by Moni Mohsin
The sun’s rays struck the canal, turning the water to a metallic shimmer. Frost spiked its grassy banks. The bare branches of acacia and shisham trees trailed in the muddy water, trapping the odd discarded plastic bag and fallen leaves floating on its surface.
In the branches of one such tree, a soldier in the front saw a patch of sky blue. It was entangled in one of the bigger boughs, quite close to the bank. What was it? Intrigued, the soldier looked again. It was definitely cloth. Only cloth would balloon up like that. He had jogged abreast of the tree now and had a better view. He peered through the tangle of branches and saw a slim bare arm, only half covered by the blue cloth caught in a branch.
‘There’s someone in the canal!’ the soldier cried. Breaking ranks with his company, he raced to the bank. He could see not only an arm now but also a torso, face down, just below the surface of the water. It looked as if it was a woman’s. Her hair was long and loose, and fanned out in the water like the fronds of an underwater plant. He shouted over his shoulder for help.
The soldiers freed the girl from the branch’s rough embrace and lifted her out of the canal. Gently, they laid her down on the grass. They checked her pulse, then smoothed her wet hair off her face and saw that she was young. A soldier shrugged off his khaki sweater and wrapped it around her. At the sergeant’s instruction, they laid her in the back of the truck. The soldiers then jumped in and drove away.
The call came late that evening. Sprawled on the sitting-room floor, Sara and Laila were playing Ludo. Tariq and Fareeda sat listening to the radio. The telephone jangled in the bedroom. A moment later, Fazal was at the door.
‘Sahib, it’s Colonel Butt’s orderly calling from the cantonment. The colonel wishes to speak to you.’
Tariq flung down his magazine and left the room. After a second’s hesitation, Fareeda followed. The girls looked up from their game.
‘You stay here.’ Fareeda shut the door firmly behind her.
Tariq sat on the edge of the bed with the receiver to his ear. Fareeda sat down beside him.
‘Yes, Colonel, I understand. Where was she found?’
The line crackled with static and, though Fareeda strained to listen, she could not catch the colonel’s words.
‘Right. No, no, I can come right away,’ said Tariq. He paused, then said, ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that?’
Tariq’s knuckles gleamed white as his grip tightened on the telephone.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘I’ll be with you in forty-five minutes.’ He replaced the receiver on the cradle.
‘Have they found her?’
‘Yes. Yes, they’ve found her. They fished her out of the canal this morning.’
‘Is she … ? I mean, she isn’t … dead, is she?’ whispered Fareeda.
‘She is.’ Tariq stared at the floor. His voice was flat, toneless. ‘Rani is dead. They found her body. The colonel thinks it’s Rani. It’s a young girl, about sixteen or so with hazel eyes and dark brown hair. They want me to identify the … the body.’
‘It may not be her. I mean, she’s not the only girl of that age with light eyes. And why on earth should she be in the canal? It could be anyone, anyone at all. Couldn’t it? I mean, just because a teenage girl has been found …’ babbled Fareeda.
Tariq turned his face slowly to Fareeda’s. The resignation she saw there silenced her.
‘When are you going?’ she whispered.
‘Now.’
The girls looked up as Fareeda re-entered the sitting room.
‘Where’s Aba gone?’ questioned Sara with a searching stare.
‘To Colewallah. For some work.’
‘So late?’
‘Yes, so late,’ Fareeda snapped. She swallowed and began again. ‘It was something urgent to do with, er, the factory. Oh, look, you’re playing Ludo. Can I join in?’
17
Colewallah cantonment was the size of an estate. Despite the lateness of the hour, the sentries on duty were alert and saluted smartly as Tariq’s car drove through the tall, spiked gates. The Zephyr glided past the officers’ mess, which was fronted by a wide veranda. The walls were hung with an array of silver military plaques glinting in fluorescent light. Potted plants as keen and alert as the sentries stood in orderly lines on the veranda.
On they drove, past playing fields, parade grounds and residential bungalows, behind spacious gardens to the small military hospital at the other end of the cantonment. At the sight of this well-ordered affluence, Tariq could never check the disparaging comments which flew out of his mouth.
