3
Though Tabinda hadn’t had time to tell her family she was coming home, she knew that after a period of distress akin to mourning, caused by their daughter’s misfortune, they’d regain their good sense.
As they did. Tabinda’s mother railed against all benighted men like Suhayl who fell victim to the spells and blandishments of Vilayati trollops.
– Those mems, she muttered. They cling to our poor boys like leeches. Aren’t their own men good enough? They eat pig’s meat for breakfast. How can angels visit their houses? They wear knee-length frocks with tiny drawers like this beneath, and wipe off the soil and secretions of their nether parts with squares of paper. Then they bathe themselves in still water, soaking in their own filth. Then they let their puppies sleep in their bed and lick their faces. How, I ask you, can the angels of mercy set foot in houses such as theirs? They look like boiled turnips with glass marbles for eyes and straw for hair. There was a lady doctor from the mission nearby who used to visit us in Bhopal – a kind woman, poor soul, I must admit – but my mother would cover the chair she sat on with a white sheet she kept especially for ‘mem’ visitors so we wouldn’t have to sit where their bottoms had been.
Tabinda’s brother, as her advocate, wrote to her in-laws, asking for a divorce. Shaikh Usman Hanafi, Tabinda’s father, had consulted the religious books and all the reformist laws derived from them.
– If you allow Suhayl to divorce you, he told Tabinda, you can justifiably claim the substantial alimony pledged to you in the marriage contract.
But Tabinda remained adamant.
– I want to divorce Suhayl. He’s observed none of the conditions that allow him a second wife. He hasn’t asked my permission to remarry. I’m not barren or deranged. He won’t be dividing his time fairly and equally between his new wife and me.
Tabinda’s advocates didn’t demand alimony, but they wanted custody of Nasreen, who in any case was an infant and far below the age of seven at which a child may choose between her parents. She must be kept by her mother. Tabinda’s father was quite sure, though, that a girl child would be of little concern to her husband’s parents. And Tabinda, though she would never have spoken of it, knew that she may be betraying her parent-in-laws’ hopes for a reconciliation and a male heir born of a thoroughbred mother, but she was also freeing the man who had shared her life for forty-nine nights from his obligations to her. And the straw-haired bride who removed the last needle from his eye would finally breathe the air of freedom and relief.
4
There remained, of course, the question of subsistence. How could she drain the meagre resources of parents who, from their misguided love of her, had chosen a husband who was to have provided her, far away from the home of her girlhood, all the comforts they had been denied in their lives?
Her brother was a petty clerk in a government office. Her father, who before he came here had been a schoolteacher, had no pension, though he still supplemented the family income by taking in students from the neighbourhood to whom, in spite of the cataracts now clouding both his eyes, he taught the words and cadences of the Holy Book.
Tabinda, too, could recite by heart every word of the Quran. And she knew its meaning, too. Should she go out and teach its message to little girls? But the role of an ambulant teacher of scriptures wasn’t one to which the gently nurtured women of her family were suited. And the older boys who came to study with her father would never willingly countenance the guidance of a young woman.
But then she had known, for a long time, the professional pursuit she’d ultimately choose. She’d take in the neighbours’ sewing.
Soon, she was preparing an entire trousseaux. She embroidered napkins, tablecloths, bedspreads for the wives of the better-off. She stitched sequins on scarves for brides, and knitted pullovers to keep babies warm in mild Karachi winters.
Her mother protested.
– Did we bring you up for work like this? Who thought my daughter would become a seamstress? Think of the loss of dignity! No woman in our community has ever soiled her hands like this before, touching other people’s garments! I dreamed that all you’d do in your husband’s home was sit on a silver chair and sleep in a bed of flowers...
In response, Tabinda quoted an example from the Bahishti Zevar she’d been given as a bride to carry with her Quran:
– Didn’t Zainab bint Jahash, the Holy Prophet’s wife, work with her hands and didn’t our Messenger himself praise her for the generosity of her ‘long hands’?
And her father, from the corner near the window where he was smoking his hookah in the winter light, added:
– And the redoubtable author of the Bahishti Zevar himself recommends that virtuous women follow in that illustrious lady’s footsteps and take in work to keep their idle hands busy at home. Calligraphy, bookbinding, teaching the alphabet, sewing and the making of pickles are all lucrative occupations suited to the wives and daughters of the virtuous.
When the work at hand became too much for her to deal with on her own, Tabinda asked her father for the use of the covered veranda in which he had taught his students who, one by one, were drifting politely away. She hired three women from the neighbourhood to come in and help her with the work.
One day a woman drove up in a shining new car and asked to see her.
– The woman who looks after my children lives in this neighbourhood and told me about you, she said. I believe you do zardozi? I want this jacket embroidered for my daughter’s bismillah.
– Anything you want, Tabinda said. She went to work.
Other affluent clients followed. Soon the house was full of baskets of thread, bolts of cloth and lengths of fine fabric in varying stages of readiness. Tabinda sensed her sister-in-law’s unease at their over-crowded quarters.
