by Gwen Florio
Gul’s uncle rose from his seat and made way for another of the hundreds of guests waiting to pose with them. Gul slid his eyes back toward Farida, this time reminding himself to look at the face he’d seen only momentarily when the mirror was held before them during the ceremony. He glimpsed large, downcast eyes, sharply angled cheekbones above a generous mouth, a dainty pointed chin.
The photographer raised his hand and Gul wrenched his gaze forward for the obligatory flash and resulting blindness. It was only midafternoon, and already his head ached from the late-summer sultriness and the unfamiliar weight of his white satin turban with its showy cockade. The next guest, one of Farida’s chattering cousins, another embarrassment in short sleeves, climbed the steps to the dais where the couple sat above their guests. She took Farida’s hand and imposed a somber expression on her features with difficulty, falling into giggles as soon as the picture was done. Gul noted, again with approval, that Farida maintained her composure as mandated, impassive throughout the several hours of photography.
They left the tent well past midnight, Farida walking beside him, clutching a copy of the Holy Quran as the guests tossed rose petals, which fell like gentle, fragrant raindrops about them. Only then did she begin to weep.
Tears slid down her cheeks as they were driven to the mansion Gul’s father had rented for just this occasion, on this night strung roof-to-doorstep with twinkling ceremonial lights. She cried again after they were ushered into the bedroom, where streamers draped a tall canopied bed with more rose petals scattered across the coverlet.
Gul, aware of the noisy crowd of relatives waiting just outside the door for the deed to be done, could not bring himself to the task at hand. Her breasts were a shock, and he stroked them in wonder as the commotion on the other side of the door grew louder. But it was her arms, finally, that undid him, the memory of the way she had displayed them for everyone to see. He circled her wrists with thumb and forefinger and slid his hands up her arms and squeezed so tightly that she cried out. He rolled on top of her, thinking with satisfaction as she sobbed hard beneath him that never again would she display those milky, beguiling arms for anyone but him, her husband.
THE GRAND TRUNK ROAD, SEPTEMBER 2001
The Toyota taking Farida from Islamabad to her new home in Peshawar slid through streets shrouded with early-morning haze. Farida ignored her husband sitting beside her and dug her fingernails into her palms, trying to follow her sister’s advice.
“You will become hard,” Alia had told her the night before their departure. “On the outside, you will appear tender. You will be like the most delectable of peaches. You will hide the stone within. You will do what they say.” She put her fingers to the corners of Farida’s mouth and urged them upward. “A smile will be your mask. It will protect these.” She raised her fingers to Farida’s forehead and tapped it. “Your head.” She lowered her hand and let it rest on her sister’s chest. “Your heart. These will stay the same.”
“Who will know what is in them?” If Farida expected sympathy from Alia during those final moments together, she was wrong.
“You waste too much time feeling sorry for yourself, when instead you should be thinking about practical things. In Peshawar, you will come to know their servants. You will decide which ones you can trust—or bribe. Take this.” She thrust a roll of rupees toward Farida. “Hide it somewhere. Hide it for as long as you can.”
Farida looked at her, confused. Gul’s family was wealthy.
“If you ever need anything, if there is a real emergency,” Alia said, “you send for me. Use this if you need to. If you still have it.”
Farida’s hand shook as she folded the money in her palm. The past few weeks since the wedding had been bad enough, but she had spent them within the familiar environs of Islamabad. Despite her family’s time in Britain, and their travels through Europe, she had never been to the northern part of her own country, on the border with Afghanistan. “Those people,” her father would say, “they are barbarians. They still stone women to death, chop off the hands of thieves. They are not modern, the way we are.”
“Pay attention!”
Farida reeled from a slap. Tears, suppressed since her wedding day, burst free.
Alia raised her hand again.
Farida caught her breath, dragged a silk-sheathed arm across her face, and straightened.
Alia nodded approval. “You are cold,” she hissed. “You are hard. You are strong. This begins now.”
