by Siya Turabi
‘I don’t want you messing things up. It’s my reputation at stake.’
‘I have to get back before the floods.’
‘You don’t even know when they are.’
‘That’s why I need to return after I’ve met Mir Saab.’
‘It’s too dangerous for you in Harikaya now.’ She spat the words out as if it was his fault. ‘Forget about all that here.’
‘Baba said the black honey…’
‘Your father’s crazy. Believe him or Mir Saab’s doctors. They’ve done everything they can for your mother…’ Her hands squeezed the clothes on her arm.
‘I will go back whether you help me or not.’ It was then that he noticed the seat of the chair was empty. ‘Where is it?’
Her eyebrows rose and she stepped back. For a second, he thought that she was scared. He stood up, his long shirt falling down over his pants and legs.
‘Where is my bag?’
‘You don’t need it here. Look, Begum Saab has given you new clothes.’
‘You’ve taken my ID card.’ A sickly feeling was squeezing his chest. ‘You came in when I was sleeping and took my bag.’
‘If you leave here and don’t come back, I risk losing my job. People talk here. Your father’s done enough damage. They’ll say the whole family is…’
‘I said I’d come back.’
‘Stop this,’ she hissed. ‘I thought you were less of a fool than your father. It’s too dangerous out there. You have no money, no status. You’ll be lucky to make it to the end of the main road without someone stealing your things or attacking you. Go out there and you’ll never come back.’
He was trembling. ‘Go now.’
‘Come to the house. They want to see you.’ Her voice was softer now. She let the clothes drop onto his bed.
He stared at the window ahead.
‘It’s for your own good,’ she said from the door. Her face was long, its skin drooped, and her eyes looked somewhere behind him.
‘Take away my freedom for my own good. Are you crazy? I have nothing else.’ The calmness of his voice surprised him.
‘You have a good education ahead of you. Don’t waste it on some myth.’
‘Black honey is medicine.’
‘Stop this. Can’t you understand? You’re a village boy. There are five million people in this city. If you go out there on your own anything can happen.’ She shut the door as she left.
Hassan turned to the window. There were smudge marks on it, greasy fingers from some previous resident. A servant.
He went to open the window and its wooden handle flopped as it swung inwards. A mosquito mesh was fixed in the frame.
‘This is how I will see this place until I see you again, Amma. Everything will be distant.’ He spoke out loud.
Stray dogs barked outside. He flinched. The fan’s motor wobbled and the old white blades spun but there was hardly any movement of air. Everything was too humid here and now he was supposed to meet Mir Saab and his wife, Begum Saab. As he lifted his shirt, he saw something black on the floor. It was his waistcoat, half hidden under his bed. It had fallen off the chair where he had put it before he went to sleep and Kulsoom must have missed it in the darkness when she came in last night. He bent to pick it up. The honeycomb was still in the pocket. He took the small, yellow piece out of its pouch and held it in his palm.
‘I’ll get my ID card back and be back before the floods. There has to be a way,’ he whispered. He put the piece of honeycomb back into the pouch and put it under his pillow.
He picked up his new clothes – a light-blue shirt and grey trousers. First, he needed to wash and he went down the steps at the side of the building. He washed his body in semi-darkness at the communal tap. The clothes were crisp and soft on his skin and he was clean at last after a night and day of travelling.
The courtyard was surrounded by high walls. Guards just beyond the gate held steel mugs of chai, their rifles resting on the arms of their chairs. They ignored him but a crow leapt out from a palm tree nearby. It flew in circles above him, and then, with a screech, it headed in the direction of the main house, a huge, old yellow building with three floors, a flat roof, and hundreds of windows.
He followed in the same direction until he was out of sight of the guards, then he stopped and looked around. It was still dark enough and no one was about. He set one foot out in the air before him and took a leap. With his arms swinging like pendulums, he skipped. ‘One, two, one, two,’ he whispered to himself, as he lifted each foot. He reached the steps at the main door. One, two, three jumps and he was through the door and into another world.
