And the World Changed (33 page)

Here, Shabbir waited for Fatimah with the patience of a man used to absences.

When she came, he gave her the box of Super Hashmi Surma and explained to her that it would cleanse her eyes much as her smile cleansed his heart of so much anguish. She smiled at him. Then placing her lips on the pistachio-green cardboard box, she kissed it. She laughed, and her joy eased Shabbir's pain.

IMPOSSIBLE SHADE OF HOME BREW

Maniza Naqvi

Maniza Naqvi (1960– ) was born in Lahore and has lived in Mangla, Tarbela, and Karachi, Pakistan. She has studied at the Lahore American School and Kinnaird College, Lahore. Abroad, she earned degrees at Mount Holyoke College in the United States, and at the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines. She currently lives in Washington, D.C., where she works on poverty reduction and post-conflict reconstruction.

Naqvi is the author of four novels,
Mass Transit
(Oxford University Press, 1998),
On Air
(Oxford University Press, 2000),
Stay With Me
(Sama, 2004), and
A Matter of Detail
(Sama, 2008). Her short stories, poems, and essays have been published in various anthologies, including
Shattering the Stereotypes
(Olive Branch, 2005) and
Neither Night nor Day
(HarperCollins, 2007). Currently, she is working on a book of short stories set in Sarajevo.

“Impossible Shade of Home Brew” explores identity and sexuality, gender roles, parenthood, exile, and the blending of East and West across the centuries. The narrator vividly recreates the vitality and living fabric of Lahore, the city whose rich pleasures he avidly shared with his beloved son. The death of his son in a rickshaw road accident due to the neglect of rich passersby sets up Naqvi's concern with a universe, marred by prejudice, indifference, and artificial divisions, such as that of class.

The reference to Moharrum not only recalls the dramatic procession he enjoyed with his son, but the dirges recited at Moharrums, which lament the sons slain at the Battle of Karbala as well as the grief of their mothers, including the Prophet's daughter, Fatima and her daughter Zainab. The son's needlework, a piece of vibrantly colored embroidery that the narrator carries as a memento, also symbolizes the many hues of love and the conscious choice that the narrator and his wife made when they entered into their pragmatic, unconventional marriage, where she wanted a child, and he needed a face-saving social cover since his parents could not accept his sexuality. Perceiving himself as both a man and a woman, the narrator continues to develop the themes of duality with metaphorical references that reflect this, such as the choice of Ephesus, which is in modern Turkey, but was associated in antiquity with the Greek Goddess, Artemis, who was the twin of Apollo and was a compulsive hunter.

• • •

Tucked away in the frenzy of Lahore's traffic-congested Mozang Chungi, a framer's shop, narrow, dark, and dusty, bears on its back wall a minor conceit from history. A slight, which made
the freshly formed impressions of a newcomer, even a tough customer like me, obsolete. At least it does in my memory, an old and faded letter dated some time in the late nineteenth century and attesting to the fine quality of the shop's work, signed John Lockwood Kipling. Curator of the Lahore Museum and Principal of the Mayo School of Arts. Perhaps it's all gone now, what with newer buildings encroaching that old downtown area—I don't know. It used to be there when I was there way back in the Eighties. “Le' go! Le' go!” I hear his voice. Tonight, as usual, a smattering of tiny twinkling mirrors wink and cover me, cautioning that the past is for the willing but it seems the only way to divine sleep.

The letter always caught my eye and was framed behind the tea-and-grime stained cloth-covered counter. Must have been around the same time as when his young son was in Lahore working as an assistant editor at the
Civil and Military Gazette
.

Such a long time ago I was there, visiting routinely the emaciated and chain-smoking septuagenarian owner of a framer's shop, as delivery dates on orders placed were rescheduled over and over again. The shop's dark interior, open to the street, smelled of everyday ordinariness: Car fumes tinged with the fragrance of
chameli
flowers that lay on the shop counter, strung in garlands; their scent folded into the smell of a mosquito repellant coil and the stale smoke of cigarette butts and an incense stick; all of them mingled with the smell of the antiseptic floor-wash, phenyl. Ordinary, normal, comforting. We would make our way there, my son and I, after I had picked him up from school. We'd stop at the dry cleaner's or the shoemaker's or tend to some other need of mine, to pick up seemingly endless additions to my treasured and admittedly flamboyant wardrobe. A pair of shoes here, a shirt there, a belt I could not resist. Inevitably, at every stop, I'd run into someone I knew. One knew, it seemed, everyone, and of course immediately a ritual would ensue: of exchanges, of perceived slights and complaints, disappointments, letdowns, and clarifications of a phone call not
returned, an invitation not honored or reciprocated, a rebuke, a rebuttal followed by mutual admirations of haircuts and various other personal effects and, of course, always the weight gain or weight loss of each other duly noted.

“Great shirt! Egyptian cotton?”

“No, pure
khadi
, a new supplier down in Shalmi!”

“Very nice. Putting on a bit of weight, eh?”

“Am I? No! I don't think so! Do I seem to have?”

“Don't see you around the courts much anymore!”

“No, it's far too hot for me now! We'll see after the rains.”