Gul shifted beside her. “I am ice,” Farida whispered. “I am stone.” She trained her gaze forward, registering sights familiar and comforting: the four soaring minarets of the Shah Faisal mosque, the still-shuttered storefronts of Aabpara Market, the gentle green backdrop of the Margalla Hills. The car swung northwest toward Peshawar on part of the old Grand Trunk Road that linked Kabul and Calcutta.
Gul’s father rode in front with the driver. Gul’s mother and siblings had returned to Peshawar immediately after the wedding. Farida had not seen them since. She wore a new ensemble made especially for this day, with long sleeves and in muted colors, in deference to the more restricted life she imagined she would lead now. Still, it was of the richest material she could find, heavy silk of an appropriately dull green, but with a glinting golden undertone and intricate embroidery about the sleeves, neck, and hem. Instead of draping her dupatta at her throat, she wound it loosely around her head, securing it at the top with a hairpin so that it would not slip. Distracted as she was, she had still noticed Gul’s look of approval when she emerged from the house to the waiting car.
Despite her resolve not to cry, her eyes stung as the car climbed the hills on the outskirts of the city and ascended the heights of the Potohar Plateau. All views of Islamabad vanished and, with them, everything she’d taken for granted. Family, friends, her job, safety. Farida’s eyes and throat burned. She suppressed a cough.
Gul noticed. “It’s bad today, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She clasped her hands in her lap, studying the henna patterns there, vines and flowers and whimsical dots that took Alia hours to apply. Its beauty would fade, much like the memory of her old life.
Dense smoke wrapped the car. Other vehicles loomed beside them, then vanished into the haze. The murk briefly cleared, and she saw the brickmakers’ tall conical kilns beside the road, discarded tires stacked beside them, black smoke pouring from their mouths.
“Why do they burn tires instead of wood? The smoke is so thick.”
“The rubber is cheaper, and it burns hotter. The hotter the fire, the better the bricks.”
An acrid scent permeated the car. She drew her dupatta up over her nose and mouth. “It’s like nuclear winter. They shouldn’t allow it. It must make people sick.”
“Not any people who count.” Gul’s eyes were as cold as his words.
“What do you mean?” She lowered her voice to match his and glanced toward the front seat. Nur Muhammed reclined with his head against the seat, eyes closed. “That old jackal,” Alia had said of Farida’s new father-in-law. “You watch out for him. He is the one who has control. Not your husband.” Farida decided Nur Muhammed was not asleep.
“The refugees work there.” Then Farida understood. Pashtuns from Afghanistan, he meant. Like him, but lacking Nur Muhammed’s wealth. Sometimes, on their way to various translating jobs at the embassies, Alia and Farida would pass the bus station, bordered by one-room mud hovels where the refugees lived with their chickens and bullocks, the latter treading phlegmatically through the streams of sewage running down the narrow alleyways dividing the homes. Afghan children would swarm their taxi, thumping on its windows, jabbering their pleas for money. Farida flinched at the memory.
They passed through the valley, leaving the kilns behind. The sun climbed higher, and traffic increased on the road, a mélange of buses, horse-drawn tongas, donkeys hauling carts piled high with new bricks, and swirls of cyclists and pedestrians. The driver wove his way through them so expertly that the se
dan’s quick feints and swerves left Farida slightly nauseous.
The car slowed through the crush of marketgoers in Taxila, and again as they passed the brick military barracks at the Cadet College in Hasan Aabdal. The road curved sinuously, then straightened and gave way to a high, wide plain. Farida had dozed but woke when the car slowed. Gul put his hand on her arm. She resisted an urge to jerk away.
“I thought you would want to see this.” The driver pulled over at Attock and stopped the car at the edge of a bluff overlooking a river. Gul motioned Farida to join him outside. Across the road, the stone walls of an old Mughal fort rose high above the riverbank.
