The Widow's Husband

by Tamim Ansary

  The malang was sitting cross-legged among the weeds, his eyes closed. In a hushed voice, Ibrahim asked the men to begin their work uphill a bit so as not to wake the God-intoxicated hermit. After all, there was plenty of work to be done before actual construction could begin: soil would have to be dug and crumbled and mixed with straw. Water would have to be stirred in and kneaded smooth with bare feet to make wet clay that would harden into tough sun-baked cob—

  But scarcely had the men started digging when the malang turned his head, his eyes wide open. He had not been sleeping after. He had only been meditating. He rose to his feet, and what a big man he was! Real meat on his bones, real weight on his belly, not by any means a starving beggar. A smile curved the crease between his thick lips and his eyes glinted with merriment—a crazed merriment, some would say later. He shoved in amongst the men, snatched up a shovel, and boomed “Y’allah khair!” God bless!

  “He talks,” someone whispered.

  “Why should he not?” Ibrahim scolded. “Sheikh-sahib, forgive my kinsmen’s manners.”

  The malang waved off the apology and set to work, pushing his spade into the earth with a powerful foot, his soles protected by calluses as thick as sandals. The men could not stop to gawk, for the malang’s industry shamed them into effort. All worked vigorously until the sinking sun dipped just below the poplars lining the hilltops in the direction of Mecca. Then the malang stepped back, leaving his spade stuck in the earth. “What are we building here, boys?”

  “Why—why, a shelter. For you, sir!” the village headman declared. “Since you won’t come down to us, we bring our hospitality up to you. We’ll put three walls around you and leave the fourth direction open so you can gaze over the river. Nothing to shut out the sound of frogs and crickets.”

  “Excellent.” The malang clapped like a child. “This pleases me, dear hearts. But three walls? I’m a simple man, two walls will do. Let the rock form the third wall. Then again, what am I thinking? Put up a fourth wall if you wish, just don’t put a roof over it. Make a waterproof box around me. When the rains come, inshallah it will fill with water, I will float to the top, and then I will hear frogs and crickets.”

  “No!” Ibrahim protested earnestly. “What do you mean? We intend to put a roof over your head! Never will I let rain wet your head. We want to shelter you.”

  The malang clapped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Ibrahim saw ruefully that he had been joking. “Sheikh-sahib, is all this acceptable to you?”

  “Is it acceptable to grass when a tree grows?”

  Ghulam Dastagir rolled his eyes, but Ibrahim frowned, trying to decipher the man’s deeper meaning. “I believe it is,” he ventured.

  “Well, then, have at it,” said the malang, waving at the ground. “An idle shovel is a waste of iron. Dig, dig, dig, my boy! While you work, I will listen to the frogs.”

  “Later, the boys will bring you rice and spinach qurma.” the malik assured him.

  “Oh, bread and tea, plenty for me. Your open hearts enthrall! Your homes be green, your eyes be bright, Allah bless you all.” The malang bowed to Ibrahim, then to the next man, and then to the next, turning in a circle, bowing every few inches, bowing to every man present and then continuing to turn, shuffling in place and bowing, bowing to the rocks, bowing to the slope above, bowing to the trees, turning and turning, fast and faster until he was dancing and spinning in a glee no one could call anything but mad. At last he stopped whirling, pushed his turban-wrapped skull cap back and wiped his glistening forehead. “Listen! Can you hear them?”

  The men all cocked their heads and listened intently. “Hear what?” Ghulam Dastagir complained. “I can’t hear a thing.”

  “You can’t? Neither can I. Send for an ear doctor! Do you have an ear doctor in Char Bagh? Or must we send to Sorkhab?”

  Ibrahim paled. “Not Sorkhab!”

  “He’s a lunatic,” Ghulam Dastagir whispered.

  “Or touched by God,” his brother-in-law frowned. “If we don’t understand him, it might be our fault.”

  “Well, he’s no malang. He never mentions Allah.”

  “He said ‘Allah bless us all.’ He said ‘y’allah khair’.”

  “Anyone can say y’allah khair.”

  “He quotes the poets, I hear.”

