Trespassing

by Uzma Aslam Khan

  This afternoon he lay on a charpoy and pressed play on the tape-recorder. It was the sound track to a movie he’d seen snippets of at the video shop. A luscious woman in a choli ghagra pranced around a mountaintop while her lover chased her. Her breasts were peaks in their own right, bulging through her blouse like cones re-routing traffic. She jingled and jiggled, pouted and fell flat on her back, writhing over the pasture while her man tumbled onto her. He belted out: ‘You and me, what mischief, what magic!’ She screeched: ‘Open yourself to me …’ He kissed her lips and peaks rolled down peaks.

  Sumbul would say he was like his father in this respect too. ‘Aba spends all day glued to the television, imagining he’s Dilip Kumar. Who do you think you are?’

  He never told her that if anyone had got him on to love-songs, it was Fatah.

  He didn’t ache for him as much now. He could remember, without longing, a tender Fatah in the grass, nuzzling his neck, piping, ‘White, white is your body, made of electricity. 440 volts!’

  ‘But I’m black as tar,’ Salaamat would say.

  ‘Silly, close your eyes. We can pretend, can’t we?’

  He didn’t want that any more. He belonged to no one.

  On the charpoy, Salaamat turned up the volume of the song when Khurram’s old chawkidaar shuffled into his room. ‘There’s a woman asking for you at the gate,’ he said.

  ‘What sort of woman?’ Salaamat sat up.

  ‘How should I know?’ The man went back to his work.

  At the gate stood a short and rather dowdy woman, clad in rubber slippers. The only thing going for her was a very fair complexion. He recognized her immediately: the Amreekan’s mother. She sometimes walked past them to throw litter in the empty plot. Once, while rummaging through a pile she’d left, he’d found the most enticing pictures imaginable, such as the one of the blonde woman in a skintight sleeveless top, with breasts like cones. Oh yes, she’d prance for him and sing, Open yourself to me. There was another with bare legs, sitting on the Amreekan’s lap. Salaamat had kept them all. The next time the video shopkeeper threw him out after he’d seen only one dance number, Salaamat had shown him a photograph. He’d been allowed to stay till the end of the film. On the next visit, he’d shown more. By now the shopkeeper and his friends had seen the pictures at least a dozen times but the bribe still worked.

  When she saw him, the woman cleared her throat. Then she seemed astounded by her own audacity, and for several seconds, stood speechless. Finally, ‘Is my son here?’

  ‘No.’

  Now she was astounded by his audacity. Well, he wasn’t going to address her by a title just because she expected it. The only man he called sahib was Khurram’s father and the only woman who was begum sahib to him was Khurram’s mother.

  She cleared her throat again. ‘Well, it seems he’d been coming here a lot and you’d been taking him somewhere. Is this correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  Salaamat leaned into the tall gate. It was happening again: he was being sucked into another world. Didn’t they all see how trivial it was? He chewed the inside of his cheeks.

  Suddenly, she handed him fifty rupees. ‘Please tell me.’

  He took it. ‘To a beach, far away.’

  She nodded, as if expecting this. Then: ‘With whom?’

  Again he chewed his cheeks. She came out with another fifty. ‘With the Mansoor child, Dia.’

  She sighed but he saw she wasn’t surprised about this either. ‘And have they gone there again?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Do you know where they are?’

  Of course he did. He often saw the girl getting dropped at his end of the street, then walking down to the teahouse. She chose this side so she’d not be seen walking past the Amreekan’s house. It was a silly plan, made by a silly girl, to get together with a silly boy. He frowned. She repeated the question, this time with twice the money.

  He shrugged. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘We can take a taxi,’ she pleaded.

  Maybe saving Dia from further disgrace would have been Mr Mansoor’s own last wish. Who could say? Sumbul had wanted him to talk to the girl’s mother. Now here was the boy’s mother.

  He shrugged again. ‘We don’t need a taxi.’

