Maps for Lost Lovers, page 37
The grandson flings his cap onto the linoleum the moment she lets the three of them in. She apologizes for the kitchen smelling of food and asks them all to take their coats into the next room. Before closing the outside door she runs her gaze in a sweep across the street to see if Mah-Jabin and Ujala are returning. She hugs the little boy and kisses his head, face and both hands.
“What’s that?” Charag points to the crumpled letter that Kaukab only now realizes she still has in her hand.
She quickly puts it into her cardigan pocket. “A letter from your grandfather in Pakistan. He says he is disappointed that your son—his great-grandson—didn’t begin Koranic lessons at the age of four years, four months and four days, as is prescribed for every Muslim child.”
Stella is looking into the room next door. “Have Mah-Jabin and Ujala not arrived yet?” The dining table in there is paved with plates. The tablecloth is obviously from an Asian fabric shop, the beautiful material— patterned with movements of flower-heavy creepers—that the Asian women make their clothing out of, the colours often bright, the shapes exquisite, and which, Charag once said, had made his adolescent self look at Matisse more carefully.
“They have gone for a walk,” Kaukab says as she strikes a match to relight the hobs. She tilts the matchstick downward so that the wood beyond the head tempts the fire into remaining alive. “Please, go into the next room and stay there. I don’t want the smell getting into your clothes.” She was hoping to take Mah-Jabin aside as soon she came back to the house—to let her know that she has found the letter, to ask her to explain the truth about her marriage in Pakistan—but it’s unlikely that she would have a chance to do that over the next few hours. And she has yet to explain to Ujala that it wasn’t her intention to harm him with the sacred salt. Those damned scientists, how they love to analyse everything! As she takes the lids off the pans one by one, she is reminded once again— having forgotten it when she read that letter upstairs—that she has to scale down the evening meal. Suddenly confused, she wishes Mah-Jabin were here to be consulted, and she calls out to Charag in the next room so that he can go out and look for his brother and sister. But he doesn’t hear her.
Switching on the television in the next room, Charag is startled by the loud burst of noise that comes out: the volume is turned too high. He decides not to ask Kaukab whether his father’s hearing is deteriorating: he had asked once but Kaukab had denied it and seemed to consider the inquiry impertinent. A son may not notice his father’s inadequacies. Tonight he will contrive to show Shamas how to access the subtitles on the remote control: white, green, yellow, red—each person speaking a differently coloured sentence.
A black-and-white Tarzan movie is found for the little boy and Stella sits with him in front of it with the assurance that he’ll like it. “What does he turn into?” he asks after a while and he loses interest immediately when he is told that the character doesn’t turn into anything, isn’t transformed into a monster or otherworldly creature, that he remains a human being. But then he looks up, points to Tarzan and says, “He speaks like Grandma Kaukab!”
The three of them go back into the kitchen just as Kaukab is opening the door to Mah-Jabin.
“Ujala is still at the lake,” she announces, and, holding Kaukab’s eye, makes the smallest possible movement of the head to convey reassurance, “He’ll be back in a moment, Mother. We walked all the way to the Safeena.”
With her arms around her little nephew, Mah-Jabin buries her lips into the soft skin of his neck. How old would her child have been now had she not lost it?
Stella tells her she has the beginning of a cold: “There was a spectacular storm scene in the play I went to not long ago. Wind machine, real water for rain.”
Mah-Jabin smiles and lowers the boy onto the floor and turns brightly to Kaukab. “Let’s get the food ready. Fasten your tastebuds, Charag and Stella. No doubt, you two haven’t been asked to help with the preparations because Mother is too polite . . .” Stella is assigned the task to locate the cellophane bag of crushed summer mint from the ice-compartment and add them to a bowl of yoghurt. The beaten pulp is frozen solid in the cellophane like a creaking chunk of tundra with prehistoric algae in it, and there is no adult way of breaking it apart: it has to be done clumsily the way a child would do it.
Leaning into Mah-Jabin at the first opportunity, Kaukab tries to tell her that she knows the truth about her marriage but all she can say is, “Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t know what was going on?”
