by Bapsi Sidhwa
Sakhi’s mother stepped forward. Gently she pulled her son’s wife away from Qasim and towards her.
Leaving her in Hamida’s arms, Qasim, his back hunched like an old man’s, walked up to the men waiting to accompany him to Pattan.
Zaitoon brushed her eyes and stood staring. Her total severance from her carefree past was personified by Qasim’s imminent departure. The enormity of the change she faced struck her with brutal force. In an intuitive flash—sapphire eyes and ice-blue waters merged with the terror of her dream in the cave—it was an ominous presentiment. “Father,” she screamed, “Don’t go. Don’t go!”
Qasim glanced at her briefly and turned away again.
“Abba, I’m coming with you. Abba!” she cried, breaking the old woman’s hold and running to Qasim. “Wait for me!”
She reached him and, panting, wrapped her limbs round him in a frenzied hug. “I’m coming with you. Take me, Abba,” she begged. A village dog barked excitedly about them.
“Zaitoon,” Qasim whispered in despair, “think of the people watching you. You’re a married woman now . . . not a child. Your place is with your husband. He is a good man. Haven’t you liked him?”
“I don’t know, Abba . . . I don’t know him. Why must you leave so soon? Stay here or take me with you.”
Sakhi pushed his way through the men gathered round Qasim. He was mortified by his bride’s tempestuous display before all his kinsfolk. His voice was level but his grubby fingers bit vengefully into her flesh when he told her,
“Come now, your father will visit us again soon.”
“Yes, of course I will,” said Qasim, a little too stridently, desperately trying to disguise his broken, suddenly old-sounding voice.
Chapter 19
That whole day the girl wept. Sakhi, miserably aware that his severity had contributed to her hysteria, tried to mollify her. He brought her bread and meat but she flung them away. He tried to talk to her with what gentleness he was capable of, but she only cried, “I want to go back.” She would not even look at him. Hamida tried to soothe her but she cried, “Don’t touch me.” There was no appeasing her. Sakhi was distraught and humiliated. Zaitoon was distressed and frightened. Yet she felt an odd satisfaction, a timorous sense of triumph, in the clumsy efforts to placate her. She had gauged the savage subjugating will of the man she was married to. His uneasiness and his efforts to calm her were a desperate comfort.
The past week had been too much for her: her emotions had soared to unaccustomed heights of adulation, tenderness, and passion; her dreams had rocketed to the stars. Then came the mercurial change that sent her crashing back into blind chasms.
Sakhi and Hamida at last left her alone, sitting on the floor in a corner of the squalid room, her head buried on her knees.
In the evening Sakhi returned to find her huddled in the same position. Crouching before her he caught her arms and, peering at her face, compelled her to look at him. Zaitoon’s dark, red-rimmed eyes, blazing like a furnace, scorched him.
Routed by centuries of ruthless pride, submerged beneath the hard toil, buried in a way of life that could afford no sentiment, a spark of pity nevertheless fought through. “But you liked me yesterday,” Sakhi said softly, “didn’t you?”
Zaitoon studied his face, his captivating eyes now pleading and remorseful. Closing her swollen lids, she buried her face in his lap.
Four days after his marriage Sakhi decided to resume his chores. Leading a gaunt, ravaged ox up a hill to a fallow strip of earth, his path lay along a sprouting of young rice. His brother, Yunus Khan, was working in the rice patch.
Dexterously loosening the crust at the base of the young shoots, Yunus Khan appeared too absorbed to notice the noisy passing of his brother. Sakhi frowned. Grabbing the ox by its tail he stopped the beast and stood looking defiantly at Yunus. Yunus Khan’s mouth was a hard line. His large jaw worked like a trowel on a wad of tobacco. Crowded disproportionately above his lips were his pugnacious features and a sloping forehead; and his ears stuck out.
“Salaam-alaikum, brother.” Sakhi saluted, pointedly awaiting the customary response.
Crumbling the soil with long, knobby fingers, Yunus Khan idly patted it level. He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve and sat back in ponderous self-absorption.
