Maps for Lost Lovers, page 14
In the end she had induced a miscarriage by taking quinine tablets for a fortnight, something a young mother of eight in Sohni Dharti had said she found effective whenever she needed to give her body a respite, her husband refusing to see reason and claiming the use of contraceptives would lead to the unborn children pointing to him on Judgement Day and saying to Allah, “That man is the one who did not allow us to be born and swell the numbers of the faithful!,” with the result that once the woman had given birth in the January and December of the same year.
With surprising heat in her heart, she takes the flattened and curved tube of white cardboard from her pocket and tosses it—like the crescent moon come unstuck and spiralling down—into the rubbish before leaving the bathroom.
“Mother, what was the matter with auntie-ji?”
Kaukab is at the sink, washing the lunch dishes, Mah-Jabin’s coffee cup, the plate that had held her own orange pieces, and the henna bowl. She doesn’t answer the question immediately—once again concealing everything regarding the Pakistanis that the children might deem objectionable. She knows Mah-Jabin will ridicule the idea of djinns.
“Nothing. She was just a little tired.”
Mah-Jabin had heard a few words of what the woman had said to Kaukab: the girl’s husband is demanding to know why she hasn’t conceived yet—either she is secretly taking contraceptives or she is barren. He called her a stony valley that had wasted all his seed. “She mentioned something about her daughter and her husband—”
“Every marriage has it ups and downs,” Kaukab says abruptly, and then as abruptly: “What was in the letter?”
“I threw it away unopened,” Mah-Jabin hears herself state flatly.
Kaukab nods; she still holds on to the hope that Mah-Jabin will return to her husband, if he’ll take her back, that is, and if not that then perhaps another marriage could be arranged for her—which would be difficult because she is no longer a virgin, is used goods. She peers over her shoulder to meet her eye, “I forbid you to go to America.” Her hands clench into fists. “A strange country full of strangers! I’m sure your father wouldn’t approve either.”
“How do you know I’m going to America?” Mah-Jabin is puzzled. “And well, I’ve been to a country full of my own kind of people and seen what that is like so I thought I’d try a strange country full of strangers this time.” Trapped within the cage of permitted thinking, this woman—her mother—is the most dangerous animal she’ll ever have to confront. “I’m just going to stay with some friends during the summer. Who told you about it? And may I add that I am not afraid of Father.”
Oh your father will be angry, oh your father will be upset: Mah-Jabin had grown up hearing these sentences, Kaukab trying to obtain legitimacy for her own decisions by invoking his name. She wanted him to be angry, she needed him to be angry. She had cast him in the role of the head of the household and he had to act accordingly: there were times when he came in to inform the young teenagers that something they had asked from their mother earlier—the permission for an after-hours school disco, for example—was an impossibility, and it was obvious from the look on his face that he personally had no problem with what the children wanted. Sometimes Mah-Jabin wonders whether her mother knows Shamas at all. Shamas wouldn’t object to her visiting America, she knows. And she says these things out loud now.
Kaukab smarts at the words. “How your tongue has lengthened in the past few years. Is this what they taught you at university, to talk like this, your precious university far away in London that you had to attend because you wanted an education? If education was what you wanted you would have gone to a university within commuting distance and lived at home like decent girls all over these streets. Freedom is what you wanted, not education; the freedom to do obscene things with white boys and lead a sin-smeared life.”
Mah-Jabin’s head not only hums like a wasp’s nest but also feels as weightless as those oblongs of chewed-up paper glued together with spit. “I knew it was not the distance that worried you; you had after all sent me a thousand miles away at sixteen.”
“We did what you asked us to do.” Kaukab moves closer and stares at her as though pinning a dangerous animal to the ground with a lance.
“I was sixteen: in every other matter I was considered a child by you but why was that decision of mine taken to be that of an adult? Another parent would have given me time to think but you were thrilled that I wanted to go and live in your beloved country,” Mah-Jabin screams. “And I was afraid as the time approached for us to leave, but I knew I couldn’t have said no at that stage.”
“No you couldn’t. These things are not child’s play. We had given our word, the wedding arrangements were ready over there, and, yes, I would’ve tied you up and taken you there had it come to that. And what’s wrong with Pakistan? Many girls from here are sent back to marry and live there, and they are happy there. Only the other month, the matchmaker told me of a woman from here who has been divorced by her Pakistani husband by mistake, and she’s still eager to go back and live with him there. That’s what a good and dignified woman is like.” She pauses for a moment and repeats her question: “What’s wrong with Pakistan? I grew up there—”
“And look what happened to you, you fool!”
The hard open palm of Kaukab’s hand lunges at Mah-Jabin and in striking her face takes away her breath. This is something Kaukab has longed to do whenever she has thought about the girl in her absence and really isn’t a response to what she has just said: she simply happened to be within reach as the need overtook Kaukab and the moment chose itself.
The force of the impact knocks Mah-Jabin off the chair, while Kaukab’s rosary—looped double at the back of the chair—snaps and the beads clatter to the floor. Kaukab’s hand alights and grips the girl’s soggy gritty hair like a claw and slams the head many times against the wall with all her strength, the red stain of henna growing richer and larger on the wall, Mah-Jabin crooking her elbow against the side of the head until Kaukab finally lets go and moves to the sink at the other side of the kitchen, washing the redness—sticky as blood—off her hands, her back turned towards the girl.
