Season of the Rainbirds (14 page)

In the partial darkness of the veranda Bano sits sieving wholemeal flour through a muslin hammock. She is so engrossed in the chore that flies drinking fluid from the corners of her eyes go unnoticed. Below the hammock is a large brass dish which catches the shower of plain flour, to be used for making pastry. She raises an eyebrow for emphasis and asks me whose daughter I am. The corners of her mouth are white with froth. She claps her hands – imitating the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings – and sends a puff of flour into the air. She takes the hookah bowl and goes over to the clay stove where the cow-dung fuel burns. Some hookah smokers, like Father, seem to prefer the cow-dung fire to ordinary coals
.

Bano cuts off the whiskers of her marmalade cat; she says the plague germs are carried on a cat’s whiskers. The cat and the goslings live in harmony. The goslings’ tiny melodious whistles turn to trumpet-like honks with age. They peck at the balls of wool as Bano loops the strands around her left hand and elbow. The cat sniffs the core of an apple. It shivers
.

The top two squares of each window have jade underwater mirrors instead of glass. Some of the panes are cracked and throw feathery rainbows across the veranda at certain times of the afternoon. Izmayal, Bano’s husband, with a skin as deeply pored as orange peel, is in the small room off the veranda. He lies on his side with one bent knee raised in the air – a three-angled shoemaker’s last. He cocks a finger at me. He exists outside the domain of mundane happenings. His time is not commensurate with the rest of the world. Ripe with wisdom, cunning and self-knowledge; manly, abstemious and brave, he is alternately execrated and idolised by me. He fought in the Bangladeshi war, and now has no feet. We lost that war and when he came back everyone spat at him. An old woman struck him on the face. He knows the names for the winds at every point of the compass. He taught me the rhyme that helps me to remember the correct spelling of Mississippi. He says that four fledgling hummingbirds can fit into the bowl of a teaspoon, and that an adult hummingbird, once stripped of beak and feathers, is no larger than a bumble-bee. With effortless regality he feeds shiny pieces of knowledge to me. What is manifest to him is news to me. And yet I am afraid of approaching him; I listen to his stories from the door. I scratch behind my right ear with the first finger of my left hand
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Once I found Bano struggling with the cork of a large bottle. She started, stammered and, recovering, said it was a king-size Coca-Cola bottle, found nowhere else but Lahore. Had I never seen one before? Hadn’t I ever been to Lahore? No? I should get my mother to take me
.

Once every three months Izmayal drags a rope cot out into the courtyard and pores over the columns of premium-bond-winning numbers. The crispy brittle bonds look like toy money. Izmayal arranges them like a hand of cards before him. Bano circles the cot, praying. Izmayal crouches on all fours – a bee on a flower – and tries to match the numbers. The cot creaks its protest. A shout escapes Izmayal when the first few numbers of a winning sequence raise his hopes and guide him along, only to mock him with the last digit of the sequence. An infinite variety of options reveal themselves to him during these first few seconds. His frustration is evident from the throbbing of his temples and the tightness of his jawline. He gathers the bonds and puts them away to ferment for another three months. How could one’s happiness be reduced to the status of a number in a sequence, he seems to be asking himself. Crestfallen, he pulls himself across the courtyard and the veranda and goes back to his room
.

One of Bano’s cows has a pink udder. It is here that a bat once planted its fangs. The bats wander all over the body, their heat-sensors searching for the tissue richest in blood. Bano calls me over and directs the pink appendage at me. I open my mouth and a thin thread of milk enters my mouth, clear of my lips. She lets me feel the calf’s head for the stumps of the emerging horns
.

I stand in the door and Izmayal explains to me what a shooting star is. Halfway through the explanation I lift an exultant finger in the air: I know what he’s talking about. The cleric’s wife says that they are arrows of fire hurled by Allah against the evil djinn when they try to attain to the lower heavens to overhear the conversation of angels. Izmayal laughs, slightly short of breath and with echoes that seem to unfurl for ever. His lips ride up his yellow teeth. ‘There’s no Allah, girl.’

Monday

Maulana Hafeez’s wife picked up the large green envelope from the shelf. Earlier in the morning, while Maulana Hafeez was still in the mosque, she had found the envelope lying inside the front door. It was addressed to her and had been dropped through the door sometime during the night. On the back, beneath the circular shellac seal was the name and address of the sender: the letter was written by Maulana Hafeez nineteen years ago, from Raiwind – the site of an annual conference of missionaries from all over the Islamic world.

Maulana Hafeez leaned his head against the back of his armchair and looked up. High up, a female spider was knitting her hammock. Maulana Hafeez removed his glasses. He smoothed the soft hairs of his beard and turned his head sideways to stare through the open door of the bedroom on to the courtyard. Bright light filled the house and Maulana Hafeez could sense the impending heat of the rising sun. The monsoon was continuing – now smooth and appeasable, now dramatic and capricious. There were colours on the washing line and a series of parallel bars of sunlight – filtered grainily through the screens – fringed the edge of the veranda.

He straightened when he saw his wife come out of her bedroom, her feet entangled in the bars of sunlight as she crossed the veranda.

‘This came earlier, Maulana-ji.’ She placed the letter in Maulana Hafeez’s lap.

She went to the other side of the room to bring a chair over to her husband’s side. Maulana Hafeez examined the letter with a furrowed brow. There was a blank moment as he realised what he held in his hands. ‘But today’s only Monday. These weren’t due till Wednesday.’

The woman was settled before him. ‘They have been delivered,’ she said. ‘They say Mujeeb Ali and his men beat up the postmaster last night. But he insisted that he didn’t have them yet.’

