Revolt (23 page)

Rasoola was in a blazingly angry mood and very keen to share it with her companion. ‘Begum, this set-up suits you, but I am being strangled alive under this bondage of slavery. Thanks to Master Ismail bringing home a foreign wife, I’ve escaped from a life of servility! I’ve decided that I will not work for anybody, in
any household
, from now on.’

‘What?’ Begum cried, thinking that the arrogant,
sharp-tongued
Rasoola had lost her head.

‘Only in the mosque. There no one will boss me … Of course I will be offering my services to Allah Pak. However, not in this village mosque as everyone knows me here. I’m off to the city once I’ve saved enough. I intend finding proper paid work in a factory and renting my own living accommodation.’

‘At your age?’

‘Me … I am only in my late forties.’

‘Well, it’s not that young!’ Begum scoffed.

‘I want to be mistress of my own destiny. Begum, we humble people also have a right, don’t we? Why is it our lives are chained to the households of the rich, where even our breathing is being controlled by our masters? Mehreen suffocated me.’

Begum gawped, unable to understand how someone like Rasoola could think like this. Her view of the world was so different.

‘Stop exaggerating,’ she replied dismissively. ‘But I wish you luck, my friend, if you are bent on “escaping” this so-called rotten life. I’ll not forsake you … if you ever need anything, you’ll always be welcome here. Listen, I have an idea. Why don’t you
stay a few more days and work in Mistress Gulbahar’s household? You like Mistress Gulbahar, don’t you? And I will swap by going to work in Mistress Mehreen’s home. They desperately need someone till Ismail goes back. I’m sure Mistress Gulbahar won’t mind. I’ll have a word with her right away.’

‘OK, that’s great. But what about when Mistress Mehreen comes to Mistress Gulbahar’s household – what do I do? Disappear into thin air?’ she scoffed. Had Begum not thought of that?

‘We’ll get you a wig and a mask!’ They both giggled, their wiry bodies shaking.

‘What about the rest of me? Drape a sack around me?’

‘We’ll have to mummify you all over to hide your skinny waistline.’ They carried on giggling loudly, not caring that Begum’s husband could hear them. In the bedroom, lying on his bed, Ali grunted. Fuming, he was bent on getting rid of Rasoola as soon as possible! He had heard everything. The wicked woman was a terrible influence on his kind, loyal, but very gullible wife. Rasoola both abused and betrayed her masters. The young Mistress Laila had manipulated his poor wife and look where it got everyone. Now it was Rasoola who had his wife under her skinny thumb.

The cracking sound of monkey nuts had begun again. It looked as if the two women on their portable beds on the veranda were bent on finishing every single darned monkey nut from the two-kilo bag in one night! They were both mad. Did they not want to sleep? They had to get up early in the morning. Master Haider was entertaining an up-and-coming politician and his wife from Islamabad.

‘And if they dare to cough later after this gorging on the nuts, I’ll throttle them both with their shawls. But which one first? Perhaps my wife, for letting that wicked woman into our home!’

Heart thumping, Mehreen stood outside her son’s bedroom listening for any sounds. Liaquat had already gone to bed. Hand trembling she turned the handle, took a deep breath, and pushed the door open. Daniela, on seeing the older woman, immediately
guessed her to be her mother-in-law. Mehreen’s eyes fell on the woman who had ‘stolen’ their son.

Daniela’s gaze was the first to fall, pulling her bare legs under her on the bed as her nightgown only reached above her knees.

‘Assalam alaikum
,’ Daniela shyly offered.

The Muslim greeting from the
goorie’s
mouth startled Mehreen, her head reeling. Eyes closed, she tried to block out the woman in front of her. Daniela sat up, assessing the older woman. There was no smile on her face but neither was there hostility. Only the look of someone lost. Mehreen opened her eyes and could not help marvelling at Daniela’s very short, shiny, golden hair under the light.

She did not become aware of her son’s entrance until he stood beside her.

‘I’m glad, Mother, that you’ve met my wife,’ Ismail sheepishly offered.

Switching a dull gaze on her son, Mehreen left the room, unable to enter into a discussion with him yet. Ismail raised his arms in defeat. Daniela looked away in understanding.

‘Glad that we’ve got that over and done with. You’ve now met both my parents,’ Ismail offered lightly.

Daniela shook her head, unable to stem the tears from falling on her hands.

‘Daniela! What’s wrong?’ Ismail was beside her, squatting on the floor.

‘Your mother hates me, Ismail!’

‘No, she doesn’t. She’s just in a state of shock.’ He hotly defended his mother.

‘I know!’ Daniela wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘I wish to God I’d never come!’

‘A bit late now, gorgeous, is it not?’ Ismail teased. ‘It’s OK! Cry if you want to!’ he offered, sitting beside her on the bed.

