by Bapsi Sidhwa
She stood up and walked slowly to the Mess door. Watching her, Mushtaq found her gait no longer provocative but crushed, subdued, and oddly touching.
Chapter 28
Carol’s restless movements woke Farukh. Sleepily, he put his arm out to her. She started to jerk away but felt, suddenly, that she needed him. “Come for a walk?” she asked.
Overflowing the ridge, shafts of evening sunlight set the river ablaze. They had walked a long way down to a sharp bend in the river. Carol’s hair swung shining as she cavorted over the boulders and the pale sand. The walk had lifted her spirits. She leapt over a narrow vein of water and stood on a rock half submerged in the river. The awesome power of the water leaping to form glassy shafts and walls, boiling and foaming dangerously past, elated her. Scanning the scene with eager, shifting eyes, she tried to stamp its grandeur on her memory.
A sooty shadow in a pool of water distracted her and she turned round. A darkness swayed on the ripples, and, completing its rotation beneath the surface, the face bobbed up—a young, tribal woman’s face.
Carol made a strangled sound and fell to her knees. In one leap Farukh was beside her. He saw the pallid waterlogged face. “God! Someone’s cut the head clean off !”
With a motion that appeared serenely willed, the face turned away and, resting a bloodless cheek on the water for a second, hid beneath. A tangled, inky mass of hair swirled to the surface and floated on the lapping current.
Carol knelt horrified in the blue haze rising from the river. She knelt frozen in a trance that urged her to leap into the air on a scream and flee the mountains.
“Probably asked for it,” said Farukh. With a cry she brushed against his shoulder and, jumping over the rocks, clawed her way up the gorge.
It was a freezing night. The three tribals squatted close, talking softly. Sakhi stood up and, holding the quilted robe tight against the wind, he crossed the road to the bridge.
The guard on duty blocked his path, his bayonet glinting in the moonlight. “No one’s allowed here at night. Get back.”
Sakhi’s lips moved back in a vicious snarl. Misri Khan had joined him. Noticing the bayonet he put a restraining hand on his son.
“Let these dogs be. Come on.”
He forced Sakhi back.
Snuggling in their blankets, Misri Khan and Yunus settled for the long night’s vigil.
Sakhi kept ambling past the bridgehead, scrutinizing the shadowy span from different angles. The guard on duty kept an eye on him.
Carol meanwhile lay in her room, staring into the dark. “. . . asked for it,” isn’t that what Farukh had said? Women the world over, through the ages, asked to be murdered, raped, exploited, enslaved, to get importunately impregnated, beaten-up, bullied, and disinherited. It was an immutable law of nature. What had the tribal girl done to deserve such grotesque retribution? Had she fallen in love with the wrong man? Or was she simply the victim of a vendetta? Her brother might have killed his wife, and his wife’s kin slaughtered her . . . there could be any number of reasons . . .
Whoever said people the world over are the same, was wrong. The more she traveled, the more she realized only the differences.
She knew Pakistani women with British accents. They wore jeans from the US and tops from Paris. Their children were at Eton or Harvard. She had related to them straightaway: and suddenly their amiable eyes flashed a mysterious quality that drew her into an incomprehensible world of sadness and opulence, of ancient wisdom and sensuality and cruelty . . .
She recalled Alia, one of her first friends in Pakistan. They said she was a princess. She lived in a splendid modern structure surrounded by the antiquity of priceless possessions—a charming laughing girl with a wide sensual face. Her enormous eyes had haunted Carol ever since they met. In friendship unveiled, layer by layer stripped of their guard, she had glimpsed in the recesses of those eyes the horror of generations of cloistered womanhood. And the pitiless arrogance of absolute power: a memory of ancient tyrannies, both male and female, and fulfilled desires. It was like peering into the secret vaults of a particular lineage or tumbling through a kaleidoscope of images created by the history of a race. A branch of Eve had parted some way in time from hers. There seemed a definite connection in Carol’s mind between all this and the incomprehensible brutality of the tribals.
