Lightning strikes without caring whose nest it burns: Shamas and Kaukab were terrified that the four of them would not make it home in time before the pubs shut and the streets were full of drunk white people.
On the road through the cherry trees, Shamas enters a sphere of street-light like a day and emerges from it as though into night, again and again. He turns into the sloping side-street between the church and the mosque. Verses from the Bible translated into Urdu, especially those extolling the virtues of Christ as saviour, are regularly pinned to the noticeboard in the churchyard and they are torn down in the middle of the night just as regularly.
From the incline between the church and the mosque, Shamas sees the faint shimmer of heat haze clinging to the roofs of all but one of the houses in his street — Jugnu’s. The Darwin—Jugnu’s Sheridan Multi-Cruiser speedboat — is still there in his front garden, covered by a faded tarpaulin.
As in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe. There is a Park Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka. Because it was difficult to pronounce the English names, the men who arrived in this town in the 1950s had re-christened everything they saw before them. They had come from across the Subcontinent, lived together ten to a room, and the name that one of them happened to give to a street or landmark was taken up by the others, regardless of where they themselves were from. But over the decades, as more and more people came, the various nationalities of the Subcontinent have changed the names according to the specific country they themselves are from — Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. Only one name has been accepted by every group, remaining unchanged. It’s the name of the town itself. Dasht-e-Tanhaii.
The Wilderness of Solitude.
The Desert of Loneliness.
IN DARKNESS
Kaukab looks out of the window and watches a little boy climb the sloping side-street lined with the twenty maples. The six-year-old is on his way to the mosque and his grandmother has just telephoned Kaukab from three streets away: “Keep an eye on him, sister-ji. He won’t let me walk him to the mosque anymore. He is becoming independent and wants to go alone. I am telephoning everyone I know along his path because you have to be careful — every day you hear about depraved white men doing unspeakable things to little children.” And the woman rang off with a sigh: “We should never have come to this deplorable country, sister-ji, this nest of devilry from where God has been exiled. No, not exiled — denied and slain. It’s even worse.”
Kaukab remains at the window after the boy has disappeared from sight, and then she blots her eyes with her veil. It has been seven years and a month since she and Shamas heard from their youngest child, her beloved son Ujala. She lifts a small framed photograph from the shelf and looks at him, his hair falling on his shoulders, the body beginning to stretch in adolescence, his mouth grinning, and she recalls that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said that Allah had revealed Himself to him in the beautiful guise of a long-haired fourteen-year-old boy. She presses the picture to her breast. He was always recalcitrant — everything she did seemed to disgust him — and he left home as soon as he could. The daughter Mah-Jabin calls every month or so and visits once or twice a year. Charag, the eldest child, the painter, came during summer last year, and hasn’t telephoned or visited since. He is divorced from the white girl — which means that Kaukab hasn’t seen the grandson for two years and seven months.
Her children were all she had, but she herself was only a part of their lives, a very small part, it has become increasingly clear to her over the past few years.
Alone in the house, she looks out in a daze. Snow has begun again.
Kaukab knows her dissatisfaction with England is a slight to Allah because He is the creator and ruler of the entire earth — as the stone carving on Islamabad airport reminds and reassures the heartbroken people who are having to leave Pakistan — but she cannot contain her homesickness and constantly asks for courage to face this lonely ordeal that He has chosen for her in His wisdom.
She often reminds herself that Allah had given Adam his name after the Arabic word adim, which means “the surface of the earth”; he — and therefore the whole of mankind, his descendants — was created from earth taken from different parts of the world. His head was made from the soil of the East, his breast from the soil of the Mecca, his feet from the West.
She lowers herself into a chair, the veil pressed to her eyes, remembering how the fridge door feels lighter these days because it is not as weighted with bottles of milk on the inside as it once was, when the children were here and Jugnu was still taking his meals with the family, as he would continue to do even after he went to live next door. How grateful she was at the beginning for Jugnu’s being here in England! When he was in America, he used to send coin-like postcards and, like a jukebox, she would sing a lengthy song in return, page upon page detailing the family’s life, asking him to come back, telling him that circumstances had improved a little since his first short visit to England. He did return and Kaukab found it hard to contain her pride when the neighbourhood women wanted to know who that flesh-and-blood Taj Mahal was they saw sitting in her garden yesterday. She recruited them in her search for a bride for him but he said he needed to find his feet in England first. She was grateful to him for being here in Dasht-e-Tanhaii because the move to England had deprived her of the glowing warmth that people who are born of each other give out, the heat and light of an extended family. She prepared for him all the food he had been missing during his years away. Bamboo tubes pickled to tartness in linseed oil, slimy edoes that glued the fingers together as you ate them, naan bread shaped like ballet slippers, poppy seeds that were coarser than sand grains but still managed to shift like a dune when the jar was tilted, dry pomegranate seeds to be patted onto potato cakes like stones in a brooch, edible petals of courgette flowers packed inside the buds like amber scarves in green rucksacks, chilli seeds that were volts of electricity, the peppers whose stalks were hooked like umbrella handles, butter to be diced into cubes reluctant to separate, peas attached to the inside of an undone pod in a row like puppies drinking from their mother’s belly: she moved through the aisles of Chanda Food & Convenience Store and chose his favourite foods. Coriander was abundant in the neighbour’s garden and it was just a matter of leaning over the fence with a pair of sewing scissors. If the ingredients were heavy as hailstone in the carrier bags, the final dishes were light as snowflakes, so delicate and fleeting was the balance of spices and the interplay of flavours. She feared her successes were accidental but with the help of Allah she repeated the error-free performances, and the diners proclaimed her to be the eighth, ninth, and tenth wonder of the world.
He was her husband’s brother, her children’s uncle, her own brother-in-law. Daily and deeply, she loved these words and what they meant. It was as though, when the doors of Pakistan closed on her, her hands had forgotten the art of knocking; she had made friends with some women in the area but she barely knew what lay beyond the neighbourhood and didn’t know how to deal with strangers: full of apprehension concerning the white race and uncomfortable with people of another Subcontinental religion or grouping.
She had had no schooling beyond the age of eleven, but when she arrived in England all those years ago, bright with optimism, she had told Shamas she planned to enrol in an English-learning course as soon as their material circumstances improved, and, in anticipation, she filled a whole notebook with the things she overheard, words whose meaning she didn’t know, proverbs jumbled up, sayings mistakenly glued to other sayings: