Season of the Rainbirds

by Nadeem Aslam

  ‘No,’ he answered himself. ‘Of course you aren’t.’ No emotion seemed to inform his voice. Nor did his face register any expression. After a brief pause he said, ‘Don’t you have a stole?’ He was pointing at her head, indicating that she was bare-headed before a male stranger.

  She went to the back of the veranda and took down her stole from the hook. It was the same green colour as the chenille of her shirt. She draped it across her shoulders, her head still defiantly bare. Her features were rigid.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled, ‘you’ll be served in the cup out of which the Muslims of the house drink.’

  ‘Watch what you’re saying, girl,’ Mujeeb Ali said sharply. ‘I don’t drink tea at this hour, that’s all. Anything else has nothing to do with it.’ And after a pause he added: ‘My servants eat out of the same plates as me and my children. Only the people who come in to clean the gutters and unblock the drains have their things kept separate. But that’s because they go down into filth, not because they’re Christians.’

  ‘I know,’ said Elizabeth. ‘My father cleans sewers.’

  Their glances disengaged. Mujeeb Ali took out a handkerchief and dabbed his eyes, his skin shone with sweat. ‘And what does your father think of this?’ he asked without looking at Elizabeth. He had pointed at Elizabeth’s clothes drying on the washing line.

  There was a silence.

  Mujeeb Ali returned the handkerchief to his pocket. ‘You should convert and get him to marry you.’

  Elizabeth looked up. ‘I’d do it if Azhar asked me.’ She spoke firmly. ‘I won’t do it so that others can sleep easy at night.’

  Mujeeb Ali nodded slowly. He made a noise at the back of his throat and, becoming aware of the burnt hair once more, expelled the air from his lungs. He said, and this time he spoke politely, ‘Tell Azhar that I called. Ask him to come and see me when he returns.’

  Elizabeth too softened her voice. ‘He’s returning late at night,’ she said. ‘It will have to be tomorrow.’

  The sun was entering the second half of its arc. Mujeeb Ali walked past the shut-up houses sleeping their siestas, past the straggly lime hedges.

  As he neared his own house he saw Maulana Hafeez in the distance. The cleric was raising his hand and hurrying towards him. He came up close and they shook hands.

  Maulana Hafeez let himself be ushered into the shade of a talli growing by the edge of the street and closed his umbrella, the canopy collapsing like a fleeing jellyfish. ‘I have just been told about the postmaster …’ He left the sentence unfinished, accusingly.

  ‘Forgive me, Maulana-ji, but those letters had to be looked at. We agreed about that on Saturday night. He said he didn’t have them but I knew that he was lying. And I was right.’

  Maulana Hafeez said, ‘But you promised me. And that poor woman …’ Mujeeb Ali started to speak but Maulana Hafeez placed a hand on his forearm. ‘I must have your assurance that if he does come back you won’t harm him.’ There was lunch on his breath and the skin around his eyes was still taut from his recent sleep.

  Mujeeb Ali nodded half-heartedly and dabbed at his brow.

  ‘It is hot,’ Maulana Hafeez said. ‘But I had to come and find you. Nabila said you weren’t in.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to trouble you, Maulana-ji. But I was round at the deputy commissioner’s house.’

  Maulana Hafeez moved his hand to Mujeeb Ali’s shoulder. ‘I’ve been looking for him since yesterday. Is he back?’

  Mujeeb Ali shook his head.

  Maulana Hafeez released him. He lowered his head, looking at his shoes: on each foot the joint of the second toe peeped out of the hole made in the leather. ‘I think you should talk to him, Mujeeb,’ he said quietly. ‘Get him to … mend his ways.’

  Mujeeb Ali did not respond. He inhaled the attar gently released from Maulana Hafeez’s clothes by the heat.

  ‘Yes.’ Maulana Hafeez spoke as though Mujeeb Ali had replied. ‘He should mend his ways. He’s an educated man. He should make us see that education doesn’t mean you forget the difference between heresy and faith.’

  Mujeeb Ali was edging towards the rim of the talli’s shadow. ‘We’ll see what can be done, Maulana-ji.’

  The cleric felt for the catch on the umbrella. ‘And do you know what would make me really happy? If both of you were to find time to come to the mosque one of these days. Then I’d be able to hold my head up in the street. I know you’re busy people but …’

  Mujeeb Ali had given a little nod and was walking away.

