The Last Beekeeper

by Siya Turabi

  ‘They’re taking you in, step by step.’ Mir Saab’s breath was quick.

  ‘I feel joy when I’m in there, as if they’ve been expecting me.’

  Mir Saab looked as if he had solved the last pieces of a puzzle. ‘I’ve been trying for so long and I was never allowed to cross the threshold into their world.’

  ‘I don’t know why it’s happening,’ Hassan said.

  ‘Sometimes it’s best not to ask why.’ Mir Saab put the spent match away. There were six lit candles under the large hive structure. ‘At least I’ve met the one that the bees have chosen.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For their teaching.’ Mir Saab shook his head. He sifted through the drawings. He picked out the one with the black honey and looked closely at it. ‘And then what, I don’t know.’

  ‘But I only want the black honey for my mother’s eyes and then I want to go to school.’

  ‘They may be your school.’ Then Mir Saab asked, ‘So, do you know the answer to your question? About what the bees would do?’

  Hassan stared at the hive on the desk. Humming, darkness, flashes of light. The hexagons turned and merged into the real wax cells that he saw in his mind – honeycomb, fresh honey. Its taste was in his mouth. What would the bees do? The humming was growing louder. His eyes were open, but he was in two worlds at the same time. One where Mir Saab stood by the hive he had created, and another where flickers were fast, where sound and light darted and flashed. The humming left him. He was back in the room.

  ‘The bees would call for change. They would hold a conference and dance until they reached a decision,’ Hassan said. ‘A peaceful revolution.’

  ‘Revolution. Yes, that is what the bees would do,’ Mir Saab said.

  ‘Why don’t the people march for change?’ Hassan asked.

  ‘For people to claim their power, they need to come together, to believe in themselves and their equality. Use their voices. The government is splitting them. It’s pointing out their differences. They’ve already made certain sects illegal.’ Mir Saab shook his head. ‘The people need to learn that freedom is their birthright. But to do that they need to wake up, to take their life in their hands. There’s still too much fear for that.’ Mir Saab dropped his head.

  Hassan remembered his father surrounded by the crowd, and their loyalty to Mir Saab. His father had only wanted peaceful protest, and for the law to be changed. Only one man had stepped forward. What was needed was the whole village to step forward, to act as one, like the bees. Hassan looked over at Mir Saab. The truth was that the people were scared of him. They were scared of this man with his thinning hair and woollen cardigans, because he stood at the front of a long line of ancestors on horseback. Warriors who had built forts and claimed land. This was not just about the fear of one man. It was the fear of everything that stood behind him and was still standing behind him. But for how long? That was how civilisations started and ended. This man before him, the mir, was part of that cycle.

  ‘The bees are suffering too. You and my father have both said that their numbers are getting smaller. The bees can’t do anything about that.’

  Mir Saab looked up. ‘No, but humans can. There has to be hope.’ He started to pace around the room, coming to a halt in front of the clock on the mantelpiece. Life was pouring back into him.

  Hassan understood now: a new era was being built on an older one.

  ‘I discovered the best way to fight is not to fight but to remain still,’ Mir Saab said. ‘The bees taught me that too.’ A tiny light began to flicker in his eyes. ‘I’ll talk to parliament, see what they say. There have to be good people there, people who understand.’

  ‘This is what the bees would do,’ Hassan said. A tear worked its way out of his eye and dropped onto his cheek. Mir Saab had made his choice: the factories over his mother’s eyes.

  Mir Saab began pacing the room again, scratching his chin. He was fighting for his people.

  Hassan’s breathing was slow. His father had needed coconut spirit to stand up and speak to the crowd. It would be difficult for Mir Saab in front of the government. The politicians had no loyalties, only their own desires. Hassan looked hard at him, puffed up like his father had been. He thought of the plans for the boat, the waves beating its walls. Where was that now?

  Hassan stayed in the living room for the rest of the afternoon and the evening. Begum Saab was away for the evening seeing relatives and the others had gone with her. The study door was open and Mir Saab flowed through the movements of prayer, his forehead touching the small stone slab at the top of his prayer mat between each round. Over and over. When he finished, he knelt on the mat.

