Typhoon (18 page)

H
IS MOUTH, A
tight slash, Haroon’s foot wedged open the door of his home. His firm tread echoed across the courtyard. Glaring at the two women standing together under the verandah, their eyes apprehensive, he ducked his head under the washing draped on the line and entering his room, slammed the door shut behind him.

Hajra signalled to her beloved daughter with a trembling hand to follow her husband.

Gulshan shook her head, fear leaping in her eyes.

‘Go to him, my daughter,’ Hajra urged softly. ‘You are his wife!’

Eventually Gulshan’s reluctant body slowly walked to her room. Outside the door she threw another fearful look at her mother. Hajra’s reassuring smile urged her daughter forward.

With thudding heart Gulshan entered the darkness of the room. Haroon was in bed. Gulshan pushed the door shut quietly behind her and miserably wondered what she had to do next. Noiselessly, she pulled her night-clothes out of the wardrobe and began to undress. Her body, a tight coil of nervous energy, was alert to any sound from the bed.

Nothing. No sound. No movement.

Folding her clothes in the darkness and placing them on the chair, Gulshan tiptoed towards the bed. She slid gently in beside her husband, then waited. Nothing.
No reaching out. No touching, no response – he just lay there. She could hear his shallow breathing and knew he wasn’t asleep. Gulshan moved nearer, her legs timidly brushing his. Immediately he jerked away, and moved to the far side. Recoiling in shame she pulled her leg back.

‘I am so sorry, Haroon,’ her voice pleaded thick with tears.
For what?
the question poked at the back of her mind,
Why am I apologising?
The inner spirit rebelled. Her woman’s instinct was screaming out loud and clear, however, that her husband was badly hurt and she wanted to, and had to, comfort him in some way.

Haroon’s answer was his back.

Dejected, Gulshan sidled away to her edge of the bed. Silent tears flooded her cheeks and soaked her pillow.

Heartbroken, she sent a thought to the other woman.
Naghmana, you sacrificed him to me, but he is still yours!
If the world had crashed around her, the previous night, now it no longer existed. She lay staring at the high stained-glass windows of her bedroom, through which the rays of moonlight peeped into the room. ‘Mother, I have truly lost him!
Meh Sehi looti ghi!
’ Gulshan cried out her agony, smothering her face deep into the
pillow
. If her husband heard her, he didn’t turn or respond – a stranger shared her bed.

Naghmana sat in bed, with her legs huddled up, her chin resting on her knees; her aching eyes remained closed. She waited patiently for the early morning
fajr azan
. When the prayer call rang through the village, Naghmana slid out of bed. Making sure the shawl was tied around her head, she stood on the prayer-mat and offered her prayers. It was the first morning prayers she
had offered for a long time – the prayer of a lost,
agonised
soul. Her aunt entered, a curious, sad light in her eyes. Fatima watched her niece raise her hands to Allah pak to offer her special prayers – her personal Du’ah.

‘Is she praying for peace or is she cursing us all?’ Fatima asked herself.

With her eyes downcast, Naghmana acknowledged and felt her aunt’s presence and stood up from the prayer-rug.

Fatima noted the subdued suit that her niece wore. Her face was totally devoid of make-up. Yet it glowed. The clear skin gave the girl an air of innocence and strange vulnerability. Her lips were pale – paler than Fatima had ever seen them. It was as if colour had been smudged out of them. Her head was bowed, her shorn hair scraped tightly away from her face and fixed into a simple knot at the back. Bitterly Fatima recalled her niece’s glamorous appearance on the day of her arrival – that of a successful, urban, career-woman. That was another Naghmana, from another world, another life. ‘Is that what we have done to her?’ Fatima’s heart broke.

She glanced at Naghmana’s case, propped against the dressing table. That was it, then.

‘So you will not stay even for one more day?’ Fatima timidly enquired.

Naghmana shook her head. ‘I must leave early, well before the villagers are up. I couldn’t face them again, Auntie.’

Fatima understood. ‘Breakfast is ready, my beloved niece. Come down and eat.’

‘No, Auntie, I can’t eat. Please just give me back my car keys and let me go.’ Gazes were carefully averted. Each had lost the other.

‘Of course.’ Blushing, Fatima slid away in shame, recalling how she had snatched the car keys by force from Naghmana’s hand and had hidden them in an old silver teapot in the bedding storeroom. ‘Oh Allah pak, what devil entered me? What happened to all of us? What did we do? What evil force entered our lives?’ Fatima groaned aloud her thoughts, as she left her niece’s room.

