“I have to return it to the shop. The seeds are poisonous, it seems. There is a note in the shop window, asking the customers to bring it back for a refund, and they have also advertised in the papers.”
“Seriously?” Mah-Jabin cannot help laughing as she takes off the necklace hurriedly. It tangles in her hair and Ujala’s attempts to free it make it only worse. He looks anxious for a few moments as though they won’t ever be able to get rid of the lethal seeds from around her neck, from around his fingers. She calms him and they collapse against each other, smiling and tumbling like kittens, the moments a ball of yarn between them.
Shortly before she left England to get married and settle in Pakistan, Ujala had come home in the middle of the night, having slipped out soon after Shamas and Kaukab went to bed. He was twelve and had clearly been experimenting with alcohol out there on the hills or beside the lake. Mah-Jabin had taken him to his bed, quietly, not wishing to awaken the parents. The smell of beer from his mouth revolted her. He wept against her, begging her not to go to Pakistan and leave him alone here; he said that Charag was a shitty swot but she was his friend, his only friend, his only friend: “What will I do without you here? No, I am holding on to your leg until you promise to stay. I mean it: I’ll hold it as long as I have to. Just watch me.” She hissed at him to lower his voice, but he kept talking, the placement of words in each sentence in slight disarray — the way the drunks talk, the way their mother speaks English (once, when she had a headache, she had told the children, “Make noise silently!”).
A few days later, he had had his face slapped by her in fury. She had returned from the town centre with a new suitcase and found Kaukab in tears in the kitchen. Without needing a word of explanation, Mah-Jabin had rushed up to his bedroom. “I want you to stop accusing Mother and Father. They are not forcing me into an arranged marriage. I am going because I want to.” He said she was stupid not to see that they weren’t giving her the advice she needed, didn’t tell her openly what she was getting herself into.
Free of the Venezuelan seeds, Mah-Jabin goes downstairs, telling Ujala to come to the kitchen as soon as possible so that they can help their mother with the meal.
Several separate foods will come together to form a meal in three stages, and Kaukab’s plan is to, over the next few hours, bring them each to within twenty minutes of completion. The bitter-gourds are almost ready, secured in the violet thread that Kaukab had used to sew herself a frilled tablecloth not long ago, and she tells Mah-Jabin how difficult it had been to settle on that colour as the thread with which the sewing would be done. “Because the pattern on the fabric was yellow splashed with violet, a yellow seam would stand out when it passed across a violet patch, and the reverse would be true if the thread of the other colour was chosen.”
“What you needed was a transparent thread: something which the spiders should get together with the fishing-line manufacturers to develop: thin enough but sufficiently strong.”
Ignoring her frivolous comment, Kaukab looks around and says, “I’ve always wanted this kitchen to be bigger.” She is draining the water off the potatoes and putting the yellow wedges into the pan where the curry base is sizzling. “It is going to fill up this evening, and everyone will have to sit cramped around the table.”
“We can eat in the sitting room,” Mah-Jabin suggests. “We’ll move the table in there.” She slides open the door and looks in to confirm that there is enough room in there. When Ujala comes down — he is putting on a sweater and his face emerges out of the neck-hole like a diver coming up and breaking the water’s surface — the brother and sister move the dining table and chairs into the centre of the next room, pushing the coffee table with the vase of lilies to one side. The Koranic verses hang in their black frames against the pink walls that are lined up to waist-length with bookshelves. “I used to cut the bookmark ribbons off Father’s books to tie up the hair of my dolls,” Mah-Jabin says. Ujala takes the latest issue of the Muslim women’s magazine Kaukab subscribes to — the monthly Veil, published in Pakistan — and puts it in the pile where the previous issues are kept.
“It doesn’t do any harm,” Mah-Jabin whispers: she had seen the distaste on his face when he picked up the magazine full of orthodox rants and strictures, apocalyptic visions and prophecies.
“I think it does.”
She looks away. “It makes her happy.”
“I don’t think it does. I have never seen more misery and guilt on her face than when she has just finished reading something printed in there. It’s turned her into a selfish monster. She is the reason why Father won’t openly condemn the idiocies of Islam. He thought it would hurt her. She and her like don’t do any harm? She has harmed every one of us. She won’t allow reason to enter this house.” Mah-Jabin leaves the room and he stands looking at the verses on the wall. For millions of people, religion was often another torture in addition to the fact that their lives were not what they should be. Their world is pitiless from womb to tomb, everything in it out of their control, almost as though the life-lines on the palms of their hands were live knife-cuts, a source of pain since birth. This world gives them terrible wounds and then the holy men and women make them put those wounds into bags of salt.
He follows Mah-Jabin out into the kitchen. A ladle in each hand, Kaukab is stirring two pots simultaneously. “I should have made some chickpea stew as well, Charag’s favourite, but it is not the easiest thing to digest and I didn’t want him getting a stomach ache.”
“But chickpea stew looks, smells and tastes so nice, though,” Mah-Jabin says, as she takes one of the ladles from Kaukab.
“Yes,” Kaukab agrees. “Jugnu said: ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t eat it, and you’ll regret it if you do eat it. .’ ”
The air in the room changes. Mah-Jabin winces inwardly and takes in a breath at the mention of the dead man’s name. Kaukab slowly looks over her shoulder at Ujala, who is sweeping the area of linoleum that has been exposed now that the table is gone. He had stopped but now resumes the strokes of the long-handled brush, the nylon bristles red as a fish’s gills.
“Don’t worry about the stew,” Mah-Jabin says, as she picks up the cauliflower pieces and adds them to the pot. “You’ve cooked enough food for today. It’s a feast.”
“A feast?” Kaukab says. “It cost £39.”
“No, Mother,” Mah-Jabin shakes her head. “The ingredients cost that much. You should add the cost of the planning, the organization, and the cooking that has gone into it all. A meal like tonight’s, if we were to pay a firm of caterers for it, would cost hundreds. Hundreds. And the food probably wouldn’t taste half as good as yours.”
Kaukab smiles. “I am just an ordinary woman. Your cooking is much better.”
“But I learnt it from you.”
“Would one of you stop licking the other’s pussy for a second and tell me where the dustpan is.”
Mah-Jabin turns around, stunned. “Ujala!”
He stands there with his jaw clenched, the eyes bright red.
“How dare you talk to your mother and sister like that,” Kaukab says to him. “I wish I had never come to this country.”
The tears spill over onto his cheeks but he is still breathing like a bull, the jaw pulsating. “What the fuck is all this for? What are we celebrating with this. . this feast? May I remind you that yesterday it was confirmed that Uncle Jugnu and Chanda were murdered, chopped up and burnt.”