Revolt

by Shahraz, Qaisra

  Begum shuffled back to the kitchen. The dinner preparation and the household chores had to be got on with. Above all, the hevali had to be emptied of all eavesdropping servants, and soon.

  ‘Farida, wash everything quickly! I don’t need you this evening! I’ll manage – the visitors are not coming,’ Begum explained to the young maid, ignoring her confused look.

  ‘Yes, Mistress Begum!’ came a meek reply.

  With exasperation, Begum eyed her leisurely scrubbing strokes. Why couldn’t the chit swing her arms out properly and give the pots a really good shine. What was wrong with the hands of the youth these days – weaklings!

  ‘Oh, God!’ Begum dropped the ladle in the curry sauce. She had to stop the guests from coming. And who would be the one to tell Master Haider? Begum agonised.

  She needn’t have worried.

  *

  Haider had personally decided to call on Jennat Bibi, the local sweetmaker’s wife, to order the sweetmeats for his daughter’s wedding. Jennat Bibi loved taking orders from Haider’s household, as the delivery of baskets of sweets gave her an opportunity to visit ‘that wonderful magical palace’ as she boasted to her family and friends.

  The sweetmaker’s front door was open and Haider overheard two female voices from within, locked in a hushed conversation; one speaker was Jennat Bibi.

  ‘Have you heard that Master Haider’s daughter, Laila, has eloped with the potter’s son? And the poor potters have all fled! See for yourself! A huge padlock is dangling from their door!’

  Transfixed, Haider leaned heavily against the wall for support. He heard the peal of bells from the milk buffaloes trundling past him and the mumbled greeting, ‘Salaam, Master-ji’ of the cowherd, shepherding them down the lane.

  A dog barking brought Haider back to reality and he hastened away down the lane – to the potter’s door. A rusty old aluminium padlock hung heavily in the middle of the bolted wooden door. Haider stood lost in thought, wondering how to verify the truth of what he had overheard.

  ‘Just gossip by bitching women!’

  Not wanting to meet anyone, Haider slid quietly through the hevali side door and went straight up to his daughter’s room – it was empty.

  With a thudding heart, he padded through all the rooms. In the kitchen, Begum was stirring the ladle in the cooking pot; he quietly closed the door.

  His last destination was the rooftop, where he found Arslan flying his kite alone.

  ‘Arslan, have you seen your sister today?’

  His son was squinting in the hot afternoon sunshine, tugging at the kite string. His kite was swaying in the sky, and about to crash straight into his friend Saleem’s large, blue, striped one.

  ‘No.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he mumbled, annoyed at being pestered about his sister.

  ‘Did you see her at breakfast time?’

  ‘No!’ was the quick surly answer. Arslan did not like his father’s harsh tone of voice.

  ‘Did you see her last night?’ Frowning, Arslan tried to remember. ‘Leave the damn thing alone and answer me, boy!’ Haider demanded.

  Arslan lost his grip on the string and watched in horror as his kite floated away. For the first time he felt the stirring of hatred for his father.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Don’t know!’ Arslan’s eyes fell before his father’s. He remembered seeing his sister leave through the back door at nine o’clock, with Begum standing behind her. ‘Begum knows,’ he volunteered, wanting to get rid of his father. Haider was already sprinting down the marble stairs.

  Arslan gazed up at his beautiful kite drifting away, wondering which lucky boy would pull it down.

  *

  When the door slammed shut, Begum knew that this was the moment she had been dreading. Heart pounding, she failed to greet her master.

  ‘Begum, just answer one question!’ the dignified voice commanded. ‘Were you the last person to see our Laila?’

  Begum trembled. ‘Yes.’ The wooden spoon fell with a loud plop into the large pot of milk and carrots for the gajar halva pudding.

  The door was slammed shut.

  Begum turned the stove off. It didn’t matter if the carrot halva got burned, for the master would not be eating anything from her hand today. Her days at the hevali had come to a piteous end. After ensuring all the servants had left, she let herself out by the side door – the family needed privacy.

