Shabanu (16 page)

“Then he orders you to return to Mehrabpur at once.”

“How can that be?” asks Mama. Our tired camels stand, heads lowered, breathing heavily. “My husband was to join us at Derawar.”

“We’ve just come from there to tell you he wants you to go to Mehrabpur. He says to tell you the trouble is past, and it is safe for you to return.”

“I don’t believe it,” says Mama. “He knows I wouldn’t believe it, and he would come himself. Please radio back to Maujgarh and ask them to describe the man who called himself Abassi.”

The
subadar
shrugs his shoulders in exasperation.

“Sister, the radio is for official use.”

“The landlord Nazir from Mehrabpur tried to kidnap and rape my daughters,” Mama says, her eyes flashing. “And if that’s how you treat me, don’t call me sister!”

“I’m sorry,” says
Subadar
Spin Gul. “We can’t get involved in family feuds.”

“We barely escaped with our lives! My husband was due to meet us at Derawar long before now. We never intended to go to Maujgarh. Nazir may have thought we
would go there, as it’s closer. We are Cholistanis. The Rangers have always protected us.”

“I see,” says the
subadar
. He turns and issues orders to his men. “We will stay here with you and see that no harm comes to you,” he says. “We should have an answer back within two hours. For now you look as if you could do with some tea and food.”

Mama and I exchange looks, and it is agreed. We will put ourselves in the care of the Rangers.

“Uuuushshshshh,” I say, and Xhush Dil bends his great shaggy head, his front knees folding under him, then his back legs, and he settles with a quiet, grateful groan. My cousins are still sleeping, and Mama and Phulan take one boy each in their arms while I spread blankets on the ground for them to lie upon. I go back to help Auntie out of her pannier. In the gathering light her face is pale.

“Are you unwell?” I ask. She doesn’t reply but leans heavily on my shoulder as I help her to the quilts where her sleeping sons lie. She turns her back to me and lies curled on her side. Auntie must be very ill indeed if she is unable to complain.

Subadar
Spin Gul and his men unroll tents for us—canvas tents with side walls and windows and ropes. One man has built a fire and is making tea. Another mixes flour and water for
chapatis
. I am so grateful, the toad threatens to leap into my throat again and prevent me from speaking, and tears burn behind my eyes.

Mama and Phulan unload the camels, leaving the saddles
and cooking pots tied in place in case we should have to move again.

“You must rest here for the day,” says Spin Gul. “Your animals have been driven hard, and you need water,” he says, pointing to our single goatskin. Full when we left, it is flat as a
chapati
now. I gasp. What trouble we’d be in if they hadn’t found us!

Subadar
Spin Gul goes to the camel to which the goatskin is tied and lifts it in the air. The sun peeps over the edge of the horizon, and a tiny golden drop slips out of one corner of the skin, which has grown dark with wetness.

“It will be easy to fix, and I think we can give you another,” he says, handing it to one of his men, who reaches into a sack on his belt and picks out a tiny piece of bitumen. He jams it in the fork of a stick and holds it in the fire until a thread of black pitch melts down. Skillfully he applies the gooey end of the stick to the wet-stained corner. He holds the corner above the fire, letting the heat dry the skin and the pitch penetrate the broken place. He then goes to the side of one of the Rangers’ camels, lifts down a square tin, and pours several cups of water into the skin. He hands it back to Spin Gul, who holds it up to the light again. After several seconds there still are no drips.

“Good as new,” he says, and for the first time I notice how like Dadi’s face his is, kind and handsome and strong in the golden sunlight that spreads its warmth across the
flat desert. I could cry for his kindness, and suddenly I am very tired. But it’s as if a taut wire stretches through me, through my head from ear to ear, down my neck, across my shoulders, down my spine, and into my legs. I won’t be able to sleep until we’ve learned what’s happened to Dadi.

I have a vision of Dadi wounded and fallen, his camel having lost its way. I am working up the courage to ask the
subadar
if he might send a man along the way we’ve come—a tracker could follow our way easily—in case Dadi is lying in the desert.

Spin Gul’s eyes lift, and I turn to look back toward the way we’ve come. A cloud of dust shimmers, reflecting light from the rising sun as two camels race toward us.

It is Dadi and another man—Hamir? I can’t tell, except that he is tall and broad-shouldered, with a mustache and a straight back.

