“Don’t know what you mean, sahib,” he said in Punjabi.
It took me a moment to realize they were protecting her. “Listen, I know Farah-bibi very well. I mean her no harm. I haven’t been able to reach her for a while. All I want”—I added another thousand-rupee note to each hand and held the money aloft—“is to make sure she’s okay.”
The boy with the turban elbowed his friend. The latter shrugged and reached for the money. “Farah-bibi’s probably fine, sahib,” he said through buckteeth. “I saw her a couple days ago.”
“Where?”
“All over, sahib. Munir the ferryman has been rowing her up and down the Ravi for weeks. Munir told my chacha that they’ve given out more ration bags than the government.”
I gave him a thousand, held the second note back. “Can you tell me where to find her?”
“Sure.” He gestured at the tunnel mouth behind me. “She lives in the tunnels. Everyone knows that.”
“Everyone?”
They snickered. “We’re river dwellers, sahib,” said the first boy. “We know the water’s secrets.”
“Know a way to get past this?” I nodded at the boulder.
The turbaned boy hesitated, glanced at his friend, and nodded.
I handed them the promised money, took out my wallet, and showed them its contents. “Take me to her and all this is yours.”
The second boy reached out. Firmly, he closed my hand around my wallet.
“Keep your baksheesh, sahib. If you’re her friend and here to help, we’ll show you the way. But we won’t go in.”
“Why not?”
“She may be the nicest pichal pairi that ever lived,” said the boy with buckteeth, “but she’s still a churail. And you enter a churail’s house at your own peril.”
* * *
I found the pichal pairi at the end of a secret tunnel. How I got there is none of your business.
Blanket pulled up to her neck, she lay on her side in a canopied bed in a room wallpapered with white and blue stripes. At the foot of the bed perched a bench piled high with frilled pillows. Dirty Dancing and Rang De Basanti posters hung above a couch covered in aqua fabric. A gold-framed Sadequain replica, softly lit by niche lights, swirled across one wall. Three bookcases lined the sidewalls with the collected works of Sylvia Plath and Parveen Shakir poking their heads out like stone animals.
The air was hot and smelled of camphor.
I went to her and whispered, “Farah.” She stirred. I reached out to touch her. “Farah, it’s me.”
She shivered and her head came up. Something was wrong with its shape. “Who’s there?” Then she made a sound, something between a gasp and a keening. “Raza?”
Quickly she thrust a hand to paw at the side table. I saw a flash of pink as of wrinkled pale drapes, and the lights went out. When they flickered on, Farah was sitting up, leaned against the headboard. Sleep hair seethed around her face. Her eyes were red and the eyeliner was a mess.
“You’re such a shit,” she whispered and tried a half-smile. “You broke your promise.”
“I made no promises.” I lowered myself next to her. She shifted to make room and the bedroom shifted with her. A sense of unreality came to me like heaviness in the head, and vanished.
“Where the fuck were you, Farah?” I said. “I was worried sick.”
“I was here, trying to—” She broke off with a cough that came from deep in her chest. It shook her entire body. Sweat beaded on her brows. She recovered, took a long breath, winced, and said, “I’ve been trying to help, but I guess I overdid it. I woke up real tired two days ago and”—she waved vaguely at the room—“I haven’t really been able to get out of bed since.”
I placed my hand on her forehead. She was burning up. I could smell her sickness. A humid, sweaty tang in her hair, her pores. The odor of a sick dog.
Her nose was running.
“You’re sick, Farah. This may be pneumonia. Hell, this may be that fucking bug. We need to get you out of here.”
“I’ll be fine, but you need to get away from me.” She wiped her forehead with a hand. “Please just go. I’ll come see you when I’m better.”
“Like fuck I will. You need fluids and medicine. Is there food here somewhere? A kitchen? Maybe some soup.”
“No, babe.” Farah laughed. There wasn’t any laughter in her eyes. “I’m all out.”
“Then let’s go to my place. Come on, I’ll help.”
She shook her head. “Ain’t happening, love. I’m too dizzy.”
“I’ll carry you if I need to.”
