Trespassing (10 page)

Nini waited. Dia decided to use the strategy that had brought them together in the first place, when their math teacher paired them up to solve a sum, advising: ‘When in doubt, count your fingers.’

‘Let’s talk about the pros and cons, Nini,’ Dia spoke gently. ‘First the cons. One, you don’t know the boy. Two, his father’s just died. Three, he’s an only child. Four, he’s an only child and an only son. Five, he lives in America. Summary: he’s all his mother has, so she’ll be even more possessive of him than the usual mother-in-law. He’s having a blast far from her in America, probably living it up with women there, while a teeny tiny voice in his brain nags him of his duties to his Ami jaan and country. So, when he’s had his fun, to pacify his guilt, he’ll be ultra-protective of Ami jaan (who’ll
symbolize the nation), and ultra-conservative with his wife (who’ll symbolize his authority in the nation). But mind you,’ her voice had risen uncontrollably. This was no good but she couldn’t help herself. ‘He’ll want to keep his American self alive too, just for fun. We all need good times, right? Now the pros.’ She paused. ‘You tell me the pros, Nini.’

The answer was sharp: ‘Have you ever used your delightful powers of analysis to find out why you’re so arrogant?
You
haven’t met him either, Dia, so your assumptions are just as unfounded as mine. Yes, many men are like that. But maybe, just maybe, he’s different. After all, you seem to think
you’re
different. Face it Dia, you need a man in your life too, and you won’t ever know if the one you pick is better than the one I do.’

Dia was stunned. It was not simply the hateful tone that stung like a physical blow. It was the knowledge that so many women fell into just this trap: arguing, or just plain fretting, about men. On the other hand, there was an unspoken agreement between men: Woman was not a topic worth mentioning, unless she aroused them sexually. But Man was a topic women devoured from every angle. Dia was certain this was the most obvious yet neglected reason for their disparate positions in society: time. Women spent it on men; men spent it on men.

And now here she was, spending close to two hours today, and several hours yesterday, cogitating emptily about one of them. Didn’t Nini see how silly this was? How typical? How dangerous?

She longed to stop the clock right here. ‘Please let’s not fight. You do what you want. I’m just sorry about yesterday.’

Nini waited. But Dia had nothing to add.

Outside, Pakistan took a wicket and Inam Gul stamped his feet. The screen cut to the milk ad again. The woman carried out the tea from the kitchen looking refreshed and jolly. The reason for her bouncing spirits was that she got to
use the milk! The guests consumed the tea in record time. The camera focused on her husband who said, ‘Begum, chai?’ So she scurried back to the kitchen in ankle-wrenching stilettos, her gold bangles ringing with jubilation.

Dia thought: Nini should have auditioned for the role.

Then she ached with remorse again.

After a long pause, which Dia was terrified of breaking, Nini spoke. ‘You asked before if there was something you could do. Well, I’ve been thinking. If his mother decides not to revoke her proposal, well, your support still matters to me. So, will you be here when he visits with his mother? You’re still my sister, Dia. Still.’

Dia smacked her forehead in dismay. ‘Of course.’

In a tremulous whisper, Nini cooed, ‘My mother needs me to acquiesce. You’re lucky your mother doesn’t depend on you to give her life meaning.’ She hung up.

Receiver still in hand, Dia muttered, ‘Let’s hope your daughter is lucky like me.’

Moving to the front of the house, Dia bitterly wondered how many parents had shrunk their daughters’ worlds to fill their own. She stooped for her sandals, eager for the oasis that was her farm. While struggling with the buckle, she glanced up at the wall. The face that greeted her was her father’s. It was framed in ornate gold that was as false as the portrait. His painted jowls did not jiggle, his lordly mustache was reduced to a blanched apple peel, and his eyes seemed to have stepped into the wrong room, where a film about his life was in progress. The reel had gotten stuck right when he was being kidnapped so he’d no choice but to see the moment over and over again. His life was in the painter’s hands and every time she stood here, Dia wished to submit the painter to the same torture.

