Shabanu (11 page)

Sharma comes around to the side of the camel and catches me in one arm as I lift a quilt onto the mirrored pannier. She spins me away from my task. The way she reads my thoughts takes my breath away.

“Truly, Shabanu,” she says, holding my chin in her hand, “a man’s love is a blessing. You and Phulan are lucky. Your father is a good man, and he has seen to it that you will marry well.”

I can’t answer, because a knot of unidentifiable feeling has paralyzed my throat and tongue and brought tears to my eyes.

“God willing, your brain will unscramble itself soon,
and you will know I speak the truth,” she says, giving my cheek a painful tweak. I manage a smile and hug her hard.

“If you say so, Auntie Sharma,” I whisper into her hair.

I wonder whether Dadi will be cross with me when we meet farther down the track toward home. If only I can keep my feelings under control!

The breeze is hot and dry with the sun still ringed by haze as we set off for home.

Dadi smiles when he sees us. He gives no clue that he saw me at the wrestling yesterday. My cousins are happy to see Auntie, who smiles for the first time in two days as she takes them from Dadi, hauling them down and wiping their faces, clucking as if Dadi has kept them badly.

Auntie takes every opportunity to show Mama how superior she is for having borne Uncle two sons. Mama always takes it in good humor, but I do wonder; if she ever wishes she’d had sons, she never shows it. I notice for the first time a strain about Auntie’s eyes and mouth and an extra swelling of her breasts. Perhaps she will bear another son before the year is out.

Mithoo trots up to Xhush Dil’s side, looking up to me for a treat. I have nothing to give him, but I slip to the ground and hug his neck, which seems to have grown even thicker in the two days since I saw him last. He prances as if he’s too old for such things, his shoulder as high as my head, his feet each bigger than my hand stretched to its broadest. Then he bleats like a lamb and nuzzles my ear. I sympathize, for I too feel like a child struggling to know what it is to be grown.

By the time
we reach the
toba
, Grandfather has fallen back into his torpid state, like a beetle in winter. Dadi worries about him, and Mama makes special efforts to make things that he likes to eat.

“He’ll come back,” she tells Dadi. “He’s been this way for years, and he always comes back. Don’t worry.” But Dadi continues to worry, stopping by Grandfather on his string cot in the shade of the courtyard wall to interest
him in a camel that’s fallen ill or a batch of new lambs. Grandfather just nods and sucks at his
hookah
.

The water in the
toba
is slowly drying up, but Dadi says we have enough for the two months before we leave for Mehrabpur to prepare for the wedding.

One night Phulan shakes me awake in the middle of a deep sleep.

“Shabanu!” she shouts from such a great distance I can barely hear her.

She yanks the quilt away, and suddenly my skin is pierced by thousands of needles. The wind is howling around us. I can’t see anything when I open my eyes, but I can tell by the sound and feel that it’s a monstrous sandstorm, the kind few living things survive without protection. Phulan pulls me by the hand, but I yank away.

“Mithoo!” I stumble about the courtyard, tripping over huddled chickens, clay pots, and bundles of reeds that have broken away from the entrance. “Mithoo!”

Hands outstretched, I feel my way around the courtyard wall, where Mithoo normally sleeps. When I get to where the reeds were stacked on their stalks, lashed side by side and tied to cover the doorway, there is a gaping hole. Quickly I make my way around the courtyard again. Mithoo is gone.

“You can’t find him without a light and something to put over your eyes!” Phulan shouts, pulling on my arm. Together we drag the bed through the doorway. Mama struggles to close the window shutters, and Phulan and I manage to push the door shut and wedge the bed against
it. Dadi lights a candle and swears softly as the light fills the room. Grandfather and Sher Dil are missing too.

“Where can he have gone?” Mama gasps, her eyes bright with fear. Grandfather had been sound asleep, and the storm must have wakened him.

Dadi uses the candle to light the kerosene storm lantern and pulls the bed away from the door. Mama throws a shawl around his shoulders. He pulls it over his head, and I follow him out to the courtyard, where
khar
shrubs, their shallow roots torn from the dry sand, tumble and hurl themselves against the walls.

With my
chadr
over my face, I can open my eyes enough to see the haze of the lantern in Dadi’s hand, the light reflecting from the dust in a tight circle around him.

Auntie has already closed up her house, and Dadi pounds on the door for several minutes before she opens it again and we slip inside.

