In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Read online

  Servants had crowded into the hallway outside the room, perhaps twenty of them, barefoot and speaking in whispers, coming into the house by ones or twos as they learned that something had happened to the master.

  The general swept in, a tall anglicized officer, his trimmed mustache and the severe cut of his clothes reflecting purpose. Rafik, who knew the general well, brought a stool. Administering an ECG on a portable machine, the general took the tape to the light, and said, ‘Go immediately to Mayo Hospital. Carry him out in a chair.’ He clicked shut the lid of the machine and put the tape away in the pocket of his vest.

  For a moment Husna and K. K. looked at each other, his face lined and grave, hers puffy with sleep. For the first time he thought of her as a grown-up, as a woman; and for the first time she thought of him as a lover, sick and possibly dying.

  All the servants, the gardeners, the chauffeurs, the junior ones who saw K. K. only from a distance, wanted to help carry the chair through the corridors of the house, where only a few lights burned, throwing shadows. K. K. sat impassively on the chair, raised above the crowd, then lowered at the doors, like an awkward king, a king onstage.

  As Husna prepared to get into the car, the general stopped her. ‘You need to be here. People will be coming to ask about him. He’s probably going to be all right, but you should call Sarwat and the others. Kamila should come back from New York. Have them call Rehana also.’ Rehana, the middle child, had broken with K. K. when he separated from his wife. Husna began to cry, shaking, and he stood back and looked at her shrewdly. ‘Don’t, this isn’t about you. Prepare yourself now. Remember who you are.’

  By midmorning people had begun to call at the house, for in Lahore word traveled quickly. Husna received them, sitting in the living room. She had dressed up too much, wearing an embroidered black kurta. Several of the guests asked about Sarwat.

  Sarwat had ordered that a car should wait at the airport and meet each flight from Karachi, as she would get a seat as quickly as possible. Just before lunch she entered the living room, narrowing her eyes. An elderly couple, who had been sitting with Husna, stood up.

  ‘What’s happened?’she asked, addressing Husna. ‘What are you doing here? Where’s Daddy?’

  The old couple quickly took their leave as Husna explained.

  ‘Please,’said Sarwat, ‘this is a time for family. I’ve asked my cousin Bilqis to come here and receive people. Go up to your room and stay there.’

  Husna didn’t dare tell Sarwat that she had moved next to the master bedroom. A servant turned on the air conditioner in the annex, and Husna stayed there all day, looking down through the window at callers arriving and leaving. Hassan sent up some food, but she didn’t eat. She knew she would not be allowed to attend K. K. at the hospital.

  In the middle of the night she fell asleep, still sitting in the chair by the window. Waking in the morning, she looked down at the driveway jammed with cars. Without even putting on a dupatta, she ran down the stairs and into the servants’ area. Rafik sat on a chair sobbing unnaturally, as if racked with coughing, his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees. She saw very distinctly the old man’s bare head, bowed down, the gray thin hairs, the scalp. She knew, of course, that K. K. had died. Two other servants, young ones new to the house, sat uncertainly on their haunches nearby. They looked at her with curiosity, but said nothing. She turned, her eyes filling with tears, and walked back to the annex. She lay down on the bed, her feelings concentrated at the forefront of her mind like an immensely weighted black point, incomprehensible.

