by Siya Turabi
He saw the yellow wall of the courtyard, a line of trees and then land, stretching out to a distant boundary wall. Three men lay on top of it like cats with nothing to do. Behind them was the city.
‘How long have your family lived here?’ Maryam asked Amina.
‘Ma says two hundred years. It used to be a hotel.’
‘I can see it as it was then. Women wearing saris and men with long jackets to their knees over trousers. They’re on holiday here. Can you see?’ Maryam pointed down to the courtyard, her nose pressed against the netting.
‘Maryam, you’re finding your stories again.’ Amina clapped.
For a second, Hassan saw those men and women too.
‘Look, can you see the poets sitting on chairs in a circle? They’re making up poems,’ Maryam said.
‘Go on, tell them the one you made up last night,’ Amina said.
Maryam placed her hands on the netting and began.
‘It’s all over, all this will be gone in a day, the wife said to her lover.
No, he replied, his lips in the air.
But there was no return for his ready kiss.
Make the days longer, he said, in anger.
But time cannot be altered, she replied.
Time is the ruler.
Change time, he ordered. Change it.
What can I do? she said. Time is the ruler.
The lover sat back on his chair, grumpy, disobeyed, and soon to be forgotten.’
Maryam stopped. Amina clapped.
Hassan thought of the bees. He thought of Baba’s poem, the time lines, sent from the planets, brought down by the workers. The number of days in the hexagonal caves. Twenty-four for the drones, twenty-one for the workers, and sixteen for the queen. ‘Everything has time in it, everything rests on time, but why should time be the ruler?’ he asked.
‘Go on,’ Maryam said.
All three of them were looking at him. He had said too much.
‘Please go on,’ she said.
He looked down onto the courtyard. Traces of saris and long coats. Wicker chairs and dark drinks. Wife and lover.
‘If time rules you, it’s only because you allow it
To swallow you up, to rush you, to limit you.
A rushing stream or a still lake.
Time depends on how you see it.’
He pointed to the courtyard below. ‘The poets. The wife and her lover.’ That word, lover, was strange, soft. ‘They want to play with time.’
‘But that doesn’t answer the wife’s question. How can she make the days longer?’ Maryam asked.
‘The lover plays with love,’ Hassan said.
‘What do you mean?’ Maryam asked.
‘It’s not real. It’s only a thought. Like time.’
‘But love is real,’ she said.
Hassan thought for a second. ‘If love is truly real then there’s no time to play with,’ he said.
He pressed his hand against the netting, to get a better view of the courtyard. How could love be real? Love between people. It only happened in films or stories. His hand slipped through the mesh and he stumbled. The netting was loose. Maryam grabbed his elbow. It was the first time a girl had touched him. He moved his arm away.
‘Come on, let’s go down,’ she said.
Two pieces of metal lay on either side of the plate – instruments for cutting. This was the first time in his life that he had used a knife and fork. He had heard about them in his lessons – that people in some countries didn’t eat with their hands. He watched for a few moments. Metal clanged on plates. He picked up the instruments, clutching one in each hand. The others held the instruments in a lighter way than he did. He stabbed he fork into the small chunks of meat and with the knife, he cut the eggs. This was not too bad.
‘They’re in the wrong hands.’ That was Amina.
He stopped with a piece of meat a few inches from his mouth, his face warming up.
‘You can use your hands if you like,’ Maryam said.
Her words felt like a poke from that pronged thing dripping juice into his hand. He put the fork down and wiped his hand with the napkin.
‘It’s all right, I can manage,’ he said.
The others started talking again but Maryam still watched as he picked up the fork with his other hand and put the food in his mouth. Hassan ate slowly, turning his fork around to scoop up the rice. She smiled at him and carried on with her own meal. Pity was in that smile.
After the meal, he offered to take the dishes and the cutlery back to the kitchen. His stomach rumbled in front of the kitchen doors. They wobbled – heavy, floppy, and transparent like plastic jungle leaves – when he walked through.
The air was humid in the kitchen, sticky with oil and spices. He spied baskets of fresh ginger and garlic, glass jars of cumin, cardamom, cloves. He breathed in the smells. Huge spoons and other tools stood in jars on the worktop. There was nothing he didn’t recognise, but something wasn’t right.
He put the dishes next to the other breakfast plates on the sideboard. The crows in the yard were loud through the open back door. Chickens clucked in the background, like in the street outside his house. He stood in the doorway; the yard was huge, nothing like home.
Servants squatted or sat on low stools around the stove with plates of food in their hands. Some were smoking or holding cups of hot chai; a few of them were from the village, talking in Sindhi. Others were silent. They ate meat and eggs like the family inside but here they ate with their hands. Like his mother and father. Baba had told stories over plates of daal, breaking off warm chapati and scooping up the daal. Those meals had been the best. Amma had never spoken much at meals.
In the courtyard, nobody bothered with Hassan. It was best that way. He was one of them and also not, someone who ate breakfast with the family but yet was not one of the family. He stepped backwards. He heard chewing sounds.
‘Nice of you to make your way here.’
