Haveli (18 page)

Rahim was just turning under the linen bed sheet when she came back, and as she sat down on the bed he got up from it heavily, as though he too had not slept.

“What is it, Rahim?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

He waved his hand at her to be still, not impatiently, and shook his head as he wrapped his dressing gown around his middle.

“Nothing for you to worry about, my dearest.” His hearty formality again—he used it like a mask. Shabanu took a deep breath.

“Rahim, you haven’t been in this bed for two weeks,” she said. “And when you do come, you might as well be sleeping alone in any other bed in the world.”

He stopped for a moment, and when he turned back to her he smiled faintly, as if he’d forgotten how.

“Whose bed did you think I’d been in?” he asked.

She lowered her eyes and didn’t deny that it had occurred to her that he might have a new love interest. Or perhaps that he’d tired of her. He seemed to forget his worries for a moment to delight in her display of jealousy. But for the first time Shabanu identified her feelings toward her husband as being more daughterly than wifely.

“There will be plenty of time for us later,” said Rahim with a small, soft laugh. “It’s just Nazir. His little demands keep increasing by the day. He’s trying to make this bloody wedding of Zabo and Ahmed into a more prominent event than Omar’s wedding. He’s a terrible nuisance!”

“Rahim, I’ve never seen you so disturbed,” she said. “Surely it’s not just Nazir’s demands over the wedding …”

But he pushed past her and dressed without another word, not even about breakfast, and was gone by the time the servant came to the door with a bed tea tray for both of them.

Shabanu had grown so accustomed to the cool, quiet world inside the
haveli
that leaving it was a shock. She felt like a jackal coming out of its lair after the winter and finding the world inhospitable—bright, hot, dusty, and noisy. She pulled her
chadr
over her face,
and Zabo did the same as they left by a heavy wooden door that usually remained closed to a small and particularly filthy side lane outside the mud walls.

The
tonga-wallah
was waiting with his horse and cart where Ibne had said they’d be, outside the gate and down the lane toward the small tiled shrine at the corner.

Shabanu watched her feet, for the lane was littered with fruit and vegetable peels, goat droppings, and filthy gray water splashed up from the slimed gutters on either side of the mud paving.

The
tonga
was worn and dusty, as was the pony, which stood with its head down like a flower wilted in the merciless sun. The
tonga-wallah
clucked, and the poor gray pony reluctantly raised his head and, in a shuffling trot under cracks of the whip, made his dusty way from Bhatti Gate to Lohari Gate, where Zabo took out a small map drawn by Ibne to guide them on foot through the maze of lanes to the Anarkali Bazaar.

The map led them under canopies; past shops selling wedding garlands strung with tinsel, rupee notes, and flowers; past posters with pictures of sinister-looking politicians plastered on the walls beyond Bhatti Gate; past the icicle-shaped stone Hindu temple, long since abandoned and fallen into disrepair; past the bustling Bannu Bazaar, where they had bought Zabo’s real gold jewelry; and into the Anarkali Bazaar, where counters overflowed with audiotapes
and plastic buckets, and Western-style rock music blared over loudspeakers.

As they picked their way down ever narrower lanes, Shabanu thought of Anarkali, the young harem girl in the court of the Mogul Emperor Akbar.

The emperor’s son, Prince Salim, fell in love with Anarkali, who was named for the delicate beauty of the pomegranate blossom. One day Anarkali returned Salim’s smile, sending Akbar into a jealous rage. The emperor ordered Anarkali buried alive. When Salim became the Emperor Jahangir, he built a magnificent tomb in her memory.

I have been like Anarkali, thought Shabanu, buried alive all these years. And I never knew it until I fell in love.

Passersby and shopkeepers stared at the two young women, some of the tradesmen leaning over their counters to watch them walk past. Dozens of pairs of eyes followed their shrouded forms as they floated through the chaotic lanes. For although their bodies were covered, their gold bangles clinked on their slender arms as they gestured, a cloud of floral scent trailed after them, and their high, soft voices sounded like bells on the hot summer air.

