by Siya Turabi
The Last Beekeeper
Siya Turabi
One More Chapter
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021
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Copyright © Siya Turabi 2021
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Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Cover photographs © Mohamad Itani / Arcangel Images (boy); Ezra Shaw / Getty Images (boy’s hands); Shutterstock.com (all other images)
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Siya Turabi asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
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Source ISBN: 9780008472887
Ebook Edition © August 2021 ISBN: 9780008472870
Version: 2021-06-18
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part III
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Baba’s last poem
Acknowledgments
Thank you for reading…
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About the Author
One More Chapter...
About the Publisher
For Saif
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&
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Hana
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Arif
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Qaia
A knowing comes when I sit alone under the trees
where the humming is constant from the timeless bees
Part One
Harikaya village in Harikaya state
Sindh Province, Pakistan
Chapter One
August 1974
The train had been too fast or the deer had been too brave.
A blackbuck deer with horns like waves. And it was dying. Hassan recognised it from lessons at school. Or was it a hog deer, or a gazelle? It could be an Indian gazelle. No, it was definitely a blackbuck deer. It had white fur on its chin and it was too big for a gazelle.
The train came to a stop, puffing and clanking as Hassan stood and looked down at the animal, thrown a few metres away from the railway line.
Groans and shrieks came from full carriages. People on the roof stared at the deer. Some climbed down metal ladders at the side of the train and crowded round Hassan. Baluchi, Punjabi, as well as local Sindhi speakers from the northern parts of Sindh on their way to work in the fields and factories of Harikaya. Dialects from neighbouring provinces flew around him.
‘These are Mir Saab’s deer,’ one man said, his Sindhi hat shaped like an upturned boat.
Some shook their heads, some sighed, but no one looked as flustered as the driver who came up, scratching his head. ‘Accidents aren’t illegal,’ he said.
‘Bound to happen. He lets them roam as they please.’ That was another man, small and shirtless.
‘What if we lose our jobs?’ another asked.
Hassan stepped back; they stank. Not surprising after a day’s travelling in a hot, cramped train.
‘The jackals and vultures will eat it overnight,’ someone said.
The deer stopped breathing. Death was an opportunity in Harikaya. Flies were gathering around a clean gash in the deer’s white chest. The evening heat was still strong enough for decay to set in.
The guard put his whistle to his mouth and blew. Hassan flinched. The crowd hushed but people finished their cigarettes before they got back on the train.
‘Mir Saab’s one of the good ones.’
‘But he’s a strange one. You know what happens when one of his rules is broken.’
The last few passengers on the ground jumped back on the train, which started its engines and then lurched forwards. Groans. More clanking and puffing before the train moved off through the sandy flatlands, reaching its normal speed and vanishing.
Everything was quiet again. Hassan stood by the deer. That humming was in his ears again, soft and like a low whistling, almost a tune, that landed right inside him. He tried to ignore it and looked down at the deer.
This was a male one, framed by cigarette butts. He had only seen deer from far away before, or in books at school, never one in real life or up so close. Did a dead one count?
There was movement ahead. He looked up. On the other side of the train tracks, still a few metres away but coming closer, was the dark outline of a man, cradling a jar, with the orange sky and dark forest behind him. The humming stopped and Hassan didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. His mother’s words came back to him, ‘When you find your father, bring him home.’
His father gripped the front legs of the deer.
‘The jackals will eat it. Why don’t we leave it?’ Hassan asked.
‘Mir Saab might see it,’ his father said. ‘He’ll think we killed it.’
‘But the train killed it.’
‘The new law.’
Hassan took the back legs. The deer was heavy even when both of them pulled it over the dusty ground. Blackbuck deer weighed more than a grown man, but they were at the river in less than a minute. One final shove and the deer was behind the tall grasses. His father ran backwards, sand flying as he kicked the dust about to cover the drying blood.
‘The jackals can eat it there,’ his father said. ‘I hope it didn’t suffer too much.’
