In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Page 3

  One morning she lay on the bed of the cramped servants’ quarters in Lahore where she and her husband lived. He was gone for the day, aimless and sloping around the streets, unwanted at the edge of the crowd in a tea stall. Though he knew right away that she slept with Hassan the cook, in this house where she served as a maid, the first time he opened his mouth she made to slap him and pushed him out of the room; and next day as usual he hungrily took the few rupees she gave – to buy twists of rocket pills, his amphetamine addiction.

  She picked at the chipped polish on her long slim toe, feeling sorry for herself. Her oval face, taller than broad, with deep-set eyes, had a grace contrasting with her bright easy temperament. At twenty-four this hard life had not yet marked her, and when she smiled her dimples made her seem even younger, just a girl; she still had some of the girl’s gravity. It was true, the cook Hassan had gotten everything from her, as always she’d given it too soon. She had been a maidservant in three houses so far, since her husband lost his job as peon in an office, and in every one she had opened her legs for the cook. She’d been here at Gulfishan, the Lahore mansion of the landlord K. K. Harouni, only a month, and already she’d slept with Hassan. The cooks tempted her, lording it over the kitchen, where she liked to sit, with the smell of broth and green vegetables cooking and sauce. And she had duties in the kitchen, she made the chapattis, so thin and light that they almost floated up to the ceiling. She had that in her hands. Mr. Harouni had called her into the dining room at lunch one day and said he’d never in seventy years eaten better ones, while she blushed and looked at her bare feet. And then, the delicacies that Hassan gave her – the best parts, things that should have gone to the table, foreign things, pistachio ice cream and slices of sweet pies, baked tomatoes stuffed with cheese, potato cutlets. Things that she asked for, village food, curry with marrow bones and carrot halva.

  The entire household, from the Sahib on down, had been eating to suit her appetite.

  ‘Ask for it, my duckling,’ said Hassan in the mornings, when she drank her tea sitting beside him, hunched together in the kitchen. ‘I need to fatten you up, I like them plump.’

  ‘Don’t talk that way, I come from a respectable family.’

  ‘Well, whatever kind of family, what should I stuff that rounded little belly with today?’

  And he wobbled off to market on his bicycle with a big woven basket strapped on the back, riding so slowly that he could almost have walked there faster, pedaling with his knees pointed out.

  But that had ended soon enough. Why are cooks always vicious? She knew that at lunchtime today she would go silently into the kitchen and begin making the chapattis, that Hassan would be standing at the stove, banging lids, ignoring her. She hadn’t done anything, she had told the slut sweepress who was always hanging around the kitchen to fuck off somewhere else, and he exploded. Hassan ruled the hot filthy kitchen. He made food both for the master’s table and for all the servants, more than a dozen of them. For days on end the servants’ food would be inedible – keeping with Hassan’s policy of collective punishment. Once, when the accounts manager had quite mildly commented on Hassan’s reckless padding of the bills, they had eaten nothing but watery lentils for more than a week, until the manager backed down. ‘Well, I’ve got to cut corners somewhere,’ Hassan kept saying, shaking his grizzled head. Anyway, Saleema knew that he was through with her, would sweeten up and try to fuck her now and then, out of cruelty as much as anything else, to show he could – but the easy days were over, now she had no one to protect her. In this household a man who had served ten years counted as a new servant. Hassan had been there over fifty, Rafik, the master’s valet, the same. Even the nameless junior gardener had been there four or five. With less than a month’s service Saleema counted for nothing. Nor did she have patronage. She had been hired on approval, to serve the master’s eldest daughter, Begum Kamila, who lived in New York, and who that spring had come to stay with her father. Haughty and proud, Kamila allowed no intimacies.

  Saleema next angled for one of the drivers – forlorn hope! – a large man with a drooping mustache who didn’t ever speak to her. The two drivers shared quarters, a room next to the cool dark garage where two aging Mercedes stood, rarely driven, because the old man rarely went out. Day and night the drivers kept up a revolving card game, with the blades from a nearby slum, the fast set. She would linger past the door of the room where they sprawled on a raft of beds. At night they sometimes drank beer, hiding the bottles on the floor.