She went into the adjoining bedding room and from a large steel trunk, pulled out the teapot and her niece’s bunch of keys. ‘Forgive me, my dear!’ she wept,
clutching
them in her palm.

Fifteen minutes later, aunt and niece silently made their way through the village lanes. Fatima insisted on carrying Naghmana’s suitcase. Luckily nobody was in sight. The sun was now fast announcing its aggressive entrance. Sardara’s six merry cocks were busy strutting about her farm courtyard, offering their ceremonial morning waking calls whilst pecking their breakfast seeds from the ground. Most women were scurrying around their houses, washing, baking, dressing, dough making.

Aunt and niece reached Naghmana’s car parked on the dusty open ground outside the boys’ school playground.

Placing her suitcase in the boot of her car, Naghmana faced her aunt to bid her farewell. Their eyes didn’t meet. She offered a silent, wooden embrace. Her aunt’s arms fell awkwardly to her side. Naghmana was about to get in her car when her aunt’s hand stopped her.

‘Naghmana, forgive me! Forgive us for everything,’ she begged, unable to let her niece go off like this.
Naghmana’s eyes filled as she miserably avoided her gaze. ‘I forgive you!’ The three soft words bridged the emotional gap in inches only. ‘Thank you, Naghmana. When will you come again?’ A timid rhetorical question, yet it had to be asked.

Naghmana’s answer was to hold up her ravaged face to her aunt’s. Fatima stepped back. ‘I can never return to this place, ever again,’ said the girl.

Sitting behind the steering wheel, she drew her dupatta tightly over her head and around her shoulders. And then with a final, poignant smile, Naghmana drove away, over the dusty, uneven road leading out of Chiragpur. She disappeared to another world –
her
world. She didn’t look back.

Fatima watched the car disappear into the dust and the tall sugar-cane fields. ‘It had only been four days!’ Her niece was supposed to have stayed for much longer. ‘I am here for two weeks, to experience what it is like to live in the countryside,’ were her first enthusiastic words to her aunt. The advertising company she worked for had granted her a special leave to spend in rural Sind with her beloved aunt.

Outside Sardara’s home Fatima withdrew a little silk parcel she had clutched under her arm; she dropped it just inside the stone step of Sardara’s home. The milk woman’s gates were forever left open. A welcome dairy home, for the villagers coming to buy milk, eggs and fresh butter. Early in the morning, there’d also be creamy fresh yoghurt with an inch-thick top layer that the customers relished and queued up for. This
morning
the yoghurt lovers hadn’t yet arrived with their small plastic and silver containers dangling from their hands or wrists. Fatima could see Sardara’s sons still
busy milking the buffaloes. The aluminium buckets were fast filling up with milk.

Kulsoom, Jamila and Naimat Bibi’s homes were Fatima’s next port of call. Ceremoniously, on the top doorstep of each one she dropped one small silk parcel. After Jamila’s house she headed for Kaniz’s hawaili. Here she tied the parcel to the letterbox on the entrance gates. Fatima’s final, bitter destination was Baba Siraj Din’s home.

An imposing whitewashed building, the hawaili stood alone in the centre of the village. She stood
staring
at the gates and the two marble pillars supporting them for a long time before pressing the bell. She couldn’t leave it to chance here. One of Siraj Din’s
servants
came running to the gates. The parcel had to reach its destination and the right hands. Fatima didn’t greet the servant but quietly dropped the parcel into his waiting hands. ‘Give this to either your mistress or your master, Baba Siraj Din. It is imperative they see its contents,’ she instructed simply.

Back in her own part of the village, she dropped another little parcel outside the house opposite. The home of the woman who had hit her niece with her shoe from the rooftop. She could never forgive the woman for that! More to the point, nor could she forgive herself for what she had done. Fatima mourned again, tears wetting her cheeks.

Debating what to do next, she stood in the middle of the village lane. She still had two parcels left. With firm steps she crossed to the side and reached the step of Hajra and Haroon’s home. She plucked open both of the parcels and taking out the coils of her niece’s hair, scattered them everywhere on the step, making sure that every inch was covered.

‘My niece’s pride! Hajra, may you be cursed with every strand of her hair!’ Crying in anguish she stooped to stroke a glossy coil before dropping it back on the dusty step. Then she turned to go home. The village had become her enemy.

