The perfect hostess, she makes a mental note to put out a saucer on the dining table just before the meal begins, to receive the oily threads.
In a large pan the size of an elephant’s footprint (as Jugnu used to refer to it), Kaukab soaks some basmati rice. Bas—scent; mati—earth. She inhales the scent of Pakistan’s earth deep into her lungs. She washes the starch out of the grains by gently rubbing them until the water is no longer milky and the rice looks like little stones at the bottom of a clear rain-fed stream.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice, singing Allah’s praises, fills the air from the cassette player on the refrigerator. Nusrat is gone, leaving his songs behind, the way when a snail dies its shell remains.
The three cassettes, Pakistani imports, had cost £5 from Chanda’s parents’ shop two years ago; these twenty or so songs would have cost about £45 from white people’s music shops in the town centre, Nusrat being famous among them these days too. Kaukab had shuddered at the price when she was told about it: tonight’s lavish meal — stuffed bitter-gourds, grilled chicken, mutton-and-potato curry, pilau rice (in case someone doesn’t feel like eating chappatis), chappatis (in case someone doesn’t feel like eating pilau rice), shami kebabs, cauliflower-and-pea curry, fruit salad, sweet vermicelli decorated with edible gold leaf, all spiced and flavoured with the finest and freshest spices — will cost just over £39. It would feed six people and a child tonight and the leftovers would be consumed by Kaukab and Shamas over the next day or two.
Islam is said to forbid music, Kaukab remembers as she marinades the chicken breasts with natural yoghurt mixed with Australian wildflower honey and the juice of two lemons, puréed onion, grated ginger and garlic, but she has always reminded herself that when the holy Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, had migrated to Medina, the girls there had welcomed him by playing the duff drums and singing Tala’al-Badru ‘alayna, which is Arabic for The white moon has risen above us.
From the cupboard under the sink, with its dark light of a forest floor (Jugnu again), she takes out the packet of desiccated Arabian dates that she had hidden there: hidden there from herself, dates being a weakness of hers. She steadies herself against the counter as she straightens — the bending has resulted in a spike of pain in her lower abdomen.
She opens each date to check that it doesn’t have insect eggs inside, takes out the stone, and then washes the flesh before dropping it in a bowl of hot water. As she discards any insect-riddled fruit, she remembers being a young girl and joking with her friends that they shouldn’t throw away fruit from the sacred land of Arabia just because of a minor impurity, that they should remember the story of the Pakistani man who went to Saudi Arabia to perform the pilgrimage and, in feverish delight at being in the holy land, began to kiss the words written on the walls along the road: Arabic to him was what the Koran was written in — he didn’t know that it was an everyday language too — and what he took to be verses from the Koran was actually an advertisement for hair-depilatory cream. Kaukab sighs as she remembers her girlhood, and only then is she disturbed by the realization that she has just thought of something irreverent if not offensive to Allah.
She shakes her head.
Muslims must be alert against such thoughts: Satan, the Father of Woes, is always around, ready to urinate in your mind through your ears the moment he feels you have let your guard down!
To drive away the Accursed One, she revolves sacred facts about the Koran in her head: the text is composed of 114 chapters, 70 of which were dictated at Mecca and 44 at Medina. It is divided into 621 divisions, called decades, and into 6,236 verses. It contains 79,439 words, and 323,670 letters, to each of which attach 10 special virtues. The names of 25 prophets are mentioned: Adam, Noah, Ismaeel, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Elisha, Jonah, Lot, Salih, Hud, Shuaib, David, Soloman, Dhul-Kafl, Idris, Elias, Yahya, Zacharias, Job, Moses, Aaron, Jesus, and Muhammad. Upon all these be prayer and peace, especially on Muhammad. There are no butterflies in the Koran but nine other birds or winged creatures are mentioned: the gnat, the bee, the fly, the hoopoe, the crow, the grasshopper, the bird of Jesus, namely the bat, the ant, and the bulbul. .
The dates, cleaned and stoned, will be cooked in creamed milk into which vermicelli — shining like a fairytale princess’s golden hair — will be added. With the potato peeler she shaves a heap of thin waxy crescents from a dried coconut, to be added to the syrupy vermicelli along with rose essence, pink-husked pistachio nuts (and the dates brought back to plump fullness by the boiling water). A square of gold leaf is safe from damage between two rectangles of rough paper: it is to be stuck onto the surface of the prepared dessert. The gold leaf flutters, aware of the slightest air current, when Kaukab lifts the top paper rectangle at one corner for a little peek. It is almost as though there is something not-quite dead between the pages of a book, a brilliant trapped moth.
The food she is making is more than enough for six people, but, who knows, perhaps Allah has written in the Book of Fates that Jugnu and Chanda — safe and sound — are to walk in on the family just as it is sitting down to eat; in that case there won’t be any leftovers for tomorrow or the day after.
She opens the front door to throw the date stones into the rose beds. They might germinate there next year. Tall sky-touching palms, the sons and daughters of trees growing over there in sacred Arabian soil. But she has to close the door immediately because the Sikh woman Kiran is coming down the slope with the maples, between the church and the mosque.
She crosses the kitchen and throws the date stones into the flowerbeds in the back garden. The sycamores and the hawthorns on the slope behind the house are bare. She recalls how, back in spring, the hawthorns’ clotted five-petalled profusion had weighed heavy on the branches like snow. The dangling arm-long sprays had overlapped like feathers on a bird’s body. And thinking about the white hawthorn blossoms, she remarks that their scent is not too dissimilar to a Pakistani beauty soap that, according to the advertisements, was the choice of nine out of ten film starlets. The air now smells of freshly cut wood and the sun is a white hole in the sky.
There is a knock on the front door just then — and she is paralysed, absolutely sure that it is Kiran. What does she want? The knock sounds again and she opens the door to find
Ujala.
“Oh my life!”
A chunk had been bitten out of her life when he walked away from her, away from this house, and with the Ganges flowing from one eye and the Indus from the other, she wraps her arms around him, opening her hands wide to touch as much of his back as possible. When she releases him he doesn’t say anything, just gives a little flick to get his long hair out of his beautiful antelope eyes in that arrogant-seeming gesture of his. She brings him in and wants to take his face in her hands, to kiss him again and again. Get drunk, my heart. Go mad, my eye. But then she remembers what a woman had once told her at the shop concerning the latest Western theories about the bond between a mother and her son: “They say all mothers secretly want to go to bed with their sons. A bunch of people in suits and ties was talking about it on television last night.” Kaukab had felt repulsed, her mind spinning with revulsion at the idea: these kind of things were said by vulgar hawkers and fishwives in the bazaars of Pakistan, but here in England educated people said them on television. To speak in this manner about a mother’s love! This immoral and decadent civilisation was intent on soiling everything that was pure and transcendental about human existence! Mothers did check that their baby boys’ penises were stiff first thing in the morning but that was nothing more than a parent’s concern for the child, to see that everything about him was in order, developing satisfactorily; and women also quietly began to look for signs of nocturnal emissions in the bed linen and the pyjamas when the sons turned thirteen or thereabouts, and, once again, that too was no different from the eye a mother kept on her female children’s development.