In the City by the Sea Read online

  ‘Do you ever think about it?’

  Zehra leaned back among the fallen almond-shaped berries of the karonda trees and ran her fingers through her long, dark hair – her most precious inheritance from her mother, Uncle Latif always said.

  ‘Stupid question,’ Hasan muttered. ‘Sorry.’

  The silence between them lengthened, stretched taut. Like a giant mass of bubble-gum, Hasan thought, and it was impossible to know how to rip through it without the gum splattering on both their faces. Zehra turned her face away, picked up a karonda and bit into its purple over-ripeness.

  ‘Zehra?’

  Zehra turned around and bared teeth dripping with thick red liquid. ‘Blood!’ she howled, in an attempt to approximate the voice of the Queen of Drama who had eaten her enemy’s liver on television the night before, in the stunning climax of a serial that was almost cancelled because the villain looked remarkably like the President (the villain shaved his presidential moustache and the show was allowed to go on, largely because the President was as big a fan of it as anyone). Ogle leapt up, barking wildly, and spun around in the air. ‘Blood!’ Zehra shrieked again, but by now the shriek had become one of laughter at Hasan and Ogle entangled in the grass. Hasan saw her raise a bursting karonda above his face, felt the juice trickling down his cheek, and yelled as Ogle’s tongue darted forward.

  ‘Zehra!’ The Widow called out from the balcony upstairs. ‘I’m going to sleep. If anyone calls, say I’m falling in love.’

  ‘Okay, Wid.’

  ‘How do you think she would feel if we started calling her “Doe” instead?’ Hasan said, wiping Ogle’s saliva off his face.

  ‘She isn’t very doe-like,’ Zehra laughed. ‘But I don’t suppose she would mind. Do you ever mind, or even remember, what people in your dreams call you?’

  Hasan looked up at the balcony. The spot where the Widow had stood still shimmered with the bright greens and yellows of her sari, and the flames of her hennaed hair. A far cry from the day she entered Zehra’s house, Hasan recalled, just over three years ago.

  It had been winter then, or rather, the City’s version of winter, and Hasan stood in Zehra’s driveway breathing out great puffs of air. He was so caught up with the two-weeks-of-the-year joy of watching his breath freeze that he didn’t hear the taxi draw up outside or notice a woman pushing the side gate open. His breath wisped away and in its place, as though conjured up from the trailing clouds of his own exhalation, stood the Widow.

  Her hair was smoke, grey and wafting. Or, at least, it was when Hasan remembered the moment, though Zehra said white and pulled back in a bun. But they both agreed that she was wearing such drab clothes that the chameleon that skittered past on the wall behind her did not need to change its colour to meld in with her apparel. And they both remembered the pillow in her hand.

  Zehra had stepped forward. ‘Are you the wife of . . .’

  ‘No, the Widow.’

  Uncle Latif yelled down from the balcony, ‘Bhabi, don’t leave or grieve, I’ll be right down.’

  ‘Bhabi?’ Hasan said to Zehra. ‘She’s Uncle Latif’s brother’s wife?’

  ‘Widow,’ the woman replied. ‘I am the Widow.’

  ‘Not brother’s wife,’ Zehra hissed back at Hasan, ‘Cousin’s wife.’

  The woman raised an eyebrow. ‘Sorry,’ Zehra said. ‘She’s the Widow.’

  ‘Bhabi, bhabi, bhabi,’ Uncle Latif called out, wagging his head with joy as he skipped down the front steps. As ever, his belly seemed to be guiding and propelling the rest of his body along while the breeze tried to carry his shoulder-length, thinning hair in the opposite direction. ‘You should have told us when your flight was zooming in, and we would have been standing on the tarmac with garlands to receive you.’

  ‘I know,’ the Widow said.

  Uncle Latif chuckled and handed her a hibiscus flower. ‘Well, this will do. Where are your things?’

  The Widow held up her feather pillow. ‘This is all they let me take.’

  ‘Good, good, good,’ Uncle Latif beamed. ‘Perfect excuse to shop till you drop.’

  ‘I don’t like shopping.’

  ‘Ah, but I love it, so you must indulge me. We will O-M-I-T the dropping part, though. But tea first. The liquid, not the letter of the alphabet. Hasan go and tell your parents to come over and meet their new neighbour.’

