In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Page 21

  That afternoon she had gazed in the mirror for a long time, searching, and known how pretty she looked, her skin glowing now because of their healthy life, early nights, not too much alcohol, regular food. No one saw her, and soon she would be old, her hair turning gray, having experienced so little. The world was happening elsewhere. She felt ungrateful, knew that she wronged Murad – that she had wronged him terribly by sleeping with Bumpy – and yet the tension of her past and her sense of being unworthy had disappeared. His constant little attentions exasperated her, his attendance on her. She had complained about the tea at the farm, and he sent someone all the way to Islamabad, to buy Earl Grey at Esajee’s, the expensive grocery used by diplomats’ wives. I can’t do it, I won’t, I just won’t, she said to herself, and knew it was much too late for that. She had proven nothing the other night, had not established her independence, if anything she had deepened her obligation to Murad. Where could she go, except to him?

  Swinging her legs, about to step down, she heard a sound, movement in the dry leaves under the tree. A little crackling, then more, a weight moving very lightly, brushing through the brown dry leaves, heavy but silent. Going away. She sat perfectly still, listening, her skin prickling. The whole time it had been there. She imagined a black figure bounding up out of the shadow, not a snake but a man, with hair on his face, upon her and at her throat. The sound moved out to where the leaves of a branch touched the ground, and there just for a moment she thought that she glimpsed something black creeping forward in the grass. In a flash it came to her, a whispering voice. Reach for it. She slipped nimbly from her perch to the place where she had seen movement, expecting to be struck instantly, expecting a blow, like a knotted cloth swung hard against her leg. She waited, eyes closed, ready to sink down, melt – but entirely resolute. Nothing happened. Ten and then twenty heartbeats. Exhaling, she heard the night resume, spreading like spilled ink, first near her, around her head, breeze in the leaves, then sounds further away, dogs barking from distant villages, carrying over the flat landscape.

  Steady, she opened her eyes and looked at the patch of ground boxed in by trees, moonlight silvering their outmost branches. What a small innocent place, a stage. That’s it? she asked. Taking another swig of whiskey and flinging away the bottle, she responded – That’s the point. You take chances and then nothing really changes. She considered the tone in which Murad had told the aphorism about the beginning and the ending of love – exposed, hardened, ironic – a tone that couples settle into when they are broken and at odds forever, but bound; and countering that, his diary, his willingness to force a change.

  Among the possible futures, Lily now recognized the likely one, the one she must avoid. Murad would be rich and powerful, she knew that, having seen him at work here on the farm. He would be shrewd, trusted by men, sometimes warm to her in comradeship, but finally cold, irreproachable. And in the very act of drowning she would be left to bear the blame, to injure him, blindly or by neglect, becoming one of those thin sharp women from the cities who can hold their liquor but are desiccated by it, who are well dressed without taking pleasure in it, living much in London, bored – and ultimately, she hoped, she would depend on this, becoming old and wise, old and self-forgiving.

  A Spoiled Man

  THERE HE STOOD at the stone gateway of the Harounis’ weekend home above Islamabad, a small bowlegged man with a lopsided battered face. When the American wife’s car drove up, turning off the Murree Road, Rezak saluted, eyes straight ahead, not looking at her. She sat in the back and smiled at him from the milky darkness of the car’s interior. What a funny little man! Once he had happened to be walking past as she was driven through the gate, and she had waved. In the few weeks since, he had waited hours to receive this recognition from her, Friday when the family came, Sunday when they left. He had plenty of time.

  The car continued up the winding flagstone drive and disappeared among the rows of jacaranda trees, blooming purple now in late April. Below lay the roadside town of Kalapani, the bazaar pierced by the horns of buses collecting passengers; above stood these walls, which enclosed ten acres of steep land, planted with apples, pine, jasmine, roses, and lilies that the wife had brought from America. The wind blew with a rushing sound through the pine branches and combed the fresh green grass sprouting all over the hillside after the winter rains.

