by Moni Mohsin
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE END OF INNOCENCE
Moni Mohsin was born and raised in Pakistan. She lives in London with her husband and two children.
The End of Innocence
MONI MOHSIN
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Fig Tree 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1
Copyright © Moni Mohsin, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
EISBN: 978–0–141–90060–5
For Mian and Bibi
Ik roi si dhi Punjab di, tu likh likh maaray vaen
Uj lakhaan dhiyaan rondiaan, kiss Varis Shah noon kaen?
Once a daughter of the Punjab did weep, and you poured out
songs of lamentation
Today a thousand daughters weep, oh Varis, but who is there to
listen?
Amrita Pritam (1947)
Prologue
Lahore. New Year’s Eve, 2001
The first bar of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ ripples through the marquee and everyone at my table abandons the cardamom ice cream and surges on to the dance floor. I, too, down my spoon and allow myself to be dragged to it by my elder sister, Sara. The floor is thronged with the well-heeled, well-soused members of the Imperial Club. But, to me, there seems a frantic edge to their merriment, as if they were all doing their utmost to forget what lurks outside.
Sara has grabbed her jovial husband and plunged into the crowd. She is now lost to me. The air is thick with the fumes of cigar smoke, Gucci’s Envy and sweat. Music pounds from four speakers placed at each corner of the floor. I catch a brief glimpse of Sara’s flushed, laughing face. She is watching me over her husband’s shoulder. I see the familiar concern hovering behind the smile. I grin back dutifully. When she disappears from view again, I slip away. Just as I reach my empty table, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around and groan inwardly. It’s an aunt, an inveterate matchmaker, to whom I – unmarried at thirty-eight – am a personal affront. As usual, she has a single man in tow.
‘Darling, I’d like you to meet Asif Khan.’ She leans towards me with the pretext of smoothing my hair behind my ear, and hisses, ‘His father is Climax Concrete. He’s the only son!’
She flashes me a tight smile and bustles off, her velvet-upholstered buttocks gambolling behind her like a pair of playful puppies.
‘Hiya!’ bellows my suitor. I grimace as a spiral of smoke from his Marlboro drifts under my nose.
‘Oh, you don’t like smoke?’ He exhales over his other shoulder, away from me. ‘When I was at college in Illinois I once roomed with a guy who was allergic to cigarette smoke. But you know what I told him? I said, “Man, you gotta …”’
While he drones on about his allergic roommate, I watch a group standing not far from me. The men are encased in Italian wool suits. They talk in strident voices of ‘profit margins’ and ‘bottom lines’. Their women pat their lacquered hair and murmur about all the other parties at which they will simply have to show their faces before the night ends. In the background, the dancers heave like the sea. A scantily clad model sways by the edge of the floor. A small appreciative crowd has gathered around her and is clapping and whistling her on. Two white-coated, turbaned bearers watch with expressionless faces.
I pluck at my suitor’s sleeve, interrupting his monologue.
‘Listen, I’m sure you’re a very nice man, but if you’ll excuse me …’ I grab my shawl and hurry towards the exit, leaving the heir apparent to Climax Concrete staring after me. I steal a glance over my shoulder at my parents’ table at the far end of the marquee. My mother, elegant in a midnight-blue sari, is deep in conversation with an old friend. My silver-haired father stares at the ceiling. I walk out.
My face tingles in the cold night air. Before me looms the Club building. I have spent many happy days here as a child, wolfing chicken cutlets and banana splits on the long terrace at the back. By the parking lot I see the glow of an electric fire. A crescent of shivering drivers huddles around it. Many of them will wait there till dawn.
I turn towards the dim garden. My high heels sink into the grass. As I walk, the noise from the marquee recedes. Goose bumps prickle my arms. I pull my shawl closer and look up at a granite sky. It is as dark as my past.
A loud whoop from the marquee reaches me across the silent garden. There is the sound of cheering and clapping. But it does not lure me back. For the truth is that I am no longer at ease in these cheerful, boisterous gatherings. I am far happier in my quiet office with my biddable computer for company.
Sensing someone close behind me, I swivel around. It is my father. The grass has muffled his approach.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Mind if I join you?’
‘Not at all.’
We stroll in silence. Presently, we reach a wrought-iron gate, now locked against possible gatecrashers. The security guards carry Kalashnikovs.
Through the elaborate metal curls of the gate, we have a clear view of the street. One moment the road is empty, and the next it’s full of open army trucks. Filled with rows of greatcoated soldiers seated facing each other, the trucks roll past, one after another, on their way to the border. The soldiers hold their guns propped upright between their legs, their faces blank beneath their helmets. Their bayonets glint in the street lights. At last the convoy ends, and the street falls silent again.
‘How long before India invades us?’ I ask my father.
‘There isn’t going to be a war.’
‘That’s what you said the last time also.’
‘Yes,’ he sighs. ‘I was wrong in ’71. Do you remember that war, Laila? You were only a child then. I expect you’ve forgotten.’
No, I haven’t forgotten that war. I remember everything. And everybody.
