In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Read online

‘Harouni Sahib is a lord, and we’re poor people. And then, these are the games that the managers play. The better the house and gardens look, the more comfortable he is, the less Mian Sahib notices the tricks they all get up to on the farms. I don’t know what they’re storing it up for, stealing fertilizer and the water and cheating in the books. In the old days no one dared. Mian Sahib made these people – the fathers ate his salt, and now the sons have forgotten and are eating everything else.’

  The fire cracked, the dry mango wood catching hungrily.

  She threw a little twig into the fire. ‘At least their bellies are full.’

  In the morning she washed Begum Kamila’s clothes, sitting by a faucet outside in the back garden, beside the unused tennis court. Foam on her arms, water splashing onto her bodice from the big orange bucket, she looked up at the trees blowing in the wind, the birds. She was alone. The swaybacked tennis net and the odd chalked lines made the lawn seem expectant, prepared. Last night she had taken a bowl of food quickly into her own room. She heard the men outside around a fire telling stories about the old tough managers and light-fingered servants, now dead, or about happenings on the farm, cattle thefts, dowries. Hassan and Rafik and even the drivers, who had after all been in service fifteen or twenty years, had old friends here.

  Churning the clothes in the bucket, squeezing them out, she felt happier perhaps than she ever had been. The April sun had bite, even in the morning, reflecting off the whitewashed walls enclosing this back garden. The earth cooled the soles of her bare feet. Her thoughts ducked in and out of holes, like mice. I’ll avoid him, she thought, settling on this as a way forward, knowing that she would be seeing Rafik at lunch if not before. Her love affairs had been so plainly mercantile transactions that she hadn’t learned to be coquettish. But the little hopeful girl in her awoke now. Spreading the clothes to dry on a long hedge that bordered the tennis court, bright red and white and yellow patches against the healthy green, she sat there alone in the sun until lunchtime, undisturbed except once, by a gardener, who walked past with a can, stooping to water the potted plants arranged next to the building.

  At lunch she made the chapattis – no one in the village could do that properly. Hassan came into the big hot kitchen, which had a row of coal-burning hearths set at waist level in one wall, and lifted the covers off the saucepans and casseroles prepared by the farm cook – enough for several dozen people.

  ‘Hey, boy,’ he said to the gangly farm cook, ‘I’ve never heard of chickens with six legs. I suppose you’re one of those guys – if you cooked a fly you’d keep the breast for yourself. At least you could waft it past your lord and master once.’

  He pinched Saleema under her arm as she stood flattening the chapattis between her hands.

  ‘Here’s where the real meat is.’

  He laughed without mirth, a drawn-out wheeze.

  The young cook didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t slipped anything away yet, though he certainly planned to.

  Rafik stood beside another servant, who was spooning the food into serving dishes. The room had high ceilings and a long wooden table in the middle. In the old times food for scores of people had been cooked here, when the master came on weeks-long hunting trips, with large parties and beaters and guides. Fans that had been broken for years hung down on long pipes, like in a railway station hall.

  Saleema had become rigid when Hassan pinched her, raising her shoulders but keeping her eyes on the skillet.

  Resting a hand on Hassan’s shoulder, Rafik said, ‘Uncle, why do you bother this poor girl? What has she done to you?’

  ‘You should ask, what hasn’t she done to me.’Then, after a moment, ‘The hell with it, she’s a virgin ever since she rowed across the river, how’s that? Don’t “Uncle” me, when you’re my own uncle.’

  He threw down his apron, and left the kitchen, saying to the village cook, ‘Watch out for Kamila Bibi, young man. Mian Sahib doesn’t care what he eats.’

  As he walked past Saleema, carrying a tray of food to the living room, Rafik made a funny stiff face and then winked.

  That evening the weather changed. This wasn’t the season for rain, but just before dark the wind from the north had begun to blow across the plain, bending the branches of the rosewood trees like a closed hand running up the trunk to strip off the leaves, throwing in front of it a scattering of crows, which flew sloping and tumbling like scraps of black cotton. The rain spattered and made pocks in the dust, cold as rain is before hail. Then it fell heavily. Rafik had taken the drinks into the living room at seven, as he did every day. The food sat warming over coals, there was nothing further to be done until the bell for dinner rang at eight-thirty. The others were in the verandah of the servants’ sitting area. Saleema leaned against the long table, while across from her Rafik sat on a stool. The dim bulbs with tin shades hanging from the ceiling threw a yellow light which left the corners of the room dark. Neither of them could think of anything to say, and Saleema kept wiping her eyes and her face with her dupatta as if she were hot.

