And the World Changed (32 page)

Feryal Ali Gauhar (1959– ) is a novelist, columnist, filmmaker, actor, and a development worker. She was born and brought up in Lahore and educated at the Lahore American School. She studied abroad at McGill University, Canada, and the University of London, UK, and studied film and television at the University of Southern California, the United States. She has worked for fifteen years in development
communication, focusing on marginalization, poverty, and the nexus between women and the environment. From 1999 to 2005 she was a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund.

Currently, Ali Gauhar teaches the history, theory, and technology of film at Pakistan's National College of Arts, and lectures on women and development at other institutes. She is working toward a Ph.D. in cultural conservation and management. She is a contributor to
Dawn
, and wrote the screenplays for her two films,
Pezwaan
(1994) and
Tibbi Galli
(1997). She developed the latter into her first novel
The Scent of Wet Earth in August
(Penguin Books India, 2002). Her second novel,
No Space for Further Burials
(Women Unlimited, 2007), has been translated into French and is being translated into other European languages, Persian, and Pashto.

“Kucha Miran Shah” is an extract from
The Scent of Wet Earth in August
, a novel set in a red-light district in Lahore. It is the love story of two powerless people: Fatima, the mute daughter of a prostitute, and Shabbir, a young man who has been apprenticed since childhood to a
maulvi
who sexually abuses him. “Kucha Miran Shah” is a pivotal chapter that reveals a traumatic moment in Shabbir's childhood when his uncle becomes the victim of an “honor killing” by the powerful landowner. Ali Gauhar presents a feudal society where a woman is regarded as her husband's possession, as are the people employed by him or living on his lands.

The framing of the story of the killing against the simple decency of Shabbir and Fatima's love story shows how the violence of honor killing reverberates through future generations. Ali Gauhar draws out the complicity of feudal lords,
maulvis
, and even an ordinary stall holder, in the exercise of male cruelty and power. Embedded in this episode is the obvious question: What happens to “honor” when it comes to the prostitution of women and the sexual abuse of defenseless young boys?

• • •

“Yes, that's the one. It's Super Hashmi Surma, isn't it?” Shabbir asked. He stood at the edge of Dilawar's vending cart. In the time between one death and another many humiliations had
been forgotten, or forgiven. Ever since the wordless one had started sending him cards with pictures of hearts and birds and lovers exchanging gleaming gold rings, Shabbir had put away the hollowness of his past.

“How much is it,
Bhai
Dilawar?”

“Hey, Maulvi, you've been buying stuff from me for a whole year and you still don't know what things cost? What's the problem, Maulvi? You seem distracted these days. Did the summer's heat melt your brain?” Dilawar teased. He was the same. He was the same, despite the fact that prices had doubled and tripled in a year. His business was still booming and his manner was as mocking as always.

“Please accept my apologies,
Bhai
Dilawar. It's just that sometimes I forget, that's all. There's really nothing else.”

“Well, it's good you don't forget to buy stuff from me,” Dilawar said.

“How can I,
Bhai
Dilawar? Your stuff is good, and inexpensive as well.”

“Of course, my stuff is good and the price is even better! Just five rupees for anything on this cart! Five rupees! You can't buy a needle for five rupees these days, Maulvi. I'm telling you, everything on my cart is cheap.”

But Shabbir wasn't listening to Dilawar any more. His eyes had caught the dusty pink edge of Fatimah's chador as she turned the corner. In the past year she had become even more beautiful. Now, as she walked, her eyes were lowered in the manner of virtuous, decent women.

Fatimah stopped at the edge of the cart, her eyes averted, pretending not to have noticed that the man she had come to love stood right across from her. Shabbir, too, looked everywhere except at her, his eyes scanning the cheap merchandise on Dilawar's cart, his ears listening for the sound of wordless declaration.

Fatimah reached out for the bottles of lip gloss.

“Welcome, pretty one—what can I get for you today?”
Dilawar stretched his hairy hand toward the bottles and picked one out. Holding a mirror up to Fatimah, he murmured softly into her ear.

