by Moni Mohsin
‘What’s your friend like?’ asked Laila suspiciously.
Rani’s face bloomed. Her lips lifted in a wide, slow smile.
‘He’s kind and strong and brave and,’ she giggled, ‘handsome.’
Laila could not think of a single boy who answered that description. In her limited experience, boys just weren’t like that. Even her school friends who had brothers agreed. Boys were messy and smelly and greedy and loud. How could girls possibly befriend them?
Laila didn’t know any girls who had boys for friends. Except, perhaps, seven-year-old Bets in Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers, who was friends with Fatty and Larry. And then there was Nora from the adventure series, who got on well with Paul. Perhaps Rani’s friendship with this boy was like that of Nora and Paul. It could well be that they solved mysteries together.
‘What do you do together?’ asked Laila.
Rani blushed and looked away.
‘Do you solve mysteries?’
‘Mysteries?’ queried Rani, nonplussed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Finding out things. Like why a mysterious red light flashes on top of a hill at night. Or who stole your neighbour’s cat.’
‘Nobody stole my neighbour’s cat.’
Laila sighed. Sometimes Rani just didn’t understand.
‘So, if you don’t solve mysteries, then what do you do?’
‘We talk.’ Rani smiled self-consciously.
‘About what?’
‘Oh, lots of things. About what we want to do. He wants to be a soldier. And I tell him about the haveli and Sabzbagh and your house and how one day I want to see Lahore and wander around its bazaars and see a film at that cinema with the crown on the top. He’s promised to take me. He said he’d show me the big mosque with domes of solid gold and the airport with huge planes that make so much wind that they can whip off your plait if you don’t hold on tight to it. I’m going to see your Lahore.’
‘You think your grandmother will let you go?’ Laila felt a twinge of jealousy.
A couple of years back, Sara had wanted Rani to come to Lahore with them for a visit. The girls had planned the trip for days. They had told Rani all about the adventures they would have. They would go to the zoo and show her crocodiles and lions, and take her boating on the Ravi, which was even wider than the Sabzbagh canal. They would visit Anarkali bazaar and buy her new clothes and take her to Shezan restaurant and order tutti-frutti ice cream in tall, cold glasses with hot chocolate sauce dripping down the sides. But Kaneez had vetoed the visit. Despite much pleading from Fareeda as well as the girls, she had not relented.
‘My grandmother doesn’t know. Promise you won’t tell her,’ said Rani. ‘Her, or anyone else. Promise!’
‘I promise. But how have you managed to make friends with him without your grandmother knowing?’
‘I meet him in secret. Like Heer and Ranjha.’
‘Do you sing and dance like them?’ Laila wrinkled her nose.
‘No, silly!’ Rani laughed. ‘I told you, we talk.’
Rani lowered her eyes. Her lashes rested on her cheeks like the thick fringes on Fareeda’s velvet cushions. She looked different to Laila, and yet nothing about her appeared to have changed. Rani wore her chestnut-brown hair, as usual, in a thick plait down her back. She had not filled out. Her collarbones still jutted out like china shelves, and the little hollow at the base of her throat was as deep as ever. Nor had she pierced her nose or plucked her thick, straight eyebrows. And yet she seemed different. She seemed alight, as though a spotlight was trained exclusively on her. Everything about her glowed – her eyes, her hair, her golden skin.
‘You don’t solve mysteries,’ complained Laila. ‘You don’t even dance. I bet you don’t play. Your friend sounds really boring.’
‘He’s not. He’s not boring at all. I feel so happy when I am with him. It’s like … like the monsoon.’
‘The monsoon?’
‘Yes. It just happens and, when it does, it sweeps away everything before it. Do you understand? Do you know what I mean?’
Laila nodded. She did not know what Rani meant, but she appreciated the urgency of Rani’s desire to make her understand. Laila knew instinctively that this was important to Rani, perhaps more important than anything she had ever divulged to her before. Perhaps these were the sorts of things that she told Sara. It was vital, if she was to raise their friendship to a higher level, to at least pretend to understand. So, Laila nodded again, more vigorously this time.
