When he had finished, he wiped his mouth carefully on a paper towel, folding and refolding it with sharp creases and dropping it into the dustbin under the sink. They watched him walk briskly into the garage. He came back through the kitchen and headed outside, dragging a large bag of glass stones. Rehan and Amal looked at one another.
He stumbled with it, dropping it with the sound of ice pouring out onto the small patio. He came back for another and another, pushing aside Rehan’s attempts to help him carry the loads. They followed him out onto the patio, where he had stopped for a moment to rub his eyes against his sleeve. Then he grabbed handfuls of different colored glass pebbles from the sacks, throwing them like seeds for the birds, blood red, royal blue and turquoise against the fading day until the patio gleamed with refracted light, like a cold river under the moon. They saw him squat on his haunches, pushing the pebbles with his fingers, one way and then the next, and murmuring to himself like a man reading a map in a foreign language.
Rehan went out to the garden and gently lifted Mirza by his elbows. He tried to steer him towards the house, but Amal thought of a magnet as her uncle shook his arm free and caromed away from the house, the tent flaps trembling long after her uncle had disappeared.
Chapter 10
When Amal came downstairs the next morning, Rehan was sitting at the kitchen table, with Moriarty on his lap, reading the morning paper. Amal realized that it was the shutter and thump of the paper through the letterbox that had woken her. She glanced at the living room sofa at the end of the hall, and saw the bedsheet and duvet she had given Rehan were neatly folded.
“You are a great house guest or… should I say, minder? I told you I did not need any help. I didn’t hear a thing last night, did you?” She looked out at the tent. “He must still be exhausted.”
Rehan pushed the paper away from him. “Good. He needs to sleep it off.” He scratched Moriarty behind one ear as he spoke, “I’m taking today and tomorrow off uni, have a friend who’ll get the notes for me. I’ll make a trip back to my place to get my stuff.” She smiled as she remembered the journey they had taken together back to her home for the same reason. “Then, I’m here until I outstay my welcome, which should be another day after that. I’m joking.” He watched her as she poured water into the kettle. “I can be here as long as you need me.”
She poured herself a bowl of cornflakes and brought a bowl for him while the kettle boiled. “That might be good. Great.”
As they ate in silence, she thought of the handful of boys her parents had introduced to her over the past few years. The whole experience had been so underwhelming that her mother and father had lost heart and stopped trying for a while. It had begun with the accountant who did not speak a word to her while her parents and his aunt and uncle chatted brightly around them. He had only looked at her with something like hope, and she had felt repulsed at the thought that he could win her with his silence.
No, she remembered, it had begun with another, the mustached engineer who had been at least ten years older than her who had visited their home with his uncle when she was sixteen. Her mother told her years later that he had been interested in proposing, and even though her parents had dissuaded him, Amal felt a tremor go through her as if a high-speed train had rocketed past her.
There was the young man with the beautiful face who opened the door in his shalwar kameez and who put paan in his mouth as they spoke and she had known right then that it would never work. The man wearing a thick gold chain around his neck that had distracted her inordinately, so that later, even though she knew it could not be possible, she could only picture him now with oiled hair. She would see young Indian couples on the street, some holding hands (Boyfriends and girlfriends? Or young married couples? She did not know). She wondered how everything had fallen into place so neatly for them that they had found love where they were supposed to find it, on cue.
She thought of her parents, and though they had not discussed the matter, she wondered if they were hoping to find someone for her in India. They had not tried hard enough here, she thought, they had not been to enough parties or weddings, to exchange phone numbers or, simply, be seen.
“Do you think we should check on him?” Rehan was asking, pushing his empty bowl away from him.
“Maybe…” she began to say, but suddenly there was a banging on the side door, making Moriarty jump off Rehan’s lap and streak out of the kitchen, her shoulders muscling low to the ground, her tail pointed straight behind her like the needle of a compass.
Chapter 1
1
“Your move.”
