by Bapsi Sidhwa
With no one to awaken me I sleep late on the morning of Papoo’s wedding. It is Saturday: exactly a week from the day Ayah was carried off. Adi tugs my toe so it hurts and says: “Aren’t you getting up? The guests have come... the bridegroom’s baraat will be here soon!”
I quickly slip into a stiffly starched and frothy frock and put on my white socks and buckled shoes and run to the back.
The caterers have already lit log fires beneath two enormous cauldrons and the sultry air is permeated by the aroma of biryani and spicy goat korma. I weave through the male guests squatting like patient sheep outside the scant lemon hedge that demarcates the servants’ courtyard. The yard itself is thronged by women in bright satins edged with gold and silver gota. The crowd is thick outside the sweeper’s quarters and I have to squeeze my way through the knot of women at the door. But even after my eyes get accustomed to the dingy light in the small, square dung-plastered room it takes me a while to realize that the crumpled heap of scarlet and gold clothes flung carelessly in a comer is really Papoo. I squat by her, smiling and awkward, and, lifting her ghoongat, peer into her face. She has an enviable quantity of makeup on. Shocking-pink lipstick, white powder, smudged kohl: and she is fast asleep.
There is a stir among the seated women and a sudden air of excitement. Someone outside shouts: “Tota Ram’s baraat has come!”
I shake Papoo: “Wake up ... Come on!” Papoo sits up, shoving her ghoongat back drowsily, and looks at me with a strange cockeyed grin, as if she is drunk.
I run out with the rest of the immediate kin to receive the baraat just as the bridegroom’s party enters our gates and the six-man band, in faded red uniforms with tarnished gold braid, bursts into brassy clamor. I glimpse the short bridegroom behind the musicians, bobbing among the men in the entourage. The women, some on foot, some crammed into tongas with their babies, follow. The groom is wearing a purple satin lungi and a long, whitely gleaming satin shirt. His chest is bristling with garlands centered with gold-beribboned cardboard hearts and strung with crisp, new one-rupee notes and flowers. His head is covered by a thick white turban with a gold kulah and beneath it hangs the sehra, veiling his face with chains of marigolds. Judging by his height, Tota Ram must be Papoo’s age—about eleven or twelve. I am confused. The distraught way Muccho carried on when Papoo was off her feed led me to believe that Tota Ram was an important, frightening and grown man.
The groom is led into Hari’s quarters, which have been cleared of their meager belongings to receive him. Now the curious women surge to see the doolha. I fight my way in with them. He is sitting straight on a high-backed chair, his legs dangling brand-new two-tone shoes.
Something about his gestures disturbs me: the way he shifts in the chair, the manner in which he inserts his hand behind the tickling flowers to scratch his nose. He sneezes—an unexpectedly violent sound—and, snorting wetly, clears his throat. For a moment I wonder if someone older is responsible for the sounds. They don’t belong behind the sehra. Again the bridegroom sneezes: so mightily that the sehra swings out. Then he parts the curtain of flowers hanging from his head and I see his face!
He is no boy! He is a dark, middle-aged man with a pockmark-pitted face and small, brash, kohl-blackened eyes. He has an insouciant air of insolence about him—as though it is all a tedious business he has been through before. I cannot take my eyes off him as he visualizes the women with assertive, assessing directness. There is a slight cast in the close set of his eyes, and the smirk lurking about his thin, dry lips gives an impression of cruelty. The women in the room become hushed. He shifts his insolent eyes to the ceiling, as if permitting the women to gape upon his unsavory person, and then lowers his sehra.
After the initial shock, two or three older women from Papoo’s family pull themselves together and move forward to greet and bless him as is ritually required. The elderly and cynical dwarf permits their embraces and then sits back, his spread legs swinging carelessly, and the women, some of them tittering in a shocked way behind the fingers screening their mouths, resume their chattering. I remain rooted to the dirt floor, unable to remove my eyes from him, imagining the shock, and the grotesque possibilities awaiting Papoo.
I sit quietly beside the bride. The women from the groom’s family lift her ghoongat and comment indulgently on the innocence that permits the child-bride to sleep through her marriage. Bending frequently, stepping over the satiny spread of legs and thighs of about twenty women jammed together on the floor, they exhibit an impressive display of the clothes and the tawdry jewelry they have brought for the bride and her mother.