An encounter was incomplete without an opening salvo or a parting shot aimed at weight. All this time, from the corner of my eye, I could see my restive son's rising frustration as I kept delaying our final destination. On one such occasion, chewing through clenched teeth the plastic straw in his empty fruit juice pack, Sher had shouted at me, “Le' go! Please, le' go!”

“Le' go?” I had inquired in his direction, winking indulgently at my chance encounter acquaintance of the moment.

“Yes! Le' go, now!”

“I'm not holding on to you!”

“I said, ‘Let's go!'” Sher had roared back at me.

“Oh!” I said, thoroughly amused, “that's better,
beta
, enunciate, enunciate!”

Off we went, finally. Even as we moved through the traffic, I'd constantly nod or wave to someone or the other. It seemed everyone knew us and we knew everyone. In such a manner we would make it to the framer's. For Sher such visits were always full of promise, first the expectation of delivery, to see his creation framed, then the frustration of a promise not kept, followed by the framer's apologies and excuses in between his hacking cough, and finally his plying of consolation in the form of a cup of
karak chai
or a
lassi
. Sher always chose the
lassi
, grasping the glass eagerly with his small hands as I looked on in consternation, anxious about the possibility of his contracting jaundice from drinking
lassi
in the bazaar. But I never stopped
him; it was good for him, it helped create antibodies, made a man out of him. I always accepted the cup of tea.

To the framer's shop we had brought a piece of embroidery. It was a large piece, one square yard of red damask with tiny mirrors worked in with yellow thread. It had been completed by Sher in home economics class, perhaps the largest in his portfolio, of which he was very proud, for it included his entire repertoire of stitches ranging from chain to cross to mirror work. Twenty years later the piece travels with me: red, mirror worked, covered in swirls of needlepoint. Back then I had thought it quite hideous, but it was rendered by my son and deemed by Mrs. Moinuddin, Sher's teacher, fit for framing. I agreed wholeheartedly. Mrs. Moinuddin was a great source of solace and joy for Sher, each Friday afternoon in her classroom located in the basement of the school building, accessed through what seemed like a secret stairway. Here, taught by her, in her comfortable, narrow, elongated, parlor-like room, my son reclaimed through needlework his sense of poise and grace, which had recently been lost to the dance teacher, a great maestro of classical dance.

Sher had appeared at the audition for the dance class dripping with sweat, right after soccer practice in soccer cleats and shorts. Attempting to strap on to his bare ankles a heavy pair of
ghungroos
, the wide leather swatches covered with tiny metal bells, he had giggled at the maestro's head and eye movements. With this, Sher had sealed his fate and that of several others who had been inclined to giggle along with him. “Your deportment has all the beauty of a flat-footed elephant!” judged the great, but affronted, maestro.

“An elephant!” an indignant Sher had protested.

“Yes, an elephant,” the great maestro elaborated serenely and with graceful employment of eye, neck, and hand movements, “an elephant listlessly wandering down the Mall toward Kim's gun, after having escaped from the Lahore Zoo on a late afternoon in the month of June.”

My son had been inconsolable that afternoon when he
plunked himself on the seat next to me in the car on the way back home. “An elephant, a lazy bum! That's what he thinks!” Sher had complained quite brokenheartedly that the great maestro of dance had not even left him wiggle room for redemption, by at least caricaturing him as an energetic or enthusiastic elephant. And so Sher was not to be found charging toward Kim's gun, down the tree-canopied, shaded, and gracious Mall road; no, he was just wandering like an elephant. And a listless one at that. There was to be no consolation commentary, as in the school report card, where the failed Maths grade was offset with the comment, “Displays tremendous esprit de corps.” Sher had always displayed plenty of esprit de corps. I had considered having a word with the dance teacher but thought better of it. Life's knocks; not all a bowl of cherries, y'know; can't always have it your way; good with the bad; good for the boy, makes a man of him.

I had always been overly protective and keenly felt my child's bewilderment at the slightest of rebukes. The framed embroidery with dozens of twinkling mirrors, with yellow chain stitches laboriously worked by Sher hunched over it for hours, tongue sticking out in concentration, had in some measure restored his pride. But watching his peers twirling across the stage in a blur of turquoise, mustard, and fuchsia,
peshwazes
and saris, while he sat in the darkened audience, plainly awestruck, had naturally left my Sher subdued and grumpy. Neither Kathak, nor Bharat Natyam, nor the Dhamal were to be performed by
jungli
brutes like him, as the maestro seemed to have implied. And I could do nothing to make up for it, except to frame his embroideries.

On rainy afternoons when the weather was fine and the monsoon was at its height, I'd take Sher to the outskirts of the city, to the dense mango grove at Niaz Baig, it was our special hidden place. We'd drink steaming cups of thick, heavily sugared, milky tea at a truck stall, then make our way into the thicket to sit by the canal and watch the rain come down. Submerged this way in every shade of green, the grass alongside the canal,
the mango trees, the surrounding fields of rice,
koels
and wild parrots fluttering through the foliage overhead, we'd sniff till intoxicated the smell of sweet wet mud. Sher had discovered a water well with an inscription inside dated 1898. It read “
prem kuwan
,” well of love. I hadn't understood it then, when I visited the framer's shop almost a century apart from that curator of long ago, this sense of belonging, because it was mine to be had in such abundance.