Mah-Jabin opens her eyes and slides herself upright against the wall, the pull causing the safety-pin at her throat to open up and the point to enter the soft hollow between her collarbones.
Sometimes the right question can be as difficult to come by as the right answer. Yes: Mah-Jabin has spent the last nine years, and most of the two years of her marriage before that, looking for the question that has come to her only just now. She remembers that Kaukab, on catching Jessye Norman on television once—singing a lyric Kaukab did not know the significance to, in a language she did not know—had risen to her feet slowly as though in homage to the grandeur of the heart-breakingly beautiful goddess standing proud as a mountain against the Paris sky, and afterwards had managed to articulate only a few words:
“I love people who accomplish great things.”
The sentence had startled the girl; and there were other similar occasions. Sometimes an idea would seem to come to Kaukab and disappear immediately so that her face was dark once again but not as dark as before, this being the darkness left behind in the flight-path of a firefly, a darkness aflicker with the knowledge that something had happened here recently, some illumination, the brain cells vibrating in the lucid wake of an insight. She would sigh, and talk to her daughter wistfully for a while.
Mah-Jabin remembers Kaukab telling her she regretted not having been able to have had an education, that she had wished to own a bicycle as a girl but it was out of the question even within the confines of the courtyard because her mother feared she would fall off and break a limb and no one would marry the cripple, so that she had bought herself a tiny pendant in the shape of a bicycle and put it around her neck on a chain, just as real bicycles are secured to trees or pillars with real chains.
And yet this same woman who had allowed her daughter to leave school at sixteen, hadn’t allowed her to ride a bicycle lest she be ruined for life. Why?
“Why don’t you hit me harder, Mother? Like this . . .” Mah-Jabin strikes her own face as she walks towards Kaukab. “Like this . . . this . . . this . . . Hit me harder . . . harder . . .”
Kaukab takes the cutlery from lunch and the knife with which Mah-Jabin had prepared the red peppers and drops them into the soapy water, standing solid as stone while the girl shakes her violently from behind with both hands. “You must be a moral cripple if you think what you did to me wasn’t wrong. Didn’t you once tell me that a woman’s life is hard because you have to run the house during the day and listen to your husband’s demands in bed at night? So why didn’t you make sure I avoided such a life? Answer me . . . Answer me . . . Why do you people keep doing the same things over and over again expecting a different result?”
Kaukab’s hand searches for and finds the handle of the long steel knife inside the water covered with the lace of bubbles.
“What was it you said to me once, Mother, that the first two decades of marriage belong to the husband, the rest to the wife because she can turn her children against the husband while she’s bringing them up, so when they are grown up they’ll make him eat dirt while she reigns over them all for the rest of her days.”
Kaukab stands immovably while the girl pulls at her shoulder to make her turn around, she the most intimate of her enemies.
“How fucking wise you are, Mother, such wisdom! Victory awaits all the beleaguered Pakistani women but what a price, Mother, two decades of your life wasted . . . What a waste when instead of conniving for all these years you could just walk away . . .”
Drops of water slide off the blade slowly as the knife rises vertically through the air. “Get away from me, you little bitch!”
The hungry steel slices an arc as Kaukab swings around and then Mah-Jabin stumbles backwards with one arm raised and the other across her stomach.
“How dare you throw questions at me like stones!”
Dazzle explodes on the blade—like blood spurting from a vein—when the weapon enters a beam of sunlight. The air itself seems to contract away from Kaukab as a school of fish twitches itself to safety at the approach of a predator. The bowl that had held henna falls to the floor, spinning on its edge like the silver cups that revolve around the lights on top of police cars to make them blink.
Eyes dilated as though lost in darkness, Kaukab lowers the knife, that diamond-hard tip that had very briefly become the sharp point of her despair and defeat.
Her own jewelled eyes flashing, Mah-Jabin throws back her head and laughs for the third time today, face tilted up to the ceiling.
“Here we have proof that Chanda was murdered by her brothers, that a family can kill one of its own. I wonder if this will stand up as evidence in court so that those two bastards can be put away for life. My god, for all of you she probably didn’t die hard enough: you would like to dig her up piece by piece, put her back together, and kill her once more for going against your laws and codes, the so-called traditions that you have dragged into this country with you like shit on your shoes.”
The knife falls from Kaukab’s lifeless grip. “Oh God, Mah-Jabin . . . I didn’t know I had the knife in my hand. I just tried to push you away with my hand.”
“Please don’t come near me, Mother. And you would love me to go back to Pakistan to my husband, wouldn’t you, back to my ‘earthly god’? Or find me someone new like they did for poor Chanda. How many times had she been married before she met Uncle Jugnu? Twice? Three times? Yes, if it doesn’t work once, try again, because you are bound to hit the target eventually, as long as it’s you who decides what to do: if the bitch decides to take matters into her own hands and finds someone herself then raise the fucking knives and cut her to pieces.”