A little after noon two enormous round copper platters, heaped with fragrant pilaf and goat curry, are brought into the room. The women gather around them and silently fall to eating. The caterers provide a separate china plate for the bride. Muccho shakes her daughter awake, urging: “Come, doll, sit up and eat, doll.” I study Muccho’s face with curious eyes. There is a contented smile on her lips—smug and vindicated.
As Papoo struggles groggily to sit up, her eyes swivel weakly under her half-open lids. Muccho shakes her roughly again, and forming small morsels of rice with her fingers, stroking Papoo’s back, feeds her. Papoo chews slowly, absently, her childish, lipsticked mouth slack. “Oi, dopey. Ufeemi! Wake up!” says Muccho affectionately. And though the tone of voice calling her an opium-addict is disarmingly facetious, it suddenly strikes me that Papoo has in fact been drugged. I have seen enough opium addicts to realize this. Mr. Bankwalla’s and Colonel Bharucha’s cooks are both addicted.
Towards evening the doolha is brought into the room and made to sit by his comatose bride. He keeps his face covered by the sehra but by the way his head shifts I can tell he is slyly ogling me and the young women moving about the room.
Later in the afternoon the Mission padre stands in the door in his long black cassock with a high, white collar. His heavy laced-up boots appear incongruous with his flowing garments. His hair is cropped very short and he has a well-bred and timid expression on his humble face. I wonder if he is the padre whose wife absconded with the seductive tailor.
The women hug their knees and shuffle back to make room for his passage as the padre, accustoming his eyes to the dark, steps hesitantly into Moti’s quarters. Holding his gilt-edged Bible and rosary deferentially he makes the sign of the cross and squats before the couple. Papoo is shaken awake and surreptitiously propped up by Muccho as the padre recites the Christian marriage litany in Punjabi.
Chapter 25
There are mysterious developments afoot in the servants’ quarters behind the Hindu doctor’s house paralleling ours. The courtyard has been walled off and a very tall and burly Sikh with curling hair on his legs stands guard outside a high, tin-sheet gate, criss-crossed with wooden beams. There is a padlock the size of a grapefruit on the gate, and a large key hangs from the steel bangle around the Sikh’s wrist. He unlocks the gate sometimes to pass the women inside sacks of grain and baskets of vegetables.
The servants evade questions as if there is something shameful going on. Cousin, Adi and I are agog. And on a Sunday afternoon —it is already October—we sneak up the stairs and, minding the holes in the roof, tiptoe to look into the enclosed courtyard. Our servants’ quarters roof runs in a continuous line of clay to their roof, demarcated only by a foot-high brick wall.
We assume it’s a women’s jail, even though they look innocent enough—village women washing clothes, crossing the courtyard with water canisters, chaffing wheat and drying raw mangoes for pickling. There is very little chatter among the women. Just apathetic movements to and fro.
The Sikh guard squats in front of a small water tank in his white cotton drawers, scouring his teeth with a walnut twig. He must have just washed his hair because it is flung round his neck like a coarse scarf to keep it from trailing in the mud.
The guard spots us on the roof and glowers ferociously. As he stands up his hair uncoils and hangs down almost to his knees. We scamper from his view like sc
ared spiders, careful not to fall through the holes where the mud has given way between the decaying rafters.
After a while, taking care to tread quietly and not daring to talk, we peer between the rafters into the dim, smoke-filled cubicles. I feel a nervous, nauseous thrill, as I make out the dark shapes of women in shalwar-kamizes moving lethargically between their cots. In one of the cubicles a thin long face looks up unseeing through the veil of smoke and the eerie desolation of that pallid face remains stamped on my mind.
The Hindu doctor’s house so unobtrusively occupied by our new refugee neighbors sprawls in an ungainly oblong block between the women’s jail and Rosy-Peter’s annex. Its cement plaster shows beneath scabs of peeling whitewash. I don’t know how many people dwell in the abandoned bungalow, but the number of its occupants appears to be increasing. There is more movement behind the windows boarded up with cardboard and newspaper, a greater frequency and laxity in the sudden shouting and subdued chatter.