Before the camels reach us, Dadi jumps to the ground and stumbles forward into the arms of the
subadar
. Mama gasps. Dadi’s tunic is covered with blood, newly soaked through, still red but dry. I look up at the young man, who steps on the
U
of his camel’s neck. He wears country slippers, embroidered, with toes that curl up in a long slender strip. They slap as he jumps lightly to the ground. The camels’ sides heave and their heads hang low. A wheezing sound comes from their chests.

The young man also has blood over the front of his tunic, and his hands, too, are stained red. Neither he nor
Dadi seems hurt. Both camels have broad country guns stuck under their girths. They look as if they have run full speed from Mehrabpur and are about to drop.

With a start I realize the young man is Murad. Tired as I am and sick with worry and fear, anxious as I am to know what has happened, I feel the odd turning in my belly again.

“Where is he?” asks Phulan, her voice bright with fear as she looks behind them for another camel carrying Hamir.

“Someone had to stay,” Murad says. His eyes are gentle and serious. He is very tall, with hands as broad as a camel’s foot, a strong neck, and a square chin with a deep cleft just in the center. I’ve never seen anyone more handsome.

“Whose blood?” asks Mama, pointing at their tunics, her hand open and flat. Dadi and Murad exchange a long look.

“Hamir’s,” says Dadi, still breathing heavily.

“What’s happened?” shrieks Phulan, throwing herself at Dadi. He puts his arms around her.

“Hamir is dead,” he says. Phulan sinks against him, sobbing, and he holds her for several minutes. Mama leads Phulan to the tent. Her face is frozen, mouth open in a silent, anguished cry.

Spin Gul takes Dadi and Murad away to wash, and Dadi tells me to walk their still-wheezing camels until they are cool and breathe normally.

I mourn for Phulan, then pleasure at seeing Murad steals
into my heart like a guilty secret. He has grown fully into his ears. I look under the camels’ necks as I walk them, and I watch Murad wash from Spin Gul’s goatskin. He has removed his turban and tunic, and the early sunlight sparkles on the smooth brown skin of his broad shoulders.

The men leave us women to rest and grieve in the tent through the morning.

Phulan sits in the back doorway of the tent, away from where the men tend the camels and smoke cigarettes. She keens softly at first, her voice rising to a wail, then trailing off into exhaustion. She raises her arms and throws back her head with another primeval wail.

“God, my life was perfect, and you struck him down. Just when I’m happy, everything changes!” she says to the sky.

Spin Gul returns to tell us that Dadi has been on the radio with the Rangers at Yazman.

“The man who called himself Abassi at Yazman was fat and wore a silk tunic over muddy trousers,” Spin Gul tells Mama. “The Rangers at Yazman have taken Murad’s family under protection. They are trying to find Nazir Mohammad to negotiate a truce. His older brother, a landowner called Rahim, is a politician and doesn’t want trouble. Perhaps he will help.”

Rahim—“the merciful.” If he is well named, perhaps he will guarantee our safety and we will go to Yazman for the men to talk with the landlords.

Near lunchtime Auntie moans with pain. All morning
she has lain motionless and, except for an occasional groan, silent. It is most unlike her. The boys have gone outside to look for Sher Dil, who should appear with the herd sometime early in the afternoon. He will have taken his time, for there are dozens of babies who must rest on the long trek from Mehrabpur.

Mama first notices the stain of red on the quilt and calls me to her. Auntie is aborting her fetus, and there is little we can do. Mama sends me to the village near Derawar, to the unfriendly people who refused to help find a place to bury Grandfather, who spilled his blood for them. I am to find a midwife to ease Auntie’s pain, perhaps to save her unborn baby.

Xhush Dil rises stiffly to his feet, but like a soldier who knows his duty, he heads straight to the village. Dadi and Murad sit inside the Ranger post on a string cot; they wait in silence, their hands folded in front of them. Spin Gul comes out, Dadi behind him. Spin Gul directs me to the midwife’s hut.

“Isn’t there a doctor?” Dadi asks.

Spin Gul shakes his head.

Dadi leaps up behind me onto Xhush Dil’s back. There is an odd, musty smell about him that I know instinctively as the smell of the blood on his tunic. We ride to the midwife’s house, and I am grateful to see our friend Shahzada in the doorway, his tattered red fez perched sideways on his shiny brown skull.