“Here, let me hold this one for you while you try on the lip gloss. Try the pink one—it will match your chador and your rosy cheeks!”

Shabbir shifted restlessly. His feet began to sweat in his Sandak
chappals
. He was outraged.
Women have to be treated with respect, comments about their person have to be restrained.

“Go on, go ahead. I want to see how the gloss shines on your ruby red lips.”

Shabbir fidgeted. Fatimah stood still, her eyes still averted.

“Here, let me do it for you. Let me show you how to make your lips look as if they've just been—”

“
Jenab
, I'm getting late and I would like you to take the money for this before I leave,” Shabbir hissed.

“
Ik minit, yaar
, hang on. Let me finish with the girl—”

Dilawar turned toward Shabbir and then back again. Fatimah was walking away, one end of her chador trailing in the dust.

“Oye, don't you want the lip gloss? I've got some really nice rouge for your rose-petal cheeks! And some scented hair oil, Oil of Jasmine too—” Dilawar called out to Fatimah, but it was too late. The girl had turned the corner. Dilawar turned back toward Shabbir and spat the words at him:

“See what you did? You upset the girl and now she's gone! Why do you always have to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, Maulvi?”

“
Jenab
, it is not I who annoyed the young lady, it is your rudeness, the familiarity of your behavior that has upset her. You must not behave in this manner with girls from good families. That is like insulting the wives of our Holy Prophet, May Peace Be Upon Him. It is like defiling the names of Our Ladies, Khadija and Fatimah and Ayesha, May Allah Rest Their Souls in Peace. You are letting the devil take over,
Jenab
. You must
not address young women from respectable homes as if they were—”

“Go to hell, Maulvi. Respectable, my prick! What do you know about this girl? Do you know that the old hags raising her used to be Shahi Mohalla's best known courtesans? Bloody whores! That's what they are, and that's what her mother still is! Good family indeed! You know nothing about these two-bit
randis.
”

“
Astakhfarullah!
God forbid, Sir! You should wash out your mouth with soap, otherwise the angels will urinate on your tongue,” Shabbir said.

“Piss on my tongue, eh? It's more likely that they'll piss on you, Maulvi! Everyone knows the
haraam-kari
you've been up to with Maulvi Basharat! Everyone knows what he's been doing to you ever since you came here as a sniveling little kid!”

Shabbir stood immobile for a while. And then, when the tears stung his eyes, he began to walk away, an ocean roaring in his ears.

“The angels will piss on you, Maulvi! They'll defecate on you, they'll piss on your mother who left you here. They'll shit in your father's beard, that bastard who sired you and then decided to dump you with Basharat! That's who the angels will piss on.”

As Shabbir turned the corner, trembling violently, he heard Dilawar through a haze of other sounds, nagging, whispering, hissing.

In the dark, the soft sighs of regret rose from the cracked earth of their home like mist on a winter morning. His father wept, head bent in submission, fists clenched with rage, nails digging into unfeeling flesh. That night Chaudhry Sultan had sent his henchmen to attack their two-roomed home in Chak Naurang and avenge his sullied honor.
Chacha
Rab Nawaz had died of the head wound inflicted by the butt of Chaudhry Sultan's double-barrel shotgun. The body lay wrapped in a bloodied sheet, an armless body, the amputation had
taken place in the back room of the
haveli
earlier that day. He had understood nothing of this kind of punishment until he heard that his uncle, Rab Nawaz, had embraced Chaudhry Sultan's wife with those arms; those powerful carpenter's arms had embraced a woman who could be touched by no man other than the one who had wed her, who had the right to bruise that body with unrelenting passion, who could drag her by the hair in midnight's drunken fits, kick her in her spine, twist her arms, and then pound her with his swollen manhood until she swooned with the pain of his ceaseless, breathless thrusting. Rab Nawaz had only held her, putting his sinewy arms around her slender shoulders as she sobbed, her body heaving with hurt, her mouth forming senseless words of anguish. He had held her because she had picked up the razor-sharp cutter he would use to shape delicate bits of wood into toys for Chaudhry Sultan's children. She had held out her arm and had started to work the thin blade into the soft flesh of her wrist. He had not even noticed her presence until she moaned softly as pain invaded her as yet unbruised parts. She had entered the back room where he had always worked, her feet wrapped in satin slippers, her young body wrapped in yards of muslin. There was a thick layer of sawdust on the brick floor of that room, golden shavings from the wood of the
diyar
tree, a gold carpet cushioning her fall from respectability.