  In Islam a body must be buried as soon as possible, ideally before nightfall. When Husna emerged from her bedroom and looked again out onto the drive, she saw men putting up a tent, where the male guests would mourn during the jenaza. The women would sit inside the house with the body. She unlocked one of her massive trunks, and removed a suit of clothing that she had brought with her when she came into the household, a cheap shalvar and kurta, with a simple white dupatta. Wearing this costume, she entered the living room. The body of K. K. Harouni lay on the floor, wrapped in a white cloth, his jaw bound closed with a white bandage, the knot tied jauntily near one ear. His dentures had been lost, and his cheeks had caved in. His body had shrunk, lying among rose petals scattered by the servants. Sarwat rose from her place at the head of the corpse, touched Husna on the head with both hands, but said nothing. Husna went to the back of the room and sat down as far away as possible from K. K.’s old wife, who was telling a rosary, a stunned expression on her face. All sorts of women had come, women from all phases of K. K.’s life, and more kept arriving, clicking through the front vestibule in high heels, spilling out into other rooms. From various places soft or loud sobbing would break out and then subside, as is the custom. Two society women sat uncomfortably on the floor next to Husna, whispering, gossiping, and she heard one say to the other in English, ‘Oh, isn’t that delicious.’

  Of course you don’t care, thought Husna, who wouldn’t cry in front of them. She felt that only she cared, that she had lost more than all the others.

  And yet she wanted to be like them, they were what she had lost.

  For the next two days Husna stayed in the annex, without once going out. People came day and night to condole with Sarwat and Kamila. Rehana, the estranged third daughter, had arrived from Paris, where she taught some esoteric form of Islamic women’s studies – but she pointedly stayed with her mother rather than at K. K.’s house. Husna felt that they had forgotten her, and she wanted to be forgotten, to stay here alone in these rooms, with their rush mats on the floor, their pieces of scavenged furniture, and an air conditioner that almost kept the apartment cool, dribbling water onto the pavement below. On the third day a servant came, early in the morning, before there were any callers, to say that the sisters wished to speak with her. They were waiting for Husna in the living room, all three wearing saris, relaxed, Kamila sitting with her feet curled under her on a sofa, Rehana and Sarwat in high-backed chairs.

  They got straight to the point, Kamila, as the eldest, speaking.

  ‘My father allowed you to live in this house. However, he would not have wanted you to stay here. Tomorrow afternoon the car will be available to take you wherever you wish to be taken. I suppose you’ll go to your father’s house.’ She settled back, finished with the problem.

  Husna, who had taken a seat halfway through this monologue, though she had not been invited to do so, looked down at the floor. Tears welled up in her eyes.

  ‘Did Uncle say anything about me before ... before ...?’

  Sarwat broke in. ‘No,’ she replied with finality. ‘There was and is nothing for you.’

  ‘That isn’t what I meant,’ said Husna.

  Kamila softened. ‘Look, whatever you had with my father is gone now. If you took care of him in these past months, you were rewarded. You’re young, you’ll find other things. You think that you’ll never heal, but you will, sooner than you think.’

  Now Husna stood. She had reached the bottom, and her pride arose, her sense of wanting to be dignified, to accept the inevitable.

  Just as she approached the door, Rehana called to her. ‘There’s one other thing. They tell us you have a number of trunks in your room. We will not ask what you have in them. You may take those with you. But nothing else.’

  Reaching the annex, Husna sat on the side of the bed and buried her face in her hands. She had hoped that Rehana, the foreign one, the aggrieved one, would take her side – yet it was she who pronounced the harshest words. At the end their estrangements were less than their contempt for her. They had closed up against her – family, blood. She tried to tell herself that she had gone to the sisters hoping for nothing, with nothing in her heart but sadness at the death of their father, who had loved her. She should have said something cold, should have refused their last insulting offer.

  ‘For him I should have said, “I came with nothing, I leave with nothing. I leave with the clothes on my back. I served yo
ur father, when you were far away. The shame be on your heads.”’

  But she could not afford even this gesture. The next day two men loaded the trunks onto a horse-drawn cart and carried them away to the Old City.

