Maps for Lost Lovers, page 7
Deepak and Aarti circled the remains of the dak bungalow, Deepak attempting hard to contain his disappointment. The women with tails had been so real during the journey that he had expected footprints around himself as he walked but now the apparitions had vanished.
Aarti saw that he was close to tears, and since she could not propose raiding the orange grove—men could be heard digging water-ditches just over the wall—she tried to distract him by constructing the dak bungalow from the clues scattered around the site. Up there had been a balcony splashed by a hibiscus vine, and down here there was a tiled veranda with a frangipani tree at its edge, the leaves the shape of a ram’s ears. Bride-red, indigo, emerald—the place glittered with fragments of stained glass. Violence unleashing violence, the fire had liberated the hundred deadly edges each pane had contained harmlessly within it when whole. In the heat breathed out by the burnt debris, the clarified butter smeared on Deepak’s skin gave off a pungent smell. He had lubricated himself before setting off on the adventure to maximize his chances of escape in case of discovery: before entering a house or a train, thieves and robbers greased themselves similarly to become as difficult to hold as fish, as melon seeds.
Smallpox had pockmarked Deepak’s skin during infancy and as he stood in the kitchen applying the clarified butter to himself, Aarti had joked that there wouldn’t be any left for her. She had only just begun to grease her arm when they were discovered by their uncle. The beating woke the two women from their nap but their appeals for moderation were ignored. Instead he imprisoned the two sisters in the back room by trapping their long plaits in a trunk lid, locking it, and pocketing the key, a smile of vengeful delight on his face on seeing both these women in torment as they sat tethered on the floor, one of them dark, the other pale— the first he was married to, the other he had wanted to marry but had been deemed unworthy of because only a wealthy man was good enough for such a pale-rinded beauty, but now that the rich man had died he was burdened with having to clothe, feed and shelter her and her children— that bitch daughter whom he intended to hand over to the first toothless man to ask for her hand in marriage, the poorer the better, no matter that she was as pale as her mother who dreamed of educating her bastard son when it was clear to everyone that the only education that street-loving loafer was ever likely to acquire was the skills of a pickpocket.
He dragged the children across the courtyard and shut them out of the house while the voices of the two women continued to plead for clemency from back there because it was dangerous for the children to be out on the streets today.
Their fear was not misplaced. There were disturbances across the province as the news of the Amritsar killing spread farther and farther. All the urban centres in the Gujranwala district were on fire—Ramnagar, Sangla, Wazirabad, Akalgarh, Hafizabad, Sheikhupura, Chuharkana, and the rebellion had also spread north along the railway line into Gujarat and west into Lyallpur.
Requests for help from Gujranwala had left the governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, in a predicament: he could not send large numbers of troops without severely depleting the garrisons in Amritsar and Lahore where the army was already overstretched. He turned to the Royal Air Force who made available three First World War BE2c biplanes, each armed with a Lewis machinegun and carrying ten twenty-pound bombs.
They were under the command of Captain D. H. M. Carberry who had flown the reconnaissance mission over Amritsar for General Dyer on Sunday, pinpointing Jallianwallah Garden as the location where a public meeting of natives was taking place. This afternoon, Tuesday, his instructions were that he was not to bomb Gujranwala “unless necessary,” but that any crowds in the open were to be bombed, and that any gatherings near the local villages were to be dispersed if they were heading towards town.
Aarti and Deepak—and the men working in the orange grove on the other side of the wall—heard the drone of the biplane engine and the tension singing in the strut-wires before they saw the machine itself, gliding steadily at an altitude of three-hundred feet, the wind of oxygen in its propeller igniting a few hidden embers in the sooty rubble around the children.
It was a vie jaaj, a ship-of-the-air, Deepak understood immediately.
He had heard about these flying vessels from his Muslim and Sikh friends whose fathers had gone to fight the War in France for the King.
It grew in size as it approached them and began to diminish once it had gone over them. The four flat projections—two on either side of the body—were the ship-of-the-air’s horizontal sails, the crisscross of wires the sails’ rigging. He wished it would drop anchor so he could examine it carefully but it had gone as quickly as it had come.
A species prone to turbulence at the merest provocation, the crows were filling the air with their noisy uproar.
Drops of sweat slid down Aarti’s arm and moved across the one stolen stripe of clarified butter, above the wrist, in the same curvilinear lines they described on the untreated areas but faster this time, like a cobra leaving coarse ground to swim across a river.
The shadow of the returning biplane poured itself down the dak bungalow’s boundary wall and advanced like a sheet of unstoppable black water undulating along the ground’s gentle rise and fall.
It had lost height and made Aarti feel she had grown taller in its absence.
Perhaps, she thought, the metal bird was about to flex two gracefully-aligned legs like a stork and alight on the dhrake tree which was now suddenly on fire.
A red lily grew out of her arm.
The sharp images blurred like a carousel gaining speed and suddenly she was so tired she had to sit down against the wall she found herself against and close her eyes.
Uprooted, lifted high onto the contours of expanding air, Deepak saw the ground rushing under him and smelled oranges being cut open before he forgot everything, the last sensation being the flesh-eating heat of his hair on fire against his scalp.