Minister to these savages! She squirmed in bed and half sobbed with self-contempt remembering her fantasy. She could no more survive among them than amidst a pride of lions. Even if she survived the privation, the filth and vermin and swarm of germs carrying alien diseases, her independent attitudes would get her killed! So much for her naive coed fantasy! She could study them, observe every detail of their life, maybe even understand them, but become one of them, never! She wasn’t programmed to fit. She’d need an inherited memory of ancient rites, taboos, and responses: inherited immunities, a different set of genes . . .
When they were traveling to Dubair she and Farukh had stopped in Saidu Sharif for tea. A knot of dancing, laughing children had circled an almost limbless beggar. Every time he succeeded in sitting upright the children playfully knocked him over. The men in the bazaar picked their teeth and laughed indulgently. She had noticed this cruel habit of jeering at deformities before, and sick to her stomach wanted to scream at the men to stop the children.
“They’ll wonder why you are fussing,” Farukh had said, laughing himself. “They won’t see your point of view at all, dear—every nation has its own outlet for cruelty.”
Perhaps he was right. In preventing natural outlets for cruelty the developed countries had turned hypocritical and the repressed heat had exploded in nuclear mushrooms. They did not laugh at deformities: they manufactured them.
Sleep would not come. She was seeing everything from a different perspective. Questions that had lurked in the back of her mind were suddenly answered. She felt her own conflicts nearing a resolution.
No wonder women here formed such intense friendships—to protect themselves where physical might outweighs the subtler strengths of womanhood . . . At least in Pakistan they were not circumcised! Small mercy! A pathetic, defiant gesture here and there invited the inevitable thunderclap! Scour the mountains! Hunt the girl! That girl had unlocked a mystery, affording a telepathic peephole through which Carol had had a glimpse of her condition and the fateful condition of girls like her.
But the girl had run away! Thank God it had not been Zaitoon’s head they had seen floating in the river.
Carol cried out, awakening Farukh.
“Can’t you sleep?” He sat up, drawing her to him when he noticed she was weeping. He knew how much the incident at the river had upset her. It had upset him too.
Carol got out of bed to fetch a Kleenex.
“That verse by Iqbal . . . what does he mean by ‘khudi’?” she asked.
“Khudi . . . It’s your willpower. No, more than just willpower or ego. It’s the strength of nature—a force, perhaps of God, within one.”
“Could you translate the verse? I feel I could understand it now.”
Farukh began to recite quietly, and the cadence of the poem sweetened the air:Khudi ko kar buland itna,
Heighten your “khudi” to such majesty,
ke bar takdeer say pahaylay
that before every turn of fate
Khuda banday say khud poocbay,
God himself asks man—
“Buta teri raza kya hai?”
“Tell me, what do you wish?”
“It’s like a prayer,” said Carol.
“It is.”
“You know, the girl who ran away? I think she forced her destiny; exercised her ‘khudi.’ I’m sure she’ll make it . . .”
“Perhaps.”
“Christ! If she comes through I’ll do something for her, I really will.”
There was responsibility in her voice and a new determination, and Farukh sensed the change in her.
“And . . . Farukh?”
“Yes?”
>
“I think I’m finally beginning to realize something . . . Your civilization is too ancient . . . too different . . . and it has ways that can hurt me . . . really hurt me . . . I’m going home.”
“Lahore?”
“San Jose.”
“Oh, you can’t be serious! We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” said Farukh indulgently. “Things will look different . . . Now try to get to sleep.”
Chapter 29
The men had kept her hostage for two hours. When Zaitoon regained consciousness, her body screamed with pain. She wept, putting her trembling legs through the shalwar. Her brown skin gaped through new rents in the cloth. She had not seen her legs in days and gazed in revulsion at the twitching, fleshless shanks. A red spot spread on the cloth between her thighs. She folded her legs quickly and covered the stain with the front of her shirt. Printed with faded lavender flowers, it was torn down the front and at the shoulders. She closed her lids and her fingers flew up to push the hair from her face. Instead of falling back it stood round her head in a stiff tangle.
