He knows what the word means. From the Greek.
Nek tar.
That which overcomes death.
He is descended from Joseph Mede, the Cambridge don and teacher of Milton, and although the family is from Wiltshire, Father Mede’s childhood was here in the Punjab during the Raj.
He resumes his walk. At the south wall is a grove composed mainly of dense rosewoods and cypresses, and one of the children had reported a hornets’ nest in an alcove somewhere along there. Father Mede wishes to determine whether it poses a threat to children, in which case the gardener will have to be told to remove it. The lines from Moses’ valedictory song go through his mind as he recalls eating the saccharine substance from hornets’ nests.
He suckled him with honey from a rock,
And oil from a flinty stone.
Soon after entering the grove he hears a sound that resembles the long dry crack that a tough cloth would give on being torn. The ground shudders and he looks around, earthquake being his first thought. He attempts to steady himself against a rosewood but the mighty trunk lightly swivels away from him, and overhead the entire crown swings sideways and the tree begins to fall. He tries to support it out of reflex and the trunk pulls him off his feet and it is like holding a fishing rod with a thousand-pound fish on the hook. He realises that the trunks of all the trees here have been severed, someone’s blade going through them at sternum height. They were just standing in place waiting for the merest touch, the meshed canopies providing the minimum steadiness until now, and they are crashing around him, the falling boughs generating a wind. In Joseph Mede’s
Key of Revelation
a historical meaning was given to the various symbols of Revelation and ‘winds’ had always meant ‘wars’. Dust fills his eyes, nothing but the torn leaves and branches around him as he attempts to gain a place of safety, the dark red flowers of the Madagascar
gulmohar
erupting into the air as the green limbs come down and he stands mercifully unscathed and watches how the place has suddenly filled up with light, the sky painfully exposed.
28
Naheed slows down as she climbs the stairs, taking the last five steps one at a time. She can hear someone in the room ahead of her.
‘Mother, is that you?’ Even though she knows Tara has gone to the haberdasher’s in Anarkali Bazaar.
She enters to discover Sharif Sharif. He stands up from his crouching position beside the bed. In his left hand is the box in which she keeps Mikal’s letters. One of them is in his right hand. It falls onto the bed as he stands up, surprised.
‘I just thought I’d come up and see how things are.’
She looks at him, unable to speak.
‘I wanted to see if you needed something. Do you need anything?’
Naheed shakes her head.
‘How are you managing? I haven’t asked after you for a while.’
Naheed looks at the letter on the counterpane.
He takes a step towards her. ‘Who wrote you those letters? They are all signed “Mikal”?’
She back away and he asks,
‘Is that Mikal as in Basie’s brother?’
She looks at the table where the scissors lie. He notices.
‘I am here to fulfil your every need. You don’t need anyone else.’
She sees how carefully he has placed himself between her and the scissors.
‘I have my family. My mother, my father-in-law.’
‘I will pour all my money at your feet. You could have anything you wanted.’
She shakes her head.
‘I’ll buy you a house, here or in Lahore. You won’t have to live with the other wives downstairs. Come away with me.’ He glances at the box on the floor. ‘Are they love letters?’
‘You have to leave,’ she says.
He goes back to the bed and picks up the letter. ‘Come away with me. I will even pay for Rohan’s eyes.’
There is the sound of someone on the stairs and Naheed moves forward and snatches the letter from him.
‘What are you doing here?’ Tara says to him fiercely as she comes in.
‘I came to see if you needed anything.’
‘We don’t need anything.’ She points to the door. ‘You must leave or I will scream. Now go.’
Buttons, snaps, collar stays and a seam ripper have spilled out of the plastic bag that Tara had let drop onto the floor as she came in. ‘I don’t know why you must pretend to be so innocent,’ he says as he steps over them to leave. ‘Both of you.’
After he has left Tara comes and holds Naheed. ‘What happened?’
Tara is thin. The months have taken so much out of her.
‘Nothing. I am fine,’ Naheed says, folding the letter and placing it in the box, securing it with a rubber band.
‘You have to throw them away,’ Tara says.