1
October 1971
Perched on the edge of a car seat, Rani and Laila hurtled towards a love story. Or as close to hurtling as anyone had come in Sardar Begum’s ancient Lincoln. Sardar Begum sat in her habitual seat in the front, her beady eyes fixed on the speedometer, lest, in a fit of dementia, her geriatric driver should exceed her oft-repeated injunction of thirty miles an hour. A white muslin dupatta was lashed around her head, and her dove-grey kurta was buttoned up to the throat. Sardar Begum had not worn bright colours since her husband’s ‘departure’ thirty odd years ago. The white muslin, in particular, was the flag of her widowhood. As always, her meaty hands gripped the sides of the seat, as if expecting any second to be catapulted from it.
Behind her sat Kaneez, her elderl
y maid. She was hunched over a thermos flask containing her mistress’s afternoon tea. Her shawl was pulled low over her wrinkled forehead to conceal her disapproval. She scowled at her granddaughter, Rani, sitting by her. Straight and radiant as a sunflower in her yellow shalwar kameez, the fifteen-year-old was impervious to her grandmother’s displeasure. Her honey-coloured eyes were alight with the excitement of her first visit to the cinema. Laila, Sardar Begum’s eight-year-old granddaughter, bounced beside Rani. Spruce in a smocked dress and patent-leather shoes, she was flushed with her success at pulling off this improbable outing.
Of all the people in the car, Bua, Laila’s middle-aged ayah, was the most relaxed. She lounged beside Laila, her fingers laced over her ample stomach, humming a tune from the recently released film, Heer Ranjha. The silver cross at her neck glittered in the afternoon sun, and the breeze from the window tugged at the handkerchief pinned to her chest. She was looking forward to watching a film and having a good weep. It cleared the head and lightened the heart, she believed. And Heer Ranjha was the biggest weepie of them all. ‘Their love conquered everything but their fate,’ she had sighed when relating the famous legend of the star-crossed lovers to Laila. Bua patted her handkerchief. It would come in useful at the cinema.
But Kaneez knew in her bones and blood that this trip to the cinema did not augur well. ‘The cinema is no place for good girls,’ she muttered.
Sardar Begum had made the announcement that had led to this unusual journey the week before. Laila was over for lunch at her grandmother’s house in the village of Kalanpur. They were seated on Sardar Begum’s daybed, in the courtyard under a shady neem tree. The daybed was a beautiful object, carved with peacocks and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It was part of the elaborate dowry Sardar Begum had brought with her when she had come to this haveli as a bride over four decades ago. The haveli had been built by her late husband’s forefathers and had wide verandas, high-ceilinged rooms and walls three feet thick. It was not an elegant abode, nor was it, with its unreliable plumbing and gloomy interior, a comfortable one, but it had a certain solidity, a presence as uncompromising as its current mistress, who was now trundling towards the washbasin.
They had just finished a lunch of ghee-soaked parathas and partridge curry. The servants had cleared away the detritus of the meal. Laila watched her grandmother wash her hands in the china basin over which Rani poured warm water from a jug. Rani was not Sardar Begum’s servant, she was her servant’s granddaughter, but she was expected to pitch in whenever she was summoned, cheerfully disregarding the fact that she was not paid.
While soaping her hands, Sardar Begum mentioned casually that the new Deputy Commissioner of Colewallah district had invited her and any guests of her choosing to a screening of Heer Ranjha at Colewallah town’s cinema. But she had, she said, already declined the invitation. She had sent a note to the Commissioner thanking him for his kind remembrance of an old lady. The note had informed him, however, that being sixty-two years old, she was no longer of an age where such worldly diversions held any attraction for her, particularly at venues frequented by the sort of people of whose company her late, revered husband would not have approved.
Sardar Begum whooshed a handful of water around her mouth and spat it out in the basin.
‘Humph! As if I’d sit alongside cobblers, truck drivers and barbers. My shoe even wouldn’t grace them with its presence!’ She dried her hands on the towel hanging off Rani’s forearm. ‘Koonj,’ she ordered, ‘throw away this water and fetch my digestive salts.’
Though Sardar Begum seldom wasted endearments on servants, she called Rani ‘Koonj’, the crane, in acknowledgement of her long neck and elegant gait. But Rani appeared not to have heard Sardar Begum’s instructions. She stood with the empty jug dangling in one hand and the towel in the other, looking stricken.
Making her way back to the bed, Sardar Begum kicked off her shoes. She tucked a cushion under her neck and lay down on her side on the daybed. Her flabby stomach flopped beside her like a beanbag. She sucked on her teeth impatiently.
‘Didn’t you hear what I said, girl?’ she snapped. ‘Get my salts and some toothpicks also.’ Coming to with a start, Rani lifted the china basin and tottered off.
‘Now, my dove, have you eaten enough?’ Sardar Begum gazed with some concern at her granddaughter’s skinny arms and knobbly knees. Never a plump child, Laila seemed particularly frail after her recent attack of typhoid. Her mother was obviously not feeding her enough.
