by Bapsi Sidhwa
One behind the other, they emerged, eyes ablaze in fanatic determination. The crowd of tribals dispersed in a hushed understanding, each to get his own gun and prepare for the hunt. Not a word was said. They identified with the man’s disgrace, taking the burden on themselves. Collectively, they meant to salvage the honor of the clan. The runaway’s only route lay across the river. Once across, she was lost to them forever. How then would they hold up their heads? The threatening disgrace hung like an acrid smell around them. It would poison their existence unless they found the girl.
There was only one punishment for a runaway wife.
Wordlessly, the men organized their hunt and walked into the twilight-shrouded mountains.
Hamida sat in the middle of the waiting women. She buried her involuntary smile on her knees, shading her eyes, and the women could not see her tears course down the deep grooves on her face.
Honor! she thought bitterly. Everything for honor—and another life lost! Her loved ones dead and now the girl she was beginning to hold so dear sacrificed. She knew the infallibility of the mountain huntsmen.
The old woman was overcome by the memory of her three dead sons: the weight of each child in her body for nine months, the excruciating pain, drudgery, sweat: and scant years later, the heartbreak when, one-by-one, each of her sons was carried home on a crude stretcher swinging from the men’s shoulders, their faces grim with the weight of the corpse under an impoverished shroud. In each grief, a nameless dread: how many more lives would the dead one claim? The set faces of the men, their eyes burning with hate and a lust for revenge, their old makeshift guns forever loved and polished, the leather slings decorated with colored bands and tassels, cherished even more for the men they killed.
Men and honor. And now the girl . . .
Visions floated confusedly in her mind. She, who had been so proud and valiant and wholeheartedly subservient to the ruthless code of her forebears, now loathed it with all her heart. Surely God would punish her for this. She knew now she would die.
Her gray, henna-streaked head shook as with palsy, and the women stroking her hair murmured, “There, there, don’t fret. They’ll be back soon with that bitch’s corpse, your son’s honor vindicated!”
Chapter 23
As the search parties were leaving the village Zaitoon was discovering a path through the chaos of boulders, and had scrambled to the end of a narrow cleft. It opened on to a gritty rectangular plateau, and crawling from the dim passage, she sprawled face down on the earth. Gasping with exhaustion, eyes closed, she lay dead to the world.
A little later, she sat up to find her thighs still shaking.
This was the first time she had paused to rest since leaving the stream in the morning. Her every thought bent on flight, she had driven her body relentlessly through the mountains, intuitively following the river downstream.
On trembling knees, she surveyed the sterile landscape. Not a trace of life: not even the droppings of a mountain goat. No sound but that of the cold breeze swooshing up from the deep shadows of the cleft and from concealed channels and gullies. Trailing her blanket, she wobbled towards a cluster of boulders.
Only after settling among them, sheltered from the evening wind and secure from view, did she allow her thoughts to surface. They crowded in on her in a clamoring disorder.
Twilight was fading. A dismal shade smudged the gray-pink sky rent by sharp mountain peaks.
Frightened by the shadows, Zaitoon snuggled into the darkness of her blanket. Its flimsy protection shut out the night. It joggled disconcertingly when Zaitoon tore at the bread. Her hunger appeased, she shut her eyes and lay inert. Inexplicably, the wind had ceased. The immense quiet of the empty world brooded around her and she grew tense, straining for any sound. The stillness poured its disquiet into her rigid body. She grew vastly afraid. She imagined strange creatures stalking the nocturnal wilderness. Snarling beasts tore at her—inhuman things crept up to touch her; the air within her blanket was lacerated by screams! And throughout, like a malign disease spreading, was the consciousness of Sakhi’s insane wrath, his murderous cruelty.
Inching her fingers to the edge of her blanket, she peered out.
It was a velvety, moonless night. Enormous icy stars pierced her face with darts of cold. She looked stealthily at the rocks. Their insubstantial shadows harbored grotesque images. Eyes wide with terror, Zaitoon sprang up. She touched the hard reassuring contours of one of the stones. There was no movement but the knock of her heart.
