Trespassing (19 page)

But this room was heaven! He could see everything! The front wall had a poster with writing in gold:

Trust in your choices
Everything is possible

Wayne marched in front of the sign. He pointed to it. He told his students to always reach for the truth. He clenched his fist, declaring, ‘Courage
does
pay!’

Daanish was off again. In dizzying succession he saw: himself in the sunken garden, looking up at a barn owl in a cedar tree. The bird spun its phantom head, ‘Hoot!’

He saw: maple syrup dripping onto a plate of pancakes at the 24-hour Pancake House. The plate was Becky’s. Daanish watched her eat. He couldn’t afford his own. She wasn’t offering.

He saw: the smooth gold medallion of the key-chain his grandfather had given his father when he became a doctor. On one side was a Pakistani flag, its crescent a neat, sure smile. The little globe swayed back and forth, back and forth, flipping minutes into seconds, seconds into hours. Maple syrup hung on the edge of the porcelain white lip of a jug. It grew to the size of the medallion but would not fall on the soft cakes below. Suspended on the jug’s lip, it waited for Daanish’s next paycheck. When this was cashed, the sweet blob dropped plumb on to the tip of Daanish’s tongue. He had all the time in the world to savor it. He chewed while watching Heather and her friends dance topless in the cornfields, mimicking American Indians. They chanted, ‘I can feel the spirits of the gods. I am one with my body. They are one with my body. The crop will grow.’

The drop lingered, an amber tablet he rolled over two pale pink nipples, down the slope of her breasts, up the small
mound of her torso, and down again, to the whiskers of her damp vagina. The scent of maple mingled with her equally heady odor, and then with a third more pungent smell, coming from the corner of his room in Karachi.

Daanish awoke in the middle of the night feeling he’d ridden a hurricane. He lay in bed, groaning. Ever since his return, his days had become a sequence of disjointed pictures. Now the pictures haunted his sleep too. It was as if the long flight back had never ended. He hadn’t landed. He was trapped, oscillating between time and space. He couldn’t stop. He could only do one thing: remember. His short life flickered before his eyes almost as if it were coming to an end, for surely, this is what the dying did. Before his father breathed his last breath, hadn’t he too remembered the ambergris perfume with which his son had once woken him?

As in his sleep, Daanish now noticed the biting stench in his room. He sat up. It came from the drawer. He walked toward it, blinking at the three cocoons bunched inside.

‘Which will it be?’ he asked again. They were half the size of his thumb and somehow resisted being separated. Two oozed a reddish liquid that stank of wood polish. He plucked the
clean one. Carrying it downstairs, he passed Anu’s bedroom. Thankfully, she was asleep.

So as not to wake her, he softly shut the kitchen door behind him. Then he threw open a window, filled a pot with water and left it to boil.

Looking around, he remembered something. In the cupboard, Anu used to keep a cluster of terracotta lanterns. He opened it: yes, they were still there. He smiled. Filling one dainty, palm-shaped dia with oil, he put it on the windowsill and lit the wick. The flame wavered, casting shadows around him.

The water came to a boil. Daanish poured it into a shallow basin. The light danced on the water’s surface, arching its neck in steam. He dropped the cocoon inside.

Swiftly, the soft mass began to separate into threads. He caught hold of one very carefully with the tine of a fork and began twirling this strange spaghetti made of the finest hair. He found, to his astonishment, that he could keep twisting. The cocoon, now bobbing in the basin as a brown and shriveled nut, was wrapped in a single endless strand. He pulled and turned the fork, then pulled and turned again. It was like unwrapping a gift.

Afraid the fork would snap the strand prematurely, Daanish slipped the bundle off it and began winding the thread around his arm. He sweated profusely and his muscles ached. He dabbed his brow with the sleeve of his free arm.

Just when he felt his arm would drop, it stopped. A breeze blew out the lantern. A thin dawn pierced the kitchen. In the basin, the boiled cocoon was stripped bare. He’d retrieved the entire length of the yarn. It was as long as an artery, and as fine as a cut. He carried it gingerly upstairs.

Adjacent to the shed that housed the silkworms stood a shack with two rooms and a telephone. On days when it got too late for the long ride back into the city, Dia and her mother spent the night here. The shack was stocked with basic aids – towels, pots and pans, dry food, a tube of Macleans toothpaste – and even some of Dia’s storybooks. Water was collected in a bucket from the main outside, showers taken in the protective arms of mulberries.

When her father was alive, her parents had slept in one room, the children in the other. They’d cooked simple meals on a single burner, and at night, rolled out frayed quilts on the floor. The children’s excitement was augmented by their proximity to one of the world’s biggest graveyards, Makli Hill, just half a kilometer away. Once the parents were asleep, ghosts would rise and begin their lumbering trek down to the farm. Then Dia and her brothers took turns daring each other to step out in a darkness that was inconceivable in the city, even during loadshedding. This one had cold fingers, trailing hair, ancient venom.

She suffered terrible bouts of anxiety days before her night to be dared. When it came, her evil brothers gloated: ‘Take a cold shower, outside,
now!’

Tiptoeing into the pit of blackness, she filled the bucket, shed her clothes, and stood as vulnerable as the day she came howling furiously into the world, like a purplish-red mulberry. Or so her father put it. It was comforting to know he slept soundly inside. She cast frequent glances at the door, into which she could dart if anything tried to grab her.

There were no shortcuts. She had to wet her hair, lather it with shampoo, rinse, soap herself from ear to toe, rinse again. And the entire time, she felt the wings of bats, the eyes of kings dead hundreds of years, and the screeching of those still alive.

Perhaps her terror of water had started then, years before her father’s drowning.

Perhaps she was dreaming of the drowning because it happened five years ago to the day.

She was bathing in utter darkness, when all around appeared a hundred geese. They bred gold cocoons. The cocoons began to unravel. Out jumped a hundred blue and battered feet. They were her father’s feet, her father who’d been wrung back to life, and they danced a bloody dance, quacking like rubber ducks. The blackness began to ooze. It condensed into bullets. The bullets scattered like beads, only they weren’t bullets or beads but her father’s small, shining eyes. Eyes that must have cried at the end. Plucked eyes, following the words in her storybooks as she read to him. And then the blackness ceased oozing and scattering. It began to pour. It was the river, and it was time to haul his body out of it.

She screamed.

‘Shh! Dia, it’s me. Shh! It’s all right.’

She sat up on the floor of the shack, keening. A woman
smoothed her hair. She’d have liked it to be Nini. It wasn’t. It was Sumbul, the cook’s daughter. She let herself be rocked. Gradually, the nightmare flew away. And then there was nothing but a breeze, and Sumbul’s maternal embrace.

Dia took a deep breath and laughed weakly. ‘Your fifth child is on the way. You have a lifetime of comforting ahead of you.’

‘Silly girl,’ cooed Sumbul.

‘Thank you,’ said Dia, gently pulling away. ‘I’m better now.’

‘I was just coming to wake you. I think it might be time.’

Dia frowned, disoriented. And then she remembered why she’d stayed the night at the shack.

Last afternoon, she’d been making the rounds through the section of the shed where a few select pupae were kept. These would eat their way out to enter the fourth and final stage of their life as mature imagoes. Their eggs would begin the cycle again. She’d been wondering which cocoon from this batch would yield the first imago when, peering closely, she found two that had already begun to open. At last, after years of trying to witness the birth of silk moths, Dia felt she might have a chance. She hurriedly called Sumbul. Together, they watched as the telltale liquid began to drip. Perhaps within the next twelve hours, the metamorphosis would be complete.

Dia had called her mother at home to say she was finally going to watch the process entirely. But Riffat was concerned about security – Dia had never spent the night alone at the farm. Dia pleaded she wouldn’t be alone. Sumbul’s mother-in-law was away, so she could share the overnight vigil. Four guards, including Sumbul’s two brothers Shan and Hamid, patrolled the grounds. And half a kilometer away, the cook’s brother patrolled the graves of Makli Hill. Her mother reluctantly consented.

Dia lay on the floor and Sumbul repeated, ‘I think it might be time.’

Dia looked at the clock. It was 5.30 in the morning. Sumbul had stayed awake longer than she. ‘Show me.’

Leaving Sumbul’s baby asleep on the couch, they slipped into the shed. At first it was eerily hushed inside. But the further they crept, the more sounds began to reach them: leaves rustling under the writhing caterpillars, the drone of ventilators, and in the distance, buses on the highway – going north, north to the river in her dream. She shuddered. When they reached the two cocoons, Dia’s mood lifted completely. ‘Look!’ she whispered.

