by Siya Turabi
‘That means he’s alive,’ Maryam said.
A glimmer of hope flew through the air. Hassan caught it for a second before that hope hardened into something quieter and infinitely strong. Mir Saab moved to the desk and smoothed his fingers over the sides of the frame.
Chapter Twelve
‘Zain, stop it,’ Amina said to her brother as all four of them sat on the floor around the board. It was noon and Hassan’s third day in Karachi.
Zain had written words in each corner of the board and placed a glass at the centre. They were here to test Zain’s theory that the upper floors were haunted by jinn, but Hassan was more than just curious. To the others it was a game, at best an adventure. To Hassan, this was dangerous, but it was too late to go back.
They were in one of the many upstairs rooms that had been empty of human life for too long. Hassan thought of all the invisible stories from before Mir Saab’s family had lived here. Were the characters of these stories walking between the furniture draped in sheets that had aged like old teeth?
‘Stop what?’ Zain asked.
‘Stop moving the glass.’
Hassan blinked; the glass was trembling, almost alive.
‘I’m doing nothing,’ Zain said, waving his hands in the air and bringing them down again in a second.
The glass wanted to move; Hassan could feel it. The room felt cooler but the air was changing. And so was the light.
‘Come out if you dare,’ Zain said, looking around the room.
Maryam giggled. Amina frowned.
‘A jinn only comes out at night.’
‘How do you know that?’ Zain asked.
‘I feel cold,’ Maryam said.
The shutters of one of the windows began opening and closing. A light breeze touched Hassan’s face. The banging continued, becoming louder until the shutters clapped for a final time before they shut.
‘Let’s go,’ Amina said.
‘Yes, we’ve seen it move now,’ Maryam said.
‘The glass has not moved yet.’ Zain sounded calm, but he looked scared.
‘What if the jinn doesn’t want to be disturbed?’ Maryam asked.
The sound of heavy rain outside made them all go quiet; the sky darkened behind the mosquito netting and there was a clap of thunder.
‘Now look what you’ve done to the weather,’ Amina said. She was about to stand up.
The changes in the weather, the breeze, and the darkness were too quick. The thunder crashed a second time; the lightbulb swung and the room darkened. They were all too scared to speak now. There was another burst of thunder and the glass swept across the board to Hassan’s corner.
‘That wasn’t funny, Zain,’ Maryam said.
Zain’s mouth was wide open.
‘Stop it, Zain.’ Amina smashed her hand down on the board, making the glass jump.
Zain held his hands up but it happened again. This time the glass moved back to the middle of the board in a smooth sweep.
‘If you’re not doing anything, what’s moving the glass?’ Amina whispered. Her face looked like the sheet behind her. They all stared at the glass. Zain’s fists were clenched, as if he was holding onto all his courage.
‘Somebody, ask a question,’ Maryam said.
Zain brought his mouth close to the glass and said with a loud voice, ‘Left for yes, right for no, and shake for don’t know.’
The glass moved to the left slightly and Zain nearly fell back.
‘I’m not asking a question,’ Amina said.
It had to be a joke, one done very well by one of them, but there was a small flame growing inside Hassan. If it were a jinn here with them, it may know things. The flame burst into a fire. Hassan wanted answers.
‘Where is Baba?’ he asked.
Nothing. The glass shuddered. That was a shudder. Everyone was silent. He carried on, his throat burning.
‘How is Amma?’
The glass moved a few centimetres to the left. Everyone gasped, including Hassan.
‘Is Amma managing without me?’
It moved more to the left. Nobody moved this time.
‘Are her eyes still all right?’
This time to the right. The floor under him shook. Hassan swayed.
‘Where is the beekeeper?’
The glass shuddered.
‘Will the beekeeper help me?’ His hand was on his mouth and his voice came out muffled.
All heads turned to him but only for a second before the glass moved again, neither left nor right, but with a full sweep straight off the board. It landed on the marble floor and crashed into pieces.
