And the World Changed (24 page)

“What!' exclaimed Samira, enjoying the man's irritation. “Are you claiming that your jewelers have better gems than the ones from Badakshan, finer gold than the Arabian isles, diamonds more exquisite than the ones from India?”

“I do,” insisted the innkeeper. “Our jewelers cast their nets far and wide and haul in treasures from the deepest, most obscure places. You have only to see their caravans when they return, twenty guards in front and back, horses and camels creaking with the weight of it all.”

“I've seen many caravans in my day,” laughed Samira, “and I have no wish to see any more. But I will take a stroll around your market to see if your boasts are true.”

And so saying, she set off in search of the merchant with the dog. She walked the streets of the city all day, asking questions openly, making inquiries but learning nothing until, on the fourth day, she came across a large shop displaying such fabulous jewels that she was quite overwhelmed by their beauty. There were fat emeralds, winking, blinking pools of green; rubies like luminous roses and hibiscus; diamonds so large they were like mounds of white light; sapphires bluer than the sky after a rainstorm; topazes like sunbursts; aquamarines as clear as the turquoise seas; lapis lazuli, veined and speckled in gold; amethysts, jet, turquoise, amber. . . .

“The Emperor Azad Bakht would go mad here,” she thought wickedly. “He would transport the entire shop and its contents to Constantinople.”

She closed her eyes and placed her fingers on the lids to shut out the harsh glare of the stones. When she opened them again, they focused on a low bed on which slept a large hound. An attendant smoothed its beautiful red tresses while another fanned it, waving away the flies. A third stood a little way behind the others, watchful that the dog's dishes of food and drink were fresh and full. And around the neck of this elegant, pampered hound of Afghanistan was a large collar of velvet studded with twelve enormous rubies. She had found him! Her father's savior! Now she could prove to Azad Bakht that her father's words were the truth and not an idle insult. But first, she must ask the dog's owner why he had made a collar of rubies for a dog.

“I am curious,” said Samira when the pleasantries were over, “to find out more about your dog. Why does he wear a collar of rubies?”

“The dog is called Wafadar—Loyal One,” began the merchant of Nishapur. “The best friend man can ever have.”

Then the merchant told Samira that during his travels as a boy he had encountered seven misfortunes. Each time Wafadar had saved his life, or befriended him.

“When I lay ill and hungry by the wayside, the dog guarded me from man and beast; when I was set upon by brigands and my companions abandoned me, he fought by my side. When, twice, I lost my fortune and suddenly had no friends in the world, Wafadar stayed by me, finding food for himself and for me by hunting fowl and wild deer. When finally, at the age of twenty-six, I made a fortune so vast that ten lifetimes could not make a dent in it, nothing was so precious to me as Wafadar.

“My old friend's traveling days were over. He was tired and deserved to rest. I decided to settle down once and for all and resolved to give my faithful old companion every luxury in my power, so ostentatiously that people would come to see the dog
and ask me to tell his story. Then I would have the chance to extol his virtues and pay him homage.”

Samira was moved to tears by the merchant's tale.

“His story has spread far and wide,” she said when she managed to collect herself. “It is because of him that my father, the Wazir of Constantinople, is languishing in the dungeons of Emperor Azad Bakht.” Then Samira told the merchant who she was and why she had come in search of him, dressed in men's clothes.

“I am sorry that your father suffered as a result of telling Wafadar's story,” the merchant said quietly, “and I would like to help in any way that I can.”

The dog was awake now and lifted his head, then rose to his noble feet and ambled over to his master.

Immediately the merchant took a fine piece of meat from his jeweled plate and fed it to Wafadar. The dog picked up the offering and looked at his owner with love in his eyes, and Samira saw his love reflected in the eyes of the merchant. Quietly, she looked on as the merchant stroked and fondled his dog and the dog rested his long, graceful muzzle on the merchant's knee.

“I would like to help you,” said the merchant, “because I admire your effort. You combine wisdom and courage with a soft heart and single-minded dedication. I didn't know women like you existed.”

“Perhaps,” murmured Samira, “They are not often given the chance.”

But the merchant was too preoccupied with his next thought to hear her. “Come and stay with me in my humble home,” he said, “and let us discuss your next step.” He looked at Wafadar. “And you, old friend, would you be willing to go on another journey for your master's sake?”

Wafadar licked his master's hand and stood up, suddenly playful.

“He agrees,” smiled the merchant. “He agrees to accompany Samira to Constantinople to plead her father's case. You
have lived up to your name, Samira—a true friend and companion. In my country poets write of a little white dove called Samira who proved her friendship by traveling far and wide to repay a human who once saved her life. It strikes me that you have done the same.” That night, in the halls of the merchant's manor, Samira fell in love and when the merchant proposed marriage, she accepted.

“But only on condition that you agree to come and live in Constantinople,” she said.

The merchant agreed and the next day they embarked on the return journey, which this time was far more comfortable than Samira had imagined possible.

On her return, Samira's first visit was to her father.

“I am back, Father, and I have with me the dog with the collar of twelve rubies and the man who owns him. What will the Emperor say to that?”

The old Wazir fell on his daughter's neck and wept with gratitude for her safe return.

