In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (7 page)

As he read the
salaam,
Rafik had breathed,
‘Va leikum assalaam.’

She had signed the letter, written by a neighbor, with an
X
. ‘Look,’ said Rafik, ‘she wept on the paper.’

‘Or watered it. What will you do?’

‘I’ll have to go.’

She turned her face to the wall and held herself rigid when he touched her.

‘Have I done you some wrong?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve done you wrong.’

‘My wife is sixty years old, little girl. She and I have been together for almost fifty. She stood by me, she bore me two sons, she kept my house, my honor has always been perfectly safe in her hands.’

‘Honor.’Saleema began to cry. ‘That’s bad. You’re tiring of me and this situation. Imagine how it feels for me.’

He tried to reassure her, but she could tell that the letter had shaken him, as a man of principle. The baby and her love had made him gentler and more philosophical, taking a long view of life as he began to grow old – but the same gentleness would bend him toward his duty, which always would be to his wife and grown sons. He would punish himself and thus her for not loving his wife and for loving Saleema so much and so carnally.

She made him give her a phone number before he left, of a shop near his house, and every evening she wanted to use it, the paper burned in her pocket; but she never dared, what would she say, who would she say was calling? When he returned to Lahore he had changed. He had told his wife about little Allah Baksh.

A few days later, Rafik’s son and his wife came to stay in the Lahore house. Saleema was dusting the living room and happened to see them arrive, through a window looking out onto the drive in front. She heard the harsh puttering of a rickshaw, and then an old woman emerged, led by a young man with glistening hair and a strong manner. She knew immediately who this must be, her destruction come in this feeble guise. Panic overcame her, mixed with jealousy and a strange pride that came of knowing they had traveled with her in their minds, planning against her. She watched as they walked up the drive and through the passage to the servants’ area. Suddenly remembering her son, who was with Rafik, she raced through the house to the back. But she arrived too late, the old woman had come to the quarters and found Rafik playing with the baby. Saleema walked past the open door, pretending to be on some errand, expecting to hear shouting and tears. The old woman sitting on the bed looked up at Saleema with rheumy eyes that expressed neither reproach nor disliking but simply a flat dismissal. She knew who this young girl must be.

Rafik brought the child to Saleema’s quarters, where she had retreated.

‘At least this one belongs to me,’ she whispered.

The grown son, when he met Saleema later that afternoon in the servants’ sitting area, said to her, ‘
Salaam,
Auntie.’

I’m younger than you, you country fool, she thought spitefully. She would much rather have been attacked, for then she could react.

That night she sat in the kitchen until midnight, the sleeping baby in her arms, watching the cockroaches scurry across the dirty floor. Finally going to her own room, she roughly pushed her husband over on the bed. He had become so thin that his face looked like a broken steel lantern, a gash of mouth and skin stretched over wires.

‘Don’t smoke,’ she ordered. ‘And don’t touch me, stay against the wall.’

‘I lost all that long ago.’ He knew why she had come back to his bed.

Lying and staring at the ceiling, nursing the baby when it woke, she felt her love for Rafik tearing at her breast, making her a stranger to herself, breaking her. Now she slept again next to this man who disgusted her, while her love must be sleeping beside his ancient wife, who had known him in his youth, who knew all about him. How she loved the baby, its tiny feet and hands, its contented smacking noises and warmth beside her.

The next day she hid in her room with the doors closed. When Rafik knocked she said, ‘Please, I beg you. You’ll only hurt me. Tell them I’m sick, and leave me alone.’

‘
Are
you sick?’ he asked, concerned.

‘What do you think?’

She heard his measured footsteps walking away.

She thought, If just once he would act rashly or even quickly, suddenly, without thinking. But he wouldn’t. She remembered how slowly he had surrendered to her.

Three days passed. She and Rafik barely spoke, and when they passed each other she saw from his broken and haunted look that he missed her as she missed him. Yet also she saw how resolutely he had turned from her. Just once, when they were alone in the kitchen, at night, he reached over and touched her hand.

‘You know, don’t you  ...’ he said.

The well inside her stirred, all the sorrows of her life, the sweet thick fluid in that darkness, which always lay at the bottom of her thoughts, from which she pulled up the cool liquid and drank.

‘I know.’ And they knew that she forgave him.

Still she hoped. The wife sat in Rafik’s room all day, the door open, cross-legged on the bed, eyes not responding to passersby, heavy and settled – Saleema couldn’t help walking past on her way to the latrine.

One morning very early she heard the master’s bell ring, and then people rushing around. She rose and went to the kitchen.

Hassan told her as soon as she walked in, ‘The old man’s sick, they’re taking him to the hospital.’

The other servants milled around the kitchen, no one spoke. The household rested on Harouni’s shoulders, their livelihoods. Late that night he died. The daughters had come, Kamila from New York, her sister Sarwat from Karachi. Even Rehana, the estranged middle daughter, who lived in Paris and hadn’t returned to Pakistan in years, flew back. A pall fell over the house. Already the bond among the servants weakened.

Hassan disappeared to his quarters, his face fallen in.

The house was full of mourners, the governor came, ambassadors, retired generals. There was nothing to do, no food would be served.

Rafik sought her out. He came to her room, where she sat on the bed, contemplating the emptiness of her future. Even the child had become silent. When Rafik came in she stood up, and he leaned against her and sobbed.

She couldn’t understand what he said, except that he repeated how he had fastened the old man’s shirt the last evening in the hospital; but as he told the story he kept saying
butters
instead of
buttons
. He couldn’t finish the sentence, he repeated the first words over and over. Finally he became quiet, face streaked.

