In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (25 page)

A bottle of champagne stood cooling in a bucket of ice next to the bed. She opened it and filled a glass, spilling, went downstairs, out through a side door so that she wouldn’t meet anyone. There were people everywhere, and she wanted to be alone. It struck her that there would be no one in the tent. She entered the long carpeted space, grass showing at the edges. The tables had been cleared and the cloths removed, leaving ugly plywood tops with steel legs. A heavy odor of damp canvas filled the room, lit by two or three bare bulbs. In a moment she would find Murad and take him to bed. From the corner of her eye she saw movement and turned to look. Where the canvas walls of the tent met the roof, a strip of clear plastic had been sewn. Hanging there at the far end, disembodied faces rippled behind the plastic, three, four, five of them, fixed on her, distorted, larger and then smaller as the breeze shook the tent. All evening they must have watched, sitting on the compound wall, invisible when the lights inside the tent were bright. These must be from the slum, the people who lived illegally on the banks of an open sewage channel that drained this millionaires’ district. Why shouldn’t they curse the rich lives of the bride and groom? She remembered the tale of a sorceress not invited to a celebration, the spell she laid.

It doesn’t have to be that way,
she told herself.
These men also ate from the wedding table
. The servants would have distributed the food left from the banquet to whoever appeared at the gate. They too could bless her, figures of propitiation, though they sat on the wall like crows. She absorbed the moment, the image, and then turned, not making any gesture toward them.

Part II: Jalpana

And so Lily and Murad were married, and soon afterward they went to live at his farm, known as Jalpana. This was Lily’s idea, and one that he at first resisted. He had wanted to go on a honeymoon, somewhere romantic and traditional, the Loire or Venice, but she refused. ‘We’ll do that when we need it, when we need to get away and when we have something to celebrate. I want to be at the farm. I’m going to be like an old-fashioned Punjabi wife, weighing out the flour and sugar every morning and counting the eggs. And everything locked up, a huge ring of keys on a chain around my waist.’

She had softened, phoning Murad or sending him messages constantly if they were apart. As a child she had been plump, an inward little girl, absorbed in a private world, mostly brought up by her
ayah
. In her teens and twenties she would gorge on peanut butter, chocolate-covered maraschino cherries, Danish butter cookies, and then make herself throw up. Now she indulged herself, would eat a whole bag of salted cashews while sitting with him, or they would drive late at night to the bazaar and have food from the stalls,
haleem, dai bhalay, taka tak
. He liked to watch her eat.

They slept together for the first time only a few weeks before the wedding, tenderly, gravely – clumsily, both of them, after having resisted so long. She had bought new sheets, took down the bright embroideries hanging from the walls of her room and covering the furniture, instead decorating with white handwoven cotton, a new bedspread, new covers for the chairs, and in that setting she removed her clothes by candlelight, passing herself to him.

‘There,’ she whispered to him, as they lay in bed afterward. ‘Now we know all the pieces fit together.’

From Bahawalpur Airport they raced to the farm through the twilight on bad roads, Lily falling asleep, waking in a bazaar, the jeep stopped in a tangle of traffic beside a stand piled with cigarettes, the owner staring at her through the window as if she were on display, until she covered herself with a head scarf.

A crowd of men lined a drive half a kilometer long leading into the heart of the farm, saluting as the car passed, the chauffeur not slowing down, Murad responding with a wave. As they approached the farm he had become quiet – she sensed the weight of his responsibilities settling on him, and she too felt this weight. Their income derived from this place, and hundreds of men worked on the farm, all looking to Murad and now in some degree to her for their livelihood. People in Islamabad marveled that Murad could spend such long periods at the farm; how then would she do here, a city girl to the core? She would be dependent a great deal upon him, and even more upon herself, upon her resources, as Murad would put it.

A series of archways had been built of bamboo and tree branches, the final one illuminated with an electronic sign that signaled in flashing green and blue lights,
happy marraj sir well-come madam
.

