The Pakistani Bride (27 page)

Misri Khan pushed forward aggressively. “No, sir. But we have news . . .”

Mushtaq glanced at the youth standing arrogantly by the older man. Taken aback by Sakhi's contempt he steadily returned his baleful stare.

Misri Khan touched the Major's chin impatiently with his rough forefinger to turn Mushtaq's attention back towards himself.

“He's my son, sir, the girl's husband. As I was saying, we have news, sir. She has been seen a few miles from here this morning . . .”

“Good afternoon, Major.”

The men turned their heads at the interruption. Carol stood framed in a window behind them.

“Good afternoon,” Mushtaq smiled and waved. “Where's Farukh?”

Misri Khan and Sakhi stepped aside.

“Taking a bath,” she said coldly with a toss of her hair, refusing to meet the Major's eye.

She noticed the splendor of Misri Khan's array of ammunition. “Aren't you going to introduce them?” Her glance slid to meet Sakhi's insolent appraisal. She blushed.

“He's the girl's husband,” Mushtaq said shortly.

“They're both gorgeous.”

Mushtaq was furious. “Get in and close the window,” he commanded icily. “I'll join you and Farukh in a little while.”

Carol shut the window wondering why Mushtaq was angry. Instantly Misri Khan resumed crowding Mushtaq with importunate demands for action, assistance, and assurance.

“Just what do you want?” Mushtaq exploded. “I've told you again and again the men on duty will report to me. They know the situation.”

“But we don't trust them,” Misri Khan insisted.

“Then stand guard yourselves.”

“Of course!” Sakhi spat contemptuously.

Mushtaq fixed his eyes sternly on Misri Khan. He stepped menacingly close, pointedly ignoring Sakhi. “Look, I want no butchering here. No butchering . . . understand?”

“It's up to her husband . . .”

Mushtaq grasped him firmly by the shirtfront. Misri Khan was a bit shorter.

“Old man, there will be no killing in my territory.”

“No, sir,” Misri Khan capitulated craftily. “My son only wishes to claim his wife and take her back to our village.”

“I don't care a damn what he wishes or what he does so long as there's no killing here.” He let go of the shirt. “God be with you,” he saluted curtly and marched inside.

 

Carol watched the men from behind the curtain. A soft half-smile lit her face. She remembered Sakhi's challenging, arrogant eyes stab at the Major and defiantly revert to her. Her fantasy—set off by his startling handsomeness, his intense animalism, and her fascination with tribal lore and romantic savagery—took wing. Suppose she had been in place of that girl, she dreamed . . .

. . . He would think her so special . . . For his sake she would win over all the men and women and children of his village. In the remote reaches of his magnificent mountains, she would enlighten a clan of handsome savages and cavemen.
She would be their wise, beloved goddess ministering Aspro and diarrhea pills. She would learn how to give injections. She'd collect boxes of antibiotics, and work sophisticated miracles. She'd flit about scrubbing, tidying up, and by her own example imbue the tribe with cleanliness. She would champion their causes and focus the benign glare of American academia upon these beautiful people, so pitifully concealed from the world by a fold in the earth. For a delightful moment she saw herself a gracious, tenderhearted, brave, blonde Margaret Mead, biographied and fictionalized into immortality . . .

Farukh stepped out from the bathroom, a towel around his lean waist.

“The Major back yet?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Carol indifferently.

 

After lunch Farukh retired for a nap and Mushtaq joined Carol on the lawn.

The moment they settled in their chairs, he confronted her: “You're unbelievable—acting up to that murderous scoundrel!”

“Oh? You mean the girl's husband? He's unbelievable too,” retorted Carol, stung to the quick by the sudden attack.

“You know how their minds work. He'll spread it all over, I'm keeping a tart! It's tough enough controlling these bastards without your making me appear ridiculous.”

“What are you talking about? I didn't do anything. I didn't say anything . . . I just asked you to introduce them.”

“You really are something, aren't you? Don't you know by now that women don't ask for introductions to such men?”