  Our Lady of Paris

  SOHAIL AND HELEN had begun dating two years earlier, at Yale, where she was an undergraduate and he at the law school. After graduating the previous summer he had returned to his home in Pakistan, while she completed her senior year. They had agreed to put the question of their future in abeyance until she finished school – not the question of whether they would be together but of how: in Pakistan, New York, or somewhere else. Sohail had vaguely committed himself to joining his father’s sprawling business – a sugar mill, farmlands, and much else. The degree had been a way to put off this step. He lived that fall in the family’s Karachi mansion, a rambling pile large enough that he could bear the rub of his parents, who occupied what was called the Old House, leaving him to an annex under an enormous banyan at the far end of the garden. When he announced to his mother that he would be going to Paris for Christmas, to meet Helen, she pursed her lips but said nothing. A few days later, he found her alone in the living room, having tea, waiting for guests. She had been a famous beauty, from a prominent, cultured Lucknow family. Now at forty-five she knew everyone of a certain class in Karachi, went to dinners and to the polo and to all the fashionable weddings, flew often to Lahore and Islamabad, and summered in London.

  In winter, her rooms were warmed by a fire lit at dusk; in summer her rooms were kept ice cold. On her bad nights, as she called them, she took sleeping pills, which left dark shadows like bruises under her eyes. A portrait that hung in the formal dining room showed her reclining on a chaise longue, one shoe dangling from her long, elegant foot, skin velvety and evenly white; she seemed indolent and dangerous, as if she were waiting in ambush, with herself as the bait.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘Come have tea with me.’ She was sitting on a divan in a green silk sari with her feet tucked under her, her black hair pulled tightly back. ‘I don’t see you enough.’

  He had been avoiding her, unable to abide her questions about his future – he was still ‘settling in,’ going every couple of days to the headquarters of the family business to write emails and read the New York Times online. During this time, with his confidence faltering, he found her overwhelming. He fixed on the cucumber sandwiches, devouring one after another.

  ‘Why won’t you ever use a plate? Your manners are even worse since you went to America.’ She took a plate, put a napkin under it, and gave it to him. ‘Sohail, I’d like to ask a favor.’ She blended these articulations together – following the maternal scolding, her request almost flirtatious.

  He raised one eyebrow, nibbling at another sandwich.

  ‘I want your father to take a vacation, he’s pushing himself too hard. He’s always bored in London. I thought we might come to Paris.’ She said this brightly. ‘Only for a week, I know you’ll want to be alone. Do you remember when we were in Rome, how nice it was? Your father mentioned it just the other day, how much he’d liked that.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Helen since June,’ responded Sohail carefully. ‘Wouldn’t it be sort of like taking your mother on your honeymoon?’

  ‘Oh, we wouldn’t be in your way. And I’d like to see her. You’ll hardly know we’re there. I’ve found an apartment.’

  He acquiesced, because he generally ended up doing as she wanted, and because he would inevitably and soon have to introduce Helen to his mother, in order to move the relationship forward.

  Sohail had borrowed an apartment on Iªle Saint-Louis from one of his childhood friends, also a Pakistani industrialist’s son, who had spent much of the last several years in Paris being a writer – though not actually writing. Arriving in Paris two days before Helen, Sohail cleaned the apartment, made the bed with new sheets he bought at Galeries Lafayette, and picked up food and wine from the tiny overpriced shops on the Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Iªle. After collecting Helen from the airport, Sohail carried her bag on his head up to the sixth-floor garret, hitting it on the turns of the narrow stairwell. She had come to love this in him, his playing, his willingness to be slightly ridiculous. At the top he dropped the suitcase, panting, and with a flourish produced a strange circular key, unlike those in America.

  She paused at the door, a pretty girl, unmistakably American, her short hair held back with a tortoiseshell barrette. She had lived among and through books, in high school and then college, won a scholarship at Yale. Paris had been a dream from her childhood, when her single mother could not take her places, not to Europe. Walking across the room and opening the window, she looked out over a cloister, then across the Seine to the Panthéon and the city beyond. A phrase came to her mind – my barefoot need – another phrase from a book. She did not want Sohail to see this. It had begun raining again and the slate roofs opposite shed streams of water.

