by Dar, Azma;
Azma Dar
The Secret Arts
A prayer for cancer, a prayer to make millions. A prayer to kill an enemy’s reproductive functions, a prayer to remove the devil inside a girl who had suddenly started misbehaving and doing badly in school exams. The man sitting here wanted his neighbour’s daughter to fall in love with him, and for her fiancé’s mustard crops to be affected by drought.
In the lush Murree hill-country of Pakistan, a wedding has been announced, between Colonel Anwar Ahmed Ali, and Saika, a younger schoolteacher. Anwar is regarded by all as an upstanding figure – yet his glamorous former wife Zaireena died under mysterious circumstances, not to mention the poisoning of Pamela, her pet poodle. And Saika has now been told her new bridegroom is ‘a dangerous man’...
Across town, there is a seething cauldron of corruption, black magic, and close-knit families who can barely stand each other. So when Saika’s disreputable cousin Pervez is stabbed to death in his own hotel by a cloaked assailant, no one is very surprised, but Saika is shocked to find evidence implicating her husband. Inspector Sharif, in charge of the case, is looking everywhere for clues to the crime – and unearthing smoking guns and red herrings alike.
All the while, up in her eyrie the sinister Begum, Anwar’s invalid mother in law, lies... waiting and plotting.
In this accomplished and blackly comedic debut novel, Azma Dar captures the exuberance and dark side of a small community whose traditions are under attack from the forces of greed, jealousy and thwarted revenge.
CHAPTER 1
Colonel Anwar Ahmed Ali sat in the garden, eating French toast and tomato omelette. He pushed the eggs to one side and pulled his dressing gown tighter around him as a chill breeze swept over the lush Murree hills. He wouldn’t have any appetite until after tomorrow. He lifted his tea – for all his military training and precise table manners, at home he drank his tea in a bowl, much to the amusement of his friends. He wiped his grey moustache gently with a napkin and called his housekeeper, a tiny old woman with thick crusty surma in her eyes, and richly dyed black hair.
‘You haven’t touched it, Saabji,’ she said, putting the things into a tray.
‘I can’t, Gago.’
‘Really, Saabji, you must. How otherwise will you ride the white horse?’
‘Don’t be silly, Gago. There will be no horse, no band baaja or other nonsense. I’m not going to make a fool of myself. I know what they are saying in town – I can’t imagine what the poor girl has to listen to.’
Gago looked inside the teapot and poured some into an empty glass for herself. She sat down on the grass.
‘It’s wet,’ said Anwar.
‘My dress is thick, and so is my skin,’ said Gago. ‘Don’t worry about the girl – I mean the future Memsahib. She’s very happy. Looking forward to becoming queen of this palace.’ She gestured hugely with her arms at the mansion behind her, one of the grander residences in the small Pakistani town. Trails of bright pink bougainvillea tumbled over the austere building like the strands of an unwanted wig. Originally a brighter yellow, the walls of the haveli had faded to a chalky vanilla, and the roof was tiled in pale blue. There were colonnades of stone arches on both the first and second floors, creating a verandah on the lower one, and a series of balconies on the upper. To the left of the house was a wide circular tower. Unlike the rest of the building it had a flat roof. The huge column of stone was broken by only two windows, until right at the top, where eight of them went all the way round it, three of them opening up onto another small balcony.
‘Take the egg, too, Gago,’ said Anwar, offering her the plate.
‘No, no, sir, poor stomachs cannot digest wealthy foods,’ she said. Although after forty years in his service she was accustomed to his kindness, she never relaxed totally before him or took what she perceived as liberties. Drinking ordinary tea was one thing, but consuming even the leftovers of the master’s specially cooked meal right in front of him was bordering on insolence. It would be eaten, later, but out of sight, in the kitchen.
‘May God reward you, Saabji, and give you the child you have been yearning for.’
