Trespassing (21 page)

‘Why not? Some of them, at least, do fall into love. And here I always thought you were a romantic, curling up in the arms of enchanted trees, lost in thousand-year-old stories. Don’t you believe anything is possible? Some women say they find love after marriage.’

Again Dia shifted uncomfortably.
Did you?
She couldn’t bring herself to ask. But she did know, as Nini too had recently pointed out, that it was the wife and not the single girl who grew into the plucky woman that revolutionized the production of silk in the country. Something about the arrangement had obviously worked for her. But was that all it was then – a settlement? Business partners, not lovers. Strangers, not friends.

Hardly a star lit the overcast sky. The cap of a crescent moon protruded from a pillow of clouds, then it too was masked.

Suddenly Riffat piped, ‘What’s the boy’s name anyway?’

Smoke from the mosquito coil snaked between their knees. Dia rose to place it further away from them. ‘Oh, some Daanishwar. Daanishwar Shafqat, I think Nini said.’

She’d barely returned to her seat when Riffat abruptly sat up. ‘Shafqat? Are you sure? Any idea what his father did?’ The voice had risen and was noticeably tight.

Dia folded her legs thoughtfully. ‘Nini said he’d been a well-respected doctor, although, like her family, this one’s run into some financial trouble. She gave me all the “important”
details: the doctor’s father had been a modest, gentlemanly civil servant and brave journalist. Slogged to educate his son and all. The doctor left a widow and just one child …’ She stopped. Was that her mother wheezing? ‘What’s the matter, Ama? Wait, let me turn on the lights.’

‘No!’ Riffat shrieked. ‘No. Sit down.’

‘Wh …?’

‘How dare you go there without my permission!’ she snapped.

‘But …’

‘Be quiet! Not one word.’ She began pacing between the boles of the trees.

What had provoked this? Dia knew better than to pose the question now. Riffat rarely lost her temper, at home or at work. She tried to remember the last time it had happened. Was it when Hassan came home drunk one day, armed with a whisky bottle, and threatened to crack Dia’s head with it? Or when the eldest, Amir, offered one of Riffat’s rings to his Scottish girlfriend – now his wife? No, even then she’d not been in such a rage.

Breathing heavily, at last Riffat said, ‘I’ll say this once and once only. You’re not to blame, you didn’t know. But now you do. Take care never to step in that house again. Clear?’

What didn’t she know? What did she know now? Under her breath, Dia mumbled, ‘It’s not clear at all.’

A distracted Riffat returned to her dark corner and adjusted herself in the chair.

Dia gazed up at the sky, watching the wind stir the clouds that fragmented the moon. Then she glared at her mother. Her mother who always had a plan. She would know what should happen next. Dia didn’t.

The next day, when Riffat had left for the mill, Inam Gul followed Dia around the house, devising ways of discovering what had happened the previous evening.

‘You have to know everything, don’t you?’ She clicked her tongue.

‘But what do you mean?’ He sucked in his lips.

‘I’m sure you heard it all.’

‘Heard what?’

‘I’ll tell you something. That American boy and his mother are going to Nini’s house in two days. She wants me there.’

He clapped his hands. ‘No!’

‘This is no cause for celebration, you know.’

He shook his head. ‘No, no. No cause at all.’

She watched him.

He watched her.

‘Go on,’ she said, smiling a little at last. ‘Ask away.’

He steered her gently from the dining room into the TV
lounge. He fluffed up the pillows on the couch. He clasped the remote control.

‘Oh no you don’t.’ She snatched it.

He again sucked on his gums.

‘You’ve gone through all those films a dozen times already.’ She pointed at the stack of videos in the cabinet. ‘They have to be returned, you know.’

‘Maybe we can watch the old one with Reena Roy again? Just once.’

‘Then I’m not staying.’

He gazed longingly at the blank screen. Then his face lit up. ‘In two days? What will you wear?’

‘Nini also cares about that,’ she said peevishly. ‘I’m not the one on display, you know.’

He nodded soothingly, then snatched the remote control quickly from her fingers and pressed
power.

‘How childish you are.’