Sakhi stood mute with anger. He struck the ox truculently to make it go and at last Yunus turned his slanting eyes his way.
“Waleykum-salaam,” he replied. “How is your wife from the plains? You know, she requires a man to control her . . .” he murmured in thin-lipped scorn. His eyes, the same color as Sakhi’s, were conciliatory but the calculated pity lurking in them stung Sakhi. Viciously turning away, he aimed a stone at the animal climbing ahead.
All morning, cruelly wounded by his brother’s taunt, Sakhi labored furiously. He flushed with shame when he thought of his efforts to appease the recalcitrant girl. Undoubtedly the news of her abrasive temper and of his docile efforts to mollify her had spread all over the village. What must they think of him, he wondered, his cheeks tightening as he descried the distant clutter of huts belonging to his kinsmen. His memory recalled the girl, bareheaded, brazenly running to cling to her father—exposing herself to the stares of all his clansmen. Most likely they doubted his manhood! “I will show them,” he thought, lunging at his plough.
Quick to anger, in a land where pride and wrath are nurtured from boyhood, he burned with an insane ungovernable fury.
At noon his mother called to remind him to chop some wood. Sakhi did not reply. She called his name stridently, again and again, opening her toothless mouth in imperative command.
“Can’t you see I’m working, you old hag!” he shouted finally, and she stopped calling.
Having tended to their scattered strips of earth, his clansmen had dispersed. Most of them had gone from the village to labor on the road, meet friends, or just to wander by the river as it changed color with the approaching dusk. The valley was mellow with the smoke of cooking fires. Women prepared meager rations for the children and for their men returning with the dark.
Sakhi worked with obsessive vigor. He was stripped to the waist, and his lean, rock-hard body gleamed with sweat. Having ploughed the fallow patch twice over, he began to work on a steppe not yet quite hewn from the mountainside. Skirting massive boulders, he ploughed dry, hard clay. With strength born of anger he cleared the surface of incidental rocks, rolling them outwards to the boundaries. There was one jagged, half-submerged rock he was sure he could uproot. Applying leverage with the plough, he set the ox to pull. It strained with all its might, skidding in the effort, but the rock did not shift. Sakhi pushed and prodded the ox cruelly with his staff. The exhausted beast tried again and again. Then it skidded to its stomach and refused to budge.
“Get up,” roared Sakhi, swearing as he struck a blow. The ox stretched its neck on the grit, resting obstinately. Sakhi shouted and fell on the animal, beating it with his heavy stick, which fell pitilessly on a sore on its spine. The beast grunted, lifting its neck in pain. Sakhi’s eyes dilated, and a venomous satisfaction shuddered through him. He hit the ox again and again, until the flesh gaped open. The beast roared and writhed, desperately trying to stand and get away from its tormentor.
Hearing the noise, Sakhi’s mother came out of her hut. She focused her weak sight on the steppe, and the effort stretched her chronic grin even more grotesquely.
Hamida’s long legs carried her bent, stringy body swiftly to where her son was belaboring the beast. She caught at his flailing arms. “Let it be, you will kill him,” she screeched. Sakhi pushed the old woman aside. Again she flung herself at him, wedging her body between the man and the ox. Sakhi glowered in insane fury. “I’ll teach you,” he hissed, “I’ll teach you meddling women. You think you can make a fool of me? Do you?”
Hamida cowered under the raised stick. The blow caught her shoulder. She scrambled like a crab down the sloping terrain. Sakhi skidded after her, wielding his staff. She trie
d to run, but a blow hit her legs and she fell forward. Zaitoon, who had followed Hamida, was appalled. She could hear women come running from varying directions behind her.
“For God’s sake stop it,” she wailed. “For God’s sake, you’ll kill her!” She could hear the shrill remonstrance of the women close behind. She tried to take hold of the swinging stick. It knocked painfully against her knuckles but she caught it and tried to wrench it away. Sakhi struck her on her thighs, on her head, shouting, “You are my woman! I’ll teach you to obey me!” Zaitoon stumbled and sprawled face down.
