Her second son is working in a hospital in Lahore. She travels to join him, in a toy plane, carrying what she can in two suitcases and a cloth bundle. She comes to this city by a river, with its bright bazaars, great gold-domed mosque, and many leafy lanes. On its outskirts, there are tombs and a pleasure garden built by a king for his consort.
It’s a hard life in this city she’s chosen to settle in. She moves from home to temporary home. The first is a cattle shed, a mere store for cakes of buffalo dung. She has two rooms in the next. She hopes or waits for the property the authorities had led her to believe they’d offer her, to compensate for all she’s lost. She moves three times in five years. People who once paid obeisance to your rank now refuse to recognise you. Those who owned a guava tree have claimed an orchard here, and those who owned a brick wall asked for marble mansions. She isn’t young: but she’ll spend the next fifteen years writing novels, and fighting for the property she feels the new country owes her to replace what she left behind in the old land.
Many, she sees, are luckier than she has been. She tries to consider the even less fortunate.
1956
Adiba dismisses young writers as anarchists and rebels. Many writers dismiss Adiba as feudal, old-fashioned. She’s a traditionalist, they say: She writes in the mode of the past. Her characters are dolls dressed up in finery. Home and hearth suffice for her heroines. She admits she can’t speak English. She’s never read Russian, French or English novels. It isn’t modish to write without a purpose or a desire to change the world; to speak of war, strife, oppression and abuse with laughter and irony, as she sometimes does, is considered frivolous. Now righteously indignant young women thirty years younger than she is, eqipped with university degrees, carry off the critical acclaim and the literary prizes. But her publishers press for new work. They tell her she has ten thousand readers a year. Adolescents and housewives can’t wait for her novels. A celebrated woman writer comments: We win the literary awards, she wins the hearts of the young. We’re writing of the same matters; but so, so differently. She tells stories of youths summoned to war by the cruel pale rulers. Of girls who join caravans to cross the new border, escaping mad uncles and careless aunts, to live separated from all they know until rescued from refugee camps. She writes about the brooding young men who pine for these maidens, driven to madness or drink by disappointment and separation. She writes about women whose men fight to free the land from the British, and of the scripture-abusers with long beards who clip youth’s wings to try to stop it from soaring. She tells stories of women who bring up their children alone, earning their wages cooking and sewing, or teaching the alphabet and the Holy Book. She writes about the wives of heroes; she writes of heroic wives.
Soldier boys write to her from the front. They ask what happens later, when the honeymoon’s over, to her heroes: Does Shaad’s brother marry Azra’s cousin? They ask for continuations, sequels, autographs, letters. They tell her, When we read your stories we find our way home.
Her daughters, like some of her heroines, graduate. One son becomes a doctor: That way, he says, he can take care of her. She has high blood pressure and a tricky heart.
Critics still make light of her writing. She’s a pedlar of romances, a teller of tales. But sometimes, when she looks at new stories, she sees young writers are learning from her, writing about the world she once delighted in painting, but their colours are sombre, and hers layer pastel on bright, like muslin scarves hung out to dry on a line in the sun. Some of the stories could be her own: of betrayal and loss, of the ignominy of men and women. Others sometimes repeat her phrases, the phrases she borrowed so blithely from life, but to different ends. They write about poverty and pain. She says she only wants to give pleasure. She’s written about the wars in the world and the struggle for freedom and Pakistan, about borders and partition and the bruises and scars of arrival in a promised land, but that’s only the bloody backdrop to stories of hope: she prefers happy endings.
She writes about love.
1960
Alone, as you can be when your children are children no longer with children of their own, when they still surround you but remain far away, Adiba grows tired of looking at poverty and pain. She begins to write romances, tales to read out loud to her grandchildren. She still says her prayers five times a day. Though her God hasn’t always been good to her she invokes his blessings on others. She admires the young General who came to power and will rule the land for the rest of her days. She remembers him in her prayers.
Her children are always in need, her publishers want her to write a book a year. But she can’t. She treasures her craft, treasures her time. She continues to love cooking and sewing; her mind is always on chores and tasks. She makes delicacies from leftover bread; cuts up a worn-out jacket into patches for a quilt, stitching purple to orange and scarlet and green, peacock colours for a cradle or an orphan.
Some critics will say her wonder tales are her life’s best work. They never give her a prize but across the whole land they call her their teller of tales. She tells the nation its stories: the stories they’ve forgotten, the stories they’re waiting to hear.
Each book makes her feel as she felt when the last of her children was cut out of her womb.
1962 (and 1939)
Adiba, now sixty-two, has been ill for years. Struggling with the novel she feels may be her last, she’s rebuilding, again, the homes that have slipped away from her hands, or chasing glimpses of blue mirages before the sun goes down. She writes letters to those journals she once wrote for often, telling readers the stories of her life. She writes about migration and her own woes in the new land: how she was cheated of a property allotted to her by the authorities; robbed of her furniture and chased away by relatives from a house she’d divided and shared.
Sometimes, though, she recalls youth and joy, writes of her days in the old land. Her husband had been an official in the Indian Civil Service. She’d travelled with him from city to city. Each one of her children was born in a different town. She missed the city where she’d come of age and married, but life and her children kept her occupied. She read many books.