Hassan spun around. It was a man, stepping out from behind the back door. He wore a white apron and a thin smile that ran straight across his face, hinting at gaps in his teeth. It had to be the cook. He had been there all this time, in the shadows.
‘You’re the kid from the village,’ he said.
Hassan moved back towards the door flaps, but the cook stepped forwards to pick up a teaspoon of sugar from a pot on the sideboard, blocking Hassan’s way. The man dropped the cube into a cup. With his free hand, he took a cigarette from his pocket, placed it in his mouth, and lit it. The cook blew out smoke and dropped the burnt matchstick on the floor.
‘Had breakfast with the family?’
‘Yes.’
‘Enjoy it?’
‘Breakfast?’
‘Being with the family?’
‘Yes.’
For a moment, their eyes met. The cook took another puff of his cigarette. Everything about this man was neat. His hair, longer than normal and slick, was tied back. His face was clean shaven and he looked at Hassan as if he could see through him. Even his clothes under the apron were crisp and hung on his tall, straight, and bony form.
‘You won’t remember me. I knew your father.’
‘How?’
‘We were friends.’
His father did not have many friends. ‘Keep reserved,’ he used to say, and, ‘Don’t let people know your business.’ When he had spoken poetry with the poets, he had called it, ‘Nature’s voice, not mine.’
‘Your father left around the time of the fire,’ the cook said.
‘I don’t know about any fire.’
Hassan turned to head for the door flaps. Something clattered on the floor. It was the teaspoon.
‘Don’t worry, you’re safe here.’
Hassan picked up the spoon and held it out. The cook’s fingers touched his for a second, warm and cool at the same time.
‘A shame about those guards. Mir Saab’s guards, weren’t they?’ The cook shook his head. ‘He’ll be back.’
‘I know he will.’ It was not a secret that his father had left but Hassan felt his breath quicken.
‘The question is when. It’s too dangerous now.’ The cook’s smile reappeared. ‘It’s all down to you now, isn’t it? To be the man that your mother needs you to be. She’s going blind.’
‘She won’t go blind. I’ll find the black honey.’ He had said too much.
‘As I said, you’re safe here. I could tell you a little about your father, if you like.’
Hassan’s feet were stuck to the ground.
‘It’ll come.’ The cook sucked at his cigarette. ‘You don’t have much time, do you? The rains are coming anytime now.’
Hassan found himself nodding slightly.
Out of the kitchen again, in the dining room, the air was hot but clear, with no stickiness, no smells of spices or smoke. But that man, the cook, Hassan had seen him before but he couldn’t remember where. His old life in Harikaya seemed so far away now after only a night here; this was another world. A world where a mir lived, a mir who had sent guards after his father. He crouched down on the ground. He had to remember where he’d seen the cook, but the more he tried the more thoughts and images inside his mind blurred.
Just then, footsteps burst through from the direction of the hall and he looked up. Maryam was at the round table, her hand on the back of one of the chairs. When she saw him, she came and knelt on one knee in front of him.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, Bibi. I was just tired.’
Amina and Zain came in. Maryam took him by the hand and helped him up. She told the others to go ahead and stayed with him.
They took several steps before he spoke. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’ He didn’t need her kindness.
‘Come with us for a walk.’
‘Where to?’
‘To the back of the house.’
The guards greeted Maryam by standing up. Their gaze followed Hassan as he walked alongside her. He wanted to say something to them, to tell them to stop looking but he held his mouth shut. He was a boy; she was a girl and he wasn’t one of her lot. Maryam saw nothing except the way ahead. The guards’ chatter started again once they were past them, busy again with a card game.
Two paths lay before them. One to the main gate across the bare land. The other edged around the inner wall. They took this one. The ground here was dry, like in Harikaya, but the soil was redder and the trees and bushes had been planted in patterns. Palm trees stood around a stone water-fountain with dry leaves in its trough instead of water. A buffalo, standing under a banyan tree, stirred. Further on, the land became wilder, more natural, the sandy floor dotted with shrubs and trees.
‘When will you start school, Hassan?’
‘After I find—’ He tripped over a root and his words stuck.
They turned the corner of the wall and about forty metres ahead was what seemed like a forest. Amina and Zain were near the trees.
‘Wait for us!’ Maryam shouted. It was hard to keep up with her march.
They all walked on a twisting, overgrown path between the trees. Hassan’s footsteps fell as heavily as theirs on bramble and weeds. He reached out to touch the trunks of acacias, palms, and eucalyptus, names his father had taught him.
There was a clearing, and in the middle stood a structure. Hassan walked over to it and found that its walls reached his shoulders. Grass sprouted up between broken sea-blue tiles on its floor. It was too big to be a water tank.
‘A swimming pool,’ Maryam said.
‘It used to be for parties,’ Amina said.
‘Baba’s friends came from all over the world,’ Zain said.
‘Poetry.’ Maryam waved her hands for the others to be quiet. ‘I hear it,’ she said. ‘Wait.’
A breeze shook the leaves and the crows chattered, as though in a gush of applause.
‘Tiger, tiger burning bright. In the forests of the night,’ Maryam said.
