Revolt

by Shahraz, Qaisra

  ‘Can’t say much at the moment, only that I care for her very deeply and will make her my wife, one day!’ The smile was that of a triumphant man, echoing once again the words he had vowed as a 13-year-old.

  ‘You sound so certain. Is it Nafisa?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Bano?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Will you not tell me?’

  ‘No, Mother. I don’t know if she’ll consider me yet. Today I know what I want. Everything I do will be with your blessing! You’ll witness your son’s nikkah!’

  ‘Please tell me who she is! Stop talking in riddles, Arslan!’

  ‘OK – somebody you know and love!’ he teased.

  ‘Tell me!’ Gulbahar cried in frustration.

  ‘No! I can’t until I have her permission. Now that you know where my marital inclinations lie, please treat this English guest with the courtesy for which we are renowned. She deserves the best hospitality – as she’s a very special guest.’

  Daniela stood listening; her ears were familiar with the rhythm of the Urdu language, although she did not understand what was being said.

  ‘I’ve just explained at length to my mother that there is nothing going on between us. Now, you can see how relaxed she is.’ Arslan switched to English.

  ‘Well, she’s wrong about us, but spot on in another way. I feel so strange being here, Arslan.’

  *

  Rani went to her daughter’s room and patiently waited. Saher was on the prayer mat, offering her midday zuhr prayers, with an extra set of thanksgiving nafl sequence for Ismail’s safe arrival. Prayers completed, Saher plucked off the white muslin scarf from her head, freeing the loose waves of hair to tumble down to her shoulders. Her mother’s eloquent eyes forced her shy gaze to fall to the car keys on the table, her heartbeat accelerating.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Yes.’ Saher would have liked to meet Ismail alone, shying away from the prospect of speaking to him in public.

  *

  ‘We have a goorie in the house!’ Begum excitedly shouted to Ali as soon as she saw him.

  ‘A goorie?’ Aghast, his eyes widened. What was a goorie doing in this part of the world and in their master’s home? Their village wasn’t exactly a favourite international tourist spot despite its scenic surroundings.

  ‘Arslan brought her from the airport. A real goorie, Ali! With golden hair and milky white skin and …’ her voice lowered to a whisper, ‘naked legs.’

  ‘I see.’ Mind ablaze with images of bare flesh, Ali was deeply offended. Female modesty was something he dearly valued in the village women around him. In the city, he was always uncomfortable in the company of women with naked arms.

  He wanted to condemn his wife’s excitement.

  ‘She has nothing to do with Arslan, in case you are jumping to any conclusions!’ Begum hastened to explain, accurately reading his mind. ‘If you think that she has followed him from America, then you are wrong. Arslan told us that she has lost her ticket and needed somewhere to stay … In fact, she was on the same plane as Master Ismail.’ She stopped, glimpsing a wary look enter her husband’s face. ‘What’s wrong, Ali?’ she croaked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he muttered, turning his face away, hiding his raw feelings.

  ‘Tell me, Ali?’

  ‘I said nothing, woman – leave it!’ He brutally cut her short, hearing footsteps outside the kitchen. ‘Don’t you dare open your mouth to anyone, or say anything about the goorie being here!’ Ali ordered, seeing the door open as Gulbahar entered the kitchen, catching his last words.

  ‘Is anything the matter, Ali?’ Gulbahar quietly enquired, confronted by the nervous look on both their faces.

  ‘No, Mistress,’ he muttered, hurrying to leave. From behind Gulbahar’s shoulders he signalled to his wife to zip her mouth. Begum stared blankly, her heart nearly exiting from her body, wondering at the new disaster about to assault this doom-ridden family. The goorie could only mean one thing – trouble!

  ‘Is everything all right, Begum?’ Gulbahar coaxed, determined to find out the truth.

  ‘Everything is fine, Mistress.’ Begum turned to chop the salad, wondering whether to slice rings or chop into small dice. She had not prepared a meal for an English guest before.

  ‘Use less chilli powder in the curry – we don’t know if this Englishwoman has tasted our food or has the strength for red chillies,’ Gulbahar instructed.

  ‘Mistress …’ Her runaway mouth had opened.

  ‘Yes, Begum?’

  ‘Who is this woman?’ The question hung heavily between the two: employer and employee – trusted lifelong friends.

