Season of the Rainbirds (8 page)

Mansoor raised his hand and nodded. ‘I realise that I was wrong to switch it on so soon after the death, but, with respect, Maulana-ji, you seem to be suggesting that mine is the only television in the town.’

The woman said: ‘Far worse things go on behind the walls of the bigger houses, Maulana-ji. The very night they kill the judge for being corrupt the town finds a woman in the deputy commissioner’s house.’

Mansoor looked sharply at his wife.

But Maulana Hafeez placed a hand on his arm. Then he looked at the woman and said, ‘You’d better go into the other room, my dhi.’

She left in silence.

Maulana Hafeez took a succession of deep breaths but failed to locate the smell of roses. ‘The deeds of others are not our concern. We must dedicate our lives to the pursuit of moral and religious excellence.’ The tips of his fingers, smudged with newspaper ink, slid a bead along his rosary every few seconds.

The call for prayers from the other mosque – the denomination called its followers twenty minutes before Maulana Hafeez – alerted him to the time. He noticed that he had drained his glass. ‘The days are getting shorter. It’ll be time for Magrib soon,’ he said, and stood up with considerable effort. During the rains his muscles felt as though they had developed knots along their lengths.

Dusk had fallen. Bats were out and fluttered above the courtyard. ‘I sincerely hope you will think about what I’ve been saying,’ Maulana Hafeez said to Mansoor who had accompanied him to the door. ‘My privilege is simply to warn people of the dangers of straying on to the wrong path, I don’t have the authority or the means of
preventing
them from doing so.’

An unfamiliar room becomes larger once you get used to it. Nusrat’s husband died in this room, peacefully in his sleep – a filament losing its glow over a period of time. The trees in the outside garden reach up to pluck a few notes from the balcony railing
.

A butterfly alights and becomes one with its shadow, like when you make the tips of your forefinger and thumb touch each other. Nusrat sings:

Eggs and their shells
.

Once all the butterflies were white
,

One day, too tired to fly
,

They fell asleep on a flowerbed

And the dew stained their wings

With the colours of the petals
.

Winter and summer she wears an old sleeveless jumper, the blue of tattoos. ‘My Afghanistani ayah taught me that poem,’ she tells us. Her father was personal physician to the emperor of Afghanistan, long long ago. ‘He was a doctor,’ she makes clear; and proudly: ‘Imagine, an FRCS in those days!’ The pomegranate in the courtyard is from Kundahar. The sapling was smuggled into the country through the Khyber Pass. ‘Others were bringing in pearls and’ – a quick glance to either side, offering us both her profiles – ‘alcohol. But I only brought in a plant.’ She laughs at the moulded ceiling. A pomegranate blossom is leathery, resembles a pitcher, and is orange in colour, the intense orange of the back of mirrors. She produces a photograph of her mother. The woman’s hairline is hidden beneath a row-of-coins headdress; she sits on a round stone by the fanfare of a trumpet vine. Mother and daughter look alike – their profiles would fit into each other as snugly as two teaspoons. Nusrat’s brother died of wasp bites
. Ina lila hé va ina ilia é rajeon.
He collapsed into a flowerbed with his mouth open. When they lifted him up they saw that a tiny daisy had been enclosed, unharmed, inside the open mouth. ‘Once a month we’d both be taken to the cinema,’ she remembers, bringing to life with words the crowded cinema theatre where smoke from the cigarettes rose to catch, like latecomers, bits of the projection on itself. And they had owned a gramophone with an elbowed limb to carry the needle. Nusrat’s marriage forced her to change countries. She bade farewell to the sound of the walnut sellers, méva vendors and bearfights degenerating into bloody brawls, and to the rattle of weapons being tested by potential customers in the gunshop behind the mansion; and she crossed the border to the west
.

She offers us dates and lumps of holy soil to eat and spoonfuls of the water of Zumzum to drink
.

Poplar pollen floats in the still air. A few of Nusrat’s cats sit in the sunlight, washing themselves. Others stitch their way through our legs, incorporating us – crosswise and lengthwise – into their invisible embroidery; the pattern also includes tables and chairs, the pillars of the veranda and the top branches of the Afghanistani tree. They are given boiled offal to eat twice a day. They cannot digest it uncooked. Someone had once asked, ‘Why don’t they run away?’ Nusrat had smiled: ‘They can’t. They get their favourite food here.’

‘It’s all ruined, no doubt, since the Russian invasion.’ She runs a fingertip along the rim of her eye and harvests a tear. ‘You hear about it in the news every day. All those refugees …’ She gives a heavy sigh and the hairs of her nostrils are visible for a brief moment. Aunt Khursheed sympathises: ‘No doubt, no doubt. Things change. It was the same with us. When we went back to India it was all so different. When they announced that there was going to be a partition, no one took it seriously. We left our horses and mules with a neighbour. A Hindu. Everyone thought it was a temporary division and that one day India and Pakistan would be a united country again. But …’ Aunt Khursheed and her husband had gone back to the place of their birth some years ago and had been unable to recognise the old street, let alone their house. The talli in the courtyard had been cut down; they found the trunk set by the outside wall. Around one of the boughs, Aunt Khursheed recalls with sadness, were two loops of rope: the decaying remains of a swing they had put up as children. She tells Nusrat of the journey they had made following the announcement of Partition, the pilgrimage they had undertaken across the bloody August of 1947. ‘We were followed by Sikhs who held in their hands moons dripping with blood.’ Her features contract in pain, her eyebrows are tense as bows. ‘Savages!’

To this, Irfan, her eldest son, would have replied, ‘That is not true. Hindus and Sikhs did not harm any emigrating Muslims. Not until the Muslims of
this
area, the area that is now Pakistan, slaughtered a trainload of Hindus and Sikhs going in the opposite direction, from Rawalpindi to Amritsar.’ He is constantly quarrelling with his parents. On the night before the last elections they had stayed up till three o’clock, arguing. In the morning Irfan had left the house without breakfast, before anyone else was awake, and did not come home till the fireflies. He was born on a pile of corpses as his parents were fleeing the massacre
.

A bushel of peacock feathers standing in a vase on a chest of drawers watches the open door with twenty-four wide-open eyes. A kitten discovers a place never before visited and tries out new echoes
.

Aunt Khursheed pushes out her elbows and stands up. Nusrat says, ‘Tell brother-ji it was very neighbourly of him to think about my well-being, but I don’t have any relatives alive.’

Outside, Aunt Khursheed whispers to us, ‘She may not have anyone now, but wait till she falls ill. Each day will see a new chacha-zad brother standing at the doorstep with a basket of langra mangoes. The house alone is worth thousands.’

Saturday

Five dry months had altered considerably the form, appearance and character of life in the town. The rains arrived at last on the night of the judge’s murder, catching many women unawares with their washing left out on the lines overnight. Thursday night was suffocating but – the monsoon
had
arrived – at noon on Friday the rains returned in force. The servant girls spent most of that evening sterilising with turpentine the many puddles that formed outside the houses. The infernal winds of June and July had exterminated almost all of the insects hatched in April but with the rains came the threat of another wave of mosquitoes.

‘I’ve discovered a flaw in the Maulana-ji’s argument,’ Azhar whispered, bringing his mouth up to Elizabeth’s ear.

Elizabeth opened an eye on to the dunes and caves of the dishevelled sheet – the other still buried in the pillow – and mumbled something incomprehensible to Azhar. She reached out her hand and running a finger along Azhar’s spine felt for the place on his back where an over-active follicle had produced a lone curved hair.

‘Here’s the join,’ said Azhar, touching the ridge of skin between Elizabeth’s legs.

With a little moan of pleasure and the words ‘You have no shame’, Elizabeth slapped Azhar’s back gently.

Yesterday in his Friday sermon Maulana Dawood, having no doubt read the article on the Japanese robot in Wednesday’s newspaper, had denounced all ‘misguided mortals’ who attempted to mimic the ‘Almighty’s adroitness’. ‘Allah’s curse on science and the scientists!’ He had taken great joy in the fact that whereas the robot was covered in riveted joins, the human body was free of such imperfections.

The pink haze of early morning was clinging to the edges of the objects in the room and outside a mournful drizzle was falling on the houses. Azhar stood in front of the mirror and, squeezing toothpaste directly on to his tongue, began to clean his teeth. During the brief pauses in the brushing he could hear Elizabeth humming to herself as she moved about the bedroom getting dressed. In her speech he would frequently catch fragments of this singing-voice.

She stood at the window looking out. Her hair she had tied with a ribbon and in her ears she wore tiny gold roses. In the trees and under the eaves of the silent houses clusters of sparrows were huddled together, their feathers fluffed into soft masses as they waited for the rain to clear. ‘So much rain,’ Elizabeth said at the sound of the bathroom door opening. ‘At this rate we’ll have to lift the town at one end to drain all the water from the houses.’

A set of clean clothes was laid out on the bed and Azhar began to dress in silence. He was young and muscular and his eyes sparkled with good health. He had a delicate triangular chin and Elizabeth had often wondered why its skin did not register the dimple she could so clearly feel in its bone.

‘Why are you questioning my father?’ she asked quietly. She had turned around and stood facing him.

‘Your father?’

‘Benjamin Massih is my father,’ she said. ‘He’s broken a leg, yet they still dragged him in for questions yesterday.’

Azhar continued dressing. ‘There has to be an accomplice. An insider.’

The response was quick and defiant. ‘All he does is unblock the gutters and drains in that street. Why should he be a suspect just because he’s familiar with the inside of the house? That makes
you
a suspect as well.’

In the brief silence which followed Azhar buttoned up his shirt. ‘We’re questioning
all
the servants, Christians and Muslims.’

Unsatisfied, she turned back to the open window.

‘This shirt is missing a button,’ Azhar exclaimed. ‘Look,’ he pointed to his chest.

‘Take it off,’ Elizabeth said, and without a glance in Azhar’s direction crossed the room and began to look for the needle and thread.

When she turned around Azhar had still not removed the shirt. ‘Why don’t you do it while I’m inside it?’ He opened his arms.

With a smile she looked away. ‘You watch too many films.’ She crossed her arms. ‘Now take it off.’

Azhar gave a mock sigh, undid the row of buttons and playfully tossed the shirt across the room at Elizabeth. She stretched out her arm and caught it.

Not many hours later, their breakfast was interrupted by three short rings at the front door. Azhar clicked his tongue in irritation – it was the first day of the week and he had been hoping to leave the town earlier than usual. As he stood he frowned at Elizabeth, mocking the concern on her face – she had stopped eating and was looking anxiously in the direction of the sound.