Rab Nawaz smelled her presence in the room before he heard her. She had come into this room on other occasions, at other times. Once she had asked him to design a cradle for the baby, her first son after several unnecessary daughters. One time she had wanted him to repair the hinge on her jewelry box. And sometimes she would just come into the room and watch him as he worked, the muscles in his arms rippling as he leveled the uneven surfaces of the wood, shaving off layers that would curl and then drop silently onto the floor. The smell of flaked wood mixed with the aroma of her closeness, with the musk of unspent desire. Rab Nawaz had only made farm implements before being discovered by Chaudhry Sultan, and now he was fashioning cabinets and tables with lions' paws for legs. So much had changed for him since coming into the Haveli of Nagar Lal,
also known as Sukhera House; he had no idea that along with the privileges would come the privation, the gnawing knowledge that desire was dangerous, that it would chip away at his resolve, whittling him down to a naked, unprotected core. That day, when she had tried to spill the blood that otherwise oozed out of every orifice every time Chaudhry Sultan flung her against the wall or bit her breasts or clawed her back, Rab Nawaz had grabbed her, pulled the cutter out of her hands and flung it onto the pile of sawdust. And then he had held her, desperate to repair the damage done to her, desperately fighting desire.

She had wept, her body wracked with unrelenting remembrance. He had held her in his arms. Chaudhry Sultan's
patwari
had discovered them like that, and taking advantage of the opportunity to destroy an old enemy, rushed to the
haveli
to report this unforgiveable transgression. Rab Nawaz was tied down to the planing table he had built himself, his arms were hacked off with the axe he would use to chop bits of wood for the children's toys, his throat was slashed with his saw, the serrated edge leaving jagged scraps of flesh just above the protective silver amulet he had worn around his neck since birth. Rab Nawaz died in the room with the golden carpet. In the evening when the light outside turned from lilac to peach to vermilion, the
patwari
and his men removed the armless body and dumped it in the field Rab Nawaz had held onto for years, refusing to succumb to the
patwari's
threats of ejection. As for Chaudhry Sultan's wife, it was said that she was found on the sawdust floor of the back room the next day, her wrists slashed to the bone.

Shabbir turned the corner, all but blinded by the memory of the bloody misfortune that had ruined his family and brought him to his fate.

It was nearly evening and the crowds in the bazaar would soon swell, spilling over into the narrow lanes of Kucha Miran Shah. Shabbir waited outside
Apa
Nisar's newly constructed room, taking refuge behind the mound of rubble that had once been walls and fireplaces and home and hearth for some long-forgotten
courtesan. He could still make out the name and date carved in relief on the battered wooden door which must have adorned the entrance to this house:
Raeesa Begum, Daughter of Budhan Bai, 1928
. This was where drunken men would trip and fall, picking themselves up from the effluent-soaked lane, stumbling into the bazaar, cursing all mothers, abusing all sisters, as if venting their fury against women would change their destiny and make them better men. Other than that, no one trespassed into this lane. Even the dogs in the neighborhood stayed away from this unlit cul-de-sac, sniffing at the pungent mix of urine and vomit and then turning away. Only
Apa
Nisar had braved the shameless men pissing into the collapsed structure of Raeesa Begum's boudoir. She had set herself down in one corner years ago. She was then nineteen years old, running from the gambling, drunken pimp who had bought her in Bombay, and then brought her across the border when faithlessness ripped open the seams of a shared history, when faith became the rallying cry for carnage. She was a Muslim, and like the lunatics in the asylum, prostitutes too were divided up according to the religion they professed. She had jumped off the truck bringing Muslim courtesans across the border, fleeing with nothing except the sari she had draped around her body.