Trembling, she sat down again, burrowing into her blanket.
Her eyes shut, Zaitoon began to pray. Concentrating on the cryptic Arabic incantations, she extracted from them a faith that once had transformed her childhood nightmares into peaceful dreams. Her voice rose to a whisper. Interspersing the mystic syllables with Punjabi, she begged, “Allah help me, help me. Don’t let me be afraid . . . Allah protect me from the animals . . .”
An inconsequential speck, lost in the endless chasms and heights of the Karakoram range, the girl gradually soothed herself with the comforting cadences. In a whisper, prayer and appeal poured from her mouth, and images advanced—of Miriam, of Nikka sitting on the sagging string-bed before his shop, and of Qasim. For a split second she saw Ashiq’s handsome brown face and adoring eyes. She tried to hold the image, screwing her eyes shut beneath the blanket, but the features refused to form distinctly. All at once they fused with the image of Sakhi in the golden handsomeness of the day of their marriage, with the flaming pomegranate blossom behind his ear and his eyes lined with antimony; his hair falling copper from the center-parting; and the lamplight gleaming gold on his strong arms. She sensed the possessed, intoxicating brilliance of his eyes . . .
“But you liked me last night,” he says, and his contrite, bewildered look makes her reach out to stroke his cheeks . . .
Suddenly she longed to see him. With all her heart she wanted Sakhi to find her. His face, ravaged by concern, broken with remorse, floated before her—gently he wooed her . . .
And his soft caressing words lulled her to sleep.
The sun climbed the mountain slope, thawed the rocks and touched back to life the numbed body of the sleeping girl.
Zaitoon blinked at the glare. She peered over the boulders at the sweep of scrubless, flinty earth and at the walls of cliffs surrounding it. To her right the plateau ended in a thin, sun-edged line that plunged abruptly into a precipice. There was no trace of habitation. Gusty little draughts from hidden crevices swept the crust and died among the boulders. For a while Zaitoon sat still, marshalling her sleep-stunned faculties. Her muscles felt stiff. Then, drawing the blanket round her shoulders, she scampered across the stretch of exposed land and burrowed down a narrow gap between two turret-ing cliffs.
All morning, tracing her direction from the sun, Zaitoon picked the most difficult route. She knew the easier passages would be the first to be searched by the tribals.
At noon, threading through a maze of winding gullies, Zaitoon climbed down into a dark, subterranean world of cold shadows. Like vermin in search of dim crevices, Zaitoon felt safe only in the dark. The air was dank along the narrow corridor and the stones beneath her feet were slippery. Far above, a slice of pale sky silhouetted the torn edges of the ravine.
Late in the afternoon she came across a drip of water gathering into a shallow, basket-sized pool in the rocks. Gratefully scooping it in her hands, she slaked her thirst. She was ravenous. She ate some bread, chewing carefully to prolong its savor, and desisted from eating more. What if she did not find the bridge tomorrow? The thought put her in a cold sweat.
She knew she had made good progress that day. Buoyed up by the conviction that she would find the bridge soon, she had used her body callously. Disregarding the strain that tore her muscles and the stones that cut into her flesh, she had disassociated herself from the frame. Her body was to serve only one purpose: to convey her to the bridge at Dubair.
A moist breeze now fanned her skin and t
he girl began to shiver. She clasped her hands to her throat and sat down by the shallow pool. What if she had moved too far inland? Where was she? She was a fledgling far from its nest, lost in this drain deep in the earth, with icy winds whistling around her.
Overcome by a sudden wave of panic, she began to scramble across boulders like a crab. Barefoot, she tried to climb an almost vertical bluff and slithered down, scraping her skin. In pain, she cowered against the stone wall. Eyes seemed to peer from the shadows, yellow and fiendish, and fearsome shapes . . .
All at once she screamed, her voice keening at a hysterical pitch, and the echo of her scream congealed her panic into an immediate need for action.
Holding her breath, she scuttled swiftly along the stony bed of the chasm. A desperate instinct guided her, and, an hour later, she crawled over the crumbling edge of the ravine on to a sun-baked plateau.