  Arms tightly folded against her chest under her cotton chador, Begum shuffled back to her home, stepping twice on the sun-baked cow pats on the footpath. Where would they find employment like this one, Begum mourned? For years they had enjoyed privileges that not even other family members could anticipate. Their house furnishings were specially ordered for them. They had three well-balanced meals each day at the hevali with plenty of meat. Moreover Mistress Gulbahar had generously given the order to the Gujjar boy to deliver a large jug of milk to Begum’s home first thing every morning. She had even got them a fridge to store their milk and meat.

  Begum did not wear Mistress Gulbahar’s cast-offs, but velvets in the winter, and in summer her body was caressed by the softest of lawns and silks that felt like malai cream, even between her chapped fingertips.

  ‘Mistress Laila, you have robbed us of our livelihood,’ Begum groaned aloud, gaze fixed longingly on the beautiful homestead. ‘I’m saying goodbye to the hevali!’

  At home, her faint whisper barely reached Ali’s ears, ‘He knows!’

  ‘It’s all your fault, you stupid woman!’ Leaping off his seat, Ali vented his wretchedness on her.

  Colour drained from Begum’s cheeks, shocked at her husband’s hostility and a fearful thought crossing her mind. Would he actually beat her? Her elder sister’s bruise-ridden body had scarred her youth. And she had vowed that she would never let any man touch her!

  ‘Ali! You don’t have to tell me what I already know!’ she coldly reminded him, her body rigid with hurt and indignation.

  ‘Can you imagine what will happen to Chaudharani Gulbahar when she faces her husband?’ Ali taunted, continuing his sexist tirade. ‘You women are all the same – weak, with your hearts ruling your heads!’

  ‘Ali, you are cruel! You loved Mistress Laila, too!’ Begum retaliated.

  ‘Just go and shove yourself in a big hole, Begum!’ Ali jeered, hating her sullen tone.

  That was the turning point – the moment in Begum’s humble life – that provided her with the answer to their predicament.

  ‘I don’t need to shove myself in any hole!’ she mocked, standing up tall. ‘I’m a faithful servant and I’ll not run away! I’m going back to the hevali. Even if they throw me out, Ali! I’ll station myself outside their front door until they forgive me. And I’ll go on begging for their forgiveness until they do!’

  ‘Good for you! But don’t come wailing to me later if they send you packing!’ he jeered.

  ‘Ali, stop being so childish!’ Loftily dismissing her husband, Begum retraced her steps back to the hevali.

  She had learned something new today; that when it came to a crisis, her husband completely lost his head. And that women were not weak, but men were cowards.

  Smiling, Begum cried, ‘On the contrary, we are strong, my silly Ali,’ sidling back into the hevali through the servants’ door. It was like a silent mausoleum.

  Where were her master and mistress?

  *

  Gulbahar’s dull eyes lifted from her husband’s feet and slowly journeyed to his face. His expression signalled everything. He knew. As she opened her mouth, it crossed her mind that she was going to dash years off him.

  ‘Haider Sahib, your beloved daughter has married the potter’s son.’ They were quiet words, but had a vicious sting. Her husband’s hand clutched the air, fingers reaching for support. Gulbahar steeled herself for the punishment: the thunder that would pelt her body; the abusive rainfall of sharp words. But there
was only a cloying, crushing silence.

  Her mighty stony-faced husband did nothing; he simply walked away.

  ‘Laila!’ An anguished scream rent though Gulbahar’s body. As if in a surreal dream, she dashed after her husband, panting up the stairs to their bedroom door but the handle wouldn’t move.

  ‘Haider-ji,’ she whimpered, panicking, ‘Please open the door!’

  No sound. Gulbahar slid down on the marble floor and resting her head against the walnut-lacquered door she wept. She felt his pain, but hers was sharper. ‘We’ve all betrayed him.’ Gulbahar sobbed into her silk dupatta with the hand-embroidered lacework, given to her by the wife of the governor of Punjab as a present when they hosted them in Lahore.

  ‘Mother!’ Arslan exclaimed. Gulbahar blinked, a large tear trembling on her lower eyelash. ‘What’s the matter, Mama?’

  ‘Your sister has swept the world from beneath our feet, my son!’ Gulbahar opted for honesty with her young son, but failed to use the word ‘eloped’.

  ‘What has she done?’ he asked eagerly, unable to make sense of his mother’s words.