“You wouldn't happen to be jealous, now would you?”

“Jealous, my arse!”

“He's about the handsomest creature I've ever set eyes on,” Carol mocked him defiantly. “His wife's one lucky girl!”

Mushtaq looked at her intently. “Oh, surely you've heard the news? The girl's run away. The whole bloody clan's out hunting her. I only hope her luck holds!”

“Hunting her? What will they do when they find her?”

“Beat her up. Probably kill her . . . She's hiding in the mountains—she could be trying to reach us. She's been on the run nine days. Imagine! Nine days in that tractless waste! I can't believe she's alive . . . they say she is!”

“How do they know?”

“A couple of bastards from Cheerkhil raped her. News spreads. She's not very far.”

“Oh God!”

Carol had a sudden sinking realization of the girl's plight. She remembered the curious communion between them; and her large, sensitive eyes. She now felt they had revealed more than just the hopeless drift of her life; they had communicated faith and a dauntless courage. Through an awesome act of will the girl had chosen to deflect the direction of her life. Carol felt a compulsion to help her, even at risk to herself.

“Can't you do something?” she demanded.

“Very little. Unless she manages to get across. The husband won't dare kill her in the camp. Don't worry, she'll probably be okay. If not, too bad. It happens all the time.”

“What do you mean, ‘happens all the time'?”

“Oh, women get killed for one reason or other . . . imagined insults, family honor, infidelity . . .”

“Imagined infidelity?”

“Mostly.”

“What's the matter with the men here? Why are they so insanely jealous?”

“Jealousy, my dear, is not a monopoly—it's pretty universal.”

“Chopping off women's noses because of suspected infidelity isn't universal!”

“That's in the Punjab. Here they kill the girl. They'd kill her there too . . .”

Carol looked away. “Do you think Farukh would kill me?”

“Who knows? I might, if you were my wife.”

She looked at him sharply. He was leaning forward, his eyes twinkling.

Suddenly a great deal became clear to her. “So that's all I mean to you,” she said. “That's really what's behind all the gallant and protective behavior I've loved so much here, isn't it? I felt very special, and all the time I didn't matter to you any more than that girl does as an individual to those tribals, not any more than a bitch in heat. You make me sick. All of you.”

She stood up and walked slowly to the Mess door. Watching her, Mushtaq found her gait no longer provocative but crushed, subdued, and oddly touching.

C
arol's restless movements woke Farukh. Sleepily, he put his arm out to her. She started to jerk away but felt, suddenly, that she needed him. “Come for a walk?” she asked.

Overflowing the ridge, shafts of evening sunlight set the river ablaze. They had walked a long way down to a sharp bend in the river. Carol's hair swung shining as she cavorted over the boulders and the pale sand. The walk had lifted her spirits. She leapt over a narrow vein of water and stood on a rock half submerged in the river. The awesome power of the water leaping to form glassy shafts and walls, boiling and foaming dangerously past, elated her. Scanning the scene with eager, shifting eyes, she tried to stamp its grandeur on her memory.

A sooty shadow in a pool of water distracted her and she turned round. A darkness swayed on the ripples, and, completing its rotation beneath the surface, the face bobbed up—a young, tribal woman's face.

Carol made a strangled sound and fell to her knees. In one leap Farukh was beside her. He saw the pallid waterlogged face. “God! Someone's cut the head clean off !”

With a motion that appeared serenely willed, the face turned away and, resting a bloodless cheek on the water for a second, hid beneath. A tangled, inky mass of hair swirled to the surface and floated on the lapping current.

Carol knelt horrified in the blue haze rising from the river. She knelt frozen in a trance that urged her to leap into the air on a scream and flee the mountains.

“Probably asked for it,” said Farukh. With a cry she brushed against his shoulder and, jumping over the rocks, clawed her way up the gorge.

 

It was a freezing night. The three tribals squatted close, talking softly. Sakhi stood up and, holding the quilted robe tight against the wind, he crossed the road to the bridge.