  ‘Neighbour?’ Hasan said, following Zehra over the wall between their two houses.

  ‘Her husband died a few days ago. All his brothers came and took everything that belonged to him, even the house – they said it was the law. Aba heard about it, and told her she could come and live here. He didn’t say so, but I know he thinks I need a female relative around. I don’t really know her. She hasn’t been to the City since my mother died. They were very close.’ Zehra bounded up the step to Hasan’s front door and peered at the surrounding creeper-covered brick wall. Sometimes Hasan wondered if Zehra would ever recover from having a lizard leap on to her hand last year as she turned the door-handle.

  ‘She seems strange,’ Hasan said, pushing past Zehra and opening the door.

  ‘I like her. She reminds me of my mother. What’s so strange about her?’

  ‘The feather pillow.’

  Zehra shrugged then, but an hour past bedtime she ran around to Hasan’s garden and knocked on his window. ‘You may have been right. Maybe the feather pillow does prove she’s strange.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Her husband had just bought the pillow when his heart stopped in the doorway of the pillow store. It was the only thing of his that her husband’s brothers let her take when they told her to leave the house.’

  ‘Oh,’ Hasan said. ‘That’s not so strange. It would be strange if she was carrying it around just like that, no slime or season.’

  The next morning the Widow announced that she had dreamed of her husband while she slept, and then again the next morning and the next and the next. Each of those mornings she awoke to find a feather from her pillow curled around her wedding ring. The fifth night a soreness in her neck prompted her to sleep pillowless, and she did not dream at all. Hasan was having breakfast with Zehra and Uncle Latif the morning after the fifth night, when the Widow swept out on to the verandah to announce she knew what was going on: every feather in the pillow was a dream about her husband.

  Or rather, each feather was a Chapter of a dream, for there was a clear chronology that connected each dream; a chronology not of time but of love. Yes, the Widow declared, after thirteen years of marriage she was falling in love with her husband, and he with her. The growing intensity of their love was manifested in the increasing brightness of the colours of her dreams, which had once been black and white. By the end of her first month at Zehra’s house the Widow’s dreams had become so bright the waking world seemed drab by comparison and she had to swathe herself in clothes of bright greens and reds and yellows so that she would not see greyness every time she passed by a mirror.

  She treated the waking world like a dream which has revealed its unreality, and for the most part she would participate in it with amusement, even suspicion at its illogic, but always with an air of remove, always waiting for her eyelids to droop and the real work of living to begin.

  But there were always those moments when she would suddenly snap her neck up, open her eyes wide, lean out of the nearest window and sniff at the air. ‘Smell it,’ she would say, ‘Sorrow and greed.’ Then she would walk out of the house and sometimes disappear for days.

  In less than a year she was legend, and whenever Mrs Ahmed seemed poised to announce weekend homework Hasan would distract her with tales of the latest trail of sorrow and greed that led the Widow to a house of mourning.

  ‘And were the brothers of the deceased about to convince their sister-in-law that the law entitled them to all her husband’s property?’ Mrs Ahmed would demand.

  ‘Oh yes, miss,’ Hasan would reply. ‘But the Widow got there just in time and quoted the inheritance laws l
oud enough for all the mourners to hear, and then she chased the brothers away with quotes from the Quran and the Hadith about honouring widows and safeguarding the rights of your widowed sisters-in-law.’

  ‘Ha!’ Mrs Ahmed would say, and the students’ homework diaries stayed blank.

  Hasan lay among the karondas and laughed at the memory of Mrs Ahmed stabbing the air in triumph with her fist while everyone in the class gave Hasan smiles of the deepest gratitude. And then he remembered what the Widow had said when Hasan asked her what would happen when she had dreamed every feather in her pillow.

  She said, ‘I will die.’

  Chapter Seven

  Generally speaking, though, the Widow was hale and vigorous enough to remove all urgency from Hasan’s and Zehra’s attempts to count the number of feathers in clandestinely purchased pillows of the same brand as the Widow’s pillow. It was only on those days when death-threats arrived that the counting and calculations took place in earnest behind locked doors.

  ‘She’s been here . . .’ Zehra would purse her lips, consult calculator and calendar, and write down how many days it had been since the Widow started dreaming, while Hasan rent open a pillow with his penknife.