She viewed her condition dispassionately. Only three months ago in Lahore, she remembered, she had looked out on days crisp with winter, the evening air perfumed by grass, and she had walked under enormous, rustling trees—towering eucalyptus, banyans that stretched their branches to form shady verandahs, wooden benches encircling the gnarled trunks. Gargantuan mango trees that filled the sky. That early November now seemed like a bygone age, her youth viewed from afar.
Nikka and Miriam had taken her to Lawrence Gardens. Miriam had tossed back the flap of her burkha, uncovering her face. They each held a small, cone-shaped packet of roasted, salted grams, or lentils, which they poured out on their palms and stuffed into their mouths.
Her packet was half-empty when a mad female creature, darting at them from nowhere, snatched it from her hand. Zaitoon gasped. The woman ran on in front, triumphantly waving the packet over her head. Unexpectedly she turned and rushed at them. Nikka protectively stepped between her and his cowering womenfolk, deflecting her course.
“Hisst, hisst . . .” he threatened her, as if shooing a cat.
The crazy creature had smiled all the time, the carefree, mischievous smile of a ten-year-old. She could have been anything from twenty to forty. Her ragged shirt hung open at the neck and the flapping sides revealed the paler swell at the top of her breasts.
She collapsed, groveling at Nikka’s feet and held up the packet for him to take. Nikka drew back, and she looked up at him handsomely, her even teeth flashing a full, insolent smile. Eons of uncombed dust gave her black hair a hue lighter than that of her sunburnt skin. The hair stood round her face in a stiff wiggly tangle.
For a moment, Zaitoon saw herself rushing wild and wanton over the mountains. She now knew the woman had been raped. Abandoned and helpless, she had been living on the charity of her rapists . . . and on theft.
In an anguished frenzy, Zaitoon pounded the sand. She cupped her breasts, and pain in a red haze exploded inside her.
A little later, she crawled between some rocks. The pain from her breasts raged through her body. On the fringe of consciousness, her mind wandered in delirium . . .
“How fat you are, how fat,” she teased, pummeling Miriam’s breasts. “They’re like a fat-tailed sheep’s, we’ll have them when we celebrate Eid! Ummm . . . they must be tasty . . .” She dug her face into the thin voile covering the softness and nibbled playfully.
Fending off the probing little face, Miriam laughed.
“Toba, toba! Have you no shame? Talking such rubbish! Some day you will be fat like me.” Holding Zaitoon’s face she kissed her . . .
And Zaitoon remembered the morning when she discovered the slight taut swell in her flesh—her promised womanhood. Suddenly shy, she had glanced around, making sure of her privacy in the dingy bathing cubicle. The canister beneath the tap was filled to the brim, and the overflow, directed by the slope of the cement floor, poured through a bright hole at the base of the wall. Zaitoon knelt on the cool, gritty cement and peered through the hole. Beyond the gaping brightness was the back of another building. She was walled in by mountains of brick held precariously by gobs of caked mud. Water drained two stories down the open cement channels into a gutter along the base. No one could see her. She crooked her slight neck and looked at herself. Her eyes and fingers probed the enchanting novelty. The softness was delicious to the touch of her childish, inquisitive fingers . . . this way and that . . . pummeling and distorting. A wondrous, possessive pride welled up in her. All along, she had accepted Miriam’s pendulous bosoms as symbolic of her sex, and the incipient manifestation of breasts of her own filled her with ecstasy. She now longed each day for the privacy of her bath . . .
She floated through halcyon scenes of her past. They had a charming immediacy. Reminiscences melted into hallucination, and the delirium receded. Every now and then she would reenter the present enough to know: “I must find the bridge—I must get out of here . . .”
She crawled farther and farther from the beach, creeping up through fissures and stony crevices. For a time she snuggled beneath a slaty overhang, like a wounded animal, to lick her bruises.