One day her husband gave her a story by a friend of his to read, a romance called Shamim. She recognised some people in it, and some places. I can do better than this, she thought. She wrote for a month, in secret. Sometimes she snapped at her children, if they pulled at her skirts while she wrote. Her daughter remembers the pencil she used, new when she began, worn out when she came to her story’s end. When she’d filled three notebooks, she showed her story to her husband. She’d titled it Andaleeb, for the nightingale and her heroine. I’ll publish this for you, he said. He chose her pseudonym, Adiba: she was Badar Zamani till then. They were in Delhi. He had a thousand and one copies of her book privately printed, and sent it out to his friends; one was a well-known writer who edited a journal. Her story ran as a serial in eleven instalments. Later, when readers pleaded for more, he would publish a second edition of her book. Andaleeb: A Tale of Love and Woe first appeared in 1939. In distant places, the world was preparing its wars. Indian cantonments emptied themselves, one by one, of white men. The war came much closer. And her husband was taken for a soldier.
1965
To the end, young women come to see her, to learn the art of writing romances, but all she can tell them is: I write what I see and I write from my life. She doesn’t like similes or elaborate figures of speech; her stories have no message, no goal. In writing, as in life, she prefers the middle path. But some of the girls who approach her think her life is her finest piece of work: they come to learn how to live.
People remember a quiet small woman in white, with fragile hands and flesh scarce on her fine bones. Fans often saw her emerge from her kitchen, wiping her hands on her clothes, or they’d find her, shears in hand, dead-heading roses. There are no known photographs.
On the airwaves, from the old country, a woman writer she once met in Delhi, their home town, calls her
the last chronicler of a lost world. That’s three days before her death. She’s still writing.
There’ll be a war this September, and the nation will call her favourite general its hero, but she’s been gone eight months by then. She won’t live to see the worst wars between the old land and the new, or the bloody struggle for the distant east. She’s had no regrets about moving. She has missed the old city, but ceased to set her stories there a decade after she landed in the new, because sometimes the light in Lahore reminds her of home, when it falls on a marble floor and picks out the gold of a dome or silvers a pigeon’s wing, and here, too, you can smell jasmine and roses and the rain on the breeze, or watch kites – purple and orange and scarlet and green – fly peacock-bright against the horizon. She has found the warm, loud people around her enchanting, though she hasn’t been able, so late in her life, to twist her tongue round their words.
But her ancestors knew Lahore. They built a fort here, in which there’s a mirrored chamber. A great queen is buried on the outskirts of the city with a poem engraved on her tomb. A dancer, walled alive for belonging to a father and loving his son, gave her name to a district: Pomegranate bud. (Queen and dancer loved the same man, one to exile, the other to death. Both lie in this city, and so does he, the world’s conquerer.)
They bury Adiba in this place of intimate strangers. Another woman writer, who’d known her and loved her, washes and shrouds her body for the journey to the grave.
There are many obituaries, on both sides of the border. Many cite Andaleeb as her best work; others praise her stories for children. Veterans (some came from the old land) remember:
Adiba, teller of tales, was born with the twentieth century. She died when she was sixty-five. She came to her new homeland when she was forty-seven. She last saw her husband when she was forty. She gave birth to her first daughter when she was twenty. She married her mother’s brother’s son when she was nineteen and he was twenty-five. It was a happy marriage.
Adiba was a descendant of poets and remotely related to the last emperor, the one deposed in 1858 after the First War of Independence, who died in Rangoon, the one who wrote these words: Father, my home is slipping from my hand, four palanquin bearers are bearing my palanquin away, I’m losing my kin and my strangers.
In 1959, after twelve years in Lahore, Adiba was allotted five rooms in a house. Though she tried to buy the rest of the house from them, her neighbours were litigious and the property remained contested.
1985
Adolescents laid fresh-cut flowers on her grave. Her daughter completed Adiba’s last story and went on to write many more books than her mother’s six or seven. She never took Adiba’s place. People mourned their teller of tales.
Twenty years after her death, a poet exiled to Delhi with only a knapsack says she’s carried two of Adiba’s books back to her native city. The poet, when she grows tired of the poverty and pain surrounding her, reads Adiba for succour.
She understood pain, the teller of tales. Hardship, she wrote, will be your your best teacher, but never let hardship bring you to your knees. And she stitched strands of sentences, patterns of phrases, now pastel, now bright, so carefully into the crisp muslin of her pages.
Her best-loved book is about a soldier taken prisoner by the Japanese in World War II. His wife is told he’s dead but she doesn’t believe the news. But the soldier finds his way home. He’s been blinded by the enemy. His wife, in his absence, has given birth to twins. One for each lost eye.
Centenary
Dear Adiba:
This is a tribute on the hundredth anniversary of your birth from a writer who has spent thirty-one of his forty-six years in a foreign city. He first read your books seven years ago and is writing to tell you of the inspiration he draws from your tales, of the great pleasure they continue to give him. When he reads you he finds his way home. He asks forgiveness for playing games with the stories you told, for occasionally reordering the events of your life.