“Have you seen Grandfather?” asks Dadi.

“And Mithoo and Sher Dil?” I shout.

She stands in the center of her house, mouth open and speechless, her hands raised helplessly. My cousins stand behind her skirt, their eyes wide. From between her feet Sher Dil’s black nose glistens in the lamplight. But no Grandfather and no Mithoo.

“Come to our house,” Dadi orders her, handing me the lantern. “I’ll close up here. Shabanu, come back for me,” he says, bending to light Auntie’s storm lantern.

When I return, Dadi holds the light so we can see each other.

“Mithoo will be fine,” he says, and I know it is a warning not to ask to look for him. “When the wind has died and it’s light, we’ll find him standing near a tree by the
toba.”

Through my mind race visions of Mithoo trying to stay with the other camels, but the females push him away, as they have since his remarkable birth. They treat him as if he’d been born of another species. Dadi is right. Mithoo has a chance if he can stay with the herd and find shelter in the lee of a dune. But Grandfather can never survive a storm like this.

Dadi holds my hand as we step back into the vicious wind. It slaps us with a terrible force, driving thousands of sand grains through our clothes and against our shielded faces.

“Grandfather! Grandfather!” I shout, but the wind tears the sound from my mouth and hurls it away before I can hear it. I catch wisps of Dadi’s voice calling out.

Never have I seen such a storm. I wonder whether Dadi, or even Grandfather, has.

In half an hour we know it’s no use. We are exhausted and sick, our skin raw from the sand, our voices gone from shouting and gulping in dust. I close my burning eyes and let Dadi lead me home.

Mama, Phulan, Auntie, and the boys huddle under shawls in the hot, swirling dark. There is no escaping the sand, even indoors, and everything is gritty with the dust that blows with great force through the thatch and around
the cracks in the doors and shutters. Mama runs to us and takes the lanterns. She holds me against her for a second.

Her eyes are haunted. I pray Grandfather will die quickly of heart failure and not be skinned alive by the sand and suffocated.

Phulan lifts her hands from over her face, and I can’t tell whether she’s been crying.

“Your eyes are bright red,” she says, looking from Dadi to me and back again.

My vision is blurred, and Phulan leads me to her quilt. Dadi and I both lie down, and Mama dips the corner of her
chadr
into fresh water in which healing desert mint has soaked, and squeezes drops into our eyes. It burns like fire, and I cry out. Even Dadi grunts as Mama gently squeezes the water into the corners of his eyes.

The night is endless. Branches—it feels like entire trees—crash into the walls and thatch. Mama thinks she hears a voice call out. Dadi gets up and lights the lantern. He pushes open the door and goes outside, but there is nothing.

“There is some light out there,” he says when he returns a few minutes later. The sand has got into the new watch he bought in Rahimyar Khan. It stopped at five minutes after two. Fear and pain have blurred the time, and we have no way of knowing whether it’s morning or afternoon.

The storm goes on for hours more, and we are too exhausted to go outside again until the wind dies. The boys
whimper. Sher Dil stays under Mama’s skirt and never makes a sound. The rest of us are silent, as if our souls have blown outside with Grandfather, tossed with the dust on the wind.

And then, as suddenly as it began, the storm is over. The wind has torn holes in the thatch, and pale, watery sunlight filters through, even before the wind is quiet. Dadi lifts his head, and dust cascades from the folds of his shawl. His mustache, eyebrows, and eyelashes are coated with pale powder, and the rims and whites of his eyes are blood-red. He looks like a fearful ghost.

Still none of us speaks. Our noses and mouths and throats are parched and caked with dust.

Mama lifts the lid from a pot and pours some water into cups, and I pass them around.

It is late afternoon. I shake the dust from my clothes and hair. Mama wets the end of my
chadr
so I can wipe some of the dust from my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.

“Quickly,” she says, following me to the door. She insists we take a water pot in case we should find Grandfather alive.

The air is calm and cool. The storm has buried all signs of civilization. Even our courtyard looks like a piece of desert, the neat mud walls and storage mounds beaten down and draped with sand.

Outside, the desert has been rearranged. Unfamiliar dunes roll where the land used to lie flat. Stands of shrub and thorn trees are no more. Nothing looks the same. Dadi looks back over his shoulder at the house and fixes
a course for the
toba
, where we hope Grandfather will be, somehow safe with the camels.