‘The poetry of arrival,’ joked Murad, breaking the silence, taking her hand and squeezing it.

They drove through an orchard, then through a heavy wooden gate that closed behind them, leaving the crowd outside. It was calm, the house servants offering garlands, men she had never before met, and who would now always be part of her life. The simplicity of the house at first surprised Lily, a plain wooden door leading from the car park, then only eight rooms, built in a U around a grassy courtyard. The lawn opening out from the top end of the courtyard, however, was truly immense, decorated with hundreds, no thousands of oil lamps in little clay dishes, burning along the walls, sparkling in the trees, making geometric designs along the edges of flower beds, disappearing in the far distance. The garden had been his mother’s one contribution to the farm –
a legacy to a woman, to me,
thought Lily hopefully – six acres enclosed by a wall, with rose beds, groupings of jacaranda trees, flame-of-the-forest, thick banyans with their suckers planted like proliferating elephants’ legs. A lily pond, the lily pads two feet across. His mother would come in the season and herself prune back the roses, hands which did no other work, as Murad had told her.

Two dogs of the local
bhagariya
breed, resembling wolves, capered around Murad, jumping up, licking at his hand, not quite daring to leap up on him, while he said, ‘Bad dogs, no, no!’ – but playing with them, patting away their paws.

Her perceptions blurred from sleeping in the car, wishing she had a moment to reflect, to arrange herself, Lily knew how much her response to the house and the place mattered to Murad. Petting one of the dogs, which licked its lips with a shy tongue, its creamy yellow snout pricked with black whiskers, Lily felt the place resounding within her, strange sharp smells, servants wearing village clothes bustling past carrying the bags, so many people. The lamps arranged in the lawn blinked and flared as a breeze came up.

‘This is our room,’ said Murad, opening a door. And in a shy tone, ‘I had it fixed for us, see. It was my father’s bedroom.’

It had been redone tastefully, the new-laid rosewood floor gleaming with fresh varnish, rosewood shutters, doors, windows – ‘The wood came from our own trees,’ he told her. A pale blue Persian carpet cooled the room and made it feminine, as did the modern white furniture, arranged too formally in front of the fireplace. He made her sit on the sofa, bounce on the new bed. ‘Do you know, I’ve never slept a single night in this room. I didn’t want my father to come here and find that I’d stepped into his place. Until a month ago his farm clothes were still in the closets. I asked his permission. Now it’s you and me, darling, now it’s our turn.’

They ate dinner in the bedroom, starting with the last bottle of excellent wedding champagne, which they had brought from Islamabad – Mino had given them several cases as a present, unobtainable from the bootleggers in Islamabad, smuggled on a launch from Dubai into Karachi. Lily went to her suitcase, which a servant had carried in, and removed a packet of tea candles. She lit them all over the room, then turned off the lights and lay down on the sofa, feeling her muscles relaxing. In a moment she would unpack, finding places for all her things, shoes, shirts, her jewelry in a drawer, her toiletries in the bathroom, which also had been entirely redone, a parquet floor and an antique bathtub lacquered royal blue. She needed to make the room hers, to start with an ordered center and work her way out. Murad sat patiently watching her, didn’t press her to go out and see the house and the garden, which Lily knew had absorbed so much of his love and imagination when living here alone.

The breeze had turned to wind, servants going around closing the shutters all over the house, making a clattering wooden sound.

‘It’s a dust storm,’ he said, when she had finished organ izing her things. ‘Come on, I’ll show you something that you’ve never seen before.’

As she came out of the room, forcing open the door, climbing a circular staircase up to the roof, the wind struck her, bent her over, snatching away the words they shouted. The sand peeled over them, fine but hard, spattering, liquid in its movement. Before they went up Murad had wrapped cloths around their heads, leaving just a slit for the eyes, muffling them.

When they were up on the roof, above the treetops, he lit a powerful searchlight and placed it on the ground, then led her forward.

‘Look,’ he shouted.