  As she walked past their room a second time on a breezy spring morning, one of the men in the room whistled.

  ‘Go to hell,’ she said.

  That made it worse.

  ‘Give us some of that black mango. It’s a new variety!’

  ‘No, it’s smooth like ice cream, I swear to God my tongue is melting.’

  ‘You can wipe your dipstick after checking the oil!’

  One of them pretended to be defending her. ‘How dare you say that!’

  She went into the latrine, holding back her tears. She didn’t even have a place to herself for that, she shared the same toilet as the men. The dark room stank, there were cockroaches in the corners. She closed the wooden door of the stall behind her, pushed her face and arms against the flaking whitewashed wall, and began softly to cry.

  ‘What is it, girl?’

  Someone must have been in the shower, next to the toilet. Usually she called before entering.

  ‘Who the hell is that?’

  ‘Stay in there, my clothes are on the wall. I’m just finished.’

  She recognized the voice of Rafik, the valet.

  ‘You can go to hell too. I’m done with you fuckheads.’

  ‘That’s all right, quiet down, I’m just leaving.’ His thin arm reached to take the clothes hanging from a nail pounded into the wall behind the door. She heard him dress and go out, pulling the door shut gently.

  She squatted in the dark, pulling down her shalvar and trying to pee. Nothing came. His voice had been gentle. Three bars of light filtered across the air above her head, alive with motes of dust, and this filled her with hope. The summer would be here in a month, the cold winter had passed. She loved the heat, thick night air, and the smell of water and dust, the cool shower spraying her breasts, water splashing on the furry walls in the dank room; and her body, coming out into the evening, drying her hair, head sideways, ear to her shoulder, combing its hanging length.

  Rafik sat in the servants’ courtyard on one of the dirty white metal chairs, smoking a hookah, not looking at her as she sat down on a low wooden stool, almost at his knees.

  He cupped the mouthpiece of the hookah with blunt weathered hands, a heavy agate ring on his index finger. She had never before looked closely at Rafik. He wore clean plain clothes, a woolen mountain vest – spoke with the curling phlegmy accent of the Salt Range, despite having served in Lahore for fifty years. Black shoes cracked where the toes bent, polished. He said the five daily prayers, the only servant who did. A week earlier he had dyed his hair red with henna, to keep him cool as summer came. Hair parted in the middle, looking almost martial but without any swagger; a small brush of mustache, thick ears of an aging man. He must be sixty, came into service as a boy, fifty years ago. He spent more time with the master than anyone else, woke the old man and put him to bed, brought him tea, massaged his feet, dressed him, brought him a single whiskey at night. All of Old Lahore knew Rafik, the barons, the landlords and magnates and politicians, the old dragons, the hostesses of forty years ago.

  She let herself cry a few more tears – she could cry whenever she wanted, she thought of herself, alone, her husband on drugs, that dried-up stick who picked her out of the village, when she thought he was saving her. She was still a girl, not just then, but now too. She cried harder, wiping her eyes with the corner of her dupatta.

  Rafik’s mouth worked, distorting his patient resigned face. He took a long pull on the hookah, the tobacco thick in the air.
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  They were alone, they could hear Hassan in the kitchen making lunch, pounding something. The drivers sat in their quarters playing cards, the gardeners tended their plants, the sweepers were in the house washing the toilets or the floors, or sweeping the leaves from the long tree-shaded drive at the front of the house.

  ‘I know what you all think,’ she began. ‘You think I’m a slut, you think I poison my husband. Because of him I’m alone, and you all do with me as you like. I’m trying to live here too, you know. I’m not a fool. I also come from somewhere.’ Her words poured out clearly, evenly, angrily, entirely unplanned.

  He didn’t say anything, smoked, his heavy-lidded eyes half shut.

  After a moment she got up to leave.

