Cracking India (34 page)

“Who else do you find attractive?” Cousin asks, managing to wipe his face and voice of all expression.

“Oh I don't know ... There was a little Sikh boy ... ”

“Do me a favor,” Cousin says. “Think about all the people you find more attractive than me—and let me know.”

I have been so engaged by my reaction to the names named that I fail to notice the bitterness and sarcasm that have crept into his voice.

 

I look about me with new eyes. The world is athrob with men. As long as they have some pleasing attribute—height, width or
beauty of face—no man is too old to attract me. Or too young. Tongawallahs, knife-sharpeners, shopkeepers, policemen, schoolboys, Father's friends, all exert their compelling pull on my runaway fantasies in which I am recurringly spirited away to remote Himalayan hideouts; there to be worshipped, fought over, died for, importuned and wooed until, aroused to a passion that tingles from my scalp into the very tips of my fingers, I finally permit my lover to lay his hands upon my chest. It is no small bestowal of favor, for my chest is no longer flat.

Two little bumps have erupted beneath my nipples. Flesh of my flesh, exclusively mine. And I am hard put to protect them. I guard them with a possessive passion beside which my passion for possessing Rosy's little glass jars pales. Only I may touch them. Not Cousin. Not Imam Din. Not Adi. Not anybody. I can't trust anyone.

Not even Mother who has taken to bathing me; and with her characteristic prim and solemn expression bunches her fingers round them and goes: “Pom-pom.”

“Let me, let me ... ,” says Cousin and pokes his hand out every-which-way every chance he gets. I find it fatiguing to maintain my distance from him.

And from Adi, who resolutely materializes whenever I'm bathing and glues his eye to a crack in the bathroom door. When Hamida blocks it, Adi shifts to another crack: and when that too is plugged, he jumps up and down on a ledge outside the bathroom window with a rapt determination that is like an elemental force. Hearing Hamida's twittering remonstrances and my shrill screams, Imam Din emerges roaring: “Wait till I catch you, you shameless bugger,” and carries Adi, wiggling and kicking, towards the kitchen. I peer out of the window and Adi's face, flushed with a cold rage, bodes ill for any ideas Imam Din might have of sitting him on his lap. Even Imam Din could not handle that frustrated cobra fury.

As the mounds beneath my nipples grow, my confidence grows. I tell Imam Din to hold Adi in the kitchen, push Hamida out of the bathroom and lock the door. I examine my chest in the small mirror hanging at an angle from the wall and play with them as with cuddly toys. What with my limp and my burgeoning
breasts—and the projected girth and wiggle of my future bottom—I feel assured that I will be quite attractive when I'm grown up.

Cousin walks with me and Hamida to the bazaars and gardens, rides with us in tongas, and I dutifully point out to him all the men and boys I find appealing. “See the boy with the cute little buck teeth?” I ask. “I could die for him!” and “Look-look-look,” I say physically turning Cousin's head. “Look at that fellow in the tonga with his feet up!”

“I'm keeping tabs,” says Cousin mournfully after this has gone on for some days. “You are attracted by roughly ten percent of the male population in Lahore.”

“Is that too much?” I enquire.

“Why not me?” Cousin demands, ignoring my question. “What's wrong with me?”

“You're too young, maybe.”

“But some of the boys you liked are younger... I'll grow up!”

My heart sinks sadly for my cousin. Why don't I feel all suffocated and shy when I'm with him? I try to fathom my emotions.

“Maybe I don't need to attract you. You're already attracted,” I say.

It is like that with Cousin. He even shows me ME!

I've admitted it before: I have a wayward heart. Weak. Susceptible and fickle. But why do I call it my heart? And blame my blameless heart? And not blame instead the incandescence of my womb?

I spend hours on the servants' quarters' roof looking down on the fallen women. The turnover, as they are rescued, sorted out and restored to their families, is so rapid that I can barely keep track of the new faces that appear and so soon disappear. The camp is getting crowded. If this is where they bring kidnapped women, this is where I'll find my Ayah.