  ‘Things will be all right,’ Hassan told himself, but the belief was weighed down by a dull ache all over his body. It was not only his pain but the pain of those in Harikaya and beyond that would be affected. Everything was coming apart. Mir Saab’s plan had to work tomorrow.

  Hassan sat in the room as darkness fell outside; the candlelight grew weak, threatening to fade at any moment. But, instead, the light became steady and, after what must have been hours, the study glowed with what could only be something more than candlelight. It was the same glow that came from deep within the hive.

  A lizard darted up the wall across from him, the first one he had seen inside the house. And then another. The door from the dining room opened and Begum Saab walked in. It must have been late.

  ‘You’re still here,’ she said, looking towards the study. Her gaze went to her beads on the long sofa. ‘Go to bed,’ she said and walked away.

  Mir Saab’s back looked small and weak as he walked into the government buildings with the estate manager the next morning. Hassan waited with Ali Noor outside in the car. Mir Saab came out a few hours later; he was walking fast. His head was up and he was smiling. Yes, he was actually smiling. Ali Noor and Hassan looked at each other.

  ‘Things will be all right?’ Hassan said.

  ‘The talks are promising,’ Mir Saab said. ‘They seem to be listening to me.’

  They went back after lunch that same day and the same happened, but Mir Saab seemed even more hopeful. ‘I’ve asked them to throw out the bill.’ Mir Saab was smiling when he came out. ‘We’ll be off to Harikaya soon.’

  This is worth it, Hassan thought.

  The next day, they ate lunch late in the morning, a simple rice dish because they were about to go to parliament again. Hassan could see Ali Noor moving around in the courtyard through the open shutters. He was probably preparing the car.

  ‘This might be the day it’s decided,’ Mir Saab said. ‘They might throw out the bill altogether.’

  Hassan heard the sound of someone clearing their throat. He looked up. The estate manager was at the living-room door; he held his head like a rag doll.

  ‘Urgent news,’ he said.

  Mir Saab followed him out to the drawing room and Amina, Zain, and Maryam crowded with Hassan at the open door. The manager had his back to them.

  ‘Those villains!’ Mir Saab exclaimed. ‘Parliament was about to throw it out.’

  Mir Saab’s face was grey and his fists were clenched.

  ‘They quoted exceptional circumstances. I don’t know how they’ve done it,’ the manager said, ‘but they’ve passed the bill without a vote. We have to stay here in Karachi and fight this business.’

  Mir Saab rocked forwards. Ancestry fell backwards, thrones toppling over like dominoes, mir upon mir.

  ‘No.’ Mir Saab’s word echoed through the room.

  ‘But Mir Saab, we have to do something.’

  Hassan stepped into the room and the others followed.

  ‘I’ve walked into a checkmate situation,’ Mir Saab said.

  ‘If all the villagers voted, what would the government do?’ Zain asked.

  ‘Perhaps, this is what I must ask for,’ Mir Saab said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the manager said.

  But Mir Saab was sinking again. Hassan didn’t think; he went up to
him and led him to a seat.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ Mir Saab said. ‘I should have known something like this would happen. He was always out to get me.’

  The government was ambushing him, running him into a corner like a hunted hog. Like the cook had done to Hassan.

  ‘And now he’s the Prime Minister,’ Maryam said.

  ‘There are small birds in the forest that appear feeble. They’ve discovered a way to gather energy from others by sucking the blood of bigger birds. By the time they’ve noticed, the bigger birds are too weak to do anything.’

  ‘We have to ask the bees what they would do,’ Hassan said.

  ‘It’s obvious what they would do,’ Mir Saab said. ‘They would organise themselves, take a collective decision, and then act on it.’

  ‘Just like my father wanted the people to do when you made your new law.’

  Mir Saab looked at him. ‘He could have come to talk to me.’

  Mir Saab still didn’t understand what it meant to be a villager.

