Haveli

by Suzanne Fisher Staples

  Shabanu’s heart turned over and over again as they neared the dunes of the desert. Seeing the blue ribbon of smoke from her mother’s cooking fire curl lazily toward the sky, she could almost taste the sweet milky tea, and already she heard the camels’ growls and mutters, transporting her back in time to her Cholistan childhood.

  Her family stood to greet her in a small clump, their bright cotton tunics like flowers against the pale gray sand.

  Shabanu flew into her mother’s arms.

  “Sh-, Sh-, Sh-, Shabanu,” her mother crooned softly, and cradled her youngest daughter’s head against her shoulder as she’d done when Shabanu was a child.

  Her cousins, aged eight and ten, had grown tall and thin. Their hands were coarse and broad, but their faces were still soft and childlike.

  Dadi held Mumtaz as if she were a treasure, and Choti pranced at his feet as if she too wanted to have a fuss made over her.

  Mama’s face was lined deeply, though her shoulders were still straight and square. Phulan’s eyes were pinched at the corners, and pockets of flesh were forming beneath them. Creases had developed around her lovely mouth, although she had not long ago reached only her twentieth birthday.

  The desert ages people too fast, Shabanu thought sadly. She’d never noticed before.

  Mama wore the same turquoise tunic she’d worn when Shabanu was married. It was worn and faded, but it still showed the strong lines of her mother’s tall, slim body.

  At Shabanu’s wedding the women of Rahim’s household had stared at the desert women’s rough handmade slippers and tunics sewn in graceful lines that fitted their full breasts and slender waists. The women of Okurabad wore more stylish cuts of splendid fabrics that hid their plumper figures. Shabanu still loved the simple embroideries and mirrored designs of Cholistan far more than the beaded chiffons the women of Okurabad wore.

  Her relatives wore their hair plain and pulled back in long thick braids, while the women of Okurabad wore theirs carefully coiffed in fluffy bobs. The hands of the Cholistan women were rough with calluses from hauling water, their nails cracked and split from patching the walls of their houses with dung and earth and water. The idle hands of the women of Okurabad were manicured, with long lacquered nails and soft white palms.

  Shabanu’s family had stood silent with a natural grace, while the women of Okurabad laughed at them behind their silken dupattas.

  Shabanu was glad to see every one of them—even Auntie, whose lips had grown thin and crooked from years of pursing them with disapproval. Shabanu embraced them, one by one, inhaling the desert-clean smell of their hair and clothing, as if to dispel the outer layers of the Okurabad woman she’d become to reveal the Cholistan girl who remained inside her.

  Auntie took Mumtaz by the hand, and they all sat beside the fire. Auntie had felt sorry for Mama and Dadi when they’d had no sons to provide for them in their old age. But now because of Dadi’s fine camel herd and Rahim’s generosity, they were far more prosperous than Auntie and her husband, who still worked as a government clerk in Rahimyar Khan and visited his family only occasionally.

  Auntie hugged Mumtaz and kept her close, perhaps mourning the daughter she would never bear.

  Mama handed Shabanu a cup of tea. She cradled it in her hands, and the warmth of her family enfolded her.

  Phulan held her newest infant son against her breast. Her second son, who was three, ran about, barefoot and bare-bottomed, herding chickens with a stick, while the third toddled after him. The eldest, who was five, sat nearby with the men.

  While Phulan seemed content and thoroughly absorbed in her four sons, the changes in her saddened Shabanu. Just seven years earlier, when she was married, Phulan’s skin glowed from weeks of massages with oil of jasmine and golden powders—turmeric, cumin, and saffron. Her hair shone from rubbing it with a paste of sandalwood and mustard oil during the wedding preparations. Her arms and cheeks had been round and sleek from a diet of yogurt and honey, carrot pudding, nuts, butter, raisins, and sugar. She had been like a ripe peach, round and golden and fragrant.

  Now, Phulan’s skin was checkered and lined. Her hair was dull, with limp strands that flopped over her forehead. Her body was spindly and slightly stooped from hard physical labor on her husband’s farm. Although Phulan was still young, Shabanu could imagine clearly how her once-beautiful sister would look as an old woman.

  Men came and went throughout the morning, squatting with their backs against makeshift shelters, smoking and talking about prices for hauling produce. Dadi and his cousins contracted out their camels to haul sugarcane to market during the busy harvest season. They calculated how many more camels they’d need for the overlap of the cotton, mango, and orange crops as the season wore on.

  Late in the morning Shabanu’s mother brought out the old wooden bowl, and Shabanu took it from her to mix dough for chapatis. Her aunt brought out cloths folded and tied around sweets from the bazaar at Rahimyar Khan.

  As they were about to eat, the sound of gongs and plunks from the bells of animals reached them from where the dunes undulated into the desert. Within moments the unmistakable husky voice of Shabanu’s Auntie Sharma shouted out above the melody of the bells, and Shabanu thought she’d never heard a sweeter sound.

  They saw the goats and sheep first, then the ancient female camel carrying Sharma and her daughter, Fatima, slipped into view like an apparition from behind the edge of a dune.

  “Ho! Can you have such a gathering of women without me?” Sharma demanded.

  Shabanu hiked her skirt to her knees and ran headlong toward her aunt and cousin. The three clasped one another’s waists and danced in circles, their bare feet sending up clouds of dust so thick it muffled their laughter.

  Sharma was Mama and Dadi’s favorite cousin. There were many who disapproved of Sharma because they said she had been a disobedient wife. Many believed she was a witch. Shabanu believed she was the wisest woman on earth.

  Sharma’s husband had beaten her after Fatima’s birth. He was disappointed when she’d failed to produce a son. Sharma had accepted her punishment and said nothing. Slowly she began to build the herds of goats and sheep she tended at the edge of the desert near Fort Abbas, where her husband owned a small farm. Every week she would bring a twig whisk or a bowl or a blanket from her house and bury it in the sand. There, unbeknownst to her husband, she’d built holding pens of thorn branches for her rapidly growing herds. In the last week she also brought red clay pots filled with ghee, a sack of flour, and goatskin water bags.

  One day during the cotton harvest, which coincided that year with a series of sandstorms in the desert, Sharma strapped Fatima to her back and announced to her husband that she was going to pick cotton in the fields of the local zamindar.

  Her husband was a proud man, and he objected to Sharma’s working in the fields. But Sharma’s will was powerful, and her husband, ever greedy for money, had acquiesced. Sharma gathered the muslin sacks she intended to fill with cotton and walked down the road toward the zamindar’s fields.

  There she made a sling of her chadr and tied it between the branches of thorn shrubs that were strong enough to hold Fatima but supple enough to bend with the breeze. She left the infant to be tended by the older children of the women who worked in the field beside her. She spent the day picking cotton, bent from the waist until she felt her back would break.

  A storm rose in the afternoon, and Sharma thought surely it indicated that Allah had blessed her plan.

  Instead of taking the cotton she’d picked to the weighing station, Sharma headed toward home with Fatima strapped to her back and the bulging sacks of cotton piled high atop her head. She leaned into the wind, and clouds of blowing sand stung her face and arms. Halfway home, she left the road and circled around to where her husband’s camels were tethered.

  She took the oldest female, because it was the quietest and most dependable animal in the herd. Also, the old camel never strayed, so her husband never hobbled and tethered her. In a san
dstorm he would think she had wandered away, and he would miss her least of all his camels when she failed to return.

  Then, in the midst of the howling wind, which tossed baskets and branches and small trees about as if they were as light as the sand itself, Sharma and Fatima struck out to gather their penned herds and entered the desert several miles away.

  It never occurred to her husband that Sharma, a mere woman, would have the strength to ride a camel four days and four nights through a storm without stopping, until she was so deep in the desert that he’d never find her. It never occurred to him that she could find her way among the dunes under such conditions with the skill of a tracker. It never even occurred to him that she’d have the courage to leave him, despite his regular beatings and verbal abuse.

  So, not wishing to acknowledge any dishonor to himself, her husband chose to believe that Sharma and the child had died in the sandstorm. When they didn’t return, he never went to look for them.

