She backs away from Ujala, who has yet to say anything.
Eight years!
“You look—” she begins but stops to wipe her tears with her veil.
“How do I look?”
Like a dream walking is what she wants to say. “I knew you were coming, but I didn’t know when. I said to myself he should hurry up and get here.” She wants to use the English expression “the sooner, the better” but wonders whether it isn’t actually “the better, the sooner”; she decides not to risk looking foolish in his eyes. With such tiny things is a semblance of dignity maintained, is a liveable life assembled. She moves forward and takes the boy in her arms again but he makes an attempt at release after only a couple of seconds, his head averted a little in discomfort. She lets go, the noise in her head louder than a tin roof in monsoon — thoughts, fears and words appearing and popping like bubbles.
The heavy stone of silence is back on the boy’s lips as he takes a chair.
“Would you have breakfast? No? Tea? I am making vermicelli for you. When you were little you used to call it ‘princess’s hair.’ ” She is afraid he will snap at her, tell her to stop digging up the grave of the time that has passed, the days that have died. But he smiles at her politely, his eyes haunted, his look colourless. One night while she was pregnant with him she had dreamt there was a rainbow in her womb. What has stolen his colours?
“How did you get here?” she asks.
He is silent as though his tongue has become fused to the roof of his mouth.
“A woman in the street told me yesterday she thought she saw you in the town centre,” she says. “Was that you?”
He takes a deep breath and shrugs.
“I told her she must’ve mistaken someone else for you, some nondescript boy who reminded her of me. I said to her, ‘Was he a handsome boy? Don’t go by my looks, sister-ji. My sons are very very beautiful.’ ” She hopes he will let her look at him to her heart’s content. How long has she waited for him to return, those long years, her eyes painted with the kohl of longing, a glittering sequin of hope stitched onto her drab veil. His face, once round and healthy, looks thin and drawn: the full moon has become the crescent.
“Where are you going?” she says in panic when Ujala makes to get up. “You’ve only just arrived. You can’t leave. By Allah, I won’t let you. .”
“I am not leaving. I would like to go upstairs and sleep for a while. I have been up since before dawn.”
A shiver runs through her on hearing his voice, the ghost of a reflex from the times she called his answering machine, fearful that he might pick up the phone.
“I’ll come with you and get you an extra blanket. We don’t have central heating so the rooms are cold, especially upstairs. The kitchen stays warm.”
She climbs the stairs ahead of him — red pain shooting up between the legs because of the speed of the ascent. Upstairs, she gets one of her new blankets out of its nylon zipped-up bag from the cupboard. “Warm as July.” She smiles as she hands him the blanket.
“You didn’t go to the trial,” he says abruptly. “They burned parts of the bodies. Now we know for sure.”
“I didn’t go,” Kaukab says. “No.” The scent of naphthalene balls escapes from the cupboard — a protection against Jugnu’s moths. Pointing to the jar full of one-pence coins in the corner, Kaukab says to the boy, as though distracting a child: “That’s yours. Do you remember?”
“I remember. Do you recognize the jar?” he approaches it and strokes it with his hands. And without waiting for her to answer, goes on to explain: “It’s one of a pair. Jugnu knitted copper wire around the other one and then broke the glass with a hammer to make a cage to hold the Great Peacock moth female. She had hatched ahead of the males, and hung in that cage, sending out chemical signals.” Kaukab watches him as he speaks almost as though he is in a trance. “The males hatched and followed the scent to her, flying up through the attic and then down into his bedroom where the cage was hanging.”
“It was his first night next door.”
“He woke in the morning to find them clustered around her, the cage completely covered with vibrating velvet. The Night of the Great Peacock Moths,” he whispers, and then in his normal voice says, “You once told me that back in Sohni Dharti a man had committed suicide by boiling a few handful of coins in water for a long time and then drinking that water.”
She nods. “The boiling metal turned the water poisonous, yes.”
He unbuckles his belt and undoes the top two buttons of his jeans to enter the bed.
Kaukab turns to leave the room. “What an awful story to remember.” She wants to examine his face, to understand why he had made that comment about the suicide, but she hears him taking his pants off, the slide of fabric against skin, and therefore cannot look in his direction. “Are you sure you will be comfortable in this room? The kitchen is directly below and I am going to be cooking all day: the smell of spices will rise right through the floorboards and the carpet.”
“Close the door as you leave.”
Downstairs, she lets out an inward sound — echo, and then echo of echo — a cry in the forest of old age, loneliness. He is out of reach, no doubt holding her responsible for Chanda and Jugnu’s disappearance. She senses loathing in him, a wall-like hate in whose foundations lie the bloody cut-up bodies of the two lovers. She thought he would be happier than he is. She’d thought he’d ask her, Did you miss me? And that she would answer: No more than I’d miss my eyes. They haven’t seen each other for eight years and have, therefore, a total of sixteen-years’ worth of life to catch up on, but he has barely said a word. Mah-Jabin and Charag have sent her photographs of him during his absence, but they stopped when he found out and threatened to cut himself off from them too.
It had taken her decades to rebuild the happiness she had lost when she moved to England: she had built it around her children, and, yes, around Jugnu, but she had never realized how loosely woven a thing it was, how easily torn.
She breathes in against a wave of tears and sits there for a few minutes before getting up carefully. There is a lot to do. She had peeled the potatoes last night and covered them in water to stop the rusting, and the base for the pilau rice was readied last night too: just a matter of reheating it half-an-hour before it’s time to sit down at the dinner table and dropping the rice in it. An illiterate woman came by yesterday to ask her if she would read a letter from her brother in Pakistan, and she and Kaukab had spent the afternoon chopping up all the onions that would be needed today.
And the dozens of cloves of garlic got peeled as though all by themselves when the matchmaker stopped by in the evening and the two of them talked as they worked, the topics under discussion varying from recipes to djinns, from the new fabrics to become available in the clothes shops to all the successful marriages the matchmaker had arranged this year, the most recent one of a woman named Suraya about whose beauty she never tired of speaking.