by Bina Shah
He had been able to bear it, but he had hoped that his wife, secluded in the home, would have been spared the wagging of their malicious tongues. But he had been wrong. It had reached his own doorstep, like a tide of sewage that raised a stink for miles around, and was impossible to wash away.
But to accuse him of loving the Seven Queens more than his own wife! It was outrageous. Blasphemous. The Seven Queens, the great heroines of Sindh, whom Shah Latif had immortalized in his poetry—Sassi, Marvi, Noori, Leela, Sohni, Heer, and Moomal—they were manifestations of love between God and man, lover and Beloved. They were not mortal women whose affections were to be competed for among men; they were not meant to be objects of lust. And they were never meant to be competition for his own beloved Sayedah Khanum.
In Marvi’s loyalty to her true love, Khet, Shah Latif had secretly extolled his own wife’s faithfulness to him. Sassi, who ran barefoot across the desert and died in search of her Beloved, made him wonder if his wife, too, would cross a desert to find him if he were lost and wandering. The tears Sohni wept on seeing the wound in her love’s thigh brought to mind the tears of Bibi Sayedah on the night of their rukhsati. And as Rano had braved the eerie magnetic field that surrounded Moomal, Shah Latif too wished to penetrate the walls of his wife’s heart, so that she would cast off her normal modesty for once and show him affection in her eyes, utter endearments more rare than diamonds and rubies.
Shah Latif rose from his chair. He went silently to the door, gathering up his long cloak and his walking stick. He did not need to tell his wife that he was setting out on a journey: she was used to him walking out of the door and returning later that evening, or after a month. It was one of her gifts to him, the ability to endure his absence without resentment. He did not know where he was going, but he knew he had to go; his soul was most elevated when his feet were moving. Sayedah Begum too got up and began to grind wheat for the evening meal. Already her face was composed again, her eyes large and gentle, fringed with lashes like the graceful chinkara that lived in the Thar Desert.
They did not exchange any words, any farewells or entreaties to take care, to go in safety. Her faith in God was absolute: she entrusted her husband to Him every second of every day, and so there was never a need to acknowledge the connection that could never be severed.
His two pups, Moti and Kheeno, leapt up when they saw him emerge from the door, but he did not reach down to pet them as he often did when going to the village. They whined and scrabbled in the dirt, then sat on their hind legs and watched him go.
After a time he came to the shrine of his grandfather, Shah Abdul Karim. Its green flags fluttered in the wind; people were milling around, some with purpose, some aimlessly. The urs would be well under way tonight, with thousands joining in the celebrations, reciting poetry, listening to music, dancing in ecstasy. The market bustled with farmers and traders selling their wares; tables groaned under the weight of gold and silver, silks and embroidery, leather and brass amid the bleats and cries of goats, sheep, even camels in a small camp set up on the open field in front of the dargah where a man had come all the way from Thar to sell his precious beasts. The sound of santoor and tabla, reed flute and sarangi mingled with the scent of incense and roses, weaving a tapestry of aural and sensual pleasure that the Lovers would feast upon tonight.
A few malangs came up to Shah Latif, spotting him standing a small distance from the crowd. Dressed in their robes with begging bowls hung around their necks, they greeted him and sought blessings from him, a few lines of new verse to be sung at the festival tonight. But Shah Latif was silent, and soon they dropped away from him and melted back into the crowds. The truth was that his heart had been broken by the slanders, and he had nothing left to give to any of them.
He turned and walked away again, and as he walked, he recited the verse that he had written soon after his marriage, never telling anyone that he had written it for her:
The heart has but one beloved,
Many you should not seek:
Just give heart to one,
Even hundreds may seek;
Weasels they are called,
Who get betrothed at every door.
But the camel seller, the man from Thar, called out to him as he passed. “O great Shah! Where do you go?”
Shah Latif stopped, surprised that this man, a stranger, recognized him. “Peace be upon you, o Man of Thar. How do you know me?”
The man laughed. He was thin and dark, weather-beaten, and wore an ajrak wrapped into a turban on his head. “Who does not know the Shah of Bhit, whose Risalo has spread far and wide? As long as there are men in Sindh, you will be known. But why do you walk away from the urs, when most people are only just arriving?”
Shah Latif said, “I am called away on urgent business.”
“But where do you go?”
“I do not know.”
“Then that’s urgent business indeed; God’s business. When a man is called but knows not his destination, only the Creator knows what’s needed. But He’s told me to tell you where to go.”
“Where is that, then, my friend?” Shah Latif leaned forward, curious and interested. He was not surprised that Allah Saeen had entrusted this simple desert man with such an important message. There were signs everywhere, if you only knew how to look.
“He bids you to go to my homeland, into the desert.”
“So it shall be done. I thank you in His name.” Without another word, Shah Latif turned and began walking east. The man from Thar stood watching him as he went, shading his eyes from the sun, the tall figure growing smaller and smaller as he vanished into the distance. Never had he seen someone so eager to obey God’s word, the desert man thought to himself, before turning back to tend to his beloved camels.