Mah-Jabin knits her brows and puckers her lips into a silent Shhh, and whispers back, “It’s OK. We’ll talk later. I think he knows you thought it was just ordinary salt.”
“I am not talking about Ujala,” Kaukab says, and wonders if she would know how to broach the subject of her marriage with Mah-Jabin later. “But, for the record I didn’t know anything about that too.” Her eyes are red.
From her coat pocket, Mah-Jabin takes out a pack of tamarind pulp: “I thought we could add it to the chutney, Mother. I stopped by at a shop on my way back.”
Kaukab is immediately concerned. “You went into a shop?” She knows the women of the neighbourhood know the girl is divorced, and is sure they would have made comments about her to each other—comments about her character, about her Western dress and cut-off hair.
“Yes. Chanda’s parents’ shop is closed. I went to the one in the next street.” She unwraps the tamarind. “A woman came in while I was there, a wealthy-looking, well-dressed woman. She must’ve heard that somewhere around here two brothers had killed their sister, and, not knowing that I was the niece of the dead man, she began berating the two murderers. She said, ‘People like that are ruining the name of Pakistan abroad.’ She was visiting from Pakistan, staying with her relatives in the suburbs who had brought her to our neighbourhood for amusement—if their suppressed smiles were anything to go by whenever a woman entered the shop with bright village-like embroidery on her kameez—to show her how the poor Pakistanis lived here in England, the factory workers, the bus drivers, the waiters. She couldn’t hide her contempt for us. Apparently she had been called a ‘darkie bitch’ by a white man in the town centre during her first week here and was resentful. She said, ‘The man who called me that name was filthy and stinking. And he would not have called me that name if it had not been for the people in this area, who have so demeaned Pakistan’s image in foreign countries. Imagine! He thought he could insult me, I who live in a house in Islamabad the likes of which he’d never see in his life, I who speak better English than him, educated as I was at Cam-bridge, my sons studying at Harvard right now. And it’s all the fault of you lot, you sister-murdering, nose-blowing, mosque-going, cousin-marrying, veil-wearing inbred imbeciles.’ ”
Kaukab shakes her head in disappointment. “We are driven out of our countries because of people like her, the rich and the powerful. We leave because we never have any food or dignity because of their selfish behaviour. And now they resent our being here too. Where are we supposed to go? The poor and the unprivileged, in their desire to keep living, are being disrespectful towards the rich and the privileged: is that it?”
“She was very elegant, not at all like people who have made their fortunes quite recently and are intent on showing it off.”
Kaukab bangs the wooden ladle on the rim of the pan—to free it of the sauce clinging to it, but with a little more force than necessary so that it emphasizes her disapproval: “What’s all this talk about old money and new money? If it’s new money it’s tainted with the blood and sweat of the poor people who are being used and abused in the present, and if it’s old money it’s tainted with the blood and sweat of the poor people who were used and abused in the past. The legs of the rich people’s thrones have always rested on the heads of poor people.” She turns back to her work: “I haven’t lived with your father for four decades and not learned a few truths.”
She wishes she could’ve said all this in English so that Stella would know she was intelligent, a thinking person. Yes, she had grown to like Stella eventually. She remembers when Charag had come home from university years ago to tell her that he was in love with a white girl who was expecting their child. After the initial shock of the revelation had worn off, Kaukab had walked to the train station to get on the train that would take her to Charag and his white girlfriend and their unborn child. How her selfishness had blinded her to the immense love her son must feel for the girl! Kaukab had grown up being told that what the two of them had done before marriage was wrong, wanton and depraved, but she had made sure her own children grew up with the same message: and if what had occurred was hard for her to accept, how hard it must have been for her son, how great the love that made him act against her teachings. Even in Pakistan everyone loved someone before marriage, but from a distance: a surreptitious glance answered by an eloquent smile. The West just gave a person the permission and opportunity to act on those feelings—it wasn’t her son’s fault. On the way to the train station, she longed to nestle her future daughter-in-law in her arms, call her by her name, Stella, but at the ticket-office window she lost heart on being told that she would have to change trains, fearing she would be lost without her lack of English as she searched for the correct platform, too humiliated by her pronounced accent and broken words to ask someone to guide her to the connecting trains. And where and how do you get a taxi in a strange city? She was a beggar who did not want to stretch out her hand because that hand was dirty. And so with eyes veined with carmine, she waited for Shamas to come home: as soon as he returned she asked him to take her to her son.
