The mother and daughter, with a Lakshmi-like abundance of arms and hands, have filled all the plates and, while the kebabs are taken steaming to the table in batches by Mah-Jabin, every other minute a new chappati is ready from Kaukab’s hands. Growing as it does from two whorls at the crown of her head instead of the usual one, Stella’s hair is often unruly, and with a touch of his finger Charag removes the irritation of an escaped strand from across her cheek, an action he — at one time — would perform with his tongue, kissing her face afterwards.
Kaukab asks Mah-Jabin to go join the others when the initial servings are over and the meal enters a more relaxed phase, the food unfolding warmth in the eaters’ bodies.
Shamas unspools the thread from around the grandson’s “starfish leg.”
The spicy cauliflower goes into Stella’s mouth and comes out through her eyes as water.
Tiny beetroot stars — that Kaukab had punched out of the beetroot slices with a cutter — are lined up in a growing necklace where they are being discarded towards the edge of Ujala’s salad.
There are white specks associated with calcium-deficiency on Stella’s fingernails, and Kaukab is privately taken aback when she notices them for the first time as she takes a chappati to the table: she is ashamed whenever these marks appear on her own nails, yet another proof for the white people that the Pakistanis are unhealthy people, disease-riddled, filthy bearers of epidemics like the smallpox they brought with them to England in the 1960s. Ever since Charag and Stella arrived she has been worried that she has forgotten to brush her teeth in time for their arrival, to get rid of any bad odour before the white girl came.
Stella tells them all about the fair she had taken the child to not long ago. Eating from cellophane bags stuffed like pillows with candyfloss, they went into the tent where a Sleeping Beauty lay on a satin-draped bier. The body was a wax statue and, as proof that the princess was dead to the world, the impresario pierced it through the gown with a long pearl-headed hat pin. To approach the sleeping body was to become a child that had awakened from a nightmare and gone into the parents’ room for comfort, or, Stella thought, a thief that had broken into a house with its occupant asleep unawares.
Kaukab says the princess should have had a few scented geraniums scattered about the palace corridors so that the intruders brushing against them would wake her up.
Surrounded by hair as long as a wild horse’s mane, the face on the bier belonged to the woman who was hiding underneath the wax body— and they saw her drunk when the fair closed, staggering about the cobbled square, weeping with her wig in her hand and shouting abuse at passersby.
Halfway through the meal, Charag reminds Stella that there is a gift for Kaukab and Shamas in their car, and when Stella gets up to go to the car, Kaukab asks her to remain seated: “It’s too cold outside — cold as outer space. Charag should go.” Stella is wearing a skirt, her legs visible below the knees, and Kaukab doesn’t want anyone in the neighbourhood to see the exposed skin and comment on it: when they were still married, she had asked Charag to tell Stella to not dress in that immodest garment — at least during her visits to this neighbourhood— but nothing happened. She hadn’t expected Stella to begin wearing the shalwar-kameez and the head veil (though nothing would have pleased her more; many white women do abandon their old way of dressing upon marrying Muslim men) but she didn’t wish to see female flesh on display.
Charag gets up and goes out to the car, returning with a small brown-paper-wrapped square fastened with a cord. “It’s a surprise, Mother. Open it.”
Kaukab unknots the thread, remembering the first time she had made a knot in something in Stella’s presence: she had suddenly gone numb, wondering if there was a Western way of tying a knot — more sophisticated, better. Perhaps the way she tied knots was an ignorant way of tying a knot?
“I bought all the photographs and negatives from a photographer in town the last time I was here. They are from the ’50s, ’60s and the early ’70s, of Pakistani and Indian immigrants,” Charag says. “I met this woman at the lake who planted the idea in my head that perhaps I should try to incorporate into my art the lives of the people I grew up amongst— examine and explore them.”
“And going through a box, he found this,” Stella smiles. “Extraordinary.”
It is a photograph of the family — Charag and Mah-Jabin, as children, sitting cross-legged on the ornate rug on the studio floor; Shamas standing and looking impossibly young; Kaukab, seated on a reproduction chair, pregnant with Ujala, the stomach swelled out like a bulb, like the middle of a vase. Kaukab smiles as she holds up the framed picture for everyone to see.
“I remember making this shirt for you, Charag.” Kaukab smiles. “You complained the collar was too stiff. The fabric was crisp as a new bank-note.”
“It was completely by chance that I went in, to rummage around but then the photographer said he would be going out of business later in the year. Look at Mah-Jabin’s two plaits! How pregnant were you then, Mother?”
“Don’t be vulgar,” Kaukab frowns. “Later Mah-Jabin would demand I make only one plait, saying, ‘On the way to school the two brothers walk either side of me and each flicks one of them whenever he feels like it.’ With one plait she managed to cut the difficulty in half.”
Shamas can scarcely believe what has occurred. When the photograph is passed to him he, instead of looking at it, asks Charag, “Where are the others? Are they in a safe place?”
Kaukab’s bright glance appeals to Stella against the impossibility of men. “Who cares about the others? Look at the one in your hand. ”
“No, no, they are an important document,” Charag says. “They are safe, Father. I might want to do a series of paintings based on them.”
“I wanted the town to buy them, but as long as the people in them are celebrated somehow and not allowed to be forgotten it doesn’t matter who has them.” He places his hand on Charag’s shoulder. So the pictures have been saved!
Charag wonders whether his father has so far been indifferent to his paintings because he thinks that his work does not contribute anything to society. Shamas had never encouraged him to become a painter, despite seeing examples of his talent around the house since childhood, despite the fact that his India-ink drawing regularly accompanied Jugnu’s Nature Notes in The Afternoon; and Shamas had disapproved when he did become a painter. Had Shamas — who had known politically committed artists in Pakistan — thought that the artists in England were engaged in a comparatively trivial activity?
Shamas looks at Charag, a bird in his chest pipping proudly: My son. . My son. . He hasn’t known how to read Charag’s paintings in the past— they seem too personal to the boy to hold any interest for Shamas — but now, now that he has mentioned that he might do something with the photographs of immigrants, Shamas knows he is maturing as an artist, becoming aware of his responsibilities as an artist.