“What is it?” he asked, kissing them away, “Have I hurt you?”
I shook my head but did not speak, for I had no words that could tell what was in my heart.
“Tell me,” he said, holding me close, cradling my head against his chest, “tell me, Sahiban, what it is?”
“You brought me pleasure that I have never known before, pleasure that was so intense that I could not but weep.”
In a little while, he made love to me again and it was even more beautiful than before. Then at last, when he drew away from me, I heard him draw his breath in sharply and he sat up with a start. “May Allah forgive me,” he said in a whisper.
“What happened?” I asked in alarm.
“As I turned, my foot touched Heer’s grave. I wonder what she would say,” he said softly, “if she saw us thus.”
“She would not say anything. I am sure she would merely smile complacently, secure in the knowledge that her prophecy had been fulfilled.”
“Her prophecy?”
“Yes, her prophecy. When her affair with Ranjha became well known and the Sayals felt shamed by her conduct, her mother, my grandmother, upbraided her, saying that she had disgraced herself and besmirched the name of the Sayals. Then, so I have heard, Heer had smiled, drawn herself up to her full height – she was a tall woman, my aunt Heer – and said in a clear voice, loud enough for all in the courtyard to hear, ‘I have done nothing to disgrace myself and to bring dishonour to the name of the Sayals. I have loved and have lived by the laws of my love. If you feel shamed by this, may every generation of the Sayals bring forth a Heer till you learn there is no shame in love!’”
My life now centred on our meetings. All day, I waited for the darkness to descend, so that I could steal away to my lover and to those magical moments that I found with him. The rest of my day was mere existence – I came alive only during that hour or two that I spent in my lover’s arms. All my waking moments, I thought of nothing else and in my sleep, I dreamt only of the ways he filled me with ecstasy.
I took to leaving my home a few minutes earlier, each day, and returning a few minutes later. My family was tolerant and had never questioned my comings and goings. Perhaps, being the only girl and the youngest of the children, I had been given more liberty than I would otherwise have been given. Yet, liberal and tolerant as my family was towards me, it could not be long before they took note of my regular absences.
On the tenth day, when I returned home late, the household was asleep. Only Shamir, my eldest brother, sat in a corner of the courtyard, smoking his hookah. He looked up at my approach and said, “The hookah needs to be refilled. Will you do it for me, Sahiban?” His eyes remained fixed on my face.
I refilled the hookah and brought it to him and then made to go to my room. But he reached out and caught my wrist. “Come Sahiban, come and sit with me a while. I get to see so little of you these days that I feel you have become quite a stranger.”
I knew what was going to come and would have liked to avoid it. But I knew my brother well, knew the steel in his grip upon my wrist and knew there was no escape. I sat down on the mooda next to him and had a feeling that he had deliberately placed it there for me to sit on. It was as if he had rehearsed our entire meeting in his mind, and gone over everything that he would say or do.
“People have begun to talk of your new found fondness for your Aunt Biro,” he said, taking a long puff on his hookah.
I looked up at him and could not conceal a flash of anger that snapped on, and then off, in my eyes.
“You, at least, can be honest with me, brother. What you want to say is that people are beginning to talk of my frequent meetings with Mirza.”
There was amusement in my brother’s eyes and he reached out and put his arm around my shoulder. This was not a gesture that was normally shared between a brother and his sister. But I was so much younger than him that he had always looked upon me more as his child than as his sister, and treated me thus. I had always found much pleasure in this gesture but there was no joy in it now. “Yes. That is indeed what I wanted to say.”
“People will talk. If we worry about this, we will not be able to live our lives as we see fit but will be forced to live them according to the dictates of others.”
