Chapter
13
Amal stood in front of the stack and read the titles with her head at an angle. It was a very small library, and she did not hold out much hope of finding the books Mirza Uncle had requested. There were a few books that covered that time period in India, and she piled them on the nearest table. It was mid-morning and deeply quiet, without the after-school crowd. A group of seniors was gathered around a coffee table by the window, mostly white haired ladies and one gentleman who looked as if he could be sleeping. Amal looked into her bag from time to time, but there was no message from Rehan. She had called him several times over the last few days. She had come down early in the morning after he had moved into Mirza’s tent, but he had already left. Mirza Uncle was no longer feverish but was still distracted, shooing her out of the tent and talking to himself. She had thought about telling the Mintons, but she could not face the idea. She had tried Rehan’s phone several times, but he did not pick up. When Amal finally got through to Rehan that morning, he had answered the phone gruffly and told her
that he would call back later. She had thrown the phone back into her purse.
She gathered up a few books and checked them out with Mirza’s library card before stepping outside. It had been raining earlier that day, and the uneven ground still held small dirty puddles that she had to step around. The pavement was narrow and soon led out of the small town through the residential neighborhood. The hedges of front gardens muscled their way into the space so that she had to lean slightly away from them as she walked. Cars sped by dangerously close, but the rush of air as they passed her felt like oxygen to the anger that was coursing through her.
As she walked past the tall fence that bordered the neighborhood allotments, she looked in to see flashes of orange and blue, the gardeners bent over their work. As she walked faster, their bodies became whole, the pickets only a thin blur in the corner of her vision. She heard voices, men’s as well as women’s, the soft whack of metal on soil and the strangely satisfying sound of roots being torn from the ground.
Her phone rang as she stepped into the house.
“You need to come,” she said to Rehan immediately. “It’s getting serious…. Well, I don’t know… he’s talking to himself. I think he’s going downhill.”
Amal heard Rehan sigh deeply. There was silence for a moment and her heart started
beating wildly. “It’s serious, I think. I wouldn’t be asking for your help again if I didn’t really need it.”
“Listen, I don’t know. I can’t do this anymore.”
“What?”
“Well, what do you expect? Look, I’m busy. I have other things to take care of.”
“You’re busy…?” she repeated, her face flushing and her scalp suddenly hot and itchy. “So, that’s it then? You’re off?” She stood on the doormat. “Rehan, what’s going on?”
There was silence for a moment.
“I have other things to take care of. I can’t put my life on hold, I can’t be in this… this chaos.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Her voice was louder than she had intended.
He began speaking quickly, and she was startled by the anger in his voice. “What are we supposed to be doing anyway? I certainly don’t know. How long are you going to nurse him while he has his”—there was a moment’s pause—“It’s a walkabout. He’s gone off the fucking range. Maybe he’ll see sense, maybe he won’t. But stop looking to me to take care of you.”
“Who asked you?” Amal shouted, surprised at the venom in her voice. “You were here before I was. You were here because he cared about you, just about the only person who does.” She bit her lip, feeling like a small child, and the feeling made her furious.
He was quiet as he spoke now, “Don’t blame me because you don’t know who you are or what you want from your life. I can’t go back to this, this mess.”
There was a pause. Amal was about to speak, but thought better of it and hung up. She looked at her phone for a moment. At the kitchen window she could see Mirza Uncle asleep on a chair, a book propped open in his lap and his head nodding softly on his chest. Behind him, the flap of the tent whipped open and closed in the wind, the ties pulling towards her as if drawn by her hand and dropping again.
“He’s an idiot,” said Vanessa, watching her coffee swirl in its paper cup as she stirred in her sugar. “Hasn’t returned Sven’s calls either.”
“Well, that hardly makes him an idiot.” Amal was folding and refolding her empty sugar packet. She had heard somewhere that it was impossible to fold any paper more than eight times; so far, she was on three, and the sugar packet was a bullet in her fingers. “Maybe he’s busy.”
“Busy gunning for hardcore heaven.” Amal looked confused. “Fire and brimstone. We’re all a bunch of sinners, and he’s going to be saved. Happened to my cousin, scratch the surface, there’s not much between them.”
“But he wasn’t that before?”
“You know it’s bad when he won’t talk to his mother. She called me, you know. Seemed to think we were an item.” Amal opened the folded sugar packet and started tearing it. “I stopped in once, bumped into him at the park, he went to get his jacket and told me to come along. Only met her that one time. She found my number somewhere. I think she was hoping I could talk him round, bring him back. I didn’t want to break it to her.”
“You think he’s gone somewhere?”
“It’s not looking good.” She stood up and pulled the strap of her handbag firmly onto her shoulder. “I think he took one off the deep end. He saw them, you know.”
“Who?”
“His dad, and the… other family. Sven told me. Saw him at Marks & Spencers buying shoes for the little one. Must have been heartbreaking. Sven told me he didn’t stop. Just kept walking past. I think his dad tried to say something to him, but he just kept walking.”