Z
ULAIKHA WAS ALWAYS
the first person to rise, a rule well-embedded in Siraj Din’s household – the
mistress
had to be up first. This morning, after a night with no sleep at all, she was out of her room before prayers and before her husband. She was busy sorting out her jewellery box, deciding which items to give her granddaughters. Zarri Bano had always had her eye on the pearl-studded necklace and long matching earrings. She had tried on both twice already. Zulaikha smiled to herself. Their Zarri Bano would make a gorgeous bride one day. Shy Ruby, always in her sister’s shadow, was content with the bracelets. Shahzada wanted nothing for herself. Zulaikha had also spotted a ring for Zarri Bano; she was looking at it when her woman servant brought the small silk parcel to her. Zulaikha frowned in surprise.

‘It is from Fatima, the widow,’ her servant Rasullah explained, placing the parcel in her mistress’s hand and leaving.

Zulaikha silently untied the string and the four folds of the square of silk cloth fell apart in her open palm. There, nestling against the silken bed, was a long lock of hair. Glossy and black, it shone against the cream background of the cloth.

Her heartbeat quickening, Zulaikha read the
handwritten
message on a tiny piece of paper sitting next to the lock of hair. It simply said,
I offer you my niece’s pride
.

Dazed and with the parcel gripped tightly in her fist, Zulaikha sat down on the bed and rocked herself to and fro. She waited for her husband. A few minutes later, he found her. His wife was staring vacantly into space, her body language still signalling the emotional and psychological rift standing between them since the kacheri.

‘Zulaikha!’ Siraj Din tenderly called her name,
bending
down from his tall height and peering closely into her face.

She moved her head, still not looking at him, but beyond his shoulder at the large painting of the Holy Kaba, the House of God in Makkah, on the wall. Her eyes tracing the four tall, majestic minarets of the holiest of mosques in the Muslim world, Zulaikha whispered. ‘I have seen your home with my own
hungry
, sinful eyes, Allah pak, but please take me there once more before I die, to absolve me of this guilt that I shall carry to my grave.’

She opened out her palm and let her husband see its contents.

Siraj Din stared down at the piece of silk fabric, unable to understand what she was showing him. Then, taking the small parcel into his own hand, his thumb parted the silk folds. With a sickening jolt his eyes traced the message and then squeezed shut. He dropped the parcel on the floor. Naghmana’s lock of hair fell out and its long silky strands scattered around Siraj Din’s feet.

Both looked down, stupefied. One strand half-lay on Siraj Din’s bare toe in his leather sandal. Zulaikha bent down and picking it up, held it in front of her husband – her face bleak. He stepped back nervously before striding out of the room. Zulaikha watched him go, her heart heavier than it had ever been.

‘Why? Why did you do this, you unfortunate woman?’ Zulaikha cried going down on her hands and knees. Reverently she picked up all the hair strands and returned them to the silk square. Firmly refastening the parcel with the string she went to her mahogany and ivory wedding jewellery box. The silk parcel was
carefully
placed beside her gold bracelets. There was no better place for Naghmana’s lock of hair than beside the most valued of her worldly goods – her heavy, gem-studded, gold
karas
.

Kulsoom Bibi stood in her friend’s courtyard, clutching the small silk parcel she had found outside on her doorstep.

‘So you’ve got one too?’ Kulsoom cried, as her friend Naimat Bibi sheepishly drew out her own parcel from under the stool where she sat making tea.

Naimat Bibi showed her soot-stained silk parcel to her friend. A strange look spread across her face as she stirred the pot of creamy tea, simmering to a boil on her pedestal stove.

‘What do all these words mean, Kulsoom Jee?’ she quietly asked of her friend. ‘I can’t read the writing on the paper, you know I’m illiterate. Did you get a
written
message with yours too?’

‘It’s from Fatima – and the hair is Naghmana’s, that woman who was divorced before our eyes yesterday. Here, I’ll read it to you.’

Kulsoom opened the little parcel with her long bony fingers. Naimat Bibi’s sooty fingers had already left their prints everywhere on the silk cloth. Carefully
setting
aside the lock of hair, Kulsoom gravely read out the scrawled message on the small yellow scrap of paper.
My niece leaves you her greatest pride. May each
strand of her hair haunt and shame you for life!
Kulsoom nearly dropped the parcel on the floor.

Fear dashed across Naimat Bibi’s eyes, goose pimples standing up on her arms. She leaned back on her
footstool
, forgetting her pot of tea, now coming to the boil.