“That is true,” Shamir said, “and you show great wisdom when you say this. But there is danger here that your life will be jeopardised by what people say. I know, and you know too, that you go to meet your childhood friend, to catch up on each other’s news after long years of being apart – there is nothing more to your visits to Aunt Biro’s house. But people do not see this. They see a beautiful girl – the most beautiful girl in Punjab, going to meet a handsome, virile man and they draw their own conclusions from it. Why, in a little while they will talk of you and Mirza in terms of Heer and Ranjha and suggest that you meet secretly in the grove where Ranjha used to graze our herds.”
He paused, but my heart beat wildly and I did not dare look up at him for fear that he would glimpse the secret in my eyes. He knew. There could be no doubt about that. “And what people say will grow with each repetition and will be bruited far and wide. Sooner or later, it will reach Tahir’s ears and the ears of his family and I am sure you know what the consequences of that can be.”
He paused again and I pondered over what he had said. Absorbed in the passion and ecstacy of my meetings with Mirza, I had not thought of this. I had lived with Tahir on my mind far too long, had built up such wonderful fantasies about my life with him, that I was not yet ready to let him go.
“Will you forbid me, then, to meet Mirza?” I still did not look at him but I heard him chuckling softly.
“Far be it from me to try and forbid you anything. I would be a fool to forbid you anything. This would only confirm you in what you were doing. You will do what your heart and mind tells you to. I only ask you to be aware of the consequences of these meetings, and do what must be done.” He paused again, and then he said softly.
“It is late now and we must both go to bed.” He leant across and put his hand on my shoulder and I felt a lump in my throat. I fought the impulse to put my head against his chest and be drawn into a warm embrace.
It would be an admission of my guilt – an admission I did not choose to make at this moment.
“Yes, you are right,” I said, getting to my feet. “It is time to go to bed. Goodnight.”
All through the night, I tossed and turned, in fitful sleep, my heart filled with dark foreboding. Shamir knew of my secret meetings with Mirza, of that I was certain. How he knew, I could not say. He knew. If I did not do what he asked, he would step in and take charge of things. The foreboding lasted till my meeting with Mirza the next evening and then was swept away in waves of passion. But when I spoke to him about it afterwards, he advised caution and we did become more circumspect in our meetings. By tacit consent, we restricted our meetings at night to the barest minimum and took advantage, instead, of the evenings when I went out with my friends to play on the riverbank. He would wait for me in the shadow of the distant trees and I would find an opportunity to steal away from my friends and go to him. Then we would go to a perfect place that we had found between the river and the road, a place concealed from prying eyes by a screen of bulrushes and here we would spend time in pleasant dalliance.
“You are vain,” he said gently one day. My brother had returned from a fair and brought me a large quantity of bangles, green and gold and red. Mirza had sat by me and watched me patiently as I spent hours arranging and rearranging the bangles till I found the most becoming combination. I looked up from my wrists and saw his face suffused with a tender smile.
“Why shouldn’t I be? I am told that I am the most beautiful girl in Punjab and there is not another girl worthy to touch my feet as far as beauty is concerned.”
“You have been told the truth,” he said with the same gentleness. “But is it a truth to be proud of? The beauty of the body is but of a day – it is the beauty of the min
d and the spirit that you should aspire to; a beauty that will remain with you long after the beauty of the body has passed you by.”
I felt a flash of irritation, the way I always did when he became philosophical.
“What do I care about the beauty of the mind and the spirit? The beauty of the body is enough for me. And what if it lasts but a day, that day is long enough for me.”
There had been a few days of abstinence and when I reached the riverbank that evening and looked into Mirza’s eyes, I knew that he too had felt the deprivation. We waited just long enough for the other girls to lower themselves into the water and then we stole away towards “our place”. It had rained the night before – one of those sharp, fresh showers that sometimes occur at this time of the year and the evening breeze was cool and pleasant. I felt my pulse quicken as we walked along, side by side and I did not need to look at him to know his excitement.