“Mmmm?” Mirza opened his eyes, and the varying shades of gray in the tent resolved themselves into familiar shapes: the wooden beams over his head, the two-shelf bookcase, the orderly rows of shoes lined up, the projector with its coiled cord. A thin slice of lighter gray marked the beginning of the day, at the edge of canvas and grass.
“How long do you expect me to wait? Your turn.” There was an old man, sitting at the foot of his sleeping bag on an upturned bucket. He was sitting in front of two piles of books that balanced a chessboard. Mirza could not distinguish the white from the black pieces on the board.
“Your turn, your turn!” the old man bellowed impatiently, and Mirza recognized his old neighbor from fifty years ago. Khan Sahib looked the same as how Mirza remembered him, perhaps missing a few more teeth.
He scrambled out of his sleeping bag, almost hitting his head on the wooden beam. “Sahib?” He scratched his head, remembering the divorce papers that lay signed in the house, and feeling the fine cuts in his fingertips from the broken vase.
“Sit down, find a… oh, I don’t know what.” Khan Sahib looked around the tent disapprovingly. “Not what I had imagined for you.”
“What…? What do you mean imagined? How can you be here?” He stared at his long-dead neighbor. He had attended his funeral prayers forty years ago.
“Tshhhtt. Silly talk.” Khan Sahib adjusted his pajamas. He waved away Mirza’s questions. “If you don’t play right now, you forfeit the game, too much time wasted.” Mirza sat cross-legged, opposite him and stared at his long, bony face and the shadow of his rough cotton shirtsleeve as it swept over the board like a buzzard. He glanced around the darkness of the tent, pinched the roll of fat on his side, then sighed and pushed forward his pawn.
Khan Sahib picked it off gleefully. “She’s gone, eh?” he grinned good-naturedly.
Mirza grunted, killing his opponent’s pawn gloomily. “Why are you here?”
Khan Sahib pointed his long finger skyward. “Allah knows. Perhaps he is lifting the veil on your stupidity before it is too late.” Mirza put out another pawn and watched as it too was killed. He began pushing forward his pieces indiscriminately until Khan Sahib looked up sharply. “Die! So die, then!” he said, “What do I care if you want to play the fool. What kind of man are you? Now I’m beginning to understand what happened around here.”
Mirza groaned and threw himself down on his bed. He waited a few minutes in silence, but when he looked up again, Khan Sahib was still there. He was praying now, his hands in supplication and his lips moving feverishly.
“Why are you praying old man? Don’t you know you are already dead? It’s too late.”
Khan Sahib kept whispering, rubbed his face with his fingers and then looked over at him, “Too late for me. Not you.” He stood up and took a few steps around the tent, picking up books and placing them carefully back in their place.
“This place is small. Why don’t you go haunt my house? There’s plenty of room for jinns in there.”
Khan Sahib lifted the tent flap, but the sharp slice of dawn hurt his eyes, and he breathed in sharply. He dropped the flap. “I cannot,” he said simply and sat down on the mat.
“Besides,” he said, more cheerily, “I think there’s already one in there, no? Otherwise you might be where you belong right now, in that bed.” Mirza stared at him stonily. “So?”
“What?” exploded Mirza. “Who knows what? You can tell me, I suppose.”
“Suppose, shmoze. What is this nonsense?! Where is your wife?”
Mirza rubbed the back of his head furiously but did not answer.
Khan Sahib strolled around the small space at the foot of Mirza’s bed, his hands behind his back: “I married Mukhtar Begum when I was 31 years old, and she was 18. She carried ten children and buried two, figured out how much to pay the dhobi wallah, fed us all on a few goat bones and a turnip when times were tough, fresh lamb biryani when I had money in my pocket. Ask her for anything, a length of string, wax, brown paper
, and she would have a box full. She saved everything and wasted nothing. We did not have much money, but she never let us feel it,” he said proudly, his eyes shining. “I told my father, you chose well for me, and I told my sons, you should have so much good fortune. That was a woman.”