‘Look at it! Just look at this obscene spread. This bloody army’s sucked the country dry.’
This time, he said nothing.
He was shown into the hospital’s reception. It was a small room with photographs of past military doctors on the walls. They looked identical, all with neatly clipped moustaches and short spiky hair. An orderly informed him that the colonel was on his way. Tariq looked at his watch. It was ten-fifteen. Perhaps his journey had been in vain. Perhaps it was not Rani, as Fareeda had suggested, but some other girl lying somewhere in this hospital. He hoped it was. But he knew in the pit of his stomach that it wasn’t.
The door swung open and Colonel Butt entered, followed by a white-coated young man. The colonel was still in uniform. He wore a thick khaki sweater over his shirt. He shook Tariq’s hand and introduced him to his companion.
‘This is Captain Mushtaq. He is our doctor here. Mr Tariq Azeem of Sabzbagh. Shall we, Captain?’
The doctor led the way down a short corridor to a double door at the end. He slid back the bolt. A strong smell of formaldehyde wafted out. There were four empty hospital beds lined up against a wall and what looked like an operating table mounted on wheels in one corner. A shrouded form lay on the table.
Now that he was actually here, Tariq faltered. He stopped in the doorway while the doctor and colonel went over to the table. When Tariq did not join them, the colonel looked up enquiringly. Tariq approached them slowly, forcing himself to place one foot in front of the other. The captain lowered the sheet, and Tariq gazed down on Rani’s still, bruised face. Her nose looked broken and her blue shirt was torn at the neck. Tariq noticed a blade of grass in her loose chestnut hair. He removed it gently. Her hair was silky to the touch.
He shut his eyes and saw another Rani. A one-year-old Rani, astraddle her father’s shoulders at Kalanpur. With cheeks like pink grapefruit, and two tiny teeth. Her dimpled hands gripped fistfuls of her father’s hair. Rani as a wailing toddler on the day of her mother’s second marriage, her arms wrapped tight around Fatima’s neck, refusing to be pried away. A six-year-old Rani with a scrubbed face and pigtails, on her first day at school. Solemn and excited in her new uniform, she was carrying a large satchel, which was empty save for a pencil and a banana. Rani, weeping over a stray kitten run over by a motorcycle. She had buried it beneath the neem tree, and for weeks afterwards, whenever he visited his mother, Tariq had noticed a marigold lying on the spot. A beaming Rani, as she was three months ago, showing him her report card and delightedly accepting a gift from Fareeda for passing her exam.
‘Is this the girl, Tariq Sahib?’ asked the colonel.
Not trusting himself to speak, Tariq nodded.
The colonel motioned to the doctor, and he covered Rani’s face again.
‘Will you come with me to my office, please?’ the colonel asked Tariq. ‘I have something to tell you.’
Colonel Butt’s office was a square room. Looking up, Tariq noticed that the ceiling was exceptionally high. He felt as if he was sitting at the bottom of an immersion tank, waiting for the flood. Shaking his head, he made himself focus on concrete things, to tether himself to the physical world. A glass display cabinet in the right-hand corner with seven shiny sporting trophies on its top shelf and five on the bottom. A grey metal filing cabinet in the other corner. A framed map of Pakistan behind the desk. The desk clear, except for a pad of lined paper, two pens, a pencil and a ruler, all in a
plastic tray. An electric bar heater. A still ceiling fan. Two tube lights.
‘Tariq Sahib, this must have been hard for you.’
Tariq couldn’t tell from the colonel’s expressionless face whether he was genuinely sympathetic, or hostile. Either way, he told himself, he didn’t care.
‘I believe the girl’s family has been in your service for many years.’
‘Her grandmother’s worked for my mother since before I was born. Where exactly along the canal did your soldiers find her?’
‘Half a mile downstream of a village called Champa. I’m told it’s near here.’
‘I know the place.’
