In one leap, suddenly he stood plumb in the path of a galloping horse and cart. Trucks came to a screeching stop, tongas reined in, cyclists wobbled to one side, and men on the pavement shifted to the edge. The cart driver yelled, rising and trying to draw his stampeding animal to a halt.
Mouth foaming, head high, the horse towered above Nikka who firmly seized the bridle. The animal's momentum staggered him, but not letting go, he slipped to one side. With a palm over the scraping wooden wheel and wrenching at the bit, he stopped the beast.
The cart driver glared at Nikka in disbelief;
“What's wrong with you, you crazy fool! You want to die?”
Nikka held the reins just above the horse's heaving neck.
“Come on. Get down,” he commanded.
“Why?”
“Because I'll castrate you for driving recklessly in our district.” Nikka was fiendishly calm.
The driver glanced around into a swarm of inquisitive faces. He raised his whip and struck the horse and Nikka in a panic to charge through. The crowd pushed apart slightly. Cursing furiously, Nikka pulled the man from the cart and struck him.
There was a surprised rustle. Shouts of “Police! Police!” rose hysterically.
Qasim, on his way to work, looked over the heads in amazement. Policemen came running with sticks. Something was amiss. They never interfered in Nikka's brawls. He shouted, “Watch out, Nikkayooooo! The police are here!”
Nikka, busy with his work, heard Qasim dimly. “So what?” he thought. The battered man was crying piteously. And then, Nikka was wrenched away.
Whirling in a hot rage, he looked in disbelief at the handcuffs clamped on his wrists. The swelling crowd pressed forward.
“Why, what's this? A joke?” asked Nikka.
“You're under arrest for assault,” said a policeman he had never seen before. The man pulled him along by a chain while another pushed him into a few bewildered steps forward.
Stung into a sudden realization of his position by this indignity, Nikka roared, “You pimps. You bloody swine. Don't you know who I am? I am Nikka Pehelwan! Nikka Pehelwan of Qila Gujjar Singh! How dare you . . .”
Ignoring the outburst, the policemen dragged him off the road.
“Where is the S.S.P. Sahib, you bastards, where is my friend?” he screeched, trying to intimidate the policemen by his acquaintance with the Senior Superintendent of Police.
An Inspector, distinguished by a trim, belted coat, stepped forward.
“Come on, Nikka, don't throw a tantrum. No one's going to help you. At least keep your dignity.”
Nikka glared at him. “Why you unfaithful dog! Don't you know whose protection I command? Ask the S.S.P. Sahib . . . he'll tell you.”
“We're arresting you on the Superintendent's orders. Now shut up!”
“The pig's penis! I'll have him hangedâall of you,” Nikka roared, slashing about blindly with his manacles.
Screaming threats, delighting the children and the crowd with his colorful invective, he was thrust into a van with wire mesh at the windows and was driven away.
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Towards the end of his four-month prison sentence, he requested an audience with the Senior Superintendent of Police. Impressed by reports of Nikka's exemplary behavior and considering it politic, the officer acceded to the pehelwan's wish.
The prison square bustled in preparation for the Superintendent's arrival. Nikka, lined up with the prisoners, stood at the far end of the square. Two whistles shrilled, and a bell drove the prison officials into a further frenzy of pushing the prisoners into line.
The Superintendent strode into the square. Smiling complacently, he walked in a cloud of dust caused by the boots of five prison officials chaperoning him.
He strode pompously, hands and baton behind his back. Scrutinizing the prisoners, shooting random queries, he finally stood before Nikka.
“I understand you wished to see me. Well, what is it, you badmash?”
Nikka studied the Superintendent, his eyes inscrutable.
“My lord, I am a lowly man. I have a request only your grace has power to bestow . . .”
“Yes?”
“I'm afraid, Sir, that you may misunderstand me . . .” Nikka shuffled his feet. A swift glance up and he was satisfied by the impression he had made.
Flattered by the deferential behavior of this notoriously arrogant bully, the Superintendent's tone became kinder.
“Go on, man, let's hear what you have to say.”
“My nights in prison, as you know, Sir, are lonely . . .” Nikka appeared to hesitate. “But I'm afraid you may take me amiss . . .”