She hadn’t told anyone, not Nini, nor the cook, that the Quran Khwani yesterday had brought back painful memories. For forty days after her own father’s death, she’d sat like a statue in this house, and learned something valuable:
some mourners came to grieve, others to collect gory details. Still others arrived to clutch the frozen Dia and shower her with pity, and yet more helplessness.
‘Allah malik hay.
God decides.’ That was the message they’d pounded into her.
You’ve no control over events. So why bother making anything of your life, little lady?

Yesterday, when she’d apologized to the widow and her son, she’d meant it.

The cook, who’d been snubbed by his favorite of the three children ever since she returned home yesterday, shuffled woefully toward her. ‘Have you forgiven me yet, my child?’ He stood below the portrait.

‘Oh, Inam Gul, it wasn’t your fault.’

He stroked her head. ‘Then come, let’s watch TV.’

‘The mood’s gone.’

His nose tried to smell the air. ‘What does Nissrine Bibi say?’

‘Have you been eavesdropping again?’

‘No!’ He stared in horror.

‘Then how did you know who I was talking to?’ She watched happily while his lips curved around toothless gums. He seemed to miss his teeth most when cornered. ‘Don’t worry. I have very few secrets. But I’ll tell you Nini’s.’ The cook’s eyes popped with anticipation. ‘She wants to marry that boy she took me to see yesterday.’

‘Oh ho, what a clever girl!’ His head bobbed loosely from side to side.

‘She’s a fool, Inam Gul, don’t you forget it.’ He changed his expression likewise. ‘I’m going to the farm now, to forget about people for a while. If anyone calls for me, tell them I’m in my cocoon and won’t come out for weeks.’

‘Toba toba.’ He tugged his earlobes, but knew better than to argue with Dia.

For most of the drive, the land was stripped and parched, dotted with occasional bands of drooping mesquite. The route led straight to the mighty Indus, about 100km east. Riverbeds ought to teem with life, thought Dia, each time she passed through here. Especially a riverbed as old as this. But except for a kingfisher poised regally on a wire, hinting at the proximity to water, there was no evidence of the fabled grandeur of the Indus. Only books and old men like Inam Gul told of princesses like Sassi, dwelling in the glorious lakhy bagh on the banks of the river, surrounded by music, fountains and burnished horses.

Dia herself hadn’t traveled all the way to the river for years. Now its banks teemed not with Sassi’s pavilions, but with some of the nation’s deadliest gangs.

She rode between two armed escorts. Both had greasy pockmarked skin, filthy fingernails and wasp waists. They handled their Kalashnikovs the way nearly all of the city’s convoys did – muzzle pointing not up but back, at the
following vehicle. Sometimes, one of the two would give his shoulder a rest and lay the weapon on his lap, with the muzzle at her. In the last five years she often wondered which was the greater risk – going with or without them. She was never permitted to know. It was believed her father had been kidnapped on this stretch.

Three rumors spread after the murder. One: it involved the synthetic dye company that had lost its contract. Two: it involved the cocoon importers who’d lost theirs. Three: the killers were fools to target the man and not his wife.

The sericulture project had been entirely Riffat Mansoor’s. It was she who introduced a silk line in their textile mill, and she who questioned the wisdom of importing the seeds when silkworms could be bred at home. The climate suited the growth of mulberries, the food of the insect, and she owned a large plot of land near Thatta on which to cultivate the trees.

Dia’s childhood was spent shuttling from farm to factory, the one an enchanted semi-tropical paradise, the other a whirlwind of equally enchanting activity. At the mill, she’d walk wide-eyed around the workshops where thread was woven into sheets of shimmering white cloth, dyed in cauldrons of bubbling color, and painted into breathtaking designs. Back at the farm, she danced between the trees, gay with her own version of things. The irrigation canals were the boiling cauldrons. The twigs her reel. She unraveled her cotton dress into a skein of thread, and twisted these over the reel, till a pattern spread. She dipped it in the canal, and tossed it up to dry. It billowed down softly, a puff of her breath. She wore the breath around the farm, and everyone swore they’d never seen a finer silk.

It had taken her mother’s vigor to make the project work but eventually, after several false starts, fifteen acres of mulberry trees successfully yielded the sixty tons of leaves required to feed the one and a half million silkworms needed to produce
roughly nine hundred pounds of raw silk. Riffat’s fully self-sufficient side business gave the mill, already successful in cotton, an added allure. Throughout Karachi, women swore only by Mansoor Mills.

