by Ali Sethi
She panicked.
She found the painter, and he said she could use the phone in his bedroom and pointed her to it; she went in and didn’t switch on the light and sat down on the bed, which was hard, and dialed the code and then the number and waited.
She had nothing to say for herself.
“Hello?” It was Mabi.
“I’ve reached,” said Zakia.
“Hello, Zakia?”
“Yes, it’s me, I’m here, I’ve reached.”
There was a pause. Then Mabi said, “What time do you think it is now?”
And Zakia said, “I don’t know. Ten?”
“It’s not ten,” said Mabi. “It is eleven thirty at night. What kind of family do you think you’re from?”
Zakia said, “I wanted to call earlier . . .”
“Don’t talk to me,” said Mabi, and hung up the phone.
She held on to hers. The line was dead, the tone flat and mocking.
“Was that your mother?”
She turned.
“Was that your mother?” And the second time he said it she saw his silhouette in the light of the doorway. She didn’t recognize the voice, didn’t think it was right, and she switched on the lamp.
He was there. And he was still. His face was fair, his eyes small and black, his body slim and tall enough to touch the door frame. He was wearing a maroon checked shirt with the front hanging out over his trousers. And he was holding a beer bottle in his hand.
“I don’t know you,” she said, and began to get up to go.
A ghost had gone from the empty bed and had left her crying. And she had been crying from before, crying because she was alone, and the going-away was how it ended, in another departure. But it was not a dream, and she removed the covers and got up now and went into the bathroom. Nargis had gone in the morning. That was the thing she had seen—her bathrobed back going out of the room. She washed her face in the sink, gargled noisily, then spat out the water and wiped her mouth with a towel. The feeling was with her still. She went back into the room and flung aside the curtains, and in the light her thoughts were settling. The feeling wasn’t real, she knew it was from the dream, and she remembered now that it had involved him, and in the kinds of circumstances that occur frequently in dreams. He had been himself but like someone she had always known. They had gone back to Karachi in the car and there her parents had rejected him. Then she was in her room and writing letters to him, and he was a dog in a cage and never responded to her letters. It should have made her laugh. It didn’t. Instead she felt relief, sudden and overwhelming, to know that her dreams were hers and weren’t being played out before other people while she was having them in all their pressing vividness.
She went to the wardrobe mirror and saw that the small sacks under her eyes were inflamed. She touched them cautiously, with her fingertips, and felt nothing.
She went to the bed and brought out her sandals from underneath, put them on, then tied her hair in one swift movement into a ponytail and went with her intentions out of the room.
The house was undergoing a slow revival. Sleep clung to corners doused in shadow, to the dim glass cabinets that gave no reflection on their own. But there was mayhem whenever she passed an open window and violently disturbed the golden dust particles suspended in slanting shafts of light. She stopped, became reverent and proceeded slowly. The sun was like a difficult god, present in the things it made visible: it was in the broad vertical gleam that lay on the washed bonnet of the car outside, in the sudden silver prongs that came now from the gardener’s hose and fell on the daisies in their patch; and it was in the sky beyond, which was lost in clouds and had merged with the far tips of mountains.
The aunt was in the drawing room, and sat in the same wheelchair but without the blanket thrown across her knees. She was reading the newspaper, and her glasses were perched just above the tip of her nose, waiting to fall, though she had managed by some mastery of habit to keep them there. The eyes were alert, at once perturbed and seeking, and moved with the page when it turned.
She saw Zakia and said, “Good!” She attempted to stack the newspaper on her knees, folded the pages and patted them subduingly into her lap. She said, “Have breakfast.”
“I’m full, thank you,” said Zakia, and sat properly in a chair by the window, with her back arched and her legs crossed at the knees. She was good at indulging the elderly.
“Nothing at all?” said the woman. Her face had creased with concern.
Zakia said, “Nothing, thank you,” and gave a small smile of contentment.
“What do you think?” said the woman. “Will they hang him?”
Zakia blinked. She appeared to ponder it, then made a serious face and said, “I don’t think so.”
The woman said, “They say they will.” She picked up the newspaper and shook it open.
SUPREME COURT DISMISSES BHUTTO APPEAL.
“O God,” said Zakia.
“You see?” said the woman.
“Yes,” said Zakia. “But I don’t think they will. Because they can’t. How can they?” And it was what she had heard others say.
The woman stayed grim. She said, “It is all very frightening,” and shuddered. “I don’t know how they are keeping up. The wife, you know . . .”
“Yes,” said Zakia, because she did know that the wife of the deposed prime minister was presently fighting the case in court and had taken over his party. She was a slim, stylish woman, and was currently under surveillance.
“And his daughter,” said the woman, and her tone was awestruck and admiring.
“I know,” said Zakia, and smiled. It was the fashion, this attitude of affectionate concern for the girl, who was going around with the mother and trying to rouse people. They cheered for her. The general hadn’t allowed the judges to acquit the accused because he knew it would end in his own elimination. It was infuriating but also understandable. And there was nothing anyone could do, certainly no one who wasn’t a politician or an activist of some sort. It all led back to the larger scheme of things, in which there was no place for people like herself.