‘That’s what he told me.’

‘The postmaster and his wife are not in town, Maulana-ji. They must’ve delivered them during the night and fled.’

Maulana Hafeez lifted his strained features towards her. ‘But where could they have run to? That woman was … with child.’

His wife did not respond. She watched the envelope keenly. Maulana Hafeez applied vertical thumbnails to the caked shellac and snapped the seal into two half-moons. Inside the official green envelope was the original letter and four photostated sheets explaining the unusual nature of the correspondence. The train crash was described at length; there was a poorly reproduced photograph of the derailed carriages. The text seemed to Maulana Hafeez to be written by an investigative journalist for the Friday supplement. He read all eight sides. His wife sat by him, placid and calm.

At last, Maulana Hafeez picked up the envelope which, he now knew, he must himself have sealed and addressed nineteen years before. Scrawled on the paper in blue water-based ink – it had faded to a grey – were his wife’s name and the postal directions: the mosque’s name, the number of the street, the letter of the English alphabet assigned to the block. Maulana Hafeez could not recall writing the letter but he recognised his handwriting. He opened the side of the envelope with careful pinches, releasing a faint smell that was familiar to him as the smell of the cupboard in the mosque where old and torn copies of the Qur’an were kept.

When he finished reading, Maulana Hafeez refolded the page along the two creases and returned it to its envelope; he then placed the small envelope and the explanatory literature inside the larger green envelope. Then, with heavy limbs and unsteady hands, he tore the whole thing up.

There was a mass of green, pale-yellow and white squares in his lap when he looked up at his wife. ‘It was nothing,’ he said quietly. He collected the torn paper in his hands and stretched out his arms towards her, as though making an offering.

She stood up and took the scraps – each tiny square scuffed at the edges – and went into the kitchen. She threw the paper on to the fire. The flames changed colour briefly and then returned to their original yellow.

Maulana Hafeez pointed up at the spider when she came back. ‘This room needs a clean,’ he said.

The woman returned the chair to its original position against the wall. She glanced up. The spider was still working. ‘Not till the rains are over, Maulana-ji,’ she said in her usual neutral tone. ‘And you had better put on a vest, Maulana-ji. The rains are bad for you.’

Maulana Hafeez was massaging his scalp. He yawned. ‘Do you remember what Atya used to say? Seasons and governments are at their most dangerous whilst changing.’ He gave a little laugh.

She forced a smile. ‘It seems true, Maulana-ji. We’re still paying for the last elections.’

Maulana Hafeez nodded. He looked out of the room. A sparrow was perched on the brass tap, drinking water by reaching down and inserting its beak into the tarnished spout. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I missed Gul-kalam’s whistle last night.’

The barber opened the paned door of his shop and peered out into the eleven o’clock glare. The street was deserted; only the trees and their shadows stood on the verges. He closed the door and came back inside. He reached under the bench and from behind the cardboard boxes he took out his radio. Wiping the dust from the top of the radio set with his left sleeve he carried a chair to the electric socket. He put the radio on the chair, pushed home the two prongs of the plug and placed an eye to one of the holes punched into the back of the set: the glass valves were beginning to give off a saffron glow. The bakelite casing had three large cracks which had been mended with criss-crossing copper wire, like a stitched up wound, and a resinous substance resembling living eggwhite. Once whilst sweeping the floor the barber had dragged the chair with the radio aside, forgetting that the set was still plugged in. It was pulled off the chair and hit the wall. The casing was broken but the circuits still received, enabling the barber and Zafri to continue listening to their favourite programme, while three walls away Maulana Hafeez slept his after-breakfast sleep.

While the radio was warming up, the barber went along the platform to Zafri’s shop. To keep out flies and marauding cats the door to Zafri’s shop had been pulled to. By the door a cloud of flies hovered above the large drum into which chickens were thrown to die after their throats had been cut. The drum was set at ground level and reached up to touch its rim against the platform. Its lumen was coated with blood, feathers and blue faecal matter. The dying bird would thrash about inside the drum, hurling itself against the sides, as though electric shocks were being applied to its little body. Sometimes a bird, squawking with fear and pain, would rise up to the top of the drum obliging Zafri to hurriedly improvise a lid.

The barber rapped his knuckles on the door and said, ‘Time for Talkeen Shah.’ He parted the door and poked his head in.

Zafri was wrapping a headless carcass in muslin. He hung it by the hind legs from the hook attached with a rope to the ceiling. The meat dangled – the amputated front legs a foot or so above the floor – ina posture which the live animal might have adopted when jumping over a fence. Zafri then locked the door and followed his friend into the barber shop.

‘What happened in the last episode?’ Zafri asked distractedly as he sprawled himself on the bench, using a towel as pillow. The barber checked the top of the radio for warmth. The programme,
Life and Opinions of Talkeen Shah
, was in its eleventh year. It chronicled twice weekly the wayward fortunes of the eponymous hero – an eccentric, unfailingly charming figure; middle-aged, and bitter at having been denied wealth and status. He had somehow – the account was altered regularly by him – fetched up in a leafy suburb of Lahore, where he now spent his days brooding over his unrequited love for the lady next door, a kindly college professor – and nostalgically looking back to the days before the Partition. And everything in life – the widespread corruption, the state of the young people, the high cost of living, the latest scandal from the film world, the smuggling and the kidnappings – everything was brilliantly lampooned as Talkeen Shah worked himself into impotent rages over minor incidents around the neighbourhood. The barber reminded both Zafri and himself of the previous episode. They laughed.