In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Read online

  Nawab ate first, then the girls, and finally his wife. He sat out in the little courtyard, burping and smoking a cigarette, looking up at the crescent moon just coming onto the horizon. I wonder what the moon is made of? he thought, without exerting himself. He remembered listening on the radio when the Americans said they had walked on it. His thoughts wandered off into all sorts of tangents. The dwellers around him in the little hamlet had also finished their dinner, and the smoke from the cow-dung fires hung over the darkening roofs, a harsh spicy smell, like rough tobacco. Nawab’s house had all sorts of ingenious contrivances, running water in all three rooms, a duct that brought cool air into the rooms at night, and even a black-and-white television, which his wife covered with a flowered doily that she had herself embroidered. Nawab had constructed a gear mechanism, so that the antenna on the roof could be turned from inside the house to improve reception. The children sat inside watching it, with the volume blaring. His wife came out and sat primly at his feet on the charpoy, a bed made of rope.

  ‘I’ve got something in my pocket – would you like to know what?’ He looked at her with a pouting sort of smile.

  ‘I know this game,’ she said, reaching up and straightening his glasses on his face. ‘Why are your glasses always crooked? I think one ear’s higher than the other.’

  ‘Come on, if you find it you can have it.’

  Looking to see that the children all had become absorbed in the television, she kneeled next to him and began patting his pockets. ‘Lower ... Lower ...’ he said. In the pocket of the greasy vest that he wore under his kurta she found a wrapped-up newspaper holding chunks of raw brown sugar.

  ‘I’ve got lots more,’ he said. ‘Look at that. None of this junk you buy in the bazaar. The Dashtis gave me five kilos for repairing their sugarcane press. I’ll sell it tomorrow. Come on, make us some parathas. For all of us? Pretty please?’

  ‘I put out the fire.’

  ‘So light it. Or rather, you just sit here, I’ll light it.’

  ‘You can never light it, I’ll end up doing it anyway,’ she said, getting up.

  The smaller children, smelling the ghee cooking on the griddle, crowded around, watching the brown sugar melt, and finally even the older girls came in, though they haughtily stood to one side.

  Nawab, squatting and huffing on the fire, gestured to them. ‘Come on you princesses, none of your tricks. I know you want some.’

  They began eating, pouring the brown crystallized syrup onto pieces of fried bread, and after a while Nawab went to his motorcycle and pulled from the panniers another hunk of the sugar, challenging the girls to see who would eat most.

  One evening a few weeks after his family’s little festival of sugar, Nawab was sitting with the watchman who kept the stores at Dunyapur. A banyan planted over the threshing floor only thirty years ago had grown a canopy of forty or fifty feet, and all the men who worked in the stores tended it carefully, watering it with cans. The old watchman sat under this tree, and Nawab and others of the younger generations would sit with him at dusk, teasing him, trying to make his violent temper flare up, and joking around with each other. They would listen to the old man’s stories, of the time when only dirt tracks led through these riverine tracts and the tribes stole cattle for sport, and often killed each other while doing it, to add piquancy.

  Though spring weather had come, the watchman still burned a fire in a tin pan, to warm his feet and to give a center to the little group that gathered there. The electricity had failed, as it often did, and the full moon climbing the horizon lit the scene indirectly, reflecting off the whitewashed walls, throwing dim shadows around the machinery strewn about, plows and planters, drags, harrows.

  ‘Come on, old man,’ said Nawab to the watchman, ‘I’ll tie you up and lock you in the stores to make it look like a robbery, and then I’ll top off my tank at the gas barrel.’

  ‘Nothing in it for me,’ said the watchman. ‘Go on, I think I hear your wife calling you.’

  ‘I understand, sire, you wish to be alone.’

  Nawab jumped up and shook the watchman’s hand, making a little bow, touching his knee in deference, a running joke; lost on the watchman these last ten years.

  ‘Be careful, boy,’ said the watchman, standing up and leaning on his bamboo staff, clad in steel at the tip.

