And the World Changed (35 page)

“And so you see, from there, from that cocoon of ennui and self-satisfaction I have banished myself!”

“So you live here?”

“For the moment, yes, finding refuge in this hotel, a runaway from a faraway unhappy situation.”

“If you don't mind my asking, it sounds intrusive, but may I ask why?”

“No, not at all! Not intrusive at all, I assure you. But the fact is that I just couldn't fit in, you see.”

“You couldn't fit in?”

“Yes, I was the wrong type, if you know what I mean. But my darling mother, God rest her soul in peace, had the foresight to save me, her only child, from the stigma of her profession.”

“The wrong type? What was your mother's profession?”

“You see, I am the child of a courtesan.” I pretend to ignore the change of emotions on my listener's wide-eyed face. I shrug my shoulders for effect, “Perhaps I am the wrong type.”

“How did she save you?” I am asked breathlessly as the listener with rapt attention moves closer across the dining table.

“Well, you see, she was very progressive and forward thinking. It is often the case. She sent me to a boarding school in the hills. To a hill station embedded with Catholic missionary boarding schools. From there I would have returned to Lahore, but society there is unforgiving, though such things as courtesans and their children are an integral part of their culture.”

“Boy, that's unfair!”

“Indeed, it is. Quite. It is, shall we say, a tradition of self-congratulation, of feeling one's importance by having someone at one's mercy. I can buy you, therefore I am. That collective sense of superiority. If you know what I mean. We can watch you being humiliated, therefore we are respectable. And so I have rebelled. I have chosen to run.”

“You are brave, a very brave person! I am pleased to meet you. You should come live in America, we aren't prejudiced against people that way!” And with that I would need to endure a lecture on civil liberties.

Or I could say that I am looking into the possibility of joining the monastery at the house of Mary up on the hill at Selcuk. For I too, am mourning a son. No, it won't work, not for me.

Or perhaps the story is to be of a murder.

“Murder?” That would make them sit up and listen. The murder would be of a woman who, having married a rich and doddering feudal landlord, miraculously produces a child who she claims is his, of course. The sons of the patriarch from previous marriages are seething with fury. A courtesan's progeny to inherit a portion of their wealth?
Never.
And then one night, when the child has come of age, they send assassins to do away with the mother and her child as they lie sleeping in their large and darkened bungalow in Lahore's snug, well-appointed, verdant residential enclave and military cantonment called Chowni, a few miles away from the yellowing squat structure of Rahat bakery, at the hour when the bakers have just begun cracking eggs for the pound cakes for the day, and the beggars who work at this busy and lucrative locale are finally beginning to call it a night, curling up to sleep on the floors in its verandahs, on their burlap bedding kept in the crevices of walls and the branches of trees in the bakery's compound. The mother is stabbed and strangled brutally, the child escapes. “I am, of course, that escapee!” Admiration all around, plenty of sympathy. Yes, and would you please pass the gravy.
Boy, the folks back home will never believe it, we're so lucky to have met you.
Having
thus established myself as
interesting and colorful
, there would naturally be a photo opportunity, insisted upon, at the customary balustrade out front, to be mounted later with the others in the lobby after I am gone. No, for now it won't come to me. A storyline that is authentic for a city so beloved, belonging to so many and to so many times. And a story about traveling the world and running out of time seems too mundane for consideration, somehow, too unattractive for a dinner conversation. A conversation that keeps a stranger interested, yet at bay.

I hear that huge cruise ships call into the port every day here. Up to six a day during the peak season. I cannot bear the thought of it. The air itself shakes with the noise of a ship when it comes into port as it blares instructions to its passengers multilingually—Japanese, American, French, and German. The air shakes with the engines rumbling, the horns blaring, and the smaller shuttle boats disgorging passengers from the ship to the shore for day trips. Here in Kusadasi, a cruise liner calling into port must dwarf the surrounding shore. Everything changes when strangers arrive and the residents are forced to sit out an invasion.

And here it is finally, I feel it coming. I can hear her call in the distance as she glides on the water tonight. Just one more chance, let me have this, this moment to dance with you, and you agree, dragging me through the bar tonight, holding my hand firmly, gently, saying, don't worry, I've got you, follow me, come through. And I, slightly intoxicated by you, slightly by the wine, knowing right place, right time, but more by my own sense of happiness and knowledge. Just thirty years shy? Wall to wall men pressed against each other, bodies pressed against each other, loving each other. And I in my black leather jacket, naked underneath, long, longed for a full-flowing, claret-red taffeta beaded skirt to my ankles, high-heeled pumps, being dragged gently through, squeezing, oozing my way through the pressed bodies, feeling them against me, legs, torsos, backs, hips, feeling hands on my hips, feeling hands against me, shutting
my eyes, not caring, let them touch me, there is no harm meant here. Are all of them loving each other, yes, perhaps, they just want to make sure, perhaps they think I'm a woman, perhaps they know I too am a man. What if I am, I don't care, for them I can be, I'm here and this is all I want. And now I feel this, it's you dragging me through, shining me, reflecting you to me, so many images coming at me, of myself refracted back to me, for the first time me, not them, not their blinding light blinding me, taking you away from me.

STAYING

Sorayya Khan

Sorayya Khan (1962–  ) is a novelist who was born in Europe and moved to Islamabad in 1972 with her parents, where she graduated from the International School. She received degrees in the United States from Allegheny College and the Graduate School of International Studies, Colorado. Khan has received a Fulbright award and a Constance Saltonstall Foundation Artist Grant.

