China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

‘Firewood,’ she reminds him.

  ‘You’ve hands,’ Suraj shoots back.

  * * *

  *

  A few moments earlier and Mehar is scouring the room for a spool of black thread when she vaguely registers that one of the men has entered the yard. She moves to the window and holds down a lacquered slat. Something catches the light. Pearls! She is sure of it. Pearls swinging from his hand. Her husband spoke of pearls. Her heart surges and her gaze lifts to take in his face. She looks at the prominent set of his cheeks, the light stubble that (as far as she can see) gives way to a thicker, if not exactly thick, beard. His mischievous eyes and their ridiculously fine lashes. The sloping set of his shoulders. Yes, she tells herself, the contours of him exactly match the shape of the man who visits her at night. His height, his legs. She knows, of course, about what goes on between his legs, and for the first time this thought, coupled with him standing as if naked in his own sun, blooms deep arousal in the roots of her. Her eyes follow him, see him approach Mai, and then she closes the slat, sits on her bed and, her mind careering, reaches for her pillow and buries her beaming face in it.

  9

  A whole day passes and Mehar hasn’t told anyone of what she’s discovered. Not even Harbans, who expresses affection so easily and to whom Mehar feels closest. In this house where she is afforded no independence of mind, it feels mutinous to hold her new knowledge close, mutinous and necessary. Mehar smiles. She is with her sisters at the window of the china room, awaiting their summons and watching the brothers. Still she doesn’t let on that the man on the right, sitting on the ground a few feet from the other two, one knee pitched up, the other lying flat, is hers. He spoons the saag directly on to his roti, his fingers long and fine. She can’t believe that she ever thought the brothers alike, now that she can really see him. What a noble face he has. Oh, Lord, hurry the night when we are together.

  ‘Mai’s not tapped any of us for tonight yet, has she?’ Mehar tries, oh-so-casually.

  ‘Thank god!’ replies Harbans.

  ‘Look who’s getting itchy!’ Gurleen says, in a breezy tone that trails an undeniable chill.

  Mehar, about to reply, thinks better of it and they wait in silence until the brothers leave the yard. The three women file out and collect the dirty dishes. Mehar makes a beeline for the rightmost bowl.

  10

  Later, Mai having given the nod, Mehar lies on the charpoy in the back room, smiling to herself, her pulse so strong she can hear the blood in her ears. The door rattles open and she jumps, then licks her fingers to smooth a few hairs from her forehead, which is a vanity, given the complete absence of light. She feels him sitting down at the end of the bed, by her left foot, and a lovely buzz travels up her calf, a feeling she hasn’t experienced before.

  ‘You are well?’ he asks.

  She nods, then, ‘Yes.’

  There’s a noise, a soft tapping, and something cold lands against her arm.

  ‘I said about the pearls.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know if you believe in it or not but now we have them you might as well put them under the pillow.’

  ‘Yes,’ and she takes the necklace up, stringed moons in the dark, and stows it under the pillow, behind her head. The fact that he’d allowed for, or at least considered, her belief (or not) emboldens her to risk saying something more: ‘And you? You are well?’

  He is quiet and her stomach dips – she shouldn’t have said anything! He thinks her loose! – but then: ‘Vandals are after our lands. I’m sleeping out a lot. Bad times. These are bad times.’

  Mehar knows nothing of this. Nothing of the news that in parts of the country and of the state, in fact, not more than ten miles from her room, many thousands have died in sectarian riots fanned by the publication of Rangila Rasul. She knows nothing of the necklaces of shoes some Muslims are being made to wear, nothing of the banning of foreign cloth, or that the drumbeats she sometimes hears at night are a signal to the British that their time is coming to an end.

  She feels him stand and when she hears him stepping out of his underwear she begins untying her salwar.

  Once he begins, she does something that she’s never dared before. She places her hands across his back. He makes a noise like a groan, but she can tell it’s a sound of deep pleasure, so she presses her hands harder into his skin and the faster he gets the more she presses, the more she thinks of his face at the side of her neck, his beautiful confident face here with her. Her mind shimmers and she floods with some uncontrollable feeling until all she can do to stop from crying out is bite into his naked shoulder.