The Superintendent, scenting mischief, rasped, “You are wasting my time, pehelwan!” He turned to walk away.
“Just a moment, my lord,” Nikka's voice, of a sudden bold, boomed through the square. “Oh, share my lovelorn prison bed with me. My nights here are so lonely.”
Spontaneous guffaws exploded all over the square.
“Why, you bastard! You shameless swine . . .” The dignitary spluttered, his nostrils flaring. Crazed with fury, he struck Nikka with his baton, and straining mightily for dignity he snarled: “Fifteen lashes! Give him fifteen lashes!”
Nikka was soundly thrashed and his tenure extended by two months. He bore the punishment with gloating fortitude.
The incident, inflated gloriously, made him an instant legend. It was related with gusto in sophisticated drawing rooms, inside the suffocating tangle of the walled city, in Rawalpindi and in Karachiâand when he completed his sentence, Qila Gujjar Singh welcomed back its hero with a warm heart and open arms.
Nikka emerged from prison, his equilibrium recovered. His stay there, he knew, had been a mild reprimand, to teach him his bounds. Soon, political commissions were again entrusted to him, and his influence was fully restored.
Chapter 10
M
arriages were the high points in the life of the women. As she grew older Zaitoon became an eager participant in the activity centered around them.
Wedding preparations dragged on for months and the attendant ceremonies for days, and sometimes even weeks. The twilight interiors of the women's quarters flashed gold and silver braid, orange, turquoise and scarlet satins, as women cut cloth, sewed and embroidered to make the twenty, fifty, or hundred sets of clothes for the bride's dower. Rose and jasmine
itars
were tested and indulgently daubed on children. The perfume mingled with the domestic smells. Servants, squatting on floors to feed children, appreciatively eyed the rich colors of fabrics and sets of gold jewelry. The squatting maids moved like indolent crabs, on their haunches, always smiling, happy to indulge the whims of a child if pressed, or the demands of their easygoing mistresses, whose legs or shoulders they were forever massaging.
A month before the wedding the
dholaks
arrived; sausage-shaped wooden drums with taut skins on either end. Young girls clustered about them, sitting cross-legged, singing ribald ditties, mocking the groom, insulting absent mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, teasing the bride, and taking turns to beat out the rhythm with both hands. The singing went on late into the night. Towards evening the girls got up, singly or in groups, to dance. Zaitoon was in constant demand and obliged with energetic dances copied from Punjabi films. Jumping and gyrating, making eyes and winking, shaking her
shoulders to set her adolescent breasts atremor, she flaunted her young body with guileless abandon. The older women gathered about her, delighted in her innocent exuberance. Her muslin kurta clinging to her, she collapsed at last amidst the girls, smiling at the whoop of laughing “shabashes”â“Well done!”âand applause. Miriam also laughed and, sharing her good humor and sensing her pride, Zaitoon's great black eyes lit up with happiness.
The absence of men permitted an atmosphere of abandon within the zenanna. Occasionally youths and even young men burst in, grinning mischievously. The dancing stopped and they were shooed out in good-natured outrage. Old men were sometimes invited to watch the girls' antics and participate in the fun.
As the ceremonies started the women of the neighborhood converged on the wedding house. Inside the zenanna they removed their burkhas and revealed their finery; the older women displayed the generosity and worth of their husbands, and the unmarried girls the beauty of their forms and the cunning of their fingers in fashioning embroidery. They admired each others' jewelry, joined the girls in their singing, and sat about gossiping and consuming huge quantities of pillaus, spinach curries, and sweetened rice flavored with saffron.
After the wedding the burkhas, which hid a multitude of sins, allowed the women to revert to their usual sloppy style of dress. With no men to show off to or compete for, complacent about their husbands' sexual attentions, they visited one another in their house clothes; none too clean and perhaps torn under the arms. Young girls who did not observe purdah dressed tidily, covering themselves merely with their chad-dars. Qasim, whose kinswomen perhaps were not even aware of such a garment, forbade Zaitoon the use of a burkha. She
slipped in and out of her friends' homes as unobtrusively as she could, her head and torso wrapped in a shawl. Delighting in a simple deception, she would sometimes borrow Miriam's burkha and, sheathed from head to toe in the tent-like cloak, would walk past him unrecognized.
