In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Read online

  ‘My father works for Mr. K. K. Harouni’s nephew, up in Islamabad. You must know them, sir. His wife is American, and she already promised to help in whatever way she can.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know of the Harounis. Excellent. Your father works for the proverbial foolish son of a rich father. Enough. For me, as you know, this is a family matter. Tell your father to come see me. And go back to your home. Call me the day after tomorrow, at ten in the morning, exactly.’

  Turning, I walked to the car. He trotted after me, no longer so composed, and as I opened the door he fell to the ground and put his hands on my feet.

  I raised him up. ‘I’m going to ask you two questions, but I don’t want you to answer them. First, in a house of two rooms how could someone break into seven trunks without being heard? Merely knock on a trunk made of tin, much less break its lock, and it resounds like thunder. Second, why didn’t you try to put out the flames? Your wife must have burned for a long time, and she must have been screaming bloody murder throughout, so that you can’t possibly have slept through it. Her first screams should have woken you, before she so badly injured herself. Why go for the neighbors instead of helping her? Think about it.’

  When I returned punctually at five from the office, my wife called me into the living room, where she sat with an old lady, one of her projects, someone from whom she wanted something. Judging from the guest’s enormous Land Cruiser parked in the verandah, she must be the wife of a big fish. This is the phrase; also, a big gun. Imagine my wife as being the poor man’s Lady Macbeth and you will have the entire picture.

  The guest went away, having been stroked to a silky fineness, and my wife turned her eyes, now in repose, upon me.

  ‘What word from Khadim? Any news?’

  I explained as briefly as I could.

  ‘And what shall we do?’

  ‘First of all I suppose we should spread some of young Harouni’s money around. A fool and his money, etc. Second, it is of course no suicide. Somebody murdered the poor woman. The police have a deathbed confession. False or not, he’ll hang for it.’

  ‘No, no,’she said, tossing aside the facts. ‘Nonsense. Good servants are impossible to find.’She thought for a minute. ‘You must, and you will immediately, send Mian Sarkar.’

  And so, the next morning my reader, Mian Sarkar, lambskin cap, imitation leather briefcase, spectacles, and three-piece suit, boarded the air-conditioned bus to Abbotabad, a ten-hour journey. He would only have done it for her.

  The two steeds pulling my career rapidly forward along the treacherous road of the Pakistani judiciary are my wife and Mian Sarkar. Each is, in a different sphere, absolutely matchless. My wife you already know. Mian Sarkar deserves not merely a thumbnail but a biography in two volumes – if it were possible to find out anything at all about him except his present rank and station. So far as I am aware, Mian Sarkar wore a cheap three-piece suit and a pair of slightly tinted spectacles of an already outmoded design on the day that he emerged from his mother’s womb. When he leaves the office in the evening, exactly at five, he doesn’t turn a corner or get into a cab or a bus, he simply dematerializes. No one knows even what quarter of the city he lives in, much less his address. He drinks nothing but milk, one careful glassful each day at lunch, and because of his digestion he eats each day only a single cheese sandwich, on white untoasted bread, with the crust cut off, brought to him by a boy from a tea stall. They must stock the cheese for him especially. Before speaking he clears his throat with a little hum, as if pulling his voice box up from some depth where he secretes it for safekeeping. His greatest feature, however, is his nose, a fleshy tubular object, gorged with blood, which I have always longed to squeeze, expecting him to honk like a bus.

  That would be a fatal act! There is nothing connected with the courts of Lahore that he has not absorbed, for knowledge in this degree of detail can only be obtained by osmosis. Everything about the private lives of the judges, and of the staff, down to the lowest sweeper, is to him incidental knowledge. He knows the verdicts of the cases before they have been written, before they even have been conceived. He sees the city panoptically, simultaneously, and if he does not disclose the method and the motive and the culprit responsible for each crime, it is only because he is more powerful if he does not do so. Locked in his impenetrable bosom are all the riots and iniquities of the past, and perhaps of the future, and when his mild figure steps out of the law courts of an evening and is lost in the crowds along the Mall, I am irrationally reminded of Lenin disembarking at the Finland Station in 1917. He is a man of secret powers, and a mover of great events. This is the bacillus my wife sent to resolve Khadim’s case as she wanted it resolved. Mightier men than I fear him.