Inside, everything was marble, even the winding staircase. Kulsoom had to be here somewhere. He walked to the other end of the hall and through a doorway, opening onto a room with a round wooden table as big as his whole house. It must have come into the room in parts like a cake and then been put back together again.
Someone in the village made a cake once for a wedding, out of pistachio and dates that had got caught in his teeth. Loud bubbles of hunger shot up and into his stomach. Where was Kulsoom? He would sit with the servants, be one of them, if he could just have some food. And then he would go back to his room and not talk to anyone.
‘There is nothing they can do to change my mind.’ English words, a man’s voice from the next room. ‘Had me round for dinner and told me about the cotton mills over chocolate mousse. How dare they think I’d agree to something like that?’
Another voice, a woman’s, too quiet to hear. And then the man’s again.
‘They have the fort already and it’s falling apart because they haven’t kept one of their promises. Those idiots. Now they’re after my factories. Not in my lifetime.’
Footsteps.
‘Don’t forget to tell the cook about the chillies.’
A woman came through the doorway.
‘Yes, Begum Saab.’ Kulsoom was following her, a little breathless.
Hassan had never seen his aunt like this before. Her lips tightened as soon as she saw him but her voice was sweet. Too sweet.
‘This is my nephew,’ she said.
Begum Saab lifted small glasses attached to a golden chain around her neck, and perched them at the end of her nose, which was powdered white and seemed fluffy. Her nose rose to view him better through the lenses. She looked up and down at his new clothes. Her general plumpness, wrapped in a long silk dress, softened the strictness in her lips.
Hassan dared not smile and yet, at the same time, there was a strange lack of cruelty in her. The bracelet she wore looked old: two silver snakes wrapped around her wrist. A red ruby joined their heads and their scales glinted as she moved her hand, picking up the sunlight from the window of the dining room.
‘Has he eaten?’
‘Not yet, Begum Saab,’ Kulsoom said.
A girl rushed in from an entrance on the other side of the room; she must have been a few years older than Hassan. She stopped at the sight of Begum Saab, nearly tipping forward but managed to keep her balance on her toes.
‘Is the cook in the kitchen?’ Begum Saab’s voice was urgent.
The girl’s ponytail shook with her head. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Come, let’s find him. My niece doesn’t eat spices.’
Begum Saab looked at Hassan again. He shifted on his feet and made his back straighter – it worked – her face became softer.
‘Remind me, why did he come here?’ she asked Kulsoom.
‘The scholarship. He’s a very studious boy,’ Kulsoom said, smiling. ‘His father’s a poet.’
‘A poet?’
Hassan held Begum Saab’s stare.
‘My children are around his age. Have breakfast with them when they wake up,’ she said to him. ‘You can practise English with them before you start school.’
They walked away but Begum Saab stopped and took an envelope from the top of the sideboard and handed it to the maid who handed it to Hassan.
‘Give this to Mir Saab,’ Begu
m Saab said, pointing to the room from which she had just come. ‘He’s in his study through the living room. Tell him you’re the boy with the scholarship.’
With these words, they left. Kulsoom looked back at him with a secretive, stern expression, better than anything his mother could do.
The room was bigger than his school hall and had two pillars in the middle. Long rifles hung over the sofa on one side. A snooker table stood on the other.
A head and then body caught his eye from the open door across the room. The body moved through different positions in candlelight: body standing, hands together in front of chest, body bending, body kneeling, and then on the ground with the head touching a small slab of stone at the top of the prayer mat. Whispers of words that Hassan could never remember.
The movement stopped and so did the whispers. Mir Saab got up. A door shut from inside the room; he must have left. The gold-trimmed envelope flapped in Hassan’s fingers until he reached the study door. A clock on the mantelpiece faced him. Tick, tick, tick. An empty chair. A large wooden desk. The window. Wooden bookshelves lined the walls.