‘It did.’ Hassan wished he hadn’t spoken.
Baba looked up at him, his eyes narrow. ‘How do you know these things?’
‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? All of us suffer when we’re dying. Mir Saab introduced this deer into—’
‘Come on, we have to get out of here,’ Baba said.
‘You’re telling me that?’
In normal families, fathers brought sons home, not the other way round. Anyway, he didn’t want to think about that now.
They set off back to the village on the dirt road, tramping between the fields and the river and
then between tall bamboo. His father held onto the clay jar tightly with both hands.
They turned a corner and Hassan heard a motor coming up the track from behind them. He turned to see the mir’s flag on the bonnet before he was pulled backwards through the reeds. He landed on the earth in a field of corn. A man in the field with two bony oxen and a cart was staring at them. Hassan waved.
‘That was close,’ Hassan said, back on the road.
‘Too close.’
‘If you did what you were told…’
But his father never listened to him or anyone. They carried on, each in stubborn silence right until the village boundary.
Hassan stayed by the coconuts, stacked high on the ground, as his father headed to the few stalls round the side of the wall, with his jar of forest honey. There were other men with other goods. His father was the only one stupid enough to go into the forest now but all of them looked as if they were in trouble with someone or about to be. It was always the same.
Hassan faced the forest, at least a mile away now. The sun was just about to vanish before the sound of crickets filled the air. There it was again, that low humming. It only normally happened when he went near the forest to look for Baba. He’d been hearing it for a couple of weeks now, maybe more. But why it happened or why he heard it, he had no idea.
This time, it seemed much closer, a different tone, but the same melody. It was too close. He tried to shake it out of his head but the sound was getting stronger. He turned around. A woman was sitting behind a spinning wheel, quietly humming the same tune. She was looking down at her hands, folding thread.
‘Are you afraid of that sound?’ she asked.
‘Why should I be afraid?
‘You’ll be watching another kind of spinning one day.’
‘At the factories?’ he asked.
‘Another kind.’
Only the ridge of her eyebrows and the round tip of her nose were visible but her head rose just enough for him to see the edges of her lips turn upwards into a mischievous smile. The kind of smile he used himself, when he knew something that no one else knew.
‘Won’t be long now, before they start to use you.’ Her green eyes studied him.
She was probably drunk. He went nearer to her. She smelt of coconut oil.
‘Who?’
‘If you please them,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Hassan, I’m ready.’ Baba’s voice.
‘Be careful, boy. Keep your head down,’ she hissed.
Crisp lines spread over her face. She turned her head to the side, her lips twisting into that smile again – a seductress with wrinkles. He laughed.
‘Give me a coin. I know you have one.’
He was reaching into his pocket when he felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. The woman laughed now as they walked away.
‘She makes the dolls,’ his father whispered.
Hassan had found a wooden doll about two months ago on the doorstep of their house. Made out of wood and clothed in black wool that smelt of musk, a smell he could have lost himself in, but that was what its maker wanted. For you to bury your head into its softness. Its cheeks were scratched out and tinted with light-red powder. Just a dab. Wind-beaten face. Black eyes narrowed around a secret gleam – his father’s smile. Whoever had made it must have studied his father’s face and chipped at the tree bark while it was still fresh and living.
His mother had snatched it from his hand and had thrown it down the street where they lived. ‘Throw cursed dolls away; every child knows that,’ she had said. ‘Let the dogs tear it apart.’
‘Who made it?’ Hassan had asked.
‘That doesn’t matter. They want to scare us.’
The next day Baba had fallen and broken his arm. No more work at his job with the local newspaper for six weeks.
‘That doll,’ his mother had said, ‘is working.’
His father had only laughed. ‘Please don’t believe in these things.’
‘Should I believe in socialism like you?’
‘That’s not a belief.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘It’s a system that works for the equality of all.’
‘Why do they want to curse you if you believe in the same thing as them?’ She shook her head.