  He made himself useful. In May pickup trucks full of summer flowers were brought up from the nurseries that surrounded the city on the plains below. When the first truck arrived he stood at the gate, watching the gardeners unload the pots, handing them down to each other and then carrying them up to the house – the loaded vehicle couldn’t make it up the steep drive. Without asking he passed through the gate, which he had never done before, took one of the clay pots in his arms, and walked up with it, rolling slightly on his down-at-heel shoes.

  ‘Hey, old man, you’d better leave that before you hurt yourself,’ called a gardener standing in the bed of the pickup.

  ‘I’m from the mountains, brother,’ Rezak said. ‘I can carry you up on my back, and one of these in each hand.’

  The pickup driver, who stood to one side smoking a cigarette, grinned.

  The old majordomo, Ghulam Rasool, had strolled down to watch the show, a potbellied figure with a tall lambskin hat resting at a slight angle on a fringe of white hair. He sent one of the gardeners up to get his hookah and, comfortably settling himself in the watchman’s chair by the gate, looked out over the valley below. At midday he said to Rezak, ‘Come on then and break bread with us.’

  Rezak looked down at his feet. ‘I’d need to put stones in my gizzard like a chicken to digest the rich food that you good people eat.’

  The majordomo tried to convince him, and the gardeners also pressed, but Rezak remained stubborn. ‘You didn’t ask for help, you don’t owe me anything.’

  ‘Suit yourself then,’ Ghulam Rasool said finally. The gardeners walked up the drive, talking, and Rezak stood watching them, wishing he had accepted. He was alone now. In the distance he could see a swimming pool, with curving sides, overhung by chinar trees and willows. Melancholy invaded him, and also peace, borne by the whirring of cicadas nestled among the rocks that punctuated the grounds of the estate. He took a bag from his pocket, undid the elastic band, and tucked a quid of tobacco in his cheek, chopped green naswar.

  In the Kalapani bazaar he ate at his usual teahouse, day-old bread soaked in milk, prescribed by a quack homeopath against a fistula that had tormented him for many years. The waiter brought the sopping bread and, when the crowd subsided, he came over to have a few words, about the flow of tourists up to Murree, more each year, this season begun so early. Lonely as he was, Rezak relied upon his welcome in the teahouse, his connection with it. When the older chickens at the poultry sheds where he worked were culled, Rezak would bring down one of the healthier birds, asking the teahouse to cook it, as a holiday from his bread diet. He shared with whoever was there, insistent, forcing his friend the waiter to eat.

  ‘There, look, I’ve taken some,’ the waiter would say, pulling off a wing. Even he, hardened by a diet of stale leftovers from the kitchen, was dubious about eating this time-expired bird.

  ‘No, you have to really eat.’ Rezak even became angry about it once, leaving abruptly, the chicken still on the table.

  After finishing his lunch Rezak walked through a government pine forest to the poultry sheds. The owner had bribed the wardens to allow construction extending into the forest, and each summer his men set fires at the base of pines planted by the British a hundred years earlier, in order to kill the trees and open up more space. Rezak came to his home, not the workers’ quarters attached to the sheds, but a hut that he had built for himself, a little wooden cubicle, faced with tin and mounted on thick legs. Several decades before, in his early twenties, he had fallen out with his stepbrothers over shared property up in the mountains, a few acres of land on which they grew wheat and potatoes, bordered by apricot trees. O
utmaneuvered, dispossessed, he had come down to the plains, vowing never to see his family again. This box had become his home and consolation. Each place he worked he set it up, and then, when he quarreled with the other workers or the boss, as he invariably did, he would take it apart and cart it away – always he kept a store of money, untouched no matter what, enough to pay for trucking this little house, this nest, to whatever place his heart had set on next. This was his guarantee of independence.

