by Moni Mohsin
But the ease with which she had taken to Sabzbagh after their marriage had still astonished Tariq. She had settled in that village with the contentment of a mother hen settling on her eggs. She loved dispensing medicine, warm clothes, jobs and advice. If ever she missed the giddy whirl of her previous life, she never said.
She had proved all her doubters wrong.
When Tariq and Laila returned from their walk, the picnic rug was spread out beneath the peepul tree, cushions were scattered about invitingly and Fareeda sat with her back against the tree trunk, legs outstretched, sipping fresh orange juice. From behind her dark glasses, she admired the view.
The sky was a steady blue, washed paler near the horizon. On the left lay a guava orchard, the short, shaggy trees laden with pale green, unripe fruit. To her right stretched a long line of poplar trees, bordering an irrigation channel. Beyond the trees lay her husband’s tube well and, further on, his acres of wheat and cane.
Laila flopped down beside her mother and accepted a glass of juice. Just then, she heard the sound of an approaching car and saw the Lincoln bump along the dirt track, trailing clouds of dust. It came to a halt beside their white Zephyr. Barkat sprang to open Sardar Begum’s door and leapt back as he was met by a volley of invective audible to Laila from a distance of thirty yards.
‘Let this dust settle, fool, before you open my door,’ barked Sardar Begum. ‘You want to suffocate me? Already my lungs are finished.’ She reached out and slammed the door shut. The car remained sealed and stationary long after the dust had subsided.
It had been three whole weeks since Laila had last met Rani. Too impatient to wait any longer, Laila thumped her glass down and raced over to the Lincoln. She made for the front passenger window. Unmindful of its powdering of dust, she pressed her face to the glass and saw a distinctly sulky-looking Rani. Uncaring of her grandmother’s ire, she wrenched open the door. But before she could even say hello, Sardar Begum cooed from the back seat, ‘I’m at the back, my moon.’ She held out her hand.
Laila grabbed her grandmother’s hand and pressed a perfunctory kiss on it. Then she pelted Rani with a hail of questions.
‘What took you so long? We’ve been waiting ages and ages. Why haven’t you been to see me all these days? Where have you been? What have you been doing?’
Rani ignored her. Very deliberately, she turned her face to the windscreen.
‘No use talking to her, Laila,’ remarked Sardar Begum. ‘She’s in a huff because I forced her to come. When I told her she was coming to the picnic, she said she had to study, if you please. You’d think she was sitting an exam to become president from all the studying she’s been doing recently. Kalay Khan, Rani, what are you waiting for? Get off and unpack.’
‘But Begum Saab,’ the driver demurred, ‘you yourself said to wait till the dust settles.’
‘Did I ask you to wait till the day of judgement?’ she snapped.
It took half an hour to unload Sardar Begum’s car. A succession of tiffin-carriers, baskets and cooking pots were ferried by the drivers to where Fareeda had spread out her rug. The drivers then withdrew to the cars, and Bua and Rani served the food. When Fareeda’s baskets were unpacked, Sardar Begum eyed the dainty sandwiches and cutlets in disbelief. She lifted a drumstick between forefinger and thumb and held it aloft. Examining it from all sides, she asked in mock innocence, ‘Is this doll’s food?’
Tariq saw his wife’s face tighten and leapt to her defence.
‘No, Maanji, it’s normal food for normal people,’ he said, wishing yet again that after fourteen years of marriage, his mother would have the grace to accept his choice of wife.
But Sardar Begum was not the accepting type. She could not forget that Tariq had married Fareeda against her wishes. Ever the pragmatist, Sardar Begum had sought an alliance with a wealthy landed family in the adjoining district.
‘You have no brothers,’ she had reasoned with her son. ‘You need to build support in the area – people who will be your eyes and ears and arms. Tomorrow you might want to fight elections; you’ll need a network. Also, a girl from the landed gentry will have good habits. She’ll be obedient, sober, economical.’
But Tariq had other ideas. He wanted a partner, an equal with whom he could share his interests. When he chose Fareeda, Sardar Begum was horrified. Had Tariq lost his mind?
