The End of Innocence

by Moni Mohsin

  Initially, the marriage seemed fine. But within a few months, he began, bit by bit, to reveal his true nature. Sardar Begum was appalled at her own error of judgement. Fatima had not been married a year when Sardar Begum was visited by some relatives from Champa, a village near Colewallah town on the other side of the canal. Mashooq happened to be making a rare visit to the haveli that day. Just as they were coming in, he was leaving. Averting his face, he scurried out. But they’d seen him.

  That brief encounter unveiled his past. It transpired that Mashooq was from Champa. His mother’s people were cobblers, low caste and dirt poor. All they had was the small, grimy shop at which his grandfather plied his trade. His mother was born deaf and mute. Although she had a proper name, no one remembered it. She was simply Boli – the deaf girl.

  When Boli was about twenty – she was single, because no one in the village wanted her – her belly began to swell. According to her parents, she had been raped when she went into the fields one night to relieve herself. But her assailant had terrorized her so that the girl would only cower and shiver whenever the parents tried to question her. The villagers dismissed the story as a barefaced lie. The girl had been up to no good and was trying to shift the blame. No one thought to discover the identity of the man involved.

  Boli duly gave birth to a boy. He was tiny, with a shrivelled foot. Just as they’d called his mother Boli, the villagers found a name for him – Harami, the bastard. They said his deformity was his punishment for being a bastard. A brand, as it were. He grew up in the village, shunned and ridiculed by everyone, except his mother and grandparents.

  Children refused to play with him, grown-ups wouldn’t let him into their houses. The lords of the village occasionally sent grain to the boy’s family, or perhaps some old clothes once a year, a conciliatory gesture in recognition of the hereafter, but their largesse did not extend further.

  As he entered his teens, the boy developed some unsavoury habits – a fondness for alcohol and a propensity for violence. But though unlettered and wild, he was enterprising. He’d go off to Colewallah and work as a loader at the truck depot. But the money was soon drained away at the town’s cheap liquor shops. Tariq’s relatives could not recall the exact date of his departure. One day, Mashooq left the village, and they didn’t see him again. Until that afternoon at the haveli.

  Sardar Begum was furious – furious at Mashooq for lying, but more furious with herself for believing him. She felt doubly guilty now for not discovering the truth about Mashooq, and for advising Kaneez to accept his proposal. She consoled herself with the thought that she had done her best to rectify her mistake by offering to have the marriage dissolved and assume full financial responsibility for both Fatima and her unborn child. But as long as Fatima wanted to stay with him, there was little she could do.

  ‘Life was hard enough for Fatima, as it was,’ said Tariq, winding up the car window. ‘It will be harder still with Mashooq out of a job.’

  ‘You should try and find him something when we get back. For Fatima’s sake and their children’s.’

  ‘I’ve had just about enough of him. If I see him on doomsday, it will be too soon.’

  It was midday by the time the Zephyr reached the outskirts of the city. They passed all the familiar landmarks – the big orphanage with its concrete walls and small, mean windows; Bata, the shoe factory, which always smelt of burnt rubber; the cacophonous coach station with a jumble of technicolored buses disgorging gaggles of dazed passengers weighed down with bundles of clothes and tired, shrieking children.

  The Zephyr stopped at a traffic light, amid a plethora of three-wheeled rickshaws, cars, vans, bullock carts and motorcycles. Beggars with twisted limbs and matted hair wove in and out of the waiting traffic. Barefoot children selling pocket-sized Korans and peeled oranges pushed up against the cars. They tapped insistently on the raised windows of the Zephyr. Fareeda and Tariq stared straight ahead, but Laila shook her head at a skinny girl with a runny nose. ‘No, thank you,’ she mouthed at her through the closed window. The girl stuck her tongue out at Laila and darted off.

  As the car approached Gulberg, the traffic thinned and the road became wider. Jumbled buildings, garlanded with loops of exposed wiring, gave way to large houses set well back from the road. Traffic here was polite, ordered and consisted mainly of gleaming cars. The Zephyr drove parallel to the narrow canal. As always, Laila marvelled at how small, how innocuous, it looked after the Sabzbagh monster. You could practically ford it with a hop, skip and a jump.