“Abassi
-sahib!”
he says, pleasure lighting his crinkled old eyes as he greets Dadi.

“Shahzada, we need your help again,” Dadi says with sadness. “I should be bringing a gift to show our gratitude for your kindness when my father died. Instead I come with another problem.”

“We are brothers,” says Shahzada. “Your time to repay kindness will come in the next life, if not in this.”

The midwife is Shahzada’s sister, only slightly younger, with the same kindness and the same three long teeth as those of her brother. She listens silently as I describe Auntie’s condition, then ducks back into her mud house to grab a bag of herbs and powders. She climbs up on Xhush Dil and we hurry back to the tent, where Auntie lies now on her back, in a widening stain of blood, her eyes rolled back into her head.

Phulan still keens outside the back door of the tent, and I go out to keep the boys company in their vigil for Sher Dil and the herd. I pull them up onto Xhush Dil’s hump behind me, and they squirm and giggle as the great camel lurches once again to his feet.

We walk slowly, for the sun is high, and though the clouds still dull its heat, the air is heavy; its weight seems to add to the burdens on my soul.

When we return, Auntie sleeps peacefully on a clean quilt, dressed in her green silk tunic. Shahzada, his sister the midwife, and Dadi are gone, and it is as if nothing has happened at all, except for the small shrouded bundle in the corner of the tent.

“It was another boy,” Mama whispers, and she takes me with her to bury it like a piece of excrement in the sand.

The next morning
we awake to a rumbling sky. A good omen, perhaps, that the rain will come and wash away the pain of death and fill the
tobas
so we can go home after the wedding?

The wedding!
There will be no wedding. Again, the dislocated bits of our lives swirl. I try to roll over, to pretend I am dreaming, but I hear men talking outside the tent.

The tent doors are tied shut. Phulan lies on a quilt,
arms outstretched, her silken hair a tangle of black around her anguished, pale face. In the gray light that filters through the tent from the stormy sky outside she looks dead, but I know the look of a grieving woman.

I go outside, where Auntie is up and clucking about her sons as if nothing has happened to her. How strange life is; it’s all there is, for now at least, yet to some it seems to have so little meaning.

Tea and
chapatis
are waiting, and I go to the fire where Mama turns the flat round bread fresh off the pan. People who travel are allowed to break the fast, and I realize we have eaten almost nothing in the past twenty-four hours.

Mama’s eyes have a white tightness around them, and her mouth is set in a straight, thin line. She doesn’t look up as I squat across the fire from her.

Dadi and Murad, their tunics and
lungis
clean but still stained with dull, rusty blood marks, lean against the kneeling camels. They have deep shadows of beard on their chins. Their eyes are red-rimmed with lack of sleep. They do not talk, just lean, arms folded across their chests, looking at the fire.

The rain starts falling in fat plops that signal we are in for a day of wet weather—lifesaving, inconvenient, glorious, wet, cool, blessed water.

Dadi and Murad stay where they are as Mama and I scurry to tie a shelter to the tent cords to cover the fire, and pull our things inside. They are so engrossed, staring and waiting, that they barely notice the now pelting water. Instinctively my heart lifts. Rain does that to desert people,
and I am still giddy from seeing Murad. But the truth is that the sky is crying for Hamir, for Phulan, perhaps for all of us.

“What are Dadi and Murad waiting for?” I ask Mama. I can’t stand this pained silence.

“Word of when we have to return to pay for all this foolishness you’ve caused,” says Auntie. Her face is pale, and though her face and hands are still plump, she looks smaller, as though the loss of this baby has diminished her.

I am speechless at her insensitivity, but I remind myself that she had to hide her hurt when she was young and her sisters and cousins were married off one at a time while she grew fatter and fatter; and now with the loss of her tiny, unformed baby—I manage to ignore her suggestion that I have caused this situation.

“What will happen, Mama?” I ask quietly, reasonably, forcing her to look me in the eye as we squat across from each other, the fire between us.

“We’ll see, Shabanu, we’ll see,” she answers. Then she looks away; she knows it’s not enough of an answer. “Dadi and Murad have been on the Rangers’ radio all night. On the other end in Yazman was the landlord Rahim
-sahib
. He and the Rangers guarantee our safety. He says the death of Hamir has appeased his brother. He won’t let Nazir harm us.”