Out in the courtyard, on the bottom step of the staircase, Mehreen leaned her head heavily against the balustrade. A dull ache spread through her body.

‘Allah Pak, help us all! The nightmare is endless,’ Mehreen muttered, shuddering.

She heard footsteps but didn’t bother getting up.

‘Mehreen?’ Liaquat was worried on seeing his wife’s posture and put his arm protectively around her. ‘Come, Mehreen!’ he gently urged.

Blindly, she followed him up the stairs.

‘There’s
haram
taking place in our household, Liaquat-ji, and we are helpless to prevent it. Our son is sleeping with a woman, who might not be his wife!’ she murmured.

‘They are legally married, Mehreen, please don’t say such things! Our son wouldn’t do that!’

‘Would he not?’ she rasped, panting. Liaquat was shaking his head. Their son couldn’t possibly be living openly in sin with a woman. Cohabiting with a woman outside of marriage – surely their son had not crossed parameters of such cultural and religious importance and etiquette?

He aggressively dismissed his wife’s fear. ‘Don’t ever utter such nonsense again, Mehreen!’

Downstairs, Daniela stared around her new room. It was past midnight and she couldn’t sleep and needed fresh air. The omelette Ismail had made was proving to be too spicy for her. A chilli lover she was, but now pregnant, she felt everything heaving inside.

‘Ismail, I feel sick. I need fresh air.’ She tried to nudge him awake but he was sound asleep.

Out on the veranda, the dark shadows of the pillars strewn across the moonlit courtyard intimidated her. Padding
barefooted
across the cool marble floor, Daniela reached the sink and threw her head over it, emptying out her stomach.

Her mother-in-law, unable to sleep, had happened to be looking down into the central courtyard from the rooftop gallery and had seen her. Bent over the basin with another stomach spasm, Daniela was about to go back to her room when she saw the shadowy figure of her mother-in-law standing a few feet away. The two women stared at each other. Mehreen noted how Daniela held her arm tight across her waist.

Eyes widening, Mehreen leaned against the marble pillar. Softly padding across the courtyard and reaching her room,
Daniela closed the door firmly behind her. It was a long time before she was able to sleep. When she next opened her eyes, the village cocks had merrily begun their morning crowing ritual, almost as if they were competing with each other. This was soon followed by the sound of the
adhan
from the local mosque.

She whispered behind her husband’s shoulder, ‘Ismail, please don’t wake me up. I haven’t slept a wink all night.’ Smiling, Ismail hugged her closer.

‘You can sleep all day, my darling, but that is if you don’t want to go sightseeing in Islamabad,’ he whispered, nuzzling his face in her neck.

‘Oh! How wonderful!’ was Daniela’s answer. ‘Give me a couple of hours then!’

‘OK, lazybones … You’ll get to see all the sights in the next couple of days.’

Horrified, Laila watched her daughter turn the corner with the musicians heading for her father’s
hevali
.

‘Shirin, come back.’ Panicking and lifting up the hem of her
shalwar
, Laila ran after her daughter, beseeching her Allah Pak above the clear blue sky to come to her aid. For he now held her fate in his hands. Her daughter had disappeared straight into the crowd of men. Laila leaned against the mud-baked wall of the woodcutter’s house and held up her face to the beaming hot rays of the sun.

Behind her closed eyelids, images of the past plagued. Renowned for his generosity, her father hosted big celebratory parties, like on the day of her brother’s birth, the
haqiqa
party, to which the whole village had been invited. Her aunties, Mehreen and Rani, accompanied by other women, had danced to their hearts’ content till their legs collapsed under them, inside the inner courtyard, swaying to loud music, away from the men’s lewd gazes. The male guests, too, had enthusiastically rejoiced with several
bhangra
dances to the loud beating of the drums in the
hevali’s
outer courtyard, with the crowd spilling out into the village lanes. Not only that, in every home some form of celebration had taken place; for their landlord was blessed at last with a son after many years of waiting. Everyone wholeheartedly shared in his joy.

Laila could not get enough of cuddling her young brother and holding his face against her cheek and running down to Begum for his feeds when he refused to suck his mother’s breast. The two aunties also fought for time to demonstrate their affection
for their longed-for nephew. Both with young children of their own, they had stayed for over two weeks to help look after their sister, the new baby and all the guests who constantly streamed in to congratulate the family. Many relatives stayed for days, lingering on to enjoy the festive atmosphere and the marvellous feasts on offer. Rani was often late in breastfeeding her own young daughter, Saher, as she supervised the feasts served in the dining rooms on her sister’s behalf.

The crushing ache for her parents’ home leapt and then died a quick death. ‘It was the past – I have to let go of it,’ Laila mourned.