Mercifully the screeching women were upon him. Sakhi turned and flung the staff up the mountain slope. He strode at a furious pace and disappeared behind some rocks. Zaitoon, trembling like a leaf, and moaning in pain, was helped to her feet by the women.
She spent the rest of the evening taking over Hamida’s chores. The old woman lay rolled up in a threadbare blanket on the floor, ominously quiet.
Hamida lay stiff beneath her blanket, dazed with shock. Her mind seemed to drift in and out of consciousness. Late at night it cleared and she felt she would die. But death, to one who had seen so much of it, did not greatly matter.
Early next morning, sensing the girl’s presence, she whispered, “Zaitoon, I think I will die soon.”
There was no self-pity in her feeble voice.
Zaitoon felt she ought to say something, but words failed her. She felt grief. Once again, she was to be abandoned. She started to cry, at the same time relieving her hopelessness and convincingly conveying the proper sentiment.
But Hamida did not die. Instead, two days after the brutal beating, she recovered enough to sit on a warm rock and sun her shriveled body.
Her work done, Zaitoon would sit by the resilient old woman, massaging her wasted arms and legs and shoulders. Hamida talked of her youth, of the price her vivacious beauty had fetched on marriage, and of the events that led to the blood feuds, and to the violent deaths of three of her sons who had been older than Sakhi and Yunus. She gossiped about long-dead ancestors, many of whom she had never seen, and anecdote by anecdote, she documented the restless history of her fierce clan.
Zaitoon, anxious to learn, absorbed every detail.
Her existence in those few days mirrored the grim drudgery of the mountain people. Subsisting on baked maize and water, supplemented occasionally by a little rice, she labored all day, chaffing, kneading, washing, and tending the animals and the young green rice-shoots and the sprouting maize. She collected animal droppings and, patting them into neat discs with her hands, plastered them to the hut. Dried by the sun, they provided cooking fuel. Occasionally she directed the flow of irrigation waters, ingeniously channeled from the stream into the terraced patches of cultivation. Gradually, in her quest for firewood, Zaitoon became familiar with the terrain.
She also grew immune to the tyrannical, animal-trainer treatment meted out by Sakhi. In his presence she drifted into a stupor, until nothing really hurt her. He beat her on the slightest pretext. She no longer thought of marriage with any sense of romance. She now lived only to placate him, keeping her head averted unless it was to listen to a command. Then her eyes were anxious and obsequious like those of Hamida.
At night she acquiesced docilely. Sometimes though, when the lamplight gilded their isolation, she surrendered to him with an unreasoning passion. Sakhi wondered at this, but on the whole he was delighted. He looked his brother in the eye, and swaggered. At times he was kind, but these exceptions were followed by needless severity.
Zaitoon’s instinct for self-preservation alone kept her going. At night she lay awake, her stupor lifting awhile as she indulged her fancies. She longed for Qasim’s love, for Miriam’s companionship, for the protective aura of Nikka’s status. In the plains, she had not even been aware of these securities. Now she longingly lived for her promised visit to Lahore . . .
Heavy with child, she sits by Miriam. Miriam weeps, caressing her tired limbs, enfolding her in her protective flesh. She flares at Qasim: The child is not to be sent back. She will not allow it! Qasim remonstrates and Miriam, pulling Zaitoon’s shirt open, dramatically reveals the cruel welts and bruises. Zaitoon hangs her head in shame.
Surely Qasim will cry! He will stroke her hair and, holding her tenderly, declare a terrible vendetta against Sakhi.
Zaitoon knew it took nine months for a child to come. She was sure to have a child by then. But nine months is a long time for a miserable young girl. And two months into her marriage an incident convinced her she might not live that long.
Chapter 20
Carol meandered apathetically around the Mess, dividing her time between her paint box and paperbacks, waiting fervently for Farukh to dash off on excursions contrived by Mushtaq. Only then did she emerge from her inertia. She was infatuated with the Major, and she wondered if she had ever really loved Farukh.