Here is a story he invented in your name. He tells it in your voice.
A young man who wore a circlet of gold with a ruby that shone on his brow saved a kingdom from an evil ogre. As a reward, he claimed the hand of Nilofar, the king’s beautiful youngest daughter. ‘Who are you?’ the king asked. ‘I am Prince Ahmar’, the young man replied. ‘My father is the king of a faraway country, but I have sworn to stay away from my land for seven years because my brother accused me of a crime I did not commit, and I am not at liberty to say where I come from.’
The nuptials took place with pomp and splendour.
Now Nilofar’s stepmother and stepsister, who envied her fortune and her handsome bridegroom, sowed the seeds of doubt in her heart: Where did the young man come from? To what clan did he belong? But most of all, they wanted the ruby that shone on his brow.
They sent an old courtier disguised as a holy man to tell Nilofar that she must travel on a pilgrimage to a shrine a night’s journey away to pray for her bridegroom Prince Ahmar’s health and his future. While she was gone they put poppy juice in the golden chalice of milk Ahmar drank from before he slept. Then Nilofar’s stepsister crept into the bridal chamber and stole the ruby from the sleeping prince’s brow. Ahmar uttered a great cry, and with blood pouring from his nose and his mouth, he fell to the earth and died. But as he fell Nilofar’s sister saw the chaplet of gold disintegrate into dust in her hand, and in place of the ruby a tiny drop of blood shone on her palm. Then she heard a great fluttering of wings and she looked up to see, in the darkness, two white birds flying up into the air and out into the night through the wide-open window. Nilofar’s stepmother and sister, afraid of the dire consequences of their deed, had Ahmar’s body secretly removed and buried in a wild remote place a day and a night’s journey away.
When Nilofar returned her stepmother and stepsister told her that her bridegroom was an impostor, an evil trickster. He had stolen her jewels and fled to his land.
But Nilofar didn’t believe their lies. She dressed in a suit of clothes Ahmar had left behind, concealed a sharp gold dagger in her bosom, and went out in search of her bridegroom’s grave.
Nilofar wandered a day and a night. She encountered many obstacles placed in her way by her sisters. As night fell, she came upon a garden enclosed in marble walls. It was a place of lush green grass and many flowers. A tall cypress tree grew there between two pools of clear blue water. She drank from one pool, washed her hands in another, and then she sat down beneath the cypress tree, her head against its trunk, to rest a while before she resumed her journey. A round gold harvest moon travelled low in the sky.
She was drifting into sleep when she realised she could understand the language of the pair of white birds that softly sang above her head in the tall tree’s branches.
‘Tell me a tale,’ said one of the birds.
‘Of what shall I sing, my love?’ her mate replied. ‘Of my own travels, or of the world’s woes?’
‘Sing to me of what you have seen in the world today.’
‘I will tell you of the prince of a faraway land and his young bride who has been betrayed,’ said her mate. So Nilofar heard them tell the whole story of her sister’s perfidy, and learned that her husband’s life lay in the enchanted ruby she had stolen from his brow.
Then one bird, weeping, said to the other, ‘Can the young man never be brought back to life?’
And her mate replied, ‘The prince lies within these marble walls. His garments are the green, green grass and his eyes these pools of blue water. His mouth is a deep red hibiscus. His body is this cypress tree, his hair its green leaves.’
‘But if his bride were to catch us, and hold us close, heart to heart, and with one stroke of his sword separate our heads from our necks, so that one of us should not die before the other, and hold our heads above the ground where the prince lies, our blood will spill on the earth and its drops will become rubies more bright than the ruby the wicked woman stole from the prince. Then the prince’s heart will beat a
gain in his breast, and he’ll return to the land of the living. But if one of us dies before the other, the prince will always lie sleeping.’ Nilofar called up to the pair of white birds. They flew down from the high branch and bent their heads before her. ‘Soon,’ she said to herself, ‘I’ll see my beloved lying asleep beside me beneath this tree, with a ruby shining on his forehead, and I’ll wake him with a kiss on his cheek.’
She took out the sharp golden knife she had hidden in her bosom. Soon the green grass grew red with the blood of white birds.
Turquoise
Then everything turned blue: the sky, the lake, the air and the further shore. The universe became blue. The palace made of clouds now turned to marble.
Shafiq-ur-Rahman, ‘Neeli Jheel’ (‘The Blue Lake’)
Nusra came to London in the last year of the century. She was forty-two. Her life in Islamabad, the city she’d lived in for nearly a decade, had become empty. Her marriage to a civil servant was tiresome, her children had grown and flown to colleges across the sea. She left the NGO she helped to run in the capable hands of a friend, and took up a scholarship to research a book on contemporary women painters.
She met Danny in winter, at a conference. He was tall for a Javanese, with a receding forehead, a black moustache, and a copper skin. She liked his low voice and his gentle accent. When they ran into each other again on the steps of the college where she was doing her research and he was teaching, Danny suggested they have a cup of coffee. He told her he’d been away.
It was April. It was sunny. They took their paper cups and sat on the stairs. Danny had to leave early, but there was a signal failure on the tube and later he told her he’d arrived at a reception very late.
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