  The first moment was always the most satisfying; Hasan dipped his hand into the mass of feathers and scooped out a handful, recalling the feel of new-born chicks stirring in his hand. But after that it was sweat and sneezing until the tedium of the counting became too much to bear and Hasan and Zehra decided yes, no question about it, obvious at a glance that the feathers numbered far more than the dreams, so the Widow would live for a while yet. Besides, not infrequently the threats to reunite the Widow with her dead husband turned out merely to be advertisements for the services of spiritualists. Consequently, all the threats were tinged with the possibility of farce, and only occasionally did Hasan imagine that some moustachioed man walking towards Zehra’s house was really an irate brother to a corpse, come to kill the woman who had cheated him out of his illegal share of inheritance. Frankly, though he never said so, Hasan was grateful for the death-threats, for without them the Bodyguard would never have come into being.

  Even now, after all this time, Hasan knew very little about the Bodyguard, except that it had appeared – in the form of three women and a boy – the day the first death-threat arrived. When Uncle Latif demanded to know why the four strangers were sitting in the patch of lawn just outside his house, the eldest woman replied, in village dialect, ‘Because you have not invited us in yet.’

  Uncle Latif’s hospitality opened his mouth to invite the four in, but his social snobbery and City-dweller suspicion of strangers constricted his voice box, so he could only gape.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ the youngest woman said. ‘We can guard her better if we keep watch outside.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘The Widow.’

  The next day they were gone, but a group of five was in their place. Thereafter, the Bodyguard changed character daily, and it became a morning tradition for Hasan and Zehra to sing out a description of its latest composition to the Widow:

  ‘One old woman, toothless

  Her daughter you did save.

  By her side her grandson

  He must be Hasan’s age.’

  Or:

  ‘ Five women, three men, one in between

  Plus the largest rooster we’ve ever seen

  They don’t know each other, yet here they are

  ’Cause of the Wid, ’bout whom they rave “wah wah!”’

  The Widow merely smiled her off-centred smile that could have been directed anywhere, and ordered Imran to see to it that the visitors were given food and water. The first time she said this Uncle Latif almost choked on his tea. Imran’s culinary excellence was matched only by his snobbery, and when he had first come to work for Uncle Latif he claimed to have quit his previous job because his ex-employees were given to displaying their newly acquired wealth by sprinkling fistfuls of saffron on every dish he made. Saffron aside, Imran had said, the company of people lacking class invariably made his food taste bitter. But though the Widow’s instructions drained the colour from his face, he did as she asked. Before long, Imran’s expression of stoic forbearance as he counted the number of the Bodyguard was as much a part of the morning ritual as were Hasan and Zehra’s rhymes.

  But other than making sure they were fed, the Widow never acknowledged the Bodyguard’s existence, even when its variegated numbers followed on her heels through crowded bazaars, houses of mourning and the law library (where, according to Mansoor of the Bodyguard, the Widow was only admitted because one of the security guards at the library was Mansoor’s uncle’s brother’s wife’s nephew’s cousin. ‘You mean he’s your cousin,’ Zehra said. ‘My brother,’ said Mansoor. Hasan was so awed by Mansoor’s ability to complicate the relationship that he never mentioned that actually it was Aba’s intercession with the Library Board that gave the Widow access to the library).

  At any rate, despite the City’s initial murmurs of disapproval (‘My dear, that rabble makes one afraid to approach her on the streets’), skepticism (‘They’re just doing it for the free food’) and whispered curiosity (‘Do you suppose they follow her into the bath?’), not to mention all the ‘Not to spread rumours, but I’ve heard . . .’ stories, within a year of its inception the Bodyguard’s position altered from gawk-and-talk-of-the-town to bemusing-but-amusing-institution. And in the last few months, as violence in the City spread even to its more élite enclaves, the Bodyguard had become a source of envy among the many women who found themselves paying for the services of armed bodyguards who terrified them. But it was only on the day of Uncle Latif’s annual party, less than two weeks after mid-term ended, that the last bastion of resistance to the Bodyguard crumbled.

  ‘It’s happened. It’s finally happened,’ Zehra announced, bounding into Hasan’s room. ‘Oh, are you still pouting?’ Hasan was. ‘Can you at least tell me why?’