‘And what will a party-going, piano-playing, car-driving memsahib do in Sabzbagh?’ demanded Sardar Begum. Exactly the same question was being pondered by Sardar Begum’s sisters-in-law, who were delighted to hear of this reversal in the fortunes of their haughty relative. Sardar Begum’s in-laws had still not forgiven her for her unilateral declaration of independence upon her husband’s death thirty-three years ago. While nibbling on tiny curried quail’s legs, they gossiped gleefully about Tariq Azeem’s fiancée.
‘I hear she wears skirts and invites strange men to comb her hair.’
‘No! In her home?’
‘Worse, much worse. In shops, in full view of the world.’
‘Shameless!’ they had clapped in delight. ‘Wait and see. She will bury them in shame. Heaps and heaps of shame.’
Fareeda hadn’t yet heaped shame on the house of Azeem, much to the disappointment of Tariq’s aunts. Nor had she thrown decadent parties or galloped a stallion through Sabzbagh bazaar. Fareeda had, in fact, confounded Sardar Begum and dismayed her aunts-in-law by giving every semblance of quiet contentment.
But Tariq knew that Fareeda’s happiness was based on living independently. Knowing his mother’s autocratic nature only too well, Tariq had chosen to live away from her. Sardar Begum had bought the farm at Sabzbagh from a colonial family soon after the subcontinent gained independence and the British sailed for home. For years, the bungalow had lain unoccupied and derelict. Sardar Begum had toyed with the idea of demolishing the house, but Tariq had prevailed upon her to let it be. The year he got married, Tariq had it repaired and refurbished and, much to Sardar Begum’s chagrin, it was to the bungalow and not the haveli that he brought Fareeda. The arrangement suited Tariq’s purpose perfectly. In Sabzbagh Fareeda was beyond the range of Sardar Begum’s interfering arm and critical gaze. Tariq, meanwhile, was close enough to his mother to provide support, yet far enough to ensure privacy. In choosing to live separately, Tariq had flouted custom.
‘Look at that!’ his relatives had clucked in false sympathy. ‘He the only son and she an elderly widow, and still he is refusing to do his duty and live with her. His mother should never have sent him to study in England. If a boy stays away so long from his own kith and kin, his blood turns white, he forgets his obligations. Allah knows we tried our best to dissuade her, but would she listen?’
Others blamed his wife. She must be a practitioner of the black arts. How else could you explain a devoted son’s abandonment of his own mother? This is what came of marrying sly city types. They turned you against your own flesh and blood.
Too proud to admit that she had been thwarted by her son, Sardar Begum pretended that the new arrangement was her idea. She gave short shrift to anyone who dared probe.
‘Of course it was my decision,’ she snapped. ‘This house is Tariq’s, but as long as I am alive I will remain its mistress. And why live on top of each other when we can afford to have two, two, no four, four houses each?’
Though she put on a brave face in public, Sardar Begum saw no reason to hide her real feelings in private. Hence, although her disapproval of Fareeda had blunted over the years, Sardar Begum didn’t see why she should abstain from all criticism of her daughter-in-law. If Fareeda’s food was foolish, she would say so. Sitting upright on the picnic rug, Sardar Begum ordered Rani to display the offerings from Kalanpur.
‘Rani, pass around our food. Give a paratha to Laila Bibi. No wonder the child is skin and bone if these chicken bones are all she gets to eat.’
In sullen silence, Rani unscrewed the tiffin carrier. There was omelette with fresh coriander and chopped scallions; lamb chops in y
oghurt; seekh kebabs; karahi chicken; and minced lamb with whole chillies. Rani opened a separate box, lifted out a pile of parathas wrapped in greasy brown paper and slapped it down on a plate.
Surveying the spread with a beatific smile, Sardar Begum spread out her arms.
‘Now eat.’
Despite herself, Fareeda laughed. Tariq shook his head.
‘You’ll kill us with all this rich food, Maanji,’ he said to his mother.
‘Better to die on a full stomach than an empty one.’
Despite Sardar Begum’s barbed comments, lunch was an amicable affair. She found, much to her evident surprise, that Fareeda’s reviled drumsticks were rather good after all. Not only did she scoff three in rapid succession, but she also had the grace to compliment her daughter-in-law between mouthfuls. (‘These are not so bad. Soaked like this in chutney they are good, even.’) Tariq tucked into the kebabs and chops and, thus, good humour was restored to the party.