  When the rain became hard she said, ‘Come on, let’s go see it come down.’

  They walked awkwardly through the empty dining room, which smelled of dust and damp brick, then through an arcade to the back verandah. A single banyan tree stood in the middle of the back lawn, the rain cascading down through its handsbreadth leaves. Saleema leaned against a pillar, Rafik stood next to her, his hands behind his back.

  ‘God forgive us, there’s going to be a lot of damage to the straw that hasn’t been covered,’ he said.

  ‘This will even knock down the wheat that hasn’t been cut. Look at how hard it’s coming down.’

  She looked over at him, his serious wrinkled face, his stubble. Despite the rain, moths circled around the lamps hanging from the ceiling. She kept bumping her hip against the pillar. Come on, come on, she thought. Finally, he said, ‘Well at least they haven’t started planting the cotton yet.’

  She turned, with her back to the pillar. ‘Rafik, we’re both from the village, we know all this.’

  He looked over at her quickly. His face seemed hard. She had startled him. Then he did come over.

  She put her arms around him. ‘You’re thin,’she said, as if she were pleading, ‘you should eat more,’ exhaling. The water splashed in the gutter spouts. He also pulled her into his body and held her, melted into her, she was almost exactly as tall as him, his thin body and hers muscular and young. He kissed her neck, not like a man kissing a woman, but inexpertly, as if he were kissing a baby. She kept her eyes open, face on his shoulder.

  The electricity went, with a sort of crack, night extinguishing the house and the rain-swept garden.

  ‘Let’s go, little girl,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘They’ll be calling for me.’ In the darkness, with the other servants hurrying to bring lamps and candles, no one noticed when Saleema and Rafik returned to the kitchen.

  But the next morning, when the servants were eating their parathas and tea, he came over and sat down next to her, saying nothing, sipping the tea and chewing noisily because of his false teeth, his mouth rotating. So everyone knew. After that he ate his meals next to her, and when they had no duties they went off into the empty back garden and sat talking. But they didn’t make love, or even do more than hold hands.

  At the end of the week Harouni and his retinue drove back to Lahore, Rafik, Saleema, and the rest.

  The servants had a game that they played, with Rafik surprisingly enough not just acquiescent but the ringleader. Up in Rafik’s native mountains marijuana grew everywhere, along the sides of the roads, and thickest along the banks of open sewers running through the rocky pine woods below the villages, the blooming plants at the end of summer competing in sweetness and stench with the odor of sewage. Hash smoke clouded the late-night air in the little village tea stall when he was a young man. Now, every spring Rafik planted a handful of seeds behind some trees in a corner of the Lahore garden, and in the fall he dried the plants a
nd ground up the leaves. He played tricks on the others, making a paste called bhang and slipping it into the food of one or another servant. Sometimes they would taste it and stop eating, but often not.

  A few weeks after the visit to the Harouni farm at Dunyapur, Rafik began secretly compounding a batch of his potion in his quarters, with the help of Saleema. Kamila Bibi had gone back to New York, but Saleema had been kept on, through Rafik’s intervention. The accounts manager Shah Sahib had been planning to tell the master that the girl was ‘corrupt’ and a ‘bad character’ – saying these words in English – and toss her out. But now he held his tongue, not wanting to cross Rafik. And Rafik spoke for her one evening as the old man went to sleep, with Rafik massaging his legs.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir, about the maid Saleema who has been serving Begum Kamila. She’s a poor girl and her husband is sick and she’s useful in the kitchen. She makes the chapattis. If you can give her a place it would be a blessing.’

  The old man did not merely lack interest in the affairs of the servants – he was not conscious that they had lives outside his purview.

  ‘That’s fine.’

  Now Saleema watched in Rafik’s quarters as he boiled the dried leaves in water over an electric ring.

  ‘Hey, girl, close the door, don’t let anyone see.’