At first she didn’t see anything, just the motes of sand streaming past in the light, like snow caught in the headlights of a car racing into a snowstorm. Then, in front of her, twenty meters tall, her shadow projected onto the dust flowing horizontally through the air. She waved her arms, the shadow mimicking her up in the sky, fuzzy, long-limbed. Running forward, right to the edge of the roof, balancing against the wind, she watched her shadow become tiny, diffuse, armless, headless. A line of eucalyptus trees close to the house waved and bent wildly, leaves being stripped away, leaves from distant trees in the garden swirling past, and she thought, in exultation,
This is life, this is real and actual. This is ours.
Facing into the wind, she took the cloth from her head, held it fluttering like a pennant for a moment and then released it, letting it sail away, attenu ated, white, flashing into the darkness.

‘Be careful,’ shouted Murad in her ear, coming up and taking hold of her elbow. ‘Don’t fall!’

‘Dance with me,’ she said. She would always remember this sandstorm, this eerie yellow light. Taking his arm, putting it around her waist, she held him very close, her face buried in his neck, eyes closed, the wind singing and fading.

Everyone spoiled her, everyone smiled on the young pretty bride. A month passed, then six weeks. The servants studied her with wide-open eyes, wondering what role she would play in the household, cooked elaborate meals, quail
pilau,
veal in a thick brown curry, grilled lamb, carrot
halva
. The orchard manager sent the first guavas, pink-fleshed and sweet, another time an enormous honeycomb, still attached to the branch on which it had grown, carried to her on a broad plank, the comb sopping. Like the chicken at the farm, the eggs, she had never tasted such good honey, spiced sharp by the clover that the bees fed on. In those first weeks she slept as if making up for months and years, waking in the morning, kissing Murad as he went off to the fields, then falling asleep again. Her fibers loosened, her mind settled to the pace of the farm.

Murad and Lily always had their breakfast on the lawn, the air soft, birds calling, babblers, lorikeets, bulbuls, thrushes, hoopoes, the brain-fever bird, from the orchard the booming call of the coucal – Murad knew all the names, of the plants, the birds. Mongooses played in the road sometimes when they walked in the fields, through lanes of sugarcane, or in the orchard, being flooded now with water, so that the thick black soil newly turned by the plow glistened and gave up a ripe odor.

‘Do you know why they sent you the honey?’ he asked her at breakfast, as she devoured her second slice of crisp toast with quick little bites, finishing and licking her fingers.

‘Because they think I’m too thin?’

‘Because they think it helps you get pregnant.’

He said this with a little moue, knowing that the subject irritated her. Perhaps it
would
be better, to leap into childbearing in this first surge of their marriage, to begin the new life with a new life beside her. She tried to imagine herself loving the child, but could think only of the pain, her body torn and stretched, the body that she cared so much about, which she had entirely lived for, its pleasures, wine and intoxication, clothing herself, pleased by herself in the mirror, undressing in front of men, silently expectant. And then, to be hostage to the child, fighting against it, finally with a sigh of relief becoming absorbed in applesauce and feeding, adoring its little feet and hands, buying it costumes printed with bunnies and ducks. Murad certainly wanted her to become a mother, to be mothering, even at the cost of losing interest in fashion and appearance, making baby talk, finding her joy in a child’s first tooth and its first words.

Before the marriage they luxuriated in their plans, at parties ignoring the other guests, during long picnics, making lists of things to buy, apportioning responsibilities, making resolutions. She saw that now the plans must be renegotiated, reconceived. She had believed that her personality would be subsumed in their larger personality as a couple, living into each other, but already the strangeness of the initial engagement wore off and she went back to being – exactly – herself. A little crack opened up as if in the perimeter walls of the compound at Jalpana, through which a poisonous scent, like very strong attar, overpowering, overripe, musky, seeped into their life together – the pull of her old life, of other lives. Why did he have to speak so slowly, to explain in such detail the mechanics of the sprinklers in the greenhouses?