“No. It’ll take us a while to get out and I’m … I’m too weak to create—” She began to cough again.
My legs trembled when I got up. “Wait here. I’m gonna go get some things for you.” I looked around, as a shudder went through the bedroom. The film posters wavered as if the movies were about to play. The niche lights dimmed, then resurged.
“Farah,” I said. “What is this place? How’s there electricity here?”
She tried to get up, but her legs gave out. Like a leaf from a felled tree she sank into the covers. “Please, Raza,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “If you care about me, please go away and don’t come back.”
I was already running.
* * *
It was after maghrib when I got back. I had taken at least three wrong turns in the dark and two tumbles, resulting in a cut on my palm and a leak in the milk carton. It must have left a sticky trail for a mile.
Just when I feared I was lost I saw a flickering light. I hurried down the tunnel and stopped at the doorless entrance of her bedroom.
In a chamber of granite and limestone she lay on a bed of moss and leaves. Two oil lamps, one in each corner, showed chairs with broken legs, heaps of pink plastic bags (the sort vendors sold sadqah meat in), soda cans, broken pitchers, and clay pots. Gunnysacks filled with refuse. And bones strewn everywhere.
Gleaming vertebrae, dull scapulae, mandibles and maxillae, skulls with deep eyeholes, incisors, and canines. Leg bones. Thigh bones. A veritable kingdom of the picked clean.
Seized with horror, I lurched to her. “Farah.” When she didn’t respond I dropped the supplies and grabbed her shoulder. “Farah, please.”
The netted mass that was my girlfriend’s shape crumpled at my touch. Wet grass rustled, eggshells from river birds cracked, the anthill beneath the fishing net stirred. Its shiny black denizens poured out in waves, swarmed to the walls, and broke against them.
I didn’t scream. Did a part of me expect this?
I settled down: into the bone dust, the odor of incense and rain-washed leaves, the crackling of ant bodies under my boots, the stillness of the air. I steepled my fingers and rested my chin on them. The river whooshed somewhere above me, a distant echo, and an image came to me of a shadow-girl bolting in the dark. The tunnels, they go from Lahore Fort to the Ravi and under it—an old chowkidar told me when I visited Lahore Fort so many months ago. Crisscrossing, apple-saucing, elbowing the river before turning southeast. Nearly five hundred kilometers they ran so the Mughal princes and their courtesans could elope, escape, abscond—all the way to Delhi, where they would live happily ever after. Why shouldn’t the tunnels run thus for a girl in a white T-shirt, an orange scarf, and blue jeans fleeing death, disease, and countless versions of herself?
This cavern should stink, I said to myself as I rocked back and forth on my perfectly formed heels. All that filth and refuse.
But the cavern smelled of cedar and pine.
Seated in the chamber at the end of the tunnel—no, I won’t tell you which one—I tore open the soup packet and ate my fill. I licked my fingers and the hole in the milk carton, and drank the remaining (thimbleful of) milk. I munched all the chocolate, including the Ferrero Rocher.
After, I went home.
THE END
On the last day of April when the first of the heat waves reached Lahore a postcard dropped into my mailbox. This was surprising because o
ur mailman had died two weeks prior from the contagion and the postal service had been temporarily shuttered.
Back inside, I took off my cloth mask and placed the card on the dinner table. Carefully I washed my hands with soap, dried them, returned to the table. Thoroughly, and avoiding the writing, I sanitized the postcard with alcohol. The picture was a seascape with a dancer in the foreground caught by the camera in the most fluid of transformations.
I held the card between my palms. I blinked a few times—my eyes were wet—and read the back. There it was, the stamp of the city it was mailed from.
In the middle of the card were three lines printed in neat handwriting. The ink smelled like mint and roses.
No, I cannot tell you what they said.
The postcard said not to.
THE END
About the Author
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani vagrant camped in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His work is forthcoming in the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Nightmare, and other venues. In December 2014, Usman led Pakistan’s first speculative fiction workshop in Lahore in conjunction with Desi Writers Lounge. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by Usman T. Malik
Art copyright © 2021 by Hazem Asif
#Spring Love, #Pichal Pairi Page 3