The shutters clapped; they were laughing at them.
‘There’s a jinn in here,’ Zain said, his voice trembling and high.
Everyone stumbled to the door as if there were no oxygen left in the room. Out on the landing, one of them started screaming and the others joined in. They carried on screaming down the stairwell, one behind the other until they went through the front door to the outside world again.
Amina nudged Maryam with her elbow. ‘Everything’s dry,’ she said.
They all panted in the sunlight until Amina and Zain walked over to the swings by the wall.
‘How did you do that, Hassan?’ Maryam asked. She looked frightened.
‘I’m sure one of us moved it,’ Hassan said.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Maybe I did move it.’
‘Maybe you did it with your mind?’
He laughed.
‘What about your mother?’ She came closer to him. ‘And your father?’
‘They…’
A shadow spread over them.
‘Hassan, give this to Begum Saab. In the living room,’ Kulsoom snapped.
‘Later,’ Maryam said as she left. A tiny smile broke out from behind her eyes at first and then it spread to her lips.
Just before the front door of the house, he stopped at a puddle. It had rained. It had really rained. His feet itched to run back, to find Kulsoom, to demand that she give him his ID card, buy him a ticket now, tell her that she was blocking his way, but he held back.
The clouds in the marble on the living-room floor slowed Hassan’s thoughts down. He didn’t believe in jinns. But the answers. The glass. All correct. Yet he still didn’t believe. The shapes turned into bees; silent, caught in mid-air. Even if he wanted to give the cook any information about Mir Saab, what was there to say? He could feed him scraps. That could be the answer to everything. Just give the cook enough to get him to buy him a train ticket, a return, from Harikaya to Karachi. He wouldn’t be hurting anyone that way. A stone scratched the skin under his heel and he tipped his foot upwards. The stone rolled under his toes. He shook the front of his sandal side to side until the stone was under his big toe. He pressed. It hurt.
‘This is about the Prime Minister and you. Go and talk to him at the wedding.’ Begum Saab’s voice was urgent. ‘It could save our cotton factories.’
The door was open.
‘In the wrong hands, those factories…’ Mir Saab stopped.
‘He might block the bill if you talk,’ Begum Saab said. ‘He’ll be in a good mood at his own child’s wedding.’
The piece of paper slipped out of Hassan’s hand and floated to the ground.
‘He wouldn’t dare nationalise the factories,’ Mir Saab said, ‘but he’s done it to so many businesses – nationalised them and then neglected them. Flops, all of them.’
‘You might change his mind. You’ve known him for years.’
‘That’s precisely the problem.’ Mir Saab’s voice carried sadness. ‘Sibling rivalry…’
Hassan didn’t hear the rest. Begum Saab came into the living room.
‘Oh, you’re here,’ she said.
Hassan bent down to pick up the piece of paper and held it out. Begum Saab took it and hurried away.
Hassan waited at the door before Mir Saab glanced at him and nodded. He approached the desk where Mir Saab stood befor
e the golden egg, looking at it as if it could give him answers to some urgent question. His hands moved fast to open a wooden box with a small key, as though he were running out of time. ‘Everything is governed by a pattern of numbers that allows life to unfold,’ he said.
Mir Saab lifted a golden stick out of the box and held it to the window. A ray of light fell on it. He took another stick and attached it to the first – a ball and socket. ‘I had these made in Harikaya. Wooden sticks painted with gold paint,’ he said. He cleared the papers to the side and placed more sticks flat on the surface of the desk.
‘What is this pattern of numbers, Mir Saab?’
‘It’s a code that makes shapes happen the way they do. It’s a law of nature that makes forms unfold with symmetry and balance.’ He took another and did the same thing. A few more sticks and he’d made a flat hexagon.
