Maps for Lost Lovers, page 41
When both her marriages in Pakistan failed and she came back to England, Chanda had been asked by her brothers and father to consider wearing the all-enveloping burqa. The men said they felt awkward and ashamed when they were with their friends on a street corner and she went by. “We see the looks in their eyes—some pity us, some blame us for not having found you a better life,” they said. If she wore a burqa no one would know it was her as she went by. The shop was named after her— Chanda Food & Convenience Store—but the sign above the entrance was painted over after she came back trailing the stink of failed marriages. The old name, it was felt, would needlessly remind people of the girl, their next thought probably being, “Chanda—the twice-divorced girl.” I feel I am being erased, Chanda wrote in her diary angrily.
Chotta was not in his room when the elder brother Barra entered it. Barra knew where he could be—in Kiran’s stealthy arms, in the room next to where her bed-ridden father lies—and he left the house to go fetch him. He went in the opposite direction from Jugnu, and he didn’t yet know that he had seen Jugnu alive for the last time. On his way to Kiran’s house, he had to go past the mosque and he met and exchanged greetings with several men who were gathered outside in the half dark, mentioning examples of the just-deceased cleric’s holiness to each other.
Some of the men who were gathered outside the mosque had remonstrated with Chanda’s brothers in the previous months for allowing their sister to cohabit with a man she wasn’t married to. Many people who saw Barra in the gathering beside the mosque would vouch for his whereabouts to the police later, not knowing if their sighting was of any value. Shahid Ali, who worked the night shift—6 p.m. to 6 a.m.—in a factory (and drew unemployment benefit too), would say that on seeing Chanda’s brother that August Friday, he had remarked to himself that no wonder what the cleric had been promised in his dream hadn’t come true, that the vision of the saintly figure had proved to be false: how could it not when the world was full of such shameless people? “ ‘We are a people so undeserving of miracles,’ I had said to myself with regret.”
Haidar Kashmiri, who had gone to the shop earlier for the spices, saw Barra and thought that he had found a packet of star anise on a shelf somewhere and had brought it over, not having been able to locate it earlier.
People had already begun to doubt that a holy man had appeared in the cleric’s dream.
“But he insisted the figure in the dream was a most-honourable being,” Zubair Rizvi says, “seated in a mosque that was so beautiful that the gaze became glued wherever it landed, with flowerbeds brimming with gul and rehan, with lala and nargis, nasreen and nastreen and yasmeen.”
“He listed it all, down to the smallest detail,” agrees Ijaz Rahmani. “He said the air was full of birdsong, the laughter of andleeb, the uproar of the kumri, the wail of the koyal, the beckoning of kubk and daraj.”
Barra nodded and said, “He could have been mistaken. He was a mere mortal—”
But he was cut off by Naveed Jamil who thought it disrespectful to allow such speculation: “I am not shameless like certain other people present here that I should not object to this kind of talk, and right outside the mosque too. There was nothing mere about that mortal. He told us several times that whilst he was praying alone in there, fairies came bearing presents, left them beside him and then hid. He never accepted any of the presents, saying, ‘Take them away, girls, daughters. A rosary in my hand, a prayer mat under my feet, a mosque-floor under the prayer mat—I don’t need anything else.’ ”
If Barra felt insulted at being so interrupted, he didn’t give any indication; some of the younger men present outside the mosque had gone to school with him and remembered his short temper of those days. “ ‘Do that again and they’ll be tracing you in chalk!’ was what he would say when provoked as a schoolboy,” Rashid Uddin the left-handed would recall later. “But that was no more extreme than anything the rest of us said. Youth provokes you into picking fights with everything in life.”
That hour, no one was sure whether Chanda’s brother was aware of the fact that, at the barber’s shop last week, Naveed Jamil—the man who had cut him off just now, and more or less referred to him as “shameless” to his face—had said that Barra’s wife was not a virgin on the wedding night, that she was split well before the “night of breakage.” Every gathering in this neighbourhood is full of such broken glass—a person has to pick his way carefully across resentments, allegations, slights to honour and virtue. Naveed Jamil had many years ago wanted to marry Chanda but her parents had turned him down: his lowly origins were said by many to be the chief obstacle—his father had been a hookah mender in Cheechokimalyan.
Barra left the mosque’s vicinity and was seen walking along the road with the cherry trees. Kiran’s house was situated in that direction. He had known for some time that the Sikh woman was Chotta’s secret lover, but he hadn’t broached the subject with him. And since he had never had the occasion to talk to Kiran, he began to feel awkward as he neared the house because the nights she shared with his brother were a secret, and she’d be embarrassed to know that he was aware of them; she could also turn aggressive out of fear of exposure and accuse him of trying to tarnish a decent woman’s name. She was a Sikh, after all, and their women were known for a certain earthy spiritedness. Some people in the Muslim community were aware of the clandestine love-affair, and hoped that Chotta would do the right thing and ask Kiran to convert to Islam and marry her. They—and Chotta himself—saw nothing in common between his secret nights with a woman he was not married to and Chanda setting up home with Jugnu. “I am a sinner,” Chotta had said in the past, regarding his fondness for alcohol, “but I am not an apostate. I know I am sinning. That’s the difference.”