She gave Amal a peck on the cheek and left the café, her umbrella already springing open at the threshold like a shield. Amal watched the red of her rainc
oat run and trickle into the gray of street.
When Amal arrived home, she changed into a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt and pulled her hair out of her face into a ponytail. Her uncle was outside, walking with his hands behind his back, looking at the plants and weeds in the flowerbeds like a dignitary inspecting the troops.
When she stepped out to greet him, he told her that he wanted to run the slideshow again, but this time, inside his tent, against the canvas.
“Oh, I can sit with you again,” she said, confused, but he persuaded her that she did not have to
stay, that he was an old man that just wanted to wallow in nostalgia and she should not feel the need to accompany him. “Oh, alright,” she said, her eyes widening as he took the library book she had brought him without looking at it and wordlessly dropped it onto a pile of books on the ground.
She had not often stepped inside his tent. It took her a moment to adjust to the darkness after the bright light of noon that had made her squint in the garden. It was still tidy, perhaps a few more books and papers that had not been put away. The air was close and hot, and without any light it was gloomy, even in the daytime. The chessboard seemed to be mid-game, and she looked quizzically at the pieces. He looked at her, and stooped quickly to give her some teacups th
at were stacked on the floor, “Please, beti. Thank you,” he called as she left with the dishes.
He waited until he heard sounds from the kitchen. He figured he would have an hour while she made lunch, to show Khan Sahib the slides. She would probably come looking for him after that. Khan Sahib arrived on cue, sitting in the chair next to the projector as if he were
going to give the presentation. Mirza Uncle was still squinting at each square slide and dropping them into the chamber in order.
Khan Sahib cleared his throat noisily. ‘What a showman,’ thought Mirza, but he was caught off-guard by the question that followed.
“What are you doing to the poor girl?”
“Just what are you saying?”
“You have turned her into your nurse.”
“I di-”
“Yes, and you know you did. She is just a shadow in your life.”
He could not resist, “You mean, like you?”
Khan Sahib snorted, and Mirza thought of a horse. “Who is she going to meet, who is going to ask for her, when she is stuck here making your chai and hiding your craziness from decent people?”
“She’s here because she wants to be. And she’s a modern girl, she’ll do her own asking. Besides, she has her parents.” He jammed the chamber into the projector, hard.
“Why is she alone? Forced to be your ayah? I don’t see her with too many choices. Do you really think she would choose this”—his upturned hands gestured towards the corners of the tent and Mirza sighed—“if there was something better on offer? She can’t stay here forever, it is not right. You should wipe your own chin for a change.” He was cut off by the noisy hum of the projector, its bright lamp blinding in the small space of the tent.
As the slideshow began, Mirza sat silently on the edge of his bed. He had chosen the slides carefully, but there was an occasional “oh” and a muttered prayer whenever Khan Sahib noticed that someone or other was missing from a frame. “I remember that photo being taken!” he exclaimed once. As Mirza clicked through slide after slide, Khan Sahib’s fingers slid over his prayer beads; he threw his head back and laughed loudly when he saw Mirza’s uncles posing as filmi heroes. “Sshhh,” he tried to admonish his teacher, with a finger to his lips, his
eyes signaling the house where his niece might hear them, but the old man was unperturbed; a moment later, he was somber again; his fingers clicked rapidly over their worship at the sight of a beaming child who had drowned in the village pond when Mirza had himself been small.
Mirza was no longer watching the slideshow, or his chess teacher. He was thinking of Amal, as the little, serious girl she had once been. Of course, she was still a serious person now, perhaps more so, playing the woman of a house that did not belong to her. He glanced out at the kitchen window: there she was,
trailing him in his madness, straining to make things normal with cups of tea and clean laundry, like a Victorian housekeeper.
He looked up to the second floor, to the bedroom he had shared with this wife. The curtains were open. He imagined her perfume, the fragrance of her hair, her things, passing one molecule at a time through the glass in the rising heat like blood draining drop by drop from a wound.
“Look! Look!” He turned back to see Khan Sahib racing over to stand next to a black and white image of himself which was rippling over the tent fabric. They were twins, now, both watery and grainy. Khan Sahib pretended to talk to his image and slap him on the shoulder. “He has always liked himself,” thought Mirza, and he dropped the tent flap, feeling for a moment as if he himself were the insubstantial presence, condemned to float through eternity like a speck of dust.
Chapter 1
4
Khan Sahib watched him chew. They could hear the vacuum in a neighbor’s house, music playing on someone’s stereo. Far away, there was the thin whine of a car alarm, almost pleasant at this distance. Raindrops hit the canvas like the drumming of fingertips; occasionally a heavy wind threw down a barrage from a nearby tree and Mirza shivered at the idea of such wetness.