Her story, “In the Shadows
of the Margalla Hills,” won the 1995 Malahat Review First Novella prize. The daughter of a Pakistani father and Dutch mother, the idea of the world's interconnectedness is central to her novels,
Noor
(Alhamra, 2003) and
Five Queen's Road
(Penguin Books India, 2008). The latter weaves together a family saga and national history. The house built by an Englishman is shared after Partition among a Hindu landlord, a Muslim tenant and his family, and eventually, the latter's Dutch daughter-in-law. The novel, which revolves around memory, traverses several countries and examines how people survived the traumas of World War II and Partition.

“Staying” is an extract from
Five Queen's Road
, in which Khan reconstructs events in Lahore during Partition: The main protagonists cannot quite grasp that they have been overtaken by history. As Khan notes, Pakistan—a word coined in the 1930s to include the initials of the country's proposed provinces, and which also means “land of the pure”—suffered the most traumatic of births.

• • •

Dina Lal wasn't moving. He wasn't going to be pulled toward make-believe lines on a tonga. He wasn't climbing on board a train heading for the other side. He wasn't joining villagers taking step after tired step toward a make-believe border. He was staying put, and everyone who knew him thought him mad because of it. He made only one concession that summer. He moved from his childhood home inside the old city of Lahore to the house of an Englishman. He'd pretended that the majesty of the house, flowers, gardens everywhere was a gift for his wife. Or so he told her. Later, when he looked back on his life knowing full well the price, in family members, that his decision to stay in Lahore extracted from him, he knew it could not have been different. Lahore, in flames or not, was his. In stillness, rare in a city bursting with life and now death, the city was his. Walking the seething city that summer of Partition, Dina Lal moved slowly. His feet were heavy with conviction, as if loath to part with the dry and cracking earth beneath. Watching jagged
flames claim snatches of still black sky from the rooftop of 5, Queen's Road, he scuffed his sandals on the cement. Hindu or not, he wasn't, goddammit, going anywhere.

It was an outrage, Dina Lal thought, this business of imposing lines where there had been none. Who were the British to draw imaginary—crooked, even—lines across his land and proclaim a random date when it would break (like a biscuit, for God's sake!) into two countries? He'd grown up a subject of the empire, as everyone else, Kings and Queens in his school books, the Empire spread like its railway tracks up and down the immensity of what wasn't theirs. Living in the midst of this had always seemed unjust, but not enough for Dina Lal to raise his voice and make a fuss. He'd profited from the railway lines expanding across his village land. But when the rumors became truth, when vague etchings became borders, he'd had enough. He would teach them all a lesson. On this side of the lines.

Dina Lal's wife, Janoo, short and sprightly like him, was of a different mind. She feared for her life the minute Partition became real. During temple visits across the city she collected stories. “What's wrong with you?” Dina Lal once shouted at her while she tried to share one with him. “Are you a sponge? Plug your ears against all that rubbish.”

It didn't stop her. She brought home an endless assortment of Lahore's incidents: knifings, robberies, murders, and things far worse that she didn't quite know how to put into words in the presence of her husband. By the time she heard about the rapes she could barely speak. For weeks, every time she saw her husband, she would draw her open palm like a knife across her neck as if to impress upon him the horror swallowing the city.

At times like this, Dina Lal reflected on the woman he'd married. They had married when Janoo was very young, and had two children, two boys, almost immediately. She'd been so young then that her pregnancies had scarcely left marks on her belly or her breasts, and her youthful skin tightened up again as if it had never been stretched. His wife had once been lovely,
before the day-to-day worries of her small children put premature circles under her eyes and an edge in her tone that set Dina Lal looking elsewhere for happiness. He'd found it in the arms of another woman, a dancing girl, who gave him what he needed and asked for very little in return. The arrangement satisfied Dina Lal. In a perverse way, Dina Lal concluded, it was not unlike the most successful relationship in his life, the one he'd had with his father. Before his father died and left his fortune to Dina Lal, their relationship had been marked by a satisfying mix of distance and intimacy, a balance that the familiarity of marriage, among other things, could never afford. Twenty years into his marriage, while Janoo went about her days drawing knives across her slender throat, Dina Lal recognized that, children or not, their lives were no longer woven into one.

Janoo did not demand much of her husband. Recently, she had only one requirement, that his driver be at her beck and call to take her to her visits to various temples. At first annoyed with the expectation (after all, why should he resort to getting around the city like any common man?), Dina Lal discovered that he enjoyed walking the streets of Lahore, something he hadn't done since he was a child, and he had learned his way around the labyrinth of alleyways inside Lahore's Old City. Even as the city took on an anger and urgency all its own during the summer of Partition, Dina Lal wandered the streets with little fear of vigilante groups who, for the moment, ignored him in their quest to set things right. He didn't cower from the streets even after he witnessed a neighbor dragged into a busy thoroughfare and pummeled to near death with a child's cricket bat. He spilled a perfect cup of sweet, milky tea in his lap when he watched it happen from a nearby tea shop, but (remarkably, he later thought) he didn't expect that such misfortune might one day find him. Instead, Dina Lal wondered what his neighbor had done to deserve such a fate. He wasn't heartless, as he'd overheard Janoo describe him to her last friend before she, too, fled for the border; he was merely honest. His best protection
against the rage overtaking the city was that he hadn't done anything wrong. He believed this would be enough to keep him safe.