The End of Innocence

by Moni Mohsin

  Rani reddened. ‘It’s something I made for Laila Bibi.’

  ‘For me?’ queried Laila. ‘What is it?’

  Peeling aside the damp folds of the cloth, she saw a circlet of yellow chambeli. She lifted the fragile bracelet and draped it around her wrist.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, inhaling the scent of the small, vivid flowers. ‘Will you do it up for me?’

  Rani deftly knotted the thread.

  ‘It is lovely.’ Fareeda raised Laila’s arm and examined the bracelet. The flowers were woven together in a delicate plait. ‘How did you do that? Not even the flower-sellers in Lahore can make bracelets like this.’

  Rani flushed pink with pleasure. ‘I don’t know. I’ll make one for you if you like.’

  ‘I’d like that very much. Now I must go. But mind, no jumping about. Is that clear?’

  Laila nodded and threw herself into a deckchair. She motioned to an upright chair beside her. Rani sauntered over, head erect, shoulders thrown back, her bright eyes alert. With Fareeda’s departure, she changed from an awkward, tongue-tied adolescent to a poised young woman. Accustomed to Rani’s shyness in front of her parents, Laila did not comment on her transformation. Rani smoothed her kameez over her thighs and sat down.

  ‘Is this shalwar kameez new?’ Laila eyed the blue tunic and matching drawstring trousers. They were made of coarse cotton, but the sky-blue complemented Rani’s colouring, emphasizing the toffee tones in her hair and eyes. The cuffs and hem of her shirt were edged in white. Rani looked clean and cool.

  ‘Want to see something special?’ Rani drew aside the white shawl from her breast with a flourish. ‘Tun-tana!’ She stuck out her puny chest. The shirt was close fitting, and its neckline was lower than usual. Piped in white, it had a fussy scalloped pattern, like fan-shaped seashells laid side by side. ‘Isn’t it pretty?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Laila did not like frills and flounces and often clashed with Fareeda over the elaborate party dresses that she sometimes chose for her.

  Rani draped the shawl over her front again, patting it into place. ‘I asked a seamstress to copy one of Heer’s kameezes from the film. Of course, hers was satin, but I like this. It makes me look like a girl, doesn’t it? Not like those sacklike things my grandmother makes for me, like an old crone’s.’

  Rani hunched her back, folded her lips over her teeth and, with her neck stretched out like a tortoise, hobbled around Laila’s chair. Laila laughed, delighted with Rani’s imitation of Kaneez.

  ‘And now this!’ Rani announced. Pushing her shawl back to reveal her slender form, she pulled her shirt tight against her middle and thrust out one hip in a provocative pose. She threw Laila a simmering look over her shoulder. Laila pursed her mouth, unsure who Rani was mimicking now.

  ‘Who’s that supposed to be?’ she asked. The pose was alien yet unsettlingly familiar. She had seen it struck before, but never by Rani.

  ‘Guess,’ Rani purred, wetting her lips.

  ‘I can’t.’ Laila scowled. Rani looked grown-up. In a strange, alarming kind of way.

  ‘Me,’ Rani pouted, caressing her cocked hip with one hand while twirling a lock of hair with the other. ‘I’m just being me.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Laila snapped, piqued. ‘You don’t stand like that or do those stupid things with your lips. You look silly. Stop it!’

  Rani’s face fell. She swaddled herself in her shawl and sat down. ‘I was trying to look like Heer,’ she confessed in a small voice. ‘The way she looked at Ranjha over her shoulder.’

  ‘Well, you’re not Heer, so you don’t have to copy her.’

  ‘I wish I was Heer. I wish I were beautiful like her so someone would fall in love with me as deeply as Ranjha did with her. I want to be adored and sung to and smiled at.’ She cupped her face in her hands.

  Laila sat up, anxious to reclaim her friend’s attention, to haul her back to the familiar, to herself.

  ‘But you heard what Dadi said, didn’t you?’ Laila shook Rani’s knee. ‘Girls mustn’t love like that. It’s wrong and shameful. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Rani was miles away.

  ‘Heer had to kill herself. Have you forgotten?’ Laila’s voice was shrill. ‘And she shamed her family.’

