One night before she married, Mikal had broken into her and Tara’s room. She was terrified to find him standing beside her bed in the dead of night, her mother only a few feet away. She had taken his hand and led him out to the roof. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he had told her.
‘Recite a poem. That helps. One that rhymes.’
‘I don’t know any poems.’
‘You sing all the time.’
‘They are songs not poems.’
‘They are the same thing.’
The next day she had bought him a book of poems by Wamaq Saleem from Urdu Bazaar, verses in which the dove called out in adoration to its lover the cypress tree. It was as though the poet knew nothing of the aeons of separateness that lay between these two things, and between the bulbul and the rose, and between the bee and the lotus blossom, and so the dove called and called, the rose continued to open for the bulbul, and the bee circled and circled and circled the lotuses.
‘Will they allow you to receive letters in the prison?’ she asks him now, when he comes away from the bag containing the dollars.
‘What are you talking about? I promise you I will come back.’
‘What about visitors?’ She is sitting up in bed. ‘Will the Americans allow you to have visitors?’
He encloses her in his arms. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘I don’t even know how much a plane ticket to the United States is. It must be thousands of rupees. I’ll never be able to visit you.’
What woke them was the sound of the rain stopping, the sudden calm in the middle of the night. A silence packed with distances.
‘It’ll be just a quick journey,’ he says. ‘Two days there, two days back. Four days — five maximum.’ On a map he has drawn a line from Heer to Megiddo. Taking small buses, avoiding all major stations. A long jagged stroke of ink resembling the constellation of Hydra. And now they speak quietly into each other’s skin. It is in the watches of the night that impressions are strongest and words most eloquent: she thinks of these words from the Koran. His fingers are on the chain around her neck that has little leaves all along its length, a string of foliage. ‘Did you play with your mother’s jewellery when you were a child?’ she asks.
‘Yes. I used to wear it as well.’
She takes it off and puts it around his neck just as the call to the predawn prayers sounds and they remain in each other’s arms, sinning in a time of holiness, and when he gets out of bed she feels for the clasp of the chain, to take it off. ‘Let me wear it,’ he says.
‘But it’s a woman’s.’
‘I don’t care.’ And then he adds, ‘Isn’t the soul a woman?’ Outside the sun would begin to rise in the bloody reefs of the clouds within the hour and the birds are already looking for light to fly into.
*
Tara is mending a broken umbrella. ‘You are leaving?’
‘For a few days.’
She continues to hold his eye.
‘A friend needs help.’
She nods.
‘I just wanted to talk to you about Naheed,’ he says. ‘None of us wants her to marry Sharif Sharif, but you mentioned this other man you have found. There is no need for him. Naheed wants to get qualifications and become a teacher —’
‘I know what my daughter needs and wants. She can get qualifications after she is married.’
‘Yes, she can.’ He looks at his hands. ‘I don’t know what I want to say. I still can’t offer her the kind of life you’d want for her. I could be caught any time and taken away, leaving her on her own once again.’
She puts the umbrella aside. ‘I stood in your way once, I won’t this time. I suppose when it comes down to it it’s a man’s word that counts. That’s all the security a woman needs. Who cares if the buttons on his shirt don’t match the fabric.’
‘I will come back in five days.’
‘Then I will be happy to call you my son-in-law.’
‘I am sorry I didn’t think of the consequences for you when I suggested to Naheed that we run away before her wedding to Jeo.’
‘It would have caused terrible difficulties for me, yes.’
‘I am sorry I didn’t think of that.’
‘Would you do it again?’
‘Wanting to do it is not what I am apologising for here.’
She appraises him openly. ‘That’s a good reply. Now I am going to be equally honest with you. You let down my daughter once, by not turning up when you said you would. I won’t allow you to disappoint her again. Is that clear?’
‘Yes. But didn’t you say that her running away would have been bad for you?’
‘That’s a matter between me and her, nothing to do with you. As far as you or anyone else is concerned, I am on her side. Don’t you ever disappoint her again.’
‘I am sorry I did it once.’
‘That’s another good thing to say to me. And you might want to rethink some of the guilt you’ve been carrying around about shooting those Americans.’
‘I’ll try. The men I killed had mothers, fathers, probably wives and children. I killed them and must pay for the crime.’
‘But there’s no need to be so hard on yourself, at least until perfect order reigns in the world. Life is difficult at times and they goaded you and you were confused. Part of the blame lies with them. Don’t hold yourself to too exacting a standard.’
‘That can be an excuse to not hold yourself to any standard at all.’
‘That too is true.’
She tells him to go with Allah and he shoulders the bag and begins to climb down.
*
From the bus station he telephones Naheed just to hear her voice and they talk about what they have planned and envisaged for themselves after his return. He whispers a few obscene things to her and she laughs quietly, and then he stands listening to her breath until the money runs out, the sun rising above Heer and the sky changing colour like someone switching from one language to another, and as in a fairy tale he knows that he’ll die if he takes off her chain from around his neck. When he hangs up it is with the bone-deep fear that beauty and loss might be inseparable, but then he thinks of a line from one of Wamaq Saleem’s poems. Love is not consolation, it is light.
III. EQUAL SONS
… how he fell
From Heaven, they fabl’d, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’re the chrystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summer’s day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,
On Lemnos th’ Ægean Ile.
36
As the bus nears Megiddo, the conductor and driver talk about a possible paramilitary cordon around the town. Mikal overhears the news that soldiers have been flagging down buses to check the passengers’ papers. Four miles from the outskirts he asks the conductor to let him out. He leaps off into the dust, the afternoon’s heat and intense light coming at him from the metal body of the bus and, as he begins to walk, from all points of the landscape, making him lose his sense of focus several times during the hour and a half it takes him to get to the outer limits of Megiddo. A wind shunting in from the open wild desert to the west. He stops when the yellow house comes into view and he stands looking at it, the material of the shoulder bag going soft in the heat. When he sets off again he has changed direction. Instead of approaching the house by the front door he will go along the riverbank, towards the kitchen at the back. Hidden in the grove of beautiful trees at the water’s edge, he watches the entrance to the kitchen. There is no movement and no sound. There is the imprint of a boot in the expanse of dust between the trees and the kitchen door. Lying on his stomach he listens with his ear pressed to the earth for several minutes. The sound of loose water. He waits the three hours until the sun drops towards the west and the light becomes a rich amber, the birds beginning to return noisily to the trees around him, screaming and ascending as they quarrel about an overloved branch. No one has gone in or come out of the house and at last he moves forward, going past the footprint. He is not sure if he recognises the pattern from his time in American custody.