Trespassing (42 page)

‘I’m not saying she should be. All I’m saying is that she’s proud to have a husband who fights for a freer environment. He speaks for all of us. Including her.’

‘But what if she preferred to speak for herself?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean: would he live up to the test?’

Shafqat stared as if he’d turned to stone.

She sat up, crossed her legs. ‘I mean, would he be the one to stay at home with the children, to feed and nurse them, to attend to her phone calls, arrange her meetings, swallow his terror every time she was arrested and the family stood to become motherless?’

He folded the letter. ‘These are my parents you’re hypothesizing about.’

‘Well, why not? I think it’s a perfectly fair hypothesis.’

He stood up. ‘It’s getting late. I think I’ll go.’

‘Am I not
allowed
to ask you that? So much for a freer environment!’

‘What’s the matter with you today? One minute we’re having a cozy time on the rug, the next you’re leaping at my throat.’

‘Leaping at your throat!’

He picked up his jacket. Then he smiled as if nothing at all had happened. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow at the bus stop?’

Riffat took two deep breaths as he walked away. Her voice was icy but calm. ‘Answer the question Shafqat, or this day will end very badly. I’m asking because I need to know what you’d do in your father’s position if your mother chose his.’

He laughed, without even turning back to look at her. ‘No one can hold me hostage. I speak willingly or I don’t speak at all.’

She was shouting then, words she couldn’t enunciate. They
stuck to her teeth, glued with spit, and all the time he kept walking, turning the lock, sliding free the chain. And then he was gone.

She stared at the rug he’d stepped across. At the knob, the blond wood of the door. She clutched her waist and started rocking because really, she was teetering, coasting through an open sky, and might crash. Below awaited her mother: See? I told you. Below, placards flew:
Let the people choose!
A speaker waved his fist, packing her with courage, ‘Until we own our own resources, we’ll never be free.’ All the speakers were men. This hadn’t even dawned on her before. She only saw it now, as she teetered above. There were other faces waiting below. Her four sisters, who didn’t go abroad, her father, who wished he’d listened to his wife, and a nation that wagged one thick finger and yelled, After all you were given. What a selfish, spoilt, ungrateful girl!

Falling back in her flat, she wept on the carpet littered with his books.

He was waiting at the bus stop with a bouquet of yellow roses and his neck in the maroon scarf she loved on him. His cloud-fracturing smile too was back. She was terrified of how happy it made her to see him. When they hugged, she kissed his long, sturdy neck, imbibing what she’d lost of him last night.

In her flat, when next he undressed her, something new loomed over them: the conversation he’d walked away from. She wondered if he felt it too. It didn’t appear so. What made him so confident? Confidence came with experience. But she’d not stoop to ask whether she was his first. He made her feel good, and not just physically. He overflowed with assurances: she wasn’t too flat, or too skinny. On the contrary, he loved her alert, athletic build. Busty women couldn’t walk like her, could they? Nor could fat thighs and a sweaty ass be limber in bed. (Did this mean he
had
done it with fat thighs and a
sweaty ass?) She had the grace of a heron, poised and regal, and he’d take that over anything else. She was his queen. No, even more than that: she was an empress. An empress in bell-bottom jeans with smart curls, a breezy run, and an easy laugh. She was a stately casual, with crayon smudges on her nose and silk tops in her drawer. He’d breathe his faith into her bones while sliding his tongue across her clavicle, nibbling his way down to the pit of her sternum while she moaned, only half listening when he got to the bit about the silk tops. The truth was he made her feel good enough to forget that others would want her to feel bad for feeling good, even as the topic he’d forbidden her from touching towered ever higher.

He started growing mercurial about her work. Sometimes, her design samples delighted him. Silk-screen or batik, embroidery or paint, he went through her portfolio meticulously, commenting on the materials, colors and patterns, encouraging her to set up her own shop when they went home and got married. He listened for hours as she spoke of the dyes and astringents, of the madder-dyed cloths found in the ancient site of Moenjodaro, so near Karachi. She wanted to revive all that. He said she must. Her heart raced as she wondered how, and whether he would really want her to. Then, just as she convinced herself he would, his mood changed. He stopped listening, stood up, suggested a stroll, or else admonished her for being too ambitious.

