Muti's eyes widened and her breath caught. “How can you say that? I thought you loved coming here. You always say it's the best part of the year!”
“It is!” Jameel said quickly. “It was justâyou know. I didn't want to leave ⦔
Muti also had been looking for an opportunity to tell Jameel about Jag, the handsome tennis coach she'd met at the Lahore Clubâand the most unsuitable person for her to have a crush on. But she didn't want it to seem as if she was trying to match Jameel's story. And Jameel was right. This summer they never had the time or privacy to talk.
Voices wafted through the trellis then, as if someone had
opened the French doors leading from the dining room into the rose garden. Jameel and Muti stood. They looked at each other, both struck by the same thought. They almost felt guilty.
“Mumtaz! Jameel! Where are you?” It was Leyla, and her voice moved toward them. “What do you mean by slipping away when we have guests?”
“Over here, Auntie,” said Jameel, resting his hands lightly on the gate to the rose garden and leaning forward so Leyla could see him. “We were looking at Grandfather's koiâ”
“In the dark? You've had all summer to look at them!” Leyla's voice rose, now that she was out of earshot of the dining room. Jameel didn't know what to say. Muti looked down at her hands and said nothing. “Come back now and say goodbye to everyone. They'll think you two have been brought up without manners.”
Muti and Jameel came into the marble front foyer just as Auntie Selma drew her white lawn dupatta up over her hair. Selma had worn widow's white for more than twenty years.
“There you are, Mumtaz!” Selma said, embracing Muti and kissing her forehead. “You must come to see me.”
“When can I come, Auntie?” Muti asked quickly, before Selma had a chance to get away.
“I'll call you this week,” Selma said, and her eyes lingered on Muti's face.
“Yes, Auntie,” said Muti. “I'll look forward to your call. I really do want to visit you.” Selma laid her palm against Muti's cheek and smiled, then left as her driver pulled her old-fashioned sedan up to the door.
Every time Selma saw Muti at a family wedding or some other event, Selma looked the girl over and kissed her forehead, and asked her questions about school, her friends, and anything else going on in Muti's life. On each occasion Selma said, “You must come to see me. You and I are destined to spend some time together when the occasion is right.”
But Selma never fixed a date for Muti to visit the haveli, and Muti wondered what would cause the time to be right and why her mysterious aunt felt destined to be with her. She thought of going there on her own, hiring a motor rickshaw to take her into the old walled city, near the Shahi Qila. Muti had not visited the haveli since she was a child, but she still knew how to get there.
S
habanu adjusted the folds of the burqa around her, lifting the hem away from her feet, and walked quickly. She had been drawn irresistibly into the smells and sounds and activity of the bazaar, just as she had been the day before. She was bolder today, venturing into conversations with merchantsâa simple query as to the cost of bangles here, and there a comment to an apothecary who ground gemstones into powder for kohl to shadow the eyes.
She made her way to Munir Bookseller and told the clerk behind the counter she wanted elementary readers.
“How many?” he asked.
“Twelve,” she said, and he took her to a shelf of booklets that contained rough drawings of foods with their names written under each: chawal, roti, atta; and animals: gaay, bukri, pakshi; and numbers: eek, do, teen. There was a section on telling time. And toward the back were simple sentences.
Shabanu paid the bookseller and went off to find a clock to teach the desert women of Cholistan how to tell time.
Delighted with everything from the sound of her own voice speaking to strangers to the shadow of her form that followed her on the dusty pavement, she had lost track of the hour. It was nearly noon, and Selma would be coming to have lunch with her in the pavilion to tell about the banquet at Number 5 Anwar Road. Most important would be the news she brought of Mumtaz. It was Shabanu's only contact with her daughterâif one could consider observation at second hand the same thing as contact.
It was an oddity of Selma's that she would not come to the roof of the haveli at night, or at any time before noon. In the deadening heat of pre-monsoon summers, Selma and her husband, Daoud, who had been a judge in the Lahore High Court, used to sleep on the roof to catch whatever air moved high above the other buildings surrounding the haveli. One night about twenty-five years before, the brother of a murderer whom Daoud had sentenced to life in prison had taken his revenge by creeping up to the roof and burying a dagger in the heart of the judge as he slept beside his wife. Selma had slept so soundly through the heat of the night that she never knew her husband lay dead beside her until she awoke in the morning and found him in a sticky pool of his own blood. The servants believed the judge's ghost prowled the rooftop every night, and so the doors to both stairways were kept locked. Shabanu was safe in the spacious rooftop courtyard
and pavilion because everyone believed the judge's ghost would haunt the place every night for eternity.
