Shabanu (14 page)

Phulan lets out a dainty yelp. I raise my eyes from the ascending goatskin in time to see Xhush Dil snatch her
chadr
from her head and wave it like a banner, his front legs stepping out before him, his neck straining against
the weight of the filled bucket. For the first time in weeks, laughter bubbles up into my throat, and I barely manage to holler to him to stop before he pulls the whole stanchion away from the well. I laugh until my belly aches.

Even Auntie smiles. Xhush Dil stands in place, tossing the
chadr
like a flag, as though he were a carnival clown. I whoop until tears stream from my eyes, and I clutch my stomach. Phulan, too, shrieks with laughter, and it feels so good, as if life will go on after all.

The wind whips our skirts around us and plasters our tunics to our chests as we walk from the camp. The voyage seems like a haze of sand, the sun a pallid disk over the dunes. We pass dozens of animals felled by hunger and thirst on the track to Mehrabpur. The bodies of six camels lie, ropes still joining them nose to tail, their feet raised as if they walk in death. They are partially covered by blowing sand; the meat has dried on their bones, robbing the foxes and jackals of a meal.

At the end of the second day a breeze bears the overripe smell of green across the desert. A line of vegetation marks the irrigation channel built by Hamir’s father on his twenty-five acres. Turning the desert to farmland killed him, crippling him with old age before the years had a chance. An image of Phulan, her black-draped figure stooped over the field ahead, stands before the eye of my imagination.

Dadi breaks away and rides to the oasis to greet Hamir and Murad. In the distance a group of figures seems to float toward us across the desert on a shimmering lake of
reflected heat. Three of them wear white, the color of mourning.

Bibi Lal, Hamir’s mother, is a large woman with wise eyes and pendulous breasts. She carries a sweating pot of water. Bibi Lal’s husband has been dead for two monsoons now, but she will wear white to mourn him the rest of her life.

Her daughter-in-law Kulsum walks behind Bibi Lal, an infant clutched against her shoulder. Kulsum’s small daughter walks beside her, a bare-bottomed two-year-old boy on her hip; her five-year-old son runs beside them, driving two goats with a stick. Kulsum is a few years older than Phulan. She is thin and pale, with deep lines around her mouth and eyes.

Kulsum wears white to mourn her husband, Lal Khan, the elder brother of Hamir and Murad. His body was found last year in a well that belongs to the landowner Nazir Mohammad.

Bibi Lal raises her large, work-worn hand to her forehead and welcomes us.

“How I wish my husband, peace be with him, were here!” she says. “He would be so happy to see the daughters of his beloved cousin marry our sons.”

“My husband thought of him as a brother,” Mama says. “He loves your sons as if they were his own.”

Bibi Lal folds Phulan into her arms and kisses her. Mama looks relieved. Many young women come to their husband’s houses as slaves to their mothers-in-law.

“Sakina!” Bibi Lal shouts to her young daughter. “Stop dawdling and bring the ladle!”

The water is sweet and cool. Never have I tasted such silvery freshness! There is plenty; Bibi Lal pours cup after cup for us until we can drink no more.

Everyone focuses attention on Phulan. But I watch Kulsum and wonder whether bearing children will rob my sister of her beauty while she is still a girl.

The women show us where to make our camp within walking distance of the canal.

“Come here,” says Bibi Lal, “under the trees.”

“We prefer to be in the open,” says Mama. “We are desert people!” Mama’s teeth dazzle white in her dark face, and Bibi Lal gives in.

Bibi Lal insists on helping us make camp. She sends Sakina to fetch extra baskets and water for mixing mud and rolls her sleeves above her elbows. We build frames of cut tree branches and tie reed mats against them. We thatch the roofs with
khip
, build a mud platform to serve as kitchen and a second platform for prayers, with a small carved slab at one end that faces toward Mecca. We sing and laugh as we work.

The clouds remain for several days after our fasting begins. We neither eat nor drink until the sun goes down, when we break our fast with tea. The first two days I feel dizzy and sleepy, but soon I am accustomed to an empty stomach. After prayers we have a meal of lentils, yogurt, and
chapatis
.

Dadi sees Hamir and Murad every day. He brings news of them to the campfire. Hamir has built a cottage for Phulan on their land. A cottage! With an indoor kitchen, a separate room for sleeping, and a courtyard surrounded by a strong wall. The women are covering it now with mud, straw, and cow dung.