  11

  In so many ways she has brought lightness to the house. The way she breaks off some jaggery when she thinks no one is looking. How perfectly she mimics Mai behind her back. That she persuades Harbans to play hopscotch on the roof, kissing Gurleen, who threatens to inform on them. Her sheer liveliness. All this Jeet notices from behind walls and doors, his ears permanently tuned in her direction no matter where in the house she is. Her curiosity astounds him. Her daring. When she held his back like that he felt such an immense surge of love, for her and from her. He shakes his head, marvelling at his luck, that she loves him too, loves being close to him, as close as anyone could ever be.

  ‘They won’t feed on air, if that’s what you’re waiting for.’

  Mai. How long had she been watching him, in this house where everyone is watched by someone?

  ‘You were gawping at the china room,’ she says.

  ‘Was I?’ He kneels to untie the bundle of grass fodder and starts spreading it into the trough. When the buffalo nose forward, he halts them with a ‘Hup!’ until the burlap sack is shaken empty and he rises back on to his feet. He can still feel his mother’s stare, a weight against his cheek, and now she steps forward and runs a hand through his hair, tugging at it, tugging hard, until she relaxes her grip and lets her hand slide, her fingers weaving down the buttons on his chest. Jeet moves a little away.

  ‘Dearest child, what if she doesn’t give us a son? Think how glum you’ll be if we have to set her aside for another. Let’s not get too attached. Agreed?’

  ‘What does it—’

  She puts a finger to his mouth, presses, and runs the pad of her finger all along the inside of his bottom lip, up against his teeth. ‘No more.’ Then, relinquishing him: ‘Such a pretty one. You did the right thing. Though I wouldn’t have thought you’d have had it in you. Cheating your brother like that.’

  ‘I have work.’

  ‘Oh, don’t feel so guilty. I called you Jeet for a reason. Of course you were going to win. Anyway,’ she goes on, looking off towards the silent room, ‘his is pretty, too, don’t you think? With all her powders and mascara. I bet she’s lots of jumpy fun.’

  12

  Finally, Mehar can hold it in no longer and she shows her sisters-in-law the pearls, one afternoon while they’re preparing the evening meal.

  ‘To help you have a boy?’ Harbans asks.

  Mehar nods. ‘By the third crop. So the priest says.’

  ‘So where are our pearls?’ says Gurleen.

  ‘Maybe Mai likes me best,’ suggests Mehar.

  ‘Or maybe you need the most help,’ counters Gurleen, her voice delicately cruel.

  ‘But look how beautiful they are,’ says Harbans. ‘I can see my face in them.’ Then, a little wickedly: ‘Did it make any difference?’

  She doesn’t know if it was the pearls, or the simple fact of carrying his face in her mind, but there was certainly a difference. She felt it . . . down below. But how to say—

  ‘It did!’ Harbans exclaims. ‘Look at your face!’

  Mehar laughs, feeling herself getting carried away, wanting that feeling of getting carried away. ‘Those trains we hear about? He was like one of those!’

  ‘Common cows,’ Gurleen says, but the other two
can’t stop laughing, and only do so when Mehar freezes and raises her head as if sniffing the air. Something is happening outside.

  * * *

  *

  ‘You’re the rotten fruit of his rotten seed.’

  Calmly, Mai whacks the sugarcane across Suraj’s calves, sending him buckling and reaching for the floor. She thrashes him again across the narrow width of his bare back, and then again, and again, until finally Suraj gives in, collapses on to his chest, and cries out.

  Jeet comes running into the yard followed by the middle brother, Mohan. ‘What are you doing!’ Jeet bellows, snatching the cane away.

  ‘Sold two of our herd and gambled away the money,’ Mai says, laughing, though the laughter contains anger, even menace. The voicing of the crime reignites the rage and she takes back the cane and slams it into Suraj’s head. This time it is Mohan who frees the stick from her hand and casts it aside.