  Opening the heavy padlock, he lifted the door hatch and climbed in, tucking his shoes into a wooden box nailed below the cramped hatch. Run off an electrical connection drawn from the poultry sheds, tiny red lights strung all over the ceiling warmed the chamber. He could sit but not stand inside, and had covered the floor with a cotton mattress, which gave off a ripe animal odor, deeply comforting to him. A funnel and pipe served as a handy spittoon, a mirror and shelf allowed him to shave without getting out of bed, an electric fan cooled him. Photographs of actresses plastered the walls and ceiling, giving him company. Fickle and choosy, he shuffled and moved them, discarding one, stripping the photo from the wall with a cold expression. For several months he had been favoring a Pathan actress known as ‘the Atomic Bum’ – who had wagged her way through a string of hit movies in the past year.

  A few dats later, loitering around the gates of the Harouni estate again, Rezak decided to go in, stepping through a narrow entry set into the wall. The owners would be in Islamabad for the week, and earlier he had seen the watchman down in the bazaar. By climbing the slope of the mountain opposite, he had observed the household routine, marked the servants’ quarters, watched the owners sitting on a terrace, brightly clothed. Close up the house seemed to him ugly, made of large rough-hewn stones, with a vast wall of glass all across the front, looking out over the valley and down to Islamabad, forty kilometers below. Nothing to it – no metalwork, no paint, no decorative lights, plain, only size to recommend it. The house blended into the landscape, as if it were one of the boulders littering the mountain slope.

  He found the majordomo sitting in a chair under a tree, reading a newspaper.

  ‘Ah, the volunteer,’he said amiably. ‘Come on then, have a pull on the hookah.’

  Rezak sat down on the edge of a charpoy, dangling his short legs. ‘I’m killing myself with this poison instead.’ He spat and then dipped green coarse tobacco under his gum.

  ‘You work up in Ayub’s sheds, don’t you?’

  ‘When Ayub needs me I work. He pays me in dying chickens and loose change.’ He tried to make a joke of it.

  ‘That’s what I hear – Ayub shaves both sides and then trims out the middle piece.’

  Rezak laughed mirthlessly. ‘The way I’m going soon I’ll be eating grass.’ He paused. ‘I’ve been thinking, I can do woodwork, I know about trees. I’ll carry things, work in the garden. Feed me and I’ll work here and do whatever you want. You don’t even have to give me a room, I’ve got a portable cubicle that I live in, you can stick me in some corner.’

  The owner of the estate, Sohail Harouni, son of a man who made a fortune in cement and other industries, had while at university in the United States married an American woman named Sonya. ‘No, I really love it here,’ she would say defensively when asked at a party. ‘It’s strange, it’s like a drug. I think I miss the States so much – and I do – and then after a month there I’m completely bored. Pakistan makes everything else seem washed out. This is my place, now. I don’t do enough, but I feel as if here I can at least do something for the good.’ She did fit in more than most foreign women, she studied Urdu, to the point where she could communicate quite effectively, made an effort to meet Pakistanis outside the circuit in Islamabad. Even her husband’s catty aunts admitted that she was one of the few foreigners who wore Pakistani clothes without looking like either an Amazon or a Christmas tree.

  And yet, though she insisted that she loved Pakistan, sometimes it all became too much. ‘I hate it, everyone’s a crook, nothing works here!’ she would sob, fighting with her husband. Then she would storm out to her car and retreat to the Kalapani house, forty minutes away, arriving unannounced, withdrawing darkly into the master bedroom, while the servants scrambled to prepare her meal. In the evening she would wander the large stone house, slowly becoming calm, speaking with her friends on the telephone. Her husband would drive up to spend the night with her, bringing their little son as a pledge of their love, and they would make peace.

  It happened that, soon after Rezak made his plea to Ghulam Rasool, Sonya had a huge row with her husband and ran away to Kalapani. The next morning, she sat drinking coffee on the sunny terrace, which had a view out over the government forest, now heavily logged by poachers, and then down to Islamabad and Rawalpindi. The strain of the fight had shaded into a desire for simplicity and order, an almost pleasant tearfulness.

  Ghulam Rasool came up from the garden, coughing so that she would not be startled. Of all the servants he was the one she most trusted with her son. She herself felt comfortable with him, with his gentle, stoic manner, with his prayers and his superstitions.