We still don’t know anything about them. Who they are, where they’re from. They keep to themselves, unobtrusively conducting their lives, lurking like night animals in the twilight interiors of their lairs, still afraid of being evicted from property they have somehow managed to occupy.
The woman is pulling a faded kamize that is too short for her over a wash-grayed shalwar. Her head is covered by a frayed voile chuddar and she is standing before Mother, awkward and uncomfortably tall. I recognize her the moment I see her. Her eyes are downcast and a nervous, apologetic smile—that is more like a twitch—jerks about her lips. I feel a surge of panic. Does Mother know she’s interviewing a criminal to replace Ayah? But there is a quality so anxious and despairing about the narrow pallid face that I conceal my knowledge. I would rather trust myself to the dangerous care of the jailbird than betray her: so strong is the drag of guilt and compassion she has exerted on me. She looks at Mother out of appealing eyes. Docile. Ready to please. So in need. Servilely murmuring: “Yes, jee, I will do everything... Anything you want.”
“These are decent folk, mind you! They’re not the kind that let fly dog-and-cat abuses,” interjects Imam Din gruffly, leaning against Mother’s bedroom door with the proprietory air of an elderly and pampered flunky. “You’ll be looked after if you work properly.”
He is as transparent as me. He cannot hide his pity.
“I am not frightened of work, brother,” says the woman in thickly accented, village Punjabi. “I will sweep, clean, milk the buffalo, churn the butter, wash clothes, clean out latrines, make chapatties ... After all, I’ve been a housewife.”
She stops speaking abruptly and looks unaccountably guilty and even more bashful. Suddenly, folding her knees, she hunkers down on the bedroom floor and draws her chuddar forward over her face.
“You won’t need to do any of that!” says Mother. She indicates me with her glance. “Here’s your charge. All I want you for is the care of the children ... Don’t let them out of your sight.”
The woman swivels on her heels and gazes into my eyes so intensely that I feel it is I, and not Mother, who is empowered to employ her. The jerky smile about her lips distends fearfully. “I will guard her like the pupils in my eyes,” she says. “Don’t I know how careful one has to be with young girls? Especially these days!” Her tone of voice and choice of words—as of village women uttering platitudes—is grotesque in the obviously straitened and abnormal circumstances of her life.
We call her by her name, Hamida. We can’t bear to call her Ayah.
Looking for Ayah. We are all looking for Ayah. Mother and Electric-aunt, heads together, go goos-goosing and whispering, contorting their faces in strange and solemn ways. And when they see us they hush and dramatically alter their fierce expressions. Their reassembled, we-were-just-talking-of-this-and-that features frighten me more than the news they are attempting to spare me.
Father once again cycles to work, leaving the Morris for Mother. Electric-aunt and Mother drive off, come back, and are off again with such frequency and urgency that I ache with expectation and shattered hope each time I anxiously look into the returning Ayah-less car.
Sharbat Khan returns from the hills and Hari, alias Himat Ali, squatting on his trembling haunches and weeping shamelessly, tells him: “He sprang at me out of a gunnysack, dead!” And wiping his tearing eyes says, “The dead bastard! Didn’t he know she’d be alone?”
Wrapped in a blanket, turban wound round his mouth, Sharbat Khan cycles up for low-voiced conversations with Iman Din and Yousaf. He rattles away—sometimes accompanied by Yousaf—and the way their legs pedal, and the way they lean into the wind, I can tell they are looking for Ayah.
Sharbat Khan looks different. His tiger eyes are grim and bloodshot. He drives his foot hard on the pedal of his machine and examines the edges of the knives he sharpens as though he will use them to kill us all. Sometimes he looks at me as if he is trying to probe my soul and search out the aberrations in my personality that made me betray Ayah. Then he shakes his head and bitterly says: “Children are the Devil... They only know the truth.”
I can no longer look into his eyes.
Hamida keeps her bowed head covered and her eyes averted from Father. She shuffles and pivots awkwardly on her long legs, hunching her narrow shoulders meekly, careful not to offend anyone by her unusual height.