  But this only made the big man flush.

  Meanwhile, the malang had withdrawn from the group to wash his face and limbs with water from one of the buckets. The time for sunset prayer had come, the men realized, and they all clustered around the buckets to perform their ritual ablutions. But the malang, who had started first, finished first. While the others were still washing, he rose to his feet. Along the ground, where the slope formed a level shelf, he spread his turban, a long swath of drab green fabric, some twenty paces long and two paces wide. This was for the men. For himself, he retrieved a bit of cloth from a bundle stashed near the rock and laid it down in front of the turban. He took his place on this little mat, facing west, without hesitation or discussion positioning himself as prayer leader for the entire group. No one questioned this at the time, and no one could remember feeling one way or another about it later. The men of Char Bagh simply lined up behind the malang, facing west like him. After a contemplative moment, the malang raised his hands to his ears and chanted, “Allaaaaaaaaahu akbar!” The men followed suit, moving through the prayer ritual in tandem, repeating the syllables to themselves but responding to the cues set by the malang for bowing, going to the ground, and bending forward in supplication to touch their foreheads to the earth, guided into unison by the malang’s intermittent chant of “Alaaaahu akbar!”

  When the prayer was finished, the malang picked up a shovel and went right back to work. The men had intended to knock off for the day, but the sight of their guest laboring so vigorously made them pick up tools again too.

  Surprisingly, they got the two walls built by the time lights started twinkling from the women’s fires in the village below. They had accomplished much because so many of them had pitched in, and because all of them had worked so hard, and because the malang had done the work of two. Where could he have gotten the energy? No one could fathom it. Each of the villagers was quite aware that his own household had sent up nothing but bread and sweetened tea and perhaps a few dried figs or nuts. Had the man been surviving on crickets and the like? Malangs were said to eat such fare and yet—the whole thing was a mystery.

  Asad and his boys had hauled along some poles for the roof, and they helped Ibrahim lay these across the two walls. Next , straw was packed between the poles, but it was too late now to plaster cob over the straw. That would have to wait till morning. At least this first day’s construction had provided the malang with shelter from the wind and the rudiments of a roof.

  On the way down, Ghulam Dastagir glanced back over his shoulder. What he saw made him pause, and seeing him pause, Ibrahim pulled up too. “What is it?”

  “Look up there!” Ghulam Dastagir pointed toward the malang’s shelter. “What’s that on his roof?”

  Ibrahim squinted at the bulky mass atop the shelter they had just built. “It’s him,” he said finally. “He’s sitting on the roof.”

  “Not under it?” Ghulam Dastagir fumed. “Then all our work was for nothing. He’s just mocking us. ”

  “We’ve pleased him. Pleasing him was our intention, so it was a good day’s work,” said Ibrahim. “And once we’ve sealed his hut, I’m sure he’ll use it to get out of the rain.”

  They trudged a few more paces down the hill. Then someone let out a little cry of laughter. Again, the men stopped and looked back. Ghulam Dastagir, who had poor eyesight at night, demanded anxiously, “What now? What’s he doing? Is he still on the roof?”

  “He’s still on the roof.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s dancing,” said Ibrahim.

  9

  Khadija pulled up short at the sound of voices. Women were packed into the room at the end of the hall, c
lucking and gossiping. “The way she was combing her hair—”

  Cold coils tightened around Khadija’s heart. She moved closer, feeling her way by touch through the lightless corridor.

  “Just before she went to him,” a voice cut in venomously.

  In the black space surrounding the compound, crickets roared.

  “Combing away!” the first woman cut back in. “Oiling every strand right to the tip—oh, she wanted to shine for him, she did!”

  The women must not have heard Khadija’s footsteps yet. The widow set one hand against the wall to steady herself. The straw embedded in the cob scratched against her palm. Fury began to bubble inside her, but she quelled it. She would need cool strength for the work at hand. Strength and charm.

  “My dear!” The first voice again, speaking almost in a whisper now. “When you fuss with your face like that just before you go see a man, it can only mean one thing.” Khadija recognized Soraya’s half-cousin Khushdil, visiting from the compound down the street. A malicious little woman with eyes always squeezed half-shut by fat!