  ‘Stay a minute, girl. I’ll bring you tea.’

  He shifted to get up, putting aside the bamboo stem of the hookah.

  ‘All right, Uncle. But let me bring it.’ His offering this meant so much to her.

  Going boldly into the kitchen, she ladled tea into two chipped cups – the servants’ crockery – from a kettle that simmered on a back burner morning until night. Hassan ignored her.

  She brought the cups and handed one to Rafik, hoping as she sat down on a bench that someone would come and see them together.

  Touching the hot tea to her lips, she peered at him.

  He poured tea into the saucer and blew the clotted cream away, then sipped. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ he said.

  She wanted to stop it, because it seemed too soon after her tears, but a smile came over her, rising up. She beamed, her girlish yet knowing face lit and transformed.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘Nothing. You look like my uncle, except he was huge and fat and you’re thin. He always blew on his tea and then he sipped it and looked sort of gloomy and important, like you do.’

  ‘Gloomy?’ He said it in the funniest way, startled.

  I can get him, she thought, and it sent a shiver of happiness through her.

  ‘I’m just joking with you. You’re completely different from my uncle. Is that better?’

  He smiled, not as a grown-up does, but like a child, smiling with his eyes and mouth and the wrinkles bitten into his face, cheerfully. She noticed this, and thought, He smiles all over, the same way I do.

  ‘You’re making fun of me. Well go ahead, I’m an old man. It’s time for me to be a fool.’

  She thought of disagreeing with him, saying he would never be a fool – but stopped herself. Instead she said, ‘Well, whatever time it is, I don’t think foolishness wears a watch.’

  ‘You’re full of riddles, little girl.’

  ‘Little girl.’ Finishing her tea, she took both her cup and his into the kitchen and washed them carefully. Going out again and walking past him, she said, ‘Thank you, I feel better for talking to you, Uncle.’

  In her room, she sat on the bed cross-legged, closed her eyes, leaned back against the wall, and thought, After all, why not? Why shouldn’t I?

  Saleema avoided Rafik during the next few days, watching him, but not presuming on the intimacy of their one conversation. She had never been discreet, so that although she did this almost unconsciously, it suggested to her new possibilities of relation, defined not by constraint – which she understood – but by delicacy. Then fate stepped in to reward her. Every year, at the time of the wheat harvest, K. K. Harouni went for a week to his farm at Dunyapur, on the banks of the Indus. His daughter Begum Kamila that year accompanied him, and therefore Saleema went too.

  Early on the morning of the departure the two cars stood in front of the house, one under the portico, for the Sahib and Kamila, and the other for the servants. The drivers polished the cars while they waited, leaning over to clean the windshields, experts. Saleema had tied her clothes in a bag. She had bought a new pair of sandals the day before, and now the red plastic straps were cutting into her feet. When the master came out, leaning on Rafik’s arm, those who were sitting on their haunches stood up sharply. He got into the car, called Shah Sahib the accounts manager over, spoke to him briefly through the lowered window, and then the car pulled away, passed under the alley of ancient flame-of-the-forest trees, and turned out the gate. Everyone relaxed, Shah Sahib lit a cigarette, looked without interest over the scene, and returned to his office.

  ‘Come on, come on, get it done,’ Samundar Khan driver said to the gardeners, who were loading provisions into the trunk of the second car.

  Hassan sat in the front, wearing a lambskin cap that brushed the roof, Rafik and Saleema in the back, a basket of food on the seat between them. She had never before ridden in a private car. Sitting with her hands on her knees, she looked out the window at the old shops along the Mall, Tollington Market, where Hassan went on his bicycle to buy chickens and meat, then the mausoleum of Datta Sahib.

  I suppose people looking in must wonder who I am, she thought.

  As they came across the Ravi River bridge she asked if she could open her window, not so much because she wanted to, as to register her presence. Hassan and Samundar Khan were arguing about whether the fish in the river had been getting bigger or smaller in the last few years.