  Maulana Hafeez, his umbrella unfurled, watched him until he disappeared into the great marble house that dominated one side of the street. Then, ordering his thoughts, he began walking slowly back towards the mosque.

  The boy set the four cups of coffee on the tray and, boldly balancing the tray on his splayed left hand, began to cross the street. The doors and windows of the courthouse were shut, only an occasional figure was to be seen wandering among the empty arches. The typists dozed in their chairs, wrists dangling near the ground. A herd of water buffaloes had come to rest under the trees on the river embankment. The beasts stood motionless, muzzle to flank, transfixed by the great heat. The boy went into Yusuf Rao’s office. Ignoring both Yusuf Rao and Mr Kasmi, who was visiting, he made a slight bow towards the two men he had earlier seen arrive by car. He transferred the cups on to the table. Then he gathered up the lunch dishes and quietly withdrew. Outside he lingered around the car, touching the creamy paintwork and examining the tyres and peering through the windows, until his father’s shout from across the street pulled him away.

  Yusuf Rao began to hand round the coffee. The cups and saucers had chipped edges revealing the darker clay beneath the white glaze.

  Saif Aziz took a small mouthful, cautiously. ‘Where did you get coffee from?’

  ‘A woman returning from Canada made me a gift of it,’ Yusuf Rao said over his shoulder. And to Mr Kasmi he said: ‘She came to see me as well the day before yesterday.’

  Mr Kasmi, his fingers delicately curved, took the cup being offered. ‘She’s the aunt of the boy who fired the shot at Yusuf,’ he turned towards the newcomers and explained.

  The photographer sat on a stool by the filing cabinet, flicking through a magazine. Yusuf Rao set a cup for him on the shelf by his elbow and returned to his chair.

  ‘Those elections!’ Saif Aziz shook his head. ‘How wrong you were, Yusuf.’ He was frowning. ‘You should have joined the Mazdoor-Kisan party from the beginning. I wrote telling you to do so. Instead you went around supporting their suppression.’

  ‘Look, Saif, yaar,’ Yusuf Rao said. ‘I have admitted to being wrong in the past. I believed all the promises. I believed that the enemy wasn’t just the rich and the powerful but also the dissident voices within our own party who criticised us for not doing enough. We thought that they would jeopardise the prime minister’s re-election.’

  ‘If more people had joined us from the outset then the country wouldn’t be the mess that it is now,’ Saif Aziz said. ‘Now we’ve got this general who looks as if he won’t budge without the help of dynamite.’

  ‘But I wasn’t the only one. Everyone was taken in by the lies,’ Yusuf Rao said, but the conviction had gone out of his voice. ‘I had the support of the whole town. Women didn’t talk to Kalsum for months after her son fired that shot at me. And that poor boy himself … We all know how much his trying to kill me enraged the people. They beat him to death, on the spot.’

  Mr Kasmi had been listening intently. He nodded, then said: ‘So, Yusuf, you accept that it was not Mujeeb Ali who had the boy killed, that it was the people themselves who beat the boy out of loyalty to you.’

  ‘No.’ Yusuf Rao shook his head uneasily. ‘It wouldn’t have gone beyond a beating. After all, he missed. I have no doubt that there were people planted in that crowd who made sure that the blows did not stop until the boy was – well, dead.�
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  There was a silence.

  Then the photographer exclaimed: ‘Here’s one of my photographs.’ He folded the magazine on itself and offered it at arm’s length to the others.

  It passed from hand to hand. ‘The only reason this magazine continues to publish is that it is in English,’ said Saif Aziz. ‘You couldn’t get away with saying half these things in Urdu. They would have banned it years ago.’ Saif Aziz’s own name appeared on the back page, in the list of regular contributors. It was a name associated with numerous organisations that existed, to all intents and purposes, on letterheads only. He had also been thanked in the preface of a book published in England a decade or so ago. The author, an expatriate, had predicted with great timeliness the breakup of the country. But that was a long time ago: the book was probably out of print by now and the library copies would have been withdrawn and sold off cheap.