  The car turned into the quiet, shady road on which Fareeda’s mother lived, and Laila counted off the two houses before her grandmother’s. First came the residence of the high court judge who had been C. P. Khan’s bridge partner, followed by the lavish turreted mansion that had belonged to a prominent Hindu family before Partition. It was now the home of a retired general. And then the car swished through the wrought-iron gates and up the gravel drive of Yasmeen Khan’s home.

  Set in a big garden with fountains and rose bowers, the house was an art deco edifice built on C. P. Khan’s retirement. It had been the talk of the town then, the imposing mansion of C. P. and Yasmeen Khan. To Laila, the white-painted house, with its prow-like façade, looked a little like an ocean liner she had once seen in a film. In her mind’s eye, she could see it cutting a regal passage through a calm blue sea, little puffs of white smoke rising from its tall white chimney into a cloudless sky.

  The house had vast reception rooms filled with Persian rugs, Chinese porcelain, Japanese lacquerware and English silver – silent testimonials to the tastes and travels of the Khans. The Khans had been a gregarious couple and their house a focus of musical soirées, political debate and influential dinner guests. But six years ago, on C. P.’s death from cancer, a hush had fallen upon the house. Yasmeen, who, until then, had cheerfully made a career of her husband and home, suddenly found herself redundant.

  For a while Fareeda had feared that Yasmeen might unravel. She took to shuffling around the house in a crumpled kaftan with yesterday’s newspapers clutched in her hand. But with the arrival of her granddaughters, now old enough to attend school in Lahore, she had rallied, and the Yasmeen whom Laila found sitting cross-legged on a silken Bokhara rug, tuning her sitar in the sitting room, was very much the brisk, independent and capable Yasmeen of old.

  ‘Laila!’ Yasmeen gave a cry of delight and, pushing the sitar to one side, rose to her feet. She threw her arms around Laila and dropped several kisses on top of her head. The bifocals she wore on a silver chain around her neck brushed Laila’s face. Laila hugged her back, pressing her cheek against the soft linen of her grandmother’s shirt. Her clothes smelt, as always, of Surf and, more subtly, of the perfume she liked above all others, Floris’s Lily of the Valley.

  With her arms around her Lahore grandmother’s slim middle, Laila couldn’t help thinking how different it felt to her Kalanpur grandmother’s soft, squashy tummy. Unlike Sardar Begum, who was ponderous both in body and movement, Yasmeen was still slender and energetic. Although, in fact, there was only a year or so between the two women, Laila and Sara always thought of their Lahore grandmother as infinitely younger. And a lot more fun. Whereas Sardar Begum was always reminding them to think of the hereafter (‘How will you answer Him on the day of judgement if you don’t listen to your grandmother?’) and urging decorum (‘Always keep your ankles crossed’), Yasmeen encouraged them to be adventurous.

  With Yasmeen they would go boating on the river; explore the narrow bazaars in the walled city; and get taken to her artist friends’ studios. Yasmeen could also speak fluent English, drive a car and play Monopoly. Sardar Begum saw no reason to speak English when the British had departed long since, drive when she employed a driver, or handle fake money when her purse bulged with the real stuff.

  ‘How are you, little one?’ Holding Laila’s face by the chin, Yasmeen turned her towards the window. ‘Come into the light so I can see clearly. Yes, I see you’ve improved. No l
onger the sickly thing your mother whisked off from under my nose. How do you feel?’

  ‘Fine, Nani, honest. Where’s Sara?’

  ‘In her room, waiting for you.’

  Laila sped to the bedroom she shared with her sister. Sara already knew of her family’s expected arrival, so it wasn’t quite the surprise Laila had hoped it would be. Her elder sister, in fact, was ready to leave with them. Her suitcase stood packed in a corner and her bulging school bag leaned against it.

  ‘Of course I knew you were coming, dummy,’ Sara said witheringly, when Laila blurted out that they’d come to take her.

  ‘To protect you from the Indians,’ Laila whispered. ‘They’re coming any day now.’

  ‘To protect me?’ Sara scoffed. ‘I’m coming to protect you.’

  ‘Me? How?’

  ‘With this.’ Sara held out her palm towards Laila. A flat metal object the length of her middle finger lay on it. It was dull silver and looked like the handle of a fork.

  Laila knew better than to reach for it. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a weapon.’ Sara pressed a catch in its side, and a tiny blade flicked open.

