes, but knew better than to argue with Dia.

  2

  Numbers

  For most of the drive, the land was stripped and parched, dotted with occasional bands of drooping mesquite. The route led straight to the mighty Indus, about 100km east. Riverbeds ought to teem with life, thought Dia, each time she passed through here. Especially a riverbed as old as this. But except for a kingfisher poised regally on a wire, hinting at the proximity to water, there was no evidence of the fabled grandeur of the Indus. Only books and old men like Inam Gul told of princesses like Sassi, dwelling in the glorious lakhy bagh on the banks of the river, surrounded by music, fountains and burnished horses.

  Dia herself hadn’t traveled all the way to the river for years. Now its banks teemed not with Sassi’s pavilions, but with some of the nation’s deadliest gangs.

  She rode between two armed escorts. Both had greasy pockmarked skin, filthy fingernails and wasp waists. They handled their Kalashnikovs the way nearly all of the city’s convoys did – muzzle pointing not up but back, at the following vehicle. Sometimes, one of the two would give his shoulder a rest and lay the weapon on his lap, with the muzzle at her. In the last five years she often wondered which was the greater risk – going with or without them. She was never permitted to know. It was believed her father had been kidnapped on this stretch.

  Three rumors spread after the murder. One: it involved the synthetic dye company that had lost its contract. Two: it involved the cocoon importers who’d lost theirs. Three: the killers were fools to target the man and not his wife.

  The sericulture project had been entirely Riffat Mansoor’s. It was she who introduced a silk line in their textile mill, and she who questioned the wisdom of importing the seeds when silkworms could be bred at home. The climate suited the growth of mulberries, the food of the insect, and she owned a large plot of land near Thatta on which to cultivate the trees.

  Dia’s childhood was spent shuttling from farm to factory, the one an enchanted semi-tropical paradise, the other a whirlwind of equally enchanting activity. At the mill, she’d walk wide-eyed around the workshops where thread was woven into sheets of shimmering white cloth, dyed in cauldrons of bubbling color, and painted into breathtaking designs. Back at the farm, she danced between the trees, gay with her own version of things. The irrigation canals were the boiling cauldrons. The twigs her reel. She unraveled her cotton dress into a skein of thread, and twisted these over the reel, till a pattern spread. She dipped it in the canal, and tossed it up to dry. It billowed down softly, a puff of her breath. She wore the breath around the farm, and everyone swore they’d never seen a finer silk.

  It had taken her mother’s vigor to make the project work but eventually, after several false starts, fifteen acres of mulberry trees successfully yielded the sixty tons of leaves required to feed the one and a half million silkworms needed to produce roughly nine hundred pounds of raw silk. Riffat’s fully self-sufficient side business gave the mill, already successful in cotton, an added allure. Throughout Karachi, women swore only by Mansoor Mills.

  Dia was ten years old by the time her mother’s project was a nationally conceded achievement. Her fellow-schoolgirls regarded her as queerly as men and women regarded her mother. Nissrine told Dia that people snickered about Riffat’s appetite being as voracious as the caterpillars she bred – only it wasn’t leafy greens she was after. Her husband may have given her free reign of his business, but could he satisfy her at home, in the bedroom, when she came out of her cocoon?

  Dia shut her eyes and leaned back in the car seat, simmering at the gossip.

  But when she recalled her parents together, the picture was no consolation. They spoke to each other only about work or children. Dia had never seen Riffat glow or throw back her head and laugh her beautiful, silvery laugh around her husband. The two never touched. They barely even argu
ed. They were business partners, not lovers. Yet, her father wanted Dia to read him stories full of promises of eternal love, of Sassi waiting on the banks of the Indus for her lover’s ship to roll in. Stories of earthly tragedy, but with attainment in the afterlife.

  Dia opened her eyes again with a start when she realized her slouching position pressed her further into the guards. She sat up. Her back was beginning to ache, as it always did by this time in the drive. They hadn’t even gone halfway. The land outside was still thirsty and desolate. Not even a kingfisher in sight. She smelled the sweat of the guards. They could probably smell hers. She tried not to wonder if this aroused them.