Shah Latif walked and walked for many days and nights, sheltering under a tree at night, drinking from the river in the morning, eating a simple meal of flat bread, and taking a cup of goat’s milk wherever it was offered to him. Some people knew who he was; some did not. But everywhere he went he could hear snatches of his verse being sung, recited, used as weight in arguments, admired, appreciated.
Beloved’s separation kills me, friends. At His door, many like me, their knees bend …
… Countless pay homage and sing peace at his abode …
… Tell me the stories, oh thornbush, of the mighty merchants of the Indus, of the nights and days of the prosperous times …
Then one day he climbed a small hill and came down the other side onto a sand dune that ran parallel to the winds, rows of undulating ridges rubbed into the sand like the lines on the roof of his mouth. Nearby, he saw a group of women dressed in the bright colors of the desert, their arms covered in white bangles up to their elbows. They were cutting at a small scrub tree with hand-axes, and singing as they worked:
In deserts, wastes, and Jessalmir it has rained. Clouds and lightning have come to Thar’s plains. Lone, needy women are now free from care, fragrant are the paths, happy herdsmen’s wives all this share.
And when he recognized their song, he knew that he had arrived at his destination.
November 3, 2007
KARACHI
When Jehangir told Ali about the girls that went topless at French Beach, Ali laughed in his face. “I don’t believe you.”
“Yaar, I saw it for myself,” drawled Jehangir. They were playing pool late one night in Masood’s massive drawing room, in the self-contained portion of the house that his parents had allocated to Masood when he returned from university in the United Kingdom. They envisaged it as a flat where he would one day live with his wife and children; but since Masood showed no inclination to get married even at thirty-one, it had slowly metamorphosed into a bachelor pad where Jehangir, Ali, and various other friends hung out together, got drunk, and talked about all the great issues of life, such as what the Americans were doing to the Muslim world,
which tycoons were cleaning up on the stock market and which were addicted to cocaine, and who were the sexiest and most available girls in town. Jehangir participated eagerly in all these conversations, pretending to all his friends as well as his family that he had a healthy interest in women. For someone who might be gay, though, he certainly knew a lot about the scandalous habits of the girls in Karachi.
“You’re such a goddamn liar,” guffawed Masood, as he aimed at a striped ball. He pulled the cue back and drove it forward with such force that the cue ball, instead of hitting its target, jumped right over it and bounced on the marble floor with a bone-jarring crash. “Bastard!” he shrieked.
“Are you calling the ball a bastard?” Jehangir said.
“No, I’m calling you a bastard,” Masood retorted.
“Save your breath,” said Jehangir. “I knew I was a bastard the day I was born. The doctor told my mother. ‘Congratulations, Mrs. Mani, you’ve given birth to a bastard.’”
“Shut up and play!” Ali said. Masood bent over to retrieve the ball and an audible crack came from his spine, which made Ali and Jehangir both wince with pain.
“Ouch!” exclaimed Masood, straightening up and rubbing his spine. “I’m getting old.” He followed this with a string of obscenities so vulgar that Jehangir burst out into shocked giggles.
“God, can you say anything without the help of a swear word?” Ali was disgusted with Masood, even though he was drinking the whiskey that Masood brought that evening in a plastic bag, a seven-thousand-rupee bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, guaranteed by Masood’s bootlegger to be “the real thing.” Ali felt that people used profanity because their vocabularies were weak, and Masood, with his father’s fortune behind him and apartments in London, New York, and Dubai, had the vocabulary of a thirteen-year-old boy.
But he didn’t mind drinking Masood’s liquor, especially tonight, after a day during which thoughts of Haroon, the look on his face as he’d talked about Benazir, came unbidden to Ali’s mind when he was in the middle of doing something completely unrelated to the story of the bombing. The glass of Black Label rested in Ali’s palm, providing mellow inoculation against the memories of the explosion, the screams, the frantic search for Haroon, the slow-growing realization that they weren’t going to find him, now or ever. He took another swallow of the whiskey to make everything move back into its rightful place. But there was nothing about that night that could be put right. Haroon had become another faceless, nameless victim of terrorism in Karachi, and soon nobody would even remember that he existed. His desk had been cleared away at work, his belongings given to his family. They’d stopped speaking his name even in the hushed tones reserved for the newly dead. There were a few attempts to put up a plaque in his honor, naming him as a shaheed, a martyr, but that would only happen if his friends pushed for it, and nobody was willing to do so, even Ali. It would be too much of a reminder about how any of them could have their names on a plaque the next time they went out in the field to film.
“Well, come and see for yourself,” said Masood. “I’m having a party on Saturday at French Beach.”
“It’s too hot!” groaned Jehangir.
“Don’t be stupid. Bring Sunita,” Masood added for Ali’s benefit. “And don’t worry about the drinks. Plenty of goray coming as well. They always make sure we’re well supplied.”