Together they watched a brightly-attired young woman sitting on her haunches, pink and blue bangles up to her elbows. Hair fell pleasingly into her eyes as she dipped those festive arms into a tub of suds, scrubbing a shirt collar as if her life depended on it. Apparently it did. In marched a large, mustachioed man with another shirt in his hands. He tossed it in her face and bellowed, ‘You can’t even make one thing shine!’ And just then, a packet of the perfect detergent fell into those soapy, bangle-ringing arms. The woman was so ecstatic Dia wondered if that ugly man had actually, finally, died. Maybe it was her first orgasm.

She leaned over Inam Gul and pressed the power button.

He sulked, but she could see the amusement in his eyes. ‘When is your friend getting married?’

‘Well she’s not getting married yet,’ Dia insisted. But her voice dropped. ‘Although it does seem she’s getting closer.’

‘What can we do?’

‘Tell me a story or something.’ She looked away. ‘Distract
me from Nini and the fact that I ought to be studying for tomorrow.’

He patted her head, confessing softly, ‘I heard.’

‘I don’t know why she got so angry,’ Dia burst out. ‘She wouldn’t say. Why doesn’t she want me to go there? It wasn’t like her at all. And what’ll I do without Nini?’

He muttered and cooed. ‘Calm down, beti.’

Dia tried.

She looked at Inam Gul, so old and frail, his shriveled bones clear beneath the thin muslin shirt. He’d comforted her numerous times in the seven years he’d worked here. ‘Inam Gul for ever,’ she used to whimper. Now she just thought it.

She liked his calling her ‘daughter’. He meant it. Maybe she helped him dwell less on his lost son, Salaamat, whom she occasionally saw at the farm. If he saw her too, he greeted her kindly. The only other person Salaamat spoke to that way was his sister Sumbul. Maybe he always remembered Dia as the girl who beat her brothers at cricket. She laughed at this.

‘There,’ said Inam Gul. ‘You’re better now.’

‘No,’ said Dia. ‘Now I’m embarrassed.’

‘Embarrassed? In front of me?’

She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been told two conflicting things. Nini insists I be with her on Tuesday. Ama wants me never to see that boy and his mother again. What should I do?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Inam Gul. ‘There is no conflict. Your mother says to
never step in that house again.
The meeting is at Nini’s house.’

She tilted her head. ‘Sometimes I wonder: are you a befuddled old man or secret service agent? Is there anything you don’t know?’

He shook his head.

‘Well, you’re absolutely right. No one shall be betrayed.’

‘That’s my daughter,’ he patted her again, gazing once more
at the screen. Slyly, he pushed the VCR button and began rewinding the tape.

When the video played Inam Gul snapped his fingers as Reena Roy bounced before her love.

‘Romance is just a spectator sport,’ mumbled Dia, remembering the conversation with her mother yesterday.
Love lurks in unexpected places.
Yes, in fantasy. In her storybooks and in Inam Gul’s videos. She said to him, ‘You marry your daughter off and watch other women prance about on television.’

He looked up and pouted. Then he turned up the volume.

There were two grilled windows. The shadows of the bars fell on the linoleum floor and a shaft of light lit a tiny space in the center. There were only two ceiling fans. Dia was under neither. The room was meant to seat twenty-five. Forty examinees were packed into it as Head Supervisor listlessly passed out exams.

To Dia’s left sat a very tiny woman with a desk covered in books. She offered Dia, with great warmth, any one of them. It was not an open-book exam.

To her right, another woman began peeling scraps of paper out from inside her bra. ‘I thought there’d at least be
some
monitoring,’ she told Dia, peeved at all the trouble she’d taken to make subtle her deceit.

Dia had still not looked at the exam. Foolishly, she was waiting for the official, ‘All right now girls, you may turn over your papers and begin.’ But Head Supervisor was off in the shadows, sniffing out her tombstone. Dia saw:
Economics.
She read the first question.
How many units of x
… The words began to swim.

Behind the woman whose bosom was steadily shrinking, another began unwinding a bandage around her arm. Others conferred with sneaker soles and the palms of their hands. The tiny woman to her left was getting tired of consulting books. She snatched Dia’s paper. Realizing it was blank she tossed it back with a look that made Dia feel filthy. It reminded her of the detergent ad. She hadn’t been scrubbing hard enough.

Everything she’d studied in preparation for the test entirely left her. Her thoughts turned to Nini. What was she doing at this very moment – going through her wardrobe? Planning a menu for tomorrow’s tea? Practicing how to carry the tray for her prospective mother-in-law?