  Two small boys dressed in soiled clothes appeared at the door of the office. Each carried high on his back a bundle of books. One of them stayed framed in the door, as the other entered the room and advanced towards Yusuf Rao’s desk. On this he placed two rectangles of pink card. They were bus passes. Then the boy addressed Yusuf Rao, the man behind the desk: ‘Can you put a rubber stamp on these, chacha-ji.’ His voice was weak, melodious. He seemed to be standing to attention.

  Yusuf Rao examined the cards. They folded like wallets. ‘They should be stamped by someone at the bus station,’ he told the boy.

  But the boy shook his head. ‘They say they should be stamped by the post office but the post office is closed today.’

  The second boy entered the office. He had been admiring Saif Aziz’s car. ‘They won’t be of much use anyway,’ he said. He seemed a little more confident, more expansive, than his friend. ‘The conductors recognise us standing by the road and don’t thump on the side of the bus to tell the driver to stop. They know we are free bus-passers.’

  The first boy nodded his agreement vigorously. ‘Then if we walk from our village we are late for school and the teachers punish us. And if we go back home our fathers beat us saying we missed the bus on purpose.’

  The photographer watched the boys with interest. ‘So what do you do?’

  Both boys laughed noisily. ‘We go for swims in the rivers.’

  Yusuf Rao smiled and shook his head, then reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and took out an old rubber stamp. The rubber had become brittle and was flaking away, and many of the letters had crumbled. He flicked open the ink pad. ‘I’ll put one of mine on. The conductor won’t know the difference,’ he said confidently. ‘He just needs to see a stamp.’

  Once their passes were stamped the boys wheeled round happily and were gone.

  Mr Kasmi shook his head and smiled. ‘When I was their age my mother-ji would send me to the village blacksmith’s shop every day. Sit and watch what he does, she would say, you’ll learn something.’

  The photographer’s lips parted in amusement. ‘My mother would order me to stand by the mechanic every time he came round to fix something. And she used exactly the same words. You’ll learn something.’

  ‘Are you from one of the villages around here, Kasmi-sahib?’ Saif Aziz asked. He was still examining the magazine.

  Mr Kasmi looked at Yusuf Rao who said: ‘No.’

  The forcefulness of his reply, followed now by silence, drew the newcomers’ attention.

  ‘I’m from one of the villages that were burnt down under the last government,’ Mr Kasmi said in a flat voice.

  Saif Aziz rounded his mouth and shifted in his chair. ‘You’re an Ahmadiya, Kasmi-sahib?’ The Ahmadiyas belonged to a sect considered heretical by purists. It was outlawed by the previous prime minister in an effort to placate the maulanas and to win over the religious vote.

  ‘Do people know?’ the photographer whispered urgently.

  Yusuf Rao folded his arms in his lap. ‘All the Ahmadiyas were driven out of the town and their houses razed to the ground. But Kasmi has never really been religious, so no one really knew. Everyone just loves and respects him as the man who pulled a generation’s ears out of shape.’

  The remark forced the others to offer awkward smiles. But the pretence at light-heartedness was short-lived.

  Mr Kasmi stood up with a sigh. The sun was beginning to withdraw its rays. ‘I’d better be getting back,’ he said. ‘Sister-ji will be wondering.’

  Yusuf Rao swayed over to the door and shouted for the tea-stall boy.

  Saif Aziz slapped his knees and stood. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we get down to business. Talking to the sixty-seven people who have received the letters.’

  Yusuf Rao clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘How could I forget,’ he said. ‘I received a letter this morning. Or to be precise, my wife did.’

  ‘What was it?’ Mr Kasmi asked. He took down the umbrella from the hook and picked up the leather bag from the shelf.

  ‘It was a letter I wrote to her from Lahore. I was away taking the bar examinations,’ Yusuf Rao was laughing. ‘She says I should be ashamed for writing such vulgar things in a letter. But I tell her that a man can write whatever he wants in a letter to his wife, especially a young man. She says didn’t I know that the letter would be going into a house full of children – what if it had fallen into their hands?’

  ‘Well, that cuts down our work.’ Saif Aziz nodded at the photographer and grinned. ‘Now we only need to talk to sixty-six people.’