  ‘The people should demonstrate,’ Mir Saab said.

  ‘But the government doesn’t listen to people in Harikaya,’ Hassan said.

  ‘Not unless there is persistent activity.’

  ‘Or unless they don’t give up,’ Maryam said.

  ‘My father said it’s the people who make the change.’

  ‘But what about when people get hurt by the ones in power?’ Maryam asked.

  Hassan thought of the people at the shrine. Most of them had been too scared. ‘I was scared of you, Mir Saab,’ he said.

  ‘I would have listened.’ Mir Saab was tapping his finger on the table. ‘We’ve got to make them realise they have a voice.’

  ‘Most of the bees are women,’ Maryam said.

  ‘Most of the factory workers are women too,’ Hassan said. He thought of the women who went to work in the mills, on the fields, never missing a day so their children could be fed.

  Mir Saab was pacing again. ‘Without the women, we’re nothing. The government doesn’t want us to believe that or they’ll lose their power.’

  He stopped in the middle of the room.

  ‘The society of bees does not ignore the women – far from it – it’s the same with all animals.’

  ‘Except us humans,’ Hassan said.

  It didn’t take long for Mir Saab to decide what to do.

  ‘I’ll go to my people.’ Mir Saab stood up and looked towards Amina and Zain. ‘Call your mother. There’s still time to catch the afternoon plane.’

  Part Three

  Harikaya village in Harikaya state

  Sindh Province, Pakistan

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘If one plane crashes at least there’ll be one heir left,’ Zain said.

  Hassan sat next to the window. Maryam sat between him and Zain. Amina had taken the first plane out with Mir Saab, Begum Saab, and the manager.

  ‘You’ll do it before the rains,’ Maryam said.

  She must have been reading his thoughts but that wasn’t too hard.

  ‘I have to,’ he said. ‘I want to do it before you go back.’

  ‘You will. And you can give me a little black honey too.’

  The flight was ninety minutes long and they were already halfway there. The air hostess brought cucumber sandwiches made out of white bread with no crusts and sprinkled with salt and pepper.

  The land he could see from the plane window was flat. Sand-coloured earth was planted with green, yellow, and brown vegetation – rice, cotton, and wheat – in rectangular, overlapping patches like the ones in his mother’s weaving. Then came the bigger fields, laden with date palms. Green, spiky-headed giants, standing in line, army-like in their formation and ready to protect the land.

  Bold and graceful, muddy waters of the river Indus flowed down the middle. The land looked freshly soaked by light showers but the irrigation channels that framed the fields were still dry.

  Bright cloths and brown flesh dotted the landscape as workers, men and women, bent down to sow seeds. They looked up at the sky as the plane flew over.

  The village appeared in the distance, a mere cluster of buildings. His breath steamed up the window pane which was cold against the tip of his nose. Would his mother be at home or in the mill?

  ‘When will you see your mother?’ Maryam asked him.

  ‘I promised I would go back with the black honey,’ Hassan replied. The glass of the window clouded over and he wiped it with his sleeve; the village was gone. That was when the pain started.

  ‘Why are you covering your ears?’ Maryam asked.

  His ears felt like they were going to explode.

  ‘Suck on this.’ Zain gave him a sweet, and the pain had disappeared by the time they landed.

  Mir Saab’s manager met them outside the plane. Someone had put Hassan’s bag, a soft plastic box bag with handles, on the trolley with the others. It was floppy and old on top of the suitcases and chests. But still, he was walking with them and people would think he was a brother or a cousin, or one of the many distant relatives of Mir Saab’s family who lived in the fort.

  No. That kind of thinking was the old him. His cheap bag, his old sandals, and fraying waistcoat were part of him. He was Hassan, who had helped his father home from the jungle, who had been in a Karachi gutter with a bleeding arm, and who was here now, a villager with his new friends.

  He was home. A wide smile spread across his face. Maryam saw it and smiled back.

