by Moni Mohsin
‘All right, then. The Irish man, Mr O’Brian, who owned the farm before your family, had a daughter, an only daughter. She was a good, God-fearing girl. When she was twenty, she told her father she wanted to become a nun. She could have got married hundred, hundred times, if she’d wanted. So pretty she was with golden hair, milky skin and eyes the colour of Mary’s shawl. And her papa so rich. But, no, she loved Jesus, only Jesus.’ Bua kissed the cross suspended from her neck.
‘Her papa tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen. She sold off the jewellery her dead mother had left her and went off to Rome. Her father asked her to return …’
‘No, he wrote to her every day begging her to return. You’re not telling it properly …’
‘All right, Baba,’ Bua chuckled. ‘He wrote her many, many letters begging her to return. He didn’t get a reply. Not a single one. Where had she the time? So busy praying she was, the holy girl. So he followed and begged her to come home. She turned her face to the wall and prayed. But he also didn’t give up. He agreed to let her become a nun but promised that, if she came back, he’d build her a convent in Sabzbagh, where she could do God’s work.’
‘And she made Christians out of your family and lots of other families, too, and sisters came from India and Ireland and France and Sri Lanka to help in God’s work. And they started a school and clinic.’ Laila finished the story for her. ‘So when your mother died when you were a girl, your father brought you to live with the nuns here. And the sisters were like mummies to you. Weren’t they?’
‘Yes, Baba, so good they were to me. Mutton two times a week and a set of new clothes every winters and every summers.’
‘And the Irish sister? Was she also good to you?’
‘Only for a little while, because she died two years after I came. Cholera. The angels carried her up to heaven on their own wings.’
‘Didn’t they get tired?’ Laila gave Bua a wry look.
‘Angels are not fat little people like your Bua.’
‘What are they then?’
‘They’re made of light, very strong like the lights at the airport in Lahore, except that we can’t see it. Now, we’re here.’ Bua pushed open the wooden gate and ushered Laila through. ‘Here, let me wipe your dusty shoes. Otherwise, what will the sister think, eh, Lailu? Now, remember to greet them nicely.’
The path to the church had been sprinkled with water to settle the dust. The moist earth smelt of rain. The nuns were proud gardeners. The path was lined with dahlias and hot-red hibiscus with their tongues hanging out. The church itself was a brick building mounted on a concrete plinth. There was a big golden bell on the roof. The windows and doors were painted emerald green and covered in mosquito netting. Behind the church were two low buildings. The nuns lived in one and the other was a school for Christian girls. Amanat’s daughters attended this school. They sat on the floor and wrote on wooden slates with reed pens dipped in ink.
Beyond the nuns’ residential block lay the maternity clinic. It was a two-roomed structure crouching behind a hedge. Laila had been in the front room of the clinic. It had whitewashed walls lined with wooden shelves. Rows of bottles full of liquids, some milky, some clear, filled the shelves. A bench ran below the shelves. A desk and a chair were placed in the centre. Both wobbled on the uneven brick floor. The room smelt of medicines. The back room lay beyond a door that was always kept shut. Laila had never been inside that room.
The nuns who worked in the clinic were Sri Lankans. Their predecessor had left in a hurry after the glucose incident. The village seamstress, a hefty woman, had strode into the clinic complaining of ‘weakness’. She suffered from low blood pressure. So the nun on duty had laid her down and administered a glucose drip. But the seamstress was diabetic. She was found dead by the hedge behind the clinic, where she fell on her way home. The seamstress was not the first casualty of the nuns’ patchy medical knowledge.
Over the years, Fareeda had kept a grim tally of the botched cases at the convent clinic. She had held her tongue because she knew that the local midwife was no better. But with the seamstress’s death, Fareeda’s enmity with the sisters – a long-smouldering ember – burst into flames. She threatened to have the clinic shut down and the guilty nun jailed.
The Mother Superior, a Canadian whose mild manner concealed a sharp mind, acted quickly. The nun whom Fareeda had threatened with jail was packed off to Lahore that same evening. The next day, Mother Superior visited Fareeda with a bunch of dahlias. Sitting on the lawn sipping Earl Grey tea and nibbling the ginger biscuits her hostess had grudgingly offered, the nun admired Fareeda’s double gladioli and murmured how sorry she was that the Lord had summoned the poor seamstress so hastily.