She tried to look impressed. But Gul directed her attention to the river—two rivers, really. “The Indus”—he pointed to the one at their feet—“and the Kabul.” He indicated the branch that ran into the Indus. The pale blue-green waters of the former caught the sunlight and refracted it to broken prisms shimmering in the mist. But the Kabul! A brown surge, more mud than water, shouldered its way into the dancing Indus, refusing to commingle, unspooling downriver in truculent curls. Across the river, the land rose sharply into hills that funneled the wind through the river valley. It tore past, snatching at Farida’s dupatta.
Gul stood with his hands behind his back. “This is the real border with Afghanistan. Not the Khyber Pass. When you cross this river, you should consider yourself already there. And act accordingly.” He brought his hands forward to show her a flat packet wrapped in cloth and tied in colorful string. “A gift for you.”
She held out her hand. Another gust caught her dupatta, whipping the ends from her shoulders. She caught at them and held them tight at her throat. “Please. You open it.”
He bent his head so that she could not see his face while he worked at the knots. He unfolded the cloth and she caught a glimpse of shimmery accordion-pleated silk the color of the Indus. He shook it out. Its folds billowed in the wind.
The sun was hot, but Farida grew cold. “A burqa.”
He stepped closer.
She leaned away. He raised his arms high, holding the garment.
Farida slid the dupatta from her head. Her hair lashed free in the wind. Then the burqa settled around her. Everything grew dark and quiet. Gul made some adjustments, and she could see again, badly, through the screen before her eyes.
Moments before, her gaze had taken in the sweep of the Indus Valley, the impregnable walls of the Mughal fort, the highlands rising smoky in the distant haze. Now her view was limited to the few inches before her. Her husband’s face loomed, checkerboarded by the shadows of the screen.
“I know,” he said.
She grimaced at the compassion in his voice. “You don’t.”
“You don’t. This is better. This is safer.”
“Safer?” She heard the impermissible rebellion in her words. “Safer than what? You are with me. Your father is with me. You’re taking me to your home and shutting me up with the women. What possible danger can there be?”
She had raised her voice. Gul lowered his.
“You know nothing of the world and its dangers. You call me ignorant—no, don’t deny it, I know how you think of me.” She turned away, but still his words struck her. “You are the ignorant one. You are angry now, but you will learn. You will thank me. This is better. On this point, you must believe me.”
The voluminous folds of the burqa flapped about Farida, and she gathered them in one hand. She took a step, stumbled, then righted herself. “I will never thank you for this.”
Five
PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN, SEPTEMBER 2001
Peshawar appeared before Farida in a palette of brown and beige, with none of the lush greenery softening the concrete boxes that passed for architecture in Islamabad.
The car entered the mazelike center of the Old Town, where wooden homes with shuttered windows and elaborate carved balconies leaned over the narrow streets. Farida peered through the grille of her burqa, studying the faces so different from those of Islamabad’s Punjabi population. She felt as though she had traveled to another country. In Islamabad, men were as likely to wear Western-style suits as tunics. Here, they wore local dress, topped with woolen waistcoats or heavy fringed shawls. A few men in black turbans, their kohl-ringed eyes strangely feminine above their beards, stalked hand in hand, and Farida recognized these from news accounts as followers of Afghanistan’s ruthless Taliban movement.
There were far more tongas and donkey carts than in Islamabad, all of them competing for inadequate street space with impertinent three-wheeled motorized rickshaws that dashed, beeping wildly, among the cars and carts.
She gasped at a realization. Gul and Nur Muhammed turned to her.
“I thought I saw something,” she said, and was relieved when Nur Muhammed resumed his conversation with the driver. Actually, it was what she hadn’t seen: women. There were hardly any on the streets, and the few she had seen were swathed in burqas like her own, most of them the same sky-blue, but some green and even a few white, impractical in this land of churning dust.
But when Nur Muhammed bade the driver to stop outside a sweetmeats shop, she discovered that they were across the street from a cinema, its walls adorned with larger-than-life murals of bare-faced women, their generous hips and breasts outlined by clinging fabric. With Nur Muhammed safely out of the car for a few moments, she murmured a question to Gul about the contrast between the veiled women on the streets and the fleshy display of the murals.
