by Farahad Zama
“Yes, darling. He’s quite a senior officer there. Let me give him a call and the girl’s job will be history. He won’t say no to me.”
Mrs Bilqis was shocked. “That’s wrong.”
“Darling,” said Nadira, patting her friend’s hand, “you are too gentle. It’s in a good cause.”
Mrs Bilqis nodded slowly as she considered the idea more fully. “Thank you,” she said, after a moment.
“Anything for you, darling. Just make sure that this Pari doesn’t meet your son before she agrees.”
“Oh, Dilawar isn’t that bad.”
“Your son is so handsome and smooth that any girl will fall for him. If he wants her to, of course. Nobody will notice any problems.”
Mrs Bilqis drew in a sharp intake of breath, and Nadira slid over the ottoman to hug her. “We all make plans, darling. But Allah also has plans that He doesn’t reveal to us.”
Mrs Bilqis dissolved into tears on her friend’s shoulder.
♦
“Have you finished eating?” shouted Pari from the bathroom. Mornings were hectic when she was on the early shift. Collecting water, preparing breakfast, packing lunches for Vasu and herself, doing the dishes, taking a bath and twenty-five other things gobbled up the time. She finished brushing her hair and quickly applied moisturising cream to her face. Pari had given up all other cosmetics when she became a widow. Now her angular face looked thin and her nose more prominent than ever. Her dark eyes did not really need any mascara.
She walked briskly into the one room where she and Vasu – the two orphans, as she sometimes said to herself – lived. She sat on the folding chair by the small table and served herself four idlis from the batch that she had steamed earlier. Vasu had taken the other steamed rice-and-lentil cakes, even though he hadn’t finished them all.
“Come on, finish what’s on your plate. What happened to the brown shorts, by the way?” she asked.
“They tore when I was playing football,” he said, coming back to the table.
Pari nodded, deciding not to pursue the point further. Vasu went through clothes the way a chameleon goes through colours. She would have to ask chaachi, Mrs Ali, if all boys were the same. She wondered what Rehman had been like as a boy. Had he been naughty? She herself didn’t have any experience of boys. She had been adopted as a baby and had grown up as an only child. Was that why she had been unable to resist adopting Vasu when Rehman had brought him from the village after Vasu’s grandfather died and nobody else was willing to look after what they considered an ‘inauspicious’ boy?
After a moment, she pushed these thoughts aside and started thinking about work. Her probationary period was coming to an end shortly. Her manager had told her that she had done well and could be assigned to the follow-up team. She looked forward to that. The work there was more interesting and varied than in the cold-calling unit.
“When can I go to a proper school?” Vasu said, interrupting her silent munching. He went for a few hours to a retired teacher’s house, but not to school.
“Soon,” she said.
“The boys were teasing me because I didn’t go to school. They said I must be dumb…or a servant.”
Pari looked up in surprise at the child, eight but soon to be nine. “Oh, Vasu,” she said. “People always talk; you have to learn to ignore them. There is just one more formality left to complete. I’ve already spoken to the principal of that school we visited.”
“That’s what you’ve been saying for a long time.”
Pari sighed. “Government work always takes longer than we think,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
Vasu turned away from her, his face set. Pari didn’t know what to say. She had been trying to get Vasu admitted to a local school but without much success. Vasu had started living with her quite recently and she did not have all the paperwork that the schools were insisting upon. Having heard of one school that was willing to bend the rules and accept Vasu without the necessary papers, she had gone to visit it.
She had entered a courtyard crammed with children on long benches. The walls rang with the sound of a hundred boys and girls reciting their lessons. The open area was divided into two classes. There was a blackboard and a teacher behind a table at either end; half the children faced one teacher and half the other. There was a narrow aisle but no other partition between the classes. The teachers had long bamboo canes in front of them that Pari eyed uneasily. As she followed an attendant towards the headmaster’s office, the teacher nearest to Pari picked up her cane, pointed towards a girl and then tapped one of the questions on the board – “How many rivers are there in the Punjab?”
“Five, madam,” said the girl.
Pari relaxed. I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, she thought, pleased with her pun. A cane was obviously not just for beating kids.
“Welcome, welcome,” said the principal when she walked into his office. After the introductions, Pari asked whether the lack of a birth certificate or transfer certificate from Vasu’s previous school in the village was a problem.
“Not at all, madam,” said the principal. “As long as you pay the fees, we won’t ask for any certificates.”
Pari smiled uncertainly, not sure whether the man was joking.
Several minutes and questions later, they stood up.
“You have already seen our years four and five. Let me show you round the other classrooms before you go,” said the principal.
The second room they walked into was for the year three students – the class that Vasu would join. A pupil was standing in front of the other pupils with his palm held out and tears streaking down his cheeks. The teacher, a middle-aged woman with a pinched, discontented look on her face, held a long bamboo switch.
“Four,” said the teacher and the cane whistled down in an arc. Thwack.