  ‘She’s a visitor!’ Gulbahar’s gaze fixed sharply on Begum’s face. ‘What do you think? You heard what Arslan told us, he wouldn’t dare lie to me.’

  ‘Yes, but she came on the same plane as Ismail?’ Begum pressed, unable to stop herself, spurred by a niggling fear.

  Silence.

  Mithu’s repetitive chanting of ‘salaam’ from the courtyard was the only audible sound.

  ‘What are you insinuating, Begum?’ Gulbahar’s faint voice pelted.

  ‘I don’t know, but is there a connection?’ Begum’s eyes opened wider.

  ‘A connection? Please don’t!’ Gulbahar beseeched, panicstricken for the second time in one day, desperately warding off the unwelcome thoughts and images prompted by Begum’s words.

  ‘I … I …’ Begum stuttered, but her mistress had already gone. Begum abandoned the half-cut tomato. In the courtyard she heard her mistress calling her son, her tone urgent. Begum hastened after her mistress into the guest room.

  Daniela was lying on the bed with her legs dangling over the edge, cheeks wet, staring up at the swirling ceiling fan when Gulbahar and Begum entered. She sat up, blushingly pulling her skirt down over her bare knees. Gulbahar had one magical word poised on her lips.

  ‘Ismail!’ It performed its magic on the white woman. Daniela’s eyes grew large in her face and then she lowered her gaze. Heart thumping, Gulbahar swung her gaze to her woman helper, and repeated the word ‘Ismail!’ her eyes calmly fixed on the Englishwoman.

  Daniela licked her lips, colour slowly reddening her cheeks, and stared back at Arslan’s mother.

  Nausea heaving through her, Gulbahar fled outside. They had Ismail’s whore under their very own roof. Gulbahar leaned against the marble wall for support, gulping fresh air into her lungs.

  ‘Begum!’ she uttered. Her housekeeper’s face mirrored her own misgivings. ‘Our children will kill us.’

  ‘Mistress, you don’t know the truth …’

  ‘Begum, did you not see how she reacted to Ismail’s name? Allah Pak, what’s going to happen to my two sisters?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ Begum pitifully raised her hands in defeat, eyes brimming with tears.

  ‘What will we tell Saher?’

  ‘You’ll tell her nothing!’ Arslan harshly commanded from the veranda.

  ‘Whose whore have you brought to our home, Arslan? Tell me the truth! If she’s not yours, is she Ismail’s?’

  ‘She’s not a whore, Mother,’ Arslan shouted, outraged. ‘She’s someone very special in your nephew’s life. Are you ready to hear it?’ He waited, his eyes on their faces.

  Gulbahar nodded, her head was dizzying to new heights.

  ‘She’s Ismail’s wife … not his whore!’ her son jeered. ‘Are you happy now?’

  They weren’t ‘happy’ at all – he had crushed them. A whore was one thing, but a wife! Unthinkable. Saher!

  Gulbahar gave up, seeking solace on her woman helper’s shoulders. Begum’s arms went protectively around her mistress. Arslan watched the two women locked in their grief with piteous eyes. ‘Please don’t tell Saher yet! It’ll kill her!’ he pressed.

  ‘Your sister destroyed our world ten years ago when she left this village. Today Ismail has done the same. Why does passion hit our families, Begum? What have we sisters done to deserve these misfortunes with our childr
en?’

  Arslan left the two women bewailing their lot. His thoughts were with his cousin, Saher.

  *

  Saher sat quietly beside her mother in the large drawing room, trying to recover her lost poise. Her fiancé had disappointed her. Although she hadn’t expected him to greet her with hugs, a cool smile and a shy hello didn’t quite merit years of patient waiting as his fiancée.

  ‘My son is even more shy than your Saher!’ Mehreen had paradoxically boasted, nudging her sister.

  Rani nodded stiffly, not at all amused with Ismail’s behaviour. In fact, she was downright fuming. Ismail hadn’t even bothered to greet her properly, and she was Saher’s mother! Is that what velat, foreign lands, did to people – turned warm blood into icy water?

  The contours of Rani’s beautiful, unsmiling face grew harsher as the evening wore on – the grooves at the side of her mouth widened and her eyes hawked over Ismail. When Arslan entered the drawing room, mother and daughter noticed the exchange of pointed stares between the two cousins and watched him follow Ismail out of the room.

