by Bina Shah
Sikandar turned his head to stare at Ali, who tried to meet his father’s eyes, although turning his neck sent a spasm of pain all the way down his spine and into his hips. He felt braver, though. And he came out with what he’d been dying to say since the beginning of all of this. Or maybe even further back: for all of his adult life.
“Baba, every government since Bhutto has been corrupt down to the core. Bhutto talked about socialism and equality but he acted like the worst kind of dictator when he was in power. General Zia turned the whole country into a bunch of raving fundos. Nawaz Sharif made a fortune out of selling every state asset off to his cronies …”
Dare he say it? Dare he talk about his father’s beloved Benazir? Another bump hit the plane, sending them up and then down in a sickening lurch, and Sikandar flinched. Ali could stop now, turn back down this path, and subside into sullen indifference, but something had been cut loose inside him and he went on, his words gaining momentum. “And Bibi? Marrying Asif Zardari? Look at what they’ve done. Mansions in Surrey, the South of France. She lives like a queen in Dubai. Every taxi driver in Dubai knows about her palace in Emirates Hills. What has she done for this country?”
“You don’t understand—”
“You’re right, I don’t understand how you just sat there and went along with all of them, even when you knew they were wrong. How? Why?” His voice still cracked on the last word.
Even in the dimmed lights of the cabin Ali could see the familiar angry flush creeping across his father’s cheeks, although there was no whiskey in his hand to help it along. Sikandar started to push himself out of his seat, but the seat belt clamped over his stomach kept him trapped in the chair. The veins in his neck bulged and for one second Ali feared he would have a heart attack and die right there next to him. Then he realized that this man who had endured the last fifty years, associated with political goons and racketeers of the worst kind, been married three times and buried a wife and child, was strong enough to deal with his son, even in the midst of the turbulence that was his worst fear.
“We had to. I had to. It was a matter of our survival. You can’t be a zamindar and make enemies out of people in power. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s the way it’s always been done. Your grandfather, your great-grandfather, do you think they could fight people who could cut off their water, seize their lands?” Sikandar glared straight ahead, one wary eye still looking for trouble, a wing on fire, an exploding engine; he still couldn’t face Ali. But at least he hadn’t lapsed into stinging silence, which always made Ali feel foolish and small. At least this time he was trying to explain. “The British, the Talpurs—they would have crushed us. They only cared about power. We had to play the game that way. At least we zamindars care about Sindh.”
“I care about Sindh!”
“No, you don’t. If you did, you’d take interest in the lands, in politics. You’d work with me to make sure that we’re strong, you’d be by my side. But you don’t want to be a feudal like me. I can see it. You haven’t wanted anything to do with me for the last five years. I’ve lost you.”
“Everyone hates the feudals,” Ali began. “They always say it’s our fault Pakistan is the way it is.”
Sikandar shook his head. “They’re wrong. The feudals are a dying breed. We died years ago. We killed ourselves with our own stupidity.”
He sank back and pressed his forehead against his fist. For the first time, Ali realized his father was old. And sad. And tired. His day, for all intents and purposes, was over. Ali’s had just begun.
“You do what you like,” Sikandar said. “You’re old enough to know your own mind. I can’t stop you from doing what you want to do. Just don’t forget about where you came from. Don’t forget about your history.”
Ali couldn’t understand what had just happened. He was so lightheaded that he could float away like a balloon released into the air, the hand that was holding on to it so tightly letting go and allowing the string to slip through its fingers. A terrible sadness flooded through him. He sat back in his seat, breathing deeply, tasting a bittersweet liberty mixed in with the stale air-conditioning and scents of frying food from the galley. Not exactly freedom, but a turning point between him and his father. But where would he and Sikandar go from here?
And then, just like that, the turbulence stopped. A moment later, the pilot’s voice crackled through the loudspeaker, telling them that they had started the descent to Karachi.
