His arm rises, remembering when it used to be a wing.
8
‘Night’ was the word employed for the long period during which Muhammad did not receive a revelation from Allah.
Naheed lies awake in her mother’s place, looking into the darkness. Five days ago there was a telephone call from Rohan in Peshawar, saying Jeo and Mikal had disappeared towards Afghanistan. Basie and his wife — Jeo’s sister Yasmin — had immediately set off for Peshawar to join Rohan. They are still there, searching, and they ring Heer every evening but don’t have any news.
The clock sounds its alarm to awaken her mother, Tara, for her predawn prayers. The amplified call from the loudspeakers attached to the mosque’s minarets cannot be relied upon, because electricity is sometimes absent. So Tara sets the alarm as a precaution.
But Tara remains asleep now. This happens on occasion, when she has stayed awake late into the night with her seamstress work, her back bent over the sewing machine.
Naheed will not rouse her. So what if she misses a prayer? Allah understands. Sometimes Naheed even gets up during the night and switches off the alarm so it won’t go off. Let her rest.
Naheed sits up, with a need to be in the room where she sleeps with Jeo. There is a series of minute scars where her glass bangles had broken accidentally against his chest on the wedding night. Where the skin on a man’s body is soft, it is softer than any place on a woman’s body. She had discovered this fact by touching Jeo.
Invoking protection from the angel who looks after the fifth hour of the night, she steps out into the darkness. From the balcony she looks down, hearing the splash of water as the owner of the building, Sharif Sharif, performs his ablutions downstairs. Freezing in winter, burning during the summer months, Naheed grew up in this first-floor room that Tara rents from him.
Descending noiselessly she raises her hand to undo the latch of the front door.
‘Where are you going at this hour?’
She doesn’t turn around. ‘I need to go to the other house for something.’
‘At this hour?’ he says behind her. ‘Wait, I’ll come with you.’
‘There is no need, it’s only a few minutes away.’
Arms and shoulders as powerful as a gravedigger’s, Sharif Sharif’s large body is taut with animal life, erect and distinct in its bearing. As Naheed had entered her teenage years his conduct towards her had taken an inappropriate turn. One day last year he came upstairs with a book and asked her if she knew the meaning of the English word he had underlined. When Tara returned from her errand, Naheed told her about the incident. Tara had reacted calmly but it was obvious that she was frightened. After several hours of careful thought Tara had gone to see Rohan, who — and Naheed was unaware of this — had promised some years ago to make Naheed his daughter-in-law. ‘I am too old and weak to look after her now,’ Tara said. ‘She’s eighteen, a grown woman, and she belongs to you. I beg you to do something.’ Her acute trepidation meant that Jeo and Naheed were married within a fortnight, and Naheed moved away to live at Rohan’s house.
*
She is not sure if she is being followed. It could be the sound of her own feet echoing differently in the silence, more audible than they are during the day. She quickens her pace and takes the next turn, and looking back she is sure she can see a figure in the shadows a few yards behind her. Resisting the thought of breaking into a run, with her veil floating off her head, she goes past the shop that djinns are said to visit in the dead of night, to buy incense sticks and perfume. A hope surfaces in her that the neighbourhood watchman might be making his last rounds in the vicinity. The English word Sharif Sharif had underlined was Nude.
The air is cold and blue and the street appears white as salt in the moonwash. As she is unlocking the padlock on Rohan’s gate, a grey saluki appears and stands looking at her from the other side of the street. The animal tilts its head and then perhaps a man appears and stands behind it, and the next time she looks they have both vanished. Blackness nestling within deeper blackness around her, she walks through the garden, the paths forking, returning, disappearing in every direction, the shadows washing over them, and there are movements and sounds overhead but they could be the birds trapped in the snares. The bird pardoner has not returned to the house as he said he would. The earliest birds must have been caught the day Jeo left and they must be long dead by now.
She bolts the bedroom door. She leans closer to the windowpane to look at the garden, the paths that at night lead to the constellations in the pond or the shattered reflection of the moon when there is a moon. Crossing the tiled floor of the veranda the saluki stops and looks in her direction and she stills herself, unable to recall if dogs have night vision. The hound moves on but she is not sure if she isn’t hearing its sporadic growl, isn’t sure she is not hearing intermittent human footsteps just outside the room.
*
The sun has risen and she is carrying a chair through the garden. She places it under the large Persian lilac tree, against the trunk twisted as though struggling with some unseen force. Standing on the chair she looks up into the high leaves made luminous by the early morning light. The brilliant rays fall onto her face as patches of heat. A pair of scissors in her mouth, she reaches up and begins to climb, her soles against the roughness of the bark as her hands grab onto the branches and knotholes, branches thick as human limbs, making her feel she’s being helped up. There is a massed chatter of birds, but there is no way for her to know which of the songs are those of free birds, responding in elation to the coming day, and which those of the trapped, calling out in distress. How many songs are missing from the chorus she is hearing? She doesn’t know.
She climbs higher into the mighty sighing organism. Arriving inside the canopy she looks around and realises the sheer size of it, sees all around her the several dozens of captive birds. Some are upside down, hanging by the claws, by the wings, hanging with nooses around their necks. The brightness of the eyes has become opaque in several, the insects roaming over the bodies, the ants entering the open beaks or disappearing under feathers. But others are struggling. A golden oriole beats its wings like a wind-maddened fire. A few others are motionless but begin to strive when they feel her. She can identify the sound of flies in her ears.
In momentary madness she tries to whistle, thinking it would calm those who are panicking at her presence, making them think she is one of them, but her mother had thought whistling rakish and had discouraged it, and so now she cannot manage it.
Becoming sure of her balance inside the seldom motionless sea of leaves, she leans forward with the scissors and cuts a wire so that the green bee-eater, spinning slowly in the air by its claw, falls onto her other hand. She blows her breath onto it gently and sees how delicate it is, how small. She places it on a branch and slowly moves her hand away. It remains sitting low on its claws for a moment and she gives a small cry when it falls off and lands on the ground thirty feet below, and the jerk she gives makes her head touch a wire and a knot appears and closes around a trailing lock of her hair. A large heron crashes into the canopy as she is freeing herself, the sandy-gold beak coming at her like a lance. She sees the knot closing around its neck to trap it, feels the wind from its ghostly white wings on her face.