But it was the desk that caught Hassan’s attention. A structure, the shape of a large egg and as high as his arm, stood in the middle of it. It was made of golden sticks, the size of big matchsticks, arranged in the shape of hexagons, like his honeycomb. He moved closer. The curves of the side of the desk were carved like vertical hills and were soft against his thighs. The smell of wax and honey touched his nostrils from some distant place. Only an arm’s length away now, the shape was too fragile to touch. It reminded him of the secret Baba had been looking for.
Piles of paper lay all over the desk like a frothy sea around the egg shape. Different sizes, creams and whites. Sketches filled every corner – fine lines and shading like photographs, only more beautiful. Bees with body parts touched by arrows that pointed to words in sloping black ink. Nests hung from branches or emerged out of holes in tree trunks and were alive with colonies of bees.
One drawing made him stop. A bee, larger and darker than the other ones. Could it be? His free hand flew forwards towards the image.
‘What are you doing?’ a voice snapped.
He pulled his hand back. The envelope in the other hand dropped to the floor. A man was at the other door. He had a small and slender frame, black hair parted on one side in a straight line and large square glasses that slipped down his nose. Beneath his glasses were round, surprised-looking eyes. He wore a woollen jumper that looked so warm that Hassan started to sweat.
‘Mir Saab, I was looking at…’ Hassan stooped to pick up the envelope and shook himself into straightness.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Hassan, the one with the scholarship.’
‘One thing I won’t have is anyone uninvited in my study.’
Hassan held out the envelope, without looking up.
‘I’m sorry,’ Hassan said. ‘I couldn’t help it.’ He pointed at the golden ball on the desk.
Mir Saab dropped the envelope on the chair. ‘The hive?’ He narrowed his eyes at Hassan before he fixed them on the structure.
‘Did you make it?’ Hassan asked.
There was no reply. Mir Saab picked up the camera that lay on the table at the other end of the room. He turned the camera around in his hands; its back was open. ‘This thing won’t go back together.’
His voice in English was like a song.
‘Hand me that screwdriver.’ Mir Saab pointed to a long metal stick lying near the table. ‘Where did you learn your English?’
‘In school and from books and films.’ The television placed in the village square every week was from Mir Saab. ‘And from a poet friend who studied in England.’
Mir Saab took the screwdriver from Hassan. Silver and black buttons on the camera shone through his fingers; he chuckled as if he had solved a puzzle until a shadow fell over his face. ‘Oh, I give up.’ Mir Saab shook his head at the camera. ‘The film won’t wind forwards.’ Mir Saab’s own voice seemed to be winding forwards like a tape recorder that was secretly chewing the tape. ‘It’s not clicking on the spool.’ He put the camera down, leaving the flap on the back open.
Hassan took the camera and slid the loose film over the spokes again before turning the metal handle that wound the spool with his thumb. The film was stuck. He pushed the handle back again, a persuasive press. It gave way and the film caught on the reel. His fingers moved with the same ease as his mother’s at her weaving machine. He shut the back cover with a flick of his other hand and heard the buzzing sound of the film winding itself around the spokes of the drum.
‘My word, you’ve done it,’ Mir Saab said.
Hassan held the camera as if it were a living creature in his hands. His fingers had known what to do.
‘So, you won the scholarship?’
‘Yes.’
‘What else do you do?’
‘I like nature,’ Hassan said, his head bowed and his cheeks warm. The truth was that he loved nature and animals, and this man in front of him, the one he hated, shared that with him.
‘That camera took two weeks to arrive on the ship from London,’ Mir Saab said. He picked up a roll of paper from the table, untied the ribbon around it and stood there for a minute or two, looking at the sheet, at eye level. He examined it with nods and sighs and then turned the paper around to Hassan.
It was a sailing boat – no, a ship. A great wooden boat, with sails reaching out to the sky like wings in the wind, drawn in pencil with such fine detail that Hassan could not take his eyes away from it.
‘Take a picture of the boat,’ Mir Saab said. ‘Turn the lens until you can see it.’
Hassan steadied himself. The lens turned both ways. One way made the drawing closer and darker, the lines tighter. The shutter snapped and his mouth opened. ‘I have it,’ he whispered.