  “Snare him into marriage? Not always!” This was Soraya’s mother. “She might—”

  “Why shouldn’t he marry her?” This protest came from Ibrahim’s paternal aunt. “She’s his brother’s widow, after all—alone in this world, alas! A man has obligations! What if you were in her place?”

  “Well, taking her in, that’s honorable, but marriage—”

  Here, however, Soraya’s mother cut in again, determined to finish her point. “Who says she’s looking for marriage? She might just be craving—”

  “That poor woman! One day, the wife of the greatest man in all the valley—the next day bereft, alone, widowed! Childless! My heart weeps for her, my dears.” Ibrahim’s aunt again? Khadija bit her lips, leaning against the wall for support.

  “I was there the day she came back from Sorkhab,” said a deeper voice: the Crone—even she felt qualified to offer an opinion! “—huffing and puffing and sweating! Well, if you have something to tell Hajji-sahib, I thought, why not go to him just as you are? But no! She had to wash her face! Comb her hair! Put rouge on her cheeks—”

  “Rouge! You saw her putting on rouge?”

  “I saw it on her cheeks, I’m sure—”

  “Where would she get rouge? She might have been flushed from the journey—”

  “Still flushed after washing with well-water? Oh, you’re a trusting one. I don’t know where she got rouge, but she’s got it, that’s all I know.”

  Khadija touched her cheeks. She had pinched them that day to bring up the blood—that was her “rouge.” Tears stung her eyelids.

  “She must have gotten some from the nomads last year. God knows what she traded for it. And kept it hidden somewhere. I tell you that woman is trying to tempt Hajji-sahib. I wonder how you stand for it, Soraya-jan.”

  “Khadija has always been kind to me,” Soraya murmured.

  I should break in now, thought Khadija; but her heart was thumping too wildly. She couldn’t be sure of controlling herself.

  “Kind to you! Well, I hope you’ll appreciate her ‘kindness’ the day she marries your husband!”

  “And what if she does?” Ibrahim’s aunt persisted. “Soraya-jan will still be his first wife, first in his heart—and mother of his first-born son.”

  “And younger too,” another voice declared reassuringly. “You’re surely younger, Soraya-jan. I remember the winter you were born, we went to Sorkhab for a wedding, and there was Khadija, already walking, talking, making mischief. Before you were even born.”

  “How would you remember one pebble among so much gravel, Auntie? You’re teasing!”

  “No, by Allah, Khadija stood out. Such eyes! A lovely child! And mischievous? Oh, you never saw such sauce. You couldn’t help but notice that one. I said to myself—yes, all those years ago, I said: that one will be a devil. Even then I knew it.”

  “I will always be Ibrahim-jan’s favorite,” Soraya insisted bravely.

  “I thought the same about my husband before he took Malia,” came Khushdil’s querulous complaint. “I was your age then and just as silly. Oh, when we’re young and well-made, our husbands favor us, and we think it’s our God-given nature to fascinate, just like the flower gives joy and the wolf makes people afraid. Then the new wife comes along and we learn. We learn.” Khushdil released a long, moist sigh. “You’re inexperienced, girlie. Let me tell you what the world has in store for you. The new wife is always the favorite. Mice like to come back to the same hole every night, but men? Men are not mice, they’ll stick it into a watermelon just for variety. Imagine what delight they take in a second wife, even a used-up widow with a dry womb.”

  “Hush. You should be ashamed of talking that way,” someone scolded.

  “Oh! Your ears are too delicate? Never seen cows do it, have you? Never seen donkeys do it? Dogs? Sheep? It’s all around us, why should I be ashamed to talk about it?”

  “I meant about Khadija’s womb.”

  Khadija’s hunched against the wall. The cricket-sounds had died away. Some insect dropped from the ceiling, and she brushed it off her shoulder, hoping it was not a scorpion. A hectoring voice broke the silence.