The Eighth Queen
KARACHI, 1961
When Pinky was a little girl, she had always wanted to visit the Shrine of the Crocodiles at Manghopir. She didn’t know when she’d first heard of the place, which was famous for its hot sulfur springs that could cure a sick person of any ailment, and the crocodiles that swam in its murky green waters, who were said to be sacred disciples of the Sufi saint Pir Mangho. But from the moment she heard the tale of the saint and his reptilian pets, she longed desperately to go there and see them for herself, commune with the crocodiles and offer them a few morsels of meat in return for their blessings.
Perhaps she’d heard the servants talking about it as she went into the kitchen in search of her favorite chocolates that Papa had brought back from Paris. Pinky loved chocolate. It was her true passion: one day she would turn to romance novels to satisfy her dreams of everlasting love and happiness, but as a seven-year-old child whose father was still her first love, chocolate warmed her stomach and filled her heart.
When she lay sleeping in her bed, wearing her pink princess nightgown and being watched over by a faithful old ayah from the village, she dreamt of chocolate, great big bars of it growing all around like a forest, and rivers of chocolate on which she would sail a boat that was made of more chocolate, and her mother and father would watch from the banks of the chocolate river, and when she reached the shore and ran to them, they would give her even more chocolate, just because they loved her so. Lulled by her chocolate world, Pinky smiled in her sleep, which the old ayah took as a sign of the little girl having been sent straight from heaven by the angels. Just look at the child’s pink cheeks, like apples and roses, the old woman thought to herself, and leaned forward to chuck the child’s chin. In the daytime the child was given over to an English governess, who taught her how to speak and act like a little mem, but at night, Pinky belonged to the faithful old village woman, who sang her Sindhi lullabies and kneaded her arms and legs affectionately with her gnarled brown hands.
Besides chocolate and her father, her other great love was to sneak away from her room in the middle of the afternoon and go to the kitchen in the hopes that the servants would share with her the remnants of their lunch. Pinky was made to eat proper food: potato and leek soup, roast chicken with potatoes and carrots, and mounds and mounds of boiled beans and spinach. She hated all of these foods, even though she was told by her governess, Miss Lucy, that they would make her strong. But she longed for the spicy bite and greasy welcome of daal and salaan and muttur pulao on her tongue, not the bland English food that her mother ordered cooked for Pinky and her brother Mir and sister Sunny. Her baby brother Shah was the most unfortunate of all: he only got to eat ground-up apples and rice from a plastic bowl, not a china dish like the rest of them.
Pinky would pretend to eat her food (hiding most of it under her fork and knife, or sneaking it onto her brother’s plate when Miss Lucy’s back was turned—her brother didn’t mind; he had the appetite of a horse and would happily eat two or three servings of any food that was offered to him, English or otherwise). Then she would wait until everyone was taking a nap after lunch, and run downstairs to the kitchen in a pair of rubber chappals that only squeaked a little bit. She would burst into the kitchen and imperiously demand from Aftab the Cook a plate of chicken karahi with naan hot from the marketplace tandoor; she would sit on a small stool, hunched over her illicit meal, and slurp the mouthfuls down delightedly, wiping her mouth with the back of her han
d and even letting out a small burp or two, something Miss Lucy would never have allowed at her table.
It was during one of these secret feasts that she heard Aftab talking about his son to one of the other housemen.
“The doctor calls it epli—epil—epilseppy,” Aftab said mournfully. He was a short, squat man, who was said to have cooked for the governor-general of Sindh back in the days before Partition, which Pinky knew from listening to her father talk with his guests was something to do with parting your hair so that there was as much hair on the left side of your head as there was on the right. She listened to them curiously, as she chewed slowly, her eyes fixed firmly on her plate so that they would not suspect she was eavesdropping.
“What is that, brother?” said the majordomo, Babu, a loyal and longtime servant of the household.
“Oh, it’s a terrible affliction: my son suffers fits, his eyes roll back in his head, he falls to the floor and shakes for ages, and foams at the mouth. I’m so afraid that one day he will swallow his own tongue and die, brother.”