  Gulbahar debated with herself. He was only young. ‘Your sister has married the potter’s son.’ Gulbahar assessed his face for his reaction. No surprise. No condemnation. ‘He doesn’t understand – he never will,’ she thought, envying her son’s innocence. ‘Arslan, please go and study in your room, my son!’ she advised, before entering her daughter’s room.

  There, her eyes fell on her daughter’s picture frame. ‘Laila, how could you do this to your father?’ Gulbahar sat on her daughter’s bed and wept again.

  Haider had locked himself in and her out of their bedroom. Gulbahar made dozens of journeys to their door that day and the next day. He had not eaten. Only drunk the tap water from the en-suite bathroom.

  ‘Please, Haider-ji!’ Begum, too, pleaded outside the bedroom.

  ‘It’s all my fault, if only I had told you!’ Begum wept on her mistress’s shoulder.

  ‘You didn’t tell her to elope or get married, did you, Begum? So please don’t blame yourself, my dear. If anyone is to blame, it’s me, her mother. How ignorant I am.’

  ‘Please, Mistress, don’t blame yourself – we are all at fault.’ The housekeeper offered generously, touched by her beloved mistress’s kindness.

  Even Ali’s appeals were ignored.

  *

  It was the new kitchen maid in Haider’s household who became the village loudspeaker, clearly letting everyone know about Laila’s elopement with the potter’s son. All waited with bated breath for the volcanic explosion at the hevali, wondering what the landlord would do to the potter’s family? Would he track them down? Speculations, speculations, but nobody knew for sure. They all agreed on one thing – that they expected something to happen; some momentous event to erupt in the village that would scorch everything and everyone in its path.

  They were in for a mighty big disappointment; the volcano didn’t erupt and there was no village scorching. No chasing after the potter’s family. Begum and Ali were not dismissed or thrown out of their living quarters.

  Master Haider had simply withdrawn – from everyone and everything. Even from his family. For it was rumoured that no one had seen him for three days. And of course the rumour of Laila’s elopement soon reached the ears of Laila’s prospective in-laws. The jilted landlord, humiliated though he was, counted himself lucky to escape from such an unsuitable match. No matter how gorgeous Laila was, she had become a besharm woman. And all for a potter’s son! Was she deranged?

  *

  ‘Can you believe it – locking yourself in?’ Massi Fiza teased her best friend, Rukhsar, peering longingly at the new gold necklace set that she was working on.

  ‘Apparently there’ll be no jewellery for Mistress Laila now! Would any parent give a dowry to a daughter who has disgraced them in this manner?’ The rhetorical question had the goldsmith’s wife’s head shooting up from the rows of rubies she was nimbly stringing.

  ‘Disgraceful, Massi Fiza!’ she loftily agreed.

  ‘Be careful, Mistress Rukhsar, you have three daughters yourself. You’ll need to watch them all!’ Massi Fiza slyly reminded her.

  ‘Oh, I do! I don’t know what our almighty Chaudharani Gulbahar was up to with her daughter. Fancy not even having an inkling of what was going on? These “big” people are so smart in so many things but apparently blind to a daughter’s izzat! It’s not as if she has half a dozen children – only two!’

  ‘Well, whether two or a dozen, children are very conniving these days. Thank goodness I don’t have any daughters to disgrace me,’ Massi Fiza preened.

  ‘Well, see that your boys don’t “disgrace” you by chasing after girls above their caste and station in life!’ Rukhsar returned equally cattily, bristling at her friend’s aspersion that she had only produced females.

  ‘My boys are quite sensible – you know what they are like.’ The feeble words did not quite ring true even to Massi Fiza’s own ears. Rukhsar dropped her gaze to her beads. It had dawned on her lately that her friend had a tendency to talk in glowing terms about her sons. As if everyone did not know what good-for-nothing sons they were. The realisation jolted through Rukhsar that Massi Fiza was after her daughter’s rishta!