Phulan’s eyes dance with excitement.

“Have you seen him?” she asks Dadi. A girl never refers to the man she will marry by name.

Dadi smiles and strokes her hair.

“Hamir is noble and strong and handsome,” he replies, and Phulan claps her hands, then folds them over her smile, half in pleasure, half in embarrassment.

We won’t see Hamir and Murad until the wedding day, and even then I’m not certain I will see Murad. I wonder what he looks like now. Has he grown handsome, or do his ears still stick out? Is his neck muscular now like Hamir’s?

I strain my eyes toward the fields looking for Murad when I take the camels to graze. Then Dadi tells me I mustn’t take the camels out alone.

“You must stay with Phulan every second,” he tells me.

“But she won’t come with me to graze the camels!” Daydreaming has overtaken Phulan’s every waking minute.

“You mustn’t go alone.”

“Why not?” I demand. I am filled with dread that I might be kept from the camels and from wandering where I please.

“Do as I say!” He turns and walks away.

“Dadi, I have so little time.” My voice is barely a whisper. I’m not sure he heard. But he turns slowly toward me.

“Nazir Mohammad has returned from the city,” he says.

“Why should we fear him?” Dadi squints at me for a moment, then squats in the sand and gestures for me to join him.

“This land was a patch of dust, good only for browsing camels, when Hamir’s father bought it,” he says. “Nazir Mohammad didn’t care about it then. When they dug the canal and planted crops, Nazir watched to see how the corn grew. The harder they worked, the more the land produced. And the angrier Nazir grew. Then one day Lal Khan didn’t come home. Hamir and Murad searched every inch of the land.

“A month passed and Kulsum gave birth to her fourth child. Still no trace of Lal Khan. One day her son came running into the courtyard shouting that there was a terrible smell in Nazir’s old well. Kulsum dropped the baby into her daughter’s arms and ran with Hamir and Murad to the well. They found the remains of Lal Khan, his slippers pointing toward the sky.”

“What does Nazir want?” My voice sounds thick and strange.

“Nazir demands a quarter of their crops as compensation for farming the land. Hamir and Murad have stamped deeds, but the court has taken three years to rule. Perhaps
Nazir is influencing the judge. He takes every opportunity to cause trouble.”

“Shouldn’t we tell Phulan?” I ask.

“Why ruin her wedding?” His eyes look weary. “She’ll have the rest of her life to worry. No, just stay with her and be sure to let your mother and me know where you are.”

We spend the next week cooking sweets for the wedding, making dresses for the women of Hamir’s family, and dyeing turbans in bright colors for the men. I drag Phulan out to the fields with me to cut grass for fodder with long, curved sickles. I tell her we have little time to be together, and she comes willingly. I watch over my shoulder as I work.

Kulsum and Sakina bring the children to visit us as we rest in the afternoons. Bibi Lal is kind to Kulsum, and people say she is lucky. But she will be a widow forever, and her grief shows always, even when she smiles.

When the cottage for Hamir and Phulan is finished, Bibi Lal, Kulsum, and Sakina invite us to inspect it. We bring gifts: sweets made with nuts and raisins, scarves that we’ve embroidered with colored silk and mirrors, and dried mushrooms.

Phulan’s eyes grow wide when she sees the house, a square brown box with mud walls and a thatched roof. It’s like any farmhouse at the edge of the desert, but this one is Phulan’s. She turns to us and her eyes are damp, her lips parted. She is speechless.

Bibi Lal clucks at her and urges us inside. She takes the baby from Kulsum and settles him in a sling tied to the cottage rafters. She sends the older children outside to play and brings out a beautiful bottle with a silver base and stopper. She opens the top and passes it around for us to smell the sweet fragrance inside.

“It’s jasmine oil. You must rub Phulan with it in the days before the wedding,” Bibi Lal tells Mama. “Add some cumin, and her skin will be fragrant and smooth and golden.” Phulan blushes with pleasure.

Bibi Lal calls us outside, where tins of white paint sit open and glaring in the morning sun. On a cloth beside the tins are sticks with short goathairs tied to one end. Bibi Lal hands Kulsum a brush and asks her to begin the ceremony of decorating the house where Hamir and Phulan will conceive their sons.

