Season of the Rainbirds (17 page)

Asgri emerged from the room adjoining the veranda – the room where Judge Anwar was killed. She carried her youngest daughter on her hip. It was necessary for the person in whose name the sacrifice was being made to touch the knife. Zafri raised his head, the blade between his teeth, and the little girl reached down to touch the wooden handle.

Zafri took the knife from his mouth and – his lips moving as he read the appropriate verses – opened the animal’s throat with short, precise cuts. Azhar watched for a few moments then looked away. Buzzards and kites and vultures floated above the house. Crows topped the outside walls, evenly spaced as though arranged there by a human hand.

‘So how’s my friend Gul-kalam, deputy-sahib?’

A few moments passed before Azhar realised that Zafri had addressed him. Asgri, on her way back to the room, stopped and looked back at the butcher. He was concentrating on the blood gushing out of the opening in the throat, his knees pinning the dying animal to the floor. The blood poured out with great force: it was almost as though it was this force, and not the knife, that had torn open the blood vessel.

Dr Sharif said under his breath, ‘Death may be an important part of nature but there’s nothing more unnatural than a dying animal.’

The boy let go of the hind legs. The animal had stopped trying to kick. And within the next minute an eighth head joined the other seven by the wall. Dr Sharif noticed that one of Zafri’s fingers was bandaged. He remarked on it.

‘I cut it on a bone,’ Zafri explained. ‘Now I understand why the cave people used to make weapons out of bones.’

Dr Sharif advised him to stop by at the surgery later. ‘Wounds don’t heal well in the rainy season. Damp, you see. Risk of infection.’

Zafri smiled. ‘You’re not going to pick my pocket that easily, doctor-sahib.’ He gave his eyes an upward roll. ‘I’ll just piss on the cut and cover it with burnt cloth. It’ll be fine by tomorrow.’

Azhar and Dr Sharif left the veranda and entered Judge Anwar’s bedroom. Asgri sat on the bed, surrounded by women. As the men entered Asgri wiped her eyes and rearranged her stole to fully cover her head.

Azhar, seeing her tears, said, ‘You shouldn’t pay attention to Zafri, apa. He’s just careless, uneducated. I’ll talk to him later.’

Asgri rejected the comment. She said to one of the women by her side: ‘It’s not even seven days yet, but I understand that to others it seems like a long time already.’ The woman nodded, shutting her eyes theatrically. ‘So much seems to have happened since then.’

The judge’s daughters – all in white, linseed oil on their hair – were sitting amongst the women. One of the women looked at Azhar and clicked her fingers at the four older girls. Of an age now to be guarded from the eyes of the adult male, they got up silently and left the room. Azhar was not aware of the command but he had registered the distaste that his presence caused on some of the faces in the room.

‘You came about the medicines, doctor?’ Asgri addressed Dr Sharif. The physician answered with a nod, guiltily. The bottles of vibrantly coloured pills, the eggshell-thin vials of injections and the packs of syringes and needles had all been collected in a large box. Dr Sharif took the box from the table and, to avoid having to wrestle with the beggars who were now filling the courtyard, he left by the inside door, emerging on to the back street – the door Judge Anwar would squat by to urinate at night.

It was hot, despite the absence of the sun and despite the fact that it had rained continuously for the past six or seven hours. Azhar pulled the collar of his shirt away from his neck and blew cold breath on to his chest. He sat down on the edge of the only empty chair in the room. With his head bowed and in an unvarying tone of voice, as though reading aloud from a book on his lap, he explained to Asgri the stage which the legal action against the judge’s killers had reached and assured her that he, personally, was supervising the proceedings.

When he finished, Asgri shifted her eyes from her husband’s photograph and nodded briskly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But, Azhar, there is something else. I want you to look through and sort out the papers in the safe. My brothers will need your help and advice when they come back for the tenth-day memorial service on Saturday. We’ve made some decisions. I’m selling everything and going back to Sind. There’s nothing for me here.’ She spoke quietly and softly.

The women let out sighs of protest.

