Season of the Rainbirds (4 page)

‘The servants will have to be questioned,’ Azhar said.

Outside in the street Gul-kalam, the nightwatchman, was talking excitedly to a group assembled around him. He moved his shoulders and hands boisterously. On seeing Azhar and the police inspector appear at the front door he became suddenly grim and, abandoning his audience, crossed the street hurriedly.

‘I was two streets away when I heard the shot,’ he said in his clipped north-western accent. ‘I couldn’t have done anything.’ He had pale blue eyes which he kept rimmed with antimony; his great bushy moustache curved into his mouth, obscuring the upper lip.

‘You’ve already made your statement, Gul-kalam.’ Azhar placed his hand on the man’s shoulder.

But Gul-kalam shook his head miserably. ‘I’m worthless. I couldn’t save him.’

‘Later, Gul-kalam,’ the police inspector said impatiently. ‘First, get these people to clear the street.’ And turning to Azhar he said, ‘We had better erect a shamiana out here. Soon there won’t be enough room inside.’

Gul-kalam had walked away from them. The brass whistle, which he would blow at the ends of each street on his rounds, dangled from his neck. On his feet he wore brown leather sandals whose thick soles held his feet inches above the mud. They watched him in silence for a few moments.

‘So,’ the inspector turned to Azhar and said, through a half-smile, ‘what’s this I hear about
you
, deputy-sahib?’

Azhar looked at him in incomprehension. A man carrying on his head an enormous basket as wide and flat as a stork’s nest, heaped with flowers, sidled past him and went into the house. ‘What?’ said Azhar, at the same time expelling the heavy fragrance of marigolds from his lungs.

The inspector smiled more openly. ‘The men who went to your house this morning to tell you about the death say there was a woman there with you.’

Through the small window of his room the old man saw Kalsum and Suraya open and enter the cemetery gate. He stopped kneading his limp biceps and went to that corner of the room where, in the angle between two walls, there was a heap of soil covered with a tough canvas sheet. With slow shovelfuls he filled a large basket and, heaving it up to his left shoulder, followed the two women down the narrow path of cracked slabs.

Kalsum squatted by her son’s grave; in lowering herself she drew the tails of her loose tunic between the back of her thighs and her calves, to prevent the hemline from getting muddied. One by one she picked up the rotting leaves that had accumulated around the grave since her last visit. Suraya walked around and began to clear the other side of the mound. The drizzle had ceased, and on the trunks and boughs of the large trees growing amongst the graves, mottled patterns left by last year’s honey-fungus showed vivid, lit by the raking afternoon light. A few of the graves had planted at their heads the colours – small square or triangular flags – of the fakirs and sufis that the dead person had followed in life. The wet rags hung stiffly, clinging to the poles, the surface-tension of water holding the folds firmly in place.

‘You should have waited for a dry day,’ the old man said to Kalsum. With a heavy sigh he brought down the basket of soil and remained bent at the waist – hands gripping the rim of the basket – for a few moments, trying to catch his breath.

Kalsum did not look up; she simply said, ‘I come on the last Wednesday of every month, baba. Have you forgotten?’ Suraya had cleared her side of the grave and was standing up, cleaning her fingers with a handkerchief. The keeper’s milky eyes examined her. She wore a large coat tightly fastened at the waist. The rigid fabric and exaggerated collar and cuffs gave it the appearance of a garment intended for a marionette, a doll.

‘This is my sister, baba,’ Kalsum said, ‘Burkat’s wife. Do you remember Burkat, baba?’

‘Burkat,’ the old man mumbled to himself, very quietly, as though turning in his mouth a piece of food never before tasted, waiting for it to release a flavour that the tongue might recognise. ‘Little Kazo Nur’s brother?’

Suraya nodded.

‘Well, well,’ he brightened. ‘We are practically family then.’ He laughed quietly to himself, pleased. The dark flesh on his cheeks had slackened with age and sunk into deep hollows on either side of the nose. ‘But didn’t he go to live in England?’

‘Canada,’ Kalsum said. ‘They went to England first, but then they moved to Canada.’

‘Canada,’ he said lifting his head towards Suraya. ‘Is that far from England?’ And, narrowing his eyes to think, he added, ‘Here to Karachi?’

‘Much farther.’

Kalsum was spreading the soil evenly over the grave. The soil caught beneath her fingernails appeared green. Suraya too sat down once more and began to take handfuls from the basket. The old man pulled up a grass stem and, snapping it in two, began to pick his teeth. ‘When did you come back?’ he asked. ‘From Canada.’

‘Ten days.’ Suraya packed the spongy soil tightly, pressing down with the palms of both her hands. The old man nodded and spat loudly over his shoulder. Sensing that he was about to speak again Kalsum chided gently, ‘Baba, have you eaten crows? You are talking too much.’

At the other end of the graveyard a group of women emerged from the small enclosure, sheltered by a corrugated-iron roof, where funeral prayers were said. The iron rails of the enclosure were wrapped in trumpet bindweed. The keeper followed the sisters’ glances and said, ‘They are servants from Judge Anwar’s house. The widow sent them to clean the floor of the jinaza-gah. I told them it is clean, it is swept every other day, but they wouldn’t listen.’

A whole layer of soil was added to the mound and doused with the watering-can that the keeper fetched – spilling and splashing to his right and left – from the tap outside his room. Kalsum stood up. ‘He would have been twenty-one this December.’ She looked around and took in all the other graves.

The old man nodded slowly and looking at Suraya said, ‘He was born three months before
my
boy.’