Moriarty was at Khan Sahib’s feet. At first she had been spooked by the visitor, hissing and arching her back, eyes wide. After that first time, she grew bolder, sniffing the spectral feet in their sandals, watching the Quran teacher carefully. She would not jump in his lap, but sat quietly next to him, often leaving the tent when he vanished. When Amal called her for her food, Mirza Sahib would quickly pick her up and gently throw her out of the tent. She was purring now, watching the chess pieces as they battled on the board.
Mirza put down the baklava he had been eating, licked the honey off his fingers and looked at his opponent. Khan Sahib was as old today as Mirza had remembered him, perhaps a year or two away from his death. His hair was completely white, the bones on his face clear and sharp, his shoulders hunched. The castle trembled in his fingers, but there was no hesitation about where it belonged. He swept Mirza’s bishop off the board. Mirza frowned and searched the marquee for a counter move.
It had been two weeks since they had watched the slideshow. Mirza had refused to talk about Amal with Khan Sahib, and a few times, his visitor had stormed off. Their visits had lapsed into a stony silence, but every day Mirza woke so see the profile of his old Quran teacher.
He put his fingers on his rook and tipped it from side to side, contemplating. He heard a sniffle and looked up. Khan Sahib was crying, his mouth pulled open in a grimace that could have been a laugh, were it not for the high pitch sound coming from his throat, his shoulders shaking. Mirza cleared his throat. Khan Sahib was looking at him, the crying unabated, and Mirza wriggled on his seat, taking one preparatory breath after another, but could think of nothing to say. Finally, Khan Sahib wiped his wet eyes with the back of his wrist.
“What… what is it, Sahib?” Mirza traced his thumb along the outline of the chess board, back and forth, following the sharp angle in front of his stomach, from himself to Khan Sahib, as if he were trying to erase a mistake in a school book.
“She is gone,” Khan Sahib said very quietly, and Mirza had to stop himself
from asking whom. He waited. “I thought I would be first, but she slipped past me… she told me to wait, she was going ahead, I would follow soon…”
The old man looked around the tent as if he had never seen it before.
Mirza remembered Mukhtar Begum’s funeral. Khan Sahib had been like this at the mosque, reading his prayer beads fervently, his head dropping to his hands at moments, when one man after another would lay his arm across his shoulders and whisper urgently to him.
So, a ghost grieves, thought Mirza, and he suddenly saw Naida’s face in his thoughts and his stomach lurched as if he were at sea.
“I should have been first, shouldn’t I?” Khan Sahib asked Mirza, his old eyes milky with cataracts. “Why was her time written before mine? How long must I… ?”
Don’t ask, thought Mirza, but Khan Sahib was no longer looking at him. He had lain down on the bed, one arm thrown across his face. Mirza drew the blankets up over him.
He stepped out of the tent and walked across the grass, the long afternoon shadows reaching into the corners of the garden like searching fingers. He felt comforted by the weight of himself, the tautness of his belly beneath his shirt, the sound of his sandals swishing through the grass blades, the odd prickle of something like straw against his toes.
Khan Sahib did not return for a few days. Every morning, Mirza found himself rising earlier than usual, slipping into the house to wash his face and brush his teeth at the downstairs bathroom sink when he knew Amal was still asleep. He walked back to the tent and sat at the chessboard, the white and black pieces slowly arranging themselves into clear rivalry as the dawn light bled through the canvas pores of the tent. By 10:30 a.m. Mirza usually sighed and stood up, looking around him aimlessly.
It w
as a Sunday morning when Khan Sahib returned, and Mirza was still asleep when he woke to find his foot being shaken through the blanket. He raised himself on one elbow and saw the outline of his teacher at the foot of his bed. There was something sharp about the jut of his chin, his tilting shoulders, that told Mirza that the old man had something to say.
“This is the last time I will see you,” he said.
“Are you sure?” asked Mirza, forgetting his manners.
“
This is not a place for men,” said Khan Sahib. “There is no life here, no comfort. I don’t know how you can stand it,” he continued, looking anxiously at Mirza. “I cannot stay.”
“How do you know that you will not come back?” asked Mirza
. “You didn’t have much say in coming here in the first place.”
“I don’t know,” said Khan Sahib, “but I know there is nothing for me to do here. I feel that I am just passing through, and the longing to be with my Lord is just too much to bear in this lonely place. I will not come back.”
Mirza nodded. “But what about the chess?” he asked suddenly.
“You are a good student,” said Khan Sahib, “but this is not your game. What that is, I do not know, I cannot understand the rules.”
Mirza watched him fade slowly, then burrowed under his blanket and listened to the sound of his breathing until raindrops began to beat out a tabla against the canvas. Then he threw off his covers and walked out into the garden, sweating and steaming like a shire horse in the downpour. Amal ran out of the house and argued with him until he agreed to sit in his tent again, with a cup on his lap, staring morosely at the line of raindrops at the edge of the tent’s canvas, wondering which one would fall and hit the grass first.