  ‘Ooh! What’s it for?’

  ‘It’s for the Indians.’ Sara closed the knife with a little click and slipped it back into her pocket.

  ‘Where did you get it from?’

  ‘None of your business,’ Sara replied in a superior voice.

  ‘Can I hold it?’

  ‘It’s not for babies. It’s dangerous.’

  Laila thought hard. ‘I’ve also got something. But I’ll only show you if you let me hold the knife first.’

  Sara considered Laila’s suggestion for a moment. ‘First I’ll see your thing, then I’ll decide.’

  Laila dug into her skirt pocket and pulled out Hester’s amber horse. In the bright light of the bedroom, it looked small, insignificant.

  ‘Who gave it to you?’

  ‘Mrs Bullock.’

  ‘Why?’ Sara scowled.

  ‘Just because.’

  Sara snatched it off Laila’s palm and sniffed at it. ‘Doesn’t smell of anything.’ She examined it closely, turning it this way and that. ‘Nah, it’s just a horse, a toy horse.’ She shoved it back towards Laila.

  ‘It’s not a toy. It’s a wishing horse,’ Laila claimed rashly. ‘You make a wish, rub the horse and your wish comes true.’

  ‘OK then, wish for a big chocolate cake to appear right now.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘It doesn’t work at all.’ Sara’s tone was scathing. ‘It is just a silly toy. Just because you’ve been with Ammi and Aba alone in Sabzbagh, you think you know everything. Well, you don’t. I’m the one who’s been going to school and learning things. You’re just a baby.’

  Laila looked at Sara through smarting eyes. She had changed in the time that Laila had been at the farm. Her hair was done in one plait instead of two. She looked grown-up. Her earrings were also different. Instead of the little gold rings that both sisters had always worn, Sara now had a pair of tiny pearl studs that Laila had never seen before. She’d also learnt to lift one eyebrow. It made her look mean. Nasty.

  ‘It’s not a silly horse,’ Laila shouted. ‘And I’m not a baby. I know lots of secrets that you don’t.’

  ‘What secrets?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Laila muttered, turning her back on Sara.

  ‘Be like that then.’ Sara shrugged and flounced off to the bathroom.

  Deflated, and perilously close to tears, Laila sidled up to the alcove that housed their two identical desks and cork noticeboards. At least her blue-painted desk and the BOAC mug that held her coloured pencils still looked the same. She quickly counted the pencils. Yes, they were all there. And so was everything she had put on the board.

  The drawing Laila had made last term of a vase with pink roses, which had won her a star at school, was still there, as was the photograph of Sara and her, taken outside the Lahore museum by their grandmother the day she’d taken them to see the Gandhara statues. Yasmeen had been in raptures over the vast, two-thousand-year-old statues, but privately Laila had thought that the men looked funny with their eyes half-closed as if they had thumping headaches. She also did not like the way they wore their hair piled on top of their heads in small frizzy buns.

  Laila’s British Council Library card was up on the notice-board, as was the postcard of Big Ben her parents had sent when they’d gone to London the year before. It looked a bit faded now, but it was pinned in the right-hand corner, exactly where she’d left it. Good, it didn’t seem as if Sara had been messing with her things.

  Glancing over her shoulder to ensure that Sara was still in the bathroom, Laila moved over to her desk to see if she had acquired anything new. The display on her noticeboard was reassuringly familiar. There was that photograph of Fareeda looking glamorous in a black-chiffon sari at a party; and the good-luck peacock feather Sara had found on Hester’s farm last summer, which Laila had coveted desperately for a whole month. There was a school timetable that Laila hadn’t seen before and the ticket stubs of a film showing at the Rex Cinema. Laila straightened the ticket and read, Thief of Baghdad. She wished she could have gone too.

  Gingerly, she prised open Sara’s stationery box and found six new felt-tipped pens. That wasn’t fair. She didn’t even have one. Laila pulled off the cap of the yellow pen and inhaled its heady petrol scent and made a mental note to badger her grandmother for a set exactly like Sara’s. She heard the loo flush in the bathroom. Hastily replacing the pen in the box, she moved back to her own desk. It wouldn’t do to be caught snooping, particularly when Sara was in that funny mood. She heard her sister come up behind her. Laila pretended a deep interest in her noticeboard.