  ‘Enough,’ Mai says, as if she was the peacemaker in all this, and Jeet drops to his knees and cradles his brother’s head.

  ‘Fetch the honey,’ he says to Mohan, but Suraj pushes his examining hands away. He rises to his knees, glowering at his mother, who is looking down at him, imperious even in the way she tidies back her hair.

  * * *

  *

  Mehar lets go of the window slat and darkness returns. Her eyes are wet. Perhaps she sniffles because Gurleen asks, ‘Is he yours, do you wonder? The one on the floor?’

  Yes, he is, she thinks. In a world where there is no word for privacy (not that she knows this), keeping this fact to herself is a way of silently claiming solidarity with her injured husband. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she tells Gurleen.

  * * *

  *

  He doesn’t request Mehar’s company that night, or the night after that. She lies there in the dark, Harbans snoring unhurriedly at her side. The memory of him splayed across the ground, refusing to scream out, torments her. If he was with her, would she throw aside all caution and kiss his wounds, touch them with her lips? She feels certain that she would and out of this conviction flows liquid heat into her thighs. To keep the sensation from rising she brings her knees to her chest. Harbans protests sleepily. Mehar closes her eyes. Remembers the warmth of his body pressing against her. Her hand goes to her stomach, under her tunic, and fingers the drawstring of her salwar. It goes further, down to her hair. She sighs a shivery lusty sigh and opens her eyes, glancing around in the dark to check that no one has seen.

  13

  Bright afternoon, and Mehar sits on the edge of the stone bath snapping off the remaining wicker spokes and folding them into the latticework. She admires her finished basket, jumping it around in her hands, and then returns to the china room, where Harbans is cutting up fruit. She doesn’t appear to have heard Mehar enter.

  ‘Everything okay, sister?’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ says Harbans, raising her head. ‘That looks plenty big enough,’ she adds, as Mehar drops the basket to the counter and begins lining it with squares of brown jute. Then, as if she’d been thinking on it for a while now: ‘My sister said jute comes all the way from the east. It takes days to get here.’

  ‘You’ve never mentioned your sister.’

  Harbans shrugs, as if to say, what was the point? ‘I think it’s her wedding today.’

  ‘As in – today?’ Mehar looks appalled. ‘Why in the name of Lord Krishna aren’t you there? You should be there!’

  Harbans turns away and starts on the next batch of fruit. Mai has ordered them to distribute it among the workers in the field.

  ‘Did Mai stop you? The old witch.’

  ‘It’s for the best. Imagine how much my parents would have to wait on Mai, all the gold they’d have to send me back here with.’ She brings the knife down hard.

  Holding Harbans from behind, Mehar kisses her shoulder, though the embrace is as much for herself and her own sadness at not seeing Monty in so long. What would he be doing right now? Press-ups in the village square? Hectoring the locals who don’t send their kids to school? She fears he is drifting away from her, and so, to touch something he has held, she darts into Mai’s room and returns with the jamawar wedding shawl.

  ‘Lord, that’s beautiful,’ Harbans says, wiping her hands down her front. Softly, she strokes its border, the woven intricacy of it all. ‘Oh, my.’

  ‘My brother helped me choose it. Tell you what, if she stops me from going to his wedding, I’ll hide a scorpion in her salwar.’

  ‘Poor scorpion!’ Harbans says, and they laugh.

  The shawl put back, the fruit cut, Harbans reaches for her veil and balances the basket on her head, all set to share it out.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Mehar says.

  ‘No, no. Someone still needs to collect the dung.’

  ‘I knew you’d give me that.’

  Harbans grins, drops her veil.

  ‘Where’s Gurleen?’ asks Mehar.

  ‘At the temple. With Mai, don’t you know?’

  Mehar pulls herself up straight, as tall as Gurleen, and pitches her voice just so. ‘Don’t you think that even Mai’s farts smell of attar of roses?’

  ‘It’s like she’s in the room,’ Harbans grins. ‘Can you believe she refused to bring in the spinach? Said we can do it. I’ll make her, you watch. Anyway’ – she opens the door – ‘don’t forget.’