Mir Saab put the sheet on the table, flattening it with his hands. He picked up a pencil and made a mark on the drawing. ‘What drew you to the hive?’
‘The shapes,’ Hassan said. ‘The hexagons were moving and overlapping each other.’
Mir Saab went to the chair and began opening the envelope.
‘You’re very interested in bees, Mir Saab,’ Hassan said.
‘What? Yes, the bees.’ His eyes glowed for a second behind his glasses. ‘It’s their collective mind I’m interested in.’ He tapped the drawing of the black bee that Hassan had nearly touched. ‘Why this one?’
Hassan cleared his throat; he had to be careful. He could never forget that Mir Saab had sent the guards.
‘It seems unusually big.’
‘Apis dorsata,’ Mir Saab said.
‘Pardon?’
‘The black honeybee.’ Mir Saab took the card out of the envelope. ‘Rare these days, but they still exist in the forests of Harikaya.’
Before Hassan could think of what to say, that humming sound, more like a tingling now, was inside him. Faint, but meeting him in the centre of his body. The beekeeper’s face was there, so clear now in his mind that he gasped.
The envelope floated from Mir Saab’s hand onto the desk and landed in front of the matchstick hive. Mir Saab took out the card and bent it back along its spine to read it. His eyebrows moved upwards to meet at the centre of his forehead. ‘What’s he playing at?’ He scrunched the card up into a ball. ‘He won’t get my factories by inviting me to a wedding.’ He walked out through the door at the back of the study.
Hassan was left, forgotten, but with his mind racing. His mother worked at the factory. Would she be all right? And her eyes? Fine blood lines in yellowing irises.
The picture, on the desk, there it was.
Apis dorsata.
Chapter Nine
‘Amina Bibi, Begum Saab asks you to come down for breakfast.’
Hassan spoke in English but he added Bibi to her name to show respect. Amina, Mir Saab and Begum Saab’s daughter, had the same moon-shaped face and surprised look as Mir Saab. She was a little taller t
han Hassan but seemed younger, her eyes wide and timid. She nodded from the other end of the bedroom that was as big as his whole house and backyard together.
It was the girl kneeling on the stone floor with her back to him that had his attention. Her long hair was not tied back like Pakistani girls’ hair. Her movements were sudden and sharp, like the little bolts of lightning that sometimes played in the sky on a monsoon night in Harikaya. She threw open a suitcase lying in front of a bed as big as his whole room and took out presents. So, this must be Maryam, the niece from London. She looked about the same age as him.
‘That’s all Zain wanted.’ She put a box of chocolates on the bed.
Maryam stood up and turned to face him.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked. She stared at him from behind smudged glasses.
Amina came up behind her and said, ‘He doesn’t speak English.’
‘Yes, I do, Bibi,’ he said.
‘I’m Maryam. I’m fourteen and I’ll be doing eleven subjects when I go back.’
‘I’m Hassan. I’m fourteen and I…’ He stopped.
She was smiling. He looked down.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Maryam said.
The edges of her lips disappeared into her cheeks when she smiled.
‘That’s Kulsoom’s nephew.’ Amina spoke in an accent that reminded Hassan of old films. ‘Baba’s offered him a scholarship to study in Karachi.’
‘Are you from London?’ Hassan asked Maryam.
‘Yes, I live in Partridge Way.’
‘She came here on a plane,’ Amina added.
‘Flew over like a partridge in a pear tree.’ A boy walked in; he was thin and tall with floppy black hair.
‘That’s Zain,’ Maryam said. He must have been a year or two older than Maryam and probably Amina too.
‘A partridge in a pear tree,’ Hassan whispered to himself.
‘A partridge is Pakistan’s national bird,’ Zain said. ‘Pears are delicious. We have a pear tree at our house in London.’
‘It’s still night-time in England.’ Maryam skipped to the wooden doors that led to the balcony and opened them to let the light pour through. The others joined her behind the mosquito netting that was fitted over the balcony wall. Maryam turned to Hassan. ‘You too, come and take a look.’