But a little short of the point where we would have climbed down from the path, we came across an old man with a small cart that had got stuck in one of the slushy ruts. No matter how much he cursed and abused his animals and showered whip lashes on them, and no matter how hard the oxen pulled, the wheel would not come out of the rut. He was a thin, emaciated man, his frame all skin and bones, his clothes little more than dirty rags. I felt a pang of pity for him. Then the nearness of my lover swept over me and I turned my eyes away.
“Poor man,” Mirza said. “He’ll never get the cart on the road again.” I felt the compassion and concern in his voice and I knew what he was going to do. My own desires had become so strong, that they could not be denied, could not wait. And I could not stem the frustration that came over me. I put my hand on Mirza’s arm, and said, “He will have to wait till someone comes along to help him.”
He put his hand over mine. “We cannot leave him like this”.
“Why not? We have our own problems to deal with. There is so little time and we do not know when we will get a chance again.”
“We can wait. He cannot.”
I snatched my hand away in anger. “You mean you prefer to spend our few stolen moments with this stinking old wreck rather than with me?”
“You know that’s not true. His need is pressing, that’s all.”
“What about my need? That is pressing too. Someone else will come and help him but it is you alone who can help me. Please, Mirza, let’s not stop. I need you – I need you more than I’ve ever needed you.”
“I need you too – with a desire that is stronger than ever before. But we would be poor souls indeed, if we did not place others’ needs above our own.”
He shuffled his shoes off and left them on the side of the road. He took off his shirt and handed it to me. Then he hitched up his tehmat and moved towards the cart.
“I will never come to you again,” I said and my voice was a cry of pain. “Never again ask for what I have asked of you now.” He turned back and tried to put his arms around me, but I drew away.
“You will see the sense of what I do, once your anger has passed and you will come to me in Heer’s grove, where I will wait.” He smiled and turned back to the cart. I waited to see him put his shoulder to the cart, to see his lean hard muscles straining with the effort. Then I threw his shirt down on his shoes and turned and fled to join my friends.
All through that night, I lay awake, unable to sleep, cursing him through my tears of frustration and rage. But he had been right. By the morning, when my anger had subsided, I knew that he could not have passed the old man by without helping him.
I went to Heer’s grove that night, where he was waiting for me. Our love was more passionate and more intense than ever before and, when we were done, I felt the tears come to my eyes.
“What is it, Sahiban? Are you still angry at what I did?”
“No,” I said shaking my head, “You would have been lesser both in your own eyes and mine, if you had not stopped to help. It is just that my need for you grows strong and I do not know how to cope with it.”
“That too will come,” he said caressing my hair, “and till it does, am I not always there?”
I buried my head against his chest and was instantly at peace with myself.
The mangoes had begun to ripen on the trees and my friends and I would spend hours searching for ripe mangoes that had just fallen off the boughs, or trying to knock down ripe ones that were still on the trees.
Mirza and I sat under my favourite tree. I lay with my head on his lap, looking up at the tree and I saw a bird settle on one of the boughs holding a small mango by the stem.
“Look, look Mirza,” I said, pointing the bird out to him. “Birds merely peck at mangoes that they think are sweet. This one has captured a whole mango and does not now know what to do with it. It must be a fruit of surpassing sweetness for the bird to have done this.”
“And you crave that mango?” he said, reading my thoughts. He lifted my head gently off his lap and then moved with great stealth to where his horse grazed. He took his bow and arrows from the saddle, and fitting an arrow to his bow, took careful aim and let the arrow fly. The arrow flew swift and sure, and hit the mango. The bird let go of the fruit and flew away. I ran and picked it up and putting it to my lips, sucked upon it. It was indeed extremely sweet.
“It is delicious,” I said, holding it out to him. “Try it.”
He shook his head. “My pleasure comes from seeing your pleasure.”
Those blissful days dissolved softly, one into the other and it seemed they would have no end. But I knew that he could not stay on forever. I knew that he would have to go back to his parents, but I did not allow my mind to dwell on this. It was enough that each day brought the joy of meeting him, and with each meeting, our relationship had become fuller and each meeting brought a deeper sense of fulfilment.