‘Too ambitious for whom?’

But he’d take her hand and laugh it off, leaving her to yearn increasingly for an answer.

It happened at last many weeks later, as they sat on the pavement outside a kebab shop. It was still chilly but the clouds had lifted. Sweaters and stockings came off. Cafés with outdoor seating bustled. Riffat rolled a cigarillo-slim kebab between a hot, sesame-sprinkled naan and bit in. She scooped the grease off her chin and sighed. ‘When we’re back
in Karachi, I want you to take me to all those roadside cafés my family insists women should be protected from.’

The upper corner of his lip twitched. For the briefest instant, a dark flint cut his sparkling amber eyes. He took a sip of lassi and said nothing but his face closed. She wondered if he’d looked like this that day he walked out the door, without showing her his face.

She took another bite. ‘This is our cuisine, after all. A shame half our population can’t enjoy it like this.’

He pushed his plate back. ‘You sound so immature when you talk that way.’

‘Immature?’

‘Irrational then. It’s not done, Riffat. You can’t transport something that exists here to another place.’

She blinked, genuinely confused. ‘Something? Like what?’

‘Like another system. You know perfectly well it doesn’t look good for a woman to eat in those cafés. Men ogle. And if she’s with a man, they want to know why he can’t shield her from their lust. He looks even worse.’

She put down her sandwich. It was slowly making sense. ‘Democracy, health care, and education can come from within our system?’

‘Of course.’

‘But when women appear in public as frequently and comfortably as men, that’s an import? An evil outside influence?’

He shrugged. ‘Some things will take longer.’

‘Because some people want them to? Could it be the same people who speak so eloquently of new wheels turning?’

He raised a brow and looked around. The couple at the next table was laughing and had noticed nothing. A few others lingered on the pavement, waiting for a table to clear. ‘Maybe we should hurry up so they can sit down.’

She grabbed his hand. ‘No. This time you’re going to answer me. You want efficiency, hygiene, and a free press
– but not that modernity should benefit women. You want one you can keep putting to the test, just like your mother?’

He snatched his hand away. ‘Don’t start on my parents again.’

‘Are you speaking for me? Do you even know how like our very own general you sound?’

He walked away but she came to his hostel later in the evening, and they argued more. She hounded him for days, hating what she was becoming, she, whose strength was grace and elegance, who was regal as an empress. She was driven to teary stridency, begging him to give her what should have been hers, forced to sink to the degradation of demanding it. At last, he snapped: No, he wouldn’t be the one to stay home with the children, or attend to her phone calls or arrange her meetings. Never. That was her job. His was to fight for freedom.

Her mother said she’d found the perfect match: Mr Mansoor owned a textile mill and would be open to suggestions from a designer like her. Furthermore, he would let her establish her own silk line if she so desired.

Riffat did not want to meet him or see his photographs. She wanted to remain a petrified shark tooth. Meeting the groom-to-be or even knowing what he looked like might prompt her to live again. She was just the kind of smooth granite that later made her break down when she saw other brides.

But she held on to one dream. As a wedding gift, her father gave her several acres of land outside Karachi. She’d do something with this land, something for herself, something that allowed her to sow all the turmoil and bliss of her London days. She was going to revive what had lain latent for thousands of years. She’d watch it grow into something soft and durable, so that when she, a tiny speck in time, vanished, it would still be there. Somewhere between the mulberry seeds and the yarns of indigo-washed silk, Riffat Mansoor learned
to find her place in the universe again. She stepped outside the cocoon of the marble-bride and moved on.

But first, she had children. And before that, she looked at her groom.

He was everything Shafqat wasn’t: fair-skinned, slouch-shouldered, tire-necked, short. How long does it take a woman to get accustomed to a man who repulses her? That’s what she asked herself while lying under Mansoor, barely breathing while he pushed inside her on their wedding night. She somersaulted like a little top, a tiny feather in the mattress torn by springs. How long?