  ‘Everyone has to die some time,’ Rani grinned. ‘What do I care as long as I get to dance and sing and taste some real happiness before dying?’ She jumped to her feet and twirled on her toes, her white shawl flapping at her back like an angel’s wings. She laughed as she spun, her arms raised to the ceiling, laughter gushing like a waterfall out of her flung-back head.

  Laila watched, bemused by her abrupt change of mood. Rani was happy, wasn’t she? She laughed and played with them. They went on picnics together and stole raw mangoes and sang, with Rani beating the back of a spoon on an old biscuit tin to keep time. So what did she mean about tasting real happiness? The question nagged at Laila, but she was reluctant to voice it. She felt as if Rani had suddenly taken a flying leap across a deep, wide chasm. She had cleared to the other side, leaving Laila behind, alone and confused.

  Laila reached out and grabbed a corner of Rani’s shirt. Mid-twirl, Rani stopped. Her shawl subsided against her with a sigh. Breathless, she looked down at Laila’s upturned face.

  ‘You mustn’t say silly things,’ said Laila.

  ‘What silly things?’ Rani was flushed after her dance.

  ‘About death and things.’ Laila dropped her gaze to the hem of Rani’s shirt. A single thread shaped like a comma hung loose.

  ‘Why? Did I frighten you?’ Rani looked amused.

  ‘Of course not. I don’t like it, that’s all.’

  ‘What’s there not to like?’

  ‘Why are you being like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘All funny and weird.’

  Rani touched Laila lightly on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry, I forgot you are just eight.’

  ‘I’m not a child.’ Laila brushed off Rani’s hand.

  ‘All right, all right, you’re not,’ Rani laughed. ‘You’re my friend. Would you like to play carom? Shall I fetch your board?’

  Of course, she was miles better at carom than Laila. Where Laila had to take careful aim before shooting while also muttering a prayer under her breath and kissing the counter for luck, Rani hardly needed to look at the board. She flicked counters into the pockets as easily as popping grapes into her mouth. But still Rani managed to lose. She won the first two games easily, but she lost the last three with a series of hysterical errors.

  Once, arms flailing and a look of mock alarm on her face, she fell over the board with a crash and had to forfeit all her winnings. Another time, she took aim with her eyes crossed, so the counters skittered all over the board without a single one entering any of the four pockets. She played the last game pretending to be Bua. She fingered an invisible cross at her neck, muttered invocations to the Holy Mother, and called her ‘Lailu Baby’. Every so often, she would lunge across the board to place a hand on Laila’s brow to check whether ‘the big fever’ was back. Laila laughed till tears ran down her face. And when, as if on cue, Bua waddled out on to the veranda and placed a hand on Laila’s forehead, both girls howled with laughter.

  Nobody was a patch on Rani when she was like this. But only as long as she stayed like this.

  3

  Rani stood wringing her hands under a massive banyan tree about a mile from Sardar Begum’s haveli. The tree was famous in Kalanpur. Many years ago, the body of a beautiful young woman had been found propped up against its trunk. It appeared, from the marks on her throat, that she had been strangled. The girl had been a stranger to the village, and her identity was never established. Nor was it ever discovered why she was killed, or indeed by whom. But one hot, moonless night, when Dullah the blacksmith was walking past the tree, shrill peals of laughter rent the silence. He stopped, looked around, even called out. Again, silence. No one stepped forth. Moments later, the laughter rang out again, louder, hi
gher, and he realized that it was coming from the tree. His blood turned to ice, for he knew then that this was no earthly sound.

  The tree was sited on the edge of a sugar-cane field but separated from it by a wide water channel bordered by high stands of bullrushes. Since Dullah’s experience, no one had ventured near the banyan, for Dullah’s word was trusted in the village and, if he said the tree was cursed, then so it was.

  Over the years, the tree’s appearance had grown more ominous, as if it were trying to live up to its reputation. Its trunk had thickened; its foliage had grown more dense. Ariel roots, the size of a child’s leg, hung from the canopy like a hangman’s ropes. Nothing grew in the banyan’s inky shade.

  Rani tried not to think of the murdered woman as she paced beneath the tree. Her mouth was dry and her palms damp. A slight wind whispered in the sugar cane beyond. Her head jerked up. Was that he? She shrank behind the tree trunk, half thrilled, half fearful, her eyes fixed on the head-high cane. When nothing larger than a rabbit emerged, she let out a pent-up breath. Would he come? Their exchange had been so brief, so furtive. Had she understood him correctly? ‘The borh tree,’ he had whispered. ‘Tomorrow at four.’