Selma had regarded her husband as the twin of her own soul and could not bear to face his apparition on the roof because she could not admit to her suspicion that she might have saved him had she slept less soundly. Shabanu found comfort in the nocturnal prowlings of Daoud's ghost, for he was her protector. She smiled when she stumbled over a potted palm that the judge's ghost moved into her path to trip her as she walked the perimeter of the roof after sunset. When she heard him humming late in the night sometimes, she took out her flute and accompanied him. When it came to ghosts, it was the djinn in Gulberg that Shabanu feared, because her daughter lived among them and Shabanu wanted desperately for her to be safe.
When Shabanu got to the weathered gray wooden doors of the outer courtyard of the haveli, she hurried past and ducked around the corner and into the alley that ran behind the old house. She picked her way over mango pits and onion peelings and shreds of plastic bags that had been tossed over the back walls of the houses at the beginning of the lane. The way was dim, shaded by the towering walls of the haveli and the houses on either side. Gray drain water sloshed up over the narrow ditches that ran along both sides of the alley.
A young man and an older woman also hurried along the lane, on their way home to their midday meal, but neither of them paid attention to her. She strode quickly to the blue-painted
heavy steel gate at the back of the haveli and pulled the rusty iron key from the bundle of keys tied in a handkerchief around her wrist to keep them from jangling, and fit it into the heavy lock in the gate.
Once back inside, Shabanu shut the gate quietly behind her and relocked it, then turned to slip up the back stairway to the rooftop. Standing in her way were Selma and Samiya, their hands on their hips, their lips pursed, so that despite the differences in their age and size they almost looked alike in their widows' white saris and angry scowls.
“What are you thinking, Shabanu?” asked Selma in her sternest voice. “We have gone to such lengths to hide and protect you, even from your own familyâand you slip in and out like a thief!” She made a clicking sound with her tongue, eloquent in its disapproval.
Shabanu reached out and touched the arm of her sister-in-law, who had suffered so much, had saved her lifeâstill saved her life every day. Shabanu left her hand on Selma's arm and looked into her eyes. After a moment she pulled the burqa off and smoothed back her hair.
“I am thinking that I am not yet thirty years old, and I have been buried on the rooftop for one third of my life,” she said, her voice level and reasonable. Samiya stepped forward then and took the burqa from Shabanu's hands and draped it over her arm.
“Have you forgotten Nazir?” asked Samiya. “How do you know he doesn't have spies around the city? He may look old and defeated, but how can we be sure he has given up?” Her voice shook with fear more than anger.
“I can't spend my entire life locked away,” Shabanu replied. “I feel like one of those plants that's been neglected in the back of the courtyard, the ones that turn white for lack of sun and water just before their leaves begin to drop, just before they die!”
Selma and Samiya looked at each other. Shabanu was first to break the silence.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “But I felt finally as if I could no longer breathe, buried alive up there.”
Selma held up her hand. “You think I don't understand? You don't give me much credit. But we have something important to discuss. We can talk later about your annee-jannee nonsenseâyour coming and going as you please. Come.” She reached for the door to the back stairway. “Samiya has made lunch and will join us upstairs.”
Selma moved slowly up the stairs, one leg and then the other on each step, her arthritis flaring to bright pain every morning and through midday. Samiya disappeared into the kitchen to fix their tray. When Shabanu and Selma got to the top step, Selma went into the pavilion to get out of the hot sun. She drew the end of her embroidered white lawn sari around her shoulders and sat heavily on the wood-and-string charpoi. Selma patted the cushion beside her, inviting Shabanu to sit.
“The evening was very festive,” said Selma. “Mumtaz and Jameel are lovely, and they're such good friends. You would be so proud of your daughter.”
Shabanu's heart quickened at the thought of Mumtaz, whose photograph sat on the table in her room. But she also
heard in Selma's voice a note of something less pleasant about to come.
Samiya brought the tray with plates of cold chicken, roti, dahi, stewed spiced lentils, and milky sweet tea. Selma and Shabanu were quiet while Samiya laid the table, then sat down with them.
“Mahsood was in rare formâas usual!” Selma smiled only slightly, and told Shabanu about the Jet Ski. “And as usual, Leyla behaved despicably.” Selma recounted how Leyla had humiliated Mumtaz in front of her cousins.
“It never ends,” Shabanu said when Selma had finished. She remembered that when she'd first come to the farm at Okurabad from Cholistan as Rahim's wife, she was terrified of the other women in his household. One morning someone had caught a rabid bat in a net and hid it in Shabanu's clothes cupboard. When she opened the door, the bat flew out and screeched around the room until Shabanu caught it with a broom and beat it to death on the floor. All the while she heard the stifled laughter of the women through the window that looked out onto the arbor-covered terrace at the side of the house.
Later, when Rahim learned of the bat, he was angry and demanded to know who had done such a thing. A small, thin boy, the son of a man who worked in the cattle pens, was produced as the culprit. Shabanu was certain that the women had put him up to the prank.