‘Now for the tricky part.’ He continued, building on the hexagon with six sticks pointing upwards. ‘The bees use the most space-saving shape to build the cells.’ He then joined these six vertical sticks together with flat sticks to make a hexagonal unit on top. He placed it next to the large egg structure, and Hassan saw that it was made of at least fifty of these smaller units.
‘Building bricks,’ he said. ‘Structures obey the code by building up these single units into different forms.’
‘An instruction?’
‘Yes, an incredibly simple one. It’s a ratio that governs everything. From the whole to the large…’
‘And from the large to the small,’ Hassan said. This was the first time he had seen Mir Saab smile.
Mir Saab opened another drawer and brought out more drawings. Spirals, shells, hexagons, a honeycomb. ‘Magic and mystery. That’s what the world is built on,’ he said. ‘Everything is connected by numbers.’
Mir Saab picked up a black spiralling stone from his desk. ‘Look at this fossil.’
He held it out to Hassan. It was heavy.
‘It curls like so many forms in the world, unfolding under the same code that instructs the positions of petals on a flower, the shape of a wave, the turning of spirals, the formation of shells, or the branches of trees.’
‘A honeycomb,’ Hassan said.
‘Yes, the honeycomb.’ Mir Saab narrowed his eyes at the large hexagonal egg. ‘I had a chance to be with the bees and I gave it up.’ He put his hand lightly on the egg. ‘They never allowed me into their world again.’
‘But they did they allow you into their world once, Mir Saab?’ Hassan asked.
But Mir Saab only sighed and, as if he’d suddenly forgotten that Hassan was there, he walked away through the far door. Hassan stayed by the desk. He looked at the hexagonal egg and then at Mir Saab’s drawings. The code had to be connected to the knowledge that his father had spoken about, the knowledge that the bees had taken back to the earth. Mir Saab and Hassan’s father loved the same thing.
It was hard to walk away from the structure but he did, and he went through to the living room. He stopped in the middle of the floor. A ball of paper lay, abandoned, under the sofa. He saw Mir Saab’s crumpled ink marks. It was easy to reach and he opened it up to see a sketch of a large wooden sailing boat. It was beautiful. Would Mir Saab let him have it? He’d ask him later. In the meantime, he’d look after it. He folded the sheet of paper into quarters and then again until it got smaller and smaller and his hand closed around it.
Out in the empty courtyard, he put the drawing in his waistcoat pocket and took his sandal off. A stone fell out onto his palm, small and sharp, and he let it drop at the gates. He put the sandal back on and walked past the guards who ignored him now that he wasn’t with Maryam. He turned the corner and stood in a patch of shade by the wall. Everything was calm here, away from the world. He walked through the forest and was at the clearing again at last; the ageing masjid stood against the sun. He leapt up the steps and opened one of the doors. The sound of humming was around him like a dancing rush of wind. He closed the door and walked to the middle of the floor.
A bee flew towards him and hovered in front of him. It came closer to his chest; his fingers moved to brush it away but he stopped. He let it explore his presence and it stayed with him until he moved and sat down by the same pillar as before. Another bee came to him – on his skin this time; it crawled along his forehead, over his hair and onto his neck. Its humming was growing louder and Hassan’s body tensed but it flew away. He leant back against the pillar. He wanted to be there again, to travel to their inner world. Bees came and went but nothing happened. Stillness, that was what he needed – the stillness again. Had Mir Saab got this far too? The bees had to give him more. The longer he sat, the easier it became to ignore the cold, hard floor under him.
The activity of the nest was steady. Workers buzzed through the holes in the walls, in and out. The male drones were too busy falling in love with the promise of the queen. That was what his father had said: drones and workers lived very different lives, just like the men and women in Harikaya. His father had written a poem about them. What were the words? All of us, part of the same jigsaw, some pieces faded and overused. Nothing was different here. Everyone was part of a jigsaw, even Mir Saab. Maryam, though, was different. Or was she? He couldn’t be sure.