Sardar Begum regaled them with anecdotes about her visit to Sargodha. Apparently, Tariq’s sister was doing well but was heartily sick of her overbearing mother-in-law.
‘Constantly sticking her leg in your sister’s home she is. Always wanting to know how much this cost, where she got that, and Allah knows what else. Why can’t the old witch mind her own business?’
Fareeda and Tariq exchanged a wry smile over her bent head. But although Laila listened to the conversation with half an ear and made a heroic attempt to taste the food her grandmother piled on her plate, she was miserably aware of Rani’s closed face.
Rani stood above them, swishing a towel to and fro to keep the flies off the food. Although Laila tried several times to catch her eye, she did not acknowledge her with so much as a flicker of an eyelid. Fareeda, who had the urban liberal’s dislike of child servants, whispered to Bua to take over from Rani, but despite the ayah’s good-natured offer, Rani refused to relinquish the towel. Sardar Begum noticed the exchange.
‘If she wants to be a martyr, Bua, let her. Fareeda, you enjoy your food. No use draping grapevines over thorn trees.’
A tide of crimson swept over Rani’s neck. It seemed to Laila that she was on the verge of tears. Despite Rani’s frostiness, Laila wanted to jump up and throw her arms around her.
‘Don’t be mean to Rani, Dadi,’ Laila mumbled, colouring at her own audacity at admonishing her grandmother. She plucked at the grass by her knee, waiting for the storm to break over her head.
‘Laila!’ rebuked Fareeda, ever mindful of her duty. ‘How can you speak to your Dadi like that? Apologize at once.’
But Sardar Begum shushed her with a wave of her hand.
‘Mean? Me?’ She turned the full beam of her glare on Laila. ‘You are calling me mean because of memsahib’s,’ she tossed her head at Rani, ‘mood? Well, let me tell you why she’s so moody. Because I made her come. And why? Because you asked for her and I didn’t want to disappoint you. That’s why.’
‘Sorry.’ Laila responded mechanically, keen not to prolong the friction.
‘Humph!’ snorted Sardar Begum, picking up an abandoned cutlet.
‘Come on, Maanji. Laila’s apologized,’ said Tariq, who hated conflict as much as Laila. ‘She didn’t mean to be rude. She was just defending her friend, which, you will agree, is an honourable thing to do.’
‘And you, Tariq Sahib,’ Sardar Begum rounded on her son, ‘can stop lecturing me about honourable things to do. Who do you think you are? A schoolmaster? Your sermons may be applauded in your factory, but I’m not one of your two-paisa babus, understand? Lecturing me about honour as if I was yesterday’s child! Humph!’ Sardar Begum tossed her head. ‘I know more about honour than you, even if you live to be a hundred.’
Tariq raised his hands in surrender.
‘I know, I know, neither Laila nor I should have spoken to you like that. Our deepest, profoundest apologies. Laila, please go and kiss your grandmother.’
‘All right then,’ muttered the old lady and opened her arms to receive Laila’s embrace.
Laila did so and, when she straightened, she caught Rani’s eye and was rewarded with a watery smile. It was worth the scolding.
‘Now, Rani, I insist you stop this fanning nonsense and eat something,’ said Fareeda briskly, stacking up the dirty plates. ‘We’ve finished, so why don’t you and Bua and the drivers help yourselves to whatever you want, hmm? There’s plenty of food left.’
‘Wait!’ Sardar Begum held up her hand like a traffic warden. ‘Give me their plates and I’ll put in their food. No, no, those plates.’ She pointed at the quarter plates. She pulled the plates out of Fareeda’s hands and reached for the omelette. Meat was too good to waste on staff. Slicing the omelette into slivers, Sardar Begum looked up and caught her son’s reproving eye. Her hand stilled.
‘What?’ she bristled.
‘Just let them help themselves, Maanji.’
Sardar Begum’s eyes flickered from Tariq’s face to Fareeda’s deliberately expressionless one. She then glanced at Bua and Rani. After a moment’s indecision, she replaced the plates quietly on the rug and waved at the servants to take it all away. However, she couldn’t help shouting after them, ‘Don’t you dare finish the cake!’