“Tauba, tauba!” Babu stroked his ears and nose in fear. Pinky, too, touched her own nose and ears, then frowned when she realized she’d dirtied them with her greasy fingers.
“Is there no cure?” breathed Yusuf, another houseman who was Sindhi like the others who all hailed from Papa’s village in Naudero, but was Sheedi, with dark African features and a powerful, muscled body. Pinky had observed him with his shirt off once as he washed Papa’s car, and he looked to her like the photo of a boxer she’d seen in the newspaper. But Yusuf was not very intelligent; once Mir had come in with an ice cream cone and said to Yusuf, “I don’t think this is very good, will you smell it for me?” Yusuf dipped his head obligingly to the ice cream, and Mir thrust his hand up quickly so that Yusuf had ice cream all over his nose. The other servants laughed and jeered, and Yusuf joined in good-naturedly, but Pinky, who had seen Mir play this joke a dozen times before, would never have fallen for it herself.
Aftab sighed. Pinky felt her own heart do a somersault of sadness with him, her plate of food long forgotten. “There are medicines, but we’ve tried them—Saeen has been very kind and given me extra money to pay for his treatment. Still, they don’t seem to be doing anything for him; he just gets worse with each year. I’ve taken him to a Pir in our neighborhood but he hasn’t been able to do anything, either. It must be the will of Allah that my son must suffer so. We are cursed—cursed!”
Babu patted him consolingly on the back. “Don’t say that, brother. There is always a way. You just have to have faith.”
“But I have!” wailed Aftab. “God has forsaken me!”
But Pinky was watching Yusuf’s face, which had begun to shine as if the man knew a beautiful, dazzling secret. He said, “Brother Cook, there is something you must try. You should take your son to Manghopir. He will be cured there!”
“To Manghopir?”
“Yes, yes.” Yusuf nodded vigorously. “Pir Mangho will cure your son.”
“He’s right, you know,” said Babu. “They say if you take a bath in the water of the hot spring, your disease will be cured.”
Aftab looked bewildered. “But that’s only for skin diseases! My son has a disease of the brain. How on earth will going to Manghopir help him?”
“Of course it will help him!” replied Yusuf. “Pir Mangho can cure any disease. Not just skin diseases. That’s what he’s most famous for, of course. Even the leprosy hospitals bring their patients there because they get cured of their leprosy.”
“Their what?”
“Leprosy. You know, the disease that makes people’s hands and legs fall off.”
“Are you sure the crocodiles at Manghopir don’t bite them off?” Babu said grinning.
Yusuf scowled. “Don’t be stupid! The crocodiles never harm the saint’s murids!”
At this, Pinky leapt off her seat. “Where are the crocodiles?” she demanded. “I want to see them.”
The three servants turned to Pinky with a single look of dismay on their faces. They had forgotten she was sitting there, and they knew now that she would never cease to torture them until she got her own way. Saeen and Jiji, her parents, spoilt
Pinky-bibi without limit; if she cried, the servants were the ones that got slapped for making her upset. The only person who was not afraid of her tantrums was that ridiculous Miss Lussi, with her high starched collars and her glasses perched high on her nose, through which her cold blue eyes blinked sternly at Pinky: three blinks was enough to make Pinky calm down and go calmly upstairs at bedtime, even if she wanted to stay up to listen to the grown-ups’ talk, as they nursed their brandies and curls of cigar smoke wafted up to the high ceilings of the formal drawing room where Saeen entertained his important guests late into the night.
“Pinky-bibi, you can’t see the crocodiles,” said Babu. “They are very far away, all the way to the north of Karachi.”
“I don’t care,” replied Pinky. “Papa took us last year to London, which is much farther away than Mango—Mangy—Mangawhatsit—and, he took us to the zoo in Regent’s Park and we saw crocodiles there, so I want to go.”
“But the crocodiles are dangerous,” said Aftab, shaking his head forbiddingly at the child.
“Yusuf just said that they never harm the Pir’s followers.” Pinky could be stubborn when she wanted to; she never gave up on something if it was what she truly wanted. And she was too clever for them all, much cleverer than all three of them put together.