‘He makes me feel important and beautiful. When I’m with him, it doesn’t matter any more that my mother never sends for me or that no one cares if I am happy as long as I am good. None of that matters when I’m with him. Because he and I together, we become something new. Can you understand?’ Rani gripped Laila’s shoulders. ‘When I’m with him, I’m not Rani, the servant girl. I become someone else. Someone who matters. Like you or Sara.’
‘But you do matter,’ Laila protested. ‘You matter to me.’
‘I matter to you as Rani who lives in Kalanpur. I don’t matter to you in school with all your friends who come in cars, or when you go to the cinema in Lahore, or when you’re sitting in a hotel eating ice cream. Do I?’ She gave Laila a little shake and turned away. ‘You don’t understand. I wish you were older.’
Laila’s eyes widened in alarm. Had she said something wrong? Had she been found wanting? Was Rani wishing that she could speak to Sara instead of her? She wanted to grab Rani’s hands, to shout that she was her friend, that she mattered to her, mattered more than anyone else, that she did wish she could come to Lahore with her, but she didn’t know how. Whatever she said, it seemed, came out wrong.
Rani turned back to her. Laila was relieved to see that she was smiling.
‘He says I’m a real rani, a princess. And you know something,’ she giggled, ‘with him, I feel like one. I’ve never felt like that with anyone before.’
A crimson bud of jealousy unfurled in Laila’s stomach. At least when Rani ran off with Sara, she knew who her rival was and what she was up against. But this shadowy figure, this hateful boy who had usurped her friend, was an alien threat.
‘Who is he?’ Laila demanded. ‘What’s his name?’
‘I can’t tell you. He made me promise I wouldn’t. If his father finds out, he’ll thrash him, because he’s not supposed to be with me. He’s supposed to be somewhere else.’
Laila wished that his father would thrash him to death. ‘I tell you everything,’ she said, ‘everything that ever happens to me, and you won’t even tell me his name.’
‘If I could, I would, really. You know that.’ Rani took a step towards Laila and held out the poplar cane. ‘See, I made a switch for you. You can pretend it’s a sword.’
Laila looked scornfully at Rani’s offering. ‘It’s not a sword. It’s a silly stick. You give it to your friend. Anyway, you like him more than me.’ Laila knew she sounded petulant. She was possibly even endangering her friendship with Rani, but she was past caring. She wanted to hurt Rani.
‘I don’t like him more than you. I like him differently, that’s all.’ Rani reached for Laila’s hand, but Laila brushed her off.
‘Then go to him. That’s what you wanted, didn’t you? Rather than come here on this picnic with me you wanted to go and meet him, secretly. Didn’t you?’
‘Shh! Lower your voice. It’s not like that. I don’t get many chances to meet him. I thought if I said I had to study then big Begum Sahiba would take my grandmother to the picnic and I could go to meet him. I didn’t say I’d rather see him than you.’
‘But you wanted to, didn’t you?’ accused Laila.
‘Lailu, why are you being so angry and unkind?’
‘You’re the one who’s being mean.’
‘I’m not,’ whispered Rani. ‘You have so many people to love you. So many things to do, so many places to go to. I have only him.’
‘What about me? You have me, don’t you?’
‘You don’t
understand. Maybe when you grow up …’
‘Don’t tell me to grow up,’ Laila yelled. ‘I am grown up.’ She turned and raced back to the car. She felt hot tears welling up in her throat as she ran, but she swallowed hard to push them down into her stomach. She didn’t want to have to answer awkward questions from Bua or her mother. However mean Rani had been to her, she had made a promise she couldn’t break.
5
The sun was climbing in the sky as Laila and Bua hurried towards the church. Indian coral trees lining the canal road blazed with scarlet, talon-like blossoms. Parakeet shrieked in the bald blue sky. Across the canal, they were burning stubble in the fields. The scent of wood smoke and cattle dung drifted over. From the mosque on the far bank of the canal, a mullah called his congregation to prayer. The mud-coloured canal slid past, silent, swift, sleek as a snake. Visitors from Lahore who came to stay with the Azeems often mistook it for a river. (‘Hai, look how fast it flows. Must be very deep also.’)
Laila’s parents had forbidden her to come to the canal by herself. Every year it claimed at least one life, often of unwary visitors who underestimated its furious current and depth. Unlike the canal near Laila’s grandmother’s house in Lahore in which boys in dripping loincloths cavorted all summer, no one swam in this canal, no matter how hot the sun.