  The goldmistress’s body trembled with indignation, nausea spiralling inside her, pricking her finger with the sharp tool as she poked the hole in the tiny pearl bead. A goldsmith’s daughter was no match for a laundrywoman’s son! The situation was almost the same as the incongruous match of Master Haider’s daughter with the potter’s son. No! Her ladli daughters were destined for more ‘elevated’ households, where gold flowed in abundance in the form of gold bracelets, not a home that overflowed with every Nethu Pethu’s dirty laundry.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Return

  Four months later, heavily veiled up to her eyes, Laila returned with her husband to the village in the middle of the night. Like bandits, they stole into Jubail’s family home, stealthily breaking open the ugly aluminium padlock.

  Inside the potter’s home, Laila saw her new home for the first time – a hovel. Everything was caked with dust and cobwebs – the two pillars, the rusty grilled windows, the veranda floor with patches of cement missing, even the washing line. In disgust, Laila withdrew from the kitchen washing area with its moss-encrusted water pump and went to inspect the rest of the house. That was it – just two rooms! No proper kitchen or bathroom. She hadn’t quite expected a replica of her parents’ palatial hevali, but this humble dwelling, devoid of any modern facilities, a few pieces of shabby furniture and stacks of ugly pots of all sizes littering the place was too much for poor Laila. At one stage, panicking, she was about to run out; and out of Jubail’s life. But to where and to what? Luckily, their Islamabad apartment was far better, rented with the money from the eight gold bangles she happened to be wearing the night of her elopement.

  Where would she cook? On that small portable oil burner stove, squatting on a rickety footstool? When she looked around for a rolling pin, her husband cheekily reminded her: ‘What wretched village woman uses a rolling pin to make chappatis? Only for puris! The first village task young women master on reaching their teens is often the art of making perfect round chappatis by hand! There are no Begums in the neighbouring households to help with the cooking.’

  How Laila wished she had learned the skill of making soft, round chappatis from Begum. This wasn’t Islamabad where they could fetch ready-made meals from cafes. Everything had to be prepared by her hands. And she was in no position to hire servants to scurry around doing her bidding. Shrugging her shoulders, Laila reminded herself that they were here on a special errand – to ask for her parent’s forgiveness and to return home to the hevali, where there were plenty of servants to take care of her needs. Jubail had strongly advised her against coming, saying it was too soon. Laila, however, wouldn’t rest until she had seen her parents and asked for their forgiveness. Each passing day had been agony. />
  ‘They can’t do anything to me now. I’m legally married,’ she emphatically told herself. ‘And parents always forgave.’

  What Laila hadn’t bargained on was that in her absence her beloved parents had swapped hearts for stones. Tossing and turning on the hard, jute-woven portable bed, she longed for the soft, wide breadth of her queen-sized bed in her family home and wondered how poor people slept on these narrow uncomfortable things. Even with two thick towels tucked under the bedsheet, she knew her back would be sore and lined with the jute-woven pattern marks.

  ‘I miss you so much, my darling Arslan. I can’t wait to see you,’ she wept, wetting another corner of the pillow. Unable to wait until the morning, Laila crept past Jubail, fast asleep on the other portable bed.

  Out in the open courtyard, she stared around in bemusement. ‘This is my new home …’

  Her own bedroom in the hevali was the size of the potter’s courtyard. Laila crushed the thought; the potter’s wheel was no match for her father’s acres of land and dozens of pedigree racehorses.

  Guided by the light of the moon, she located the staircase to the rooftop, semi-hidden behind a tall stack of round-bellied milk churning pots. Her father’s hevali, including the rooftop terrace, was elegantly dressed in marble from top to bottom. Half of the potter’s rooftop terrace, used for stacking pots and portable beds, was brick-lined. The other half had a small heap of coal and a pile of chopped wood to use for the rooftop chappati tandoor. No plants, or flowering bushes, or marble floor. Just three old rickety portable beds, one with a missing leg.

  Laila had very rarely viewed her home from any of the villager’s rooftops. In fact, she could not recall ever crossing to the other side of the village. The hevali was the first building in sight when one entered the village, and she had always travelled by car. Her everyday life had little to do with the local village people. As the daughter of the wealthy landlord it never occurred to her or her parents to befriend the village children. Similarly the villagers shied away; Laila was beyond their reach as a playmate or sphere of influence, even for the ‘fashionable and very modern’ goldsmith’s daughters.