Zaitoon's closest friend was the Mullah's stepdaughter, Nusrat. Though Zaitoon's friendships had all the intensity young girls bring to friendship, there was always something that kept her the slightest bit apart: a dimension in her life that was not in theirsâof Qasim's faraway background and of his dreams.
Years slipped by. Qasim, nostalgic for the cool mountains, wove such fascination into reminiscences of his life among them that Zaitoon longed to see what she considered her native land. Her young, romantic imagination flowered into fantasies of a region where men were heroic, proud, and incorruptible, ruled by a code of honor that banned all injustice and evil. These men, tall and light-skinned, were godsâfree to roam the mountains as their fancies led. Their women, beautiful as houris, and their bright, rosy-cheeked children, lived beside crystal torrents of melted snow.
Often she asked, “Father, when can we visit home?”
“Soon, bibi, soon,” he murmured.
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At last even Nusrat got married. Zaitoon danced and sang until she was ready to drop. She sat with Nusrat, sharing her desolation at leaving her family, and teased her with speculations about the charms of the unseen groom.
For a whole week the bride sits, her body and hair greasy with oil massages, in old clothes; the better to bloom, bathed and perfumed, swathed in red silks, hair, throat and arms aglow with jewels, on the day of the marriage.
The day before the wedding, at the Henna ceremony, Zaitoon helped to hold the canopy of flowers over Nusrat's
huddled, yellow-robed form. When the henna platters were ceremoniously placed before the bride Zaitoon drew intricate floral designs on the soles of Nusrat's feet and the palms of her hands, fashioning rings round her toes and staining her fingertips with the orange-red paste.
At the brief Nikah ceremony, the actual wedding, the Maulvi asked Nusrat if she would accept the groom; and the groom was asked separately. They first saw each other in a mirror. The weeping bride, supported by weeping women, at last climbed into the tonga to be driven to the station. Zaitoon sobbed her heart out. All that night she wept.
She was sixteen years old.
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Zaitoon gazed down from the tenement balcony. She was curious. Sitting on the charpoy, Qasim was talking to a stranger, a fine-looking tribal. Nikka sat by listening. He frowned, apparently keeping his opinion to himself until the stranger had left.
Qasim had several Kohistani friends, who, like himself, lived in Lahore; but this man was distinctive, somehow more authentic. Voluminous gathers, like a dancer's skirt, circled his baggy pantaloons. His turban, too, was different. Its careless swirls partially covered hair that fell to the tips of his ears in a straight red bob. His black velvet, gold-threaded waistcoat slid back to reveal a double row of cartridges. As Zaitoon watched, his expansive, robust gestures conjured up the world of the wilderness, of tall, jubilant men pirouetting on the balls of their feet, heads thrown back, hypnotized by the guns turning in their strong armsâthe mountain world of Qasim's memories, of Zaitoon's fantasies.
Every little while, the two tribals clasped each other close, their hennaed beards mingling in an uproarious exchange of pleasantries. Nikka, who sat scowling to one side, shifted his sullen bulk when they fell against him.
“Bring the pehelwan along. He shall be our guest,” declared the stranger, affably resting his palm on Nikka's shoulder. “What do you say, pehelwan? Will you honor us with your presence?” Nikka gave him a noncommittal look. Slowly he turned away.
“Of course he will. I'll see to it,” interposed Qasim quickly.
Reverting to their tribal dialect, they ignored the taciturn pehelwan.
Finally, Zaitoon saw them get up from the charpoy for a parting embrace. Qasim, conspicuous as a mountain-man anywhere in Lahore, looked curiously unlike one when facing the stranger. At least so Zaitoon thought as she hurried in to warm his tea. He would be coming up any minute and she would soon find out who the visitor had been. Twenty minutes went by, and she leaned over the balcony to see what was delaying him.
The stranger had gone. Nikka was talking to Qasim and Qasim, looking at the pavement, kept trying to force the toe of his shoe into it. They seemed to be arguing, and Qasim looked hard and cold as he did only in rare moments of obstinacy. Zaitoon had seldom seen the two friends in such solemn disagreement. She grew uneasy.