  The next evening, when I drove through the gate of my house, a sagging wooden affair once painted green, once perhaps in colonial days a swing for little English children, I found an old man standing by the portico with the timeless patience of peasants and old servants, as if he had been standing there all day. He wore a battered white skullcap, soiled clothes, a sleeveless sweater, and shoes with crepe rubber soles, worn down on one side, which gave each foot a peculiar tilt. The deep lines on his face ran in no rational order, no order corresponding to musculature or to the emotions through which his expressions might pass, but spread from numerous points. The oversized head had settled heavily onto the shoulders, like a sand castle on the beach after the sea has run in over it.

  I opened the car door, closed it carefully, and rounded upon him. He put his head down, looking up at me under his brows, and quickly and pathetically saluted me, with a hand balled together.

  ‘As-salaam uleikum, Baba,’ I said.

  ‘Salaam, Sahib.’

  ‘You are the father of Khadim.’

  ‘Yes, Your Honor.’

  By his language and his manner I knew him to be a serving man of the old type, of the type that believes implicitly in his master’s right to be served. They are impossible to get now, unless you own land and bring a man from your own village, and even then you have to choose a simpleton, a real feudal peasant. I waited, but he said nothing. ‘You’ve come,’ I volunteered, ‘about your boy? You wish me to intervene?’

  ‘You can do anything, sir. I don’t understand. They took my money, sir, all of it. I’ll starve to death.’

  ‘Who took your money?’

  ‘God knows, sir.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘My daughter-in-law, she became insane. She killed herself.’

  ‘What should I do, how can I help?’

  ‘The girl’s family, if they agree the police will release my boy.’

  ‘And will they agree?’

  ‘Never, sir, not in a thousand years.’

  I began to lose patience. ‘What about the girl’s statement that Khadim killed her?’

  ‘The father told her to. They told her to.’ He began sobbing, his face long and dark like a cab horse in the rain. His shoulders shook but no tears came to his eyes and he didn’t raise his hands, which hung at his side.

  ‘O God, O God, I’ll starve, I’ll die, I want to die.’

  I couldn’t bear it, I put my arm around him. He reminded me of the old man who brought me up, whose lap held me, who had callused hands and wore a ring with a cheap red stone, who took me to the zoo and showed me the deer, put me on his shoulders so that I could see over the fence.

  ‘Don’t cry, Baba, don’t cry.’ I felt embarrassed. ‘Your boy will be all right.’

  ‘He’s a good boy, he’s the only one, the other is no good.’ He wiped his eyes, now full of flat tears, like splashed water. ‘They took my money,’ he sobbed, head bowed.

  ‘Wait, one moment. Is your master really willing to lay out a lot of cash?’ I had to ask.

  ‘I’ve served fifty-eight years, for the big Sahib and now the small one.’

  ‘Go in back,’ I said. ‘They’ll give you some tea. I’ll fix it.’

  He walked away from me without shaking my hand,
without thanking me, his shoulders fallen, shuffling, still crying.

  The next morning but one Mian Sarkar came into my office at his usual time, as always arriving exactly five minutes after I did, and seated himself primly at his desk. (Arriving after me, although by this same small margin, is his one extravagance.) He did not open the files arranged in front of him, though he would answer with exactitude any question I might presume to put to him about them.

  I treat him always with the greatest refinements of courtesy. ‘Mian Sarkar, I trust you had a comfortable journey?’

  ‘The roads might be better, sir.’

  ‘Indeed. And on returning you found everything well in your home?’

  ‘No surprises, sir.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I retreated into my chambers, in order not to seem impatient. Half an hour later I called him in.