‘They’re trying to make me write what they want,’ Baba had said. ‘But they don’t own the newspaper.’
‘I just wanted to ask her about…’ Hassan tried to shake his father’s hand off his shoulder but the grip became tighter.
His father led him into the village. The metal letters glistened over the gates. Harikaya in Harikaya. Village and state had the same name.
‘That was easy tonight,’ his father said, licking his lips of any traces of the forest honey. Spillage, he called it.
Hassan looked around. Nobody was paying any attention. The law was still new. His father checked the bundle of rupees.
‘Let’s go to the shrine,’ he said.
‘But Amma said…’
‘We won’t stay long.’
‘You always say that Baba. Every time we go to the shrine we always stay long.’
‘That happens, I agree, but when the poetry begins, I forget time. You know by now that poetry doesn’t belong in a world of tasks and timetables. Haven’t I taught you enough to know that poetry and nature are partners? Just like honey and the bees are partners. Honey is a product of love. It can’t be limited by clocks. They only feed our addiction to become, to constantly become something.’ He looked around at the people. ‘We need to forget time sometimes and just listen.’
‘To what?’ Hassan said.
‘To the truth that nature speaks. When the mind is quiet and we’re no longer rushing around to be somewhere, to do something or think something, that’s when you can hear nature speak.’ He licked his lips again for any remaining honey. ‘But we’re all addicted to becoming something, too busy to listen.’
With that, he laughed but only with his mouth. His face seemed to grow more wrinkles as he stepped back onto the track.
Chapter Two
The white shrine of the local saint stood tall, its dome bulging like a hump of one of the camels that sat under the date palms on the track. They said that when the saint had wandered here hundreds of years ago, his body had been buried somewhere nearby and then dug up again weeks later to be brought over to this shrine. There had been no decay at all – proof of sainthood. To Hassan it was just another story, just like the stories of the jinns, who were said to live in the forests and could be good or bad, or jadus that could live in people who were cursed. Hassan didn’t believe any of it.
‘Bedeel.’ Hassan spoke the name of the dead saint out loud as he stepped onto the tiled area, just in case it was bad luck not to.
People were finishing off their daily meal and now the vultures, perched on the rim of the dome, had their eyes on their prize – meat – dropped from plates, spat out from between teeth or squashed under bare feet.
‘Get a coconut shell for me.’ Baba handed him a rupee. ‘That’s the only spirit I believe in.’
Hassan chose a big one and handed the rupee over to a man who was sitting on the floor and smoking a thin beedi, no bigger than Hassan’s little finger. He had tried one once, and it had been over in a flash. His father was already sitting in a circle with the other poets. Hassan squeezed in between him and their friend, Ansari Saab, a poet who had brought back a chest full of books from England on the ship after his studies.
His father read the ones on Marxist theory but Hassan had picked one of those up and put it straight down again. Too many words, too many opinions. He preferred the poets. Wordsworth, Yeats, Keats. And the modern ones too. Ted Hughes. Dylan Thomas. He even read the English translations of Rumi. Over and over. Rumi’s work reminded him of Ansari Saab’s. The poet had never married but his poems were all about love. ‘Why did you leave England?’ Hassan had asked him once, but the poet had just sighed.
‘Did
you go to the forest again?’ Ansari Saab said to Baba. He always spoke in English.
‘Yes.’
Ansari Saab swished the coconut spirit about in his mouth and waited for the alcohol to reach his thoughts. ‘You’ll have to stop,’ he said.
But Baba wasn’t paying him any attention. He was drinking and watching the poets. Hassan looked around the circle too. She was there. Sami, sitting next to her father. He hardly knew her but she sat next to him in class and he had noticed her. Not because of her looks or because he was falling in love. No, he didn’t believe in that. She was different from the others. She had to be, coming out here to listen to poems. There were other women there, but not girls like Sami; much older women, usually married too so no one could gossip about them. She must have felt him looking because she turned to him and smiled. He smiled back, and then kept on looking around, pretending he was looking for someone.