He laughed indulgently.
“Yes, the cinemas are scandalous,” he said. “The mullahs are always trying to shut them down. The murals are a way of showing what the movies are about.”
Farida nodded. The men in the murals, their belts bristling with guns and knives, stood in attitudes of either threat or protection to the women. She thought of the genteel British costume dramas, with their ladylike yet spirited heroines, the only films that her father had let the family watch in London’s cinemas. He didn’t realize that Farida and Alia connived to slip away with their friends to other, far more interesting, features. She examined the murals more closely. Despite their sensuality, the women exuded helplessness.
“Aren’t there any women heroes?” she asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Ah, here is my father.”
Nur Muhammed returned to the car with a white box wrapped in string, the scent of fresh pastries filling the car, and made a great show of directing the driver through streets the man obviously knew quite well. Khaki-uniformed members of the Frontier Corps were everywhere, even in the wide, quiet avenues of the old British cantonment, watching passersby with suspicious eyes.
Gul explained their presence. “The Khyber Pass is very near. Many Afghan people try to enter Pakistan illegally.”
In the front seat, Nur Muhammed barked a laugh. “Try?” he said. “They succeed. These troops”—he lifted his chin toward one of the trucks—“are just for show, to please the Amriki who make a big stupid fuss about everything. Taliban this, Taliban that. As if the Taliban are a problem to anyone but themselves.”
Farida tried to make her voice timid and questioning. “Surely so many Afghan people would not need to come to Pakistan if the Taliban were not a problem?”
Even through the screen of her burqa, she could see the displeasure that crossed Nur Muhammed’s face. But he said nothing. Only after they had passed several more blocks, into wealthier neighborhoods where plane trees shaded wide boulevards, did she realize that his silence was his response. It was as though she no longer existed. So this is how it would be; she was invisible. For a moment, she was perversely grateful for the way the burqa disguised her distress.
She chided herself, remembering stories of brides beaten, stabbed, set afire. Silence, really, was an occasion for gratitude. At Gul’s whispered “Hayatabad,” announcing her new neighborhood, they rolled up before a rambling stucco villa whose verandas and arches enticed the rare cooling breeze. Here, at last, was the color she’d crave
d. Scarlet hibiscus nearly obscured its walls, drooping among well-watered bougainvillea vines thick with purple blossoms. She caught the scent of jasmine. Gul held the door for her.
“Home.” Gul bowed, his courtesy nearly disarming her. “It is my home, and now it is yours, too.”
Farida peered toward the front door, where Nur Muhammed waited. No, it was his home. She was merely a guest here, and Gul was little better. Even though the burqa severely curtailed her ability to walk, she tossed her head and lifted her chin high as she followed her husband and father-in-law into this new life.
* * *
Gul’s mother, Maryam, a stout, handsome woman, greeted them at the door. She grasped Farida’s elbow and ushered her into the house, simultaneously praising and scolding her for wearing the burqa.
“Ah, I see my son has turned you into a proper Pashtun,” she said in broken yet confident Urdu. “Good, good. But you need not wear that here among family. What must you think of us?” She tugged the burqa back from Farida’s face as they entered another room. Farida was vaguely aware that Gul and Nur Muhammed had disappeared to a separate part of the house. Her more immediate concern, as she smoothed her hair into place, was the crowd of women seated on the floor. They stared in silence, the tea before them forgotten. Even in the extended families of the Punjab, there were not so many aunties as had gathered in this one small room.
Maryam gave the burqa a final yank and tossed it into a corner. Farida saw a heap of accordion-pleated blue and wondered how she would ever distinguish her own from all the others. But the thought passed quickly as the women scrambled up and surrounded her, fingering the bangles on her wrists and commenting upon their number and weight, touching their fingertips to the tiered earrings that swung from her lobes, bunching the silk of her kameez in their hands and exclaiming at its softness. One woman put her nose to Farida’s neck and sniffed at her perfume.