The sun hung low in the sky between snow-softened summits. It nuzzled up to the girl as she lay face down, gasping for breath and trembling, and its warm magic calmed her. Pushing back her hair she stood up and looked around. She trudged to a rocky niche and there, protected from the wind, settled down to her second night in the immense loneliness of the stony waste.
All the next day, and the next, Zaitoon climbed into the mountains. The air grew rarer, and she breathed it in quick, exhausted gasps. High on the slopes dirty white glaciers nosed their way into the valley. She drank at the streams that trickled from them, and hot with exertion, splashed her face.
As the sun set it drained away the heat and the wind turned icy. Zaitoon was deathly cold. Huddled in the lee of an overhang she shivered. Her teeth chattered, until a cold, numbing sensation drugged her to sleep.
It took Zaitoon a while to be fully awake the next day. Had she not been so young and strong, she might have died of the cold. She could tell it was noon. The sun rode high and the rocks, once again radiating its heat, had revived her frozen body.
The girl sat up, vexed that she had slept through half the day. She ate a chappati, dipping it in the stream to soften the hard dry bread, and counted the remaining discs of maize. Only five! She had eaten two chappatis a day. She must eat even less. She stood up, surveying the bleak hills. Already she was out of breath. Recalling the numbing cold of the night before she decided to climb down to a lower altitude. Skirting the desolate hills she gradually descended. By evening she could tell from the warmer feel of the air and her eased breathing that she was considerably lower.
Zaitoon gasped in dismay. She had struggled up a steep slope confident she would glimpse the river from there. The high ridge she had conquered swooped down and up again in a solid brown mass. All around was a maelstrom of mountains. They billowed out like frozen waves. The sun hung low now and at the farthest point snow-topped heights merged into clouds.
Zaitoon knew that somewhere in the serpentine vaults of the ravine and in the glacier-riven valleys she had lost her direction, and that the river gorge could be hidden anywhere in the myriad furrows between the mountains.
Darkness fell, and with it came fear. Mountains closed in on her like a pack of wolves.
Zaitoon shook her head in disbelief. “These are not the same mountains,” she thought in horror of the hills she had loved at sight—whose magic and splendor lived in Qasim’s reminiscences. Now she was appalled at the country’s sudden menace. She realized that Qasim’s presence, and even the presence of Sakhi and the tribesmen had concealed from her a truth; that the land she stood on was her enemy: a hostile inscrutable maze.
In trepidation, she scurried towards an eruption of rock. For the fifth night she curled up beneath her blanket.
Chapter 24
Leaning back on a ledge, Sakhi stretched his arms up and straightened his cramped legs. He felt bruised by the incessant weight of the gun across his thighs, and dusting the ground with his turban, he carefully placed the weapon by his side.
Gradually his body resumed its former posture: neck strained forward, shoulders and back slumped against the rock.
From here he could survey the bridge and all the accesses leading to it. He stared fixedly at the shiny asphalt surface of the bridge reflecting the sun, and his eyes throbbed painfully.
The moment he heard a sound, his muscles jumped alert and the ache in his body vanished. Silently he picked up the gun.
A soft footfall and then the scrape of leather on rock.
Sakhi slouched back, and a little later, when the tread he had recognized grew distinct, he called,
“Here, brother.”
The footsteps changed direction and Yunus Khan hauled his scraggy limbs over the edge.
“No sign of her yet?” he asked.
Sakhi shook his head. “No, but she’s bound to try the bridge sooner or later.”
He had said this to himself again and again, fending off the fear that she might have taken another route.
Beyond the bridge, in the distance, a cloud of dust traveled along the ground marking the passage of an invisible vehicle heading towards Pattan. Yunus Khan blew into the muzzle of his gun and cocked one eye to peer into it.
“Munawar and his son also have joined the search,” he said, referring to an uncle who lived two villages downstream. “They’re all out combing the mountains. Someone is bound to stumble on the corpse sooner or later. She can’t be alive, it’s four days now.”