“Not everyone has the freedom to walk away from a way of life,” Kaukab says quietly. “The fact that you have managed to do it easily has made you arrogant and heartless.”
“It was not easy! It is still a torment. What hurts me is that you could have given me that freedom instead of delivering me into the same kind of life that you were delivered into. I want to go back into the past and tell that young girl who was me—and whom I love—what not to do, but no one can return to the past. But it was easier for you because I was there right next to you: if you loved me you would have prevented me from doing certain things—”
“I did not have the freedom to give you that freedom, don’t you see?” Kaukab is pained and broken at the realization that someone as close to you as one of your children can make so many mistaken assumptions when they take it upon themselves to evaluate your life.
“Don’t lie. You would have done it if you wanted to. You still want me married because you still believe a woman must have a husband. Please, don’t come near me, I said.”
But Kaukab walks by her and begins to pluck the rosary beads off the floor.
“Yes, I do want you to go back, because in the eyes of Allah you are still married to him. You may have divorced him under British law, but haven’t done so in a Muslim court. My religion is not the British legal system, it’s Islam.” Snatches of sentences are coming to her from the past few timeless minutes like waves returning to a shore and she deals with them as they come. “When I said a woman’s troubles are over within twenty years of marriage because now her grown-up children will defend her against the father and in-laws, I didn’t mean you have to connive and tell your children certain things deliberately. You need someone to talk to, to tell your troubles to, and her children are the people closest to a woman. You don’t connive to bring about that situation, it happens of its own accord.” She is on her haunches, weeping, as she lifts the beads off the linoleum like picking shells off a beach. “And what is this talk about me taking a knife to you: do you really think I could harm you?” There is a sense of consolation to the activity her fingers are engaged in, almost as though contact is being made with the dead: as a child she had seen her mother and grandmothers, and the other women in the house, similarly bent over the myriad daily tasks of the day, and sometimes—but not today, not now— the feeling is close to celebration, a remembrance and a praising of those now dead and absent but still living in her mind, unsung elsewhere and otherwise. Gone so thoroughly it is as though she had dreamed them.
Mah-Jabin moves towards the stairs, on the floor coated with dried-up or drying henna that she had shaken loose when she hit herself, and from the powdered layer under her feet it is as though she is in a room in Pakistan after a dust storm has just passed through. “Don’t worry.” She pauses by the bottom step. “It’s not the first beating I’ve taken from you. Your husband beats you and you beat your children in return.”
“I cannot understand why you constantly pluck this one string. I wish to Allah I had never told you about him hitting me and I’ve told you a thousand times since that it only happened that one time and that I didn’t speak to him for many months afterwards. He begged for my forgiveness and when that didn’t work, he even moved out for nearly three years.” Kaukab comes to the stairs, obstructing the flow of light into the well, and watches the girl’s ascending back. “Have you never made a mistake? Remember if you ever go back in time, make sure you choose to fall in love with the right person at fourteen, so that when he marries someone else two years later you wouldn’t have to ask your parents to arrange a marriage for you somewhere far-away—somewhere like Pakistan, for instance. We sent you to Pakistan because you wanted to go live in a place where you wouldn’t have to witness that young man leading a happy life with another woman.”
A moth pressed to a window-pane, Mah-Jabin stops on the staircase as though air has suddenly solidified ahead, but she doesn’t turn around. She rubs the point of pain at the base of the neck where the safety-pin has broken the skin, rubs it until it is lost in the smudge of heat the friction creates, and then, when the light rises a tone higher to signify that Kaukab has returned to the kitchen, she continues up the stairs, breaking free of the chains that her mother’s words had briefly become around her ankles, head bowed like a lily on a broken stem.
He, a stranger, had smiled at her for a few moments and held her eye. That’s all it had taken. Over the next few days she re-imagined and revised those first moments. He had paid her a compliment by noticing her and she had fallen in love: it was that easy because she had never been an object of curiosity, a scrutiny other than the kind that was openly intrusive, always aggressive, usually hostile. But what was deadlier was that she believed he too was in love with her, that he contrived to run into her here and there. She imagined herself beside him as his lover, naked, her tresses parted in a two-panelled robe along the front of her body, playfully identifying on his person the thirty-two signs of excellence in a man: deep in three respects and broad in three as well; glowing a healthy red in seven; fine in five and long in four; elevated in six, and shapely and short in four. He lay with his head in her lap, and she kept up a commentary as she ticked these off to him, both of them attempting to suppress their giggles, “It is said that it is a mark of excellence in men if the navel, voice and breath are deep, and the thighs, brow and face are broad; if feet and hands, the corners of the eyes, palate, tongue, lower lip and nails have a rich red hue; according to the ancients it augurs well if fingers and finger-joints, hair, skin and teeth are fine; in the rulers of the earth the jaw-line, eyes, arms, and the space between the breasts are long; happiness is said to be ensured if chest and shoulders, finger-and-toe nails, nose, chin and throat are raised and prominent; and if back and shanks and the male member are shapely and short—oh dear! Well, thirty-one out of thirty-two isn’t bad. Alright, I agree that it should be thirty-one and a half because it is shapely.”