“This curry is done. Now I must see if there’s enough dough for the chappatis. Who wants chappatis instead of rice?”
Charag has been peeling and cutting fruit into a salad bowl that is now filled up with the sweet chunks—the colourful heap of peels beside it looks as though the flags of a dozen nations have been shredded—and he now asks from where he is standing at the dresser, “Where are the lemons? And why is there such a feast being laid out for tonight?”
“It is not a feast,” Mah-Jabin says quickly. “As Mother explained to me earlier, and as I explained to Ujala not long ago when he asked me the same question beside the lake, Mother just decided to cook the next few days’ food in one go. She happened to be in the mood.”
Kaukab looks at Mah-Jabin with gratitude. “I’ll freeze them in silver-foil containers.”
Stella nods. “It’s a good idea.” She points to the eight-year-old: “He asked me recently, ‘Why is Grandma Kaukab always cooking?’ ”
Kaukab is moved that the boy had noticed her, had paid enough attention to her to have identified a trait of sorts. She wants to kiss and nuzzle him but stops herself in case the whites have come up with a theory about grandmothers and grandsons too.
“It would be a feast if I were making something special: these foods are everyday.” She has found another reason to bolster the lie Mah-Jabin has told to save her. She wants to make a humorous comment at this point: “But, yes, being a housewife is difficult. I sometimes say to myself that if I had studied medicine I would have had to take the exam just once and be respectfully called a doctor for the rest of my life, but in domestic life you have to take and pass exams every day, and even then appreciation isn’t guaranteed.” She is in the process of mentally translating all this into English to be able to tell it to Stella, when Ujala returns.
Head drooping like an elongated sunflower, he seems as gaunt and withdrawn to Kaukab as before when she dares to take a quick peek at him, but he joins in with the tasks and even carries and lifts up the eight-year-old to the cooker to let him look into the pot in which the bitter gourds are sizzling. “What are they?” he asks the child.
“Starfishes!” the boy exclaims on seeing the plump pointed gourds that have browned on cooking and now do look like dismembered starfishes.
“That’s right. We are having starfish curry,” Ujala says.
Over the next hour—while December’s darkness falls outside—the kitchen is animated as voices rise and hang in the air for short periods—a mouthful of food taken directly from the pot resulting in a bout of praise for Kaukab; the grandson spitting out a mouthful of half-chewed M&Ms like coloured gravel; Charag smiling and telling Mah-Jabin to finish the apple she has left to brown on the table (“Apples don’t grow on weeds, you know—as Mother always told us”); the threat of a tantrum from the child, followed by a counter threat of punishment from one of his parents, a fawning taking of the sides by the grandmother, the young uncle, the aunt—but these are short lived and the air becomes tense and subdued quickly: yesterday—with its verdict—is like a colossal block of ice that’s still too near, breathing chilly air on everyone’s skin. The house, as it floated through time, has arrived at an iceberg, and no one is sure whether it will ever move away from it, leaving it behind. Now and then, to relieve the silences, Kaukab says, “Allah is great!”
When she goes upstairs to the bathroom immediately after Charag has been there to wash his face, she notices that the linoleum is warm where he had been standing just now, and she has to steady her heart with joyful fingers—her cold cold house is full of her children again. There’s warmth in unexpected places.
Shamas comes home just as Kaukab is telling Stella about a woman in the neighbourhood both of whose identical-twin daughters became pregnant at the same time: one of them has had the baby in the seventh month, and now the news has to be kept from the other in case she too fails to carry the pregnancy to full term; luckily the still-pregnant girl lives in America so it’s easier to hide the truth. Every time Kaukab has spoken to Stella, she has surreptitiously breathed into the hollow of a hand and sniffed it to see that her breath isn’t stale, and she has missed the sarsaparilla root that is thrown into the brass or earthenware containers which hold a household’s drinking water in Sohni Dharti, to sweeten the water so that its scent will freshen the mouth when the water is drunk.