  Whatever transpired between them, her parents became the topic of even more gossip when Riffat decided to discard chemical dyes. They were expensive, hazardous, and not even colorfast. Though organic dying was a method none of the other factories relied on, it had once flourished in the subcontinent. There was evidence enough to support this. Three-thousand-year-old madder-dyed cloth and indigo vats had been excavated in Moenjodaro, barely 300km north of where Dia rode in the car now. The technique seemed right outside Riffat’s doorstep, and had been for centuries. Could it really be lost?

  She discovered most colors could be obtained from plants easily grown here. She also learned which part of each plant needed to be harvested, how long this took, and what color it would give. Turmeric and myrobalan produced yellow; henna, madder, and pomegranate red; indigo blue; tamarind and onion black; chikoo brown. So she reserved the remaining five acres of the farmland for cultivating the crops.

  Within two years, they yielded consistently and the contract with the dye company was annulled. They began receiving angry telephone calls.

  Riffat grew tense. Her temper ran high. The family ceased piling into their Toyota Corolla for weekends at the farm. Her parents went from rarely speaking, to frequently fighting. And still the phone kept ringing. And more customers pledged loyalty to the mill.

  On the night before his death, her father climbed up the mulberry tree planted when she was born. Why? Was it to turn back the clock and have her that small in his arms again, back before the threatening phone calls and gossip about his wife?

  Dia had huddled indoors, petted by the cook, while her brothers argued with the crowd outside and her mother, for the first time in her life, stood frozen with shock. Her husband cowered in the foliage like a child, while the world laughed. But then at some point in the middle of the night, he must have climbed down and left the house before anyone awoke. He was never seen alive again.

  The cook maintained that the answer to her father’s death lay in nothing as obvious as an angry minister with shares in a severed company. According to Inam Gul, Dia’s father was simply unlucky. He was in the way. The province was seething with free-flowing anger. Probably, the killers had known absolutely nothing about him. He was a random target, or a victim of crossfire. There were hundreds of such deaths in Sindh that year. There was no reason for it besides the will of Allah. The same will that had made killers out of some and gentle, caring folk like her father out of others.

  But Dia could not accept that the death had been mere fluke – a simple detour. It pained to think that if it hadn’t been his battered and bruised body, it would have been someone else’s. This meant that even when alive, he’d been nothing but a mere number. And so was she. And Nini and Inam Gul. Everybody.

  3

  Life at the Farm

  A quartet of armed guards paced the farm’s exterior. The boundary wall extended into five rungs of barbed wire. The iron gate was topped by a plethora of slender spikes pointing up at the grayish-yellow sky. Inside the gate sat two more guards, but unlike her private escorts and the sentinels outside, these two were draped in soussi lungis from the mill. The cloth was dyed indigo and mint and shimmered like cock feathers in the sun. Together, they formed a friendly duo: they were two of Inam Gul’s three sons.

  Their bare arms and torsos glistened with sweat and the lungis wrapped them so tightly she could see the contours of their very different body types. On Shan, boyish and slight, the cloth rippled around the curves of a small tight bottom. But on Hamid, it hugged a pair of bulky thighs. She noted also his solid, wrestler-like gut. He would have been very handy with a pair of oars on a stormy night at sea.

  The cook and his family had come into Dia’s household two years before her father left it. They’d moved to Thatta from their village, driven out by the trawlers that invaded the local fishermen’s zone. Mr Mansoor had seen Inam Gul’s family outside the tombs of Makli Hill, close to the farm, and offered them work here.

  As Dia entered the grounds, the two sons lowered their Kalashnikovs to let her through. ‘How is everything?’ she piped, relieved to stretch her legs and be in congenial company again.

  ‘We’ll have to see,’ said Hamid. ‘Sumbul says there are fewer good cocoons than last year.’

  ‘And that was worse than the year before,’ Dia sighed.

  The yield of leaves had peaked at sixty tons when she was a child. But in the last three years, due to the increasing water shortage, this had begun to drop startlingly. A reduced diet meant larvae either never reached the cocoon-stage, or that the cocoons were thin-shelled, too small, or pierced, resulting in poor quality threads.

  The water channels tinkled melodically, reminding Dia, with each drop, how much depended on them. In the stifling, pre-monsoon heat of May she fanned her face with a corner of her dupatta and hoped the year would be a wet one.