Anwar winced. After it had happened, the thought of remarrying had filled him with horror. It had taken years for the memory of those torturous weeks and the screaming, dreadful final moments to ease their crushing grip on his mind. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping for, perhaps just anything better than that last disaster, and he prayed that his insistence on selecting his own bride this time would go some way in helping prevent such a calamity. Even now, he was happy alone, and personally didn’t care if his name died out with him, but there was his mother, over seventy and counting breaths, yet still croaking orders he couldn’t refuse from her room upstairs.
‘Higher, higher!’ yelled Gago later, to the man attempting to adorn the outside of the mansion with an endless string of fairy lights. ‘The house must be crowned with glory on this joyous day. Come on, only eight hours to go.’
‘Why are you bothering with all this?’ asked Anwar, wandering out into the garden. ‘I’ve told you a thousand times I don’t want a fuss.’
‘Madam’s orders. The town must know the family is celebrating. Do they flash? I told you I want a disco effect.’ Gago waved a fist at the lights man.
Anwar, unable to bear the vision of entering his solemn new union before a backdrop of pulsating neon, disappeared inside the house, only to emerge seconds later from his bedroom window, brandishing a shimmering sherwani jacket.
‘What the hell is this?’
‘Golden suit, saab,’ said Gago, without removing her eyes from the coil of paper bunting she was busy trying to loop over a rose bush.
‘I refuse absolutely to wear this. I’m wearing the black suit I have – English style, and that’s it. Understood?’
‘Saabji, you’ll break Madam’s heart,’ said Gago. She shook the ladder. ‘Eh you, tell saab he should appear in full majesty.’
The lighting expert, who was on his way down, clutched at a step as she wobbled him.
‘She’s right,’ he said. ‘You’ll look like royalty.’ Gago winked at him. ‘And I’ll be up in a minute to apply the Mr Grecian,’ she said.
‘What?’ Anwar was puzzled.
‘You can’t go to your wedding without dyeing your hair.’
Anwar could only splutter.
‘Get ready with a towel on your shoulders,’ instructed Gago. ‘We don’t have to do the moustache, just the head. Grey black combination, like the Indian film stars.’
The Colonel retreated into the room, slamming the window shut.
From her bed by the window, Begum Shezadi heard this exchange between her son and the maid, and cackled quietly, rubbing her gnarled, jewel-encrusted hands together. The tower room was ideally positioned for listening in on conversations taking place in the garden, an activity the Begum enjoyed for recreation and sometimes necessity. It was for these spying facilities that she refused to leave the tower and move to another, more accessible part of the house.
The room was painted in shiny cream gloss and the doors and shutters were made of intricately carved panels of sheesham wood. A gallery of photographs and paintings hung on the wall to the left of the bed, while the wall opposite was covered in mirrors with an array of frames – hammered silver, etched copper, mango wood sculpted into swirls and flowers, mosaics made of jewel like tiles in emerald and scarlet.
Beside the bed were a folded wheelchair, and a marble-topped table, upon which stood a white plastic box containing the Begum’s medicines and insulin injections, a jug of water, and a radio cassette player, currently tuned into BBC World Service.
It was the room that the Begum herself had come to as a young bride, more than half a century ago, a place that had seen the bloo
m of life and love, but also the rot of death and blackness of hatred. Anwar’s great grandmother had died in this very bed, diseased by the plague, and it was said that one of his ancestors, driven crazy with greed, had murdered his brother here. The Begum believed in ghosts, and sometimes she thought she could hear these bleak spirits murmuring, moaning, laughing and cursing. She occasionally she wished that one of them would appear and enter her own body, arouse it out of its useless state, make it do extraordinary things, evil if necessary, but at least vital and alive. But she knew such things didn’t happen by will alone. There were ways, specific, sacred, studied.
The Begum wouldn’t insist on the gold outfit or the hair dye. It had taken her twenty years to convince him again, and now she had only hours left. She knew just how much Anwar would take. Even a nudge too far could prove fatal at this point because, after an age of despair, it was happening at last.