  Nawab kicked over his motorcycle with a flourish, and in one smooth motion flicked on the lights and shot out the threshing floor gates, onto the quarter-mile drive that led from the heart of the farm. He felt cold and liked it, knowing that at home the room would be baking, the two-bar heater running day and night all winter on pilfered electricity. Turning onto the black main road, he sped up, outrunning the weak headlight, as if he were racing forward in the globe of a moving lantern. Nightjars perching on the road as they hunted moths ricocheted into the dark, almost under his wheel. Nawab locked his arms, fighting the bike as he flew over potholes, enjoying the pace, standing on the pegs, and in low-lying fields where the sugarcane had been heavily watered, mist rose and cool air enveloped him. At the canal he slowed, hearing the water rushing over the locks.

  A man stepped from behind one of the pillars, waving a flashlight down at the ground, motioning Nawab to stop.

  ‘Brother,’ said the man, over the puttering engine, ‘give me a ride into town. I’ve got business, and I’m late.’

  Strange business at this time of night, thought Nawab, the taillight of the motorcycle casting a reddish glow around them on the ground. They were far from any dwellings. A mile away, the little village of Dashtian crouched beside the road – before that nothing. He looked into the man’s face.

  ‘Where are you from?’ The man looked straight back at him, his face pinched and therefore overstated, but unflinching.

  ‘From Kashmor. Please, you’re the first person to come by for over an hour. I’ve walked all day.’

  Kashmor, thought Nawab. From the poor country across the river. Each year those tribes came to pick the mangoes at Dunyapur and other nearby farms, working for almost nothing, let go as soon as the harvest thinned. The men would give a feast, a thin feast, at the end of the season, a hundred or more going shares to buy a buffalo. Nawab had been several times, and been treated as if he were honoring them, sitting with them and eating the salty rice flecked with bits of meat.

  He grinned at the man, gesturing with his chin to the seat behind him. ‘All right then, get in back.’

  Balancing against the dead weight behind him, which made driving along the rutted canal path difficult, Nawab pushed on, under the rosewood trees.

  Half a mile down the road, he shouted into Nawab’s ear, ‘Stop!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Nawab couldn’t hear over the rushing wind.

  The man jabbed something hard into his ribs.

  ‘I’ve got a gun, I’ll shoot you.’

  Panicked, Nawab skidded to a stop and jumped to one side, pushing the motorcycle away from him, so that it tipped over, knocking the robber to the ground. The carburetor float hung open and the engine raced for a minute, the wheel jerking, until the float chamber drained, and then it sputtered and died.

  ‘What are you doing?’ babbled Nawab.

  ‘I’ll shoot you if you don’t get away,’ said the robber, on one knee, the gun pointed.

  They stood obscured in the sudden woolly dark, next to the fallen motorcycle, which leaked raw-smelling gasoline into the dust underfoot. Water running through the reeds in the canal next to them made soft gulping sounds as it swirled along. When his eyes adjusted Nawab saw the man sucking at a cut on his palm, the gun in his other hand.

  When the man went to pick up the bike, Nawab came and touched him on the shoulder.

  ‘I told you, I’ll shoot you.’

  Nawab put his hands together in supplication. ‘I beg you, I’ve got little girls, thirteen children. I promise, thirteen. I tried to help you. I’ll drive you to Firoza, and I won’t tell anyone. Don’t take the bike, it’s my daily bread. I’m a
man like you, poor as you.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Without thinking, Nawab lunged for the gun, but missed.

  Dropping the motorcycle, the man stepped back and shot him in the groin.

  Nawab fell to the ground, holding the place where it hurt with both hands, entirely surprised, shocked, as if the man had slapped him for no reason.

  The man dragged the bike away from the fallen body, stood it up, and straddled it, trying to start it. It had flooded, and not owning a motorcycle, he didn’t know what to do. He held the throttle wide open, which made it worse. At the sound of the shot the dogs in Dashtian had begun to bark, the sound fitful in the breeze.

  Nawab, lying on the ground, at first thought the man had killed him. The pale moonlit sky tilted back and forth, seen through the branches of a rosewood tree, like a bowl of swaying water. He had fallen with one leg bent under him, and now he straightened it. His hand came away sticky when he felt the wound. ‘O God, O mother, O God,’ he moaned, not very loudly, in a singsong voice. He looked at the man with his back turned, vulnerable, kicking wildly at the starter, not six feet away. Nawab couldn’t let him get away with this. The bike belonged to him.

