Haveli (10 page)

Meanwhile, out behind the stables, Shabanu sat on her
charpoi
, which she’d dragged into the doorway to catch the green air cooled by the canal, embroidering
shalwar kameez
for Zabo in delicate pastel cottons handwoven in India and smuggled across the border through the Cholistan Desert.

Amid the comings and goings in the courtyard, Zabo arrived virtually unnoticed to spend the night with Shabanu before their departure for Lahore. She came in her father’s car, barely visible in the backseat between two bodyguards. A third sat in front beside the driver.

Six small boys—all children of servants of the household—stopped their cricket match outside the heavy wooden gates to watch, fascinated by the ugly black snouts of the automatic weapons sticking from the tops of the gray-tinted windows of the air-conditioned sedan.

Shabanu ran to greet Zabo, who stepped from between the gunmen. Shabanu took her hands
and looked her up and down.

Zabo was pale and thin, but her eyes shone with pleasure at seeing her friend.

“I’m so happy to see you,” Zabo said.

As the servants lifted her bags from the car, Mumtaz came running, her shiny black braid bouncing out behind her. Zabo bent her long slender frame and lifted the child to near shoulder height before dropping her to rest on her hip.

“I won’t be able to pick you up this way anymore!” she said, and Mumtaz beamed. “You’re too big.”

“Auntie Zabo, come see my fawn!” she said, wriggling to be put down again. “She’s not growing.”

“Where did you get a fawn?”

“Papa brought her from the desert so I would stand still when Uma brushes my hair. Come see!” Mumtaz rushed away again, and Shabanu and Zabo followed.

“She lives for the little beast,” said Shabanu. “It was so frail when it arrived. It’s still small, but it’s grown fat and healthy. It’s completely taken over our lives.”

In the courtyard, Choti was stealing maize from the bin where the
mali
kept the birds’ food.

“Take her away before Mali scolds both of you,” said Shabanu. “We’ll be out in the garden.” She called to Zenat and asked her to bring lemonade.

“You’re thin,” said Shabanu. Zabo didn’t reply. Shabanu took her arm and led her into the shade of
the arbor at the end of the veranda. They sat in the covered swing, and still Zabo didn’t speak. They listened to the birds calling to each other from their cages, while the flower-scented breeze played around them.

“Tell me,” said Shabanu after a while.

“I think of Ahmed often,” Zabo said. She looked around to see if any of her cousins were nearby.

“Don’t worry,” said Shabanu. “They’re so engrossed with wedding plans they don’t have time to eavesdrop.”

“I try to think of how sweet he is,” Zabo said. “I try to concentrate on how happy I’ll be here with you. But no matter how I try to see his smile, I see him as he really is, with his senseless laugh, hiding his wet chin behind his hand …”

Shabanu squeezed Zabo’s fingers, but her own mind carried the picture still further: Zabo lying dutifully on her wedding night beside a quivering Ahmed. The bed would have been prepared with fine white linen, and Ahmed would have been schooled in impregnating her. A shiver of revulsion skipped across Shabanu’s shoulders, and she could think no further.

“From now on we will be together,” she said. “I pledge it on my life.”

The servants lifted Zabo’s leather bags into the farm van, which already was half full of luggage that contained Shabanu’s and Mumtaz’s belongings.
Shabanu meant to leave enough in Lahore that they would not have to pack each time they went.

They left early the next morning, their sandals wet from a heavy dew. Their departure went unnoticed but for a pair of green eyes peering from behind the mosquito net of a hand-carved bed that stood beside the window in the top story of the house. Amina sighed and lay her heavy form back against the cushions.

Two of Nazir’s gunmen crowded into the front beside the driver. Mumtaz, Shabanu, and Zabo rode behind, and the fawn lay quietly in the back of the van behind the suitcases. She had assumed a proprietary air over every place Mumtaz chose to keep her. Beside the child’s
charpoi
at night the little doe slept, her delicate legs folded under her like a bed of twigs. When Zenat came to wake Mumtaz, the deer would stand and lower her head to ward off the old
ayah
, sending Mumtaz into fits of helpless laughter.