  It didn’t displease him, really. Sharma was the second wife who’d borne him only daughters, and he couldn’t afford a third and still feed them. But without Sharma and Fatima he now could ask his cousin for the hand of his eldest daughter, who was just reaching a marriageable age. She would bring no dowry, but he’d watched her breasts bud and her backside grow round. Perhaps finally he’d have a wife who would give him sons!

  Fatima had grown fat and healthy in the desert with her mother. They sold the cotton to buy cloth and food. When they needed more sugar or tea, they sold their fine strong animals. Sometimes they harvested wheat in the fields near Rahimyar Khan, far away from Sharma’s husband.

  When she came of age, Fatima decided she would not marry at all. Her mother was delighted that her daughter had chosen to stay with her.

  Sharma and Fatima were self-sufficient. Any man who had ever tried to harm or cheat them had fallen on hard times.

  Once a goatherd had stolen their spring lambs. The foolish man bragged of this deed to his cousin. The very next day the lambs and his entire herd of goats disappeared from the edge of the desert where they grazed. He looked for them for days, but they’d disappeared without a trace, and he never saw them again. The man was ashamed—not of his thievery, but that he’d been outsmarted by a woman—and never mentioned his misfortune to anyone.

  Before long Sharma and Fatima were known widely to be witches, and their reputation shielded them well. They seldom had need to protect themselves.

  “You’re just in time to eat,” said Mama, smiling at Fatima and Sharma through the steam of the roasting bread.

  “You could time your chapatis to their arrival,” Auntie said sourly. Phulan rolled her eyes, and Shabanu had to turn her head away so her laughter didn’t show.

  The women talked and talked until the sun was high in the sky. When it grew too warm, they stretched a chadr between the lean-to and two poles and moved under its shade, never once interrupting their talk.

  Shabanu luxuriated in a sense of belonging. She’d forgotten how it felt to be accepted, not to have to watch for danger over each shoulder, not to examine the motives behind everything that was said to her. Not being afraid to let Mumtaz out of her sight was entirely new to her.

  “Jamil’s wife still has only daughters—four!” Phulan said with some satisfaction. “Poor Jamil. Perhaps he should take another wife.”

  “But Adil,” said Mama, “now has three sons! Perhaps he’d give one to Jamil.” How like her mother always to hope for the best in others!

  Phulan touched Shabanu’s sleeve and looked into her eyes.

  “I’m sorry …” she began.

  “Don’t worry,” said Shabanu. “I’m happy with just Mumtaz.”

  “But you would make your husband so happy if you gave him a son. Perhaps you should consult a hakkim.…”

  “I’m very happy with only a daughter,” Shabanu said. “Life would have been far more difficult if Mumtaz had been a boy. It’s much easier to endure the scorn of the other women than to worry that if I had a son he might be killed.”

  “Killed!” said Phulan. “Whatever for?”

  “Mumtaz will inherit nothing,” she said. “It would have been more difficult for Rahim to pass off a son. He would have been a threat to the other wives, and someone would have found a way to get rid of him.”

  “Still, you should have other children,” said Mama as she whirled the last of the chapatis into a flat disk and slid it onto the black iron pan over the fire. “You’re so healthy! Why have you not conceived again?”

  “I am healthy,” said Shabanu. “So don’t worry.”

  The first time after the wedding that Shabanu had seen her family, Sharma had taken her aside. After the others had eaten, they spread quilts on the ground and slept away the heat of the afternoon.

  Mumtaz, a brand-new infant at the time, grizzled halfheartedly, and Shabanu moved away to lean against a thorn tree while she held the baby to her breast. As the infant suckled, Sharma came to sit beside her.

  “You’ve had your daughter for yourself,” Sharma said. “But you should have no more children.”

  “But how can I not conceive again?” Shabanu had asked. She knew what Sharma said was true. “It’s too soon after this one’s birth for Rahim to demand that I come to his bed. But he will soon. And he wants me to have a son.… ”

  Sharma undid a knot in the corner of her chadr and withdrew a piece of dried vine that lay darkly coiled in her open palm like the antler of a black buck.