  RIFFAT

  1

  A Usual Day

  Riffat Mansoor walked briskly, as always. Leaning over the trays of caterpillars she exchanged a few words with her employees, examined the mulberry stock, drafted notes on her clipboard, and exhaled so vigorously the curls on her forehead fluttered like down feathers. She was exhausted. Every few weeks a team of men arrived with a long list of reasons why they needed to be paid. Otherwise, they threatened to burn her farm, or simply cut off the water supply. She was tired of ringing her lawyer, who’d increased his charges. She’d been forced to hire engineers to tell her if the current water crisis had more to do with the Mafia than the drought. They said, ‘It could be,’ and sent a team of experts who complained about the heat and vanished. She’d hired someone else who sent a different set of experts. They dug around her land, shook their heads, demanded tea. If she lost her temper she was called a fool for breeding silkworms in Sindh. When reminded that she’d succeeded thus far, they waited for her to lose her temper. And this was a very small part of her day.

  Another worry was that for the past few years, the trouble in the province made it hard for her workers to get to work. Transport was infrequent and unsafe. Besides, with the exception of the gardeners and guards, the staff was all women, and this meant family came first. There were days when husbands and in-laws threw tantrums or children fell ill. All this meant the caterpillars weren’t fed, and since there were as many as two hundred thousand to feed, it meant she or Dia spent the entire day chopping a ton of leaves. Once she’d even asked an armed guard to pitch in, and had had to laugh when he said it would get his Kalashnikov dirty. ‘Set it aside,’ she’d argued, certain that no woman had ever asked him to mince anything before. He grudgingly complied, wrinkling his nose at the foliage as though it were a used nappy.

  Then there was the factory. After Mansoor’s death, she’d refused to let his family take over her silk line, but this meant she’d also retained the stress of managing it. Her weavers came from Orangi Town, a neighborhood that was plumb in the center of the arson and strikes, and many had suffered tragedies in their own families. They’d say, ‘Bibi, if a rich man like your husband could be a victim of crime, what hope is there for people like us?’

  To combat power breakdowns she’d finally installed a high-power generator, but every time the engine revved and black smog lifted into the air she winced. It made no sense: this use of fuel to sustain an industry she’d taken pains to start cleaning by introducing natural dyes. But it pained just as much not to use the generator when the weavers did show up and the power shut down – it was the choice between a waste of human or natural resources, even as she worked hard to prove the two were the same. But there was no arguing around it, especially when she conceded that fuel was depleted in another way too: by commuting between her house in K.D.A, the farm near Thatta, and the factory near the dead Lyari River. It was the choice between working and sitting at home. Both produced their own waste.

  And somewhere in the equation lapped her children – fatherless atoms orbiting worlds increasingly hidden from her. What could she do about Hassan’s arrogance? About her older son who’d given up on his homeland? The grandchild she hardly knew? And Dia – where was she these days? She’d never known her to look so distraught, not since Mansoor’s death. Had Nissrine’s desire to marry unleashed some dread about her own future? Well, with good reason. Dia was doing miserably at college, Riffat knew, because she wasn’t being taught the things that mattered to her – entomology, zoology, mythology. She’d heard they offered degrees in just about everything now, in the new colonial power many parents were sending their children to. More even than England had offered when her generation
went abroad to study.

  Riffat tapped on her clipboard, unhappy with the turn her thoughts were taking. She didn’t like to think of her London days. Not because of her classes – those had enriched her. She shook her head. Her attention returned to Dia. The child didn’t want to leave home, but was it coming to that? Wouldn’t it be better to send her away than watch her feel ineffectual here? Would it?

  What kind of reception would her daughter get in a country where people applauded their government for waging a war no less ruthless than in Vietnam? She’d been a part of the rallies in the ‘60s, in London – so her thoughts were taking her back there after all. She’d been witness to the outrage. But many who’d protested then would remain silent during the Gulf War. If ‘peace’ and the ‘people’s movement’ had been popular causes when Riffat was a student in London, the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim civilians had nothing to do with either.