‘No.’ Asgri smoothed away a wrinkle in the guipure counterpane. ‘My mind’s made up. Everything including the house.’ Asgri was from a large feudal family in the south whose land-holdings had been in the family for over three hundred years – since a century before the arrival of the British. An only sister to six brothers, Asgri was dearly loved. It was said that the brothers had been outraged to the point of threatening annulment on discovering, soon after the wedding ceremony, that Judge Anwar smoked cigarettes – something the judge had failed to declare when asking for their sister’s hand in marriage.

Azhar stood up. ‘I’ll come by later, apa.’

‘Be in time for dinner,’ Asgri told him and he nodded. He was aware that some of the women were staring at him with quiet yet defiant hostility.

He turned to Nabila Ali and asked: ‘Is Mujeeb Ali at home today, apa?’

Nabila’s eyes hardened before she answered.

Azhar whispered a
salam-a-lekum
to all the women and left the room.

Zafri had spread a straw mat on the tiles of the veranda and was beginning to cut the meat on a block of tree trunk. He was dividing the quartered carcasses into smaller pieces by efficient strokes of the cleaver, as though attempting a children’s puzzle where a minimum number of intersecting lines must be drawn inside a circle to achieve the maximum number of divisions. ‘The poor animal lost its life and you still complain,’ he said loudly, shaking his head in mock despair when one of the crowd of beggars asked for more than she had been given.

As Azhar walked past the tailor’s shop – a roughly knocked together box of old boards whose corrugated-iron roof was shaking to the rattle of sewing machines – he heard his name being called out.

It was Saif Aziz. He emerged from the shop, clicking open his umbrella and raising an arm in greeting. Azhar waited under a tree as the journalist jumped over puddles towards him.

‘Ah,’ Azhar responded as Saif Aziz introduced himself and they shook hands. ‘I know who you are.’ They walked along the street, protected by the umbrella. ‘You are the person who began printing the countdown to the General’s election-within-ninety-days promise.’

Saif Aziz shrugged. In the newspaper that Saif Aziz had edited four years ago, the countdown to the General’s promised election-day had appeared daily at the foot of the front page, in a large boxed inset.
The elections will be held within the next 28 days, 27 days, 26 days
 … until, a fortnight before day zero, the newspaper was shut down.

‘I intended to go into minus figures,’ Saif Aziz smiled. ‘
The elections were held yesterday, two days ago, three days ago …
’

They were walking towards the courthouse. At the other side of the street a beggar woman with a pick-a-backed child, and a bulging sack slung over her shoulder, was directing another beggar to Judge Anwar’s house.

‘But I do safe work now,’ said Saif Aziz. ‘I have three children to feed and clothe. Though if the General’s recent speeches are anything to go by, they’ll soon shut down every newspaper in the country under the pretext that they’re publishing letters of the alphabet that can be rearranged to form an anti-government message.’

Azhar said, ‘Why are you telling
me
this? I myself try to be as honest as my position allows.’

But Saif Aziz continued on his former line. ‘I’ll tell you something which troubles me at night, deputy-sahib. This is the worst government we’ve ever had and yet this is the only government in my adult life under which I haven’t been to prison.’

They walked on in silence until they came to the school building at the fork at the end of the street and stopped. The smell of decay, of putrefaction was overwhelming here. Water was seeping into the foundations of the school and rotting the underlay further. Water lizards crawled out from between the cracks at the base of the outside wall and scuttled about the street.

‘So what can I do for you?’ Azhar asked Saif Aziz.

‘People aren’t being very co-operative. No one is admitting to having actually received one of those letters. All they want to talk about is who they
think
has got one and what might be in it. Someone even said that one of the maulanas, Hafeez, has received one which he had written to his wife in his less older days, a letter full of love and longing.’

Azhar raised his shoulders. ‘Why are you journalists always chasing after weird stories? Why can’t you write about ordinary things?’

Saif Aziz made the umbrella rotate above their heads. ‘To write about ordinary things is the duty of a novelist: it’s the task of the journalist to write about extraordinary things.’ He grinned.