She places the box in the suitcase under the bed. She turns the key and takes it out of the lock.
Tara comes forward, holding out an envelope towards her.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a photograph of the boy you will be engaged to soon.’
About to unseal it, Naheed lifts her finger away from the flap immediately.
29
Not a day goes by when a living person’s eventual burial site does not call out in a clear and unambiguous voice, ‘O child of Adam, you have forgotten me.’
In Baghdad House, Rohan is reading the Koran for Sofia, recalling the verses from memory.
Allah created four homes for Adam. Eden, the Earth, Purgatory and Paradise. And He has given four homes to the Children of Adam too. The womb, the Earth, the grave, and then Paradise or Hell.
After the burial a person is asked by the angels, who have materialised inside the grave, ‘What do you think of Islam?’ The second question he is asked is, ‘What do you have to say about Muhammad?’ If the answers are satisfactory, he is shown a glimpse of the tortures of Hell. ‘You have been spared this,’ he is told, and a vision of Paradise is granted him. ‘This will be your eventual home.’ The grave widens and seven doors open in its sides to allow the fragrant breezes of Paradise to circulate until Judgement Day. The opposite is true if it is a sinful person: seven entrances to Hell open up and the grave shrinks until the ribs crack past each other, the demons descending on the body to begin the tortures.
Rohan makes his way around her room and stands at the window, listening to the garden. The Prophet said there will be no tree in Paradise whose trunk is not of gold. Paradise, which Sofia will enter after Judgement Day, he is sure. Though about himself he cannot say anything.
He moves his head in the air of the room, aligning his dead eyes for a chink of light. Her voice seems present in the walls. Everything in this room has outlived her: he senses the lamp looking at him with that knowledge, the paintings of flowers on the walls, the ink-stained table. It’s all here except her. It is as though she still exists but is choosing to stay away from his eyes.
*
‘Naheed.’
Tara calls out to the girl.
‘Naheed.’
‘She’s not here, sister-ji,’ Rohan answers.
He comes to the veranda, feeling along the walls. The tips of his fingers are the precise length that his gaze can travel now – his eyes bandaged.
‘I thought she was here,’ Tara says, looking around, and she calls out again.
‘I have been alone all morning. I thought she was with you.’
Tara takes his hand and guides him back into his room. ‘You’ve been alone all morning?’
‘Yes. What time is it?’
‘It’s past noon. I just came in to help her prepare lunch.’ With the beginning of panic in her voice she shouts the girl’s name once more.
‘She’ll be here any minute, I’m sure,’ Rohan says as she lowers him into his chair. He sighs and slowly reaches out for the notebook on the table. ‘I have been trying to write.’
The pages are empty because, unknown to him, the pen doesn’t have any ink in it.
‘Where could she be?’ Tara says, moving towards the window.
‘Perhaps she’s gone to the bazaar.’
‘She would have told me, brother-ji. Her behaviour has been somewhat erratic these past few days but she wouldn’t go anywhere without telling me. Or leave you here all by yourself.’
She enters the garden hoping to see her step out of a pocket of greenery, dressed in ash, and she walks towards the pond where the water lilies burn in the sunlight and then recoils at the thought that enters her mind on seeing the moss floating at the water’s edge, looking like long hair.
As she cooks in the kitchen – and attends to the disorder Rohan has unknowingly created in making himself breakfast or pouring a glass of water – she remains alert to every movement out there, every sound.
By the time Yasmin and Basie return from St Joseph’s, at three, she is close to tears.
‘I am sure there’s a perfectly simple explanation,’ Basie says. ‘Don’t be alarmed.’
‘Yes. She’ll be here soon,’ Yasmin says.
‘Have you asked the neighbours?’
She shakes her head.
‘I’ll go,’ says Yasmin.
Tara reacts with pain. ‘Don’t.’
‘Someone might have seen her, Aunt Tara.’
‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘We have to be careful who we ask. If we tell them she is missing, the thought will enter their minds that she has a secret life, and later they’ll easily accuse her of immorality and unchastity.’
Yasmin half-heartedly comes back to her chair.