As things turned out, Barra didn’t have to knock on Kiran’s door. A dark-blue wave of peacocks ran towards him from behind with their dot-of-oil-on-water’s-surface tail feathers in disarray. He stopped and turned around. The birds were being scattered by Chotta, who was running towards him, out of breath. He arrived, pale as death, and grabbed him by the upper arm.
“Come with me, over by the lake,” he said. “I think he’s dead.”
When Jugnu knocked on Kaukab’s back door—soon after being awoken by the peacocks, a few hours before he died—she was not in the house, though the light was on.
She had got up, unable to sleep, and gone out—to see the man Chanda was married to. She had run into him the previous week and asked him to do the decent thing and divorce Chanda “so she can marry my brother-in-law.” The man was aloof and said he would see what he could do when Chanda returned to England. She asked him where he lived so she could send Shamas to talk to him.
He worked in a factory and left for work at an early hour and Kaukab, lying awake all night, thought in the dark about Charag and the news about his vasectomy.
The previous week, coming home from the town centre with a few things from Marks and Spencer, Kaukab had seen a woman from the neighbourhood walking towards her, and recognizing her as the woman who had once bristled upon seeing her with a Marks and Spencer carrier bag, telling her that as a Muslim she shouldn’t buy anything from that shop owned by Jews, Kaukab had stopped on the bridge above the river to conceal the bag with the St. Michael logo in her coat. When the woman neared, Kaukab realized it wasn’t the same woman, but she saw that the man standing on the bridge not far away from her was Chanda’s third husband. Naturally, she changed colour when she saw him. She approached him and introduced herself. “You have forced her into that sinful situation,” she told him. She reminded him of how much Allah hated the unjust, and she demanded to know his address. He seemed taken aback by the force of her will and told her where he lived when she asked him.
He had been living in England illegally already for three years when he married Chanda. He had arrived in Britain on a three-month visa as part of a television crew from Lahore, ostensibly to film a drama serial for a television production company, but had then “disappeared.” In reality there was no serial: the actors, the crew, the photographers were all young men and women who had paid thousands of rupees to the people who ran this and other similar immigration scams. He washed dishes in a restaurant but Chanda’s parents had agreed to the match because they were desperate to see their twice-divorced daughter married again and settled. “Life weighs as much as a mountain,” Chanda’s mother had said, “so how will she be able to bear the burden of it on her own?” The father had agreed: “Even a tree dries up if it’s on its own.” They knew they had to trust Allah and not despair because to be the parent of a girl had been a trial since time immemorial. Chanda’s mother would quote the Pakistani poet Hasan Abdi:
The walls carry the scent of humans—
Had others been imprisoned in this dungeon before me?
They both kissed the marriage certificate. They envisioned a happy future at last for their girl but it was like trying to project a film onto a spider’s web, because it was obvious from the start that the man had married her simply to gain British citizenship. Chanda’s brothers and parents were courteous—even respectful—towards him, and he too acknowledged and returned their kindness during the year or so it took for his nationality to be finalized. But after that he changed, saying they should buy him a car, that the shop should be signed over to him, or he would divorce Chanda. Chotta hit him one day over an insult and he disappeared soon afterwards, having emptied the cash register of everything it contained.
Chanda’s brothers had accepted the contempt he had repeatedly shown them during the previous weeks. They had been brought up to believe that a man must respect his brother-in-law because he has taken the burden of your sister off your hands, that he is to be feared lest he take offence at anything you’ve said and abuse or divorce your sister. Language reflected this matter: anyone who made himself too comfortable at another’s expense was told to mind his ways because the world wasn’t “the house of his family-in-law.” And there was deeper humiliation too: the word sala—“brother-in-law”—was a term of abuse all over the Subcontinent: to call someone sala was to say, “I fuck your sister and you can’t do anything about it!,” “You can’t stop me from trying my manhood on one of your women!” What could be more humiliating to men who had been brought up to defend their women’s honour above all else? A man’s brother-in-law was a swear-word made flesh, and, frustratingly, he had to accept it.
Just before dawn on the day of Jugnu and Chanda’s death, Kaukab arrived at the man’s house. “You have played your part in this sin for long enough,” she told him when he came to the door in a vest, holding a shaving brush. He had to be at work by five.
“I want you to present yourself to your wife’s parents as soon as possible and formally divorce their daughter.” She gave him the shop’s telephone number, but he said he already had it written down somewhere, although he did accept the phone number of Chanda and Jugnu’s house when Kaukab said he could call her directly if he wished. He went to get a pen and she stood there. On the opposite side of the street there was a giant advertising billboard depicting a blonde woman in a lace brassiere, and she remarked to herself that living in England was like living in one big brothel. The billboard of the woman with the lace brassiere had been daubed by some lover of Allah with the words “Fear Your Creator” in another location closer to the mosque. When he came back, she told him: “A word of two syllables, spoken three times—Talaaq, Talaaq, Talaaq— and you would have made God happy. He is compassionate and forgiving.” She left only when he promised that he would stop by at the shop after work.
He didn’t.