  Her blond hair held back by a black velvet band, she wore a simple white blouse, white slacks, and lay on a divan, immaculate, reading a slender volume of poetry – she had been an English major, and turned to a handful of familiar books as a restorative, Yeats or Rilke, Keats, to be taken as needed.

  ‘Excuse me, Begum Sahib. I wanted to ask, it’s time to think about the roses.’

  She knew that he wanted to soften her attitude toward her husband. In any case, she liked him to come and talk with her, and they used as a pretext his supervision of the garden, although he had always been a valet and knew very little about flowers or trees. She put down her book and they considered the roses and the placement of the annuals.

  ‘Begging your pardon, the local people drive their goats into the Ali Khan orchard, and they’re destroying the saplings that you brought from America. There’s an old man, he can’t do hard labor, but he’s a reliable person. His family abandoned him. He even has his own portable hut – he’ll take it there and live as a guard. You don’t have to give him a salary. Just food and a few rupees for pocket money.’

  But she wanted to give the old man the same as all the others. It made her happy to think of spoiling him in his old age.

  Newly hired, Rezak moved to the Ali Khan lands, a walled parcel of four or five acres just up the road from the main house. Like the other servants and gardeners, he received a salary of nine thousand rupees a month, more than he had ever made in his life. The gardeners from the big house transported his cubicle in pieces, then helped him reassemble it next to a hut that was already standing there, a single stone-built room, with an open hearth, which Rezak could use as a storeroom and kitchen. The land had no electric connection, so he bought oil lamps, which glowed soothingly at night as he went about his last chores, his routine of dinner and bedtime.

  The season turned hot just as Rezak moved to his new home, coloring the green fruit on the apple and peach and pear trees imported from America. He devoted all his grateful heart to the little orchard, watering the trees with a bucket from the stream that ran through the property, working manure into the soil with a spade. Taking a bus to Islamabad, with his own money he bought three grape vines, carried them back wrapped in straw, and trained them up the legs of his little tin-clad cubicle. He planted radishes, corn, cauliflower, onions, peas, more than he alone could eat, so that as they ripened he could take baskets of produce up to the big house. With his second paycheck he bought a goat for milk – before, in his previous jobs, it would have cost many months’ savings.

  One day the master and his wife took some guests to the Ali Khan land for a picnic lunch. In the morning servants brought carpets and divans, tubs full of ice for the wine, grills for the meat, firewood in case the party lasted into the night. Rezak spent hours ferrying boxes and chairs and rugs down from the main road to the picnic spot, taking the biggest loads, pushing him
self forward, claiming precedence on his plot of land.

  The guests arrived, Pakistanis and foreigners, a dozen or so of them, and were soon sprawled on the carpets, drinking wine, resolved into several groups. Walking briskly down the steep path, sure-footed, holding a floppy yellow sun hat with a trailing ribbon in her hand, Sonya had said to Rezak as she passed, ‘Salaam, Baba.’ His heart, his soul melted, as if a queen had spoken to a foot soldier. She had given him charge of the garden, of the trees that she brought from her homeland, and now she was seeing the results of his husbandry for the first time.

  All the other servants knew what to do – Ghulam Rasool poured the wine and passed the hors d’oeuvres, a cook readied the fire and skewered kebabs on metal rods, the gardeners spread out as a kind of picket, to prevent anyone from looking over the walls. Rezak’s shyness and diffidence contested with a desire to take part, to show off all the work he had done in the orchard. He squatted under an apple tree, trying not to look at the Sahibs, pulling up sprigs of grass, tying them into figures and knots, hoping to be summoned. Restless, he knelt down by the cook and took over the job of tending the fire, pushing aside the weedy boy who acted as the cook’s helper.

  Sohail Harouni was a handsome cheerful man with never a care in his life, who enjoyed giving parties more than anything else. After a few glasses of wine he called a young valet and told him to bring the stereo from the main house and hook it up. A driver raced to Murree, ten kilometers up the mountain, and bought a roll of heavy wire. Glasses in hand, the guests and even the host enthusiastically helped string the wire down through the trees from a roadside shop.