Season of the Rainbirds

by Nadeem Aslam

  Yusuf Rao too was shaking his head. He sighed and said, ‘Anyway, Maulana-ji, you can tell Mujeeb Ali that I’m not contributing even a teddy-paisa towards this scheme.’

  He was not heard. There were loud voices outside the shop. The barber stood up slowly, reluctantly, and went to the door. The newspaper photographer was on the other side of the street, surrounded by a group of men and children. He appeared to be asking for instructions and it was clear that he was receiving contradictory or unsatisfactory answers. Maulana Hafeez approached the door. Only then did the barber see that one side of the photographer’s face and most of the upper part of his shirt were covered in blood.

  Maulana Hafeez’s loud exclamation caused Yusuf Rao to come to the door as quickly as he was able. The photographer saw them come out of the shop and hurried across the street.

  ‘What happened?’ Yusuf Rao took off the cloth which was still wrapped around his body. With a nod of approval from the barber he offered it to the photographer. ‘Did you have a fall?’

  The cut was high on the forehead, near the hairline. Drops of blood formed at the point of the injured man’s chin, two had fallen on to the camera slung around his neck. ‘Does this town have a doctor?’ he said testily.

  Maulana Hafeez touched his elbow. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I went to photograph that goat. A woman hit me with an iron rod saying I was taking away the animal’s soul.’

  Maulana Hafeez said quietly, ‘Islam forbids us to make images of God’s creatures. On the Last Day, God will challenge all artists to breathe life into what they created. Forced to admit failure, they will be consigned to the Fire.’

  The injured man gasped in anger. ‘Maulana-sahib, you have been to Mecca, haven’t you? Well, then, didn’t you have a photograph taken for your passport?’

  ‘But that was not for vanity,’ said Maulana Hafeez, unperturbed. ‘And the first thing I did on getting back from the pilgrimage was to burn the passport.’ And with that he took the photographer’s elbow. ‘I’ll take you to Dr Sharif.’ He guided the man along the street. The photographer, holding the cloth to his forehead, let himself be led.

  ‘I had to see Azhar about something very important but that will have to wait now,’ said Maulana Hafeez.

  Someone from the crowd shouted after him: ‘I have just seen his car drive away, Maulana-ji. So don’t trouble yourself today.’

  Another voice rose, causing Maulana Hafeez to look back with a heavy heart. ‘You could always leave a message, Maulana-ji. Someone’s bound to be home.’

  Yusuf Rao watched the cleric’s receding back. ‘I was wrong when I said Maulana Hafeez doesn’t understand the complexity of the world. I think he does. He just embraces the lesser of two evils when it suits him, and at other times absolutely refuses to compromise. It’s the other maulana, Maulana Dawood, the fanatic, who doesn’t realise that times have changed.’

  ‘But Maulana Dawood has been to Mecca as well,’ the barber said. ‘Five times.’

  ‘I wonder if he burns his passport every time he gets back.’

  ‘Maybe he knows he will be needing it again and keeps it.’

  Back inside, the barber finished trimming Yusuf Rao’s hair. Then he smoothed shaving foam on to the lower half of Yusuf Rao’s face – Yusuf Rao gripped his lips between his teeth – and, after testing the razor on his callused palm, got ready to shave him. Yusuf Rao released his lips: they were neatly defined by the white foam.

  ‘I forgot to mention,’ the barber said. ‘On Saturday Kasmi-sahib and Maulana Hafeez nearly bumped into each other. Right here. Kasmi-sahib saw Maulana-ji but I don’t think that Maulana-ji saw him.’ He pushed his glasses up his nose with the back of his wrist, the razor pointing in the air. He moved Yusuf Rao’s chin upwards and began to shave the stretched skin under the jaw.

  Yusuf Rao was unable to speak so the barber continued: ‘They burned his whole family. I often wonder what poor Kasmi-sahib felt having just heard the news about his village and then listening to the two maulana-jis rejoicing on their loudspeakers that the country was being purged.’

  With a forefinger Yusuf Rao pushed the razor away from his face, slowly and evenly as though on a smooth rail. ‘Maulana Hafeez had nothing to do with that. He was in Mecca during those months. Remember? It was Maulana Dawood and the temporary maulana of this mosque who gave those sermons.’