Zaitoon awakened late in the evening. Her pain had eased and her mind was alert again. The comforting roar of the river throbbed in her ears, and once more her instinct for life came to the surface.
Twilight shaded the hills. Restless winds in the rock signaled nightfall and, dusting the sand from her clothes, she started along her path.
Zaitoon followed the tortuous course of the river by its sound. Now and again she glimpsed the inky void of waters far below.
Of a sudden, a blank stretch was straddled by a shadowy thickness. It was the bridge!
Far across gleamed the flicker of a light. Lost when she tried to focus her vision, it again winked unexpectedly when her eyes shifted.
She scurried over the rocks like a skeletal wraith. The bridge took on definition. It loomed nearer in the faint moonlight. Zaitoon was careful now, crouching in the shadows.
She climbed down a shallow well of boulders, and stepping on a stone, peered over. Beneath her, about twenty yards to her left the concrete started.
Her heart sang. She shrugged the burdensome blanket from her shoulders. She had no use for it. All she still needed to drag along was the numb weight of her pain.
Stealthily Zaitoon moved down to the base of the granite that had been her shelter. A few feet from her stretched the sand, a naked gleaming white, and then the bridge, flanked by smoky, V-shaped girders. The ghostly silhouette of the Chinese lions reared up at dim intervals. It was perfectly still. The breeze had died. An eerie light streaked the asphalt, and only the deafening rush and crash of the waters hinted at the river’s invisible tumult.
Zaitoon examined the churning stillness. All her senses were alert.
She stood ready for a spurt, when she saw the movement. Momentarily something cut across the dim haze of the girders at the far end, the ghostly, barely discernible shadow of a man. She waited breathlessly, and the spectral form dissolved. Zaitoon climbed back over the stones.
Squatting on the floor of her well, she thought carefully. She was too close to allow for the slightest error. Her impulse to run to whoever was on the bridge alternated with an instinctive desire to wait for light, and be sure to whom she was going. She was suddenly cold. She scrimmaged among the stones at her feet, and finding the blanket, covered herself. An unreasoning fear swept over her. Even now, with the glimmer of a light from Dubair winking at her, she might not make it.
Her brain whirls. In her mind’s eye she sees herself climbing down at last, huddling amidst the stones, and finally, scuttling swiftly across the sand, vanishing into the shadow of the girders.
She is nearly halfway down the bridge when some instinct makes her grip the railing. The steel feels like ice. She stands still, and there is a slight vibration, as of someone moving as stealthily as she herself. She whips around, scanning the shadows,
and the vibration ceases, but she knows she is not alone. There it is again, the slightest tremor, and now she knows it comes from ahead of her. She glances back for a way to retreat and then again strains ahead, probing the narrow shadows cast by the concrete pillars and lions. Except for them, the bridge lies bathed in moonlight. Not a pebble mars its smooth surface.
And then her blood congeals. A soft blackness has obscured the pattern in the railing. Terror freezes her, kneeling, to the asphalt. A form, tenuous as gray smoke, floats forward and involuntarily she moans. For an instant the smoky movement stops. Then it starts towards her, a pale, rolling blur—a man sneaking towards her on hands and knees. He sees her, shrunk and crumpled on the ground. She feels the throb of his rush and hides her face between her knees. When the groping fingers touch her, her nerves jerk in a single, convulsive paroxysm and she springs upright. The man stoops level with her and his breath stings her face.
She looks at the pitiless curve of his lips, the unforgiving hurt in his eyes, and comprehends his heart. Now she is calm. So, I am to die after all, she thinks. Sakhi knows she will not scream. She is aware of his grief, and of the relentless pride and sense of honor that drives him. It is not an act of personal vengeance; he is dispensing justice—the conscience and weight of his race are behind him.
She feels him move and her destiny is compressed into seconds. She hurtles in a shortcut through all the wonders and wisdom of a life unlived. Instantly old, her tenure spent, she is ripe to die.
She feels so tired. Sakhi’s hand bites into her fleshless shoulder. Allah, let it be swift. I can’t bear any more.
