He opens the door wider for her to step inside, handfuls of snow on a gust of wind rushing in inquisitively either side of her and then past him into the house, sticking softly to the linoleum in whose pattern of ivory-and-green roses a peeled almond is hard to find once it has slipped out of the fingers, or out of which, as though one of the green roses has shed a petal, a mint or coriander leaf curling at the edges strangely appears when the floor is swept at the end of the day, having lain undetected against the pattern since lunch.
“You should have telephoned, Kiran.”
She doesn’t enter the house — uneasy no doubt about encountering Shamas’s wife, Kaukab. Kiran is a Sikh and had three decades ago wanted to marry Kaukab’s brother, a Muslim. The two were in love. He was a migrant worker here in England, and when during a visit to Pakistan he told his family of his intentions of marrying Kiran, they were appalled and refused to allow him to return to England. Kiran boarded a plane in London and arrived at Karachi airport to be with him, but her telegram had been intercepted by the young man’s older brother who was waiting at the airport to tell her to take the next flight back to England, any reunion — or union — between his brother and her an impossibility. A marriage was hastily arranged for him within the next few days.
Shamas asks her to step in now. “Come in out of the rain, I mean, snow, while I put on my Wellingtons. Kaukab is still in bed.” This is a narrow house where all the doors disappear into the walls, except for the two that give on to the outside world at the front and back, and he slides open the space under the stairs to look for the shoes, stored somewhere here amid all the clutter at the end of last winter. There are fishing rods leaning like stick-insects in the corner. Soft cages for her feet, there is a pair of jellied sandals that had belonged to his daughter, lying one in front of the other as though he has surprised them in the act of taking a step, the straps spiralling like apple peel.
“I apologize again for having troubled you so early. I was hoping one of your sons would be visiting, and I would bring him with me.”
“All three children are far away, the boys and the girl,” he says as he rummages. There is a lobster buoy from Maine, USA, that is used as a doorstopper at the back of the house on hot mornings, to let in the sun and the trickling song of the stream which runs beside the narrow lane there; the stream that is more stones than water as the summer advances but a great catcher of pollen nevertheless, the stones white as chalk in the sun, black underwater. During autumn the speed of the water is so great that you fear your foot would be instantly sliced off at the ankle if you stepped into it.
Outside, as he walks behind Kiran in that below-zero monsoon, there are gentle skirmishes between the falling snowflakes now that the wind has risen a little.
Two sets of Kiran’s footprints lie before him as he follows her to her house. Each perfect cylinder punched into the deep snow has at its base a thin sheet of packed ice through which the dry leaves of the field maples can be seen as though sealed behind glass. They are as intricate as the gold jewellery from the Subcontinent — treasures buried under the snow till a rainy day.
Planted between two field maples on the slope, the telephone pole has had several of its wires broken during the night, and, encased in thick cylinders of ice, they lie snapped like candles in the snow. The chilled air is as keen as a needle on the skin and the incline is forcing him to take a hummingbird’s 300 breaths per minute. A frozen buried clump of grass breaks under his weight and the cracking sound is the sound that Kaukab produces when she halves and quarters cinnamon sticks in the kitchen.
“I lay next to him on the floor all night, distracting him with talk,” Kiran says over her shoulder. “But when he began to grow despondent I set out for you. He said, ‘I want to leave this life. My bags are packed, but the world won’t let me go: it fears the report I’ll present to Him on my arrival.’ ”
Shamas wants to say something in response but a snowflake enters his mouth and he almost chokes.
Kiran is now ahead of him by a few determined yards. His own progress is decisive but full of inaccurate moves.
Kiran never saw her lover again — until perhaps last year when, now a widower, he visited England; Kaukab was apprehensive that the one-time lovers shouldn’t encounter each other, and, as far as Shamas knows, she succeeded in keeping them apart, but — he is quite sure — Kiran must have caught glimpses of him.
The street rises. On one side is the hundred-year-old Parish Church of St. Eustace, nestling in a wedge cut into the hill, circled by lindens and yews. Missing for as long as he can remember, the tail of the weathervane had turned up two months ago when the lake was dragged unsuccessfully for the bodies of Jugnu and Chanda. And on the other side of the street is the mosque. The crescent faces the cross squarely across the narrow side-street.
Pakistan is a poor country, a harsh and disastrously unjust land, its history a book full of sad stories, and life is a trial if not a punishment for most of the people born there: millions of its sons and daughters have managed to find footholds all around the globe in their search for livelihood and a semblance of dignity. Roaming the planet looking for solace, they’ve settled in small towns that make them feel smaller still, and in cities that have tall buildings and even taller loneliness. And so the cleric at this mosque could receive a telephone call from, say, Norway, from a person who was from the same village as him in Pakistan, asking him whether it was permitted for him to take an occasional small glass of whisky or vodka to keep his blood warm, given that Norway was an extremely cold country; the cleric told him to desist from his sinful practice, thundering down the line and telling him that Allah was perfectly aware of the climate of Norway when He forbade humans from drinking alcohol; why, the cleric had asked, couldn’t he simply carry a basket of burning maple leaves under his overcoat the way the good Muslims of freezing Kashmir do to keep themselves warm?
A telephone call could also come in the middle of the night from Australia, a despondent father asking the cleric to fly immediately to Sydney all-expenses-paid and exorcise the djinns that had taken possession of his teenaged daughter soon after an end was put to her love for a white schoolmate and she was married to a cousin brought hurriedly over from Pakistan.
Having reached the summit of the street, Kiran is looking down the slope waiting for him to catch up. He arrives and they stand side by side, motionless for a short moment, looking down at his house.
The town lies at the base of a valley like a few spoonfuls of sugar in a bowl. At the very top are the remains of an Iron Age fort to which a tower was added to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.
“All night I have tried to lift him to put him back into bed,” Kiran says, “but I wasn’t able to.” Her hair has silvered with age but her skin is still the colour of rusting apple slices. The beads hanging from her earlobes are tiny and clear, as though she has managed to crack open a glass paper-weight like a walnut and somehow managed to pick out whole the air bubbles suspended within it. “All night I tried.”
“You should have come for me immediately.” Encrusted with snow, the hawthorns behind his house seem to be in flower this morning.
“Your elder boy is married now? To the white girl with the green Volkswagen Beetle?”
“They referred to it as ‘the Aphid.’ They were married, but are now divorced.” They’ve set off again, along the road through the cherry trees towards Kiran’s house. “I can’t really remember the last time I saw the grandchild.”