She also gently reminded Fareeda that the land on which the convent and indeed the clinic stood had been gifted them by the Irish family who had planted orchards on this barren land. Hence, the nuns were within their rights to offer solace to the poor ladies of this area. But humans were human, and didn’t it also say in the holy Koran that they were fallible? Mistakes were made by all, and what could one do but beg the Lord’s forgiveness?
Of course, as Tariq Azeem’s wife, Fareeda had a right to feel protective about the people of this village, for Mr Azeem was widely regarded as a generous benefactor. But when the villagers chose not to consult them, did the Azeems have a right to intervene? But all this was very complex and really shouldn’t be discussed on such a lovely spring day. How did Fareeda keep the squirrels off her glads?
Fareeda was stunned by the woman’s gall. Here was this nun, this visitor, this foreigner, not only brushing aside a fatal error as an everyday event, but also warning Fareeda not to pry into the goings on at the convent. Who did she think she was? How dare she remind Fareeda about the O’Brian legacy? Was she trying to pull rank by reminding her who was here first?
‘Indeed, Sister, we all make mistakes,’ said Fareeda, stirring her tea. ‘But some mistakes are so grave that even God, all forgiving though He is, would expect us to account for them. Those who have suffered from these “mistakes” would also find it hard to turn the other cheek. And even if they were to do so, the law of this land would not be lenient. Not when the same mistake was made over and over again. For we must remind ourselves that, though the land may have been granted in colonial times, it is now a part of Pakistan. More tea?’
Two Sri Lankan nuns arrived in Sabzbagh a month after the seamstress was buried. Though they’d been in Sabzbagh now for two years, they could only manage very broken Urdu. Their patients thought this very strange. As Bua remarked, ‘It’s all right for white people like Mother Superior not to speak Urdu, but why should someone as black as your Bua not know, hmm?’ Despite the language barrier, the nuns were kept busy in the clinic.
Today, they hovered by the church door, greeting the villagers who had come to attend the service. Mother Superior was away in the hills of Abbotabad, where the sisters ran a small boarding school. In her absence, her second-in-command, Sister Clementine, was in charge of the convent.
Sister Clementine was an Indian from Kerala. She had round, rubbery features and skin the colour of bitter chocolate. Frizzy hairs escaped from the sides of her wimple, and there were damp patches under her bolster-like arms. As always, Laila’s eyes were drawn to her feet. Wide and splayed, they reminded Laila of Fareeda’s Japanese fan opened to its fullest. Today, they were wedged into black sandals with broad straps that strained to control her yellow-nailed toes.
Sister Clementine had a modest background. Her father was a plumber by profession and a moaner by inclination. He had spent most of his underemployed life in a singlet and shorts, lying on a string bed and bemoaning his singular misfortune.
‘Five girls I have. Not one, not two, but five. To feed, to clothe, to wed. Why He upstairs hates me, I don’t know.’
Though loath by nature to count his advantages, secretly, he did not think himself all that unlucky, for his daughters were, with one exception, extraordinarily pretty
. He had high hopes of his girls, whom he trusted would ensnare sufficiently good matches for him to abandon his fitful work altogether. Already the simpering smiles and doe-like eyes of his two eldest girls, Sharmila and Sushila, had elicited discreet enquiries from interested parties. As for Shirley, the youngest, the plainest, nicknamed Cowpat, he had found a solution for her too.
When Shirley was seven, she asked her mother if she could wear pink on her wedding day. Her father raised himself from his string bed on one bony elbow and cackled, ‘Oh no, Cowpat, you’re not getting married. You’re pledged to the church. As soon as I saw your poor fat face, I said to myself: “No hope of getting this Cowpat a husband.” Even if I were to find you a halfwit or a widower, so much dowry he will ask for, to make up for what God left out. Poor men like me can’t afford ugly daughters. No, child. You’re going to be a nun. No husband-marriage for you. You’ll get church and prayer in this world, and heaven in the next. Think of that! Stop blinking like an owl and scratch my back, in the middle where your poor father can’t reach. Aah, that’s my Cowpat.’