Hamida has to be trained from scratch. Yousaf teaches her how to make beds the way Mother likes. Mother shows her how to stack clothes in tidy piles in cupboards, how to wash woolens and dry them on spread towels. Hamida has never used an iron. She never does. She is so terrified of electricity that she doesn’t even switch on the lights—until Cousin shows her how to with a wooden clothes hanger, which, it is dinned into her head, makes her shockproof.
We tell her where our things go and Mother shows her how to bathe us and massage my legs.
I barely limp now.
Hamida has to be restrained from latching on to Mother and massaging and pummelling her limbs whenever she finds Mother sitting, sewing or reading in bed. Hamida doesn’t know what to do with her hands in Mother’s presence. And, when idle, in fluttering panic they reach out and massage whoever is at hand. Adi wiggles and slips away from her grasp. Or, if she is too insistent, kicks out. I let her hands have their will with me and tolerate her irksome caress. She is like a starved and grounded bird and I can’t bear to hurt her.
Sometimes her eyes fill and the tears roll down her cheeks. Once, when I smoothed her hair back, she suddenly started to weep, and noticing my consternation explained, “When the eye is wounded, even a scented breeze hurts.”
Hamida comes to fetch me from Mrs. Pen’s. When we are close to the house, she casually says: “Imam Din has guests ... Poor things: they have suffered a lot ... The Sikhs attacked their village.”
“Where are they from?” I ask, my pulse quickening.
“Pir Pindo ... or some such village.”
I leave her hand and as I run towards the house I hear her voice trying to restrain me. “Be careful, Lenny baby,” she cries. “Wait for me!” And she runs after me. My heart beating wildly, I run into the servants’ courtyard.
A small boy, so painfully thin that his knees and elbows appear swollen, is squatting a few feet away concentrating on striking a marble lying in a notch in the dust. He is wearing ragged, drawstring shorts of thin cotton and the dirty cord tying them in gathers round his waist trails in the mud. His aim scores, and he turns to look at me. His face is a patchwork of brown and black skin; a wizened blemish. He starts to get up, showing his teeth in a crooked smile; and with a shock I recognize Ranna. His limbs are black and brittle; the circular protrusion of his windpipe and ribs so skeletal that I can see the passage of air in his throat and lungs. He is covered with welts; as if his body has been chopped up, and then welded. He sees my horror and winces, turning away. “Ranna,” I say, moving quickly to touch him. “Ranna! What happened to you?” I can’t help it; I look at the ugly scab where his belly button used to be. He s
tares at me, his face crumbling. And, wheeling abruptly, he runs into Imam Din’s quarters, I see the improbable wound on the back of his shaved head. It is a grisly scar like a brutally gouged and premature bald spot. In time the wound acquired the shape of a four-day-old crescent moon.
I almost live in the quarters. Hamida sits with us for short periods, and when she pulls Ranna to her lap and he presses against her, her disorderly hands grow tranquil. I only go to the house to sleep. I eat my meals in Imam Din’s quarters, relishing everything Ranna’s Noni chachi cooks. That’s when they talk—using plain Punjabi words and graphic peasant gestures—Ranna, bit by bit, describing the attack on Pir Pindo, Noni chachi recounting her part in the story, and Iqbal chacha intervening with clarification, conjecture and comment. It is hard to grasp that the events they describe took place only a couple of months ago... that, like Ranna, Pir Pindo is brutally altered... that his family, as I knew it, has ceased to exist ...
No one realized the speed at which the destruction and the rampage advanced. They didn’t know the extent to which it surrounded them. Jagjeet Singh visited Pir Pindo under cover of darkness with furtive groups of Sikhs. A few more families who had close kin near Multan and Lahore left, disguised as Sikhs or Hindus. But most of the villagers resisted the move. The uncertainty they faced made them discredit the danger. “We cannot leave,” they said, and, like a refrain, I can hear them say: “What face will we show our forefathers on the day of judgment if we abandon their graves? Allah will protect us!”
Jagjeet Singh sent word he was risking his life, and the lives of the other men in Dera Tek Singh, if he visited Pir Pindo again. The Akalis were aware of his sympathies for the Muslims. They had threatened him. They were in control of his village.