  “I tell you, I don’t think she’s trying to get Ibrahim-jan to marry her.” Soraya’s intimidating mother was pushing to finish her point. “Virginity gone, womb dry—what’s to hold her back? She’s a widow. Women like that are beyond shame, they’ll take their pleasure as they please. They’ll do anything. Just anything.”

  “If only I had been a widow at her age,” half-cousin Khushdil lamented.

  “With a handsome brother-in-law to play with,” someone laughed.

  “Don’t listen to them,” Khadija’s aunt counseled Soraya. “You and Khadija get along like sisters. If you become co-wives, all the better. The first year or two will be difficult, but after that, my dear! After that, it will always be two of you against one of him. Work together and you can rule this house. You get along, don’t you?”

  “She’s bossy, but I don’t mind.”

  In the hallway, clench-fisted Khadija considered slinking away—no, running as fast as she could, away from all this judging and sneering, but run where? She had nowhere to go. She could only stand and fight for her place, right here. She steeled herself, cleared her throat, and began moving bumpily down the hall, making noise to announce her presence, so the women could change topic and save face.

  By the time she turned the corner, they had all put on cordial faces. “Khadija-jan,” they beamed brightly. “Where have you been? We were just talking about how hard you work. Must you keep track of every last potato? Sit down, you take on too much responsibility. Only six months widowed, you’re still grieving, you should be letting us take care of you.”

  Khadija’s eyes searched out Soraya. The younger woman blushed and said nothing, but nothing needed to be said. Amidst all the nasty gossiping, she had stood up for Khadija. Even in her mother’s presence, she had said a few kinds words about the widow. Khadija swept into the room and settled regally next to her nervous young sister-in-law. Why did these women conspire against her? Why should most of them care whether Khadija secured a high place or sank to servant-level in the house that where she had once been queen of? Only Soraya had a stake in this matter. What did that sour-hearted Khushdil stand to gain or lose? It was only spite that drove her, nothing but spite!

  Khadija knew what she had to do, she had to distract these women from their petty jealousies, by rallying them around some excitement. Then it came to her. “Which of you has seen the malang?”

  “Are you asking me?” Khushdil tittered.

  “Any of you. Who has seen the malang? Anyone?”

  A flurry of voices rose up to protest her question. How could they have seen the malang? He was up on Baba’s Nose, he would not come down to the village.

  “Well, then, we must go up there,” Khadija trumpeted. “We see the malang for ourselves. Which of you has se
nt him food?”

  “I sent him some raisins,” Khushdil said sheepishly; and several others then declared their charities but with a penitent awareness of how meager their offerings had been.

  “It’s not enough,” Khadija said. “Sorkhab has sent him dried meat, fruit-and-nut leather…we must take him something wonderful. Warm pudding! Yes, that’s just the thing—halwa! And we must take it to him in person.”

  The women burst into argument at the audacity of Khadija’s plan. Leave their compounds? Leave the very village? Climb the mountain? Absurd! But Khadija insisted. They would be wearing their ankle-length chadaris. There would be nothing to reproach in their conduct, it would be a pilgrimage. She herself had been to see the Howling Malang of Gulabad once. Her late husband had taken her—didn’t they all remember? To quicken her womb, had been the hope. If she could see that malang, why not this malang, their very own malang? They might get amulets from the mystical man. Gradually, she won the women over. They talked themselves into it, really, for all were burning with curiosity to see a man who had seen Allah, saw him every day if the stories were true.

  The visitors slept over that night, and the next morning, after the first spate of chores, Khadija directed the preparation of the halwa. They heated up real clarified butter, not sheep’s fat, they stirred sugar and wheat-flour into it, and ground pistachios, and water and essence of roses into it, making a cauldron of the warm pudding, and they ate quite a bit of it themselves while they cooked—just to make sure it was acceptable: licking the grease off their fingers and smacking their lips with satisfaction. Khushdil ate twice as much as the others, and Khadija wanted to slap her fat face. Stop gorging on another household’s scant food, she wanted to scold. But officially this was Soraya’s household, and so Soraya had to take the lead, and Soraya, of course, remained oblivious to the tubby locust despoiling her husband’s stores.