As the brothers went up towards the crest of the hill, they passed several peacocks that were displaying their tails, the huge fans shimmering in the pale darkness.
The two men climbed down the other side where the sycamores and the hawthorns were and when they arrived in Jugnu and Chanda’s back garden the message in dew was still there, the drops each carrying a piercingly bright highlight. The door was open. They went in tentatively and heard footsteps coming down the staircase.
“Where is he?” Chotta asked Chanda when she came down.
“He’s upstairs,” she replied quietly after the initial shock.
She had awakened shortly after Jugnu left for The Vision and, coming downstairs, she had opened the back door to fill her lungs with the early air of a summer-dawn. She saw the words in the dewdrops and knew Jugnu had gone to buy breakfast. She left the door ajar and began to attend to the suitcases, carrying them upstairs and taking things out of them. Because they had left Pakistan unexpectedly, she had had to pull some of her wet clothing from the washing line in Sohni Dharti and put it in the suitcases still wet. She took out the damp garments — the shalwar-kameezs, the see-through head-veils, the chadors and wraps of thick cotton — and brought them down to spread them on the line strung across the room next to the kitchen: the washing line in the back garden had been out of use since spring because of the wren nest in the denim jacket that hung from it. She filled the room with the colourful garments and the long swathes of brilliantly dyed fabric. When the brothers came in, she had been oiling her hair upstairs, pouring the fragrant liquid onto the scalp as though she were adding oil to a curry — generously. She had used the same brand all her life, the same one as her mother’s. It smelled more beautiful than the fabled roses of Quetta, which she had had the chance to smell during her visit to Pakistan: she had gone to that mountain city with Jugnu in search of butterflies — they had seen the famous silhouette of the dead girl that appeared in the vast Koh-e-Murdar range of mountains outside Quetta at sunset, her dishevelled tresses, her face in profile, her torso with conical breasts.
Her brothers dragged her back up the stairs but Jugnu wasn’t there. “Where is he, girl?” Barra shook her. The younger spat on the bed she had shared with Jugnu, the sheets awry, and said: “Where is he hiding?”
She had lied to her brothers, of course: Jugnu still hadn’t returned from The Vision, but she thought they would be less abusive towards her if they knew her man was upstairs. “Get out,” she said in an even voice when she saw Chotta spit on the bed, “or we’ll call the police!”
“Are you threatening us, you shameless whore?” said Barra as he slapped her.
“You think the world is heart shaped?” Chotta said. “Some people aren’t as lucky as you, and have problems. Tell us where that Hindu bastard is!”
The brothers checked the rooms but couldn’t find Jugnu. “Oh fuck!” Chotta exclaimed suddenly. “I don’t think he’s here. He’s still outside, bleeding. For all we know he hid behind the fans of the peacocks when he saw us and we walked right past him.”
“Bleeding?” That her brothers had had a violent encounter with Jugnu somewhere out there was now obvious to Chanda and she was about to shout in panic when they all heard a sound from the gate at the entrance to the back garden. The horror of what might have happened to Jugnu earlier was clear to Chanda when Chotta pulled out the gun and held it to her head. “Shut up!” he whispered. A milk van went rattling by at the front of the house.
After the noise receded, Chanda said: “Tell me where Jugnu is.”
They told her they didn’t know where he was, that they hadn’t seen him since he left for Pakistan three weeks ago.
She began to weep, aware that they were lying, and she made a lunge for the stairs, managing to get to the ground floor in a few seconds but they were soon beside her again, blocking her path to the outside door. She shouted that she would ring the police. To stop her shouts Barra blocked her mouth with his hand as they dragged her towards the cellar door. “We had to keep her there and go out to look for Jugnu. One minute she was struggling with us on the steps,” Chotta would say later in Pakistan, “the next she suddenly went limp. I didn’t connect this to the crack I’d heard only a moment ago. I couldn’t understand what had happened and thought she had fainted. But then I saw that her neck had a small protrusion. Barra had broken her neck.”
“What’s done is done,” said Chotta after the next few moments had passed in silence. “Let’s stay calm.”
Barra nodded, letting go of Chanda’s wrist. The limp hand fell to the floor beside her where she was lying. The girl’s eyes were open, their colour changing from second to second, very fast.
“He’s out there somewhere,” said Chotta. “He could have called the police, and they could be on their way here.”
There was a sound from Chanda’s mouth at this moment, the weakest of groans. Barra leaned to her face and said, “If you can hear me, beg Allah’s forgiveness for your sin before dying. And beg pardon from us and your parents for all that you put us through. And don’t forget your husbands, ask forgiveness for the times you may have overlooked their concerns and comfort. The soul will leave the body easily if you repent before dying.”
“She’s gone,” said Chotta who’d been looking for signs of life in her body. “What do we do now? I don’t want to go to jail.” He shook and opened the canister set on a shelf in the cellar, and giving it a sniff he discovered that it was motor oil, used to power The Darwin. There was another one of petrol because the Sheridan Multi-cruiser ran on an equal mixture of oil and petrol. He would say later in Pakistan that, just at that moment, he was overcome by the enormity of what had happened, the great difficulties that still lay ahead: “I felt like a spider caught in its own web.” But, as it turned out, things went their way. Barra would say, “What appeared to be an impossibly huge mountain from the distance, turned out to have paths all across it once we got closer.”
It was just as the sun was rising above the hills that Barra left the house, to search for Jugnu, the sky turning the blood-red of anemones in the east. Chotta stayed behind in case the wounded man turned up, Chanda lying on the cellar floor, the two cans set beside her, still full. “I thought the police had arrived when I heard the door open twenty minutes later,” he would say in Pakistan. Barra would interrupt him and say, “But it was only me, coming back. I didn’t find him but while going by our shop I saw that the newspapers had been delivered, and I picked up two batches of them where they had been lying on the doorstep, and carried them to Jugnu’s house, to wrap up her body.”
The message in the dew was already beginning to evaporate.
They decided to leave her in the cellar until that night: they’d bring the van and carry her out to the woods by the lake.
Chanda’s mother telephoned the newspaper delivery people when she opened the shop at just after six-thirty, to complain that they had got their order wrong, that some of the papers had not been delivered that morning. Both Chotta and Barra were back in the shop by then. Barra stayed at the counter to help his mother because his wife — who was the one who usually stood at the counter with the woman at that hour — was in hospital, recovering from the abortion.
Chotta went to bed. They were both agitated all day, and Chotta was eager to go to Shamas’s house to deliver the bag of chappati flour Kaukab had ordered over the telephone. His mother told him it could wait till the next day when he would be making the door-to-door rounds in the van to deliver the sacks of rice, potatoes and onions, but he went anyway, despite the fact that the shop was busy with the people who had come to say the funeral prayer of the cleric-ji.