‘He was a good son,’ Kalsum said; she rubbed the palms of her hands hard against each other and the damp soil came off in thin, slender sickles and the skin beneath showed white.

‘Mine would ruin me,’ the keeper turned towards Kalsum and said. ‘He’s been nothing but trouble since he grew up. When he was a boy, people sent him on errands and gave him money afterwards. I would protest. Send him to do work, by all means, I said, it’s good for a child to be obedient. But don’t give him any money. A child shouldn’t have money, he’ll develop bad habits.’

Kalsum agreed and touched the old man’s forearm. ‘May God guide them, baba.’

‘Now the shopkeepers are his friends. He gets them to write fake receipts and keeps the difference,’ the keeper went on. ‘He thinks I don’t know, but I know.’

‘He sent his mother to her grave,’ Kalsum turned to her sister and said quietly; and to the keeper: ‘Where is he now?’

‘I’ve sent him to the fertiliser factory to buy a sack of lime. There wasn’t going to be enough for the judge’s grave.’ As he spoke, the old man’s adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He placed the empty watering-can inside the basket and picked up the basket. ‘Still,’ he smiled, ‘I could be rich soon. Perhaps I’ll get a letter saying that nineteen years ago I had won a lottery.’

Suraya and Kalsum were walking down the path. Kalsum turned around. ‘What are you talking about, baba?’

The keeper approached; he looked at her incredulously. ‘You haven’t heard about the letters?’

Kalsum shook her head. ‘What letters?’ Suraya had walked down to the tip of the path and, folding back the sleeves of her coat, was washing her hands at the tap.

‘They’ve just found three sacks of letters that went missing after a train crash nineteen years ago,’ the old man explained. ‘The ones belonging to the two neighbouring towns have been delivered. It’s our turn soon.’

Maulana Hafeez did not go home directly after the burial. First, aware that there would be a shortage of rosaries for the mourners, he instructed some of the younger men at the cemetery to carry the sacks of date pits, collected and stored for just such occasions, from the mosque to the judge’s house. Then he walked to the lower part of the town. He went down the narrow, twisting alleyways, saying his rosary – the beads rising slowly towards his fingers and dropping one by one over the other side. It was the hottest hour of the day; the houses were shut and, apart from some schoolboys playing truant, the streets were deserted. Maulana Hafeez knocked on the door of a small adobe house. He informed the woman who came to the door, her clothes in disarray and her hair dishevelled – she had been taking her siesta – that her mother’s grave was showing signs of neglect, it needed a new layer of soil. She stood listening with bowed head, trying to stifle her yawns. She asked the cleric into the house but he refused the invitation courteously.

When he arrived back at the mosque he was covered in sweat. The door to his wife’s room was closed and on the veranda all the blinds had been lowered, enclosing the small space, and the rooms it gave on to, in a cool, tranquil stillness. Waiting for him in his bedroom was the man who made his living by selling spectacles and eye medicine at street corners. He was drinking bright-red cordial from an aluminium tumbler; and as Maulana Hafeez entered, he quickly put out the cigarette he had been drawing on so pleasurably. He put the cigarette in his pocket and stood up to greet the cleric.

‘There was no need to hurry,’ said Maulana Hafeez. ‘You should have waited for the sun to go down a little.’

The vendor responded by making a humble noise at the back of his throat. Maulana Hafeez wiped the oily sweat from his face and the sides of his neck. The vendor set about opening his large leather case; its felt-lined inside was divided into several compartments, all taken up by tidy rows of spectacles. The frames were identical – imitation tortoiseshell – and the glass of the lenses they carried had a greenish tinge. The inside of the lid too was adapted to hold ranks of eye drops, each small vial secured by its neck to a clamp-like, near-complete circle. And there were many compact boxes containing monocles. Maulana Hafeez brought a chair over and sat down facing the man, who immediately began asking him his questions.

Maulana Hafeez answered each question thoughtfully and precisely.

‘Myopia,’ the optician announced when he had finished the questioning. ‘It’s also called near-sightedness because things near the eye are less out of focus than those far away.’ Maulana Hafeez was nodding uncertainly. ‘It’s natural, Maulana-ji,’ the optician continued. He explained how, due to stiffening with age of certain muscles in the eye, almost everyone lost some ability to see distant objects; and how people who were far-sighted when young had near-perfect vision in their old age because the myopia of their later years counterbalanced, and therefore corrected, the earlier defect.

‘God’s wisdom is limitless,’ responded the cleric. The optician leaned forward in his chair towards Maulana Hafeez and began handing him pairs of glasses.

The blurred edges contracted all of a sudden and objects came sharply into focus – even those that he had thought of as simply too far away to be seen. Maulana Hafeez was taken aback – that others observed things with such clarity, that all the time he too had been meant to see the world as clearly as this.

‘This one is just right,’ Maulana Hafeez said, looking around and pointing up at the pair resting on his nose. He took them off and carefully folded down the arms. The vendor walked around the case, some of whose neat rows were now in disarray, and began to examine Maulana Hafeez’s eyes. Using a forefinger and thumb he exposed almost half of each eyeball and, holding his face inches away from Maulana Hafeez, shone a torch into each eye.

Maulana Hafeez had never seen another face so close to his own. He struggled to look away. ‘You didn’t have to come straightaway, you could have waited until it was cooler.’

‘There’s no problem, Maulana-ji,’ said the vendor. ‘You must provide us sinners with more chances to be of service to you.’

Maulana Hafeez did not hear him; he was not listening. ‘A terrible calamity,’ he said. ‘A tragedy. May he find a place in God’s paradise. God is the glorious truth.’