  Outside, the midday heat was like a bread oven compared to the humidity of Karachi. The smell of rain was in the air and the cool air inside the car was a relief.

  ‘That’s where my mother works,’ he said to Maryam, pointing at the factories and cotton mills.

  Her forehead creased. He didn’t want to see Maryam worried. It made things even worse.

  The road narrowed and bamboo lined the path. There was so much to tell her about his life, about how he had lived. He and his father had hidden in those reeds from this very car.

  The car slowed down to almost a stop. An old man was in their path, ahead of their slow-moving car.

  ‘He’s one of my neighbours,’ Hassan said.

  The man shuffled to the side of the road and bent forwards, ninety degrees from the ground, holding his cupped hand to his chin. Hassan shrank back into the seat when the man looked through the window as the car made its way past.

  They drove along a high wall and through a set of iron gates, opened by a guard.

  ‘Zain, you never told me you lived in a palace,’ Maryam said, climbing out of the car.

  The palace was the colour of red fire. Amina was waiting for them in the shade under the arches as they got out of the car. The doors of the palace opened onto a great hall. Paintings the size of a village house hung around the walls.

  ‘Ancestors,’ Zain said.

  In a corner was a swinging seat with big red cushions on it to which Maryam and Amina both ran.

  ‘Hassan, have a go,’ Maryam said, moving closer to Amina to make space.

  ‘No Bibi, it’s all right.’

  She asked again but he said no. He looked around, pretending he had made the right choice when he suddenly felt a strong push and he found himself landing on the seat. It was soft and he gave in to the laughing. The rays of the sun fell on his face from the windows in the sky.

  ‘Come on,’ Zain said, pointing to a door in the far corner behind which there was a maze of rooms and beds and wood-panelled walls.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Maryam asked, pointing at the painting.

  ‘Jinnah,’ Amina said.

  The face of the man was thin, his eyes kind and he wore a narrow black hat.

  ‘The founder of the country,’ Zain said.

  ‘I know that,’ Maryam said. ‘Why is it there?’

  ‘Baba put that there when he came to stay.’

  ‘1948, to be precise, a year after partition,’ Zain said.

  And so on, room after room, each with a painting
of a new Prime Minister that had visited. The final painting was a landscape.

  ‘The future,’ Zain said.

  There was no picture of the current Prime Minister. The last door led them along a corridor that opened onto a dining room with a long wooden table and about fifty wooden chairs. Maryam ran to the other end.

  ‘Pass the salt!’ she shouted.

  Outside again at the front of the building, Amina, Zain, and Maryam were no longer behind him but their voices echoed in the dining room; they must have found something. Hassan looked out onto the gardens. When he was back with his mother, he would bring her here one day. Mir Saab was by the arches, talking to the manager and a second man with the same long, curly moustache as the manager. The men were still and quiet.

  Hassan went closer, his camera ready. He stopped a few feet away. The button, there it was, under his finger now. Would the scene stop and turn into just a picture? Mir Saab had given him no advice about how to take a photograph. Hassan pressed.

  ‘Arrey!’ The cry from the new man cut through the stillness.

  Hassan took the camera away from his face and let it hang around his neck.

  ‘Chalo!’ the man said. ‘What are you doing, taking a picture of Mir Saab? Go! Go quickly, get out of here.’ He waved his hands at Hassan.

  Although his tone was harsh, the man’s face was tired. Hassan stayed where he was.

  ‘Stop that,’ Mir Saab said to the man. ‘How dare you?’ His voice was loud. ‘That boy is called Hassan. He is a human being.’

  The managers bowed. The rough heat of shame on the man’s skin was dark and blotchy; the man bowed again, this time to Hassan, and both of them left.

  ‘The constitution talks about equality but things will take a long time to change,’ Mir Saab said tensely.

  They stood for a while, facing the gardens. The breeze was gentle but there was that familiar smell mixed in with it that signalled the imminent arrival of the rains. They had to be coming soon. Hassan took a deep breath in. Mir Saab deserved the truth. He turned to Mir Saab who turned to him at the same time.