Even now, although Bua gripped Laila’s hand firmly, there was something illicit about being on this deserted dust road. Traffic was always thin here – the occasional jeep, trailing a parachute of dust; the odd herd of goats chewing on the elephant grass that grew in thick clumps on the canal bank; but, mostly, the few men who worked in the powdered-milk factory beyond the village and used the canal road as a shortcut.
Normally, Bua took the road that led past the guava orchard, but because they were late, she’d taken this shorter route. Fareeda had delayed them unknowingly. They had planned to creep out by the side veranda at nine-thirty while she was still in the dining room having her third cup of coffee. That would have allowed them to get to mass comfortably by ten. But a telephone call had spoilt everything. Fareeda had come upon them as Bua was drawing the bolt on the door into the veranda.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked, flying past in her flowered dressing gown to answer the telephone.
‘To visit my niece, Marium, the nurse,’ replied Bua quickly. ‘She’s just returned from Dipalpur and …’ But Fareeda wasn’t listening. She’d already lifted the receiver, and motioned them to wait. Laila sighed.
‘Now, you let me do the talking. Understand?’ Bua whispered to Laila.
Laila nodded. She knew she mustn’t mention the church. While it was perfectly all right for Bua to go to church, it wasn’t so for Laila. Her mother was funny like that. It was fine for Sara and Laila to attend a convent in Lahore, but she didn’t like them going to the church in Sabzbagh. Especially not to pray.
‘Darling, you’re a Muslim,’ she sighed, whenever Laila brought up the subject.
‘But I like the church.’
Fareeda didn’t see the statue of Mary in her sky-blue plaster shawl through Laila’s eyes, nor did she understand the lure of those big tinsel stars hanging from the ceiling or the scent of melting wax and incense and polished wood. It was a special place for Laila, warm, welcoming, forbidden. Feminine.
The village mosque, on the other hand, had a resolutely masculine atmosphere. It was stark and stern with bare white walls enclosing a brick-paved courtyard that got so hot in the summer, it seemed to shimmer in the afternoon sun. The mullah there had a long bushy beard and a bad temper. Once, when Laila had dragged Bua in, just to have a look, he had chased them out.
‘Out! Out! Females not allowed in the mosque,’ he had yelled, brown flecks of tobacco-stained spittle landing on his beard. ‘And heathens like you,’ he poked Bua with a bony forefinger, ‘who believe in three gods, will go straight to hell.’
Unlike the mullah, the nuns were kind. They let Laila thump on their piano, gave her gooey fudge at Christmas and went into ecstasies over her smocked dresses.
‘Look, Sister, how pretty these pink roses are on Laila Baby’s dress. So real they look. Just like the rose she is herself.’
But Fareeda didn’t share Laila’s fondness for the sisters. She did not think they were kind. ‘They’re quacks,’ she had snapped just the day before. ‘Cutting up young women in that clinic of theirs. They should be shut down immediately.’
Now, Fareeda replaced the receiver on its cradle and smiled at her daughter.
‘Hello, darling. You’re looking sweet,’ she said, taking in Laila’s pink going-out dress and long white socks. ‘Where are you off to? Anywhere special?’
Bua’s words came out in a rush. ‘To meet my niece, Bibi. The one who got married last month?’
‘So early in the day?’
‘If we leave it any later, it will be Laila’s resting time, so instead of tiring her …’
The phone rang again. Fareeda picked it up and waved them away.
On the canal road, Laila skipped along by Bua’s side. She reached almost up to Bua’s ear now. Last year, she could only see past Bua’s shoulder if she stood on the tips of her toes.
Bua panted as she hurried along on her short, fat legs. But despite her fifty-odd years, her dark, burnished skin was still smooth, stretched tight over her podgy face. When she laughed, her cheeks rode up her face, almost squeezing shut her eyes.
She was dressed, as usual, in a plain cambric shalwar kameez. A pristine white handkerchief folded into a square was pinned to her bosom. She was particular about this handkerchief and changed it twice a day so that it never looked creased or grimy. The handkerchief, Bua had been assured by the French nun who had pinned it to her chest before her interview with Fareeda all those years ago, was the sign of a good ayah.