But human happiness is, at the best, episodic and our time of togetherness too came to an abrupt close. I returned from one of my now infrequent visits to Heer’s grove, to find my brother, Shamir waiting for me. He sat puffing at his hookah and did not even look up at me as I came into the courtyard. I turned and closed the door and drew the bar across it.
“Still up, brother?” I asked.
“I am not the only one.”
“I was at Aunt Biro’s,” I said, not looking at him and making to go into the house.
“Tonight you were not.” I stood still. There could be no playing with the truth anymore, no hoping that we could continue meeting each other, without anyone knowing.
“Sit down, Sahiban. We must settle this once and for all.”
I pulled the moora that was beside him, a short distance away and sat down facing him.
“I knew when I spoke to you last that it would be pointless, my forbidding you to meet him. I had hoped that you would, yourself, perceive the danger of what you are doing and you would stop seeing him of your own accord. Tell me now, will you give him up?”
“No,” I said and though I spoke in a soft voice, the resolve I felt could not be disguised.
Shamir sighed, a deep sigh that shook his entire frame.
“Then I must find another way to end this affair.” The resolve in his voice was equally clear. “Good night.” He got abruptly to his feet and went into the house.
I sat there, alone in the courtyard, fear and anxiety gnawing at my heart. I longed to run away to Mirza to tell him of my fears. I knew my brother Shamir well. He was a man of action, and when he said he would find a way to end our affair, he would. After a very long time, I went to my room, but all through the night, I tossed and turned, worrying about what lay ahead. Once again, my heart filled with dark foreboding. All the next day, I mused on my brother’s words and worried at their import. What way would he find to end our affair? Would he, perhaps, inflict bodily harm upon Mirza? The thought of this made me sick and by the time my friends and I went out to the river, I was close to panic.
When we were finally settled in our little hiding place, I told him what my brother ha
d said. He drew me close and eased all my worries away, not so much with kisses and his caresses, as with strong, gentle words.
“He would not dare to do me physical harm. He knows that this would lead to a vendetta between our families and would earn him the wrath and censure, not only of the maulvi, but of the entire community. I am, after all, his cousin. No, that is not what he will attempt to do. He will attempt to persuade my parents to prevail upon me. And as long as I am sure of your love and of my own, nothing can sway me. Be strong Sahiban – strong in your resolve and belief. If we decide not to give each other up, no one else can come between us.”
Thus he allayed my fears and I became, once more, complacent in my love. I was sure I had no cause for worry, a conviction which prevailed even when Shamir went away the next day and no one could give a satisfactory explanation for his absence. He returned five days later. As he entered the courtyard, I saw my father look at him with uncertainity on his face. I saw the look that passed between father and son, I noticed the almost imperceptible nod that Shamir gave our father and then the smile that touched the elder’s face. Still I did not worry. My Mirza was right. If we were sure in our love, nothing could come between us.
But I should have worried, for two days later, Mirza received an urgent summons from his father to return immediately and he left, with time only for the most perfunctory of goodbyes and the briefest of reassurances that he would return soon.
The days of waiting dragged on, one after another, and still there was no sign of his return, no message of reassurance. And as the days crept slowly into weeks, and weeks into silent months, my initial despair and grief turned to petulant anger. How dare he treat me like this – I, who could have any man in Punjab grovelling at my feet, with a mere lift of an eyebrow! How dare he think that he could treat me like his chattel, to be picked up when he liked and dropped when he wished! If he could live without me, I would show him that I, too, could do without him. All day, I nurtured this anger, but at night, as I lay awake and the memories of our days together came upon me, I was filled with a longing for his nearness, and the feel of his hardness within me. Then I would bury my head in my pillow and weep silent tears of agony and frustration. But the silence remained unbroken. In the beginning, I would go to my Aunt Biro each day and ask, “Is there news from Mirza? A message for me?”
Love Stories from Punjab Page 21