  He stood up again and stumbled toward the motorcycle, tackled the thief, fell on him, pushing him to the ground. The man rolled over, kicked Nawab, and stood up.

  Holding the gun away at arm’s length, he fired five more times, one two three four five, with Nawab looking up into his face, unbelieving, seeing the repeated flame in the revolver’s mouth. The man had never used weapons, had only fired this unlicensed revolver one time, to try it out when he bought it from a bootlegger. He couldn’t bear to point at the body or head, but shot at the groin and legs. The last two bullets missed wildly, throwing up dirt in the road. Again the robber stood the motorcycle up, pushed it twenty feet, panting, and then tried to start it. From Dashtian a torch jogged quickly down the road. Dropping the bike, the man ran into a little stand of reeds by the side of a watercourse.

  Nawab lay in the road, not wanting to move. When he first got shot it didn’t hurt so much as sting, but now the pain grew worse. The blood felt warm in his pants.

  It seemed very peaceful. In the distance, the dogs kept barking, and all around the crickets called, so many of them that they made a single gentle blended sound. In a mango orchard across the canal some crows began cawing, and he wondered why they were calling at night. Maybe a snake up in the tree, in the nest. Fresh fish from the spring floods of the Indus had just come onto the market, and he kept remembering that he had wanted to buy some for dinner, perhaps the next night. As the pain grew worse he thought of that, the smell of frying fish.

  Two men from the village came running up, panting.

  ‘O God, they’ve killed him. Who is it?’

  The other man kneeled down next to the body. ‘It’s Nawab, the electrician, from Dunyapur.’

  ‘I’m not dead,’ said Nawab insistently, without raising his head. ‘The bastard’s right there in those reeds.’

  One of the men had a single-barreled shotgun. Stepping forward, aiming into the center of the clump, he fired, reloaded, and fired again. Nothing moved among the green leafy stalks, which were head-high and surmounted with feathers of seed.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said the one who sat by Nawab, holding his arm.

  The man with the shotgun again loaded and walked carefully forward, holding the gun to his shoulder. Something moved, and he fired. The robber fell forward into the open ground. He called, ‘Mother, help me,’ and got up on his knees, holding his hands to his waist. The gunman walked up to him, hit him once in the middle of the back with the butt of the gun, and then threw down the gun and dragged him roughly by his collar onto the road. Raising the bloody shirt, he saw that the robber had taken half a dozen buckshot pellets in the stomach, black angry holes seeping blood in the light of the torch. The robber kept spitting, without any force.

  The other villager, who had been watching, started the motorcycle by pushing it down the road with the gear engaged, until the engine came to life. Shouting that he would get some transport, he raced off, and Nawab minded that the man in his hurry shifted without using the clutch.

  ‘Do you want a cigarette, Uncle?’ the villager said to Nawab, offering the pack.

  Nawab rolled his head back and forth. ‘Fuck, look at me.’

  The lights of a pickup materialized at the headworks and bounced wildly down the road. The driver and the other two lifted Nawab and the robber into the back and took them to Firoza, to a little private clinic there, run by a mere pharmacist, who nevertheless kept a huge clientele because of his abrupt and sure manner and his success at healing with the same few medicines the prevalent diseases.

  The clinic smelled of disinfectant and of bodily fluids, a heavy sweetish odor. Four beds stood in a room, dimly lit by a fluorescent tube. As they carried him in, Nawab, alert to the point of strain, observed the blood on some rumpled sheets, a rusty blot. The pharmacist, who lived above his clinic, had come down wearing a loincloth and undershirt. He seemed perfectly calm and even cross at having been disturbed.

  ‘Put them on those two beds.’

  ‘As-salaam uleikum, Doctor Sahib,’ said Nawab, who felt as if he were speaking to someone very far away. The pharmacist seemed an immensely grave and important man, and Nawab spoke to him formally.

  ‘What happened, Nawab?’

  ‘He tried to snatch my motorbike, but I didn’t let him.’

  The pharmacist pulled off Nawab’s shalvar, got a rag, and washed away the blood, then poked around quite roughly, while Nawab held the sides of the bed and willed himself not to scream. ‘You’ll live,’ he said. ‘You’re a lucky man. The bullets all went low.’