  ‘So do you think Maulana Hafeez would have acted differently?’

  A faint, almost imperceptible, breeze was at work. All around them branches were letting go of leaves. Suraya bent down to pick one up, then looked around and through the drizzle of yellow leaves located the small tree growing against the courtyard wall to which the leaf had belonged until only moments ago.

  ‘Did that apricot ever give any fruit?’ she asked Kalsum. Since there was no electricity they were sitting in the cool of the veranda. Birds sang in their cages – some suspended from the ceiling, others in a line at the edge of the brick floor.

  ‘You remember,’ Kalsum said, surprised. ‘When your brother-ji bought it he thought it was an apricot tree but as it turned out he’d made a mistake. It is a peach tree. The first year it produced only flowers, no fruit. So we changed its position and the following year it did produce fruit, peaches!’

  The garden was fading fast for the coming winter. The grapevine was nothing more now than a tangled mesh of thin branches which looked like rust-covered wire. Years before – from the time she had been widowed until the year of her son’s death – Kalsum would, in early summer, have tiny sacks of cloth tied over the choicest bunches of grapes, to prevent birds from pecking at the fruit. Enough fruit was left, though, for the humming-birds that were so fond of visiting the garden. She had made the sacks by cutting up an old dress.

  ‘That’ – she pointed at the lubinium – ‘is a cutting we got from Gul-kalam.’ Gul-kalam had brought some saplings from the mountains to plant outside his house and being native to higher altitudes the plant was beginning to turn green. During December and January the whole plant would be smothered in blazing yellow petals.

  ‘Flowers in winter,’ Suraya said quietly. ‘When I left for England I thought I’d never see flowers again. I hadn’t seen many flowers in winter here and I knew that England was a very cold country.’ And she looked at her sister and said: ‘There are flowers in those countries but you still dream of the place you come from.’

  ‘It’s easy to dream when your stomach is full,’ Kalsum said. ‘Don’t forget you left this country because you didn’t have anything to eat here. It didn’t seem very pretty then, did it?’

  Suraya looked away.

  ‘I remember just after you were married,’ Kalsum said, ‘Burkat said he’d leave for England soon. Everybody was going in those days. He said he would make lots of money. “It’s a rich country, England is, sister-in-law,” he said.’

  Suraya smiled painfully. ‘He ended up in Canada, in a restaurant, washing dishes like a woman.’

  ‘When he left he said the first thing he was going to do on reaching England was to employ a gora to clean his shoes. It was to be his revenge for the hundred and fifty years of their raj.’

  Suraya twirled the yellow leaf in her hand, then she dropped it. She rubbed her fingertips together to dislodge any dirt. Her nails were bitten down to the quick. ‘We didn’t know anything,’ she said. ‘Neither of us.’

  Kalsum touched her sister’s arm. ‘Go back to him.’

  ‘I don’t know what I should do,’ Suraya said under her breath. And she repeated the words louder, as though she herself needed to hear them spoken.

  By late afternoon Alice had managed to kill every water lizard in and around the house. The day had been hot and dry and she found most of them in the damp corners of the bathroom or in the moist soil of the flowerbeds. Mr Kasmi had to spend the whole afternoon listening to loud thuds as the broom descended on the witless creatures. Afterwards Alice sprinkled salt on the doorstep and, against Mr Kasmi’s advice, blocked the
drainpipes with rags. At five o’clock, when the heat ebbed, she went out to throw the dead creatures into the river.

  When the doorbell rang Mr Kasmi, who was searching for a favourite poem in an anthology, clicked his tongue in displeasure and put the book on the table. He went to the open window and looked down on to the street. Maulana Hafeez was standing on the doorstep.

  Mr Kasmi waited for a few moments before stepping back. Then, after another brief pause, he crossed the room and went on to the landing. He saw that Zébun was on the courtyard below, excitedly welcoming the cleric into the house.

  ‘Allah, Maulana-ji,’ Zébun was saying, ‘so you decided at last to bless this house with your presence.’ Maulana Hafeez was smiling absently; he pointed to the doorstep and asked, ‘Is this salt?’ Zébun arranged her stole over her head. ‘The water lizards, Maulana-ji. It’s that girl’s idea.’ She steered Maulana Hafeez towards her bedroom.

