After the dawn prayers today, Kaukab sat down with a basket and extracted the peas from each peapod with the skill of a pickpocket.
The mince for the shami kebabs was boiled with split chickpeas, cinnamon sticks and other spices, two days ago, beaten in a large black-stone mortar with a heavy wooden pestle until it had the texture of wet sand and came out from between the fingers in sculpted waves when squeezed in a fist. It was patted into small discs: they are in the fridge now, and all that remains is to dip them in egg and shallow-fry them in sunflower oil minutes before eating — the egg coating would seal the mince in the thinnest omelette imaginable. For the fruit salad, she would enlist one of the other guests when they arrive: the fruit — apples, pomegranates (the very last batch of the year), pears, grapes, and peaches that look as though they are apples made out of the finest pink suede — must remain fresh and crunchy. There is coriander and mint chutney to pound in the small marble mortar the size of a green-pigeon’s nest — oh, Jugnu! Oh, my Jugnu! — that she had been given as a present by a woman returning from Pakistan five years ago.
She takes the coat Ujala has left on the kitchen table and carries it into the pink sitting room. The smell of cooking mustn’t get into the clothes. The whites call the Asians “smelly” but they do have a point: the coats are hung in the kitchens and the pungent smells of the spices get into them. The Asians who have moved out to the suburbs also call the Asians in this poor neighbourhood “smelly” and “stinky.” Some of the women in this neighbourhood are from villages where it is common practice to put butter in the hair: the smell is often rancid. Kaukab makes sure Shamas’s coat and hers are never in the kitchen.
The extractor fan has been on for over an hour now and will continue to work into the evening.
She wonders if she should ring Shamas at the office and let him know that Ujala has arrived. But she is still a little apprehensive about the telephone because two days ago, when she had dialled a wrong number, she was told to, “Get off the phone and go back to your country, you Paki bitch.” She is glad Shamas doesn’t drive: accidents happen, and you never know what kind of person you would have grazed the vehicle of or offended with your way of driving, what kind of name he or she would choose to call you in public.
From the floor she takes up the glove that had fallen out of Ujala’s coat pocket and places it on top of the coat next door. The wool is bright green, vivid red, a deep yellow reminiscent of linseed oil. Children’s primary colours. In winter the tiny mittens and gloves are all across the town centre, lone and lost, along with dropped mufflers and misplaced pompom hats. It is almost as though there is a conspiracy among the toddlers to replace the colours now that the hanging baskets containing the annual flowers have been taken down for the year, the wrought-iron brackets affixed to lamp-posts remaining empty until next summer.
She had turned off the cassette player when Ujala arrived, but now she switches it back on: so as not to disturb him, the volume is turned low, like the faint whiff from a long-empty scent bottle. She cuts the cauliflower into florets, and as she washes them in a basin her hand becomes a starfish, the florets among which it moves appearing like a coral reef. Getting the mutton-and-potato and the pea-and-cauliflower curries started and kneading the dough for the chappatis takes her to one o’clock. Turmeric has dyed the tips of her fingers golden as though with the yellow dust of lotus blossoms. She wipes the table until it is as wet and clean as an eye. It is time for the noon prayer, but before that she tiptoes upstairs and, asking herself to be courageous, goes into the room where Ujala is asleep and carries away the jar of coins. She hides it under the sink, his comment about the suicide flying inside her head the way the silver ball zigzags inside a pinball machine. She had heard somewhere that one Japanese emperor had taken his life by inhaling gold leaf, and she wonders whether the edible gold leaf could be used by someone for similar purposes. Having performed her ablutions, she says her prayers on the velvet prayer-mat, bending and straightening with immense pain, and afterwards she opens the front door to see if there is anyone outside the church — in order to ask them to go in and see if a Song of Solomon cake can be bought: it has all the spices mentioned in that Christian poem and it has been a favourite of Ujala ever since he tried it at a school fair. She doesn’t have time to look in the direction of the church because she finds Mah-Jabin sitting on the doorstep, a bunch of Madonna lilies — coned-up in red paper — held against her breast like an infant.
“I rang the bell,” Mah-Jabin says as she gets up.
“I was saying my prayers. I didn’t hear anything at all.”
“I hope I didn’t disturb you. I knocked too,” the girl says apologetically, placing the lilies on the table.
“My mind wandered during the prayer twice. There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer. He succeeded in distracting me today. I began wondering about what kind of gold leaf the Japanese have?”
Mah-Jabin smiles. “Are we having vermicelli for dessert?”
“I was just asking Ujala if he remembered calling them ‘princess’s hair.’ ”
Mah-Jabin, unwrapping the lilies, looks at Kaukab. “He left before the rest of us were up. When did he come?”
“He came around ten. Mah-Jabin, he looks so thin.”
Ujala is as healthy as a footballer, as a ballet dancer, but Mah-Jabin doesn’t wish to contradict Kaukab so early. She goes into the sitting room to get the vase. The pink tulips had turned violet as they had dried up in dying, a petal here and there leaning away from the cup of the others like a resting insect that hasn’t quite succeeded in shaking its wings into perfect order upon alighting.
After the lilies, Mah-Jabin goes upstairs to the bathroom (where all those years ago she had sat with a knitting needle, not knowing how to proceed). She takes off the silk scarf and hangs it from the hook. The fabric was bought from an Asian material shop, just two feet of it, where once she would have bought it by the yard to make shalwar-kameezs. She laughs whenever her fashion-student friends make a fuss because they have to undo a few inches of a seam that has been placed wrongly. Growing up she had seen her mother — and the other women in the neighbourhood— rip up seams, put them down again, and cut and recut sleeves, necklines, hems by the dozen. Kaukab, who has never bought any Western shirts and trousers and has never paid a seamstress to make her a shalwar-kameez, had once claimed that in her life she had stitched five-hundred kilometres of seams.
She stands motionlessly. The stress of the previous days, and the lag brought about by the fact that her usual routines have been broken here in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, have combined to produce a kind of delirium: she fades and comes into focus with the rhythm of this mild fever, now suddenly conscious of her weight on the floor, now unconvinced of the reality of things. And now, remembering something, she opens the narrow angular cupboard in the corner that houses the immersion heater swaddled in insulating pillows of shiny silver nylon. “Hello, spaceman.” It was in here that she had tossed her husband’s letter — unread and crumpled-up— during the visit back in spring. The spaceman was to take it up in his rocket: toxic waste to be dumped into some distant black hole. But it is still back there, and just when she reaches in, out of curiosity, and has pulled it forward a little she hears Ujala’s voice. She quickly lets go of the balled-up paper and closes the hatch. Ujala enters the bathroom just as she turns around. He is smiling, and, his arms extended towards her, he comes closer and begins to feel for the clasp of the Venezuelan necklace she is wearing. A row of seeds threaded onto cord, he had bought it for her two days ago.