Pari winced and unconsciously rubbed her palm as the bamboo made loud contact with the boy’s hand. “Stop,” she cried out, unable to prevent herself. Everybody looked at her, surprised. “How can you hit a small boy so mercilessly?” Pari said to the teacher.
The teacher moved her hands behind her, so that the cane was hidden – like a schoolboy surprised in an act of petty theft. “He didn’t bring his homework. He claims that his little brother urinated on the book,” she said.
Several pupils giggled until the teacher glared at them. The boy being punished looked even more miserable.
“Don’t…” Pari said weakly and turned on her heel.
“Madam, we believe in discipline,” said the principal, running behind her.
Pari increased her pace and left without looking back.
She blinked and saw Vasu sitting in front of her, his expression still disgruntled. She smiled and put her hand on his arm. “You will be able to start at a good school soon.”
She had been wrong even to visit that school. How could a place of education that itself broke rules teach children anything?
Vasu started getting up from the table but Pari stopped him. “Now, don’t leave that last piece of idli. All the strength of the food is in the last morsel.”
“That’s not true,” said Vasu.
“Of course it’s true. My mother said so.”
“That’s what you always say, but she must have been mistaken. I asked Rehman Uncle and he said that the last part of the food has the same amount of strength as the first one.” He looked at her with a smug smile.
“What does Rehman know?” she said.
“He knows everything.”
“Don’t be cheeky. Nobody knows everything, except God. Go on, eat that last bit,” she said and stared at him, until he grumpily put it in his mouth. “Put the plate away and wash your hands. Get your bag, we have to leave.”
She was eating the last of her breakfast when there was a loud crash. She turned quickly to see Vasu hopping on one leg, holding his foot. His face was screwed up in pain. She rushed over and sank to her knees, taking his foot in her hands.
“Are you all rig
ht?” she asked, feeling his toes.
“Yes,” he said after a while. “I am sorry.”
There was a rolling pin on the floor, next to a broken teacup. Vasu had accidentally knocked both from the sideboard.
Pari sighed. The room was too small for both of them. She had taken it when she had moved to the city from the village after her father died. It had been fine, if slightly cramped, for living in on her own but it was definitely too small to raise a child. Also, much as she loved Vasu, he was a boy and she needed her privacy sometimes. The entire place was one room, ten feet by twelve feet, plus a bathroom. She had set up one corner of the room as a kitchen and the rest was living room, bedroom, study and wardrobe combined. The only way they survived was by spending a lot of time with the Alis, who lived just across the road.
She had to find a bigger place. It was not as if she didn’t have money. Her inherited capital was actually growing because her monthly expenses were less than her dead husband’s pension added to her own salary from the call centre.
“There’s too much stuff here,” said Vasu.
Pari gave the boy’s foot a final rub and stood up. “Don’t worry. We’ll soon move into a two-bedroom flat. We can afford it.”
Two
Pari had spent many months reading Shakespeare while nursing her father in his final illness and she remembered lines from the bard’s plays on the odd occasion.
♦
I have seen a medicine that’s able to breathe life into a stone, Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary With spritely fire and motion.
♦
The potion that made one dance canary, whatever that was, had been Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well. Rather unlike the government, thought Pari as she looked around. This office had done the opposite. It had found a way to squeeze the passion out of the most fundamental events of any life – birth and death, finding and losing a mate, gaining a home – and turned them into dull, stodgy prose on grey, curling paper.
The room was small and stiflingly hot. The press of people was overpowering. House buyers, brokers and bored civil servants jostled for space among piles of files under the patina of dust that overlay everything. The stuffy air made her feel faint. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to ignore the chatter and the press of the women on either side of her on the bench where she sat.
A hand on her shoulder shook her and she looked up with a jerk to find Rehman gazing at her, concern in his eyes. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Too hot,” she said, wiping her forehead with a tiny handkerchief.
“Then you will be glad to know that this office is for registering commercial transactions. We have to go round.”
There were far fewer people on the other side. They were ushered into an office by an attendant in a starched white shirt and trousers with a broad red sash across his upper body, who whispered to them to wait at the back until it was their turn.
A young couple were standing in front of the registrar and their family members formed the rest of the audience in the room. The young woman had elaborate henna patterns on her arms and glowed with the special radiance that only brides have. Her partner was dressed in a suit that seemed too large for his thin body.
Pari was surprised to see that not only were there two sets of parents but that everybody looked very pleased. If they were all happy, why were they having a civil ceremony rather than a religious one?
She watched the bride, who couldn’t seem to stop smiling. Pari thought back to her own wedding. She had married young and it seemed like a long time ago now, though it had been only four years. Much had happened in the intervening period. The oh-so-short time that she had spent with her handsome, loving husband now seemed like a dream, a drop of morning dew that evaporated as soon as the sun touched it.
Her husband had died in an accident. Shortly afterwards, while she was still reeling from that awful blow, her father had suffered a stroke that had left him incontinent and prone to violent seizures. She had nursed him for a year on her own, until he too had passed away. It was then that Pari had decided to leave the village where she had grown up.