The bomb, like a foot stamped into a rain puddle, had emptied his mind of all its contents.
Shamas looks out at the snow lying on the street outside, hearing Kaukab at work in the kitchen.
In most minds, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the governor of Punjab at the time, carried the ultimate responsibility for the Jallianwallah Garden Massacre of 1919. He was shot dead in London in March 1940 by Udam Singh, who had been wounded in the Massacre as a child; he was hanged in Pentonville for the murder.
But one of the stories that began with the RAF’s bombing of Gujranwala two days after the Jallianwallah Massacre would take considerably more than twenty-one years to find an ending of sorts, an ending equally brutal.
The child Deepak, having drifted through the provinces for a year, fetched up at the shrine to a Muslim saint where in the courtyards in the evenings the drum-skins would be beaten with such devotion that friction often rose to dangerous levels and set the hands on fire. He was given the name Chakor, because he seemed fascinated by the moon, and chakor was the moonbird, the bird that was said to subsist on moonbeams, flying ever higher on moonlit nights until exhausted, dropping onto roofs and courtyards of houses at dawn, close to death. A chakor is to the moon what the moth is to the flame.
“You are appropriately named,” his future wife would say, when he met her at the shrine in 1922. “My name is Mahtaab. The moon.”
Shamas moves to the pink room and opens the album containing the photographs of his father and mother. They were great lovers, even in old age, Chakor smiling good-humouredly and saying to Shamas and his elder brother, “Come on, bring your wives here and make them stand next to my woman: let’s see if she isn’t the most beautiful of the three despite being the eldest.”
Mahtaab’s eyes shine blindingly in the grainy pictures—a light reaching the present from the distant years, the way light from long-dead stars continues to arrive on earth.
He puts the picture album away, sliding it next to one of the butterfly books that Jugnu had given to his nephews and niece, the children quoting things from them to each other during the day.
Having gently stroked the spine of the butterfly book for a few seconds, he returns to his seat and takes up the newspaper. He has thought about his parents all morning, due to some dream he must have had last night, and in about an hour it’ll be time for him to go to the Urdu bookshop situated at the edge of the lake, near the xylophone jetty; he spends most of his free weekend hours there.
Kaukab comes in from the kitchen carrying a tray and takes the chair opposite. Flat, round, the size of pebbles on a doll’s beach, a small cupful of black masar seeds lies in an uncertain mound in the centre of the tray: enough for two. They are to be cleaned and then soaked for a few hours prior to cooking. These days—less out of loyalty to her own family than the fact that the grief of Chanda’s mother shames and unsettles her— Kaukab has taken to visiting the grocery shop twenty-minutes away on Laila Khalid Road. She feels shame because her brother-in-law Jugnu is partly, no, not partly, entirely, responsible for the woman’s distress.
Chanda, the girl whose eyes changed with the seasons, was sent to Pakistan at sixteen to marry a first cousin to whom she had been promised when a baby, but the marriage had lasted only a year and her mother had been devastated by the news of the divorce. But another cousin in Pakistan took pity and agreed to marry her even though she was no longer a virgin. But he too divorced her a few months later and the girl came back to live in England, helping the family at the grocery shop all day. Then they found an illegal immigrant for her to marry: he wanted a British nationality and wasn’t concerned that she had been married twice already. But he disappeared as soon as he got legal status in England. Chanda remained married to him because there had been no divorce.
And then one day last year she went to deliver the star anise that Jugnu—the man with the luminous hands—had asked for over the telephone, an ingredient for his butterflies’ food. She was twenty-five, he forty-eight. It was March and the sparrows were about to begin shedding the extra five-hundred feathers they had grown at the start of winter to keep warm, to return to their summer plumage of three-thousand feathers each. The apples had not yet put out their shell-white flowers. The blossom would be out in May—when she would move in with Jugnu— and both Chanda and Jugnu would be dead by the time those very flowers became fruit in the autumn, the apples that would continue to lie in a circle of bright red dots under each tree until the snows of this year’s January.
Jugnu had said he would marry Chanda but since she had not been divorced by her previous husband, Islam forbade another marriage for several years—the number differing from sect to sect, four, five, six. All the clerics she and Jugnu consulted stated firmly that the missing husband had to be found, or they had to wait for that prolonged period for the marriage to annul itself. If the husband did not return after those years, she could consider herself divorced, and marry whomever she wished.
All these consultations were, of course, to gain favour with Chanda’s family and with Kaukab. If only she could obtain a Muslim divorce and marry Jugnu Islamically—they could cohabit then, regardless of the fact that she was still legally married to someone under British law.
Gently, Kaukab shakes the metal tray containing the heap of masar seeds until she has lined the surface evenly in a layer the thickness of one grain. Clearing an arc on this doll’s beach with the back of her fingers, she begins to look for insect damage, pieces of real stone, and millimetre fragments of chaff. She surveys the room, eyes going on brief sorties along the various surfaces and returning to the tray where something unusual is being kept in sight. She gives up at last and stretches out her hand: “One second, please.”
Shamas lowers the newspaper and looks over its top edge that is serrated like a carnation petal, and at the flicker of her fingers he takes off his spectacles and passes them on to her.