The colonel told him how the soldiers had found Rani’s body and brought it to the cantonment. They could have taken her to Champa, which was the nearest settlement, to check if anyone could identify her. But since the suspicious death of a young girl was a sensitive matter, the sergeant on duty decided it would be safer to bring her to the cantonment and await instructions from the colonel. The colonel had been away in Lahore on official business and so he had not been informed till his return, well into the evening. Afterwards, he had spent an hour or so with Captain Mushtaq, who showed him the body, before calling Tariq.
‘I regret the delay in informing you. It was most unfortunate,’ said the colonel.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Tariq sighed wearily. ‘She was already dead.’
‘That much we can be certain of. However, what we don’t know for sure is how she died. The captain doesn’t think she drowned.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Drowning, he thinks, was not the cause of the girl’s death,’ said the colonel.
‘Why?’ Tariq sat up in his chair. ‘I mean, how can he know?’
‘The captain is a very keen doctor. He was one of the best medical students of his year. Most doctors would not have conducted a post mortem. But he did. The captain will gladly go over his findings with you. I have, in fact, requested him to wait at the hospital. As I understand it, there was no water in the girl’s lungs.’
‘So how did she die?’
‘She has many injuries. Her jaw is broken, as is her arm, and you no doubt saw her smashed nose. But the captain puts the probable cause of death down to a blow to the head. There is considerable damage to her skull.’
Tariq stared at the trophies unseeingly. How could Rani have suffered so? Three days ago she was safe in his mother’s back yard.
‘Could her injuries have been caused by an accident? Say, a hit-and-run by a bus or a truck?’ Tariq asked.
‘Possibly. But no trucks or buses ply the canal road.’
‘The accident may have taken place on the main road, which, after all, is only a quarter of a mile away, and the driver or whoever, could have brought her body to the canal and dumped it in there.’ Even as Tariq voiced his theory, he realized it sounded far-fetched.
‘Not very likely. If a truck driver wasn’t seen running over the girl, why would he take the trouble to carry her body all the way to the canal and dump it there? And if he was seen, he’d be hell bent on getting away. She could have been knocked down by a passing car on the canal road. Rare though they are, cars do occasionally use that road. But again, why bother to throw her in the canal? In most hit-and-run cases, drivers don’t even pause long enough to check whether the victim is dead, let alone move the body.’
‘Could it have been suicide?’ Tariq wondered aloud. ‘But even if she threw herself off a height, or in front of a car, how do we explain the canal bit? And she couldn’t have jumped into the canal, because, as you say, there’s no water in her lungs.’
‘Precisely,’ said the colonel crisply. ‘In any case, the girl’s injuries are more consistent with an attack. Someone killed the girl and threw her body into the canal, hoping, probably, she’d be carried far downstream.’
‘But why would anyone do that to Rani? She had no enemies. She was a child, barely a few years older than my daughters. Why would anyone break her jaw, her skull …?’ Tariq shook his head in disbelief.
‘There’s one other thing.’ The colonel picked up a pencil from the tray and examined it closely. ‘Captain Mushtaq suspects the girl had also suffered a miscarriage very recently.’
‘A miscarriage?’ Tariq echoed. His mind began to race. Could the father of Rani’s unborn child have done this? If she had threatened to reveal his identity, he could have turned nasty. He could have come to her house, taken her off under some pretext, killed her and then dumped her body in the canal. ‘Er, does the doctor know if it was a spontaneous miscarriage before her injuries, or was it brought on by them?’
The colonel seemed puzzled by the question. Then, his brow clearing, he asked, ‘I take it the girl was not married?’
Tariq shook his head.
‘Ah, I see. Hence your mention of suicide.’ The colonel dropped the pencil back in the tray. ‘Unfortunate, most unfortunate. But then these things happen. Particularly when you expose young village girls to radical influences for which they are unequipped. It confuses them. They lose their way, take wrong decisions. Fatal decisions, in some cases. And when they do, Tariq Sahib, there’s no one to help them. All those who encouraged them before are nowhere when these girls most need them.’
Tariq winced. But he was too exhausted to argue or even bother to explain that Rani had never worked at his factory.