As we reach the top of each dune, I expect to see water. When we’ve gone farther than it should be, we split up, Dadi walking into the sun, quivery and pale on the horizon, and I with my back to it. The sand is powdery underfoot, its fresh whiteness an obscenity to me, covering up the devastation it has wrought.

“Grandfather!” I shout, with little hope. “Grandfather, where are you?” If Mithoo is anywhere within hearing, he’ll come to the sound of my voice.

According to the legend of the thirsty dead, men lost in the desert tie a turban into the branches of the highest shrubs, then take shelter underneath and wait for help. My eyes scan the few thorn trees, spiky
kharin
, and hardy
pogh
for the pale blue turban Grandfather wore yesterday.

At the foot of a hillock I see a sand-covered lump too small to be a dune, and my heart lurches into my mouth. I turn and shout, “Dadi! Here, Dadi, here!”

I put down the water jar I’ve been carrying on my head and run toward the thing in the sand.

I fall to my knees and scrape the sand blanket away to find the body of a black baby camel, knees tucked under him, chin on the ground, as if asleep. I pick up his perfect little head and brush the sand from his tightly shut eyes and pinched-down nostrils. Perhaps he’d been sick and unable to move when his mother urged him. He’d just given up here, and the sand had covered him.

“Poor baby,” I say softly, stroking the curly dark fur. Where is his mother, and the other camels? And where is the
toba?

Dadi runs over the hillock. He stops when he sees the dead baby and clucks his tongue. Hands on hips, he looks around with a strange expression on his face.

Suddenly he falls to the ground and begins digging with his hands. The sand flies out behind him in a powdery shower.

“Here!” he says, holding up a handful of damp sand. “This is our
toba!”

There on the far edge is the thorn tree where I tied Mithoo’s goatskin milk bag, where he and I sat after his birth.

I turn back to Dadi, who continues to dig, the sand flying out behind him now in heavy gray clumps.

Finally he sits back on his heels, hands resting on his thighs, breathing heavily. He throws his head back and looks at the sky.

“Allah, Allah,” he says softly, tears streaking through the dust on his temples.

I go to his side and squat down to peer into the hole he’s dug. A small puddle has formed in the wet sand at the bottom.

“Dadi, there’s water enough for a day or two, until we find Grandfather. We’ll survive.” We’ll have to find the camels quickly and bury Grandfather. We have enough three-year-old males to pack and move to the settled area, where Phulan will live the rest of her days after she is
wed. Surely the storm will not have filled the wells at Dingarh.

“We’ll be all right,” I say.

The sun has slipped below the horizon, and there’s little color in the sky; the day has stolen quietly away. Dadi stands and I fetch the water pot. Together we walk home, realizing we must leave the desert as soon as possible.

Mama, Auntie, and Phulan have cleaned the houses and shaken the sand from our bedding. They have put the mats back on the floor, and are busy now carrying debris from the courtyard. The little boys are making piles of
khip
to repair the thatch in the morning. Sher Dil watches, his chin on his paws.

Dadi sleeps early, waking for a supper of stew made of leftover meat. The new moon is waxing, and Dadi prepares to go out again in search of Grandfather and the camels, using the stars as guides.

“I’m going with you,” I say. Dadi shakes his head.

“You help Mama pack. I’ll be back by morning.”

Phulan, Mama, and I gather our possessions together again, our cooking pots and plates and cups, our ax and ropes and harnesses, our half-empty water pots, our spindles for making cord, wooden spoons, and whisks.

After several hours Phulan and I drag Grandfather’s string cot outside to sleep in the courtyard again, in case he should return during the night.

The moon and stars are brighter than before, the storm having cleared the dust from the air. The shadowless blue-white
light is eerie. Mama cries quietly inside. Phulan goes to her, Sher Dil trotting at her heels, and I am asleep before she reaches the door.

Sometime later, in the hours before dawn, the magic symphony of the animals’ bells wakes us,
ta-dong-a-room-a-long-chink-a-dong
. I run, apprehensive and groggy with fitful sleep, to the courtyard gate. Dadi’s turban glows the same blue-white as the stars in a makeshift harness around the neck of Xhush Dil. The others, fifty or so big camels and dozens of babies, follow in a close knot. They look as if they’ve just been out grazing. Among them is Mithoo, one of the herd now.