That was the last time ever that she held him. After a week Sarwat called all the servants into the living room. She sat wearing a sari, her face pinched and eyes ringed, arms hung with gold bracelets.

‘I’m going to explain what happens to you. Rafik and Hassan I’ve spoken to, as well as the old drivers. The ones who’ve been in service more than ten years will get fifty thousand rupees. The rest of you will get two thousand for each year of service. If you need recommendations I’ll supply them. You served my father well, I thank you. This house will be sold, but until it is you’ll receive your salaries and can stay in your quarters.’ She stood up, on the brink of tears, dignified. ‘Thank you, goodbye.’

Crushed, they all left. They had expected this, but somehow hoped the house would be kept. It must be worth a tremendous amount, with its gardens and location in the heart of Old British Lahore, where the great houses were gradually being demolished, to make way for ugly flats and townhouses. That all was passing, houses where carriages once had been kept, flags lowered at sunset to the lawns of British commissioners. Gone, and they the servants would never find another berth like this one, the gravity of the house, the gentleness of the master, the vast damp rooms, the slow lugubrious pace, the order within disorder.

She found Hassan in the kitchen, muted for once.

‘What’ll become of me?’ she asked. After all, something must come of his intimacy with her. She had slept with him, held him. The stark fact of her body shown to him, given to him, must be worth something. She wished for this, and knew that it wasn’t so. With Rafik it had been different, he had raised her up, but Hassan had degraded her. She saw her hopes receding. Again she became the stained creature who threw herself at Hassan, for the little things he gave her.

‘You came with nothing, you leave with nothing. You’ve been paid and fed for some time at least. You have decent clothes and a little slug of money.’

‘What of you and Rafik?’

‘We’re being put in the Islamabad house.’

‘And did Rafik say anything to the mistresses about me?’

‘Nothing,’ Hassan said cruelly. ‘Not a word.’ He put his hands on the counter and looked directly in her face. ‘It’s over. There never
was
any hope. I spent my life in this kitchen. Look at me, I’m old. Rafik’s old.’

So Rafik had renounced her. At the end of the month she had found another place, with some friends of Harouni, who took her because she came from this house.

Before leaving she said to Rafik one day, ‘Meet me tonight in the kitchen. You owe me that.’

She found him waiting for her, under a single bulb. He had aged, his face thin, shoulders bent. Worst of all, his eyes were frightened, as if he didn’t understand where he was. K. K. Harouni had been his life, his morning and night, his charge, his wealth.

‘What of the child?’ she asked. ‘Will you help him? When he’s grown will you find him a job?’

‘I’ll be gone long before that, dear girl.’

‘Say that once you loved me.’

‘Of course I did. I do. I loved you more.’

Within two years she was finished, began using rocket pills, which she once had so much despised, lost her job, went on to heroin, leaving her husband behind without a word. She knew all about that life from her husband and father.

The man who controlled the lucrative corner where she ended up begging took most of her earnings. This way she escaped prostitution. She cradled the little boy in her arms, holding him up to the windows of cars. Rafik sent money, a substantial amount, so long as she had an address. And then, soon enough, she died, and the boy begged in the streets, one of the sparrows of Lahore.

Provide, Provide

SEATED AT DINNER in Lahore one winter in the late 1970s, for the third time in a week Mr. K. K. Harouni was forced to endure a conversation about a Rolls-Royce coupe recently imported by one of the Waraiches, a family no one had heard of just five years before. The car had been specially modified in London and cost an absurd amount of money, and the mention of it inevitably led to a discussion of the new Pakistani industrialists who at that time were blazing into view. Like other members of the feudal landowning class, Harouni greeted the emergence of these people with condescension overlaying his envy. He had capital, as he observed expansively. Why shouldn’t he play along a bit, how difficult could it be? Toying with the idea in the following weeks, then deciding, Harouni resolved not to do things by halves. He began selling tracts of urban land and pouring more and more cash into factories, buying machinery from Germany, hiring engineers, holding meetings with bankers. Caught up in these projects, he spent increasingly less time at his family estate in the southern Punjab, relying instead upon his manager, the formidable Chaudrey Nabi Baksh Jaglani. Tall and stooped, wearing heavy square-rimmed glasses, his face marked with deep lines of self-control and resolution, Chaudrey Sahib grew paramount in Dunyapur, the place along the Indus where the Harouni farms lay.

Thus, Chaudrey Jaglani’s moment struck. The more money that Harouni sank into the factories, the more they seemed to decline in a bewildering confusion of debts and deficits, until finally his bankers advised him to fold. A few months after this catastrophic event, Harouni summoned Nabi Baksh Jaglani to his house in Lahore. When the manager went into the landlord’s study, a dark place with a famous ceiling painted by the great surrealist Sadequain, and incongruously adorned with Indian miniatures and temple bronzes of dancing girls and Hindu gods, he found the old man sitting with his steno. Jaglani remained standing.

‘Come on, Chaudrey Sahib,’ said his master. ‘After all these years you can sit down.’

They enacted this scene every time Jaglani came to Lahore. He complied, not quite sitting at the edge of his seat, as the steno Shah Sahib did, but keeping himself rigid.

‘How are things on the farm?’ asked the landlord.

‘The crops are good but the prices are bad.’

‘How are land prices?’

Jaglani had been expecting this and saw in a flash where it would take them. ‘Low, buyers get nothing from the lands, so they don’t pay much for them. The Khoslas sold four squares at sixteen hundred an acre.’ He failed to mention that this land stood far from the river, at the tail of an unreliable canal.