  ‘The driver’s cat has had kittens. Want to come and see?’

  Laila spun around, nodding eagerly. Sara smiled and held out her hand.

  That evening, when the girls had gone to bed, the adults retired to C. P.’s library after dinner. It was a comfortable room, still imprinted with C. P.’s personality. A teak roll-top desk with a sheaf of his monogrammed writing paper still in its top drawer dominated the room. The walls were lined with shelves bearing his enormous library of leather-bound books and a phalanx of silver-framed photographs of C. P. with heads of state and sundry dignitaries. Amid the pompous black-and-white photographs of Nasser, De Gaulle and Khrushchev was a smattering of family photos, of Fareeda on her wedding day, of his grandchildren as plump babies and himself and his wife relaxing on the deck of a cruise ship, he sporting a Derby and she, cat-like, dark glasses.

  A log fire burnt in the grate, and Fareeda, Tariq and Yasmeen sat on a squashy leather sofa facing it. Fareeda poured herself another cup of green tea and, curling her feet under her, broached the subject uppermost in her mind.

  ‘You know, Mummy, that there’s going to be a war, don’t you?’

  Yasmeen nodded. ‘Yes, I can see it coming.’

  ‘You should come and stay with us in Sabzbagh. It will be much safer there.’

  ‘Why should Lahore be more unsafe than anywhere else?’ Yasmeen got up to stoke the fire.

  ‘For God’s sake, the border is only thirteen miles away,’ cried Fareeda. ‘I’d die worrying if you were all right.’

  ‘Well, then, you mustn’t worry,’ her mother replied, replacing the poker.

  ‘You know I’ll worry.’ Fareeda’s voice rose in exasperation.

  Yasmeen held up her hand to bring the discussion to an end.

  ‘It’s sweet of you to ask, but, no. I can keep busy here. What would I do at the farm but get in your way? I have my old servants here with me. We’ll take care of each other. Now, stop looking so anxious. This is not the first upheaval I’ve lived through, you know. In fact, we stayed right here in Lahore through Partition. And if I could stay put with murderous mobs prowling the streets, then what are a few skirmishes on the border?’

  ‘How do you know there’ll be just skirmishes? Or that t
hey’ll be restricted to the border?’ questioned Fareeda. ‘Anyway, the point is, I wasn’t old enough to worry then, but I am now.’

  ‘You were just a girl then,’ Yasmeen reminisced with a misty smile. ‘Do you remember anything from then?’

  ‘A few disjointed things. I remember our Hindu gardener – Nathoo Ram, wasn’t it? – leaving with his family on a bullock cart. I remember their parrot cage hanging from the side of the cart. And Daddy’s double-barrelled Holland and Holland propped up by his bed for several days. And all those whispered, worried conversations among the adults. I remember the distant chants of mobs and feeling a sense of danger quite clearly.’

  ‘Hmm, it was a dangerous time,’ recalled Yasmeen. ‘But also a very exciting time. We were getting freedom. And our own country. Pakistan. We’d fought for it for so long. We’d marched on the streets and protested and gone on strike against the British. And Mr Jinnah, so ill, so emaciated and yet so resolute. He was up against a whole stableful of wily Congress wallahs, aided and abetted by that ghastly Mountbatten. But, in the end, he trumped them all.’

  A log fell in the grate, scattering a small shower of sparks. Tariq replaced Yasmeen’s empty cup on the tray.

  ‘We had such high hopes of this nation,’ Yasmeen sighed, staring unseeingly at the curling flames. ‘I never imagined it would unravel so fast.’

  ‘Perhaps we were never a nation,’ ventured Tariq.

  ‘But we were,’ insisted Yasmeen, shifting her gaze to Tariq. ‘That was Jinnah’s whole point, wasn’t it? That we, the Muslims of the subcontinent, were a distinct nation and needed our own homeland. Why did we stop being a nation twenty-five years later? Why?’

  ‘The distance was a fault line,’ pointed out Fareeda.

  ‘Also, our culture is different. And our language,’ said Tariq slowly.

  ‘So why were they not a consideration in ’47? No, it wasn’t meant to be like this,’ Yasmeen whispered in a husky voice. ‘We weren’t meant to split, to shatter. I was there when this country was made. I remember.’