A year after coming to Lahore it had slowly dawned on Carol that the repressed erotic climate was beginning to affect her. In the States, what she had thought was a unique attraction for Farukh had in fact been her fascination with the exotic, and later the attraction had disconcertingly extended itself to include his friends and relatives—and even acquaintances. She realized her casual American ways here, in a country where few women were seen unveiled, made her youth and striking looks an immediate challenge. She got more than her share of attention—more than any woman ought! She knew Farukh was right when he said: “These goddamned men even fall in love with holes in trees! Don’t let it flatter you.” But she was flattered. Being naturally responsive she could not remain unaffected.
God knows Carol had tried to modify her behavior. She had conformed as well as anyone brought up to be free and easy with men could!—she thought, reflecting on the advances she had resisted, at first casually, then with increasing strain.
The men were not overtly sexual: rather she sensed their sexual tension. Their desire for her carried a natural tenderness that was reflected in their behavior to all women. They showed a surprisingly gentle consideration of her vulnerabilities, of the differences between the sexes that made her feel complete—and completed the men. The bronze, liquid-eyed men became increasingly disturbing . . . and the Major had slipped through her defenses, shattering a heroic resistance of which only she was aware.
Each time Mushtaq stood before her Carol was swamped anew by desire. It was as if the struggle with Farukh’s jealousy, combined with the bewildering forces let loose within her in Pakistan, had broken in a storm of feelings centered on Mushtaq. A glimpse of him, by chance in the morning along the Mess corridor, or out of her window, left her enfeebled and breathless.
Noticing her pallor and worried by her erratic behavior, Farukh secretly surmised that at long last his wife was pregnant.
Early in the morning, not wishing to disturb Carol, he dressed quietly. Before leaving, he tiptoed round the bed to kiss her goodbye and, finding Carol’s eyes wide open in unseeing reverie, inquired, “What’s the matter, darling? Anything wrong?”
Carol shook her head. “No. Oh, I feel sleepy. Are you going?”
“You don’t look well. I think it’s the altitude.”
“At only five thousand feet above sea level?” Her voice curled a contemptuous question mark.
“That’s high enough to upset anyone not used to the mountains. You look pale. I think we should return to Lahore.”
“Lahore . . . sure, it’s up to you.” Carol kicked the quilt, and turned away irritably.
Having heard of the irascibility of expectant women Farukh held his temper. He sat docilely on the edge of her bed.
“Bye, darling. I’m going,” he whispered, nervously touching the bare arms that covered her face.
Mushtaq returned from Pattan an hour after Farukh had left for Bisham, the hill reputedly garrisoned by Alexander the Great on his way to India.
He glanced at his wristwatch. It would take Farukh four hours to cover that distance. That gave them ample time. Knocking light
ly on Carol’s door he went in.
Carol stood in the glow of the log fire. She was wearing a flimsy slip and was gratified by Mushtaq’s startled look of possessive admiration. He went to her quickly.
Cupping her breasts with both hands, Mushtaq pressed against Carol impatiently. She lifted her mouth and Mushtaq kissed her. He seldom remembered this preliminary caress and Carol’s insistence on it amused him. Kissing was to him a gesture of affection. He kissed his wife with the same quality of feeling he reserved for his children. From romantic scenes in foreign movies he surmised that kissing represented the act of love, indicating what in Pakistani films was conveyed by a pair of converging lotus flowers. He found kissing Carol mildly pleasurable, but chiefly because of the excitement it aroused in her.
“There’s something I want to say to you,” she said seriously.
“Can’t it wait?”
“Please.”
Carol stepped back and, curling her legs beneath her, she sat down on the stuffed sofa to one side of the fire. Mushtaq perched on its arm, hungrily ogling the rich, flame-licked hues of her body.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
Carol held his eyes: “Marry me.”
Mushtaq blanched at the unexpected demand. A block of ice plopped into his stomach.
“I love you, darling,” she breathed. “I can’t bear to live without you. You don’t know how I feel,” and she pressed her breasts against his coat sleeve, lowering her head. “God, I’d do anything for you. I would really—wear a burkha if you wanted me to.”
Growing up in the 1950s, Carol was inexorably conditioned to marriage. She had only one recourse with which to reconcile her feelings and her actions. She had found her true love. He must marry her.