  Why had he chosen this place for a meeting? Young and dashing, he didn’t look the type to frequent such a godforsaken spot. But then, what did she know about him, except the little she had gleaned from his appearance? He was well off, at least compared to herself. He wore sturdy leather sandals instead of rubber flip-flops and, unlike the faded, shabby cottons of the villagers, his clothes seemed new. He certainly wasn’t as rich as Laila. Unlike Laila, he didn’t ride in a car or wear western clothes. What else did she know about him? He didn’t seem that much older than her. Although he was clean-shaven, his skin looked soft and smooth, as if it had first made acquaintance with a razor only recently.

  Rani had noticed him three months back, an alien face amid the familiar crowd outside her school. That first day she had felt his gaze upon her, probing and insistent. She had not returned his look. She had hurried home, taking the shortcut that led past Tariq’s tube well. Rani’s school, Punjab Model Girls’ School, lay beyond Kalanpur, and it took her half an hour’s brisk walk to make the journey.

  When Rani was younger, Sardar Begum had deputed her elderly driver to cycle her to and from school. Balanced sidesaddle on the crossbar of his old bike, Rani had borne with the driver’s asthmatic wheezing and odour of unwashed clothes. But when she turned twelve, Rani informed Kaneez that she was quite capable of walking there with the two other girls from Kalanpur who also attended the same school. But on the day that she had first seen him at the school gate, she had been so flustered that she had run home without waiting for her usual companions.

  Rani guessed he was from a neighbouring village. He was certainly not from Kalanpur, most of whose inhabitants she knew by face if not by name. She took to watching out for him. On the days he was there, she would quickly avert her face, lest he think that she’d been looking for him. But try as she might to conceal her pleasure, she couldn’t stop grinning as she walked home with her friends. On the days that he wasn’t there, disappointment settled on her shoulders like a wet sack. And then, around the time she went to the cinema, he didn’t come for six days in a row.

  Rani was frantic. Each day, she’d pause in the midst of the jostling, chattering stream of schoolgirls pouring out of the school gates. Standing on tiptoe with neck outstretched, she searched the crowd in vain. Just as she had convinced herself that he had moved away, or worse, lost interest, she finally saw him again. He was standing behind the gatepost and, as she rounded the corner, she ran into him. His hand shot out to steady her. Close up, she saw that his front tooth was slightly chipped and a tiny scar sliced his right eyebrow into two. His teeth glistened white against his coppery skin. She looked him straight in the eye and gave him a smile of such radiance that he blinked and fell back a step. Swamped by embarrassment, Rani shook off his hand and ran all the way home.

  The next day, he spoke to her. Having spotted him early, Rani was hurrying though the gates with her head down when he appeared beside her. He bent and, retrieving a pencil from near her feet, held it up to her.

  ‘Is this yours?’ he asked in a loud voice, blowing dust off the pencil.

  Rani stopped. Clutching her books to her thudding chest, she peeped up at the unfamiliar pencil and shook her head mutely.

  ‘Someone else must have dropped it then.’ He spoke in the same ringing tone. But before she could move away, he muttered, ‘The borh tree. Tomorrow at four.’ Then he disappeared into the crowd. It was done so quickly and quietly that even Rani’s walking companions, who were just behind her, did not hear.

  She was sure he’d said the banyan tree. She couldn’t have misheard. Unless he meant some other banyan tree elsewhere. Rani had assumed that he meant this banyan tree just beyond her village. Did he know she was from Kalanpur? The school was a short walk from the main Sabzbagh–Kalanpur road. For all he knew, she could be from Sabzbagh, or indeed from Bridgebad or any of the villages in the area. Come to think of it, he could be from as far afield as Colewallah. But no further, for she could not imagine a place further than that.