And, indeed, it was the handkerchief that had impressed Fareeda. Bua had come to the Azeems from the convent, sent over by the nun who had heard Fareeda was looking for an ayah for her firstborn. Bua had just been widowed and was desperate for a job. Fareeda, meanwhile, had already ‘interviewed’ eleven women from Sabzbagh and concluded that peasant women were not cut out to be ayahs. They were sluggish and careless, unable to appreciate the importance of boiling, scrubbing, timing and smiling. Fareeda had been on the verge of appointing a sour-faced but efficient nurse from Lahore when Bua had walked in, crackling in her starched clothes, with a broad smile and a frosty handkerchief pinned to her chest.
‘Oh, Mary, Mother of God,’ she panted now. ‘Such pains in my side I get when I walk fast. Your Bua is getting old, little baba. Remember to give her a nice funeral in the church when she dies. With tears and sad songs. I wonder if anyone will ever visit my poor grave?’ She gave Laila a pointed look.
‘You won’t die, Bua, not for ages and ages,’ replied Laila, producing her stock answer to Bua’s stock question.
‘Everyone has to go one day, Lailu, but it’s nice to know you don’t want me to die tomorrow.’
A man cycled past. A fat-bellied dog chained to his handlebars trotted beside him. Laila tugged Bua’s hand.
‘Look, Bua, that dog is going to have babies.’
‘How do you know?’
‘See its tummy, it’s fat – full of babies.’ Laila beamed at the dog. In her mind, she was already among a litter of fluffy brown puppies licking her sandalled feet with their warm pink tongues.
‘Hush! Who tells you these dirty things?’
‘What dirty things?’
‘About tummies full of babies.’
‘Oh, that! Ammi told me. She said everyone – dogs, cats, you, even – came out of their mothers’ tummies. She told me she went to the hospital and a doctor pulled me out of her tummy.’
‘No, he didn’t,’ snapped Bua. ‘I’ve told you so many times I found you behind a jasmine bush in the back garden.’ Bua’s crisp tone softened as she warmed to her story. ‘It had rained at night. When I went out what did I see? A tiny baby wrapped in your green blanket lying be
hind the bush. With apricot cheeks and eyes big as frying pans. I brought you in and showed you to Bibi. “Oh, what a sweet little baby, Bua,” she said. “Let’s keep her. She’ll be Sara’s little sister.” Have you forgotten all that?’
‘No,’ mumbled Laila, bored by the reiteration of a story she had come to mistrust. ‘So how was Sara born?’ She knew the answer to this question too, but she asked simply to goad Bua.
‘Same way. Only, she was behind the cactus.’
‘And who left us there?’
‘Uff, Baba, what questions you ask! I told you it had rained. You must have dropped from the sky.’
‘I didn’t break into little, little bits falling from the sky? Rehmat’s son broke both legs when he fell from a tree. And it wasn’t very high even.’
‘God laid you down gently, like a feather on a breeze.’
‘So Ammi was lying, was she, when she said I came out of her tummy?’
‘It’s not for me to say who’s lying and who’s not,’ Bua sniffed.
Laila straddled a divided world. On one side stood her mother, and on the other, Bua. Laila knew Bua’s account was unreliable. Three years ago, when Bua had first told her the story of her origins, Laila had spent an entire monsoon rushing out after every downpour to search for a baby. With her skirt bunched up above her knees in one hand and Tariq’s walking stick in the other, she had pounded every rain-soaked bush in the garden in quest of a blanket-wrapped bundle. But her only noteworthy encounter had been with a mongoose, which had leapt out with bared teeth and spiky, sodden fur, an enraged loo-brush on legs. Laila had dropped the stick and fled, bawling. That day, a crack had appeared in her faith in the world according to Bua.
‘Now hurry or we’ll miss church.’ Bua pulled Laila’s hand.
‘Bua, tell me the story about the church and the Irish sister.’
‘Again, Baba?’
Laila nodded. That story was a particular favourite of hers. It had a fairy-tale quality about it, with a golden-haired princess, a separation, a promise and, finally, a happy union. And unlike most fairy tales she knew, it wasn’t set ‘long, long ago, in a faraway land’ but right here in Sabzbagh.