Choti lay now on a fine old
kilim
that Mumtaz had folded to make a cushion. The driver had made room for the fawn when Mumtaz had stamped her foot and refused to go to Lahore without her. Choti was unperturbed by the increasing blare of the traffic. She blinked slowly and imperiously atop her cushion.

Zabo talked little during the trip, and Shabanu tried to draw her out by talking about shopping plans. Where would they go? She’d never been to Lahore,
and she wanted to know if Zabo knew the shops where the beautiful silks were sold, and where the stones and sequins would be sewn on.

Zabo answered politely a few times, and then her attention drifted away again, seeming to draw her out into the heat-hazed sky over the outskirts of Lahore.

Shabanu turned her attention to the traffic. Enormous trucks hurtled by, loaded so full of cotton that their burlap sides threatened to burst, and small white tufts stuck to the thorns of the acacia branches overhanging the road. The van passed the swaying traffic of wooden-wheeled carts drawn by donkeys, camels, and oxen. These were fewer as the van came closer to the city. Horse-drawn
tongas
crammed with women in city
burkas
, which covered heads and shoulders, and schoolchildren in uniforms—all riding backward—gave way to brightly painted Bedford buses, parting the peace of small villages with blaring horns. Herds of goats driven by small ragged boys with long sticks gave way to minibuses and motor scooters.

Once in the city, they followed the canal, its fecund smell cloaked in the sweetness of early summer flowers and clipped grass. Shabanu and Mumtaz were mesmerized by the smells and the traffic, and more activity than they’d ever seen before. Deeper into the city, wide boulevards lined with splendid old bungalows and manicured gardens turned to ever more crowded and disorderly streets lined with
modern public buildings. Shabanu marveled at how perfectly square they were; how white, and how many windows they had!

The streets seemed to grow ever wider until they drew close to Badshahi Mosque, with its red sandstone walls and white marble domes glistening in the sun like enormous translucent onions. Passing through the ancient gates where the modern city ended and the city of the Mogul princes began, Shabanu’s excitement turned to quiet anticipation—almost a feeling of familiarity and affection. She felt more as if she were returning to the Cholistan Desert to see her family than making her first visit to Pakistan’s grandest city.

Once inside the walled city, the van sat for ten minutes at a time as overloaded
tongas
squeezed past, their sides scraping the walls of the buildings next to the lanes, and hawkers pulled carts piled high with roasted peanuts and fried dumplings out of the way. The bodyguards got out several times and shouted for them to move faster.

The van came to a small square surrounded by very old wooden buildings that looked as if they leaned on each other for support. From here the lanes were too narrow for the van. Above the street, sweating red clay pots kept water cool on platforms behind delicately carved screens that were thick with dust. Women peered out from behind the pots to see what was causing the commotion in the square below.

Here two black lacquered
tongas
with leather bonnets and polished brass carriage lamps stood waiting. The horses were fat, sleek, and well groomed, and bright feathered plumes flashed from the tops of their harnesses as they shook their magnificent heads. The driver unloaded the bags, and groups of urchins and old men gathered to watch. The bodyguards pushed them aside until a large, staring ring formed around them. Not a breath of air stirred, and Shabanu began to wonder how they would be able to move with so many people crowded into the square. The overripe smell from the gray water in the sewers beside the lane grew oppressive. Mumtaz reached up for her mother’s hand. Choti slipped her nose under Mumtaz’s arm, and the child held on to her pet’s neck.

One
tonga
held their luggage and one bodyguard. In the other, Shabanu sat with Mumtaz on her lap; Zabo held the fawn, and Zenat clung to the back of the seat. The second bodyguard climbed up to ride with the
tonga
driver. The horses’ iron-shod feet clattered loudly, and every few yards they passed pyramids of oranges and carts loaded with bright ribbons and mounds of spices, tea, and dried beans.

Deeper they went into the heart of the old city, until it seemed surely they would emerge on the other side. And then the
tongas
turned in through old wooden gates, their paint visible only as faint blue shadows embedded in the grain.