Shamas realizes that the grandson is about the same age as Suraya’s son. He tries to drive the thought away.
He knows he’s going to end up wandering around this town, muttering her name.
He looks at Kaukab when she is otherwise occupied, to see what kind of a day she has had. The last few days—if not the last few months—have been devastating for her, he knows. Each day after the trial he came home and told her the details of what happened at the court, and she had been inconsolable. Last night he wondered whether he should add to that story of Chanda and Jugnu’s last few hours on earth what Kiran had told him on the bus, weave that dark thread into the already-dark tale. But he feared how Kaukab would react—she would see Kiran’s secret affair with Chanda’s brother as proof that she was a woman of loose morals, that her family had been right in the 1950s when they refused to let her marry her brother; perhaps she would accuse Kiran of lying about her brother’s secret visit to Dasht-e-Tanhaii—? But, he must admit, he had also envisaged the opposite reaction: that she would insist Shamas not reveal to anyone the details of Kiran’s love affair with Chanda’s brother or the night she spent with her own brother: “People would gossip and point fingers at the poor woman. You have no idea how easy it is to ruin a woman’s life.” Now, as he steals glances at her, he wonders which of the two Kaukabs is the real one.
She seems contented, her children around her.
The pots sing on the fire. Dipped in beaten egg, the shami kebabs drip like a cow’s mouth from a drinking pail and they are noisy when lowered into the oil which crackles like cellophane. Everyone except Kaukab and Mah-Jabin sits down and eats from the yellow plates arranged on the table in the next room. In the kitchen, Mah-Jabin asks Kaukab to join the others too—seeing as she has been on her feet all day and also has the pain in her abdomen to consider—but Kaukab bats down the suggestion, and then Mah-Jabin tells her that she will come to Dasht-e-Tanhaii to be with her when she has to go to the hospital for the operation in January, that she has arranged leave at her work. Kaukab tells her to lower her voice— “There are men within earshot, and this is women’s business.”
The mother and daughter, with a Lakshmi-like abundance of arms and hands, have filled all the plates and, while the kebabs are taken steaming to the table in batches by Mah-Jabin, every other minute a new chappati is ready from Kaukab’s hands. Growing as it does from two whorls at the crown of her head instead of the usual one, Stella’s hair is often unruly, and with a touch of his finger Charag removes the irritation of an escaped strand from across her cheek, an action he—at one time—would perform with his tongue, kissing her face afterwards.
Kaukab asks Mah-Jabin to go join the others when the initial servings are over and the meal enters a more relaxed phase, the food unfolding warmth in the eaters’ bodies.
Shamas unspools the thread from around the grandson’s “starfish leg.”
The spicy cauliflower goes into Stella’s mouth and comes out through her eyes as water.
Tiny beetroot stars—that Kaukab had punched out of the beetroot slices with a cutter—are lined up in a growing necklace where they are being discarded towards the edge of Ujala’s salad.
There are white specks associated with calcium-deficiency on Stella’s fingernails, and Kaukab is privately taken aback when she notices them for the first time as she takes a chappati to the table: she is ashamed whenever these marks appear on her own nails, yet another proof for the white people that the Pakistanis are unhealthy people, disease-riddled, filthy bearers of epidemics like the smallpox they brought with them to England in the 1960s. Ever since Charag and Stella arrived she has been worried that she has forgotten to brush her teeth in time for their arrival, to get rid of any bad odour before the white girl came.
Stella tells them all about the fair she had taken the child to not long ago. Eating from cellophane bags stuffed like pillows with candyfloss, they went into the tent where a Sleeping Beauty lay on a satin-draped bier. The body was a wax statue and, as proof that the princess was dead to the world, the impresario pierced it through the gown with a long pearl-headed hat pin. To approach the sleeping body was to become a child that had awakened from a nightmare and gone into the parents’ room for comfort, or, Stella thought, a thief that had broken into a house with its occupant asleep unawares.