  ‘You had better face the consequences!’ Arslan burst out, pushing the bedroom door shut behind him, body aggressively poised. ‘The news about Daniela is going to reach this hevali soon.’

  ‘What have you told them?’

  ‘Mother and Begum found out. I’ve left them buried in shock and grief.’

  ‘That stupid bitch!’ Ismail spat, aghast. His auntie knew!

  Arslan dived at his cousin, throwing his tight fist straight across his jaw. Ismail fell on the marble floor, reeling from the pain.

  ‘That was for using such an awful term for your wife and for wasting five years of our Saher’s life, you louse! I’ll not let you marry her! You don’t deserve her!’

  ‘I’m already married, you fool!’ Ismail stiffly reminded him, lifting himself up.

  ‘How could you do this to her and to your family?’

  ‘The same way that your Laila did with the potter’s son!’ Ismail taunted. ‘In your parents’ eyes she married beneath her. I married a woman from another race and country! So what?’

  ‘Yes, so what?’ Arslan jeered, eyes sparkling with pure hatred. ‘Laila damaged my family, just as you are now going to make two sisters into bitter enemies. Do you think Auntie Rani will ever forgive you for jilting her beloved only child, the chirag, the noor, the light of her life? Or that your parents will accept a goorie into their household, ever?’

  ‘Well, why do you think I’ve not told them?’ Ismail snarled back, now really hating his younger cousin. ‘I knew what their reaction would be. I came home, not to marry Saher, but to gently wean my parents into accepting my marriage to Daniela, now pregnant with our first child. I can’t keep it a secret any longer. I hadn’t bargained on her foolishly following me here, however. I’m still in a state of shock myself.’

  ‘Well, you had better make an honest woman out of Daniela soon, by claiming her as your wife. Otherwise they’ll think that she’s my mistress who has followed me here … I can’t go on lying for you … only until I can break the news gently to Saher myself. And don’t you dare go near her!’ he threatened, ignoring the speculative gleam in his cousin’s eyes.

  ‘What is it to you, anyway?’ Ismail scoffed, taken aback by his cousin’s impassioned behaviour and scanning his face with interest.

  ‘Don’t push your luck, Ismail. You had better find some excuse to visit Daniela! Or you’ll have neither a wife nor a child after the disgraceful way that you treated her at the airport. It would send any woman off the rails,’ Arslan brutally reminded his cousin before leaving.

  Ismail stared at his luggage, wanting to flee back to England with Daniela. But it was too late; he was cornered, and all because of Arslan. A wife he had disowned – how despicable of him! ‘But what could I do?’

  CHAPTER 12

  The Visit

  Laila stood on the potter’s rooftop, her eyes fixed on her parents’ hevali in the other section of the village.

  ‘Your velati cousin Ismail has arrived!’ Massi Fiza, the laundrywoman had cheerily announced. ‘And a goorie from velat, too! Guess where she’s staying? In your parents’ home. Who is she?’ she asked eagerly, expecting Laila to have the answer.

  Laila’s response was an open mouth. Did the white woman have anything to do with Arslan?

  ‘Massi Fiza was saying that there’s a goorie in the white hevali. Is there one, Mummy? I want to see a real goorie!’ Shirin had excitedly asked later.

  ‘Yes, Shirin, but she can’t be as white as you,’ Laila indulgently told her daughter, priding herself on her daughter’s colouring. ‘Come on, let’s go downstairs, it’s getting dark soon. I still need to wash your dress.’

  ‘For Daddy’s arrival?’

  ‘No. I’ve asked him not to come.’

  ‘But why? I want him to come.’

  Laila’s eyes were on her foot, poised on the broken step. She had nearly twisted her ankle two days ago.

  ‘We are going back soon.’ Laila remembered to answer her daughter’s question, once she was safely down on the veranda.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘But, Mummy, you said we were going to stay here for many days?’

  ‘Well, I’ve changed my mind. We are going back tomorrow.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘No buts, Shirin, we’ll be going back to Islamabad.’ She glared down at her daughter’s petulant face.

  Away from her daughter, Laila mourned, ‘I just want one more glimpse of my Arslan and to hug him.’