The guard on duty blocked his path, his bayonet glinting in the moonlight. “No one's allowed here at night. Get back.”

Sakhi's lips moved back in a vicious snarl. Misri Khan had joined him. Noticing the bayonet he put a restraining hand on his son.

“Let these dogs be. Come on.”

He forced Sakhi back.

Snuggling in their blankets, Misri Khan and Yunus settled for the long night's vigil.

Sakhi kept ambling past the bridgehead, scrutinizing the shadowy span from different angles. The guard on duty kept an eye on him.

 

Carol meanwhile lay in her room, staring into the dark. “. . . asked for it,” isn't that what Farukh had said? Women the world over, through the ages, asked to be murdered, raped, exploited, enslaved, to get importunately impregnated, beaten-up, bullied, and disinherited. It was an immutable law of nature. What had the tribal girl done to deserve such grotesque retribution? Had she fallen in love with the wrong man? Or was she simply the victim of a vendetta? Her brother might have killed his wife, and his wife's kin slaughtered her . . . there could be any number of reasons . . .

Whoever said people the world over are the same, was wrong. The more she traveled, the more she realized only the differences.

She knew Pakistani women with British accents. They wore jeans from the US and tops from Paris. Their children were at Eton or Harvard. She had related to them straightaway: and suddenly their amiable eyes flashed a mysterious quality that drew her into an incomprehensible world of sadness and opulence, of ancient wisdom and sensuality and cruelty . . .

She recalled Alia, one of her first friends in Pakistan. They said she was a princess. She lived in a splendid modern structure surrounded by the antiquity of priceless possessions—a charming laughing girl with a wide sensual face. Her enormous eyes had haunted Carol ever since they met. In friendship unveiled, layer by layer stripped of their guard, she had glimpsed in the recesses of those eyes the horror of generations of cloistered womanhood. And the pitiless arrogance of absolute power: a memory of ancient tyrannies, both male and female, and fulfilled desires. It was like peering into the secret vaults of a particular lineage or tumbling through a kaleidoscope of images created by the history of a race. A branch of Eve had parted some way in time from hers. There seemed a definite connection in Carol's mind between all this and the incomprehensible brutality of the tribals.

Minister to these savages! She squirmed in bed and half sobbed with self-contempt remembering her fantasy. She could no more survive among them than amidst a pride of lions. Even if she survived the privation, the filth and vermin and swarm of germs carrying alien diseases, her independent attitudes would get her killed! So much for her naive coed fantasy! She could study them, observe every detail of their life, maybe even understand them, but become one of them, never! She wasn't programmed to fit. She'd need an inherited memory of ancient rites, taboos, and responses: inherited immunities, a different set of genes . . .

When they were traveling to Dubair she and Farukh had stopped in Saidu Sharif for tea. A knot of dancing, laughing children had circled an almost limbless beggar. Every time he succeeded in sitting upright the children playfully knocked him over. The men in the bazaar picked their teeth and laughed indulgently. She had noticed this cruel habit of jeering at deformities before, and sick to her stomach wanted to scream at the men to stop the children.

“They'll wonder why you are fussing,” Farukh had said, laughing himself. “They won't see your point of view at all, dear—every nation has its own outlet for cruelty.”

Perhaps he was right. In preventing natural outlets for cruelty the developed countries had turned hypocritical and the repressed heat had exploded in nuclear mushrooms. They did not laugh at deformities: they manufactured them.

Sleep would not come. She was seeing everything from a different perspective. Questions that had lurked in the back of her mind were suddenly answered. She felt her own conflicts nearing a resolution.

No wonder women here formed such intense friendships—to protect themselves where physical might outweighs the subtler strengths of womanhood . . . At least in Pakistan they were not circumcised! Small mercy! A pathetic, defiant gesture here and there invited the inevitable thunderclap! Scour the mountains! Hunt the girl! That girl had unlocked a mystery, affording a telepathic peephole through which Carol had had a glimpse of her condition and the fateful condition of girls like her.