  ‘O for God’s sake,’ said Hassan, ‘what do you know about it. I’m a cook, and I’ve been cooking fish longer than you’ve been breathing. Listen to me, once upon a time the fish used to be half as big as this car.’

  ‘For you old guys everything used to be bigger.’

  With Hassan, this could go on for hours. Saleema asked again, ‘Can I open the window please?’

  They were stuck in traffic going through the toll.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Samundar Khan said. ‘The air’s free.’

  She couldn’t find the handle. Rafik leaned over and touched the button, and the window glided down. He pointed out at the river. The rising sun threw a broad stripe of orange on the chocolate brown water. Bicycles and donkey carts and gaudy Bedford trucks streamed in and out of the city over the bridge. He gestured with his eyes at Samundar Khan and Hassan debating nonsense in the front.

  ‘Wisdom against youth,’ he whispered.

  Saleema drove back into her childhood, through towns the same as those around her home a hundred miles to the east, rows of ugly concrete buildings, crowded bazaars, slums, ponds of sewage water choked with edible water lilies, then open country, groves of blossoming orange trees, the ripe mustard yellow with flowers; but she rode in an immaculate car instead of a bus crashing along thick with the odor of the crowd. She had painted her nails the night before; her hand rested on the sill of the window, the spring air brushing her fingers. She felt pretty. They drove through mango orchards, fields of harvest wheat. Rafik sat telling a rosary of worn plastic beads, mouthing the ninety-nine names of Allah, his eyes dull, allowing the landscape to pass through him.

  They turned onto a single-lane road, which led first through barren salt flats, then irrigated fields, and finally into an orchard of old mango trees.

  ‘All this belongs to Mian Sahib,’ said Rafik.

  They drove up a packed dirt road bordered with jasmine, along the brick wall that enclosed the house, running for several acres, and then into a cul-de-sac planted with rosewood trees. Ten or twelve men sat on benches and stools – the managers and others who wanted to be noticed by the landowner. Rafik stepped out of the car and embraced them one by one. Several of them looked over at Saleema and said, ‘Salaam, Bibi jee.’

  After they had tea Rafik said to her, ‘Come on, I’ll show you where Begum Kamila’s room is.’

  They went through an ornate wooden door, set in the wall, and into a lush garden that stretched away and became lost among banyans and rosewood trees and open lawns.

  She paused, shading her eyes with her hand, taking in the green sward.

  ‘There’s more than you can see. If you like, I’ll show you later.’

  Walking through a grassy courtyard, Rafik came to a door, removed his shoes, and knocked.

  ‘Come in,’ called Begum
Kamila. She was sitting in an armchair reading a book. ‘So you’ve come, have you?’

  She must once have been a very beautiful woman. She wore bright saris and colored her long hair jet black, and on her third finger she wore an immense emerald set in gold, which Saleema once found lying next to the bathtub, and held in her palm for a long time, feeling the heft of the stone, guessing what it must be worth.

  ‘Shall I light the fire, Begum Sahiba?’ asked Rafik.

  ‘Go ahead, it’ll take away the damp. I suppose Daddy’s about to call for lunch.’

  Rafik kneeled in front of the fire, twisting sheets of newspaper into sticks.

  Kamila’s bags had been placed on a long desk by the window, which overlooked another garden. Lines had been chalked in the grass for tennis and a net strung. Saleema took the toiletries into the bathroom and laid them out. Unlike the house in Lahore, where the doors were smudged with fingerprints and the paint flaked off the walls in strips, these rooms had been newly painted. The rugs were bright and clean, the brick floors had been washed, vases of flowers, badly arranged, had been placed all around, mari golds and roses.

  Going out again into the dark chilly bedroom, Saleema found Rafik still kneeling at the hearth, the flames orange on his orange face.

  ‘Is Bibi gone?’

  ‘They announced lunch.’

  ‘May I sit down?’

  He moved over.

  ‘It’s amazing. My village would fit in a corner of this garden, and we were thirty families. And it’s so clean and comfortable, out here in the middle of nowhere.’