The others laughed. Poets and friends, imaginary or real, it didn’t matter. Zain was the first to move into the forest again; it was cooler under the canopy of trees. They walked on to another clearing, a bigger one. Dozing birds shot upwards in panic.
‘That’s the masjid,’ Zain said.
A small building stood in the sun’s rays that spread around its dome like the fingers of a giant hand. Winding weeds clung to broken orange and turquoise tiles. Flakes of paint from the timber frame dusted the ground. The building was alive.
‘Baba listened to poets and scholars here. Our grandfather was one of them. We called him Nana,’ Amina said.
‘I called him Dada, because he’s my father’s father,’ Maryam said.
All those people were gone now. Had they been chased away or simply blown away by winds too delicate at first to notice until too many tiles had chipped? A flake of paint drifted to the floor. The grandfather, this building, was dying in front of them.
‘What’s a scholar?’ Hassan asked.
‘Someone from the olden days who told stories and read a lot,’ Zain said.
‘Why did the parties stop?’ Maryam asked.
The others just shrugged. Maryam walked over to where Amina and Zain stood at the bottom of the steps. Hassan stayed at a distance. This was their place, this building; it belonged to those who were part of Mir Saab’s family. The building stood solid like a grandfather should stand. Theirs, not his; he had never known his. Yes, this building was a grandfather.
‘Why are all the tiles hexagons?’ Maryam asked.
‘Six is a special number,’ Hassan said.
‘Why?’ Maryam asked.
‘I don’t know why but it’s special for the bees.’
‘Father designed it to look like a beehive,’ Zain said.
There was row after row of hexagonal tiles; the walls were like sheets of honeycomb.
‘Each hexagon is a cell for a young bee to grow in,’ Zain said. ‘Sheets of wax hexagons make a nest.’
‘A city of hexagons,’ Hassan said.
Zain was already on the bottom step and he swung his arms in the air as if waving a sword. ‘Be careful of bird droppings.’ He was laughing and jumping up the steps in twos to the wooden doors.
Hassan wanted to copy him, to join in with the play, but the wish only made him tense, stiff.
Zain pulled one of the doors and stopped. ‘What’s that?’
Hassan went nearer. It was a humming sound, but this one was outside his own head. Zain raised his hands up to tell them to stop. Hassan took a step back but Amina and Maryam carried on. They were following him up when a bee appeared from inside the masjid through the open door. Another came and then another.
‘Go back,’ Hassan said.
‘What is it?’ Amina asked.
The sound was growing but still faint.
Another bee came through the door. Three became four, then five, six; more came out in pairs and Hassan lost count. Amina covered her face with her hands as a cloud of bees gathered at the top of the steps. The humming was loud and strong; Maryam screamed and waved her hands. It was the wrong thing to do; the bees approached her.
‘Keep still!’ Hassan shouted.
Maryam screamed again and jumped down the steps, followed by Zain and Amina. Maryam was shouting something at him, but he couldn’t hear above the humming. All three of them ran across the clearing and disappeared behind a tree. The bees moved now as a cluster after them, like a slow thunder cloud. Running was useless. Hassan stayed at the bottom of the steps. Maryam’s head poked out from behind a tree. The long shirts of Amina and Zain flapped even though there was no wind.
Hassan took the honeycomb out of his pocket and held it between his palms, close to his heart. His eyes were open but the beekeeper’s face was clear in his mind. Behind the face was another clearing, the one in the forest where the nest of black honeybees lived. The beekeeper’s mouth was moving and Hassan began to copy it. It was the same language that had saved his father’s life – a series of puffs, g
rowls, and gargles. His lips came together to whistle both high and low tones. Mouth opening wide. A sharp puff. Then another. Wider. A grunt and then a long, low, throaty sound.
The swarm stopped at the line of trees and Hassan moved to the top of the steps.
The bees paused and changed direction, faster now, heading towards the masjid until they stopped, hovering above the bottom step. The cloud was spinning, becoming wilder, a potential invasion. Spinning faster and faster, the cloud rose, a flying wave coming towards him. It circled him and explored his presence, but Hassan was neither food nor threat and the bees had a choice: to attack or show mercy.
The humming changed. It was just as loud, but softer, less angry. He was lost in their sound, his body still, the movement of his breath steady and deep.
The bees became a cylinder of humming that expanded and contracted around him, in and out. His body sang to their sound. His being merged into theirs and the bees became part of him.
He was a statue with head bent and arms folded across his chest. Every cell in him hummed and his heart opened to their power. Nothing mattered except the sound, the humming. It was part of him. It was him.
The bees started to retreat, one by one at first. When the final bee had left him and made its way back inside, the spell of stillness broke apart and the inner sound was gone. He wanted to follow the bees but some kind of force, emanating from inside the building, stopped him.
‘I’ll be back,’ he said to the bees, and shut the doors to their world.
Silence.
He placed the honeycomb back in his pocket and went down the steps into the strong sunlight that pricked his skin. The others were waiting for him behind the trees.
‘What happened?’ Maryam asked Hassan.
She was trembling; Amina and Zain were shivering.
‘You saved our lives,’ Zain said.
All three of them came towards him with their eyes and mouths open.
‘How did you do that?’ Maryam asked.