“Why are you here?” Mirza asked again.
“I don’t know, beta, which one of us is dreaming. I see you living in a hut at the bottom of your garden like a servant. Your father deserved better than this, to have a son so… confused. A few more slaps of the shoe at the right time would have set you right.”
Mirza harrumphed.
“If you don’t know any better then be quiet,” continued Khan Sahib. “You are disturbing my rest for some reason. Hurry up and learn what you need to so that I can wait for my Lord in peace.” He winced as his student lifted the tent flap and strode out onto the grass, breathing heavily. Mirza took several turns around the garden, the dew running in little rivulets between his bare toes in their sandals. He saw Frank’s face at the window and waved an arm absentmindedly in his direction.
He could hear the familiar sounds of his niece moving about in the kitchen. He ran to the kitchen door, banging until Amal peered through the frosted glass. When she opened the door, her eyes were guarded against the morning light, her hair frizzing in a halo around her head like a wool sweater. “Uncle?”
“Come, come,” he exhorted, taking her arm and pulling her into the garden while she looked back in bewilderment at Rehan, propelling her towards the tent.
“What is it I’m supposed to be looking for, Uncle? Are you quite all right?” She stepped into the tent and out again, her face worried. He stuck his head through the flaps, and then looked wildly around the garden. Khan Sahib had gone.
“Oh, it’s nothing really… I saw a badger in the tent, and I thought you’d like to see it. It was quite adorable really, must have wandered off.”
“Ahh,” she said, already walking back up to the house, where Rehan was standing, watching.
“Old fool,” said Khan Sahib, when Mirza ducked back into the tent. “She can’t see me, you know. I was called for you, not her. That I am sure of. Now, we will play chess, so you can learn how to seize your destiny, like a real man.”
As the game began, Khan Sahib clucked and tutted whenever Mirza made a poor move. Eventually, he would look at his teacher before moving, only doing so if the face before him was placid. He lost anyway. Khan Sahib only shrugged. “We will play again and again until you learn.” They set up the board again, and Mirza played more cautiously this time, only to lose faster.
“No more. No more,” he said as Khan Sahib moved to set up the pieces again.
There was an awkward coughing outside the tent, and then Amal called out, “Uncle? Would you like some lunch?” Khan Sahib became very still an
d as the tent flap opened, Mirza saw that the bright sunlight entering the tent seemed to wash out Khan Sahib’s face and body. Only the faint outline of Sahib’s feet were clear to him in the gloom.
“Is everything okay
?” asked Amal worriedly. Her eyes darted around the tent.
“Do you see anything?” asked Mirza, looking directly at Khan Sahib, who was rolling his eyes in contempt.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” She stared around the tent and then back at her uncle’s face.
“Never mind. Yes, lunch would be wonderful, thank you, beti.”
She stood for a moment, looking at him, then left. There was a moment’s silence as Mirza listened to her steps as she walked back to the house. Khan Sahib snorted.
“You are the one who cannot see.”
“Enough!” shouted Mirza, upending the chessboard. He pushed through the tent flaps and walked quickly around the garden, tearing leaves off the bushes that grew against the fence and throwing them to the ground.
As he turned back up the side fence, he saw Amal peering out at him from the patio door. Through the kitchen window, he saw several figures that were standing still, and although he could not make out their faces, he wheeled around and ducked back into the tent.
“He’s lost it,” said Sven, running tap water over lettuce leaves in the sink.
Rehan had invited a few friends over for lunch. Vanessa showed up with a duffel bag. “I’m staying the night, remember?” She had said. “Rehan thought you might need some moral support.”
So that’s how it’s going to be, Amal thought.
“Is he violent?” Vanessa was asking her as she sliced a cucumber.
“It’s just not in his nature. He’s had a blow, that’s all.”