  Tuesday

  BY the time Zafri slaughtered the seventh goat a crowd of beggars had gathered outside Judge Anwar’s house. Indifferent to the rain, beggars of all ages – from very young to extremely old – jostled and fought each other to reach the front door. One seemingly able-bodied man wore a framed statement around his neck that carried his picture and proclaimed him deaf, dumb and blind. Azhar and Dr Sharif made their way into the house with difficulty. A blind woman – irises flickering for lack of anything to focus on – cursed loudly when Azhar pushed her aside. She was accompanied by a young girl who had tangled hair and clogged nostrils. The old woman’s left hand rested on the girl’s right shoulder.

  ‘This isn’t the granddaughter you had with you last week,’ Azhar shouted over his shoulder as he crossed the rainy courtyard.

  The woman recognised the deputy commissioner. ‘The other one is getting old, deputy-sahib.’ She turned her blind eyes towards Azhar and shouted out her reply. ‘I can’t drag her around for every Ayra, Gyra and Natho-khyra to lay eyes on.’

  Plants had been taken down from the eaves. Instead, from the hooks hung the disembowelled carcasses of the seven goats. The black-and-white checked floor of the veranda was wet with orange, watered-down blood and fluids the colour and consistency of melted butter. The pots of ferns were set against the back wall, and next to them in a neat row were the heads of the sacrificed goats. Their small eyes were like marbles. The long, velvet-encased ears rested softly on the tiles like robes. The ribbed horns curved backwards and touched the wall.

  Despite the rain both Dr Sharif and Azhar hesitated before stepping on to the veranda. The young boy assisting Zafri was dragging the eighth goat on to the veranda by the rope around its neck. The animal, sensing the danger, struggled and bleated. Zafri held the knife between his teeth and, with a quick movement of his right foot across the goat’s front legs, threw the animal to the floor. His movements from then on were perfectly co-ordinated; the actions of the assistant, however, as he grappled with the writhing rump and hind legs, were haphazard and betrayed his lack of experience. Once the animal was overpowered, the boy shouted for Asgri Anwar.

  Asgri emerged from the room adjoining the veranda – the room where Judge Anwar was killed. She carried her youngest daughter on her hip. It was necessary for the person in whose name the sacrifice was being made to touch the knife. Zafri raised his head, the blade between his teeth, and the little girl reached down to touch the wooden handle.

  Zafri took the knife from his mouth and – his lips moving
as he read the appropriate verses – opened the animal’s throat with short, precise cuts. Azhar watched for a few moments then looked away. Buzzards and kites and vultures floated above the house. Crows topped the outside walls, evenly spaced as though arranged there by a human hand.

  ‘So how’s my friend Gul-kalam, deputy-sahib?’

  A few moments passed before Azhar realised that Zafri had addressed him. Asgri, on her way back to the room, stopped and looked back at the butcher. He was concentrating on the blood gushing out of the opening in the throat, his knees pinning the dying animal to the floor. The blood poured out with great force: it was almost as though it was this force, and not the knife, that had torn open the blood vessel.

  Dr Sharif said under his breath, ‘Death may be an important part of nature but there’s nothing more unnatural than a dying animal.’

  The boy let go of the hind legs. The animal had stopped trying to kick. And within the next minute an eighth head joined the other seven by the wall. Dr Sharif noticed that one of Zafri’s fingers was bandaged. He remarked on it.

  ‘I cut it on a bone,’ Zafri explained. ‘Now I understand why the cave people used to make weapons out of bones.’

  Dr Sharif advised him to stop by at the surgery later. ‘Wounds don’t heal well in the rainy season. Damp, you see. Risk of infection.’

  Zafri smiled. ‘You’re not going to pick my pocket that easily, doctor-sahib.’ He gave his eyes an upward roll. ‘I’ll just piss on the cut and cover it with burnt cloth. It’ll be fine by tomorrow.’

  Azhar and Dr Sharif left the veranda and entered Judge Anwar’s bedroom. Asgri sat on the bed, surrounded by women. As the men entered Asgri wiped her eyes and rearranged her stole to fully cover her head.

  Azhar, seeing her tears, said, ‘You shouldn’t pay attention to Zafri, apa. He’s just careless, uneducated. I’ll talk to him later.’

  Asgri rejected the comment. She said to one of the women by her side: ‘It’s not even seven days yet, but I understand that to others it seems like a long time already.’ The woman nodded, shutting her eyes theatrically. ‘So much seems to have happened since then.’