And, yes, as she waits for Shamas to come home, Kaukab can also hear the women talk about herself and Shamas, about how Shamas has insisted on remaining in this neighbourhood even though he can afford to move out to a better area. The whites were already moving out of here by the end of the 1970s, and within the decade the Hindus became the first immigrant group to move out to the rich suburbs, followed slowly over the next few years by a handful of Pakistanis. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers — all have moved out of the neighbourhood and gone to the suburbs by now, leaving behind the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, and a few Indians, all of whom work in restaurants, drive taxis and buses, or are unemployed.
Only the good Shamas-brother-ji has remained — thinks a woman preparing the dinner — despite the fact that he works in an office and can no doubt move away ten times if he chooses but he is not the kind of man who believes you see through your window what you deserve because nobody deserves this rundown neighbourhood of one suicide attempt a year, twenty-nine people registered insane, and so many break-ins a month that the woman unplugs the video-recorder that had cost twoyears’ savings and brings it up to bed every night, and when she isn’t lying awake waiting for the sound of a window breaking downstairs, she is lying awake wondering where her two boys are because more and more of the burglaries are being done by the sons of the immigrants themselves, almost all of whom are unemployed.
Next door, this woman’s neighbour wonders why her children refer to Bangladesh as “abroad” because Bangladesh isn’t abroad, England is abroad; Bangladesh is home.
Kaukab hears them gossip about Jugnu, he whom they had all loved from the beginning, encouraging their children to seek his company because he was educated and they wanted some of his intelligence to rub off on them, Jugnu who had lived in Russia and in the United States and had gone on butterfly collecting trips to western China, India, Peru and Iran. He told the neighbourhood children that in Oklahoma he had seen the white funnel of a tornado turn red as this apple as it pulverized a nursery full of geraniums. And the children had wanted to know why he didn’t stick around to see if the tornado passed over a dye factory because they certainly would have.
The women were pleased that the children were spending so much time with a civilized person and they stopped him in the street to tell him how happy they were that he was among them, and to chastise him gently for telling the children that there are no references to butterflies in the Bible because it might make the children curious about that book and become Christians.
That was, of course, before he was seen with white women, long long before he began living openly in sin with that shopkeeper’s daughter, Chanda.
They asked him to secure the shoelace that had come undone or he would trip. And only later — at home — would they smite their foreheads in regret for having made that comment about the children converting to Christianity because the confusion of faiths was exactly what had torn to pieces the life of his and Shamas-brother-ji’s father. Their father was born a Hindu and had lost his memory as a ten-year-old boy and drifted into a Muslim life, remembering his true identity only in adulthood, by which time it was too late.
Yes, the women would nod, among the many things the white people stole from the Subcontinent was that ten-year-old boy’s memory, back in 1919.
Kaukab, having just finished her prayers, hears Shamas’s key turn in the front door, and the sound takes her back to the day Jugnu had brought the white woman home for dinner, and she remarks to herself that it had been a sign from Allah for the electricity to have failed the moment the white woman had stepped in, the house plunging into darkness.
WOMEN WITH TAILS
Shamas doesn’t remember his dreams, but on some mornings, like today, he awakens with a gentle deliberateness to his gestures and from that he knows that his father has managed to infiltrate his dreams, just as a lover long gone and not allowed to surface in the waking thoughts comes to place a flower in the mind during sleep, not settling for being forgotten.
Alone in the blue kitchen, Sunday morning, he reflects on the nature of his father’s drift into Islam, part dream, part nightmare, back in 1919 when he was a Hindu child of ten years and on his way with his sister to witness the wonder of women who had tails.
In the India of the Raj, the clothes the white women wore were an announcement that they weren’t going native. Although it may not have been convenient and certainly was not comfortable, some British women kept firmly to their corsets well into the twentieth century, even after they had passed out of fashion back in Britain. And in the nineteenth century they had insisted on the rigidly swaying crinolines and ruched bustles even during the muddy and humid monsoon, and during the tandoorhot heat of the months preceding it, making the natives wonder about the nature of the secret concealed under the yards of fabric, a belief spreading across the Subcontinent that white women had tails.
It was to see them that two Hindu children walked along the lanes of their Punjabi hometown of Gujranwala one spring afternoon in 1919. The brother was the true child but the sister who was older than him by three years had enough of childhood’s exploratory initiative still in her to have agreed to the expedition.
What kind of a tail does a white woman have? they wondered in excitement. Not dissimilar to a peacock’s, capable of being jerked up to form a giant fan of five-hundred feathers? Or a small twitchy one, resembling a deer’s, needled with white hair? The boy — his name was Deepak but he would have no memory of it or of anything else by the end of the day— wondered if perhaps it was long and packed with powerful muscle for the mem-sahib to lean back on, kangaroo-like, as she lifted her feet into the air to remove her shoes. The girl — Aarti — desperately wanted it to glow in the dark like a firefly — the frilled and ruffled skirts irresistibly bringing to mind a lampshade — and there were two quarrels and three reconciliations between the pair as they made their way to the dak bungalow — the rest-house where the white people lodged when they travelled through Gujranwala. It was surrounded on three sides by the groves of blood-oranges for which the region was famous, and the sahibs were said to climb over the boundary wall in the middle of night for an orange to squeeze into their drinks. So intensely perfumed was the air that in winter a single curl of fog plucked from outside the window and stirred into the glass was enough to impart the flavour of six of the fruit’s segments.
It was a Tuesday in April. The jackals and wolves in the nearby jungles had howled throughout Sunday night, roused by the smell of warm human blood that the winds brought to Gujranwala from forty miles away, and by dawn on Monday the news had spread to the human population also: hundreds of men, women, and children had been gunned down at the Jallianwallah Garden in Amritsar.