“This morning I discovered a single icicle, thin as a thermometer, outside my window.”
“Do you remember the year when winter unexpectedly arrived in September and everywhere the rain being held in the bowls of garden flowers froze into ice? About twenty years ago.”
“Was it really that long ago?” From this existence of two moments, we have to steal a life.
“Shamas, I haven’t heard whether the police have found out anything about who assaulted you.”
“No. I didn’t see who it was, so there are no leads. None of my children had been told about it, but they found out when we met at the courts this week. I am mostly healed but they were still shocked by my condition. They gave me a headache as they asked me a hundred concerned questions. Had the police done this, Had the police done that?” They had offered to drive him home, but he didn’t want their company — afraid that a shrapnel of the truth might be extracted from him by them.
The bus is almost full and they have to sit upstairs. Their bodies become warm soon after the journey begins while, outside, the rain intensifies, big drops that each hit the windows diagonally and break into a row of six to eight smaller drops, sticking there to the dry glass that is vibrating like a harp string.
“Your sons reminded me of you — the way the elder stands, the younger’s way of talking. I can see them in you.”
“The children will come home tomorrow for a few hours, much to their mother’s satisfaction. They are terribly missed by her.” His distorted reflection in the steel tubing of the seat in front reminds him of the time he saw Jugnu leaning over a scarab beetle: his face was being reflected in the insect’s polished silver back.
“I wanted to come to the courts yesterday too,” Kiran says.
Someone rustles a broadsheet newspaper at the back and it sounds like a peacock dancing with its tail fanned out, the feathers aquiver.
In the seat in front of Kiran and Shamas a small boy of about eight or nine (the same age as Suraya’s son, surely) is talking to an adult man, an uncle or father; he’s eating an apple, journeying bit by bit along its equator, and his talk is obviously a complaint about school, “Everyone these days is doing the sideways thumb-flick thing when they want to point to someone standing next to them, copying the new boy in class. .” He stops to take a bite.
A new boy in class? Shamas’s heart begins to beat faster as it occurs to him that the new boy could be Suraya’s son: could it be that she has managed to bring her son to England? Which school does this apple-eating boy attend?
“. . who’s called James Hamby. Everyone thinks he’s so cool. .”
The new boy is obviously not Suraya’s son. Just for a moment back then Shamas had had an image of himself standing outside this boy’s school to meet Suraya as she comes to pick up her son. His heart is hammering inside his breast — from now on he’ll see everywhere a possible map that’ll lead him to her. He fears he’s going to end up wandering around this town, muttering her name.
Kiran says, “I know how painful the past few days have been for you. When they set up home together, there were rumours that Chanda’s family would soon poison them both. Of course, it didn’t happen — our neighbourhood runs on gossip.”
“Kaukab, I know, sometimes blames Jugnu and Chanda for what happened. They tried to turn their back on the world, on the world’s trouble, and found themselves stabbed in the back.”
“Meaning: No one on the planet has yet earned the right to be that innocent?”
Shamas nods, but his attention is drawn towards the people waiting to get on the bus, out there, now that they are approaching a stop: no, Suraya is not among them. He turns to Kiran. “Do you know this Punjabi couplet?
Kuj Sheher de loke vi zalim san Kuj mainon maran da shauk vi si
It’s by Munir Niazi.”
Kiran translates the words into English, “On the one hand, the city surrounding me was easily provoked. On the other, I was curious about ways of dying. Though, of course, it’s their curiosity about ways of living that led to Chanda and Jugnu’s death.”
“The second verse should be, ‘On the other, I was curious about ways of living.’ Kuj mainon jeen da shauk vi si. They did not have a death wish. They had a life wish.”
“Jugnu, with a blindfold of butterflies on his eyes,” Kiran says after a while.
“Why weren’t they careful? Even animals know to retreat from obvious danger. For all his love of the natural world, Jugnu should have remembered that all animals retreat from fire.”
“All, except moths.”
The sky is getting darker. Evening is on its way, planting flags of sadness as it comes.
Kiran says, “You mustn’t feel too sad. In this life we are duty bound to dig up a little happiness. Remember Kaukab’s brother visited England last year?”
Shamas looks at her.
“I met him,” she says quietly.
Shamas nods: “I thought you would be curious.” He smiles at her: “I hope Kaukab didn’t see you two together.”
Shamas glances at the newspaper in front of him. He cannot remember the last time he looked at the news. A seventeen-year-old Palestinian girl was beaten to death in the Gaza Strip by her father for having lost her virginity. . The Bahamian authorities found 56 Haitian migrants and the body of another on a desolate shore six days after their sailing boat foundered, the US coastguard said yesterday. The survivors said about 130 people were on board when the 30 ft boat left Haiti for Miami ten days ago. . In Saudi Arabia, a fifteen-year-old boy has been publicly beheaded for changing his religion from Islam to Christianity. .
Shamas waits to see if she would resume telling him about the lost lover. There was a shameful expression on her face when she mentioned him, mentioned her search for happiness. Perhaps she thinks people would judge her? The world doesn’t rub salt into our wounds exactly: it has coated us with salt so that whenever we happen to get injured it is doubly painful.
“How is your father, Kiran?” he says to indicate that she doesn’t have to continue with the earlier subject, in case she has begun to regret having confided in him during the minutes away from him. “Is he still finishing every sentence with a laugh as though ridiculing his illness?”
Kiran however does wish to return to the earlier topic, and says, “I didn’t meet him while he was visiting your house. Remember he left Dasht-e-Tanhaii to go to London, to spend his last two weeks in England looking up old friends in the capital. Well, one day I received a letter from him — from London — saying he was coming back to Dasht-e-Tanhaii just to see me. The look on my face had alarmed my father. ‘What was in that letter?’ he asked, having seen me reading it earlier. ‘Has someone died?’ I wanted to say, no, someone dead has come alive.”
“He wrote to you and came back to Dasht-e-Tanhaii? I didn’t know that. Did you know he had named his daughter after you?”
“No, I didn’t, but he told me when we met. You knew?”
“Yes, but I didn’t want to mention it in case it hurt you. I am sorry.”
“There he was, at the doorstep one day soon after the letter. All my life I have looked at other men with the hope of catching a fleeting glimpse of one of his gestures, a skin-colouration like his, a smile resembling his. Now, there was the accumulated sadness of compromises in his features that comes to everyone in old age.”
“I don’t think he knew you had gone to Karachi.”