During the weekends they like to settle in this room whenever they can, leaving it and returning to it, each going about his or her own habits at the periphery of the other’s consciousness. The disorder of the day’s living is tidied away at night and the pink room—filled with books in five languages—is made immaculate once again as though all the slack strings of a musical instrument have been pulled tight.
“Look what I found,” she removes the spectacles, her inspection complete. “A ravann seed. Here.” In the palm of her hand is a shiny blue bead, the outer skin flaking away to reveal the ivory within. “The packet said Product of Italy. That probably means they grow ravann in Italy. Is Italy somewhere quite close to Pakistan?”
As she passes it to him, he holds her hand without looking at the grain. He smiles at her, trying to catch her eye, and strokes her wrist with the other hand, sending the fingers up under the sleeve.
She is shocked by the overture, and knows she mustn’t look at him from this point onwards—but he holds her hand suggestively and tries to bring it closer to him, while she tries to pull it back decisively. There was a time when in the mornings she sometimes stood over him and twisted her wet hair into a yard-long rope, letting beads of water fall onto his face, waking him with her body scented with the dawn bath, eyes glittering with mischievousness. His “beautiful wife,” he called her, “the heroine of the story of his life.”
But now? No, no. It’s too late in life to be rutting like animals. Kaukab had heard that to go to Shamas’s house in Sohni Dharti was to often find his parents in bed together, lying next to each other contentedly or talking, joking, the door open, in full view of the children playing out in the courtyard. Well, she was born and bred in a mosque, and that wasn’t the norm in her household.
Shamas releases her with a soft groan, barely audible, and then they sit in silence, too ashamed, embarrassed, and distressed, the both of them.
The blue grain is discarded into the glass that contains the other debris from the masar. “Your father-ji, may he forever rest in peace, used to love ravann, with a corn-flour chappati thick as cardboard.” She is trying to convince herself that his holding her hand just now wasn’t a request for intimacy: she’s relieved that she had managed to avoid the look in his eyes. The open rattle of seeds in her lap is given a final little shake and deciding glance before the tray is placed on the carpet. She adds a little tea to the dregs in Shamas’s cup, swirls and empties it out into the glass of masar debris, and refills the now-clean cup. No it wasn’t a sexual touch. There is a burst of sandalwood from the tray where the warm teapot has been resting. “Have the police found out who left that . . . that . . . thing outside the mosque last month?” She stirs milk into the cup and subdues the whirlpool with a little counter-circle of the spoon.
He answers only after a while. “It’s not difficult to guess who it was but there is no proof.” An English girl had converted to Islam in December and had been given shelter in the mosque because her family was hostile towards her decision to change her faith.
Kaukab sips her tea in silence. Unable to understand the lovers’ mysterious vanishing, she has wept over Jugnu’s absence (perhaps the reaction with which his love for the girl was met has made him take her somewhere and start a new life?) and she prays for their safety after each of the day’s five prayers (perhaps something dreadful has happened to them?) but she refuses to believe that Chanda’s brothers had anything to do with it.
While Chanda and Jugnu were away in Pakistan last year, Kaukab had asked Charag to visit Dasht-e-Tanhaii. He and the white girl were no longer together and Kaukab had had several meetings with the matchmaker with the thought of finding a girl of Pakistani origin for him. Thirty-two, he was still young—a mere boy—and it wasn’t unheard of for Muslim men to marry white girls and then divorce them quickly upon learning how difficult and shameless they were, and then having an arranged marriage to a decorous and compliant Muslim girl, preferably a first cousin brought over from back home. Her Allah told her to be optimistic: let the rope of breath snap, but never the thread of hope. Charag had no suitable first cousins in Pakistan, but Kaukab had made a list of four girls from amongst the three dozen the matchmaker had told her about. She planned and dreamed for weeks and she had the photographs of the four beautiful girls in her hand as she telephoned Charag to ask him to come home the following weekend because she missed him. (“It’s not a lie,” she told herself, “I do miss him!”) And it must be said that a part of Kaukab was somewhat relieved when Jugnu and Chanda had decided to go to Pakistan for the summer: she didn’t want any interference from the uncle when she suggested a second marriage to Charag.
“A vasectomy! You’ve had a vasectomy!”
It was against Allah and everything the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said. He had mutilated himself. Unmanned.
“My Allah! When did you have it done?”
“A while back. I don’t want another child. Ever. I can’t even look after the one I already have. I resent him sometimes when I want to paint but must look after him instead.”
“That’s what a wife is for! Looking after the children is the woman’s job while the man gets on with his work.” A man, a man—she lamented in her heart—something you no longer are! If that white girl had done what a woman is supposed to do her son would still be a man.
“I slapped him once when he moved some of the drawings I had laid out on the floor. No, I didn’t slap him—I hit him, hard.”
“So? Parents are supposed to hit children.”
“I remember.”
“What do you mean by that remark? Parents are supposed to hit children, disciplining them. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that when you send a camel out to graze, make sure one of its legs is doubled up and tied securely with a rope, so it can’t wander too far. Too much freedom isn’t good for anyone or anything.”