  ‘Mian Sarkar,’ I began, ‘would you be so kind as to explain the situation in ... what was the name of the village?’

  ‘Parian, sir.’ Putting his hands on his knees, which he held clamped together, he cleared his throat. He has a habit of sitting always at the edge of his seat, as if at any moment prepared to spring up. ‘To be brief, sir, the deceased did not commit suicide. She was killed. The boy, however, is not the murderer, although he was present and did not interfere.’

  ‘Excellent, or rather, good. And the – ’

  ‘The husband killed her. As always there had been trouble in the family. The old man threatened to remove his money and to retire in Islamabad. The elder brother called the younger home, in order that they might steal the money together and neither feel compelled to take the father’s side. Husbands and wives all took part in the theft. Of course I entertained no doubt that the sons had stolen the treasure and murdered the girl. Only the question of why they killed her remained. The harsh method they selected to practice upon her I left aside as immaterial.

  ‘The facts presented themselves as follows. The police, who had been called by the brothers merely to conduct a pro forma investigation of the theft, saw the possibility of exploiting the situation, of taking the lion’s share of the stolen goods, and began to act with unwonted energy. When the husband saw his wife breaking down under questioning, he prepared an elaborate dinner with which he lured the constables away, urging them to continue their inquiry the next morning. They acquiesced, sensing an opportunity to negotiate in private. That evening the boys decided to kill her. Not only must they silence her, they also needed a victim, someone to whom they could ascribe the theft, and who would not talk. They panicked. Criminals are fools. The husband was the prime mover. He is, sir, a nefarious fellow. A man of very poor morals.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’ I paused, not wishing to seem importunate. ‘Would it be indiscreet to ask how you unraveled this, and unraveled it so quickly?’

  ‘Options, sir. For every lock there is a key. Take hold of your man, sir, and give him options. Contrary to popular belief, there is no honor among thieves. The elder brother quite expected young Khadim to be presented with the black warrant and to swing. He of course would thereby reap the younger brother’s share. The victim’s deathbed statement went against him, and in these inflationary times to escape murder charges is ruinously expensive. I explained to the gentleman, however, that if the unfortunate death were to be called a murder, neither you nor the generous Mr. Sohail Harouni would allow the younger brother to absorb the blame. The younger was after all the father’s favorite. Why then, I asked him rhetorically, shouldn’t the less favored one make the sacrifice? In Pakistan all things can be arranged – and surely the girl’s family could be mollified. That evening he came and laid open to me not only his heart but also his overflowing purse.’

  After pausing again, in order to let this sink in, I asked, ‘And so, what is the solution?’

  ‘I took the liberty of making inquiries regarding the willingness of the deceased’s family to settle the case. It seems they were attached to the girl and wish to see the young man hang. They nominated him as the subject of the alleged deathbed confession because he is the most beloved of the father’s offspring. They want blood rather than gold.’

  ‘That looks bad.’

  ‘Madam most particularly desires to retain the services of the young man. I had money in hand. It happened that the Deputy Superintendent of Police and I became well acquainted, almost in fact as if we had grown up in the same village, as he rather poetically phrased it. He had informed me already of the costly treatments his aged mother was undergoing – a heartbreaking tale. His men belatedly reported that they did not distinctly hear the confession, due to the extent of the deceased’s injuries. This confession is the only evidence linking the boy to the murder.

  ‘I also happened to strike up a second acquaintance. A respected doctor from Abbotabad, another similarly disposed though less effusive friend, happened to be in the hospital that night, and this gentleman suddenly recalled that he had looked into the room where the woman lay. He is willing to testify that due to her burns, which covered ninety percent of her body, and which had incinerated her cheeks, her lips, her teeth, her tongue, and even her gums, there is not the remotest possibility that she could speak. Furthermore, he testifies that she would not have been in her right mind at the time.’

  ‘How dreadful!’ I interjected, and Mian Sarkar cast his hooded eyes upon me, as if to say, Ah! Pieties!

  ‘And so ...’