Inside the thick mud walls they came upon a different world. The fetid stench of open sewers gave way to the joyous sweetness of lime trees and jasmine in bloom in pots under the old banyan trees that crowded the far end of the outer wall. The clatter of wooden wheels on cobble and the shouts of children and hawkers were replaced by the cool splash of water in the blue-and-white tiled fountain at the center of the
haveli
courtyard.

It was a space of graceful proportion. The grand old banyan trees looked like servants kneeling at the feet of the three-storied wooden
haveli
.

Although it was just past midafternoon, the sun set behind the buildings surrounding the
haveli
, casting the courtyard into shadow. An old servant in white placed small clay dishes filled with oil around the fountain and beside vases of flowers set in tiny niches in the mud garden walls. A small boy in a clean but faded
lungi
came behind him and lit the wicks with a thin taper.

Selma appeared wheezing at the bottom of steps that led upward into the midsection of the house, which was open at the center through the balconies of three stories from the ground to the sky.

A white sari draped around Selma’s large figure and over one shoulder. White was the color of mourning, and she’d worn it since the death of her husband many years before.

“Come in, come in,” Selma said, waving one hand
for them to enter. With the other she tucked a silver strand back into the untidy knot of hair at the back of her neck. “Don’t stand there loitering like thieves. Who’s this? My youngest niece? Come to Auntie Selma,” she said, stooping gracefully for a woman of her size for Mumtaz to run into her widespread arms. The fawn followed the child across the courtyard, bucking and dipping her velvety head, as if she too sensed she was home in this oasis of calm in the chaotic and dirty city.

Selma embraced Shabanu and Zabo together, pulling them to her pillowy bosom with her large arms.

“You are as lovely as ever,” she said, taking Shabanu’s face in her hand. “And you,” she said to Zabo, “grow prettier each time I see you.” Selma’s eyes held Zabo’s for a moment.

Zabo’s eyes filled with tears, as if the older woman’s compassion and tenderness had touched a place she’d kept secret.

“Thank you, Auntie,” Zabo said, and laid her head against Selma’s comfortably padded shoulder. “It’s always so good to see you.”

“How wonderful to have beautiful young women and a child here again,” said Selma, her voice reassuming its cheery boisterousness. “And Omar’s back! We’ll fill the place with music and laughter! How happy I am to see you all!”

Selma had lived here alone for many years. She
loved the old
haveli
, but had little money to maintain it. While Rahim and Mahsood supplied some funds, it was she who kept it from falling down altogether, sometimes it seemed by sheer will.

Selma took them to their rooms up high in the third story of the old house. Zabo ran her hand along the smooth wall of the stairwell as if she were greeting a dear old friend.

The
haveli
had a feeling of history about it, so that Shabanu felt the presence of generations of happy, well-fed schoolchildren when she looked at the worn treads of the stone stairways and the weathered-smooth wood of the gates and shutters.

The two bodyguards took their places beside the courtyard gates, which they ordered closed. The old wooden gates creaked as two elderly servants pushed them shut.

A servant carried the fawn up the three flights of steps, and it was clear that this house, too, would fall under Choti’s spell. Each room looked out over the courtyard and was lit with brass kerosene lamps. Shabanu threw open ancient wooden shutters at her window and looked out on the winking lights in the courtyard below. They reminded her of the starry nights of Cholistan.

Yes, she thought. We can be safe here in Lahore.

S
habanu stood at the foot of the silver
charpoi
in the center of her room, which seemed oddly familiar, as if she’d dreamed about it without ever having seen it. Apart from the silver bed legs, the room was simply furnished. Stylized vines painted in green intertwined with flowers of red and wound their way around window and door frames, the paint faded in some places but bright in others where cracks in the mud plaster walls had been patched and repainted. Rahim had employed the last painter of many generations whose Mogul designs had graced the walls at Okurabad to restore the
haveli
. The artist, now an old man himself, was the last of his line. He had taught his own grandsons his art, but they had hungered for the city and the chance to earn their fortunes and had gone to work in factories.

A white porcelain pitcher and basin stood on a chest in one corner, and a straight-backed chair was
placed beside the window. The windows were without curtains, bare but for scarred shutters of weathered wood. A plain country-made table and two other chairs stood against the far wall. A bowl of oranges sat on the table near the head of the bed.