I
t was just less than a month before Omar’s wedding, and still he had not come to the pavilion. Shabanu refused to think of him. She had prepared a small speech to deliver to him—if ever he should appear—about the risks she faced by meeting him, and how it just wasn’t possible …

Still his face appeared unbidden before her as she sat, late into the summer nights, embroidering clothes for Mumtaz, Zabo, and herself, and coverlets and bolsters for the pavilion.

A soft breeze blew through the stone screens, and Shabanu knew with certainty that here, high above the stench of the gutters and dusty alleys, blew the only cool breeze in all of Lahore. But the thin wicks of the lamps burned straight and true behind their crystal chimneys, and the pavilion glowed like her old Auntie’s brass water pots in Cholistan’s winter sun.

She reached into her sewing basket, which she’d used to carry up her belongings, the things she’d
brought as a child from the desert and carried to Lahore, then over the last two weeks, one or two at a time, to the summer pavilion. She took from it a pile of rupee notes, wrapped in white cloth and stitched at the edges in a thick oblong bundle. She placed it on the table.

Zabo had handed it to her with her eyes closed.

“I don’t know how much there is, and I don’t want to know,” she’d said. “I don’t want to know where you keep it. Just keep it safe.”

Three intermediate Urdu readers were stacked on Shabanu’s desk beside a newly sharpened green pencil and a tablet of rough white paper with gray lines. Beside that lay another bundle of handmade paper upon which Shabanu intended to write her father.

On the low lacquered table lay her most prized possession—the small wooden flute carved by her grandfather, a warrior in the army of the last of the Abbasid princes. She could see him clearly, his large white turban nodding as he worked beside a fire of
khar
twigs, its acrid smoke twisting like a blue ribbon toward the stars.

In the corner of the room stood a large red clay milk jar, an important part of a Cholistani girl’s dowry. It had stood empty all these years at Okurabad, and she’d had Ibne bring it back when he took Rahim home for one of his tribal meetings.

Shabanu took her scissors from the sewing basket
and snipped slowly and deliberately at the threads that bound the money. She unwrapped the muslin. Inside were not one but two stacks of notes—not ten-rupee notes but five-hundred-rupee notes, all blue and crisp from the bank, still stapled at one end. A
lakh
—one hundred thousand rupees—enough for them to live on for years!

Zabo had never said how much Nazir had given her to spend on the dowry. But she had already spent tens of thousands, and this was only part of what he’d sent to pay her bills. Shabanu remembered Rahim’s bribe of hundreds of acres of land and knew he had made Nazir promise to be generous with Zabo, who was his only daughter.

She rewrapped the notes and restitched them carefully into two bundles that would fit into the milk jar. She was about to cross to the corner of the room where it stood when she heard a quiet footstep outside. Her heart flew into her mouth, and she moved quickly to the tall jar. She laid the bundle in the bottom and was just replacing the lid when a shadow fell over the doorway.

“Who is it?” she asked. “What are you doing here?” Her voice was calm, but she felt tense and strong, ready to defend her aerie.

“It’s me. Omar. May I come in?”

Shabanu’s heart hammered, and the back of her throat was so dry she was unable to say anything.

“Forgive me,” he said, looking through the doorway
to see her standing with her hands crossed over her chest. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“You
frightened
me!” she said. She sounded angry but relieved. She ran her hands through her hair and then clasped them in front of her.

“Do you want me to go?”

“No … no,” she said. “It’s just …”

“I understand you don’t want anyone to know about this place,” he said. “I didn’t want to intrude on you, but I had to see you.”

“No, I was going to say I’d expected you—but …”

“I meant to come sooner, but I thought …”

“Selma’s been telling us about the parties and hunts and dinners.” The speech she’d prepared fled from her mind, and she couldn’t remember anything she’d meant to say to him.

“I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind since the day we first came here. I’ve had to fight myself not to come looking for you. The risk is enormous, especially with Uncle Nazir’s guards following every move you and Zabo make.”

He watched her intently while he talked, as if to see whether she understood what he was saying.

Shabanu felt weak and trembly as a newborn camel. She didn’t trust her voice, and so she nodded. She was grateful that he understood the seriousness of their meeting. Again she thought of Anarkali, of Akbar’s rage, and of the horrible price Anarkali had paid for love.