  Leaving the guards, she took her time strolling between the rows of mulberry trees, carefully planted eighteen feet apart. Ahead of her fluttered a pair of black swallowtail butterflies. They chased each other, landed on a twig, and mated, tail to tail, resembling a single creature with two heads and four wings. The male must have overpowered her with his scent, she mused. In moths, it was the female that produced the aphrodisiac. It could be so powerful that immediately upon her emergence from a cocoon, if a male hovered nearby, she’d lure him. She’d have sex at birth. Dia had tried many times to witness this, but in all her trips to the farm, never succeeded. This season, she was determined to.

  She crossed over to the shed. From the outside, it resembled a greenhouse: low-lying and flat-roofed. Adjacent to it was a two-room shack. From here came Sumbul, Inam Gul’s tall, languid daughter and the farm’s most valued worker. A lilac kameez offset her smooth, nut-brown skin, and she looked like a jacaranda tree in bloom. Approaching Dia Sumbul swayed, carrying a baby on her hip and a clipboard in her right hand.

  ‘Salaam Baji,’ Sumbul greeted her.

  ‘Waalai-kum-asalaam.’

  ‘How is Aba?’

  ‘Oh fine,’ answered Dia. ‘Mischievous as ever. He sends his love. How’s your husband? Is everything okay at home?’

  Sumbul smiled, tugging the braid that had slipped over her shoulder. It was so long and thick she’d twisted it in a U-turn. ‘His mother’s gone back to our village for a few weeks. Things are better. But,’ she looked away, ‘I think a fifth is on the way.’

  Dia sucked in her breath; Sumbul was only her age. ‘And you still don’t want Ama to give you pills?’

  ‘What if he finds out?’

  ‘Keep them here, at the farm. He’ll never know.’

  Sumbul sighed, adjusting the baby to her other side. ‘No, Baji.’

  Dia shook her head but said nothing; the choice was Sumbul’s.

  Together they entered the shed.

  The interior was hot and humid, fanned with a continuous stream of fresh air. It was divided into four sections. The first, empty during this season, would soon hold the eggs laid by the current batch. In the second room was a long table with trays of wriggling larvae feeding on finely chopped mulberry leaves. Dia walked past the trays, greeting the women who tended the maggots. As in the days of the Chinese Empress, now too silkworms were bred by women. With the exception of the gardeners and the security guards, the farm was entirely run by them, which was why they
were allowed to work at all.

  When they first started, the sight of the larvae had made the workers squirm. Touching had been out of the question. But now the insects were handled as mechanically as braids and babies; sliding a handful down the shirt of any farm worker would never produce the effect it had on Nini. Despite herself, Dia smiled.

  Sumbul, guessing the reason correctly, asked how the plan had worked.

  ‘Well, unfortunately Nini overreacted. She has marriage on the brain.’

  ‘Marriage?’ Sumbul adjusted the baby again. ‘Well it’s no surprise, is it? Nissrine is so beautiful!’

  ‘Is it her beauty that’s made her change? She doesn’t even know the boy she’s after.’

  ‘Most women don’t,’ replied Sumbul. ‘Inshallah, she can make it work.’

  But why should she? Dia wanted to scream. Why should Nini accept the limits that others so maliciously placed upon her? Why was it up to her to make it work, with a man who was a complete unknown, no less? Not wanting yet another argument with a woman she liked, Dia again said nothing.

  They walked down the length of the table. The larvae were white and blind; their only activity was eating. But having been bred for so many centuries, they’d all but forgotten how to eat. The women had to chop up their food in tiny slivers and change the supply nine times daily or the fussy creatures would starve. If in their wilder days, they required no hygiene, now the perforated paper beneath them had to be scrupulously cleaned, or this too would elicit a hunger strike.

  Toward the end of the table were caterpillars that had molted a fourth and final time. It always happened this way, thought Dia. An insect’s life was so measurable, and yet so mysterious. Perhaps the paradox was the allure. As diligently as she studied them, there would always be details – like the changes inside a cocoon or the moths mating at birth – which escaped her.

  She studied the sheets stacked on the clipboard. On top was the tally for this year. The news was not good. Fewer caterpillars had lived through the fourth molt than ever before. Watching them slither on a bed of leaves, she made believe they talked to one another. They whispered: Let us vow never to spin our fine threads for these wretched humans again!