And so, Shirley entered the church on leaden feet and became Sister Clementine. And she found that once she donned a nun’s habit, she was viewed differently. The very face that was pitied for its homeliness now, framed by a wimple, became a beacon of virtue. It seemed to Sister Clementine that a simple change of costume had transformed her from pariah to paragon. Even her family came to regard her as an asset, now that she had access to influence. Particularly when Sharmila’s husband abandoned her after the birth of their second daughter, Clementine’s lot rose still higher with her family. Now, Sharmila was the burden, while Clementine was the dutiful daughter, the possible saviour.
‘Ask your nun sisters to help a bit, eh?’ her father would wheedle, rubbing forefinger and thumb at Clementine. ‘So many mouths to feed I have, with these brats of Sharmila’s on top. Please, eh?’
Clementine relished this unexpected reversal. She grew into her role.
‘You think the Church is there just to feed the litters of runaway scoundrels?’ she scolded. ‘I saw that carpenter boy with his shifty eyes and rat-teeth, and at once I knew he was going to rub your faces in the dirt. I warned you all, but too busy listening to his big talk and jingling pockets you were.’
Clementine’s triumph was short-lived. The next year, in 1957, her church sent her across the border to Pakistan. There was some talk of her returning home after the ’65 war with India, but to Sister Clementine’s intense disappointment, it never happened. She remained stranded in Sabzbagh as relations between the two countries tautened once again.
Now, she stood on the steps rubbing her aching stomach. Bua scurried up to Sister Clementine and kissed her hand.
‘Sister Clema-tee, I hope you won’t mind, but this baby here was eating my head – “I want to come, I want to come” – so I thought, who am I to refuse if the child wants to be holy? Let Sister jee decide …’ Bua nudged Laila. This was her cue to throw her arms around Sister Clementine and press her face to the nun’s middle. But Laila hung back, overcome by shyness.
Sister Clementine held out a hand.
‘Child, you want to come to our church, no?’
Laila took her hand. Sister Clementine wheezed as she heaved herself up the three steps to the entrance of the church.
‘Oh my, these wheat chapattis will kill me,’ she groaned. ‘From mother’s milk I went straight to rice like everyone at home and, even after so many years, this wheat is so hard for me to digest – hard as rocks, crashing together and giving me too much of stomach-ache. These Punjabis must be having stone-crushers in their bellies. How else they are eating chapattis three, three times a day, eh?
‘Tell me, child, what is your daddy saying about this bad fighting in East Pakistan, eh? BBC radio says there’s sure to be war, what with the army doing what it’s doing in Bengal. But Radio Pakistan is saying everything is going nicely there. Bengalis are saying sorry, and Mujib is also doing “yes sir” to General Yahya. What does your daddy say? He must be knowing, him having all his big friends in Lahore. They must be telling him. Will there be war with India? Will I get to go home?’
Laila did not know what to say. These names, Mujib and Yahya, were mentioned often in her home, but all she knew was that General Yahya, who lived a car journey away in Rawalpindi and wore a khaki uniform and a peaked cap, was Pakistan’s ruler, and the bare-headed, bespectacled Mujib was a Bengali who wore kurta-pyjama and lived far away in a watery place called Dhaka. Mujib had done something bad, and General Yahya was now punishing him. In fact, Barkat’s son had been sent to Dhaka to punish Mujib and anyone else who took his side. Laila had gleaned this from the servants’ talk.
‘So, child, you ask your daddy and let me know, yes?’ said Sister Clementine.
‘Yes, Sister.’
Laila spotted Amanat and his family as they filed in to the church. She counted five of his seven children. She also saw the village tonga-driver. He was unshaven and bleary-eyed. His wife had a black eye she was trying to conceal with the edge of her shawl.
‘Hello, Miss Laila.’
Laila released her hand from Sister Clementine’s damp clasp and turned to see her father’s secretary, Mr Jacob. Aside from the nuns, he was the only member of the congregation in western clothes.