  “Whenever you go to him, you must be sure this is in place,” she said. “You will not conceive as long as you use it.”

  Sharma told her how to insert the piece of vine into the mouth of her uterus, and a great weight lifted from Shabanu’s heart. Now, she thought, I will have only Mumtaz and myself to look after.

  “You must take control of events before they take control of you,” Sharma had said. “If you don’t do what you can for yourself, no one else will.”

  The afternoon wore on, and the heat grew oppressive. The women pulled out their quilts and lay down, dropping unwillingly out of the conversation one by one as they fell asleep.

  Shabanu felt as if she’d never left these women whom she loved more than anything on earth. She wished Mumtaz could grow up as she had in the golden warmth of their circle.

  Shabanu did not want to waste any of her time sleeping. Mumtaz curled up beside her, and Shabanu sat with her back against the wall of the lean-to, her arms folded and resting on her knees. While she was content just to look at them, she was impatient to talk to Sharma, who moved closer to Shabanu. The older woman crossed her ankles, folded her knees, and sank to the ground beside Shabanu in a single fluid motion.

  “So, my little pigeon,” Sharma said. “What mischief have the women of Okurabad been up to?”

  Shabanu told her about Ibne and the baby camel’s foot, the dead puppy, Zabo’s betrothal to Ahmed, and her promise that she would help her friend. Sharma listened carefully.

  “Oh, oh, my pigeon, you must have a good plan!”

  “Auntie, listen. We must make a plan for Zabo now. But Mumtaz and I must stay at Okurabad.”

  Sharma laid her fingers against her niece’s lips.

  “No. Come to Fort Abbas and live with Fatima and me. Or have you outgrown us and the desert?”

  “My life is at Okurabad now,” Shabanu said. “As long as Rahim is alive, and perhaps after, I must do my best to survive there.”

  “Rahim is forty-two years older than you are! You will live a long time as a widow.”

  “Mumtaz’s best chance for survival is to be educated. She can’t do that and live in Cholistan. I must do what’s best for her, and hope that Rahim lives until she finishes her schooling. Only then can we leave.”

  “Your daughter climbs thorn trees as naturally as you did,” said Sharma. It was as far as Sharma would push her to change her mind.

  Have I made a mistake? Shabanu wondered. It is true that Auntie Sharma knows the way of the desert and
not the way of the village … certainly not the way of the city! But she is the wisest woman I know. Could it be that her wisdom applies to the desert and also to the village and to the city? It was rare that Shabanu’s confidence was shaken.

  “Once she’s been to school, she’ll live in the city so she can work,” she said, testing.

  “Bah!” said Sharma, waving her hand. “You’re thinking like a city woman. You must make her tough like you to survive! Promise me you will think about it.”

  “Oh, Auntie! I’ve thought of nothing else!” Shabanu said. “I have promised Zabo I will help her. She can’t go through with her marriage to Ahmed unless she knows she won’t have to live as his wife. I want to send her to you, to stay in Cholistan. And then someday …”

  “The time to plan is now,” said Sharma, leaning forward, her face barely an inch from Shabanu’s. Urgency thinned out her voice. “Times are dangerous. Rahim could be gone tomorrow.”

  “They watch me so closely that it’s hard to do anything without their knowing,” said Shabanu. “It’s not just Amina and Leyla—even the servants watch and listen. Sometimes it seems the house has eyes and ears!”

  “Send word to me when you’ve come to your senses,” Sharma said. “I will be there within a day. So—now we will make a plan for Zabo.”

  They talked then of how Zabo would get to Sharma just after the wedding, and again Shabanu felt a great burden had been lifted from her. When she was with Sharma she felt somehow hopeful, no matter how impossible the situation looked.

  The day went too quickly, and it seemed no time at all before the tonga cart returned to take Shabanu and Mumtaz back to Okurabad. Shabanu kissed her relatives good-bye.

  She fought unexpected tears when they asked how soon they could see her again. She would find a way to persuade Rahim to allow her and Mumtaz to come again within the next month, she thought. But first she must persuade him that they must come to Lahore.