  ‘Dung dung,’ they say, in unison.

  * * *

  *

  She naps first and by the time she wakes the house’s shadow hangs across the yard. Another afternoon is dwindling. Crickets scrape in the branches. The first carts are wheeling out of the fields. Noises, noises. She walks quickly on her toes through the barn, closing her nose to the animal smells and exhaling only once she is out and standing by the buffalo enclosure at the rear of the house. Against the back wall the dung patties are heaped in a pyramid twice her height. She checks that the bulls are all tied up, then steps on to the brown field, anklets chiming as she scouts around for the big stick. She finds it lodged in the wheel of a wooden cart, heavy with fodder, and drags the stick to the pyramid of dung. Stretching up, straining, the sun on her face, she jabs the stick towards the topmost patty. She jumps, but still the stick won’t reach and the thing won’t fall. Muttering, she rolls her salwar bottoms up a few inches, begins scaling the ladder of bricks protruding from the wall and, agile as she is, is over halfway up when:

  ‘Shall I get them?’

  It doesn’t cause her to slip, hearing a male voice. If anything it only strengthens her grip, as if that allows her to keep hold of her dignity. She turns her face away from his voice and into the meat of her elbow. She imagines Mai slapping her for flaunting her face like this. And her calves. Dear Lord, her bare calves. She tries jiggling her legs and, mercifully, the material drops silkily to her feet.

  ‘You might fall. Let me do it.’

  She starts to descend, and before both feet are back on the ground she grabs her veil and lurches it down her face. Her heart feels monumental in her chest. She steps aside to give him access to the brick-ladder but he doesn’t need it and nimbly zigzags up the wall, his arm a lever he uses to swing himself high. At the top, like some prince straddling his horse, he kicks down one, two, three patties. She hears them land.

  ‘More?’

  ‘If it’s no trouble,’ she says.

  ‘Well, how many then, if you would be so merciful?’ If you would be so merciful. Mehar-bani kar ke.

  Is he teasing her? Could it be him? Sickening joy leaps in her stomach.

  ‘Come on,’ he says gently.

  ‘Only two more, please,’ and the patties come thudding down by her feet and then his own feet land beside them. Next, in a moment that terrifies her, he crouches down to gather them up and suddenly his face is there and it is him, her husband, come to help her, and she feels her terror convert into delight. She wonders how
long he had been watching her from the barn door before coming to her aid. She imagines him leaning into the doorframe, arms across his chest, chewing a bit of straw, watching her movements. The thought is intensely pleasurable. He stands and once more she can only see his feet.

  ‘Where do you want them?’

  And because it is her husband, and because they are alone, she lifts the veil clean off her face and folds it over the crown of her head. Her eyes feel huge to her, as if they take up more than half of her face. She looks at him and she could not be clearer, she could not be more wanton, he thinks, and his chest pumps so quickly it’s obvious he’s read her correctly. A long electric moment charges and forks about them. She wonders what he might be thinking. All she wants him to say is that he’ll come to her tonight. Maybe she should ask him straight out? Why not, now she’s gone this far already? He motions with his chin for her to follow him and he leads her back towards the barn, where the sun fills the doorway but intrudes no further. He puts down the patties and then moves, diagonally, to the corner of the room where the recess seems darkest. She doesn’t know what he expects of her right now, standing in the middle of the barn. To collect the patties and go? She hopes he’s not ashamed of her, of her unbecoming behaviour. She hopes she has not disgusted him. She tells herself that she’s willing to argue her case, that she’s not done anything unforgivably wrong. But even as she prepares herself, the question fades, and none of that seems to matter now because he’s neither speaking to nor looking at her: he’s clearing the ground. Nerves press her throat, forcing some words to pop out.

  ‘How is your head now?’ she asks.

  ‘Hmm? Oh, you saw.’

  She can tell he’s embarrassed that she saw his beating. She shouldn’t have mentioned it, but now that she has: ‘It’s not my place to criticise your mother, and perhaps I speak beyond my allowance, but I felt it was very cruel.’