Saika had always planned on getting married in white instead of the traditional red favoured by brides in India and Pakistan, but when the time came, the lehnga she fell in love with was the colour of the ripest tomatoes. As her cousin and the woman from Murree’s one beauty parlour arranged her hair in a snaky sculpture of spirals and embedded it with rosebuds, Saika looked in the mirror and thought the dress made her look somehow overcooked. Well, she was overcooked, overdone, aged, mouldy, or whatever it was a girl became once she passed the upper marriage age-limit of twenty-seven. At an almost antiquated thirty-one, she had been saved from the grave of spinsterhood by the Colonel’s spectacular eleventh hour proposal.
It was her uncle Munir’s wife Rabia, also a second cousin of the Begum, who’d acted as the go-between and brought the message. The Colonel wanted the honour of making her, Saika, daughter of Ibrahim and Zubeida, his wife. There was no need for the fifty year old ‘boy’ to come along and be questioned about his education, work prospects, lineage, bad habits and general intentions towards her. All this was well known –although a little reclusive, the Colonel had a reputation for being honest and generous, and was respected and admired by many. Saika’s parents were speechless for at least ten minutes. When he finally recovered, after drinking four glasses of water and three spoons of Gaviscon, Saika’s father said to his sister in law, ‘Please repeat, Rabia, and this time speak clearly. I don’t think I understood you properly.’
‘You heard, Ibrahim. Colonel saab will marry Saika,’ said Rabia with an air of exaggerated casualness, popping a pistachio from its shell, throwing it up in the air and catching it with her mouth. ‘The Begum wants a wedding directly, without the hassle of a long engagement. Which day shall I tell them?’
‘How can such a match be made between those aristocrats and us commoners?’ asked Ibrahim. ‘And our girl – well she isn’t the freshest little flower is she?’
‘If you must know the decision was Colonel saab’s own,’ Rabia said.
‘He’s seen her photo?’
‘Well yes, and he’s seen her around town, gallivanting about as this generation does.’
‘Now, Rabia, my girls are never ones for gallivanting unnecessarily, and as far as that goes, you yourself…’
‘Alright, don’t start. The point is that Colonel saab wanted, for some reason, an old girl, and as we know, Saika is one of the oldest around. It seems that her unreasonable obsession with education has paid off.’
When Saika had announced her intention to finish a degree, Rabia had voiced the fiercest opposition in the family. For Ibrahim, who disliked Rabia and loved his daughter, this had been the only encouragement he’d needed to side with Saika.
‘So, tell me,’ said Rabia, removing a plastic straw from a glass bottle of Sprite and dropping it on the floor, so she could drink without obstruction. She turned to Saika’s younger sister, who was buzzing about in excitement. ‘Eh, Nadia, make some tea. When do you want to set the wedding date?’
‘It’s an unbelievably generous offer, but Zubeida and I need to discuss it with Saika first,’ said Ibrahim, surprising even himself. He already knew he would do everything in his power to make Zubeida and Saika see the benefits of accepting, but he would never grovel at Rabia’s feet.
Rabia crashed the Sprite bottle on the table.
‘Are you crazy? Who in their right mind needs to discuss something like this? That’s why she’s still not married – you and that half-wit wife of yours let her get her own way in everything. Who wants an educated old hag?’
‘You mind your tongue, missus – and why she’s not married I’ll tell you! You’re the hag around here, putting black curses on her chances, drying up her good luck!’
‘You dare to say that!’ Rabia grabbed Ibrahim’s wrists and began waving them up and down in fury. Fearful that she would flatten him within seconds, Saika and Zubeida pulled her off and sat her down.
‘Where’s that tea?’ panted Rabia, wiping her face with her dupatta.
‘Nadia, hurry up!’ Saika called to her sister, before speaking to her aunt. ‘You can tell them to come in the second week of next month. They can decide the date themselves.’ After years of rebuffing the dozens of nice young men her parents had paraded before her with the vague reason of them being ‘not right’, her marriage had been decided in a few minutes. Saika had never even bought a handbag without visiting the shop three times and pondering over the various aspects of the purchase for weeks but she had accepted a husband on impulse. She still wasn’t quite sure why she had done it. She’d seen the Colonel a handful of times at social occasions, and although she had never spoken to him, she’d noticed they had both suppressed a smile during an account of a burglary by a mutual relative, which the rest of the audience was finding harrowing. That was all. The rest of her life had been determined by her instincts and a silent and secretly-shared joke.