Ali nodded. It didn’t surprise him that Masood had found out about Sunita; Masood and Jehangir were close friends and, in Karachi, it was impossible to keep secrets forever. It didn’t matter, as long as nobody said anything to his family, and Masood and Jehangir had no connection with them; they moved in more privileged, Westernized circles, lived in different worlds. Besides, Sunita would never come. She hated the sun and the salt water and the effect the wind had on her hair. Her mother was always going on at her about being too dark, even though Ali thought her skin was beautiful. Dark brown, the color of teakwood warmed by summer sunlight. Dark like wet sand on the beach, like milky tea. Ali hungered to know whether she was that dark all over, or darker in some parts and lighter in others.
“‘How will I get any good proposals if I’m dark,’ she says. God! I hate it,” Sunita told Ali as they sat together at one of their many café rendezvous, the only places in Karachi where they could be together in relative privacy. She pursed her lips around her cigarette, holding it between her finger and thumb. Ali dreamt of her holding him just like that, and pursing her lips around him and inhaling him the same way she was doing to the cigarette. The thought made him weak at the knees and provided endless fodder for his fantasies many nights after. He took another sip of his overpriced cappuccino and ignored the word “proposals,” even though it hung in the air like a sickeningly sweet vapor all around them, reminding him of the impossibility of their situation.
Sunita dreamt that they would get married one day. The only way that could happen, Ali knew, would be if she converted to Islam, and even that would not be enough to convince his mother to accept Sunita as her daughter-in-law. What will people say? she’d tell Ali. Your father would never permit it. It would shame our family.
His father might not have allowed Sunita and Ali to get married, but it wouldn’t have been out of shame. It would have been because Ali’s happiness, or that of his wife and other children, hardly mattered to him. An ironic judgment coming from a man who had acted so selfishly in the pursuit of his own pleasure, thought Ali.
He knew very little about Shehla, his father’s second wife, except that she was the thirty-four-year-old daughter of some bootlegger his father had befriended; he’d visit the man most evenings to talk politics and drink whiskey. One day Ali thought he spotted her as she was coming home from her job—she worked in a bank, or maybe even a hotel as a “customer relations officer”—a euphemism for a high-class call girl, really, but nobody could say that in front of Ali’s father and expect to leave the room alive.
Shehla must have been singularly beautiful; Ali’s mother fervently believed she practiced black magic because, two months after meeting Shehla, Sikandar had embarked on an affair with the younger woman. The news was relayed to them by Shehla’s father, who called Ali’s mother one day and told her that they were married, and that Shehla was going to have a baby. Ali’s father went to live with her somewhere in Defence, in a new house paid for by the bootlegger.
Ali sipped his coffee and let Sunita rest her head on his shoulder, her long black hair rubbing against his neck, thinking hard about all this. His father was never deliberately cruel to any of them, but then again, never was he purposefully kind. Ali caught himself: again, he was being unfair to his father. His father had done a million little things to please them as children: school pickups and drop-offs, trips to the beach where Sikandar sat behind them as they rode, screaming and shrieking, on the back of a swaying camel, and once, an exhilarating ride on a motorcycle around their neighborhood. There were regular comic books and candy, a weekly treat at the Holiday Inn where they could all order as much ice cream as they wanted. But then they’d all gotten older, their needs had gotten more complicated, and Sikandar withdrew, unsure and unable to cope with them in their growing emotional complexity.
Of course, he provided for his family; they lived a comfortable life and went to good schools and had a good car; they had a small house in Clifton. A family inheritance paid for Ali’s education in Dubai, and there was money enough for Jeandi to have a decent married life when the time came. But Ali never truly believed the feeling that their father treasured his family, that their existence made his life any better than it would have been without them.
Maybe this was because they were the children of his second marriage; Ali was the only one of the children who knew his father had been married once before: his first wife had died in childbirth. Sikandar never talked about it, had never even mentioned it; Ali knew bits and pieces from his mother, and his imagination filled in the blanks with his own theorie
s. Maybe his father’s first wife was the love of his life, and when she died, he was too heartbroken to think of loving anyone else as much. Or maybe he had neglected her, too, and when she died, the guilt had poisoned him, so that he was unable to give his heart to his second wife or their children.
Ali fought long and hard to find excuses for Sikandar’s indifference to them, but he failed to understand why it existed, in the end. He was always busy—he traveled often in the interior of Sindh for several weeks at a time. He’d return late at night, slotting back the next morning into the rhythm of their household as if he’d never been gone. He expected to be able to drift in and out of their lives like a minor player, instead of the most important person in their family.
And their mother? Ali’s maternal grandfather, her father, was a member of his father’s biraderi, the clan, and he’d proposed for her because he was close to her father by association, their lands neighboring each other just outside of Sukkur. But they were not related by blood, not even distantly. Sikandar showed no deliberate cruelty toward her; he treated her well, and with respect. But there were expectations: as long as meals appeared on the table, his clothes were laundered and ironed, his children born and raised, he was satisfied. Ali couldn’t recall seeing his parents talk. They exchanged no smiles, no jokes; he rarely took her out with him, preferring to leave her at home like other Sindhi men did with their wives. She wavered somewhere in between elevated servant and tolerated spouse, but she was never an equal partner, companion, lover, or friend to Sikandar Hussein.