She took a deep breath. The past is another country – where had she read that? The registrar seemed to be in some confusion. The two fathers and the official were holding an urgent, whispered conference. She looked at her watch. It was almost eleven.
Should she marry Dilawar? The proposal had come out of the blue. Dilawar’s family was so posh – a Nawwabi family with a rich lineage. On top of that, he was an executive with a multinational company, earning what to her seemed like an unreasonably large salary. What did they see in her? She was an orphan who did not know anything about her real parents except that they had been poor enough to give up their newborn daughter for a relatively small sum of money. She had been sold at birth – even now that thought had the power to hurt her in the dark reaches of the night.
Would Dilawar and his family expect her to give up Vasu? That’s what widows normally had to do to get remarried. But she had sworn to look after him. Nothing would separate them, she told herself.
Rehman bent his head and whispered, “What did you say?”
Perhaps she had muttered it out loud. Their eyes met. “Did you say that you knew Dilawar?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Rehman. “We were classmates and good friends at school. We went to different colleges and lost touch after that.”
Pari nodded and stared straight ahead. The rest of the witnesses had joined in the conference at the lectern. Only the bride and groom, gazing at each other and smiling, seemed to take no part in the discussion. Pari studied Rehman’s profile out of the corner of her eye. She wondered what was going on in his mind as he watched the scene in front of him.
She and Rehman were Muslims, but his ex-fiancée, Usha, had been a Hindu. He had planned a registered wedding, just like this one. Was he imagining himself standing there with Usha? He was doing a remarkable job of hiding his heartbreak, but he had become silent and stiff since his engagement was broken off. She suddenly realised what it must have cost Rehman to agree to come here with her today. She reached out and took his hand.
He looked at her, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Thank you,” she said softly.
“What for?”
She shrugged. “Everything,” she said. “Pagli,” he said. “Foolish girl.”
At that moment, as she looked intimately at Rehman, though specks of dust dancing in the beams of sun from the windows in an airless office full of hushed conversation, something extraordinary happened. A revelation burst on her like a bolt of lightning. She loved him. No! She was in love with him. The certainty of it staggered her and she dropped his arm as if it were a hot skillet. Where had that come from? And what was the point? He was still deeply emotionally involved with his ex-fiancée. And she was a widow who had just received a marriage proposal. Why did God play such cruel jokes on her? Hadn’t He tested her enough?
She kept her attention resolutely focused on the knot of people before the registrar, conscious of Rehman’s eyes on her for a long moment before he too looked ahead. The problem at the dais seemed to have been resolved and the bride and groom were pushed to the front again.
Marriage was fine, Pari thought. Nobody, not even Pari herself, could begrudge her that. Though she had come up with many reasons for not immediately accepting Mrs Bilqis’s proposal, guilt had not been one of them. But falling in love…She shook her head slowly. Love was something else altogether. She could not betray her dead husband. Her heart did not belong to her any more. She had given it away to her husband a long time ago.
The registrar said, “Do you, Sujata, accept Vijay as your husband?”
“I do.”
Less than five minutes later, the register was signed and the formalities complete. One of the women in the audience showered the couple with rose petals. The pink confetti softened the harsh office. As the pair went past, Pari called out, “Congratulations!”
The brid
e turned towards her and gave her a wide smile. Before the young woman could say anything, one of the matrons in the family looked at Pari with horror and stepped in front of the bride, speaking to her but with her eyes on Pari. “Don’t say a word,” she said in a harsh whisper. “It is bad luck. Don’t begin your married life by talking to the witch. These office people should have more sense than to let inauspicious widows in when there’s a wedding taking place.”
The other family members looked alarmed and speeded up their pace. The bride averted her eyes.
Pari flinched as if she had been slapped. This kind of reaction was not uncommon, though most people didn’t realise quite this quickly that she was a widow. Was her widowhood tattooed on her forehead for all to see? Perhaps her dark clothes and lack of jewellery gave her away.
“How dare – ” began Rehman, moving towards their receding backs.
Pari put a hand on his arm. “It is OK, Rehman. Leave it.”
“No, it is not all right. I’ll make them apologise for hurting you.”
His anger warmed her. She wanted to tell him that she loved him for taking it so personally, but instead she said, “Let’s just go to the registrar. He is free now.”
She took out the papers from her handbag and passed them over to the official.
“Who were those people?” said Rehman, indicating the previous group with a jerk of his thumb.
“They are two big landlord families,” the registrar said. “The actual religious wedding is tomorrow but they wanted to apply for a US visa so they needed a wedding registration document.”
Before Rehman said anything more, Pari interrupted. “What do we care who they are? I want to get back to Vasu.”
The registrar flipped through the papers. “These documents have only the mothers name,” he said, and looked at Rehman. “What about the father?”
“That’s right,” said Pari. “I am adopting him. There is no need for a father.”
The official seemed confused. “I am not sure…” he began. He looked at Pari more carefully. “You two are not married.”
