Since his right hand was greasy from the food Mansoor offered Maulana Hafeez his right forearm. His wife meanwhile had switched off the television and voltage stabiliser, and was quietly asking the children to leave. They left in silence but from the street their excited voices reached the room.
The cleric insisted Mansoor continue with his meal. Mansoor repeated his half-hearted greeting and sat down.
Staring into his lap where the tips of his fingers were engaged with the beads of the rosary that Mujeeb Ali had brought back for him from Mecca, without further preamble Maulana Hafeez revealed the real reason for the visit.
‘On the outskirts of every town in this province there is a cinema which shows immoral, indecent and sinful pictures.’ Between each adjective Maulana Hafeez paused for a few seconds. ‘However, it is our good fortune that the God-fearing citizens of this town, in collaboration with the diligent people who have influence over such matters, have made sure that no such establishment be permitted to take root here.’
For over a fortnight Mansoor had been expecting a visit from Maulana Hafeez. He chewed quietly on a sliver of raw onion.
‘It would seem that all their good work was pointless,’ Maulana Hafeez said. ‘Because we can now, if we so wish, turn our homes into little cinemas.’
Mansoor’s wife came in, stirring sugar into a glass of lemon water, and with an anxious glance at her husband presented the drink to the cleric. He accepted gratefully and drank — keeping to the Strictures — in a succession of three short sips.
Mansoor said, ‘Forgive me, Maulana-ji, but a television programme is not the same as a cinema film.’
‘That is irrelevant.’ Maulana Hafeez closed his eyes. ‘If something is forbidden, it is forbidden. You only need a pinch of poison.’
Mansoor explained how the transmission began and ended each day with a recitation from the Qur’an, and how since the new religious measures by the regime the programmes broke off at prayer time. These intermissions were long enough to allow men to make their way to the nearest mosque, discouraging them from praying at home like women.
But the maulana was shaking his head. ‘In my opinion,’ he said to his lap, ‘this will lead to other, more serious, neglect of the rules laid down by Hazrat Muhammad sallula-hé-valla-hé-vasalum.’
On hearing the Prophet’s name, the woman kissed the tips of her fingers and lightly touched them to her eyes. ‘I don’t understand what you mean, Maulana-ji,’ she said irritably: the stole which she had been using before Maulana Hafeez’s arrival to numb her headache was now back in place, covering her head and the upper part of her body, and the headache had resurfaced.
Maulana Hafeez looked up. The woman was standing by a shelf at the other side of the room. He reached into his pocket — the movement released the smell of attar from the folds of his shirt — and pulled out his glasses. On the shelf there were many framed samplers with verses from the Qur’an, and in a soda bottle filled with water a shoot of vine had thrown long hairy roots which looked like rats’ tails. The shelf was draped in white cloth embroidered with colourful bouquets and fragments from the poems of Wamaq Saleem. There was a photograph of a very young man, not much more than a boy, standing against the backdrop of clear blue sky.
‘Your guard has already been lowered,’ Maulana Hafeez said. ‘There was a time when a death in the area meant no one celebrated Eid that year. Now I see that with the dead man’s shroud not yet soiled in the grave you were entertaining yourselves.’ And bowed like a crescent on the edge of the bed, he repeated quietly: ‘Your guard has already been lowered, my dhi.’
‘But we were doing it privately, Maulana-ji,’ the woman said, ignoring the angry glances from her husband. Her face was pink with powder but the skin on her neck showed dark brown.
‘That is precisely where the danger lies,’ Maulana Hafeez said, visibly disappointed, ‘in this talk of privacy. It causes people to become selfish, and will lead to the founding of a morally base society.’
Mansoor raised his hand and nodded. ‘I realise that I was wrong to switch it on so soon after the death, but, with respect, Maulana-ji, you seem to be suggesting that mine is the only television in the town.’
The woman said: ‘Far worse things go on behind the walls of the bigger houses, Maulana-ji. The very night they kill the judge for being corrupt the town finds a woman in the deputy commissioner’s house.’
Mansoor looked sharply at his wife.
But Maulana Hafeez placed a hand on his arm. Then he looked at the woman and said, ‘You’d better go into the other room, my dhi.’
She left in silence.
Maulana Hafeez took a succession of deep breaths but failed to locate the smell of roses. ‘The deeds of others are not our concern. We must dedicate our lives to the pursuit of moral and religious excellence.’ The tips of his fingers, smudged with newspaper ink, slid a bead along his rosary every few seconds.
The call for prayers from the other mosque — the denomination called its followers twenty minutes before Maulana Hafeez — alerted him to the time. He noticed that he had drained his glass. ‘The days are getting shorter. It’ll be time for Magrib soon,’ he said, and stood up with considerable effort. During the rains his muscles felt as though they had developed knots along their lengths.
Dusk had fallen. Bats were out and fluttered above the courtyard. ‘I sincerely hope you will think about what I’ve been saying,’ Maulana Hafeez said to Mansoor who had accompanied him to the door. ‘My privilege is simply to warn people of the dangers of straying on to the wrong path, I don’t have the authority or the means of preventing them from doing so.’
An unfamiliar room becomes larger once you get used to it. Nusrat’s husband died in this room, peacefully in his sleep — a filament losing its glow over a period of time. The trees in the outside garden reach up to pluck a few notes from the balcony railing.
A butterfly alights and becomes one with its shadow, like when you make the tips of your forefinger and thumb touch each other. Nusrat sings:
Eggs and their shells.
Once all the butterflies were white,
One day, too tired to fly,
They fell asleep on a flowerbed
And the dew stained their wings
With the colours of the petals.
Winter and summer she wears an old sleeveless jumper, the blue of tattoos. ‘My Afghanistani ayah taught me that poem,’ she tells us. Her father was personal physician to the emperor of Afghanistan, long long ago. ‘He was a doctor,’ she makes clear; and proudly: ‘Imagine, an FRCS in those days!’ The pomegranate in the courtyard is from Kundahar. The sapling was smuggled into the country through the Khyber Pass. ‘Others were bringing in pearls and’ — a quick glance to either side, offering us both her profiles — ‘alcohol. But I only brought in a plant.’ She laughs at the moulded ceiling. A pomegranate blossom is leathery, resembles a pitcher, and is orange in colour, the intense orange of the back of mirrors. She produces a photograph of her mother. The woman’s hairline is hidden beneath a row-of-coins headdress; she sits on a round stone by the fanfare of a trumpet vine. Mother and daughter look alike — their profiles would fit into each other as snugly as two teaspoons. Nusrat’s brother died of wasp bites. Ina lila hé va ina ilia é rajeon. He collapsed into a flowerbed with his mouth open. When they lifted him up they saw that a tiny daisy had been enclosed, unharmed, inside the open mouth. ‘Once a month we’d both be taken to the cinema,’ she remembers, bringing to life with words the crowded cinema theatre where smoke from the cigarettes rose to catch, like latecomers, bits of the projection on itself. And they had owned a gramophone with an elbowed limb to carry the needle. Nusrat’s marriage forced her to change countries. She bade farewell to the sound of the walnut sellers, méva vendors and bearfights degenerating into bloody brawls, and to the rattle of weapons being tested by potential customers in the gunshop behind the mansion; and she crossed the border to the west.