  The call for maghreb prayer carried over from the village mosque. He was already an hour late. Had Sardar Begum been in Kalanpur, she would be laying out her prayer mat on her divan in the courtyard. Soon, Kaneez would serve her mistress tea on a tray in her bedroom. Then she’d help Nazeer, the cook, carry the daybed on to the veranda. She’d collect the cushions, fold the sheets, roll up the mattress and take them indoors. She might stop to attend to the odd task but, failing that, she’d return to the quarter. And notice Rani’s absence. Rani’s heart plunged, but, no, wait, she mustn’t panic needlessly. Her grandmother was away in Sargodha with Sardar Begum, who was visiting her daughter.

  Kaneez had entrusted Sardar Begum’s cook’s wife to keep an eye on Rani, as she had on previous occasions. But this time, exactly two days after Kaneez’s departure, the cook’s wife had suffered a late miscarriage and taken to her bed. The next day, she had summoned Rani to her bedside and feebly enquired if she was all right. Did she have enough food in the house? Oil? Bread? Rani had assured her that she had everything she needed and was well able to look after herself. She mustn’t worry about her. In fact, if there was anything that she, Rani, could do for her, she had only to ask. The cook’s wife had smiled weakly and closed her eyes. With no one to keep tabs on her, it had been easy for Rani to slip out and make her way undetected to the borh tree.

  Rani twisted her dupatta in her restless fingers. She was stupid and credulous to have believed him. She should leave. What was she doing in this ill-fated place, waiting for a man who had spoken to her for the first time only yesterday? Nervously, she turned back to look at the tree. Where, a moment ago, mynahs had been chattering, now all was quiet. Each green-black leaf hung still. The whorls and twists in the gnarled old bark looked like eyes – eyes that bored into her wayward soul. Rani felt the skin on her neck prickle as she heard a faint rustle behind her. Too frightened to turn around, she was poised for flight when someone touched her elbow. It was he. He had come.

  He grinned at her, displaying his dazzling teeth. He was spruce in a donkey-grey shalwar kameez with a big, flowing collar. His hair was brushed forward in a quiff. Rani was glad she had changed into her new blue shalwar kameez. Did he like it? Shy at the thought, she stared at her flip-flops. He fingered his quiff and cleared his throat.

  ‘Have you been waiting long?’ His voice was thin.

  Rani nodded, but then, nervous that he might take that as a reproach, shook her head.

  ‘Were you scared to come here?’ he queried.

  ‘A little,’ she mumbled, reluctant to dwell on this betrayal behind her grandmother’s back.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said smoothly, pulling on the points of his collar. ‘It takes more than a tree to scare me. I come from a family of soldiers, you know. We don’t scare easily. My el
der brother is in East Pakistan, killing Hindus and smashing those scrawny Bengalis’ faces for trying to break away from us.’

  Rani nodded absently. How had the conversation come to scrawny Bengalis?

  Suddenly, a parrot shot out from a branch above him. He flung his arms over his head and cowered in terror. At the sight of him crouching before her, Rani giggled. He stood up and scowled at her.

  ‘That stupid bird took me by surprise,’ he muttered. He pushed his dishevelled hair off his forehead. His hair was thick and inclined to curl. It reminded Rani of Ijaz’s hair in the film. But he was much slimmer than Ijaz, and more handsome. Had Rani been less intoxicated by their encounter, she might have noticed his close-set eyes and pigeon chest.

  ‘So! So you’re from Kalanpur, are you? What does your father do?’ he asked.

  ‘My father’s dead. I live with my grandmother.’ Shy of looking him in the face, Rani kept her eyes on the second button of his shirt.

  ‘And your mother? She dead too?’ he asked.

  ‘No, she lives in another village, called Dera, with my stepfather.’

  ‘How come you don’t live with them?’

  ‘They have children of their own,’ replied Rani.

  ‘Strange.’

  Rani felt a sudden surge of anger. Who was he to pronounce on her family set-up?

  ‘What’s strange about people having children?’ she asked heatedly.

  ‘Where does your grandmother live in Kalanpur?’

  ‘At Sardar Begum’s haveli.’ Seeing his eyebrows shoot up, Rani added quickly, ‘In her servants’ quarters.’

  He asked her if she got on with her grandmother. It was an odd sort of question. She had never really thought about her relationship with Kaneez. As far as she was concerned, it just was. So she nodded.

  ‘Do you tell her most things?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Have you told her about us?’

  ‘Us?’ she queried.

  ‘You know, meeting here like this? Did you tell her you were coming to see me?’