  She straightened her back. Her neck and shoulders were heavy with the tension building inside her. She pressed a finger deep into the muscle just below her shoulder blade. Her scapula. She’d known someone once who liked to name her parts as he kissed them. No! She could not dwell on that.

  Sighing, Riffat remembered a relative had called last night, and she’d promised to phone back but hadn’t. It was a miracle anyone still tried to reach her. She’d made too many angry too many times with all the phone calls never returned, weddings unattended, deaths only hastily condoled. The truth was brides and corpses made her cry – not crocodile tears but real ones.

  When Dia had told her of his death, after snapping at the poor child she’d slipped into the bathroom and wept as if it were 1968 again. Wept more, she knew, than his wife would. It should never have ended this way. Two youths who’d fallen in love in another land ought to have returned to their own to cement that love. Love knows no boundaries. No geographic, man-made perimeters. That’s how she’d tell it if she ever had to. Make a story of it. Pretend it happened to someone else. Let Dia jot it down, slip it into her Book of World Fables along with all her other tales of beginnings. Read it up in the mulberry tree, adding her own twists, so it metamorphosed into something other than what it was: the story of Dia’s own beginning.

  Riffat Mansoor was exhausted when Sumbul met her by the silkworm trays, took her hand, led her into the shack, made her a cup of green tea and offered painkillers for her ulcers. Riffat thanked her, adding that the business would have completely dissolved if it weren’t for Sumbul’s family. She, her cousins, her father – what comfort hadn’t they provided, especially in the years following Mansoor’s death?

  Sumbul smiled, waiting till Riffat had drunk the soothing leaves. Then she said she’d something urgent to confess.

  2

  Awakening

  APRIL–MAY 1968

  She’d been sipping coffee from a flask under the eaves of an old brick café, waiting for her bus, when she first noticed him: a tall, dapper man in a maroon scarf, with a smile that could fracture clouds. The scarf matched his large, amber eyes beautifully. One didn’t have to attend design school to notice, as the other women throwing covert glances his way confirmed.

  The smile was for her, as he stepped aside to let Riffat on the bus first. All day she sketched impatiently, chewing her pencil stub, shading a poster for dog biscuits in hurried, clumsy strokes. Her professor snapped, ‘No self-respecting terrier would eat that!’

  In the following days, the elegant man repeated the moves – the bow, the beam, the arm extending to usher her on without once brushing her jacket. At last she touched her curls and tossed him a sassy, we’ll-see-about-that look, and then they both laughed while the bus slid away.

  He invited her to eat with him in his tiny hostel room. Lunch was arranged on a rickety desk full of medical books he picked up and placed carefully on the already cluttered floor. An old towel functioned as the tablecloth. He was entirely unembarrassed by his modest means and this moved her.

  The daal tingled with heaps of tamarind brought from home. ‘Hyderabadi style,’ he said. ‘The way my mother made it.’ There was rice, a small salad, and a slab of Cadbury’s milk chocolate for dessert. And throughout, his easy, cheerful manner and boundless hospitality as he spooned most of the meal onto her plate because if she ate well he’d cooked well. No man from her household had ever offered a woman his share, let alone prepared it. She’d not thought Pakistani men did that.

  In the musty room lit by wavering candlelight, he watched her eat and said, ‘We wouldn’t have met if we hadn’t been waiting at the same stop.’ He touched her wrist under the cuff of her right shirtsleeve. Then he touched her chin, sliding his thumb along her jaw. He said she had the loveliest bones imaginable and that her curls enhanced them. Twisting a coil around his index finger he brought it forward, so it fell on the smooth shelf of her right cheekbone, just above the deep dip of her cheek. ‘This is called the zygomatic bone,’ he said. ‘If I ever have to remember that, I’ve only to think of you.’

  In her lap, her fingers twitched. She thought herself too thin to be lovely and had always fought her mother to keep the hair short. ‘Hair could make up for the body you lack,’ her mother would argue.

  Now here she was, fed by such a handsome man. And so tender too.