“They aren’t dangerous at all,” said Yusuf, his eyes shining, “and during the Sheedi Jat we sing so many songs to them and they come out of the water, they love listening to the one about the Sheedi Basha, our king from Africa, and they also dance; oh, what dancers they are! And we give them fresh meat, and the Gaddi Nashin comes and puts a garland of roses around the neck of the chief of the crocodiles, Old Mor Sahib, and then—”
“Will you shut up!” hissed Babu, elbowing Yusuf in the ribs.
“I want to see the crocodiles dancing!” bellowed Pinky.
Aftab moaned, “Bibi, you can’t! Jiji would never let us!”
“She would!”
“She wouldn’t!” said Babu. “And Saeen would send us back to the village and we’d have to become peasants and …”
“Arré, Babu, would you shut up? Do you realize what you’re saying?” Aftab was almost hysterical by now. If Pinky began to cry and caused a scene, Saeen would come in and take her away, sobbing; and then later he would summon them to the back of the house and have them whipped by one of his guards. He had had that done before, to a hapless chowkidar who had dared to stare at Jiji as she was getting out of her car; the screams and howls of that man still echoed in all their ears.
“Listen, Pinky-bibi.” Yusuf knelt down in front of the child and was looking beseechingly into her eyes.
She pouted but hesitated, as though trying to decide whether or not to throw a fit. “What?” she said sulkily. Aftab and Babu muttered a silent prayer that Yusuf wouldn’t say something stupid, like the time he’d told Pinky that her cat had died when in actual fact it had only run away, just because he hadn’t wanted to be made to look for it.
“You can’t go to see the crocodiles because it’s a place only for sick people, all right? A healthy little girl like you … you should let the truly needy, the very poor, the desperate people go see the crocodiles. They need them more than you do. Do you think you can do that?”
A slow nod of the head. “Dadi says we should always look after the poor.”
“Your Dadi-jiji is a very wise lady.”
Aftab and Babu were staring at each other in amazement. For once, Yusuf hadn’t ruined everything! Could the fool be finally learning how to think like a normal person, instead of a stupid Sheedi?
“And because you’re so good, I’m going to take you to somewhere much more fun and exciting than
the stupid old crocodiles, who are dirty and smelly and have mostly lost all their teeth by now anyway.”
“Where? What?” Pinky was standing up now, her fists clenched by her sides, breathing noisily through her parted lips.
“I’ll take you to Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s Mazaar, which is nearby, and you can have a parrot pick out your fortune. The Tota-Fal is never wrong.”
Pinky clapped her hands in glee, and a wide smile turned her apple cheeks into blooming roses. “Really? When? When can we go? Can we take Sunny and Miss Lucy with us? Should I go upstairs and get ready now?”
Yusuf turned to grin triumphantly at Babu and Aftab, expecting extravagant praise for his cleverness, and couldn’t understand why Aftab sagged against the kitchen counter, his hand pressed against his forehead, or why Babu’s eyes were already closed in despair.
Sneaking Pinky-bibi out of the house was not as simple a task as it might seem. It was easy enough to choose a day when Saeen and Jiji were away, on a trip to America where Saeen was sent often on important government business. Getting money for the Parrot Oracle was no problem either: Jiji always charged
Pinky-bibi with looking after the house, giving her a small sum of money that Pinky turned over to Babu, and stood next to him while he wrote down the accounts in a small black notebook. The day before the planned outing, she turned to Yusuf, who was lolling against the fridge and watching the transaction with curious eyes, and asked him, “How much does the Tota-Fal cost?”
“Two rupees,” replied Yusuf.
Pinky carefully counted out four rupees and gave the rest to Babu. “Here, Babu. I’m keeping this much for the parrots. One turn for me and one for Yusuf, because he’s taking me. You can have the rest. Mama gave me fifteen rupees, and I know it only costs ten to get food for the whole house. There’s one extra rupee for you, to buy your special medicine.”