  Why should have been obvious. For the last few days Zehra had been spending hours on the phone with Najam, Hasan’s cousin with the one-haired chest, and in school she tilted her head to one side and tucked strands of hair behind her left ear whenever Najam was around. All this was inexcusable enough, but today when Najam had demanded to know why Zehra spent so much time at Hasan’s house, Zehra replied, ‘Oh, you know how it is. He’s my neighbour.’

  ‘Well, you are my neighbour,’ Zehra said, when Hasan revealed his complaint. Hasan turned his face from her and pretended to gaze, enrapt, at the mural of the Milky Way which Ami had painted on one of his walls. During the day the mural showed the creatures of the constellations – Bear, Lion, Hunter, Crab, and the like – circling each other, each claw, bristle and nail delineated; but at night, when darkness swallowed up detail, scattered smudges of luminous paint made stars glow on the wall.

  Zehra poked Hasan in the ribs. ‘No more head-tilting, okay? Solemn vow. Now, listen . . . Imran has accepted the Bodyguard.’

  Hasan fell on his knees beside his bed and made scraping gestures on the carpet. ‘Keep going,’ he said. ‘I’m just picking up my jaw.’

  ‘To put it in an eggshell, Imran got into yet another fight with your new no-name cook, and while arguing forgot to tend to the chicken he was cooking, and it burned. So, minor crisis happened. Then your cook said he was quitting and stormed out of the house, attempting to take your mother’s silver with him, but the Bodyguard stopped him and recovered the goods.’

  ‘That made Imran accept the Bodyguard after three years of complaining about having to cook for them?’

  ‘Not at all. We only reached the minor crisis. Imran then pedalled off to the market to buy more chickens but . . . it’s a meatless day. No flesh or fowl available, except the frozen variety which, of course, Imran refuses to cook. So, major calamity. Much wailing, hair-pulling, contemplation of suicide from Imran, which flung my father into a panic, which in turn really upset Ogle who tried to chew the Widow’s pillow as an outlet for all his
disorientation, which really woke the Widow up for once, which made the Bodyguard take things in their own hands.’ Zehra fell back gasping, and in a final burst spurted out: ‘So a bunch of them disappeared somewhere and returned in half an hour with no less than eight chickens.’

  ‘Were they fresh?’ Hasan asked.

  ‘Very. They were alive.’

  There was always some crisis or another to contend with in the hours leading up to Uncle Latif’s annual party, and Imran was usually at the centre of it. But from the moment Khan, son of Khan, unofficial leader of the Bodyguard, plugged in the outdoor lights that nestled between branches of the chikoo trees some angel with a taste for panache and Imran’s stuffed green chillies took over.

  Hasan and Zehra stood on the Widow’s balcony, which overlooked the shorter stem of the L-shaped garden, and watched the visible patches of grass shrink further and further as the evening progressed. ‘We’re on Olympus. I’m Aphrodite – no, Artemis – and you’re Hermes, and we have to decide whether to exterminate the human race or not based on this party,’ Zehra said.

  Hasan kicked up his heels to indicate winged sandals and scrutinized the proceedings with the eyes of an impartial god. The buds of Raat-ki-rani had opened wider than usual tonight and their scent mingled with women’s perfume and men’s cologne; the lights from the chikoo tree illuminated the reddest hibiscus, the whitest motia, the greenest leaf. Not one flower drooped in the centre-pieces of the eight round tables and nocturnal birds resisted the temptation to soil the white tablecloths. Cigarette butts and mosquito coils glowed; Club bearers slipped from group to group holding aloft silver salvers laden with illegal beverages; no one’s heels sank into damp mud.

  The men were disappointments as usual – a dark-suited bunch, lightly smattered with shalwar kameezes made formal by the addition of waistcoats with high collars. At least Aba’s silk cravat acquired him some distinction, though he had only worn it at Ami’s insistence. So much for the men. But the women! Saris, peshwazes, sheraras, sleeveless kameezes and some garbs that even Zehra couldn’t name. It was no surprise that Ami preferred painting women, Hasan thought. But he wondered if even Ami’s palette was capable of reproducing all the colours arrayed on the lawn.