  ‘Judge Aftar will preside over the case. He graduated from the Academy five years after you did. His wife is second cousin to Mrs. Arafa, Brigadier Kuloo’s niece, who came under obligation to Madam, Your Honor’s wife, at the time of Bibi Kamo’s death – you recall, I am sure, the dancing master and the emeralds. In any case, you may wish to speak with the judge.’

  And that, of course, is exactly what I did.

  In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

  HUSNA NEEDED A a job. She stole up the long drive to the Lahore house of the retired civil servant and landlord K. K. Harouni, bearing in her lacquered fingers a letter of introduction from, of all people, his estranged first wife. The butler, knowing that Husna served the old Begum Harouni in an indefinite capacity, somewhere between maidservant and companion, did not seat her in the living room. Instead he put her in the office of the secretary, who every afternoon took down in shorthand a few pages of Mr. Harouni’s memoirs, cautiously titled Perhaps This Happened. Ushered into the living room by the secretary after a quarter of an hour, Husna gazed around her, as petitioners do, more tense than curious, taking in the worn gold brocade on the sofa, a large Chinese painting of horsemen over the rosewood mantel. Her attention was drawn to ranks of black-and-white photographs in silver frames, hunters wearing shooting caps posed with strings of birds or piles of game, several of women in saris, their hair piled high in the style of the fifties, one in riding breeches, with an oversized dedication in looping script. To the side stood a photo of a youthful Harouni in a receiving line shaking the hand of Jawaharlal Nehru.

  The door opened, and Mr. Harouni walked in, a mild look on his handsome golden face. Placing a file on the table in front of him, the secretary flipped through the pages and showed the old man where to sign, murmuring, ‘Begum Sahiba has sent this young miss with a letter, sir.’

  Although he had an excellent memory, and knew the lineage of all the old Lahore families, K. K. allowed Husna to explain in detail her relationship to him, which derived from his grandmother on his mother’s side. The senior branch of the family had consolidated its lands and amassed power under the British, who made use of the landowning gentry to govern. Husna’s family, a cadet branch, had not so much fallen into poverty as failed to rise. Her grandfather had owned thirty or forty shops in the Lahore Old City, but these had been sold off more than thirty years ago, before prices increased when Lahore grew in the 1950s and 1960s. Encouraged by K. K., given tea and cakes, Husna forgot herself, falling into the common, rich Punjabi of the inner city. She told with great emphasis a story about
her mother, who remembered falling and breaking her teeth on the steps leading into the courtyard of a lost family home, which were tall and broad to accommodate the enormous tread of a riding elephant, emblematic of the family’s status.

  Finishing the tale, Husna was silent for a moment, then narrowed her eyes, collecting herself. ‘In this world some families rise and some fall,’ she said. ‘And now I’ve come to you for help. I’m poor and need a job. Even Begum Harouni agrees that I should have a profession. My father can give me nothing, he’s weak and has lost his connections. Everyone says I should marry, but I won’t.’

  Outside the living room, overlooking a side patio, a gardener switched on yard lights, illuminating a cement swimming pool half filled with rainwater and leaves. A servant entered the room with an armful of wood, threw it with a crash into the fireplace, then took a bottle of kerosene and poured a liberal splash. He tossed in a match and the fire roared up. For a moment, he rested on his haunches by the fire, grave before this immemorial mystery, then broke the spell, rose, and left the room.

  A car drove up the long circular driveway. A minute later, an elderly couple entered the room. Kissing Harouni on the cheek, the woman said in a husky voice, ‘Hello, darling.’ The man, gray beside his brightly dressed companion, his mustache trimmed, waited to one side.

  ‘Hello, Riffat,’ Harouni said, kissing her on the top of the head and then going over to the wall and pressing a bell. ‘Will you have a drink, Husky?’

  The man glanced at his wife. ‘I’ll have a small whiskey.’

  The visitor wore a pinkish kurta, too young for her but certainly very expensive, finely printed with a silver design. She eyed Husna, as if pricing her.