“Four days!” Sakhi dredged his lungs with a snort and spat out the brownish phlegm he stored like the venom of a scorpion. “Four days and no sign of her! Well, she has not crossed here.”
He studied the crashing, impassable expanse of the river boiling under the bridge. “What if she’s crossed at Dubair?” he asked, voicing the apprehension that had been gnawing at him since morning.
“Hah!” Yunus Khan’s guttural laugh was contemptuous. “You think she’d find her way through the mountains? All the way to Dubair? Even if she knew it as we do, her miserable body would give out. She cannot go halfway without our hearing of it.”
Sakhi whirled on his brother angrily. “You think she has wings? If the men have searched the mountains as you say, then she is alive! I tell you she’s alive, or the jackals and vultures would have led them to her.”
His face suddenly turned ugly with suspicion. “Are you lying, brother?” he hissed. “Has she already crossed the bridge to Dubair? Are you trying to spare my feelings? You’re deceiving me! You have betrayed my trust!” he cried, scrambling to his feet. “‘You say the clansmen are searching the mountains: No! they’ve all been comfortably asleep while she slipped past. You’ve not cared for my honor, brother, you have not cared!”
Both men were standing. Yunus Khan’s face was ashen. He seized the ragged front of Sakhi’s jacket and threw him sprawling back on a boulder. Sakhi hit it with a thud, bracing his legs to keep him upright. Yunus Khan towered over him. Standing deliberately on Sakhi’s feet to prevent him from moving, he pinioned his brother’s arms against the rock. His elongated face descended to within an inch of Sakhi’s.
“You fool! Your honor? Why didn’t you think of it when you allowed the bitch to run away? You knew she’d run. Are you a buggered up eunuch? You should have slit her throat right then!”
Their faces almost touching, Sakhi saw his own fatigue reflected. New lines marked his brother’s eyes, etched by the dust and exhaustion of the last few days.
Sakhi’s vision misted. Deep in those cold, vituperative eyes nailing him to the rock was a spark of tenderness, of a bond forged over the years.
With a last punishing shove, Yunus Khan stepped back. Torn by a sense of shame and failure Sakhi slid to the ledge floor. Burying his face in the dusty folds of his jacket, he broke into furious weeping.
Yunus Khan fondled his brother’s hair. He pressed his blubbering, distorted face to his chest. It was not strange that Sakhi cried, for men here wept as copiously as women. In this land where subtle expressions of grief were misconstrued, men, dominant in all spheres, were jealous of their supremacy i
n sorrow. They lamented loudest.
Sakhi’s racking sobs subsided and Yunus Khan, having wiped his brother’s wet face with the loose end of his turban, leapt wearily from the ledge.
An hour later Sakhi sat up to watch his father walk across the bridge. So, he gloated, his misgivings were not absurd after all. Yunus Khan had seen fit to send Misri Khan on a foray.
Immaculate in white garments, his embroidered red velvet jacket flamboyant in the sun, Misri Khan walked confidently. At the bridgehead, he saluted a drowsy guard and headed for the billows of dust rising from Pattan.
Misri Khan sat down with a group of Gujjar nomads whom he would not have deigned to notice in normal circumstances. He exchanged pleasantries and engaged them in animated small talk. Had they known anything at all about the girl, it would have come out in the course of his circumspect maneuvering of the conversation. They had no news.
He sauntered among the gangs of tribals laboring on the road, and satisfied that they knew nothing either, ambled towards the officers’ quarters.
Two uniformed men sprawled on chairs on either side of a rickety table on the verandah. Misri Khan climbed the steps.
“Salaam-alaikum,” he called, with his customary arrogance. The younger officer, who by now was fed up with the demands of arrogant patriarchs in imposing turbans and waistcoats, returned the greeting curtly.
“What is it?” he asked, drumming the wooden armrests of his chair.
“Son, I have to go to Dubair on an urgent matter. I wondered, can I get a ride?”
The officer studied the tribal with the air of a man empowered to withhold a favor, and then he capitulated with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“Oh, hop into any jeep. They keep coming and going.”