‘Naimat Jee, don’t worry,’ her friend hastened to reassure her. ‘There was a similar message in mine and in Sardara’s too.’

‘What? Are you sure? Did Sardara Jee get one too? I have personally done nothing to her. I don’t want to be cursed by her. Imagine what it will do to my business.’ Naimat Bibi said, as she gingerly plucked off the pot of tea with her tea towel and turned off the stove. She would be sick if she drank it now.

‘Yes, when I went for my milk this morning, there was Sardara Jee, propped in her cane chair and staring down in rapt wonder at the lock of hair lying in her lap. She didn’t know what to say or what to do with it. She said that she heard the car drive away in the early
morning
. Remember, Sardara’s courtyard is next to the school playground. That’s where Naghmana’s car was parked. It is gone. I have looked myself. There is no car there. She must have left after the Fajr prayers.

‘Poor Sardara is worried sick and so upset. Afraid of both Fatima’s curses and the woman’s tears. She fears that the curse will dry up all the milk of her buffaloes. You know how much she loves her beasts and how superstitious she is! She just kept on staring at the hair in her lap, Naimat Jee, and uttering to herself, ‘This young woman came to our village with her gorgeous long hair, that she proudly displayed and now she has left without it! There is no bigger disgrace for a woman than to lose her
guth
, her plait in our culture. A woman without her hair, can you imagine it …’

As you can see, Naimat Bibi, this lock is a good six inches long. She must have chopped it all off! All that hair! How could she do it?’ Kulsoom leaned against the pillar near the vine that she detested.

Naimat Bibi stared at the long strand of hair that Kulsoom held out to her once more. ‘She has not only shamed us all but punished us and herself too, Kulsoom Jee,’ she declared, surprising her friend with a pearl of wisdom early in the morning. ‘If someone cut my plait, Kulsoom, a sorry sight though it is, they would have robbed me of my prized female honour – and this woman has offered us her honour. She has laid it at our doors, but it was we who robbed her of that honour, Kulsoom Jee. What are we going to do? I am so afraid! I wish that I had never been to that wretched kacheri. Yet I still believe that it was wrong for them to meet stealthily in the middle of the night especially as nobody knew of their secret relationship.’

Bemused at what her best friend had said, Kulsoom looked away, forgetting that she stood under the
grapevine
and that there were black crows perched on the branch directly above her head. Many a time she had had her head splattered with their droppings.

‘I know, my friend, I have not slept a wink. How could anyone who attended that kacheri sleep last night? I kept on remembering her, Naimat Jee. I kept on seeing her face, her eyes, her bowed head. I believe she will haunt us for life. She has brought a typhoon into our lives.’ Kulsoom’s face and eyes sang the
turmoil
inside.

‘Please don’t say that, Kulsoom Jee. I don’t want any more typhoons in my late life. I have had quite enough of them already. Infertility was the first one. All those crazy aching years of waiting. Abandoning my husband
to another. By that I mean sacrificing him. Letting him marry another woman so that he could have children. Then the raw jealousy of seeing him surrounded by children by another woman. Oh yes, I think I have had my fair share of typhoons. What about this hair? What are we going to do with it? Shall we stick it between an old door hinge or cracks as in the olden days?’

‘No! No, Naimat Jee, what a suggestion! Her hair deserves a far superior place than that. I just hope that Allah pak forgives us for what happened at that kacheri. It wasn’t our fault, but we did spread the rumour around the village. We must take responsibility for that.’

The two friends stared at each other. For once in their lives they had nothing more to say. Despondency had attacked their usual ebullience.

‘What am I going to do with this pot of tea? Will you drink some, Kulsoom Jee?’ Her friend shook her head, a first, for Kulsoom loved drinking tea, not only in cups but bowlfuls. Day and night. But, not this morning. She placed the small parcel beside Naimat Bibi’s footstool and left.

Naimat Bibi emptied the whole pot of tea in her small wash area and watched a pint of milk drain away. Her tea was very costly. She placed the pot to be scoured later in the morning. Gently picking up the silk parcel in her large hand from under the stool, she entered her
kothri
, her dark rear storeroom. Switching on the light, she tiptoed to the pile of steel trunks. The top trunk was the place where she kept her valuables, including money. Lifting the cold steel lid, she peered at its contents and then stuffed the small parcel in one corner. Then she closed the lid tightly shut, praying that the moths wouldn’t get to it.