Kulsum paints a fish for fertility, her hand deft and sure. She dots the fish’s eye and hands the brush to Sakina, who paints circles intertwined for harmony in the family, her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth as she concentrates. I paint camels for wealth and hand the brush to Mama. She paints a row of lines with arms and legs and appendages that indicate the sons she wishes for Phulan.

As we paint we talk about the cousins who will come to the wedding. Soon we have paint on our faces and in our hair. We laugh and chatter like sisters.

Phulan is not supposed to paint her own house, for fear
it will bring bad luck. When we finish we sit back to admire our work.

The image of Kulsum, tired and anemic, haunts me. And as we leave, a twinge of regret that I have not seen Murad pinches my heart.

Sharma and Fatima
are due to arrive within a week, and Phulan and I talk happily about seeing them as we fill our water pots at the canal.

“Sharma says I’ll have a son the first year,” says Phulan. I hand a water jar up to her, but she’s looking at the tops of the trees.

“Phulan!” She takes the jar from my hand and gives me an empty one.

“She says if I eat plenty of lentils and milk and butter he’ll be fat and healthy. I hope he looks like his father.”

Hamir is as different from Murad as I am from Phulan. He is wild, like Dadi says I am. He loves horses and rides them hard. But he’s insensitive, coming back with his horse lathered and breathing heavily. He is handsome and tall like Phulan, and impatient, a dreamer. I’ve always liked him less than Murad. He is the older brother by three years. He never had time to join our children’s games. But he is decent. I remember Murad going to him to decide when two of us claimed to have won a race. He offered us the choice of splitting the prize, a melon, or running the race again.

Sharma’s words play through my mind, and the truth steals like a stranger into my heart: Phulan and I are very lucky for desert girls, marrying not only decent men but men who have land, who are richer than anyone in our family.

“Don’t you think he is handsome?” asks Phulan.

I consider for a moment. He was seventeen when we saw him last year at Adil’s wedding. He had a thick mustache and broad, strong hands. He stood very straight. But handsome? As compared with Murad’s thin neck and protruding ears, I’d have to say yes.

“I suppose so,” I reply. How strange that we barely remember how they look, when very soon Phulan will see Hamir every day for the rest of her life.

I hand Phulan another pot. When the pots are full, Phulan loads two pots on my head and I leave her behind
to wash the cloths she uses during her monthly bleeding. She makes a major production of it, to show how grownup she is, and I turn my back on her as she hums over her washing beside the canal.

Xhush Dil, Mithoo, and I walk slowly down the canal path toward our camp as the clouds part for a moment just before the sun sets, leaving a sheen like sun-ripened melon on the water.

The air cools rapidly and mist rises from the canal, making ghostly shadows of the grasses and bushes against the opal sky. Perhaps this will be a good place to live after all.

“Who is this?” asks a smooth, deep voice from the bottom of the canal bank. I look down at a fat man in a silk tunic and drawstring trousers. He leans on a hand-carved shotgun. Laughter booms out from the bushes.

My heart quickens with the realization I’ve disobeyed and left Phulan alone. I lean back against Xhush Dil’s shoulder as if he’ll protect me. Another man with hard eyes, younger and slimmer than the first, steps out from behind a tree. He also has a gun. Both men wear elaborately embroidered caps, finely woven vests, and gold watches. A third man appears, and a fourth—a young man, still part boy.

“How about this one?” the fat man asks the boy-man.

“She’s just a child, Uncle,” he replies, looking me over, up and down with eyes that have seen a great deal for one his age.

I cover my face, for the men look as if they are taking
me apart with their eyes. For the first time I’m grateful that I am small and not so elegant as Phulan. But she will come this same way in a moment, and they will want to take her with them, surely as the mustard blooms in spring!

“That one!” says the slim man, pointing a manicured finger up the canal.

Phulan walks slowly along the bank, her bangles clinking on her brown arm, slender hips swaying, the basket of knotted, wet cloths atop the water jar on her head, another round jar under her arm. She hasn’t seen the men yet, and she looks beautiful and dreamy with the lowering sun glowing behind her like a halo.

The men watch as Phulan catches up with me, her face uncovered and lovely, her nose disk glinting in reflected sunlight, her graceful, pale fingers molded around the curves of the water jars. When she sees the men she stops, but she doesn’t seem alarmed.