  ‘Did it hit ...’

  The pharmacist dabbed with the rag. ‘Not even that, thank God.’

  The robber must have been hit in the lung, for he kept breathing up blood.

  ‘You won’t need to bother taking this one to the police,’ said the pharmacist. ‘He’s a dead man.’

  ‘Please,’ begged the robber, trying to raise himself up. ‘Have mercy, save me. I’m a human being also.’

  The pharmacist went into the office next door and wrote out the names of drugs on a pad, sending the two villagers to a dispenser in the next street.

  ‘Tell him it’s Nawabdin the electrician. Tell him I’ll make sure he gets the money.’

  Nawab for the first time looked over at the robber. There was blood on his pillow, and he kept snuffling, as if he needed to blow his nose. His thin and very long neck hung crookedly on his shoulder, as if out of joint. He was older than Nawab had thought before, not a boy, dark-skinned, with sunken eyes and protruding yellow smoker’s teeth, which showed whenever he twitched for breath.

  ‘I did you wrong,’ said the robber weakly. ‘I know that. You don’t know my life, just as I don’t know yours. Even I don’t know what brought me here. Maybe you’re a poor man, but I’m much poorer than you. My mother is old and blind, in the slums outside Multan. Make them fix me, ask them to and they’ll do it.’ He began to cry, not wiping the tears, which drew lines on his dark face.

  ‘Go to hell,’ said Nawab, turning away. ‘Men like you are good at confessions. My children would have begged in the streets.’

  The robber lay heaving, moving his fingers by his sides. The pharmacist seemed to have gone away somewhere, leaving them alone.

  ‘They just said that I’m dying. Forgive me for what I did. I was brought up with kicks and slaps and never enough to eat. I’ve never had anything of my own, no land, no house, no wife, no money, never, nothing. I slept for years on the railway station platform in Multan. My mother’s blessing on you. Give me your blessing, don’t let me die unforgiven.’ He began snuffling and coughing even more, and then started hiccupping.

  Now the disinfectant smelled strong and good to Nawab. The floor seemed to shine. The world around him expanded.

  ‘Never. I won’t forgive you. You had your
life, I had mine. At every step of the road I went the right way and you the wrong. Look at you now, with bubbles of blood stuck in the corner of your mouth. Do you think this isn’t a judgment? My wife and children would have begged in the street, and you would have sold my motorbike to pay for six unlucky hands of cards and a few bottles of poison home brew. If you weren’t lying here now, you would already be in one of the gambling camps along the river.’

  The man said, ‘Please, please, please,’ more softly each time, and then he stared up at the ceiling. ‘It’s not true,’ he whispered. After a few minutes he convulsed and died. The pharmacist, who had come in by then and was cleaning Nawab’s wounds, did nothing to help him.

  Yet Nawab’s mind caught at this, looking at the man’s words and his death, like a bird hopping around some bright object, meaning to peck at it. And then he didn’t. He thought of the motorcycle, saved, and the glory of saving it. He was growing. Six shots, six coins thrown down, six chances, and not one of them killed him, not Nawabdin Electrician.

  Saleema

  SALEEMA WAS BORN in the Jhulan clan, blackmailers and bootleggers, Muslim refugees at Partition from the country northwest of Delhi. They were lucky, the new border lay only thirty or forty miles distant, and from thieving expeditions they knew how to travel unobserved along canals and tracks. Skirting the edge of the Cholistan Desert, crossing into Pakistan, on the fourth night they came to a Hindu village abandoned by all but a few old women. They drove them away and occupied the houses, finding pots and pans, buckets, even guard dogs, which grew accustomed to them. During Saleema’s childhood twenty years later the village was gradually being absorbed into the slums cast off by an adjacent provincial town called Kotla Sardar. Her father became a heroin addict, and died of it, her mother slept around for money and favors, and she herself at fourteen became the plaything of a small landowner’s son. Then a suitor appeared, strutting the village on leave from his job in the city, and plucked her off to Lahore. He looked so slim and city-bright, and soon proved to be not only weak but depraved. These experiences had not cracked her hard skin, but made her sensual, unscrupulous – and romantic.