The loud drumming of the
dhols
and the music of the Scottish bagpipes sounded the same as on the day of her brother’s
haqiqa
party. The musicians had played tirelessly all day, their faces lit with joy for the popular
zemindar
, their aching hands and limbs forgotten. Master Haider, in return, thanked them by lavishing expensive gifts on them.

Today’s celebration marked Aslan’s homecoming; it had been a long time since the
hevali
sounded with the celebratory beat of the drums. Sadly, the villagers mourned that their landlord had been robbed of the biggest celebration of all – his beloved daughter’s wedding.

They also felt sorry for Chaudharani Gulbahar for not giving birth to any other children. ‘What it all shows,’ Rasoola had cattily twittered to her friend, ‘is that all the bags of money notes in the world, or dozens of gold bangles on your wrists can’t buy you fertility or furnish your womb with children. That’s a blessing indeed, my friend, that only Allah Pak can bestow on us.’

Did Allah Pak deliberately overlook others? The village women shook their heads. The baker’s wife could not stop herself from voicing aloud her thoughts and commiserating, ‘None of the three sisters is blessed with many children. Rani has just one daughter, but of course she was a widow, so that accounted for it. Mehreen has only one son and Gulbahar one son and one daughter. Between the three of them only four children. They are indeed impoverished in numbers, though there are so many rooms in their homes.’

‘Well, they could not compete with Khanum Bibi with her brood of eight and still happy to go on adding, boasting philosophically, “If Allah Pak has blessed me in this way, why should I turn away his blessing?” Can you believe it, sisters! Is the woman mad or merely witless?’ The women agreed unanimously that Khanum Bibi was utterly ‘witless’.

‘She’s also cruelly skilful in delegating the childcare to her three teenage daughters. The poor girls have lost their own childhood – they’ve been propping babies on their hips and changing nappies since they were seven. And what about when all the kids grow into adults, ready for marriage? Has that idea never dawned on her? Or would she delegate that task to others, too? She nearly died during the seventh birth – or was it the eighth, I can’t quite remember,’ the baker’s wife bitchily continued.

‘Perhaps with the active breeding she has no brain cells left,’ gossiped the greengrocer’s wife, who prided herself on having a perfect family of two sons and two daughters; sons were needed for looking after the parents, but daughters were a
must
for household chores.

Quite a few of the women were still openly speculating on the fertility status of the three land-owning sisters. With so much wealth why did they not seek medical help abroad? Was it the sisters or their spouses who were infertile? Yet, all three? Surely that couldn’t be right. It must be the sisters themselves! Especially Mehreen, the pompous one. Heads had unanimously nodded.

‘No woman wishes to be infertile!’ Begum angrily cut short the women’s malicious gossiping. They had all forgotten that she, too, was childless. ‘It’s all in Allah Pak’s hands! And don’t forget fertility is not guaranteed for life – either for yourself or your daughters. I, too, have no children. You’ve not commented on my fertility status! Do you think I did not want any? Mean women! So shut up, the lot of you! Bitching about the very household that is feeding you!’

A loyal servant and a personal friend of Mistress Gulbahar, Begum found it very painful to listen to their spiteful chit-chat and was especially cross with Rasoola for starting it all off. She let her know it with a mighty scowl.

Seething, the women shut up, pursing their mouths and exchanging hate-filled, heated glances. Why was Begum always championing her mistress? What was wrong with her? Did she not enjoy a bit of harmless gossip?

As soon as Begum had left the room, it was their cue to happily begin again. After all, they had to entertain themselves. This time the gossip hinged on Mehreen, the most reviled of the three landladies! It was the master tailor’s wife who started the ball rolling. For she was thoroughly fed up with Sahiba Mehreen’s complaints about her dressmaking skills, in particular with the positioning of the darts and zips on her dresses!

‘With all her snooty airs and graces, just look where it has got her as a woman – she has lost her only son to a foreign woman! On that subject, tell me, ladies, why do all these rich folks,
waderas
, want to send their children abroad, when they have all the worldly goods they need at home? The sisters have had their fair share of family calamities, haven’t they? From Laila’s marriage to the potter’s son, to Ismail bringing home an English bride and to Saher being jilted by her cousin.’

They all chuckled under their breath, afraid of another one of Begum’s scoldings raining down on them. They still had to be fed by her. ‘Now where have Mehreen’s airs and graces disappeared to? If one overreaches, Allah Pak, let me tell you, has a delicious way of dropping us down to earth. Well, our almighty Mistress Mehreen’s ego has been badly bruised, by the look of things!’ The tailor’s wife stopped, seeing Begum reappear in the marquee with a tray of drinks. The women enjoyed another bout of sniggers before reaching for the glasses of cool home-made sherbet.