Kaukab thought she was doing the right thing by approaching him to demand he release Chanda. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said, “He who is a go-between in a fair action has equal merit with the performer and shall meet with reward in Paradise.” She was out there when Jugnu knocked.
Chanda’s brothers, when they confessed to the murders during the visit to Pakistan, had said: “It was a matter of honour.” Everyone present had agreed. Such killings were not uncommon in Pakistan, but the killers usually killed openly and were proud of their deed. Some even presented themselves to the police afterwards and said they had done what needed to be done and were now ready for whatever punishment the law of the land thought they deserved. The law of Pakistan was almost always lenient with them and they were out of jail much sooner than those who had committed other kinds of murder. And in their streets and neighbourhoods, their act gave them a certain nobility in the eyes of those around them. Chanda’s brothers, on the other hand, had insisted they hadn’t killed her and her lover. They knew the law of this country would not view their crime indulgently. They boasted of having killed her and Jugnu— but only in Pakistan, where the laws and the religion and the customs reinforced their sense of having acted properly, legitimately, correctly. The people who learned of their crime patted their backs and said they had fulfilled their obligation, that such sons were born only to men among men and women among women. They said that he who committed the great dirty sin of sex outside marriage was nothing less than evil; it would not have surprised anyone if bats flew out of the gashes when such a person was stabbed and slain. The friends in Pakistan told them that they had acted wisely by not telling the truth to the English police:
“They would never understand your reasons. The West is full of hypocrites, who kill our people with impunity and say it’s all a matter of principle and justice, but when we do the same thing they say our definition of ‘principle’ and ‘justice’ is flawed.”
Here in England, the judge, batting down all talk of “code of honour and shame” would call them “cowards” and “wicked” on the day of the trial. The Afternoon would say, They were the kind of people who don’t realizethat not everything in life is to do with them. In short, they were not grown-ups. They thought the world revolved around them. A distinguished Pakistani commentator on the Asian radio too would be forthright: “Some immigrants think that just because they belong to a minority they are nice people, that they should be forgiven everything just because they are oppressed.” As for the murderers themselves, after the verdict had been announced they would begin to shout in the court the litanies, including words like “racism” and “prejudice.” The judge’s remarks would be deemed to have “insulted our culture and our religion.” They’d said England was a country of “prostitutes and homosexuals.” Being led away, the younger, Chotta, would shout: “It’s a kangaroo court!”
“Come with me, over by the lake,” said the younger brother, pale as death, scattering peacocks as he came running, on the last day of Jugnu and Chanda’s life. “I think he’s dead.”
The two brothers hadn’t seen each other since late the previous day in the town centre when Chotta had by chance run into Barra who was returning from a visit to his wife at the abortion clinic. She had had the pregnancy terminated as soon as the tests revealed that the embryo was female. The couple already had five daughters and they did not want a sixth one. The woman often worried how they would ever find suitable matches for the five girls when they grew up because no one would want to marry someone whose aunt had set up home with someone out of wedlock.
When they met in the town centre, Chotta had been alarmed by the tired and distressed look Barra wore. When he commented on it, Barra replied: “I decided to walk home instead of getting on the bus, to clear my head a little.” But the truth soon came out as the brothers walked along the street: “I am ruined. The doctors now say they made a mistake: it was a boy she was carrying, not a girl.”
The news devastated Chotta too. And Barra went on speaking quietly to himself with tears brimming in his eyes: “They killed my son, they killed my son.” There had been a mix-up at the laboratory, and now it was too late. “The security guards were summoned when I began to shout. It was only they who stopped me from punching the doctor.”
Chotta offered to drive the elder brother home from the town centre but was turned down because the family van that week was full of the stink of meat. “I’d feel nauseous,” Barra said. “In that case,” said Chotta, “get into a taxi.” He accompanied him to the taxi office and that was where they were told that their sister and her lover were back in England. Although they were given the information casually and in passing, they had both wondered whether there was a malicious intent: this was a taxi firm run by Bangladeshis, and they were a treacherous and wicked people, having broken away from Pakistan to found their own country, the treachery and betrayal of their race going back even further to the time in the eighteenth century when, just before the battle of Plassey, Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of Saraj-ud-daullah, had signed a secret pact with the Englishman Robert Clive, and ensured him a victory over the good Siraj, a victory that marked the beginning of the British Raj in India and the beginning of the end of the Muslim rule. Yes, every time there was news of a cyclone devastating Bangladesh, killing hundreds—sometimes thousands—of people in one fell swoop, the brothers at the shop would hear several of their Pakistani customers mutter under their breath that it was Allah visiting his vengeance on the damned Bangladeshis for first helping to put an end to Muslim rule in India, and then, in 1971, breaking away from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
At the taxi office, on being given the news about Chanda, the brothers had protested that a male stranger should not have uttered their sister’s name with such familiarity: “No one can talk to a man about his women-folk.” It was a fleeting glimpse of the nightmare: the brothers knew the kind of crude talk that went on among the gathering of young men in such places—they too had been participants in many—and they had suspected for a while that their sister’s character and virtue—because of what she had done—was probably discussed in demeaning and suggestive terms behind their backs.