‘Who said that?’ Azhar snapped his fingers a few times in an effort to remember. He poked Saif Aziz’s chest. ‘That Irishman … what was his name …?’

The other smiled. ‘James Joyce.’

‘Yes, James Joyce.’

Saif Aziz leaned towards Azhar’s face. ‘Should I write about the unusual manner in which the letters were delivered here?’ His voice had quietened to a conspiratorial whisper.

Azhar came out from under the umbrella. ‘If you must write about unusual things then go and write about that goat which I hear has been born with the Prophet’s name on its hide.’

Saif Aziz reached out his hand and took Azhar by the upper arm. ‘One more thing, deputy-sahib,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘I would be interested in knowing what attracts a deputy commissioner to a miserable place like this.’

Azhar freed himself gently. He began to cross to the street that would take him to the courthouse.

‘You see, deputy-sahib,’ Saif Aziz shouted after him. ‘When I ask an ordinary question, no one makes a reply. They just walk away.’

Alice came to the kitchen door and shouted Zébun’s name, calling down to the bedroom. There were two pans on the cooking range, and to avoid contaminating the dessert with the smell of spices she needed another pair of hands.

‘You know how fussy Kasmi-sahib is when it comes to food,’ Alice said as Zébun came and stood alongside her. Zébun stirred the bubbling milk. On the shelf by the range was a peeled orange whose rind had been added to the meat. In a glass of water Alice had dissolved a little food colouring; there were fresh coriander leaves resembling a duck’s webbed feet, and rhomboids of glacé pumpkin – Sikh-yellow, bride-red.

Zébun looked into the pan of meat in front of Alice. ‘Make sure to take out any big cardamoms from brother-ji’s plate,’ she advised the girl. ‘He says they remind him of cockroaches.’

Alice smiled and sucked her teeth. Her lips were painted red. She glanced down at Zébun’s feet and, beaming, said, ‘You’re wearing the new slippers.’ And with a self-congratulatory look she added, ‘I chose the design myself.’

Zébun continued to watch the tiny whirlpools that her stirring produced in the milk.

‘I only wear high heels myself. I don’t like flat slippers,’ Alice was saying. ‘I’m glad I’m not tall, or I wouldn’t be able to wear high heels. I’m going to buy a new pair next Sunday. It’s got rhinestones all along the edges. They say it’s all the rage in the cities.’

She picked up the salt, tilted it above the meat and held it there. Zébun was about to comment on the imprudence of this when with a measured flick of the wrist Alice cut off the flow of the white crystals. She was half smiling and excitedly recounting the details of a recent afternoon when, she claimed, a young man had deliberately bumped into her walking down the street.

‘ “Can’t you see?” I turned around and said sharply. And he answered back, “Of course I can see, that’s why I bumped into you.” ’ She shook her head as though despairing. ‘Men are terrible. Always bothering pretty girls.’ She laughed.

Zébun was staring at Alice. Her eyes moved steadily from the gaudy clothes to the row of plastic beads around the neck and on to the untidily painted lips. ‘Why do you wear that stuff on your lips, girl?’ she said wearily. ‘It’s almost as if you needed to know where your mouth was. It’s too hot for surkhi and powder anyway.’

Alice’s laughter stopped abruptly. Zébun glanced up at her eyes and found herself looking at tears. She let her gaze fall instantly, pretending not to have seen. But the girl realised that she had been seen; she turned off the heat and began to weep openly.

Zébun stood motionless, shocked. Then she too turned off the heat under her pan. ‘What’s the matter, Alice?’ Zébun remembered that something similar had happened a few years back when Alice had just begun to menstruate. The terrified girl had wept inconsolably, thinking she was going to die. Zébun had had to explain to her the changes taking place inside her twelve-year-old body. On that occasion Zébun had instantly guessed the cause of Alice’s fear. And she had begun saving cloth for her – old towels, scraps and cuttings of dress material. Now she folded her arms and tried to think.