But once again Tabinda’s keen eye helped her out of the situation she found herself in. A seamstress who worked with her told her of a small warehouse nearby that was lying empty. She covered her head and shoulders with a grey shawl and went off to bargain with its owner for a fair rent.
Within a week, she had supplied the scrubbed single room with a modicum of furniture – chairs, stools, sewing machines, pitchers for cool water, even a small stove to make tea. It travelled across the neighbourhood in a camel-cart. In the month after Ramadan she moved her seamstresses, along with an ageing machinist who had now joined them, and his small grandson to whom he was teaching the craft, into her new shop.
A poster, proclaiming NAUBAHAR: Ladies’ and Childrens’ Garments and Fancy Needlework in bright green letters, hung resplendently above the door.
5
Five years after her return to Karachi, Tabinda was able to rent a tiny plum-coloured building on the fringes of the expanding district of P.E.C.H.S., to which she moved her workshop and showroom. The disused servants’ quarter of a bigger house which had been rented to American missionaries who didn’t need rooms for servants, it had been found for her by their cook, who knew the husband of one of the seamstresses from Lalukhet.
The house had a wall festooned with the purplish bougainvillea that grew so profusely in this neighbourhood, and a low wooden back gate she used as a separate entrance. The fine folk of the city who availed themselves of her skills had found Lalukhet too distant for their chauffeurs to drive them to, but the prices they were ready to pay for the fine traditional embroidery they demanded had enabled Tabinda to change her location. She left the machinist, his grandson, and three women who didn’t want to work away from Lalukhet in charge of the old shop. In the new premises, there was almost too much work: Tabinda had to hire many more hands, among them a number of residents of the nearby refuge for destitute women, who took home two-thirds of the price Tabinda charged customers for their work. Two years ago, when she’d sent the sum she received for the bracelets and the ring she’d sold back to her parents-in-law, a money order for a substantial amount had come from them in lieu of a receipt, to help, she supposed, with the expenses of Nasreen’s upkeep. Sh
e’d cashed it and banked the sum in an account she opened in Nasreen’s name. Thinking of the plight in which she’d have found herself if she hadn’t had her parents to support her, and her own faith and enterprise to see her through, she now set aside a part of her income in a charitable trust for abandoned women and their offspring. One Friday a month, after prayers, she fed the poor of the neighbourhood in her courtyard.
Soon Naubahar was known as the best shop of its kind.
6
A teacher from the girls’ school nearby took to dropping Nasreen at her mother’s shop after classes. On the pretext of having an outfit stitched for Eid, she befriended Tabinda. Her name was Shamim. A lively, talkative graduate with a degree in education, Shamim had bobbed, permed hair and, in her mid-twenties, was in no hurry to marry. In the afternoon, she sipped tea and nibbled savoury snacks with Tabinda who, with much of the heavier work now delegated to her staff, had a little time to spare.
Shamim asked Tabinda for a signed photograph one day. Some days later, she handed her a slim volume of verse. It was, she said, written by her brother, Omar Baig.
Tabinda had, until now, found no time to make friends. But with her daughter at school she was sometimes lonely. These days, with Shamim’s visits, she had company. A rare source of entertainment over the year or so since she’d started to work in P.E.C.H.S. was a trip to Elphinstone Street, where she shopped among the society ladies and the foreigners, or to Saddar for fabric or shoes, or a visit to the neighbouring Khayyam cinema with Nasreen. But in all these years she hadn’t walked on the Clifton esplanade or in Frere Hall’s gardens, or seen the Zoo.
Six years had passed since her divorce, and she hadn’t seen her former husband for nearly ten. At times she wondered about that callous stranger she married who had never wanted to know his own daughter, and the straw-haired mem he’d brought across the sea to Pakistan. How were they faring? Had they moved back to Lahore or did they live in London? Was he now the father of that son and heir her parents-in-law had acquired Tabinda to produce? Sometimes she felt as if she had been enchanted since her divorce, like those princesses who slept in a spell all day and only rose at night, except that it was at night, when she heard the peaceful breathing of her family through the thin walls around her, that she felt forgotten and lonely.
Nasreen was nine, and Tabinda nearing thirty. She’d been independent for a while and, though she rose before dawn to make the journey by rickshaw to drop Nasreen at school before opening the shop, and still travelled back every evening to her parent’s little home to sleep there with Nasreen beside her on a mattress, she had furnished a room with a bed for herself in the house she rented, and there was also a bigger room for Nasreen. The child, who’d never had a room of her own to sleep or dress in, used it with joy in the evening, before her mother took her back by rickshaw, soon after sunset, to Lalukhet. She brought schoolfriends here, with whom she’d do her homework in her room, or play in the yard that lay between her house and the missionaries’. Brought up with her boy cousin, Nasreen was now, in the company of her schoolfriends and in the long hours she spent in the house in PECHS, growing unused to Lalukhet. She really only saw her family at weekends, when her cousin was out playing ball on the streets with his playmates, and all she could do there was spend her time reading, drawing animals or playing with her dolls alone.