She shook herself back to the paper. Long liquidation … basis points … short-term frustrations and difficulties … What made the letters shimmy like that?

Before the exam, there’d been rumors that Lubna, daughter of a minister rumored to be one of the prime smugglers of Afghan heroin, would pay someone to do her test for her. This someone was not even meant to take the retake, but here she was, beside Lubna. And she was doing her test. Lubna filed her nails, yawned, painted her nails green. Head Supervisor skated by.

There were other stand-ins. Not all got a fee. Gulnaz had threatened hers in the following way: Huma, who’d scored highest in all her exams, had been seen slipping out of the college grounds with a boy. Gulnaz’s mother’s friend’s sister’s husband was Huma’s father’s friend’s sister’s brother-in-law’s friend. Gulnaz had only to say the word, and the ball would roll straight into Huma’s father’s lap. Huma sat beside Gulnaz. She did her test.

Dia took to seeing how many smaller words could be made from Economics. Nose. Moon. Come.

How could she face the widow again? She remembered her from the Quran Khwani: a soft, dumpy woman with long frizzy hair. Oh, Nini was cruel.

Forty-five minutes remained.

Lubna could have simply bribed her teacher instead of the stand-in but obviously didn’t care for shortcuts. Maybe she’d inherited her father’s sense of adventure. Now her green nail polish was being mopped off for a brown one.

Why on earth was she dwelling on Lubna?

She stared down again. But the invisible line that connected the words to her eyes and on to her brain had snapped. Briefly, she worried that this was a permanent thing.

She shifted in her seat, growing increasingly irritated with herself. There were fifteen minutes left. She glanced at the woman with the scraps in her bra and burst out laughing. Her matronly bosom was now barely a curve, and ribbony chits oozed out of her kurta like birthday streamers.

She thought: the American boy might undress Nini. What if she hated his touch? What if he had bad breath? What if he drooled? What if he hurt her? What if she hurt for the rest of her life?

What if she didn’t hurt, but loved it?

What if Dia was going completely mad?

Head Supervisor consulted her watch and, with what sounded like a last breath, declared that time was up. It hardly mattered: those who wanted to keep writing did.

Dia had written three words: Nose. Moon. Come.

Miserably ashamed, she handed over the test without even her name.

At the college gate, she walked past her car and driver and on to the street. The driver followed her. ‘I don’t need an escort. I’m sick of escorts!’ She whisked by, then turned back guiltily. He was only doing his job. His job was to drive her to college then drive her back. Drive her to the farm with two armed guards then back. Drive her to Nini’s, her relatives, the bazaar, mill, and back. His job was to confine her in a safe and mobile haven, between safe and immobile havens. His job was to keep her off the street, where men leered, sometimes
pinched, and sometimes did worse. She heard Nini’s voice:
Look at us. Always stuck behind walls and in cars. If we step out, what is there?

‘I’ll be back soon,’ she told him. ‘You needn’t follow me.’

As she threaded her way through traffic, every pair of eyes followed her. She kept her gaze forward, noting none of the crumbling, gothic balconies lined with laundry, the chipped sandstone gargoyles, the lattice screens – all that she’d seen many times from a car. Now she had no protection, no shell, and she felt too naked to look around. The more she was watched, the more she watched only herself. Under her shalwar, her legs were too skinny, too hairy, and why on earth hadn’t she bothered to moisturize them? The dry patches made her skin gray. The stretch marks on her hips were white scabs in the middle of the gray. Her belly button too was hairy. Her breasts shapeless. Face lackluster. Hair straggly.

There were no other women walking down the street. That much was registered. Also a kissing sound. Grins. Eyes that gorged. Shoulders pushing into hers. A finger lingering on her buttocks.

She kept on walking, a zombie like Head Supervisor.

She turned into a narrow lane where a gutter had leaked. It smelled of old cabbage. Should she plunge deeper into the alley, where there were fewer onlookers and more shops, or stay on the main road with more space to run? Deciding on the first, she skipped over a puddle. Now she was less exposed but more trapped. She took another turn. The lane opened somewhat. A young boy sat outside a doorway, shaving a circle of wood on his knees. He scraped the surface and the fragment slid free, curling at the end. It fell to a ground littered with wood pellicles, plastic bags, tissues, heaps of rotten food.