The grass is always green with envy on the other side. Love is in the air but is blind as a bat. Blood is thicker than water through thick and thin. It will be a cold day in Hell when Hell freezes over. A friend indeed is a friend, indeed. Heaven is other people.
This last she had heard and remembered correctly, Hell is other people, but she had later begun to doubt herself: surely no one — no people, no civilization — would think other people were Hell. What else was there but other people?
She never did take that language course. But when they bought a television in the 1970s — it was a Phillips because her father had owned a radio made by that company back in Pakistan so she found it a reassurance and also knew it could be trusted — she began to watch children’s programmes with her children, but each one of the three moved on eventually, leaving her and her rudimentary grasp of English behind.
Now she stands up and moves towards the telephone. Dialling carefully, she waits for the call to connect but then hangs up after the first ring, her courage failing. A minute later she dials again and, bravely, keeps herself from walking away. She lets it ring. The answering machine at the other end has a message in Ujala’s voice. He has refused to speak to her personally for years now, but she rings his number every few days to hear his voice, always afraid lest the boy himself pick up the phone and proceed to say something unpleasant to her, something abusive, telling her she is heartless, is partly or wholly responsible for the deaths of Jugnu and Chanda, having been outraged when they set up home together.
Overcome by fear, she hangs up for the second time.
Yes, she had objected to Chanda moving in with Jugnu, but she is not heartless and hadn’t disapproved of their love. When she heard the rumour about the pair, she remembers being secretly relieved that Jugnu had chosen a Muslim this time, all his previous women having been white. Jugnu was in his late forties, and Kaukab knew he must marry this girl and settle down. But then they began to live together in sin and Jugnu refused to listen to her no matter how reasonably or passionately she tried to make him see the error of his ways.
She was already anxious to see Jugnu settle down and raise a family long before Chanda appeared. Shamas — unwilling to think about such things unprompted — agreed with her whenever she insisted on raising the subject. They would then talk to Jugnu together. The last time the two of them broached the subject with him, seven years or so ago, he startled them both by replying: “Good. I have been meaning for you to meet her.” He was referring to the white woman Kaukab had seen with him in the town centre on two occasions during the last month.
It was high summer, and on the day of the dinner Kaukab worked in the kitchen all morning. She went to sit out in the sun for a few minutes as the afternoon wore on, all the summer foliage giving a sea-tinge to the light in Dasht-e-Tanhaii as though a green scarf had been draped over the sun. That was when Charag came home on an unexpected visit: Charag — the son whom she had sent away to university in London to get an education — had come to inform her that he had a girlfriend who was not only white but also pregnant. The news stunned and repulsed Kaukab, and she held Jugnu responsible for her misfortune. Once, on seeing a diagram of a moth’s innards in one of Jugnu’s magazines, Kaukab had wondered how there could be room in so small a creature to house so many mechanisms, and that summer seven years ago, her own despair was immense although she was tiny: she accused Jugnu of leading her children astray. After Jugnu, her mind, flooded with bitterness and sorrow, had turned on Shamas because Shamas himself had confused the children with his Godless ideas, undermining her authority and devaluing her behaviour as though it was just neurotic and foolish — Jugnu only finished the job Shamas started years ago.
And then she held her own father responsible for having chosen an irreligious husband for her, the father whose impeccable judgement — she had said at other times — could be counted on to remain unclouded during all circumstances, uncowed even by the most monumental of world events so that he had sent a nine-page telegram to Ayatollah Khomeini following the Iranian Revolution to ask him to reconsider his zeal, quoting from the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet, peace be upon him, against his excesses.
She accused her father of not checking what kind of people he was handing over his daughter to: surely, the clues were everywhere if he had cared to look. Just after the engagement, Shamas’s mother had wondered whether Kaukab would like to rub bird shit into her face, claiming it would enhance her complexion, and she sent her a cage of Japanese nightingales which Kaukab kept just for their song!
Charag, after giving her the devastating news, stayed for less than an hour, leaving her alone with her grief and tears.
She wept as she prepared the food in honour of Jugnu’s white woman — a feast celebrating the fact that they were sinners! The two guests would come after eight, around the same time as Shamas, who had a Communist Party meeting that night; and since Ujala was staying with a friend, Kaukab was alone in the house, alone in the house just as she was alone in the world, alone to let out a noisy sob whenever she felt the need, and as though in harmony with her own state the sky darkened around six and it began to rain noisily. It was just after seven that she happened to see herself in the mirror: the whites of her eyes were veined with blood, her face was red, her eyelids were swollen, and her hair was in disarray (she had beaten her head with her hands several times in a fit of grief ten minutes ago).
She did not have the energy to clean herself up — let Shamas come home and see what he and his family and his children had done to her— but she washed her face nevertheless and oiled and combed her hair because the white woman was coming.
She sprayed perfume into her armpits, and rubbed moisturiser into her flaky grey elbows. She had never met a white person at such an intimate level as she would tonight, and for several days now she had been wondering which of her shalwar-kameezs she should wear, settling on the blue one that had a print of white apple blossoms. She clicked open the lid of the face-powder container for the first time in ten years and the smell the cracked pieces of powder gave off took her back to her younger days. Delicately, she patted the fawn-coloured powder over the eyelids, to hide the dark circles and the wrinkles, to bring out the eyes that had sunk into her skull over the years. Allah, the pores on either side of her nose were deep enough to lose coins in. She plucked hairs out of her eyebrows. (Must remember to take out exactly the same number from the other brow.) She wondered which earrings she should wear as she painted her mouth with the pale reddish-brown lipstick. Too much? She wiped it off and started again, and wondered whether she should try eyeliner and just the smallest hint of mascara, wishing her daughter was still living at home to provide guidance on such matters. She struggled hard not to cry at that but failed; in the end, however, she had to restrain herself because she had also to practise her English in the mirror. And it too was hopeless: what was a person to do when even things in England spoke a different language than the one they did back in Pakistan? In England the heart said “boom boom” instead of dhak dhak; a gun said “bang!” instead of thah!; things fell with a “thud,” not a dharam; small bells said “jingle” instead of chaanchaan;the trains said “choo choo” instead of chuk chuk. . The eyebrows were still a little unruly, she decided towards the end, and rummaged in the cupboard where Ujala kept his things: she managed to locate the jar of hair gel and smoothed a little of it on each brow to tame the hairs. Shouldn’t she take some of the powder off her face: the layers looked so thick she could’ve scratched a message on her forehead with a nail. After she was ready, at last, there was just enough time to attend to the few last details of the meaclass="underline" she went into the back garden with her sewing scissors to clip leaves of coriander to sprinkle over the mung dahl. And that was when a ten-year-old girl from the neighbourhood saw her from the other side of the lane, crossed over, looked at her contemplatively for a few seconds, and then said quietly in the flat tones of one making an innocent observation: