‘Well, well, Mr Manucci,’ Fatty Chacha says. ‘Looking very smart this evening.’
Manucci’s face breaks into an enormous smile.
‘Go clean my bathroom,’ I tell him. ‘And scrub behind the toilet. It’s getting filthy.’
I show Fatty Chacha out myself.
I think it’s safe to say Mumtaz is already at least a tenth mine. At least. I saw her sixteen hours this week. I know, because I timed it. And even though a tenth of someone is a lot to have, she has more than a tenth of me. I’m always dreaming of her, or thinking of her, or fantasizing about her, or waiting for her to come or to call. Even when I’m with her I miss her.
And she cares about me.
‘I tried heroin,’ I say, my lips touching the soft skin where her jaw meets her neck.
‘Was it good?’
‘Unbelievable.’
‘That’s bad. Don’t do it again.’
I’ve already decided not to, but I say, ‘Why not?’
‘Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.’
‘Like you?’
‘Say you won’t do it again.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You won’t what?’
‘I won’t do it again.’
Mumtaz has six moles. Two are black: behind her ear and on her hip, in the trough of the wave that crests at her pelvis. Three are the color of rust: knuckle, corner of jaw, behind knee. And one is red, fiery, at the base of her spine, where a tail might grow. I touch them and know them because I watch her like a man in a field stares up at the stars, and I love her constellation because it contains her story and our story, and I wonder which mole is the beginning and which is the end.
I have no moles. Not even one. I didn’t know that, but Mumtaz has looked and looked, and now she’s given up.
Manucci adores her. He brings us tea without us asking for it and leaves it outside my bedroom when the door is shut. Mumtaz likes chatting with him. She says someday she wants to write an article on young pickpockets in the old city, and Manucci has promised to take her on a guided tour of his former haunts. Once, when I haven’t seen Mumtaz for a couple of days and she wastes half an hour talking to Manucci before she comes upstairs to wake me, I get upset and tell her I don’t understand why she would rather spend her time with him than with me. She says it’s cute that I’m jealous. And I become angry, asking how she could even suggest I’m jealous of my own servant. She says she was only joking, and then I feel completely embarrassed, and when we make love I keep looking at her to see if she’s laughing at me.
Then one night Mumtaz asks me if I’ve done heroin again, even though I haven’t, and it turns out Manucci has told her I spend all my time sitting on the sofa, rolling joints and smoking. I decide enough is enough. I go to the servant quarters with a leather belt and tell him I’ll thrash him if he talks about me behind my back. He pulls his bedsheet up around his eyes and stares at me. But he doesn’t do it again.
The next day I see Mumtaz cry. Not just shed tears but cry, with furious gasps and shouts of pain. Her voice is always throaty, almost hoarse, but when she cries she chokes off her words, and it hurts me to watch.
When she stops trembling and sobbing and can speak, I ask her why.
‘I’m a bad mother,’ she tells me.
‘You’re not.’ I stroke her hair.
‘You don’t know,’ she says, frighteningly serious, her eyes wide and sharp. ‘You don’t know.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Muazzam told me I don’t love him.’
‘Why?’
‘He wanted me to read him a story and I came here instead.’
‘Read him a story when you go back.’
‘I don’t want to. That’s the problem. I don’t want to.’
I don’t understand Mumtaz’s relationship with her son. Sometimes she does so much for him, too much, everything he asks, from the time he wakes until the time he goes to bed. But she never seems to do it because she wants to, only because it upsets her when he gets angry with her. And sometimes she won’t do anything for him, leaving him at home with his nanny all day.
We think Ozi still doesn’t know about us. Mumtaz rarely stays with me for more than a couple of hours at a time, unless he’s in Switzerland or the Caymans. I’m surprised he doesn’t smell me on her. Maybe he doesn’t care, but I doubt it. Part of me wants him to know. Part of me is afraid. When we were small Ozi was a bully, but then he was just a boy, and if you were bigger than him he went away. Now he’s not a boy. He’s a man and his father’s son, and what they want done can be done and done quietly.
Maybe I should ask Murad Badshah if I can borrow his revolver.
When I’m not with Mumtaz, I usually have nothing to do. When I’m not with Mumtaz and I do have something to do, I’m generally selling hash. It isn’t much money. And even if it does buy me petrol and food, I don’t like doing it. I don’t like the way I think I look to other people when I’m doing it, and I don’t like the way they treat me.
One day I catch Manucci taking a hundred-rupee note, washed out and red, from my wallet.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask him, coming into the living room.
He drops my wallet and the note onto my jeans and starts to back away. ‘It was to buy groceries for the house, saab,’ he says.
I take hold of him by the flesh of his upper arm and squeeze until he cries out. He’s never been so eager to do the grocery shopping before that he couldn’t wait until I woke up.
‘You weren’t stealing from me, were you?’
‘No, saab.’
‘If you ever steal from me, I’ll make you wish my mother never took you off the street.’
‘Please, saab.’
I let go and he runs into the kitchen. I know I haven’t paid him in a long time. But he isn’t going hungry: he eats food from my kitchen and sleeps under my roof. Sometimes servants only want their pay so they can leave, and if that’s his plan I won’t make it easy for him. Not that he has anywhere else to go.
One day I’m at Main Market, picking up a paan and a pack of smokes from Salim, when I see Pickles get out of his Land Cruiser and walk over to a Pajero. He embraces someone I haven’t met in a while, and I go to say hello with a big grin.
I tap Arif on the back. ‘Oh-ho,’ he exclaims, hugging me with enthusiasm. ‘This is turning into a reunion.’
I like Arif. A bit slow, he was the butt of our section’s jokes in senior school. Luckily for him, his family owns half of Sialkot.
Pickles and I shake hands. ‘Listen, boys,’ he says. ‘I’m having a little get-together for some of our batchmates at the Punjab Club this evening. You must come.’
The ‘must’ may be meant more for Arif than for me, but I smile anyway and say, ‘I’d be delighted.’ It’s not every day I’m invited to the Punjab Club, after all.
‘Batchmates only,’ Pickles says. ‘So no wives or fiancées. And jacket and tie, Daru.’
That night, as I’m getting ready, Manucci reminds me he can’t iron my shirt without electricity. ‘Boil some water and put it in the iron,’ I say. ‘Do the best you can.’
I pull into the Punjab Club, curving around the tennis courts, and park in front of the bakery. The car next to mine is a Suzuki Khyber, which makes me feel good, because most of the spaces are filled by huge monsters.
A uniformed bearer greets me as I enter and directs me out the back to the swimming pool area, where I see thirty or so very familiar faces, rounder, of course, their flesh hanging more loosely from their bones, but still familiar.