  At dusk the following day, Sohail sat watching Helen dress for their first dinner with his parents. He wore a sports jacket, a black cashmere turtleneck, and pleated trousers; she rolled black stockings over her legs, which were pink and damp from the shower. Walking to the closet, naked but for the stockings, she removed a black dress, stepped into it, pulling it over the flare of her hips. She turned her back to him, and he zipped it, then stood for a moment holding her close, inhaling the scent of her hair.

  They walked past the halfhearted Christmas tree in front of Notre Dame and then along the left bank of the Seine, among the headlights of scooters and cars, the crowds rushing home into the twilight, the tourists everywhere taking pictures, the Parisians with buttoned-down faces. The wet streets glittered. Helen walked beside Sohail, keeping up with him, her heels clicking. She drank in the city around them, moving so quickly, so differently.

  A barge passed, going upstream, long and fast, smoking into the night, the lit cabin cozy and cheerful above the cold black water.

  ‘You know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘the Seine doesn’t divide Paris, it keeps the city together. It’s just the right width, not a little stream but a public place in the heart of the city.’

  Sohail leaned down and kissed her. ‘That’s a great image, the river not dividing Paris.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ said Helen. ‘For your next poem.’

  His parents were staying in an apartment on the Quai des Grands Augustins, overlooking the Seine. Sohail and Helen went up to the second floor, found the door, and he had just touched the bell when a voice called, ‘Coming.’

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said his mother, presenting her cheek to kiss, looking past him to Helen. She had a husky, attractive voice and was dressed quite plainly, a long white cotton tunic embroidered in white over slim-fitting pants.

  Helen extended her hand, palm flat, and looked Sohail’s mother in the eye, directly and ingenuously. ‘Hello, Mrs. Harouni. I’m Helen.’

  ‘And I’m Rafia. Welcome.’ She had fixed a stiff smile on her face.

  Sohail’s father stood to one side, a smallish man with a little mustache, precisely dressed in a thick brown tweed suit with a vest and muted tie and brilliantly shined shoes of a distinctive tan color. As he took Helen’s coat he said, ‘Welcome, welcome. Thank you for coming.’ But his statement appeared to be reflexive, without connection to his mental processes. Putting the coat on a hanger, he looked at her closely, with shrewd eyes. Sohail had thrown his coat on a chair near the door.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Sohail, looking around at the apartment, which had high ceilings and diminutive fittings. A woman on the stereo sang in French, and his mother had lit candles.

  ‘It belongs to Brigadier Hazari,’ said his father, sitting down again in front of the fire.

  Rafia and Helen had moved into the living room. The mother leaned down and looked at Helen’s necklace, an Afghan tribal piece, silver with lapis.

  ‘Isn’t that pretty.’

  ‘Sohail gave it to me. It’s one of my favorite thi
ngs.’

  Rafia said to Sohail, turning and smiling at him, ‘Will you get Helen and yourself whatever you want – it’s in the kitchen.’ Then to Helen, ‘Come sit here by me.’

  Sohail brought a drink for Helen and one for himself. His father sat back in the sofa, his drink on his knee, and looked sedately about the room. Rafia began.

  ‘I promised Sohail not to embarrass him, not to say how much I’ve heard about you.’ She had little dimples when she smiled. ‘But it’s true, he keeps telling me about you, it’s sweet.’

  ‘Ma, please. That makes me sound like I’m fifteen,’ said Sohail.

  ‘It’s the simple truth. And why shouldn’t I say it, it’s nice to see you happy. But please come help me with dinner. Bring your drink.’

  As mother and son went into the kitchen, Helen heard Rafia whisper to Sohail, ‘But she’s so pretty.’

  Helen was left with Mr. Harouni, who did not seem disposed to conversation. He looked complacently at the fire, his glass sweating. After hesitating to have a drink, Helen had accepted a white wine, reminding herself that she was an adult. Now she took a sip of the wine, trying to relax. She had been sitting up erect, halfway forward in the seat.