She knew well that another man would have left her the morning after, when the sheets weren’t stained. But he said nothing. He seldom did. He had none of Shafqat’s eclectic knowledge. He didn’t get her laconic humor and offered none of his own. He played no delightful games, hated to walk, over-ate, and had absolutely no flair for conversation. When he spoke it was to grunt something about food, funds, and fabrics. About the latter, she joined in heartily, and throughout their nineteen years of marriage, he remained in awe of the confidence with which she did. He was one of the few who never discouraged her mulberry scheme. He was, from the day they married till the day before his death, deferring and suspicious. When he touched her he remained, as on the first night, so clumsy she developed a second skin, something that would molt and drop off after he fell asleep. In the finer, bottom layers dwelt the farm. And, underneath it all, Shafqat.

He tiptoed down the staircase of her sleep, stealing into keyholes, wriggling under cracks, helping himself to her rooms. She sealed these off, but then he’d slink into another, stretch out, flash his grin. She felt her insides had been completely and utterly violated and was left with no choice but to move into the gaping holes. The loneliness that engulfed her then was the worst agony ever known.

He came to her their fourth year apart. She had two children, he one. She welcomed him as she’d done in London after their first fight, when he’d brought the yellow roses. And then she threw him out for ever.

Riffat looked at Sumbul’s child staunchly refusing to die. He whimpered and wheezed, and Sumbul told Riffat she wished the end would come quickly now. Riffat was about to tell her again that she could take a few days off, but she knew why Sumbul came to the farm. Home meant a mother-in-law working her from dawn till midnight, a belligerent husband who sometimes beat her, three other children, countless neighbors pouring in for gossip and meals bought with her money, an open sewer outside the kitchen, and absolutely nowhere for her to sit quietly for two minutes and sip her very own cup of tea. If she tried, the other women would snap, ‘We never had such luxuries at your age.’

Yet, Sumbul found it in her to care for Riffat, though surely in Sumbul’s eyes she lived like an empress. The contrast pained more because it highlighted the limits of each. What would it take to make Sumbul cross over to Riffat’s? What would it have taken for Riffat to cross over to Shafqat’s, or for him to leap past his own confines? He, who’d traveled
and ruminated more than anyone she knew, could never overcome them.

They both knew that. She could see it when they met for the last time at the tomb. He was sagging, in body and spirit, as far as possible from the youth who’d run from protest march to student meeting. He was waiting, like everyone else, for a meteor to shatter the walls. Like so many political liberals of the time, he turned out privately orthodox. As if a thin membrane snagged his beliefs each time he stepped inside his home and he could do nothing but surrender because change was only in God’s hands. That was the principle he’d despised, but the one his life had followed. So he came to her, hoping for miracles. This one would be Dia.

‘I know she’s my child,’ he began.

They stood behind a pillar underneath a dome clustered with bats. Riffat shuddered. ‘You have no way of knowing.’

‘She has something of me. I do know. My eyes. My curiosity …’

‘Oh, and her mother can’t give her that?’

‘One simple test. As a doctor, I can arrange for it to be strictly confidential.’

‘You fool,’ she trembled. ‘You’re at your wits’ end for something to fill your vacuum. You didn’t let me in, you won’t let your wife in, obviously your son’s not enough. And your wife is barren. So now you want to disturb the peace I’ve built from ashes.’

‘If she’s my child I’ve a right to know,’ he retorted. ‘You can insult me all you want.’ He stepped forward, causing her to stumble back. ‘I have a right to stay in touch with her.’

She shut her eyes against the threat. He’d been watching Dia then. Stalking her in school? She didn’t want to know. And she didn’t want any more of the noise in the dome. The bats chittered as if in mockery, swinging above them like soothsayers. Riffat looked up at the net that had been strung across the dome’s breadth. She thought back to the day she’d
learned of Shafqat’s marriage, and how, in her anger, she’d let her mother pick her groom. She’d regret that, always, and to make up for it, warned Dia often of the pernicious fatalism the nation was increasingly trapped in. It was a deadly cycle. Dia had to understand that in her own small but tenacious way, she could break it.