Hamida knows where to find me when Mother asks for me—or when someone is going to Godmother's on an errand and thinks of taking me along. Sometimes, furtively climbing the stairs, Hamida sits quietly with me and together we look at the dazed and dull faces. If they look up we smile, and Hamida makes little reassuring gestures; but the women only look bewildered and rarely smile back.

I wonder about the women's children. Don't they miss their mothers? I pray that their husbands and families will take them back. Hamida seldom mentions her children. All I've been able to get out of her is that she has two teenage sons and two daughters, one as old as me and one younger.

“The youngest was just beginning to walk,” says Hamida one crisp afternoon as we sun ourselves on the roof. Hamida has come to fetch me for lunch, but she is willing to stay for a while.

“Don't you miss your children?” I ask.

“Of course,” says Hamida.

“Then why don't you go to see them?”

“Their father won't like it.”

“They must miss you. You could see them secretly, couldn't you?”

“No,” says Hamida, turning her face away. “They're better off as they are. My sister-in-law will look after them. If their father gets
to know I've met them, he will only get angry, and the children will suffer.”

“I don't like your husband,” I say.

“He's a good man,” says Hamida, hiding her face bashfully in her
chuddar.
“It's my kismet that's no good ... we are
khut-putli,
puppets, in the hands of fate.”

“I don't believe that,” I say. “Cousin says we can change our kismet if we want to. The lines on our palms can also change!”

Hamida gives me a queer quizzical look. “Have you heard of the prince who was eaten by a tiger?” she asks.

“No,” I say, shaking my head and settling comfortably against the roof wall to listen.

It is the perfect day for a story. The sun is warm on our skins, casting a quiet, lazy spell on the afternoon. It is the first story Hamida tells me. Later I discover she has a fund of unusual and depressing little tales.

 

Once upon a time there was a king who had no children, says Hamida. Night and day the king and his queen prayed for a son. They traveled afar, visiting one holy-man after another, and visited all the shrines of saints in their kingdom. The queen wove temple saris for the various goddesses, stuck flowers in their images and covered the goddesses with gold.

One night the king had a dream. In his dream a ragged holyman with wild hair said: “O, king, your dearest wish will be granted. Before the year is out you will have a son. But you have accumulated an unfavorable karma. In your past life you were disobedient to your guru and, at times, even irreverent. You will be punished for your insolence. Your son will be eaten by a tiger in his sixteenth year.”

As foretold, the royal couple was blessed with a beautiful son. The king and queen rejoiced and diligently distributed food and money among their poorer subjects to improve the condition of their karmas and earn blessings.

The king decreed that all tigers be hunted and killed. He organized tiger hunts and rode at the head of the elephant cavalry to
decimate the beasts rounded up by the drummers. He offered handsome rewards for the pelts brought by the hunters.

The prince grew tall and beautiful. He was compassionate and filled with laughter. The more they loved him the more his subjects feared the prophecy.

By the time the prince was ten years old they had killed all the tigers and, as an added precaution, all the domestic and alley cats: for what is a cat if not a miniature tiger? The tigers in the surrounding kingdoms were also killed.

As the prince grew older he yearned to hunt: and at last the king was satisfied that it was safe for the prince to venture into the forest. Most people had forgotten what a tiger even looked like!

The fateful year dawned. The prince turned sixteen.

Once again the wild-haired holy-man appeared in the king's dream. “The tiger who will eat the prince is already near,” he said to the trembling king.

Again the hunters beat the bushes and searched the woods. There were no pug marks or droppings even—no trace to show that tigers had once inhabited the forests.

The prince was confined to the palace. He was never left unattended. Huntsmen patrolled the forests and armed guards the palace gates.

The king and queen prayed more, fasted oftener and did all manner of penance. The king gave his fine robes to the beggars and wore the coarse garments of the fakirs. He distributed large portions of his wealth among the poor and donated fortunes to shrines, mosques, temples and churches. He undertook vows and oaths that would bind him to a lifetime of penitence if his son was spared.

The year was almost past. The king, in his penitent's sack-cloth, was discussing affairs of state in the
darbar
when the prince walked in. The king made room for his son on the marble
takth,
covered with silk rugs. The assembly bowed till the prince settled amidst the velvet cushions and signaled them to sit. He lay back on the bolsters and after a while he fell asleep.

The
darbar
was almost over when the prince awakened from a
terrifying dream. His frightened eyes opened on a finely wrought hunting scene painted on the ceiling. Royal huntsmen, spears poised in varying attitudes of attack, surrounded a fierce tiger, bare-fanged and richly striped. Suddenly the prince screamed and cried: “Oh! The tiger! The tiger! He's got me!” He fell back and writhing in agony died.

In the pandemonium that followed, the king's eyes quickly traced the path of his son's congealed stare: and, horrified, he saw the lifelike glow on the rich pelt dim, and the tiger's shining eyes revert to yellow paint!

 

Hamida, who has been gawking skywards like the horrified monarch, returns halfway to earth and looks at me.

But I'm in no mood to countenance tragedy. Despite the unnatural angle of my upended hairs, despite the accelerated beat of my heart, despite the gloaming images of the screaming prince and the chill on my skin, I rend the story with savage logic. If the king's karma was so lousy how come he was king? And why should the poor prince suffer for his father's ... ? And how can a painted tiger ... ?

“Perhaps it's not so unreal as it is unfair!” I conclude.

“What does Fate care?” says Hamida with placid and omniscient certainty. “That's why it is fate!”

 

We become still: cocking our ears to a din and uproar coming from the kitchen.

“Imam Din's caught the
billa!”
says Hamida, her narrow face lighting up. And just as Ayah and I ran to the back at the sounds of struggle with Hari's dhoti, we now run towards the kitchen: Hamida holding me by the hand and my feet flying to match her long strides.

Neighbors and the servants already form a small crowd. Imam Din, one leg on the ground and one on the kitchen steps, has a huge black and battle-scarred cat trapped in the screen door and is pressing his whole weight on the frame to hold the slippery intruder. The cat, caught below its ribs, is suspended a foot off the
floor. Frantically twisting, its teeth bared, the panicked creature is spitting wildly.

Imam Din roars: “That'll teach you to sneak into the kitchen, you one-eared monster! Make all the noise you want! I'm not letting go of you, you badmash
billa!”

The crowd outside the kitchen grows as more people run up from the road. Someone shouts: “That tom sneaks into our kitchen too! Teach the fellow!” and someone else yells: “He sure won't poke his snout into your pans again!” And Yousaf yells, “That's enough,
yaar! Bas kar
!” and Imam Din says, “This time I'm going to teach him ... It's the third time I've caught the thug! Poke your nose into the milk will you?”

“Let him go,” I scream. “He'll die.”

“He's not about to die,” says Hamida. “He's a tough old alley cat!”

The Morris rolls up the drive and comes to a stop in the porch. Mother beeps the horn and shouts: “What's going on?”

Imam Din is so intent on chastising the cat that he doesn't hear her, and oblivious of her presence roars invective at the caterwauling animal.

“Let her go at once!” screams Mother, slamming shut the door of the car. She cannot see the cat's gender—it is secreted behind the door—but the rest of us seem to know it's a
him
.

Mother grabs hold of Imam Din's shirt and pulls but I don't think he even notices.

“Get the fly-swat, Lenny!” screams Mother in an absolute frenzy.

I dash in and fetch the fly-swat with a long reed handle and a wire-mesh flap. Mother snatches it from my hand and, waving her arms in an awkwardly feminine and energetic way, swats Imam Din with it. She strikes his legs, arms, shoulders and even his shaven head.

All at once Imam Din lets go the door and grips his arm. The surprised cat bounds down the steps and spitting and bouncing like a charred firecracker streaks zigzagging past the startled crowd.

Imam Din turns to face Mother. Glasses dramatically awry,
face flushed, she continues to whack him. Imam Din looks bewildered—and searches confusedly for the flies she is swatting on his person. When he realizes her fury is directed at him, his bewilderment turns to incredulity, and then to shock. He holds out his hand and like a man taking away a dangerous toy, snatches the fly-swat from Mother. He examines it as if he's never seen a fly-swat before.