Zakia straightened the hem of her kameez and said, “No, I don’t think they’ll hang him.” And as she said it she felt it grow into a conviction, or something like it, a temporary faith that was taken from the likelihood and made to console.
She went on talking now because she had to. She said, “There’s not enough evidence,” and saw that that line of reasoning had already been exhausted. Then she said, “It’s never happened before,” and knew at once that there was always the chance that it could. The more she talked the more she saw, with growing resentment, that she didn’t know enough about a matter of national importance, which should already have engaged her to the degree that it was now doing.
The woman said, “Eat something.”
But Zakia was overwhelmed by her own failure and said, “No, no, thank you.”
“Why don’t you go out?” said the woman, and put aside the newspaper. “Go out and get some fresh air.”
In jail there was no fresh air for anyone.
“Take a walk.”
She didn’t deserve it.
“I always recommend a walk to young people.”
And his daughter was only a few years older than she, and was going into jails. Zakia couldn’t imagine going to see her own father like that because she couldn’t think of what she would say.
She said, “Do you think they’ll hang him?”
And the woman smiled and said, “No. I don’t think they will. I don’t think they can. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”
They played cards. It was a simple game called Memory, in which the cards were shuffled and then placed facedown in rows. One had to lift a card, any card, and then lift another to see if it matched. One began to recall the cards and their particular places and to gather pairs that were then stacked in a corner. But she still made mistakes, and was unaccountably angry when she did.
&nb
sp; “Don’t worry,” said the woman. “You are new. You will learn. Look at me. I learned. If I can do it, anyone can. That’s how I look at things. Of course now there’s another way, an opposite way, which is to think, If others can do it, so can I. That is the fashion now, is it not? Yes, yes. It is the fashion. Among some of the new girls.” And she enlarged and then narrowed her eyes, as if to grant the very reaction those girls were seeking before withdrawing it chasteningly.
They went on playing. The woman won the first round, the second round, and allowed Zakia to win the third. But the fourth the girl won on her own. It restored her. She asked the woman about the house and the things in it. The paintings, she was told, were made by Ustad Allah Bux, whom the woman and her husband had known. “We bought them when they were for nothing. Now they are worth more. Who knows how these things are decided? If a picture is pretty, I keep it. That is my approach. Don’t you think that should be the approach?”
And they talked of Nargis, who had still not returned. The woman said she wasn’t bothered. “Not at all. It is love! I have always believed in love. Don’t you?”
Zakia said she did, though her own experience was of nothing, and her real thoughts were embarrassingly unresolved.
“You know,” said the woman, “I didn’t have what they call a love marriage. It was not done like that in those days. Very few people. Some Hindus. And some Sikhs, because their women are like that.” She stuck out her elbows like a clucking chicken, though she was trying to imply physical robustness and independence of spirit. “But among the Muslims it was not like that. No, no, we were very correct. Very. I met my husband on the day I married him. And I fell in love with him there and then. It is true. I have told my children and they don’t believe me. But it was love at first sight.”
It had to be, Zakia thought.
“We had a happy marriage. He never looked at another woman. That was enough. It should be enough. Why should you make demands? You know”—she became stern—“a wife must never make demands. You know why? Because it spoils the household. A wife should stay content. This is mine, she should say, and that is not. Buss. No more for me. I am happy with what I have.”
Zakia wanted to ask other questions but didn’t think she could.
The woman said, “He fell off a horse. That was how he went.” She picked up a card and it was the right one. “Oh, look!” she cried.
“I’m so sorry,” said Zakia.
“But I’ve won it!” said the woman.
“Oh!” said Zakia, and brought herself at once into that happy mode.
“Yes,” said the woman, smiling, and added the new cards carefully to her stack. “So, yes. He died. Just broke his neck and that was it.”
Zakia shook her head.
“Yes,” said the woman, and sighed. “It was something. It was a shock. I grieved. Every widow grieves. But I was fine afterward. You will be, you know. If you have your house and your children, you will learn to get on. In the beginning it is difficult. The things you are left with, they are like the noose, something you have never imagined. How can you? You cannot. But time waits for no one. That is a very famous saying. Did you know it?”
“Yes,” said Zakia, and saw that the maidservant had come into the room and was standing before them with a towel in her hands. She said the bathwater was ready.
The woman was alarmed, then dismayed and resigned. She held out her hands, which the maidservant clasped in hers, and Zakia went over to help her up and then stood by the chair and watched as the woman was led slowly out of the room.