They all stared out at the tent, but there was no sign of movement. Rehan was making omelettes, and Amal watched his elbow shaking as he whipped the eggs. She had not noticed that he had put on a thick jacket and looked as if he were dressed for an outdoor hike. He looked at her and smiled.
Amal stepped out to invite her uncle to join them, but he had only taken the plate and shaken his head. When she returned to the house, everyone was lazing on the living room sofas, and Kiran was spearing the last tranche of omelette on the serving plate, his jacket halfway off his arms. He mumbled his hello, through a mouthful of food.
Vanessa was lying on the floor, her head propped up against the base of the sofa. Sven stood up and reached for a packet of cigarettes from his backpack. As he moved to step outside to light a cigarette, Vanessa held onto his leg. “Unhand me woman,” he shook his foot.
“That’s another six minutes of your life you’re taking from me.”
“Hey, be grateful. I’ve given you the best
years
of my life. This is from my discretionary account.” She let go of him, rolling her eyes. Rehan stood up.
“Got a new habit?” asked Vanessa.
“No. Just the old one,” he made a gesture with his hands out in front of him, in supplication.
After he
had stepped out, Amal sat down next to Vanessa and placed her head on her friend’s shoulder.
“Are you alright, love?”
“I suppose so. This is new. I haven’t seen him like this before.”
“I’m glad you have us, now especially.” There was a moment’s silence. Vanessa tapped her toes together.
That evening, Kiran pulled out a packet of cards, and they played a few rounds of snap and whist. Sven made a card tower, which Amal accidentally knocked down when she opened the door into the room quickly, sending a draft that scattered the cards over the room. They laughed at her, and made her improvise a dessert for them as penance, and she fried some oats in butter and brown sugar, which they ate with their fingers from the hot pan.
Rehan and Sven stepped out briefly to check on Uncle Mirza, but they reported that he was sleeping, and had drawn an extra blanket over him. It was late when the boys left, and Vanessa and Amal settled upstairs. Amal gave the guest bedroom to her friend and lay down in her own room, listening to Rehan as he moved around the downstairs level, making himself a cup of tea, flushing the toilet and running water in the bathroom, stepping on the creaky floorboard by the radiator in the hallway
, until there was finally complete silence and the last light was turned out.
At dawn the next day, Khan Sahib came again. This time, however, Mirza was puzzled to see that he looked younger, his hair mostly a rich red that Mirza remembered from an old photograph of the Quran teacher that he had found as a child. He was irritable and short with Mirza’s questions.
“What preposterous timing. I was dreaming of the best part of my life. I was playing cards with Shuja Bhai, and Shamsi and Ehtishaan were there, too. I had a winning hand too, and then I’m back here with you.”
He would not play for a while, and just sat stiffly. Finally, he sighed and rose to make his prayers.
When he finished, Mirza pressed the button on his tape recorder, and they closed their eyes as the ghazals floated tinnily out over the lawn. Before the lights rose up in the house across the lawn, they were back at their chess game, moving the pieces, mostly in silence.
Every now and then Mirza would stop and ask his teacher about someone or something they had both known many years ago: the black carrot harvest that Khan Sahib would oversee, barking orders affectionately at the head servant as the purple-black haul was grated and stewed with milk and sugar to make halwa; the Patels across the street from Mirza’s family who had three phone lines and a garage full of cars that gleamed. They did not talk about the present. Mirza stopped after losing for the third time, and stretched his arms above his head. His teacher was reading his prayers quietly on his rosary, his head bowed. When he finished, he sat stiffly on his chair, his veined hands folded in his lap. Mirza looked through the flap at the house. There was the sound of laughter, and he thought he heard the front door slam and a car start on the driveway. He let the flap drop and lay down on the bed, still drowsy from his early morning awakening. Images flickered behind his eyelids, startling surreal pictures that told his tired brain that he was on the verge of sleep. He shook them away, but then, he was back at Dera Dun again, losing her all over again.