Mr Jacob was an Anglo-Indian. He was different to the local Christians, for he had white blood in his veins. Mr Jacob was very particular about his white ancestry – even though the said ancestor had died a hundred years ago. It proved that he was not a low-caste convert like the other Christians of Sabzbagh. He was, he insisted, part English. Once, Sara had asked him why he was so black if he was really part white.
‘Oh that’s the subcontinental sun for you,’ Mr Jacob had replied cheerily. ‘Plays havoc with white skin.’
His dark complexion notwithstanding, Mr Jacob took every care to live up to his white credentials. He never wore a shalwar kameez or what he referred to as ‘native dress’. He always wore socks, even in the blistering heat of June. And he ate his curry with a spoon.
Today, he was dressed in a polycotton safari suit. A thin strand of hair was pulled up from above his right ear, combed carefully across the top of his gleaming scalp and glued down with Brylcreem into a curl behind his left ear. Once, Laila had seen him riding pillion on his son’s motorbike. As they roared past, she had caught a glimpse of Mr Jacob’s face. His head was completely bald, and a long ribbon of hair streamed behind his right ear. He looked as if he would give anything to plaster that strand down over his scalp, but his hands were full of folders.
‘Hello, Mr Jacob,’ said Laila.
‘Does your mother know you’re here?’ He stooped to whisper in her ear.
Laila breathed in a great waft of Fair and Lovely skin-bleach cream and shook her head.
‘Then we won’t tell anyone, either. You’re here with Bua?’
Bua nodded at Mr Jacob. ‘Come on, Lailu. Prayers are starting.’
It was dim inside the church. A Sri Lankan nun sat at the upright piano by the altar. Another stood by to turn the pages of the music book. A vase with three blooms of wine-red hibiscus was placed on the altar. The altar cloth was embroidered with red-roofed chalets with smoke curling from their chimneys. Fareeda had an identical cloth at home, which she kept folded in a cupboard. It was a present from a long-departed French nun who had started a small sewing room at the convent.
Most of the narrow benches were already full, with people shuffling and sliding down to make room for each other. Bua led Laila to the last empty bench, at the back. Only a few people had picked up copies of the Urdu hymnbook. Like Bua, the rest, Laila guessed, could not read. Across the aisle, Laila noticed that the tonga-driver held his open copy upside-down.
A beam of sunlight streamed in from a skylight, spotlighting the small but dramatic figure on the cross above the altar. Laila had never noticed him before. But for a ragged cloth around his middle, he was naked. Even from where she sat, L
aila could count his ribs. His eyes were closed, his head drooped, and his palms, with their long, loosely curled fingers, dripped blood. Blood also trickled down his feet and his forehead, which was encircled by a spiky Alice band. He looked sad but beautiful, with magnolia skin, long caramel locks and a slim, straight nose like a sharpened pencil. Laila peered at Bua’s blunt profile and, gazing past her, at Amanat’s bulging eyes and sloping forehead. The man on the cross didn’t look like anyone in the church.
‘Bua, is that your prophet on the cross?’ Laila whispered.
‘Yes, that’s Jesus.’
‘Why does he look so different to everyone here?’
‘Because he is Irish.’
‘Shush, everybody.’ Facing the congregation, Sister Clementine raised a finger to her lips. ‘Shush. Now. We will start with “I Cannot Come”. For those who can read, it’s on page fourteen. The rest, sing by heart. Ready, Sister?’
Her fingers poised above the keys like the talons of a hawk about to swoop on its hapless prey, the nun at the piano nodded. But in that still second, as her hands began their descent towards the keys and the congregation took a deep breath to dive into the music, there was a loud crash behind them. Sister Clementine dropped her hymnbook. Fifty heads swivelled around in unison. Someone was pounding on the net door, kept closed to keep out the flies.
Bua pushed Laila behind her. ‘Quick, hide. It’s your mother. She’s found us.’
Recovering her composure, Sister Clementine waddled towards the door.
‘Who is it? What do you want?’ she called.
Leaning out into the aisle, Laila saw a girl silhouetted against the sun. Her arms were flung out, and her face was pressed against the netting, flattening her features and making them unrecognizable. Sister Clementine pulled open the door, and the girl stumbled in. Laila knew her instantly.