She was alone once again. But her thoughts were with her. She went back to where she had sat, but instead of sitting down in the chair she decided to stay standing, and stood above a shelf lined with small items of decoration. She subjected herself to the broad view in the window. It was late morning. The light was fierce. It would stay like this for a few more hours and then start to go. It was odd that there wasn’t a single moment in the day when the sun began to set or began to rise, just as there was no way of catching the first hint of night. They were concepts of importance, sunrise and sunset and dusk and dawn, and were required by songs and poems. They were a convenience in that sense, things that people, even if they couldn’t prove their existence, needed for a sense of sequence in their lives. And some lives were more ordered than others. She thought of Nargis, of her determination to have the things she wanted, which came from a sureness, a way of knowing where she came from and where she was going. She couldn’t imagine Nargis ever having a conflicted thought and then keeping it like that in her mind; all her thoughts must be stalled for analysis and resolved. Which was not to suggest that Nargis was unflawed, or didn’t have dilemmas of her own; Zakia knew that Nargis, like everyone else, was undisclosed and was in some ways capable of anything. But Nargis had a way with things, she was predictable, and Zakia knew now that she would return from her outing with tales of success, with news of annexations and expansions that would leave her tormented and filled with regret at her own inaction. That was the most predictable thing, inaction, a birthright, a void with which all people were born and had to fill with their own needs and desires. But she knew herself, she knew her limitations and lived within them, and people everywhere had strengths and weaknesses. She raised a brassy urn from the shelf, brought it to her nose and took in the faintly sour smell. The gardener had watered his plants and left. Routine was life for most people. And if the novelty was bound to fade, if it was destined, like all living things, to move steadily toward an end, what was the point? (The point of wanting, not of marriage, which sat substantially in her hazy view of life.) She saw that she had strayed into irrelevance, and from there the punishing impulse quickly moved to snuff her out: it was best to forget the episode; in a matter of days she would be in Karachi, with her parents and her sister, and this glimpsed life would be in the past and at rest. She resolved to enjoy the scenery; she flung open the window and was startled by the fragrance, the same as yesterday’s, a washed deep green. She closed and then opened her eyes, and watched with growing involvement as a pair of courting squirrels chased each other in an erratic spiral down the bark of a tree.
She was going outside to collect pinecones.
The path led downhill. She had brought an umbrella, in case of rain, and had changed into a dark brown shalwar kameez and a black sweater so that the spatters wouldn’t show. She started walking, hurriedly at first, then slowed down and developed a steady pace. She was going nowhere, a walk without a destination. She kept walking. The pine trees to either side of her shot far into the sky and had needles that didn’t start to show until more than halfway up the bark. She even came across a white tree, white like ivory. It had been struck by lightning, and the thought held her: the sound, the shock, the sensation, then the lack of it, and then the way it would leave her looking, whitened and stiff and with her arms stretched out like a scarecrow’s.
She screamed.
It was a monkey.
She calmed herself. Her heartbeat was audible. She began to walk again, but slowly, and with the umbrella in her hand, and the monkey didn’t follow and went its own way, and she was able to go on walking. But the mind was astounding! It produced fear and also produced ways of ending that fear, was self-reproaching and self-correcting. Zakia thought of madness as she walked along that dusty track, the source of make-believe, the thing that enabled dreams and fantasies but also created hallucinations, delirium, hysteria; and of the mental asylum in a run-down part of the city, a vast concrete building that had no windows and from where, it was said, the most terrible sounds came until late in the night. She had seen those people in public places, the ones with the eyes and the unexplained laughing, the speakers of gibberish, those who had lost the ability to discriminate between illusion and reality. She detected a release in their madness, and an implied kinship in their communications with the sane, who were tongueless and confined, like caged animals, when confronted with that challenging nonsense.
&nbs
p; She went on walking. She had nothing to fall back on. She had never known love, never known real hatred either, and was still a person of moods, a person with a temperament, a person who felt things with uncontestable intensity. It dismayed her to know that these things were imagined. But that didn’t end the excitement, didn’t make what she thought or felt any less compelling.
She saw that she had come too far. The path had ended, and the trees were thick here and deep, the light high up and out of reach, a twinkling between the tops. There was no one way now, just dusty improvised tracks that went in different directions and may or may not have been man-made. She thought of the time and recalled that it was early afternoon. But she could be delayed here until the light began to go, and then it would be impossible to get out. She took a few determined steps in one direction, became conflicted, stopped, turned to go in the other direction but was aware now of her indecision and had to stop altogether. She was surprised when she cried out for help and the sound came back, strangely disembodied and sinister, as though someone else had said it but in her voice, someone who knew things and now gave her this feeling of being watched. She cried out again, and the echo was louder this time; her eyes were shut and her fingers were gripping the handle of the umbrella, which had a blunt tip and which she knew she couldn’t have used as a weapon.
A movement came from behind the trees. She heard the sound of nearing footsteps and became still.
“Do you need help?”
And she was overwhelmed with surprise and relief, because it was him.
“Are you lost?”
She saw that he was wearing the same shirt as the night before, and that it was crumpled, suggesting that he hadn’t bathed. She forgave it. She saw the faint growing hair above his lip.