The colonel continued with a twisted smile: ‘But, thankfully, reviled though we are by some, we are here to mop up the mess. She may have had a brutal death, but at least her dead body has been treated with respect.’
‘My thanks to your brave boys for rescuing Rani’s corpse,’ retorted Tariq. ‘And to you for treating it with respect. But crimes of passion like this one are common here. Have been for centuries. I don’t know as yet who killed her and why, but I am ready to bet that she was a victim of her own naivety. Some ruthless, ignorant bastard took advantage of her innocence and killed her.’
The colonel received Tariq’s outburst with a snort of derision. ‘That’s convenient! Blame the girl for her own death. “What did she die of?” “Oh, she died of innocence!” It certainly lets you off the hook, Tariq Sahib, for bringing her murderer to justice. I suppose now you will drive back to your lovely home with its leather-bound books and have a good night’s sleep in your soft, warm bed for, as far as you are concerned, this girl died of natural causes.’
‘I don’t have to listen to this rubbish from an ignoramus like you!’ spluttered Tariq, rising to his feet. ‘How dare you pass judgement when you know nothing of this girl, her … her history or family? And, for that matter, you know still less of me …’
‘Oh, I have your measure.’ The colonel lounged back in his chair. ‘You make all the correct noises about human rights, but when push comes to shove, you are too fastidious to get your hands dirty. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve had a long day. Captain Mushtaq will give you whatever information you need.’
The colonel stood up. Signalling to Tariq to precede him, he flicked the light off in his office. Outside, under the inky December sky, he turned to Tariq and said, ‘The captain will be at your disposal, but if you need me, you have only to call. And I am sorry about the girl, Tariq Sahib.’
Tariq peered at the colonel’s face to see if he could detect any traces of mockery. But it was too dark to tell. He turned on his heel and headed for the hospital.
It took an hour of Ludo to allay the girls’ suspicions. Pacing the room after they’d gone to bed, Fareeda wasn’t sure if she’d been entirely successful. Laila had looked anxious, while Sara had eyed her sceptically. It had been difficult to keep up the act of enforced jollity under that scrutiny. But with the girls packed off to bed, at least she could drop the pretence.
Whom had Tariq found at Colewallah cantonment? Was it Rani? But her mind refused to venture further down that bleak path. No, no, it must be someone else. A case of mistaken identity. Yes, that’s what it would be. After all, the colonel had never seen Rani.
How could he be so sure it was she? Typical of him to be so presumptuous, so sure of everything.
Was that Tariq she’d heard in the driveway? She ran to the window, lifted the curtain and, cupping her hands around her eyes, stared out into the still, dark night. No, no car. She let the curtain drop and looked again at her watch. It was ten to twelve, almost two hours since he’d left. Should she call? Find out if he’d got there safely? The road could be so dark and misty at this time of night. No, of course he’d got there safely, otherwise the colonel would have called. He didn’t look the type to wait patiently. Just like Sardar Begum. Oh, God, what would they tell Sardar Begum? And Kaneez? How would they break the news to Kaneez? And Fatima?
Tariq did not return for another hour. Exhausted, Fareeda had fallen asleep. But the minute she heard the creak of the bedroom door, she woke with a start.
‘Tariq, is that you?’ She switched on her bedside lamp.
Tariq blinked. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up.’
‘Wake me up? I’ve been waiting for you all evening.’ Fareeda sat up. ‘What happened? Was it Rani?’
‘Yes.’ He sat on the bed and pulled off his shoes.
Fareeda looked down at her hands clutching the quilt. She felt as if she was choking. She leaned her head on her drawn knees and gave vent to the guilt, anxiety and grief she had been holding in check. From across the bed, Tariq watched her cry. Tired and numb, he let her weep. He dropped his shoes to the floor and turned his back on his wife. At last, Fareeda’s tears subsided. Pushing her hair off her face, she reached for a tissue from her bedside table.
‘Where was she found?’ she asked in a nasal voice.
‘About half a mile downstream of Champa. Some soldiers found her body caught in the branches of a tree overhanging the canal. They brought her to the cantonment and told the colonel. The rest you know.’