  Then she would disappear, for there was nothing else to keep her here. Her parents had slammed the door on her. The image of her mother’s peeping face still wounded her – over ten years of waiting to see that beloved face. ‘When will you forgive me, Mother?’ Laila bitterly wept, picking up the unwashed crockery. ‘I want to see you!’

  Her formerly elegant hands, ‘worthy of being wrapped in cotton buds’ in Begum’s words, had fingertips crisscrossed with lines from the daily scouring of pots. As she tipped another greasy clay pot under the water pump, the image of her father’s foot crushing her garland in the dust and the village women smirking behind their chadors bitterly flashed across her eyes. It was the ultimate humiliation; the mighty Haider’s daughter on the ground, scooping up the remains of the crushed garland.

  ‘Mummy, are you all right?’ Shirin had run down the stairs, anxiously peeping up into her mother’s face. She recognised the tear-choked tone – having lived with it all her life and sometimes wondering why her mother cried so much.

  ‘Why have you been crying a lot here, Mummy?’

  Laila turned her face away, heart melted. ‘OK, we’ll stay another week. Go and watch TV! I’ll go across to the dhoban’s to collect your frocks.’

  *

  Laila’s timid knocks on the door of Massi Fiza’a home went unheard, for Massi Fiza had a more interesting mission than getting through the laundry bags littering her small courtyard. ‘Most of my clients have suitcases and wardrobes stuffed with clothes. So they won’t go naked if I am a day late with the washing!’ Massi Fiza made a point of reminding herself.

  Ensconced in the goldsmith’s drawing room, Massi Fiza was in full reel entertaining Rukhsar and her three ‘fashionably dressed’ daughters whilst slurping down her cup of milky coffee and plucking another delicious ghee-fat ladoo from the steel plate. Two streets away, the village butcher had been blessed with a baby son. As well as being entertained by the transvestites’ – the khusroos – merry dancing and singing, most households in the vicinity had been rewarded with a basket of ladoos. Only the households that his wife had fallen out with were deliberately omitted, openly shaming them. For the butcher’s wife was unable to hear any criticism of her husband’s skill as a butcher, in respect of his mean cut of meat or that he weighed in too much of the fat.

  ‘Honestly, she’s as milky white as that tablecloth of yours!’ Massi Fiza excitedly elaborated – fasci
nation with skin colour, tones and facial marks was one of Massi Fiza’s favourite topics – pointing her greasy, chapped finger towards the dining table next to the window.

  ‘Really!’ Rukhsar voiced in wonder.

  ‘I was collecting the laundry from Begum then. Oh, Rukhsarji, you should have seen the look on poor Begum’s face as the goorie entered their hevali!’

  ‘I see!’

  ‘It was her legs, Rukhsar-ji, long, muscled, white legs – not thin ones like mine and not a single hair in sight!’

  ‘Everyone has hairs on their legs!’ scoffed Rukhsar’s youngest daughter, Farah, not fully appreciating the picture and irritated with their dhoban’s knack for exaggeration. ‘Her hair is golden. So either you can’t see or it has been shaved off – women do shave, you know,’ she explained drily.

  ‘I don’t!’ Massi Fiza looked horrified. ‘I would never let the razor come near my legs. Look!’ She pulled up her shalwar to her kneecap. ‘See, my leg is smooth – thanks to the vigorous scrubbing with the pumice stone.’

  ‘Please do go on!’ Rukhsar prompted, interested in the goorie, not Massi Fiza’s smooth, thin, brown legs!

  ‘And her hair, Rukhsar-ji! I’m sure it can’t be more than two inches long. Can you believe it? Your husband’s hair is at least three inches longer.’

  ‘Are you insinuating that my Sharif-ji keeps his hair long? Come on, my friend, girls here in Pakistan now also have these boy cuts, especially in the city. And this woman is a goorie, from a different land. The important question we should ask ourselves, however, is who is she? That’s what I’d like to know,’ Rukhsar finished. They exchanged meaningful glances.

  ‘What is this white woman doing in our village?’ Rukhsar continued, being the first to open her mouth. ‘It’s not every day that a goorie from velat ends up on our doorstep. And then to arrive on the same plane as Ismail! Also, why is she staying at Master Haider’s hevali? Whose sweetheart is she? Arslan’s or Ismail’s?’ She lowered her voice to a whisper, seeing her daughters delicately drop their gazes, but exchange sly glances beneath their Max Factor-streaked eyelashes.