Up there was a big hanging heart, a single organ made up of thousands of bees. Humming floated out towards him, joining with his own breathing. In and out. The bees belonged to their colony; loyalty and duty was their nature, each bee having a part to play. Hassan had never been part of anything but now he ached to merge with the whole, to be another unit in their world. His breath moved in and out. Their sound, his chest, became one. In and out.
Humming soothed his whole body, wrapping around every part of it. There was no more trying. The humming wrapped around his own heartbeat and pulled him deeper. Pulsations of sound became his guide as he sank deeper into a vast darkness. And then, with no warning, he began to hurtle through a tunnel of light and dark. Objects were flung to the sides of his path until he finally stopped.
Stillness was held together by some distant murmur of life. Short and long tones rang from near and far and made up some kind of background language. It was the call of the bees.
Two or three dark spots approached, turning into blobs of light. They grew bigger, were about to engulf him, but then vanished leaving just a flutter in the air, the memory of a wing. Then there came the beating flurry of more wings.
A light began to flicker in the distance; it sent joy out to him as if some distant star had finally reached him, an ancient star that was still alive. The joy had a distinct scent. Whispered words came into his mind: The queen… It was the scent of her; a beautiful scent from deep within the hive.
It was as if a switch was turned off too soon and he was back in the world again, breathing hard, his throat dry and his lungs tired, as though he had been fished out of water onto a stone floor. He wanted to be there again, to stay longer. He fell to the ground, lying for several minutes in the memory of their world, his body numb.
That light, the source of the joy, was the home of the queen. How could he reach her? Blood flowed around his body again and he moved his legs. He let out a laugh. He had no control in their world. They brought him in, showed him what they wanted and then let him go. Baba had talked about their love. He had said that to win their trust, he had to equal their love, to balance it with his own for them. Was it the bees that had stopped him going further? Or perhaps he did not have enough of this love to give them. The floor felt colder, hard. Perhaps he would never have enough.
He bolted the door and started to walk back.
In his room again, he took out the honeycomb. It spoke in pictures: the beekeeper, the jungle, the forests of Harikaya, a moon disappearing behind rain clouds above tree tops, the beekeeper calling. Yes, he was calling; the beekeeper was waiting. The call was a slow song from a clearing, deep in the forest. It would be his homecoming.
Days of drifting around without his father and trying to f
orget were coming to an end. His will had stirred and was waking up. It was the same will that had carried him and his father to the forest in the first place. It was the same will that drove his father to find the bees again and again.
There would be no hesitation when he reached the forest.
It was all so clear now.
When he found the beekeeper, he would also find himself.
Chapter Thirteen
The humming was still echoing in Hassan’s ears, like a steady rumbling. It was nearly dinner time. Servants walked around the courtyard, their day coming to an end before the evening meal. The guards chatted at the gate.
‘Where have you been?’ It was Maryam. ‘Did you go again?’
The humming suddenly vanished and he nodded.
‘Did anything happen?’ she asked, coming closer, her voice lower, her eyes searching his for answers. ‘Can we go together?’
‘Not now, the guards.’ Hassan turned to the gate.
‘But last time…’ Maryam said, tilting her head.
‘Last time, we went with Amina and Zain. Pakistan is different. People talk.’
‘But we’re friends…’
His heart raced. Her words were kind – more than kind. They were true, but standing in the middle of the courtyard, just the two of them, was drawing more glances.
‘It’s not so simple. I’m a…’ The word villager stuck in his throat.
‘Come inside,’ Maryam said. ‘To the study.’ She went ahead.
It was different in there. It was another world, the world he wanted. Maryam had already taken out the book on bees from last time. She was turning the pages and he came to stand next to her. The warmth of her body touched him even though they were a few inches apart. She stopped at a photo of a honeybee swarm leaping into the sky from a row of hive boxes. In the picture, a line of female beekeepers stood by the boxes, all with their faces hidden under dark nets that hung from their wide-brimmed hats.
‘That’ll be you one day,’ she said.