  When at last she found the nerve to look up at him, she wanted it to be in the same sassy way she’d found earlier. No tears of gratitude. No violins. She wasn’t going to turn into the girl her mother wanted her to be. She stared him in the face and said, ‘I’ll leave you now. But the next meal is at my place.’

  ‘Let me walk you home.’

  She was the wealthier of the two. Her father had land in Sindh and a flat in London, in the West End. They held hands and nobody looked. It wasn’t a shameful thing to do though her family would have said otherwise, even as they watched Shammi Kapoor plant famished kisses down Saira Bano’s zygomatic bone.

  They walked to her flat via Goodge Street, for the names it rang with: Woolf, Orwell. He spoke of the irony of their schooling. He, the son of a rowdy journalist whose pen had fought the colonialists, was learning through them how to treat the wounded. His father said benefiting in this way was just. But he wasn’t sure. Was it equilibrium or a step back? Or could he really find a way to take it forward?

  ‘I understand the conflict,’ Riffat replied, speaking at length of studying textiles in a land that had stripped hers of the very plants she hoped to one day reintroduce, like indigo and catechu. ‘Yet it’s in these libraries that I’m learning what we’ve lost.’

  How could they create peace from paradox?

  She’d ask herself this often in the following years, particularly when training weavers descended from those whose thumbs the British had chopped off because they’d been too adept at turning fiber to tissue.

  And particularly when marrying Mansoor.

  In the following weeks, Riffat and Shafqat rendezvoused between rows of fiction in Foyle’s, nibbled Greek take-out in Russell Square, vowed never to let go of each other all the way from Bloomsbury to Soho. Dangerously enraptured, they began weaving a world around themselves, legs looped, breath knotting tighter with each moment. They’d grow as one or not at all. That was the pledge. It had to do with gravity. It was the only natural way to mature.

  Between curling up together in her one-bedroom flat, studying, attending classes and walking the city, they steeped themselves in the student movement pumping the streets. Riffat’s awakening in London was not merely of her own self, but of her place in a world eager to decide its future for itself. In Iran, the democratically elected Prime Minister had been ousted and the Shah affixed like a plug; in Guatemala, the CIA had engineered a similar coup and tried again in Cuba. And US-backed Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Let the people choose! Che Guevara placards bobbed around Riffat as she held Shafqat’s hand and listened to speakers from around the world. A Pakistani journalist who’d sneaked into Hanoi and later given accounts of American atrocities at a
War Crimes Tribunal, addressed them: ‘Until we own our own resources, we’ll never be free. And as long as the West keeps stealing the forests and minerals of the South and the East, we will fight!’ He spoke of the swindling of Congo’s wealth, of attempts to sink ever deeper into the Middle East. ‘See how the CIA overthrew Kassem in Iraq? It’s because he nationalized oil. They will always seek to depose any ruler who wants Iraq’s assets to stay in Iraq.’

  She and Shafqat left these rallies resolving to return home and together make a better world. They scoured the paper for news of events in their own country, fuming about press-censorship, delighted that back in Karachi, Shafqat’s father was at the center of anti-martial law protests. Holding her, marching down to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, Shafqat would excitedly proclaim, ‘That general is sitting on top of us because of the same power that sits on Vietnam. But things are changing. I can feel new wheels in motion.’ And he’d tell her how the notion of fate enraged him. History was a question of conscious, free will. Not of helplessly succumbing to choices made by others.

  3

  Her Job, His Fight

  JUNE 1968

  For many years she held on to the fossilized shark tooth he’d hidden in her flat one night.

  ‘It’s something very womanly,’ he teased.

  ‘So it has to do with my period?’

  ‘You might say that.’

  She fished in amongst sanitary napkins. Nothing there, nor in her make-up kit. She padded back into her bedroom and threw underwear out from a drawer, exasperated.

  ‘You were closer in the bathroom,’ he grinned.

  She finally saw it in the bristles of her toothbrush – two crusty inches sticking out like a siphon in a bed of white kelp. ‘What on earth is this? And what does it have to do with my monthly flow?’