‘Let’s just wait for a little while longer,’ Basie says. ‘I am sure she’ll be back any minute.’
As the afternoon advances, Tara ties on her burka and goes back to her room five streets away. Before climbing up she stops to exchange a few words with Sharif Sharif’s wives but they don’t mention Naheed. On a shelf in her room there are stacks of clothes, folded as neatly as newspapers. They are the sewing work she has finished over the past week, and she carries these around the neighbourhood now, taking them to the customers’ houses. In each house she mentions Naheed’s name several times, with a pretend casualness, in case someone says something about having seen the girl, in case someone remembers something Naheed had said recently and provides a clue to her disappearance.
When she returns to Rohan’s house it is almost dusk and the stars are beginning to come out in the east, where it is darkest.
She is sitting with Yasmin and Basie in the kitchen when Rohan makes his way towards them through the banana grove. ‘Where is Naheed?’ he asks from out there.
Basie goes out and offers him his arm to lead him in but Rohan refuses to take even a single step. ‘Where is Naheed?’ The voice is louder now.
Basie makes to say something but then stops.
‘Answer me, someone. I know you are all here. Basie? Yasmin? Tara? Where’s my Naheed?’
‘She’s not here, Father,’ Yasmin says.
‘Where is she?’
‘She’ll be here soon, brother-ji,’ Tara says.
‘What time is it?’
Nothing but silence from them. Basie wondering whether it is possible to lie to him as he had tried to earlier. But the night prayers have been called from the minaret so he must have a very good idea of the hour.
‘I said what time is it? Eight? Eight thirty?’
‘It’s just gone past nine, Father.’
He reacts as though a sword has fallen onto the back of his neck. ‘Why are you just sitting here? Why aren’t you out there looking for her?’ He turns around and rushes through the banana trees into the garden, seeing with the light of his grief. Terror is not knowing where the pain is coming from – and so in his desperation he begins to shout, the word echoing through every dark canopy and trunk, turning in every direction, batting at various things. As Yasmin and Basie try to help him, Tara sits holding the envelope containing the photograph of Naheed’s prospective husband, still unopened.
*
At midnight Yasmin and Basie are sitting on the steps of the veranda. An insect-swirled candle burning beside them. There was rain earlier and hundreds of snails are roaming the garden, their shells conical in shape, and tiny, no bigger than the exposed lead of a well sharpened pencil. The bodies are bright yellow.
‘She’ll return,’ he tells her.
‘I wish Father would stop insisting we look in the pond and the river.’
‘He can still frighten me when he is angry.’
‘Me too. We should keep reminding ourselves we are twenty-eight years old.’ She leans her head against his shoulder in tiredness. ‘After Mother died he’d make me pray five times a day for her. Even Jeo when he was five or six was being made to do it. He was so strict, a disciplinarian. I joke about it with him now sometimes, and he claims not to remember being severe.’
He looks towards Rohan’s room. From a confused anger Rohan had slipped into melancholy and despair. Saying this place was ill-fated. This building defines the line of the trench in which the horses were buried during the Mutiny. The surrounding lands were gifted to Rohan’s great-grandfather by the British as a reward for his loyalty during the rebellion. But in the decades since 1857, several members of the bloodline refused the tainted inheritance. Businesses begun on it would fail. Locusts descended on the wheat fields. Orchards rotted. Rohan too had wanted nothing of it, and only at Sofia’s pragmatic insistence had decided to build Ardent Spirit here, only at her insistence had he used the parcel on the other side of the river to build the bigger building. It is possible that he gave it all away to Ahmed the Moth with relief.
Basie inhales the damp scents in the air, the cold moonlight. The Rangoon creeper above them has been adding new leaves to itself every day this month, a dense opaque green, branch crowding branch, while the new leaves on the banyan and the peepal are a soft red.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I am thinking when will I see my husband smile again.’
She feels him hold his breath at this, the mechanism of the body becoming still.
‘I am sorry,’ he says after a while.
‘And when will I hear my husband use a swear word? Mikal said you taught him such filthy things as a child.’