The shells had split. Two tiny heads each with two brown antennae and two stubby palps poked out. They were nibbling the husks, a sound like grasshoppers crunching leaves, or roaches in a paper bag.

And then someone tapped Dia’s shoulder from behind.

She swung around, yelping. It was Shan, grinning, his Kalashnikov pointing at her. He lowered it. ‘I was just joking!’

Sumbul slapped him. ‘How dare you frighten us!’

Shan pouted, rubbing an injured cheek. ‘I just came to tell you the phone’s been ringing in the shack,’ he whined.

‘Well, answer it then,’ Sumbul and Dia snapped together.

‘The door’s locked. It’s that automatic kind, remember?’ He waved his gun, and, half-whimpering, half-threatening, declared, ‘Next time I won’t be joking.’ Pivoting on his bare heels, he stomped off, his soussi lungi billowing about his legs like a petticoat.

Dia returned to the moths. They’d retreated into their holes. She sighed. ‘Who could be calling at this hour?’

‘Maybe it’s your mother,’ said Sumbul. ‘Perhaps I should go.’

‘Yes,’ Dia agreed. ‘You must be sleepy anyway. I’ll wait
here. Who knows when they’ll come out again.’ She gazed at the half-bitten cocoons beseechingly.

Sumbul took the keys and left.

Dia sat alone in a chair, waiting. If the larvae were private about spinning their cocoons, the pupae were neurotic. They seemed able to detect her even when she sat motionless, even through the shells of their cocoons, and kept their transformation defiantly to themselves. Dia wagged a finger:
I’m going to watch you this time.

The smell was rancid. She held her nose. Out loud, she said, ‘Aphrodisiac. Dizzy Ak.’ The word came from Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Aphrodite tucked her charm into a girdle many other goddesses tried to steal but no, it was hers to keep. She was born with it. So were female moths. A male moth could smell the female from miles away and when he found her, it was called
assembling.

‘Dizzy. Dizzy. Ak. Ak.’ Dia fumed at the cocoons.

With butterflies it was the other way around. The male carried the scent, and the females assembled around him. When he chose one, he dusted her with another type of pheromone, an anti-aphrodisiac. This way, after he was done with her, she’d never be desirable to other males.

Obviously to silk moths, people were anti-aphrodisiacs. She sighed, her thoughts continuing to roam. How much better it would be if these were the kinds of things her college taught. Her retake was on Monday. At least the college had shut for the summer holidays now so she didn’t have to tolerate those crammed and dingy classrooms.

She yawned. It was almost six-thirty. The moths made no appearance. Her body ached. But she wasn’t going to give up now. She was going to witness the birth of those stubborn beasts waiting for her to fall asleep.

Perhaps she’d be the first to ever see it. Next time, she should bring a camera. Maybe she could drop out of college and start photographing the mysterious life of bugs on her
farm … she yawned again. Seven o’clock. She scowled.
Just pretend I’m not here, won’t you?
Her shoulders felt like sacks of dirt rested on them. Her throat was dry. It hurt. If only she could have a glass of ice-cold water. And a quick nap on something soft.

No!
She shook herself awake.

Seven-thirty. Eight. The workers would be trickling in …

And then Sumbul, looking greatly revived and well nourished, was standing beside her. ‘Nissrine’s on the phone.’

‘What?’ mumbled Dia.

‘Your friend Nissrine is on the phone. It was she who called earlier. She says she must talk to you.’

Dia blinked skeptically. ‘You’re joking. First Shan and now you. It runs in the family.’

‘I told her you were watching the cocoons and wouldn’t want to be disturbed. But she sounded quite frantic. She’s waiting,’ Sumbul added.

‘I don’t believe this.’ Dia stood up. ‘If that Nini spoils this for me …’ She shuffled out, about to keel over with exhaustion.

‘I’ll keep watch,’ Sumbul assured her.

Dia entered the shack feeling stiff as a breadstick. She picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’

‘Hi!’ Nini shrieked.

Dia moved the receiver an inch away from her ear.

‘Where’ve you been? I tried calling as early as I could but no one answered. I called the house last night. Your mother told me …’

‘Nini,’ Dia interrupted, sitting down on the bed so she wouldn’t fall. ‘I’m really very busy right now. Is this important?’