Dia was ten years old by the time her mother’s project was a nationally conceded achievement. Her fellow-schoolgirls regarded her as queerly as men and women regarded her mother. Nissrine told Dia that people snickered about Riffat’s appetite being as voracious as the caterpillars she bred – only it wasn’t leafy greens she was after. Her husband may have given her free reign of his business, but could he satisfy her at home, in the bedroom, when she came out of
her
cocoon?

Dia shut her eyes and leaned back in the car seat, simmering at the gossip.

But when she recalled her parents together, the picture was no consolation. They spoke to each other only about work or children. Dia had never seen Riffat glow or throw back her head and laugh her beautiful, silvery laugh around her husband. The two never touched. They barely even argued. They were business partners, not lovers. Yet, her father wanted Dia to read him stories full of promises of eternal love, of Sassi waiting on the banks of the Indus for her lover’s ship to roll in. Stories of earthly tragedy, but with attainment in the afterlife.

Dia opened her eyes again with a start when she realized her slouching position pressed her further into the guards. She sat up. Her back was beginning to ache, as it always did by this time in the drive. They hadn’t even gone halfway. The land outside was still thirsty and desolate. Not even a kingfisher in sight. She smelled the sweat of the guards. They could probably smell hers. She tried not to wonder if this aroused them.

Whatever transpired between them, her parents became the topic of even more gossip when Riffat decided to discard chemical dyes. They were expensive, hazardous, and not
even colorfast. Though organic dying was a method none of the other factories relied on, it had once flourished in the subcontinent. There was evidence enough to support this. Three-thousand-year-old madder-dyed cloth and indigo vats had been excavated in Moenjodaro, barely 300km north of where Dia rode in the car now. The technique seemed right outside Riffat’s doorstep, and had been for centuries. Could it really be lost?

She discovered most colors could be obtained from plants easily grown here. She also learned which part of each plant needed to be harvested, how long this took, and what color it would give. Turmeric and myrobalan produced yellow; henna, madder, and pomegranate red; indigo blue; tamarind and onion black; chikoo brown. So she reserved the remaining five acres of the farmland for cultivating the crops.

Within two years, they yielded consistently and the contract with the dye company was annulled. They began receiving angry telephone calls.

Riffat grew tense. Her temper ran high. The family ceased piling into their Toyota Corolla for weekends at the farm. Her parents went from rarely speaking, to frequently fighting. And still the phone kept ringing. And more customers pledged loyalty to the mill.

On the night before his death, her father climbed up the mulberry tree planted when she was born. Why? Was it to turn back the clock and have her that small in his arms again, back before the threatening phone calls and gossip about his wife?

Dia had huddled indoors, petted by the cook, while her brothers argued with the crowd outside and her mother, for the first time in her life, stood frozen with shock. Her husband cowered in the foliage like a child, while the world laughed. But then at some point in the middle of the night, he must have climbed down and left the house before anyone awoke. He was never seen alive again.

The cook maintained that the answer to her father’s death lay in nothing as obvious as an angry minister with shares in a severed company. According to Inam Gul, Dia’s father was simply unlucky. He was in the way. The province was seething with free-flowing anger. Probably, the killers had known absolutely nothing about him. He was a random target, or a victim of crossfire. There were hundreds of such deaths in Sindh that year. There was no reason for it besides the will of Allah. The same will that had made killers out of some and gentle, caring folk like her father out of others.

But Dia could not accept that the death had been mere fluke – a simple detour. It pained to think that if it hadn’t been his battered and bruised body, it would have been someone else’s. This meant that even when alive, he’d been nothing but a mere number. And so was she. And Nini and Inam Gul. Everybody.

A quartet of armed guards paced the farm’s exterior. The boundary wall extended into five rungs of barbed wire. The iron gate was topped by a plethora of slender spikes pointing up at the grayish-yellow sky. Inside the gate sat two more guards, but unlike her private escorts and the sentinels outside, these two were draped in soussi lungis from the mill. The cloth was dyed indigo and mint and shimmered like cock feathers in the sun. Together, they formed a friendly duo: they were two of Inam Gul’s three sons.