The cars beeped in unison as they climbed the final steep corner of the road that led up to the house. The marriage had taken place in an orange, purple and green tent pitched in the street outside Saika’s house, its entrance distinguished by a pair of moveable palm trees, and a wooden signboard stencilled with the words ‘MOST WELL COME TO HAPPY MARAGE’. The Imam had performed the nikaah, wandering in and out of the house to ask permission and obtain signatures from the bride and groom separately. Anwar had been in the tent, seated on a red and green wooden throne on a raised platform, his audience of guests in rows on metal chairs, men at the front, women at the back, while Saika had stayed indoors, in the living room with a few selected ladies. Having received positive responses from both parties, the Imam had recited surahs, read a sermon on the obligations of the married couple, extended his congratulations to the families, and sat back to enjoy a plateful of the dried dates, almonds and crystalised sugar that were being distributed to celebrate the happy occasion.
Now a convoy of cars – mostly Datsuns with a couple of white Suzuki vans and the wedding carriage, a black Jeep, all decorated with strips of coloured crepe paper and balloons and packed to at least double their usual capacity – was returning home with the bride.
Alone in the tower, the Begum sat up in bed and smacked the netted window with her walking stick to open it. Gago had gone with them, after much insistence that she would rather stay and serve her mistress than attend an event as trivial as a wedding. Her mistress, however, had ordered it, and it was unspoken between them no one could report back to her about the proceedings with the accuracy and perception that Gago could. She knew that Gago had secretly wallowed in the preparations for the wedding, taking days to select the garlands, donning the gold jewellery so they could see what it looked like ‘on’, smelling roses to shower on the bride like an experienced perfumier, even though she claimed to have lost her sense of smell during an attack of small pox twenty-five years ago. It amused the Begum that she was, for once, allowing Gago to indulge in her passions by attending the grand finale of her labours. The other two servants, Nathoo and his wife Sharmilee, were downstairs in case of emergency.
The Begum craned forward and squinte
d down at the road, but could see nothing through the darkness brushed thickly with white, nothing of the newness that was stealing up towards her. But she could feel it in the flutter that beat in the pit of her stomach, in the quickening of her own breath when she considered what her son’s marriage would bring. She twisted the stick and hooked it around the shutter, pulling it to. That was the only drawback of being in her little eyrie that overlooked the world: she could keep her eye on everything, but it was bloody cold. The Begum pulled the other shutter but the stick prevented it from closing completely, so she was forced to lean forward and shut it with her hand. Then she lay back and waited for the fools to arrive.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Anwar asked his bride. Saika was sitting in the middle of the bed, her dress spread out around her in a perfect sanguine circle, crawling with flowers and paisley leaves.
‘No thank you,’ she said. ‘But if you’d like some…’
‘I don’t think I should,’ said the Colonel. ‘Won’t be able to sleep – not that I’ll get much sleep tonight anyway. Oh! I didn’t mean… here, how about a plum?’
As she declined the unappealing-looking fruit, bruised and leaking blackish juice, Saika wondered if these offers of sustenance concealed a more sinister meaning. Her fidgety new husband hardly looked like a master of innuendo, but perhaps he’d been advised to lead up to the expected big event of the night with some subtle hints. The proffering of the plum had required him to sit on a chair between the bed and a table holding a fruit bowl, where he still sat now, eating and gazing unhappily at the ceiling. Would a banana be offered next, she thought, that poor subject of the crudest of jibes, accompanied by an attempted casual slide from the chair on to the bed?
‘I’m sorry we haven’t really met before. I would have liked to…’
‘Then why didn’t you?’
‘I… er…,’ he mumbled something incoherently, though Saika thought she caught the word ‘busy’.
‘What would you have said?’ Saika shifted on the bed. She could no longer kneel in the picturesque bridal pose and moved into a rather less dainty cross-legged position.
