The shadow of the returning biplane poured itself down the dak bungalow’s boundary wall and advanced like a sheet of unstoppable black water undulating along the ground’s gentle rise and fall.
It had lost height and made Aarti feel she had grown taller in its absence.
Perhaps, she thought, the metal bird was about to flex two gracefully-aligned legs like a stork and alight on the dhrake tree which was now suddenly on fire.
A red lily grew out of her arm.
The sharp images blurred like a carousel gaining speed and suddenly she was so tired she had to sit down against the wall she found herself against and close her eyes.
Uprooted, lifted high onto the contours of expanding air, Deepak saw the ground rushing under him and smelled oranges being cut open before he forgot everything, the last sensation being the flesh-eating heat of his hair on fire against his scalp.
The bomb, like a foot stamped into a rain puddle, had emptied his mind of all its contents.
Shamas looks out at the snow lying on the street outside, hearing Kaukab at work in the kitchen.
In most minds, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the governor of Punjab at the time, carried the ultimate responsibility for the Jallianwallah Garden Massacre of 1919. He was shot dead in London in March 1940 by Udam Singh, who had been wounded in the Massacre as a child; he was hanged in Pentonville for the murder.
But one of the stories that began with the RAF’s bombing of Gujranwala two days after the Jallianwallah Massacre would take considerably more than twenty-one years to find an ending of sorts, an ending equally brutal.
The child Deepak, having drifted through the provinces for a year, fetched up at the shrine to a Muslim saint where in the courtyards in the evenings the drum-skins would be beaten with such devotion that friction often rose to dangerous levels and set the hands on fire. He was given the name Chakor, because he seemed fascinated by the moon, and chakor was the moonbird, the bird that was said to subsist on moonbeams, flying ever higher on moonlit nights until exhausted, dropping onto roofs and courtyards of houses at dawn, close to death. A chakor is to the moon what the moth is to the flame.
“You are appropriately named,” his future wife would say, when he met her at the shrine in 1922. “My name is Mahtaab. The moon.”
Shamas moves to the pink room and opens the album containing the photographs of his father and mother. They were great lovers, even in old age, Chakor smiling good-humouredly and saying to Shamas and his elder brother, “Come on, bring your wives here and make them stand next to my woman: let’s see if she isn’t the most beautiful of the three despite being the eldest.”
Mahtaab’s eyes shine blindingly in the grainy pictures — a light reaching the present from the distant years, the way light from long-dead stars continues to arrive on earth.
He puts the picture album away, sliding it next to one of the butterfly books that Jugnu had given to his nephews and niece, the children quoting things from them to each other during the day.
Having gently stroked the spine of the butterfly book for a few seconds, he returns to his seat and takes up the newspaper. He has thought about his parents all morning, due to some dream he must have had last night, and in about an hour it’ll be time for him to go to the Urdu bookshop situated at the edge of the lake, near the xylophone jetty; he spends most of his free weekend hours there.
Kaukab comes in from the kitchen carrying a tray and takes the chair opposite. Flat, round, the size of pebbles on a doll’s beach, a small cupful of black masar seeds lies in an uncertain mound in the centre of the tray: enough for two. They are to be cleaned and then soaked for a few hours prior to cooking. These days — less out of loyalty to her own family than the fact that the grief of Chanda’s mother shames and unsettles her— Kaukab has taken to visiting the grocery shop twenty-minutes away on Laila Khalid Road. She feels shame because her brother-in-law Jugnu is partly, no, not partly, entirely, responsible for the woman’s distress.
Chanda, the girl whose eyes changed with the seasons, was sent to Pakistan at sixteen to marry a first cousin to whom she had been promised when a baby, but the marriage had lasted only a year and her mother had been devastated by the news of the divorce. But another cousin in Pakistan took pity and agreed to marry her even though she was no longer a virgin. But he too divorced her a few months later and the girl came back to live in England, helping the family at the grocery shop all day. Then they found an illegal immigrant for her to marry: he wanted a British nationality and wasn’t concerned that she had been married twice already. But he disappeared as soon as he got legal status in England. Chanda remained married to him because there had been no divorce.
And then one day last year she went to deliver the star anise that Jugnu — the man with the luminous hands — had asked for over the telephone, an ingredient for his butterflies’ food. She was twenty-five, he forty-eight. It was March and the sparrows were about to begin shedding the extra five-hundred feathers they had grown at the start of winter to keep warm, to return to their summer plumage of three-thousand feathers each. The apples had not yet put out their shell-white flowers. The blossom would be out in May — when she would move in with Jugnu— and both Chanda and Jugnu would be dead by the time those very flowers became fruit in the autumn, the apples that would continue to lie in a circle of bright red dots under each tree until the snows of this year’s January.
Jugnu had said he would marry Chanda but since she had not been divorced by her previous husband, Islam forbade another marriage for several years — the number differing from sect to sect, four, five, six. All the clerics she and Jugnu consulted stated firmly that the missing husband had to be found, or they had to wait for that prolonged period for the marriage to annul itself. If the husband did not return after those years, she could consider herself divorced, and marry whomever she wished.
All these consultations were, of course, to gain favour with Chanda’s family and with Kaukab. If only she could obtain a Muslim divorce and marry Jugnu Islamically—they could cohabit then, regardless of the fact that she was still legally married to someone under British law.
Gently, Kaukab shakes the metal tray containing the heap of masar seeds until she has lined the surface evenly in a layer the thickness of one grain. Clearing an arc on this doll’s beach with the back of her fingers, she begins to look for insect damage, pieces of real stone, and millimetre fragments of chaff. She surveys the room, eyes going on brief sorties along the various surfaces and returning to the tray where something unusual is being kept in sight. She gives up at last and stretches out her hand: “One second, please.”
Shamas lowers the newspaper and looks over its top edge that is serrated like a carnation petal, and at the flicker of her fingers he takes off his spectacles and passes them on to her.
During the weekends they like to settle in this room whenever they can, leaving it and returning to it, each going about his or her own habits at the periphery of the other’s consciousness. The disorder of the day’s living is tidied away at night and the pink room — filled with books in five languages — is made immaculate once again as though all the slack strings of a musical instrument have been pulled tight.
“Look what I found,” she removes the spectacles, her inspection complete. “A ravann seed. Here.” In the palm of her hand is a shiny blue bead, the outer skin flaking away to reveal the ivory within. “The packet said Product of Italy. That probably means they grow ravann in Italy. Is Italy somewhere quite close to Pakistan?”