The inspector smiled more openly. ‘The men who went to your house this morning to tell you about the death say there was a woman there with you.’
Through the small window of his room the old man saw Kalsum and Suraya open and enter the cemetery gate. He stopped kneading his limp biceps and went to that corner of the room where, in the angle between two walls, there was a heap of soil covered with a tough canvas sheet. With slow shovelfuls he filled a large basket and, heaving it up to his left shoulder, followed the two women down the narrow path of cracked slabs.
Kalsum squatted by her son’s grave; in lowering herself she drew the tails of her loose tunic between the back of her thighs and her calves, to prevent the hemline from getting muddied. One by one she picked up the rotting leaves that had accumulated around the grave since her last visit. Suraya walked around and began to clear the other side of the mound. The drizzle had ceased, and on the trunks and boughs of the large trees growing amongst the graves, mottled patterns left by last year’s honey-fungus showed vivid, lit by the raking afternoon light. A few of the graves had planted at their heads the colours — small square or triangular flags — of the fakirs and sufis that the dead person had followed in life. The wet rags hung stiffly, clinging to the poles, the surface-tension of water holding the folds firmly in place.
‘You should have waited for a dry day,’ the old man said to Kalsum. With a heavy sigh he brought down the basket of soil and remained bent at the waist — hands gripping the rim of the basket — for a few moments, trying to catch his breath.
Kalsum did not look up; she simply said, ‘I come on the last Wednesday of every month, baba. Have you forgotten?’ Suraya had cleared her side of the grave and was standing up, cleaning her fingers with a handkerchief. The keeper’s milky eyes examined her. She wore a large coat tightly fastened at the waist. The rigid fabric and exaggerated collar and cuffs gave it the appearance of a garment intended for a marionette, a doll.
‘This is my sister, baba,’ Kalsum said, ‘Burkat’s wife. Do you remember Burkat, baba?’
‘Burkat,’ the old man mumbled to himself, very quietly, as though turning in his mouth a piece of food never before tasted, waiting for it to release a flavour that the tongue might recognise. ‘Little Kazo Nur’s brother?’
Suraya nodded.
‘Well, well,’ he brightened. ‘We are practically family then.’ He laughed quietly to himself, pleased. The dark flesh on his cheeks had slackened with age and sunk into deep hollows on either side of the nose. ‘But didn’t he go to live in England?’
‘Canada,’ Kalsum said. ‘They went to England first, but then they moved to Canada.’
‘Canada,’ he said lifting his head towards Suraya. ‘Is that far from England?’ And, narrowing his eyes to think, he added, ‘Here to Karachi?’
‘Much farther.’
Kalsum was spreading the soil evenly over the grave. The soil caught beneath her fingernails appeared green. Suraya too sat down once more and began to take handfuls from the basket. The old man pulled up a grass stem and, snapping it in two, began to pick his teeth. ‘When did you come back?’ he asked. ‘From Canada.’
‘Ten days.’ Suraya packed the spongy soil tightly, pressing down with the palms of both her hands. The old man nodded and spat loudly over his shoulder. Sensing that he was about to speak again Kalsum chided gently, ‘Baba, have you eaten crows? You are talking too much.’
At the other end of the graveyard a group of women emerged from the small enclosure, sheltered by a corrugated-iron roof, where funeral prayers were said. The iron rails of the enclosure were wrapped in trumpet bindweed. The keeper followed the sisters’ glances and said, ‘They are servants from Judge Anwar’s house. The widow sent them to clean the floor of the jinaza-gah. I told them it is clean, it is swept every other day, but they wouldn’t listen.’
A whole layer of soil was added to the mound and doused with the watering-can that the keeper fetched — spilling and splashing to his right and left — from the tap outside his room. Kalsum stood up. ‘He would have been twenty-one this December.’ She looked around and took in all the other graves.
The old man nodded slowly and looking at Suraya said, ‘He was born three months before my boy.’
‘He was a good son,’ Kalsum said; she rubbed the palms of her hands hard against each other and the damp soil came off in thin, slender sickles and the skin beneath showed white.
‘Mine would ruin me,’ the keeper turned towards Kalsum and said. ‘He’s been nothing but trouble since he grew up. When he was a boy, people sent him on errands and gave him money afterwards. I would protest. Send him to do work, by all means, I said, it’s good for a child to be obedient. But don’t give him any money. A child shouldn’t have money, he’ll develop bad habits.’
Kalsum agreed and touched the old man’s forearm. ‘May God guide them, baba.’
‘Now the shopkeepers are his friends. He gets them to write fake receipts and keeps the difference,’ the keeper went on. ‘He thinks I don’t know, but I know.’
‘He sent his mother to her grave,’ Kalsum turned to her sister and said quietly; and to the keeper: ‘Where is he now?’
‘I’ve sent him to the fertiliser factory to buy a sack of lime. There wasn’t going to be enough for the judge’s grave.’ As he spoke, the old man’s adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He placed the empty watering-can inside the basket and picked up the basket. ‘Still,’ he smiled, ‘I could be rich soon. Perhaps I’ll get a letter saying that nineteen years ago I had won a lottery.’
Suraya and Kalsum were walking down the path. Kalsum turned around. ‘What are you talking about, baba?’
The keeper approached; he looked at her incredulously. ‘You haven’t heard about the letters?’
Kalsum shook her head. ‘What letters?’ Suraya had walked down to the tip of the path and, folding back the sleeves of her coat, was washing her hands at the tap.
‘They’ve just found three sacks of letters that went missing after a train crash nineteen years ago,’ the old man explained. ‘The ones belonging to the two neighbouring towns have been delivered. It’s our turn soon.’
Maulana Hafeez did not go home directly after the burial. First, aware that there would be a shortage of rosaries for the mourners, he instructed some of the younger men at the cemetery to carry the sacks of date pits, collected and stored for just such occasions, from the mosque to the judge’s house. Then he walked to the lower part of the town. He went down the narrow, twisting alleyways, saying his rosary — the beads rising slowly towards his fingers and dropping one by one over the other side. It was the hottest hour of the day; the houses were shut and, apart from some schoolboys playing truant, the streets were deserted. Maulana Hafeez knocked on the door of a small adobe house. He informed the woman who came to the door, her clothes in disarray and her hair dishevelled — she had been taking her siesta — that her mother’s grave was showing signs of neglect, it needed a new layer of soil. She stood listening with bowed head, trying to stifle her yawns. She asked the cleric into the house but he refused the invitation courteously.
When he arrived back at the mosque he was covered in sweat. The door to his wife’s room was closed and on the veranda all the blinds had been lowered, enclosing the small space, and the rooms it gave on to, in a cool, tranquil stillness. Waiting for him in his bedroom was the man who made his living by selling spectacles and eye medicine at street corners. He was drinking bright-red cordial from an aluminium tumbler; and as Maulana Hafeez entered, he quickly put out the cigarette he had been drawing on so pleasurably. He put the cigarette in his pocket and stood up to greet the cleric.