“My days were hell and my night hellfire while you were away,” he confessed. “I imagined that you had been attacked by every evil and besieged by every conceivable misfortune. I felt sure I would never see you again. I would have thanked God a million times every moment of the day for the rest of my life, even if you had returned alone and without the means to free me.”

“Shame, Father,” laughed Samira. “You have very little faith in your daughter.”

Then Samira sought an audience with the Emperor and requested permission to bring a companion. The audience was granted and Samira and the merchant told Azad Bakht the whole story. He described how Samira had left home dressed as a man to redeem her father's honor.

“And now that you know the facts, Your Majesty, we beg a reprieve for Samira's father, the Grand Wazir.”

“I have never heard such an incredible story!” exclaimed
Azad Bakht. “And I thank God that I did not harm my Wazir or put him to death.”

The Emperor immediately ordered the release of the Wazir, and in the presence of his family and his courtiers, he begged his forgiveness.

“And all this,” concluded the Emperor, “has been achieved through the efforts of a devoted daughter.”

“A daughter,” thought Samira alone in her chamber that night, smoothing her soft fabrics to her skin, inhaling the perfumed atmosphere of her room, slipping between the silk of her bedclothes, “who is very happy to be a woman now that she has shown what womankind can achieve.”

EXCELLENT THINGS IN WOMEN

Sara Suleri Goodyear

Sara Suleri Goodyear (1953– ) is an academic, critic, and writer. She grew up in Lahore and earned degrees there from Kinnaird College and Punjab University, and a doctorate from Indiana University in the United States.

Suleri Goodyear is currently a professor of English at Yale University, the founding editor of
The Yale Journal of Criticism
, and on the editorial board of
The Yale Review
and
Transition
. She is the author of the critical work,
The Rhetoric of English India
(University of Chicago Press, 1992), and two much-acclaimed creative memoirs,
Meatless Days
(University of Chicago Press, 1989) and
Boys Will Be Boys
(University of Chicago Press, 2003). Together with her friend, Azra Raza, an oncologist in New York, she has translated into English a collection of
ghazals
by the great Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib,
Epistomologies of Elegance
(Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Suleri Goodyear originally wrote “Excellent Things in Women” as an essay that won a Pushcart Prize in 1987. The story became the first chapter of her creative memoir,
Meatless Days
(published under the name Sara Suleri). Suleri Goodyear contemplates the women in her family, and the differences not only among them, but between them and the women she knows in the United States. She makes the point that women in Pakistan think of themselves not as members of a group that may or may not exhibit solidarity, but define themselves according to the role and rank that they occupy within a home. Dadi, Suleri Goodyear's widowed grandmother, is the family matriarch. She continues to find ways to assert her will, even when thwarted—and she knows how to strike back—yet she is hardly the mean-spirited, harsh mother-in-law of both Eastern and Western stereotypes. Suleri Goodyear's vivid portrayals of her are juxtaposed with the portrait of Suleri Goodyear's Welsh-born mother, who quietly finds her way as an insightful daughter-in-law with the rare ability to skilfully blend East and West within the household.

• • •

Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women. I can tell this only to someone like Anita, in all the faith that she will understand, as we go perambulating through the grimness of New Haven and feed on the pleasures of our conversational way. Dale, who lives in Boston, would also understand. She will one day write a book about the stern and secretive life of breastfeeding and is partial to fantasies that culminate in an abundance of resolution. And Fawzi, with a grimace of
recognition, knows because she knows the impulse to forget.

To a stranger or an acquaintance, however, some vesitigial remoteness obliges me to explain that my reference is to a place where the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: We were too busy for that, just living, and conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant. By this point admittedly I am damned by my own discourse, and doubly damned when I add, yes, once in a while, we naturally thought of ourselves as women, but only in some perfunctory biological way that we happened on perchance. Or else it was a hugely practical joke, we thought, hidden somewhere among our clothes. But formulating that definition is about as impossible as attempting to locate the luminous qualities of an Islamic landscape, which can on occasion generate such aesthetically pleasing moments of life. My audience is lost, and angry to be lost, and both of us must find some token of exchange for this failed conversation. I try to lay the subject down and change its clothes, but before I know it, it has sprinted off evilly in the direction of ocular evidence. It goads me into saying, with the defiance of a plea, “You did not deal with Dadi.”

Dadi, my father's mother, was born in Meerut toward the end of the last century. She was married at sixteen and widowed in her thirties, and by her latter decades could never exactly recall how many children she had borne. When India was partitioned, in August of 1947, she moved her thin pure Urdu into the Punjab of Pakistan and waited for the return of her eldest son, my father. He had gone careening off to a place called Inglestan, or England, fired by one of the several enthusiasms made available by the proliferating talk of independence. Dadi was peeved. She had long since dispensed with any loyalties larger than the pitiless give-and-take of people who are forced to live together in the same place, and she resented independence for the distances it made. She was not among those who, on the fourteenth of August, unfurled flags and festivities against the
backdrop of people running and cities burning. About that era she would only say, looking up sour and cryptic over the edge of her Quran, “And I was also burned.” She was, but that came years later.