  Mr Kasmi returned to his room and picked up the book.

  Maulana Hafeez had never visited the house before, not once. When word of Zébun’s arrival spread through the town all those years ago, Maulana Hafeez had planned a visit. But before he could find time Zébun herself came to see him. She said she was carrying the child of a man who had promised to marry her but who, in the face of resistance from his wife and family, was now irresolute. Now he would only marry her if the child that she carried turned out to be a girl: the family, she said, could not trust her – a courtesan – with a female child. In the case of a boy she would receive a monthly allowance but there was to be no attempt at direct contact with the father. Zébun was visiting the cleric to ask what observances – special rosaries, specific verses of the Qur’an – could ensure a girl. It was an unusual wish. Women always came asking for a male child, and were told to recite daily the section of the Qur’an concerning Hazrat Ibraheem and his wish in old age for a son – a wish that was granted in Ishak. When the townspeople heard about the unusual wish, their fears were confirmed: only a prostitute would wish for a girl. Evil charms were thrown into Zébun’s courtyard. There were showers of mysterious seeds and pulses, small packets of powder, bottles of liquid that changed colour at the touch, scraps of paper with geometric designs and sequences of inverted numbers; and once a goat’s ear was nailed to the window during the night. For all that the baby, a boy, lived for only a few hours.

  Over the years Zébun had continued to visit Maulana Hafeez at his house. Maulana Hafeez was aware of the persecution she had suffered during her earlier years in the town. And he had been forced eventually – when he heard the rumour that Zébun’s bathroom had a looking-glass floor – to include the matter in a Friday sermon. Without direct reference to Zébun he had talked at length about the spirit of tolerance and forbearance. He was understood.

  When he heard Maulana Hafeez leave, Mr Kasmi came downstairs. Zébun was sitting inside the mosquito netting.

  ‘What did Maulana Hafeez want, sister-ji?’

  ‘They’re thinking about putting up gates at either end of the street,’ Zébun replied. And she explained the matter as best she could. ‘That’s how I understood it,’ she concluded. ‘You’d better ask the men about it, brother-ji.’

  ‘Such a strange scheme.’

  ‘Many people seem to have agreed. Dr Sharif, Nasin Hasanie, Majid and Wajid Shafik. And I too think that if it can prevent something like last week then it’s worth the trouble and expense. But as I said, you better ask around; you’re the man of the house, brother-ji.’

  Mr Kasmi nodded.

  Zébun said, ‘Brother-ji, I hope Maulana Hafeez’s being here didn’t distress you. All these years I have gone to see Maulana-ji at his house, just to prevent him from coming here and maybe reminding you of – no, no, let me finish, brother-ji – but today I couldn’t hide my pleasure at seeing Maulana-ji in the house, even though I knew you were standing watching by the banéra. I now realise that it was a little inappropriate.’

  Mr Kasmi came into the room. ‘Whoever else was responsible for those months, sister-ji, we can be sure it wasn’t Maulana Hafeez. He was out of the country at the time.’ Mr Kasmi remembered, as clearly as yesterday, the day he had seen an anti-Ahmadiya slogan for the first time. Through the window of his bedroom he had looked down on to the street and seen a boy squatting by the wall opposite. He had paints and brushes by his side and he was waiting for the white rectangle he had painted on the wall to dry. When next Mr Kasmi looked out through the papery flowers of the bougainvillaea – it was spring – the white background had words written on it, and the boy was long gone. Soon there would be stencils, and handbills, and leaflets dropped on to waving children from a blue aeroplane.

  They were quiet for a few moments. Then Zébun reached her hand under the pillow. ‘Brother-ji, I have something I would like you to see.’

  Only when the envelope was out of the gloom cast by the mosquito netting did Mr Kasmi see that it was dark green in colour.

  ‘Sister-ji! Who was it from?’

  Zébun folded her arms across her stomach. ‘From his wife. It was an invitation to their daughter’s wedding.’

  The sound of Alice’s wooden heels resounded on the tiles. ‘I decided to feed them to Bano’s geese instead,’ she shouted into the bedroom, explaining away her prolonged absence.