‘What exams are you preparing for?’ Laila asked Rani. They were sitting on the grass, their bare feet dangling in the stream. The servants had eaten and packed the picnic paraphernalia into the cars. Far from her employers’ gaze, Bua leaned against the Zephyr’s bonnet and smoked companionably with the drivers. Tariq, Fareeda and Sardar Begum had gone for a walk to inspect the new saplings. Sardar Begum was armed with a notebook to count up and note the exact number of plants to ascertain that her son was not being cheated.
‘Oh, just normal exams,’ Rani replied, without looking at Laila. She was pulling the leaves off a thin poplar branch she had found lying on the ground.
‘But I thought you’d just had them. Didn’t you tell me when we went to see the film that you’d failed in arithmetic?’
‘So? These are new ones.’ Rani inspected the leafless branch. From one end, she ripped off a tiny bit of the soft bark with her teeth.
‘So soon?’
Rani spat out the bark. ‘Why are you so bothered about my exams?’
Hurt by Rani’s tone, Laila fell silent. The water felt cold on her bare feet. She lifted them out of the stream and anxiously probed the soft wrinkled skin between her toes for evidence of killer worms. Fareeda had often warned her about the millions of invisible worms that swam about in dirty water and buried themselves into the skin of the ‘careless people’ who dipped their feet in it. The worms swam through the streams of blood that flowed up careless people’s legs into their tummies and gave them all sorts of horrid diseases.
The warning had echoed in Laila’s head when she had seen Rani fling off her flip-flops and plunge her nut-brown feet into the stream. Rani was being careless. Laila had been about to stop her, but she had looked so merry with her feet splashing in the water that Laila had been tempted to join her. Carefully removing her white socks and brown T-bar shoes, she had lowered her own pale feet into the stream.
Now, she shivered, as she imagined hundreds, no, millions of worms swarming up her body. There would be traffic jams in her veins with all the millions of worms pushing, jostling and streaming up her calves. Her legs would ache unbearably as her veins bulged to bursting point. But not by so much as a sigh would she reveal her agony. Before she reached home today, the worms would already be in her stomach. By midnight, she would be bleeding. By dawn, she would be dead. When Bua came to wake her the next morning, she’d find her grinning skeleton stretched out on the bed. The worms would have devoured her overnight. And then Rani would be sorry. Sorry that she had snapped at her and hadn’t treated her better.
Laila reached for her socks and tried to pull them over her wet feet. She felt like crying. She turned her back on Rani and, grunting and sobbing with frustration, she tried once again to pull up her wrinkled, stubborn s
ocks. Then Rani came to kneel beside her. She took Laila’s feet in her lap and gently wiped them dry with her shawl. Rani eased on the socks and did up her shoes for her. Socked and shod, Laila felt less vulnerable. Rani sat on her haunches and wrapped her arms around her knees.
‘You’re right. I don’t have any exams,’ she admitted in a low voice.
‘Then why did you lie?’
‘Because …’ Rani coloured under Laila’s frank gaze, ‘because instead of coming here today I wanted to do something else.’
‘What?’
Rani’s gaze dropped.
‘Do what?’ Laila repeated.
‘I wanted to meet a friend of mine,’ Rani whispered.
‘A friend? But you could have brought her with you.’ Though she was not pleased to have a rival for Rani’s attention, Laila was prepared to be magnanimous in the abstract. ‘No one would have minded, you know.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because my friend is a boy.’ Rani said it so softly that Laila almost didn’t hear.
‘A boy?’ She didn’t know Rani knew any boys. She and Sara certainly didn’t. Their convent school was for girls only. All their friends, even outside school, were girls. Admittedly, their parent’s friends had two sons whom they met occasionally, but they were not their friends. Samir, the younger one, always spat in her Coke and tripped her up in races. And Saqib, the elder one, had yellow pimples on his forehead and a clump of scraggly hairs on his chin. He marched around with an air gun, with which he shot frogs in his mother’s ornamental pond. No, they were definitely not friends, even though Sara sometimes became all coy and simpering when Saqib was sauntering around with his air gun. But, still, he wasn’t a friend. In fact, both brothers were equally disgusting.