Sardar Begum seldom agreed with her daughter-in-law, Fareeda. Hailing from the city, Fareeda was prone to some very odd notions. She had elected, for instance, to send her girls to a convent school run by Irish nuns in Lahore. It was a choice of which Sardar Begum disapproved heartily. She was also sceptical of her granddaughters’ living arrangements. During termtime, the girls lived with Fareeda’s widowed mother in Lahore, a big bustling city some seventy miles to the west, where no doubt they were being infected with all manner of sinful things like dance and boys. The rest of the year they spent with their parents at their home in the village of Sabzbagh, five miles from Sardar Begum’s home.
Whatever their differences, Sardar Begum concurred wholeheartedly with Fareeda’s decision to pluck Laila from school and bring her home to Sabzbagh, with its clean air and wholesome food, to nurse her back to health. She only wished she’d bring Laila’s elder sister, Sara, too. What need had they of exams and books? It was hardly as if they would be required to earn a living, Allah forbid.
‘One chapatti is not enough for a growing girl.’ Sardar Begum stroked Laila’s cheek. ‘You should be eating three or four. When I was your age I could eat a whole lamb. You should eat properly now that you are here. None of those factory eggs and watery milk that you are fed in Lahore.’
Laila listened absently while she watched Rani empty the basin in a drain. Attuned to every gesture and expression of the older girl, Laila wondered why she had looked so put out just then. Why, only a moment before, she had winked at Laila when Sardar Begum had produced one of her thunderous postprandial belches. When Rani returned with the bottle of salts and toothpicks, she signalled to Laila to follow her into the haveli.
‘Dadi, I need to do bathroom.’ Laila slid off the bed and followed Rani into the house.
Her eyes shut to savour the exquisite pleasure of excavating her molars, Sardar Begum grunted in assent. As soon as Laila stepped into Sardar Begum’s chilly room, Rani grabbed her wrist.
‘She mustn’t refuse,’ she whispered urgently. ‘Please, tell her she must go and take her with us. Only you can make her change her mind.’ Her arrow-straight eyebrows drew together in an anxious line.
‘Make her change her mind about what?’ blinked Laila.
‘The film. Heer Ranjha. I really, really want to see it. Everyone says it’s the best, with such sad songs and the prettiest Heer ever. Everyone from Kalanpur has been to see it in the new cinema. The cinema, they say, is so big, with hundreds of seats, and so many lights that it is like a night sky thick with stars. Please. I’ve never been, and if we don’t go now, I never will.’
‘You want to go to the cinema?’ Laila queried.
Rani nodded.
‘Then why don’t you?’
‘You know my grandmother won’t let me,’ cried Rani. ‘She thinks the cinema is a lewd place. I’ve never been, Laila,’ she pleaded. ‘This is my only chance. If your grandmother said she was taking us, my grandmother wouldn’t dare object.’
Laila knew that Rani didn’t have much fun living alone with the dour Kaneez. Rani’s mother, Fatima, had remarried after Rani’s father’s death and lived in another village with her new husband. Kaneez kept Rani on a tight leash in Kalanpur, refusing to let her go to the bazaar on her own or even to visit her own mother. Laila knew how frustrating it was to be shadowed. Bua, her ayah, was her constant chaperone. Even in Lahore, where people were more modern, her other grandmother insisted that Bua accompany Laila to the birthday parties of her sch
ool friends.
But, unlike Rani, who never went anywhere, Laila went to plenty of birthday parties. And she got to see films. She and Sara had seen lots of films in Lahore – The Swiss Family Robinson, Sinbad’s Golden Voyage, King Kong, My Fair Lady. They were familiar with all the cinemas where English ‘family films’ were shown. Her favourites were the Crown, which had a big golden crown poised on the roof like a hovering spaceship, and the candy-pink Plaza. Laila had never been to a cinema with an Urdu name. She’d heard of Naz and Sanobar, but they were in the part of town the girls did not frequent. And, anyway, those cinemas only screened Urdu and Punjabi films of which Fareeda did not approve. (‘Too many vulgar dances with heaving, panting heroines. No thank you!’)
‘You want me to tell my grandmother that I want to see Heer Ranjha so she will take us all then?’ asked Laila.
‘Yes. Yes, please.’
‘But I don’t see Urdu films. Ammi says they’re not good for me.’
‘Heer Ranjha is not an Urdu film,’ protested Rani. ‘It is Punjabi, and it’s very, very nice. You can ask anyone. It’s got Ijaz and Firdaus in it. And Ijaz is married to that famous singer who has a big house in the best bit of Lahore, where your Lahore grandmother lives also? He’s not like the other heroes who can only grunt and go dishum dishum.’ Rani pretended to throw a punch. ‘He speaks English and wears jacket suits.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I overheard our neighbours talking. Please, Laila, please. Can we go? Just this once. I want to see for myself.’
Laila thought about the twilit world of the cinema: the dark, tiered hall, the leatherette seats that snapped shut with a thwack and the red velvet curtains which rose in tasselled scallops to reveal a screen as big as a swimming pool standing on its side. And the drinks-sellers with wooden crates hoisted on their shoulders who ran the metal bottle-opener along the ridged Fanta bottle just as you passed them. And the special smell of the cinema – a pungent cocktail of packed bodies, cigarette smoke and fried food. How could she let Rani miss all that?