  Zébun said quietly: ‘You mean you felt like gossiping.’ And loudly: ‘Don’t forget we’re answerable to your parents for your safety, girl.’

  It was a short letter, written in an elegant hand, and arranged into neat paragraphs. Mr Kasmi folded the paper. The smell of old paper – familiar to him from his volumes of Dickens, Wamaq Saleem and Virginia Woolf – wafted up.

  ‘She called you sister,’ he said and stood up to hand the letter back. ‘What do you plan to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was written a long time ago.’

  ‘Nineteen years ago.’

  ‘He’d been dead five years when she wrote it. Why did she want to invite me to their daughter’s wedding?’

  Mr Kasmi was more direct this time: ‘Do you plan to write, sister-ji?’

  Zébun was tracing the edges of the envelope with a fingertip. ‘We don’t even know whether she’s still alive, brother-ji.’

  ‘The marshal eagle’s escaped!’ shouted one of the night-patrollers. They had gone into the shed by the stables to see the birds tethered on their perches. There were two golden falcons, four eagle hawks and four peregrines. Some – those which wore leather hoods over their heads – looked as though they were sculpted in wood.

  The three-year-old marshal eagle was an obedient bird with a peaceable character and was seldom tied up. It had been bred in an aviary and had learned not to fly into the wire mesh. It was graceful with a five-foot wing span and never ate anything unless it was offered on the point of a dagger. During hunts it flew in a perfect circle for a long time – like the hand of a distinguished lady uncertain above a plate of sweetmeats, Arshad Ali had often said – before descending upon the selected morsel. In the mountains it could be trusted to come back from flights of considerable distance, and on several occasions had been left out overnight. But skies around the town were unfamiliar and Arshad Ali had tied it to the perch with a chain fixed with a metal half-moon link that was hammered shut.

  The bird had broken the chain and flown out through one of the ventilation holes.

  They did not have to search for long. Lining the wider streets of the town and the inner banks of both rivers were large talli trees, both sprawling and tall. It was in one of these, growing on the bank of the eastern river, that they located the eagle, desperately flapping its wings near the topmost branches. The chain which had become entangled in the branches had broken at the half-moon link and a considerable length was still attached to the bird’s prehensile claw.

  ‘She’ll break a wing!’ Arshad Ali climbed up as the bird struggled to free itself.

  Evening was easing into night. The air was filled with the cries of alarmed birds who had returned f
rom the day to find a predator near their nests. From high above their heads the four men heard the sound of wings striking the branches become suddenly louder, increase to a frenzy, then stop altogether: Arshad Ali had grabbed the chain, pulled the bird under his arm and stilled the beating wings. He held the claws – each the size of a human infant’s hand and each prong ending in a razor-sharp hook – in one hand and began the long climb down. He had cleared the canopy of leaves and was almost at the base of the trunk when his left foot slipped from under him. He released the claws to steady himself against the trunk. The marshal eagle, equally instinctively, reached for the nearest object and embedded a claw deep into Arshad Ali’s face.

  He could not cry out. The bird fastened on his mouth with one talon hooked under the jaw and another through the upper lip; the remaining two were buried in the left side of the face. The skin on the cheekbone had been pulled down to reveal the flesh lining the eyeball. Arshad still held the bird firmly under the arm, its curved beak open to expose a tongue the colour, shape and size of a peeled almond.

  ‘Get a knife. We’ll have to kill her!’

  Arshad Ali was making a dull grunting sound at the back of his throat, behind the clamped-shut mouth. The claw was turning red with blood. One of the men produced a large curved knife enveloped in a canvas sheath. Arshad Ali reached his hand to his jaw and with a sharp, desperate movement prised the back talon from under his chin. A jet of blood, dark blue in the failing light, soaked the front of the shirt.

  ‘Don’t kill her!’ he shouted as soon as the jaw was free.

  Working by the light of a torch they loosened the bird’s ferocious grip. Two men took the eagle home while the other two, walking either side of Arshad Ali, accompanied him to Dr Sharif’s house.

  The physician was closing the door of the surgery. He took a step back into the room. ‘And whose picture were you trying to take?’ He turned around and hurried to the large screen on rubber wheels which he pushed aside to reveal a couch.