In the seven years of Shabanu's marriage to Rahim, his familyâwith the exception of Omar, Baba, and Selmaânever let her forget that she was the daughter of camel
herders. The women played cruel tricks on her and treated her like a servant. Rahim dismissed Shabanu's complaints and said he was too busy dealing with more important issues.
Rahim had loved Shabanu the best of all his four wives, and they never forgave her. Rahim would not tolerate dissension in the house, and so Shabanu and Mumtaz had to sleep with their eyes open and their ears tuned for trouble.
Shabanu and Mumtaz visited Lahore for the first time when Mumtaz was five. They stayed with Selma in the haveli in the Old City, which was the family's ancestral home. When Pakistan became independent from India and British colonial rule in 1947, Baba and Nazir had moved with their mother to the house in Gulberg because they wanted a more modern house than the haveli, with its unlit rooms and unplumbed baths and creaking stairs. But Rahim and Selma loved the Old City. Shabanu and Mumtaz felt safe there with Selma, untroubled by Rahim's other wives, who lived in fancier houses in the Cantonment and Gulberg. The haveli became Shabanu and Mumtaz's home.
“There is more,” Selma said. “I overheard Amina and Tahira saying that Leyla has been making inquiries about a marriage for Mumtaz with a boy from the farm.”
“But Omar and Mahsood would never let that happen!” said Shabanu.
“No, not together. But if something were to happen to Mahsood, I'm not sure that Leyla couldn't manipulate Omar,” Selma said. “She has grown to be an indomitable force in that way.”
“But Omar would never allow anything to keep Mumtaz from finishing her education!” Shabanu said. Like Rahim, Omar was a man of honor. He had known how much she wanted an education for Mumtaz, and he would see that Mumtaz finished school.
“In any case,” said Selma, “we should be prepared if Omar gives in to Leyla. I think perhaps it's time you and your daughter had a reunion. She's already older than you were when you married Rahim. She's old enough to understand what happened, and old enough to keep your secret. And she still needs youâperhaps now more than ever.”
Shabanu took a deep breath. It was difficult to think of Mumtaz as a young womanâimpossible to think of her married to an uneducated boy in a dusty village. She had to remind herself that her daughter was no longer the five-year-old child she'd last held in her arms ten years before. Shabanu still thought of the sweet smell of milk on Mumtaz's breath, the soft curves of her small elbows and knees, the way her eyelashes fell to her cheeks as she fought sleep at nap time.
“I agree,” said Shabanu. “Mumtaz and I should become reacquaintedâas soon as possible. What shall we do about Nazir?”
“He was there last night,” said Selma. “He's different, Shabanuâhe's like a toothless old tiger now. He's failed at every scheme he's plotted. He's been abandoned by his family, and he looks pathetic. His only interest is his airplane, and I don't think he's flown it in ages. His clothes aren't
clean, he needs shaving, and heaven knows how long since he's had a haircut. He barely spoke to anyone last evening, and I saw no one speak to him.”
Shabanu thought of the day she and Omar went with Rahim to confront Nazir over the theft of some of Rahim's land. Nazir's men had cut down the trees and fenced off several dozen hectares, and Nazir's cattle grazed there. Rahim was just stepping from the car when bullets began to fly. Several slammed into Rahim and knocked him to the ground, and Omar, whom Shabanu loved more than she could now remember, exposed himself to the bullets, leaping from the car and pulling Rahim back inside, blood seeping through his uncle's clothing. Shabanu didn't see the shooter, but her mind's eye captured Nazir's fleshy face bunched in a squint as he took aim down the barrel of his gun and killed his brother. She heard Nazir's heavy breathing, felt it on her face as he demanded that she marry him.
After Rahim's death, Nazir had kidnapped her and Zabo, his own daughter and Shabanu's only friend, and held them prisoner in a damp, dark room in the depth of the house on his farm near Rahim's at Okurabad. She watched him pluck a cockroach from the floor, heard its shell shatter as he pinched it between his fingers to show that he held the same power over her, and felt its insides splatter on her face and clothing.
And when they escaped, Shabanu felt Zabo's arms around her waist as they fled from Nazir's farm into the desert by camelâuntil she heard the impact of a bullet piercing
Zabo's back, and her friend slumped against her shoulder. She stopped only when they were safely inside the gate of the fort at Derawar. She saw Zabo's eyes close in her pale face and felt her last shuddering breath. So much death, so much fear, so much loss caused by Nazir and the penchant that men had for taking revenge.
“You must never trust a tiger, even a miserable, toothless old tiger,” said Shabanu.
Shabanu told Selma and Samiya then how she had broken the spell Nazir had cast over her by sending the pigeon to her family with the message that she was alive, and by leaving the haveli, showing the fates that fear no longer held her in its grip.