Tabinda often secretly considered shifting with Nasreen into the rooms she had furnished. Her brother’s family was growing, and they could do with the added space her departure would allow. He’d been offered, as a government servant, a house in the nicer district of Nazimabad, in which he could make a new home for his family. Tabinda knew there’d be no room in this new life for her. He had, in fact, offered more than once to arrange a government loan for her, to enable her to buy the property she rented.
– You should remarry, her sister-in-law said frequently. There are widowers who would be happy to acquire a wife with an income of her own, and as for Nasreen – well, what with your position in the world as a woman of considerable means, you can always send her to boarding school in Murree. Or else you could stay on here with Abbajan and Ammi – but people would talk. You’re fine as long as you have your brother’s hand of protection on your head, but if we leave you alone here with them – a single woman who works – people will talk.
But Tabinda had never dreamed of a second marriage. After the unedifying experiences her body and then her mind had undergone with Suhayl, she wouldn’t consider the notion of sharing her life with a man she didn’t know. Discreet proposals had been brought to her father’s doorstep, but she always suspected that the men who asked for her hand wanted a nanny for their children, or knew about her financial security. She had heard stories of men who, though they had no legal right over their wives’ assets, had, through various machinations, drained rich girls of everything they brought with them. She could, she thought, move her parents with her into the new house. But there was hardly room for them there and they wouldn’t, at their age, want to leave their son and grandson to move so far away. And telling them she was leaving their home to live alone? It would break their hearts. The question didn’t arise.
For years Tabinda had been embroidering, on a bedspread, a tree with bright birds on its spreading branches. A blue and gold stream flowed beside it, from which two golden does were drinking. It’s for Nasreen’s wedding, she told herself.
7
Tabinda was waiting alone in the mild March afternoon for Shamim to bring Nasreen home. She idly watched a blue-winged bird shake water-beads off its wings and wondered where it had taken a dip. From the cinema nearby she could hear Noorjehan’s plaintive voice:
Chand hanse, duniya base, roye mera pyaar re
Dard bhare dil ke mere toot gaye taar.
Earlier, instead of the religious pamphlets or the women’s digests she usually read, or the amber beads she told in spare moments, Tabinda had picked up from her table the volume of verse Shamim had left with her. A sketch of the poet, whose pseudonym was Armaan, graced the book’s jacket. She noted a fine wide forehead, deep intelligent eyes, thin lips and a firm jaw.
Two verses captured her restless eye. One spoke of the seasons: How, the poet asked, could those who suffered winter’s winds ever forget the smell of the jasmine in spring? The other celebrated the blue of the sea. Above the second poem, someone had written: To those dark eyes that have never seen the blue sky look at its reflection in the sea’s waves.
Shamim had told Tabinda once that her brother took her to Clifton sometimes on the back of his scooter, and Tabinda remembered saying: In all the years I’ve been back in Karachi, I’ve only twice, and very briefly, seen the sea. She realised that Shamim must have passed the information on – with some amusement – to her brother.
Sipping tea with Shamim later, Tabinda, carefully and casually, once again brought up her wish to see the sea. Shamim suggested a trip to the beach that Sunday. Her brother would drive them there in a borrowed car.
8
– I don’t know how much Shamim has told you about me, Omar said to Tabinda at the beach while Shamim and Nasreen rode on camels’ backs. I work for the Urdu newspaper Naya Zamana and scribble verses in leisure moments. My dream is to own a bookshop. I’m twenty-seven. I came alone to Karachi when I was seventeen. I still live in the family home in Bahadurabad, where we’ve been since my parents came to Karachi from the Deccan seven years ago, in ’51. I favour progressive politics and I don’t mind the occasional drink, but I fast, and never fail to go to the mosque on Fridays. I decided (he continued quite hesitantly), if you don’t mind mind my saying this but I’d rather say it all to you myself, that you were the right person for me even before I saw the autographed photograph Shamim took from you to show me. I want to ask you first, before I take any steps, if you have any objection to my parents visiting yours...
I’m a divorced woman with a daughter, Tabinda wanted to tell him, but that seemed redundant because he must already be aware of her
past, as her daughter was right there with them. Neither could she find words to say she’d let him know. She didn’t speak. And then, to break the silence, she said:
– The sea in poems and songs is always blue. But in this light, wouldn’t you say, it’s the colour of a turquoise.
9
Though it seemed incongruous, particularly because Tabinda was a divorced woman and Omar a younger man, Shamim’s parents came to Lalukhet with gifts and a formal request for Tabinda’s hand. They were doubtful at first because of the difference in age and the knowledge of her failed first marriage, but, Shamim told her later, her mother had taken one look at the modest bespectacled young woman who hardly ever raised her eyes to them and had been persuaded. Tabinda’s entrepreneurial reputation probably helped.
Tabinda and Omar were married in June. They’d known each other since March. Only the two families attended the wedding. Tabinda hadn’t wanted to dress up, but Shamim draped her in a red chiffon sari, and put a string of jasmine, punctuated with a single rose, in her long hair. Now take off your spectacles! Shamim said. Tabinda didn’t like jewellery, but her mother-in law had given her earrings and bracelets she’d worn at her own wedding, and Tabinda had to wear those, though she drew the line at the sprinkling of powdered gold on her face and hair.
Turquoise Page 9
