If Barra felt insulted at being so interrupted, he didn’t give any indication; some of the younger men present outside the mosque had gone to school with him and remembered his short temper of those days. “ ‘Do that again and they’ll be tracing you in chalk!’ was what he would say when provoked as a schoolboy,” Rashid Uddin the left-handed would recall later. “But that was no more extreme than anything the rest of us said. Youth provokes you into picking fights with everything in life.”
That hour, no one was sure whether Chanda’s brother was aware of the fact that, at the barber’s shop last week, Naveed Jamil — the man who had cut him off just now, and more or less referred to him as “shameless” to his face — had said that Barra’s wife was not a virgin on the wedding night, that she was split well before the “night of breakage.” Every gathering in this neighbourhood is full of such broken glass — a person has to pick his way carefully across resentments, allegations, slights to honour and virtue. Naveed Jamil had many years ago wanted to marry Chanda but her parents had turned him down: his lowly origins were said by many to be the chief obstacle — his father had been a hookah mender in Cheechokimalyan.
Barra left the mosque’s vicinity and was seen walking along the road with the cherry trees. Kiran’s house was situated in that direction. He had known for some time that the Sikh woman was Chotta’s secret lover, but he hadn’t broached the subject with him. And since he had never had the occasion to talk to Kiran, he began to feel awkward as he neared the house because the nights she shared with his brother were a secret, and she’d be embarrassed to know that he was aware of them; she could also turn aggressive out of fear of exposure and accuse him of trying to tarnish a decent woman’s name. She was a Sikh, after all, and their women were known for a certain earthy spiritedness. Some people in the Muslim community were aware of the clandestine love-affair, and hoped that Chotta would do the right thing and ask Kiran to convert to Islam and marry her. They — and Chotta himself — saw nothing in common between his secret nights with a woman he was not married to and Chanda setting up home with Jugnu. “I am a sinner,” Chotta had said in the past, regarding his fondness for alcohol, “but I am not an apostate. I know I am sinning. That’s the difference.”
As things turned out, Barra didn’t have to knock on Kiran’s door. A dark-blue wave of peacocks ran towards him from behind with their dot-of-oil-on-water’s-surface tail feathers in disarray. He stopped and turned around. The birds were being scattered by Chotta, who was running towards him, out of breath. He arrived, pale as death, and grabbed him by the upper arm.
“Come with me, over by the lake,” he said. “I think he’s dead.”
When Jugnu knocked on Kaukab’s back door — soon after being awoken by the peacocks, a few hours before he died — she was not in the house, though the light was on.
She had got up, unable to sleep, and gone out — to see the man Chanda was married to. She had run into him the previous week and asked him to do the decent thing and divorce Chanda “so she can marry my brother-in-law.” The man was aloof and said he would see what he could do when Chanda returned to England. She asked him where he lived so she could send Shamas to talk to him.
He worked in a factory and left for work at an early hour and Kaukab, lying awake all night, thought in the dark about Charag and the news about his vasectomy.
The previous week, coming home from the town centre with a few things from Marks and Spencer, Kaukab had seen a woman from the neighbourhood walking towards her, and recognizing her as the woman who had once bristled upon seeing her with a Marks and Spencer carrier bag, telling her that as a Muslim she shouldn’t buy anything from that shop owned by Jews, Kaukab had stopped on the bridge above the river to conceal the bag with the St. Michael logo in her coat. When the woman neared, Kaukab realized it wasn’t the same woman, but she saw that the man standing on the bridge not far away from her was Chanda’s third husband. Naturally, she changed colour when she saw him. She approached him and introduced herself. “You have forced her into that sinful situation,” she told him. She reminded him of how much Allah hated the unjust, and she demanded to know his address. He seemed taken aback by the force of her will and told her where he lived when she asked him.
He had been living in England illegally already for three years when he married Chanda. He had arrived in Britain on a three-month visa as part of a television crew from Lahore, ostensibly to film a drama serial for a television production company, but had then “disappeared.” In reality there was no seriaclass="underline" the actors, the crew, the photographers were all young men and women who had paid thousands of rupees to the people who ran this and other similar immigration scams. He washed dishes in a restaurant but Chanda’s parents had agreed to the match because they were desperate to see their twice-divorced daughter married again and settled. “Life weighs as much as a mountain,” Chanda’s mother had said, “so how will she be able to bear the burden of it on her own?” The father had agreed: “Even a tree dries up if it’s on its own.” They knew they had to trust Allah and not despair because to be the parent of a girl had been a trial since time immemorial. Chanda’s mother would quote the Pakistani poet Hasan Abdi:
The walls carry the scent of humans—
Had others been imprisoned in this dungeon before me?
They both kissed the marriage certificate. They envisioned a happy future at last for their girl but it was like trying to project a film onto a spider’s web, because it was obvious from the start that the man had married her simply to gain British citizenship. Chanda’s brothers and parents were courteous — even respectful — towards him, and he too acknowledged and returned their kindness during the year or so it took for his nationality to be finalized. But after that he changed, saying they should buy him a car, that the shop should be signed over to him, or he would divorce Chanda. Chotta hit him one day over an insult and he disappeared soon afterwards, having emptied the cash register of everything it contained.
Chanda’s brothers had accepted the contempt he had repeatedly shown them during the previous weeks. They had been brought up to believe that a man must respect his brother-in-law because he has taken the burden of your sister off your hands, that he is to be feared lest he take offence at anything you’ve said and abuse or divorce your sister. Language reflected this matter: anyone who made himself too comfortable at another’s expense was told to mind his ways because the world wasn’t “the house of his family-in-law.” And there was deeper humiliation too: the word sala—“brother-in-law”—was a term of abuse all over the Subcontinent: to call someone sala was to say, “I fuck your sister and you can’t do anything about it!” “You can’t stop me from trying my manhood on one of your women!” What could be more humiliating to men who had been brought up to defend their women’s honour above all else? A man’s brother-in-law was a swear-word made flesh, and, frustratingly, he had to accept it.