Omar looked past her shoulder and into the room.

“Would you like to come in?” she asked then.

He looked at the old-fashioned furnishings and the mirrored embroideries that cast light from the oil lamps in little fairy dots all over the room.

“It’s a room only you could have made,” he said.

They crossed the golden pools of light that the oil lamps made on the stone floor to the Swati chairs and the low lacquered table. Omar reached out and picked up her bamboo flute.

“Can you play?”

“I used to,” she replied. “That’s how we called our animals in the desert. But it’s too sad to play and not hear their bells as they move among the dunes … I haven’t played since I left Cholistan.”

Shabanu adjusted her
chadr
around her shoulders and looked across the table at Omar. Now, she told herself. Tell him now that he can’t come here anymore, that he can’t meet you anywhere, or speak to you. The lamp on the desk lit the fine straight line of his cheek from behind, like a halo.

“I have loved being back in the Punjab,” he said. “Until now I haven’t thought about America at all.”

“And what makes you think of it now?” she asked.

“I’ve told you anything is possible there,” he said. “It makes people think differently. Here so much is not possible, and people learn not to think of what
cannot be. I know I should think that way about you. But I can’t.”

His words were accompanied by the graceful gestures of his large, smooth hands. She remembered the feel of them on her hands. His hair was glossy, his skin smooth, his voice deep, the planes of his cheek and chin and shoulder straight—all of his textures were clean and strong. They made her ache with longing and sadness.

Stop it! she said to herself. Stop it now!

As she sat watching his lean figure folded gracefully into the small Swati chair, a warning came to her from her Auntie Sharma: “Don’t ever fall in love,” Sharma had said. “It will ruin your judgment.”

Now she knew what Sharma meant. Here she was with everything at stake, and all she could think of was how it felt when Omar touched her. She’d never expected her heart to be so stubborn about having its way. She prayed to Allah to give her the strength to discipline her feelings.

For the sake of Mumtaz, she said to herself. And that time it caught hold, and there was no turning back.

“I have learned to live with what is possible,” she said quietly.

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

She couldn’t look at him for fear she’d tell him what was in her heart.

“You are the girl who could never obey. You are
too direct to hide your feelings from me. You can’t tell me you don’t care for me.”

She could not let him know how she felt. He would try to persuade her to give in to her feelings, and she couldn’t do that. She had to lie.

Allah, give me strength, she prayed. For the sake of Mumtaz, for the sake of Mumtaz.

“You are wrong,” she said, looking directly at him. “In America do men respect the wishes of women?”

He looked at her with disbelief.

“Do they?”

He nodded.

“Then take the best of what you learned of duty in Pakistan and of respect in America, and leave me in peace.” Her voice was firm and steady, and she knew she was convincing.

Without speaking, Omar stood and left. She didn’t look up until he was gone. She saw him pass the outside wall of the pavilion and heard his footsteps recede into the stairwell.

When he had gone, she bowed her head and let the grief engulf her. Her heart crumpled and shrank, like a ball of paper set on fire.

S
habanu didn’t see Omar the rest of that week or the next, as the social whirl surrounding the weddings increased to what seemed to her a maddening crescendo.

She had been right, she told herself again and again. Omar would have jeopardized all her plans—for Zabo, Mumtaz’s education, her marriage to Rahim, their very lives. And there was no possibility of a future. But there was no comfort in being right.

She tried to keep busy, but each afternoon she was drawn into the courtyard or up into the pavilion, where she sat still as a pool of water. It was as if she feared she’d fly into a million pieces if she moved.

Late each afternoon the women of the Cantonment, still dressed in their finest
shalwar kameez
from lunch or early tea, piled into the air-conditioned limousines to be driven to watch matches at the Lahore Polo Club.

One day Selma insisted that Zabo and Shabanu join her.

“I won’t have you two moping about,” she said.

They sat at the end of a row in the section reserved for Omar’s team. The field was green and cool-looking in the late-afternoon sun. A breeze played over them, ruffling their hair and clothing, refreshing them.