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, swinging her bare feet, kicking off her sandals, which fell by the door. Rafik squatted, stirring the leaves with a wooden spoon and peering into the cauldron. They still hadn’t made love, though now he would lie with her in the afternoon during the servants’ naptime, his hand on her breasts. He made no attempt to hide their relations, and all the servants thought they must be sleeping together. She would fold him into her body, and stroke his thinning hennaed hair while he slept.

  ‘This is a strange kind of cooking for an old man.’

  ‘You’re the strange one, following this old man around like a little sheep. Most shepherds are young boys.’

  ‘Please don’t say that.’ She never in her life had spoken in these gentle tones.

  He looked up at her, eyes smiling, pointing with the spoon. ‘Be careful or I’ll give you a taste of this!’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘No, I’m serious. When Mian Sahib goes to ’Pindi I want everyone to take some. I’ll have it too.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘It’ll be fun. And we’ll be together. You can trust me.’

  Two days later K. K. Harouni flew to Rawalpindi, to attend a meeting of the board of governors of the State Bank – one of the few positions he still held, a sinecure – the real policy was decided elsewhere, Harouni and other eminences unknowingly acting to camouflage self-serving deals and manipulations.

  Shah Sahib, who had accompanied his master to the airport, stood next to Samundar Khan in the parking lot, leaning against the hood of the car, wearing a gray suit with excessively broad lapels.

  A jet taxied out and came hurtling down the runway, then climbed smoothly through haze, toward Rawalpindi to the west, locking its wheels up.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Shah Sahib.

  As they drove out the airport gate, Samundar Khan said, ‘May I take you home?’

  Shah Sahib glanced over at him. ‘I need to pick up some things for my wife. Then you can take me home.’

  ‘Well, Shah Sahib’s out of the way,’Samundar Khan said, walking into the kitchen.

  Hassan stood at the stove over an enormous pot of boiling oil, cooking the samosas, which Rafik and Saleema were assembling at a table, filling them with meat and bhang. Rafik had told the servants that he would be passing around samosas to celebrate good news from home, but everyone saw through this. The drivers and their gang were fully on board, and had sent Samundar Khan to make sure they got a heaping plate. The old gardener had left, but the younger one had sidled into the drivers’ quarters and wanted to join in. The oldest of the sweepers, a thin balding man with a meek, servile expression, sat out in the courtyard hoping that he would be included. Whenever he could afford it he would buy himself a stick of hash to smoke at home after the day’s work.

  All the bhang had been used up. A pile of samosas steamed in a plate.

  ‘Okay, now it’s us,’ said Rafik.

  Hassan turned his back and raised the lid on a saucepan. ‘Not me.’

  But he ended up having some.

  Saleema and Rafik sat in his room eating samosas. At first she had refused, but he pressed her.

  ‘Now what?’ she said.

  ‘Sit here and tell me a story. Tell me about when you were a girl.’

  Neither of them had spoken much of their pasts or their homes. She knew that he had a wife and children, two sons, and shied away from anything bringing it to mind.

  ‘What shall I say? I was brought up with slaps and harsh words. We had nothing, we were poor. My father sold vegetables from a cart, but when he began smoking heroin he sold everything, the cart, his bicycle, the radio, even the dishes in the kitchen. Once a man – a boy – gave me a little watch – he brought it from Multan – and my father pushed me to the ground and took it from my wrist.’

  ‘Poor girl, little girl, how could he do it?’ He rolled her over onto the bed and kissed her neck, under her chin. Stopping for a moment, he stood and locked the door.

  She didn’t tell him the worst, much worse things. Her father came into her room at night and felt under her clothes. For the first time, Rafik touched between her legs. She opened the drawstring of her shalvar, then took off her shirt, sitting up on the bed. Her small breasts stood out, her ribs.

  He turned off the lights, but she said, ‘No, I want to see you.’

  ‘This old body? Leave it, there’s nothing to see.’

  ‘For me you’re not old.’

  The bhang had begun to affect her, she felt the dimensions of the room, the light, the calendar on the wall that showed a picture of the Kaaba, the black cloths covering the stone and crowds circling around it. How strange, she had never before seen the roof, made of bricks and metal rods, the little high window to let in air. She felt aroused, yet wanted to get up, to go somewhere. She took off his clothes, peeling off his tan socks. Their skin touched. Standing up and going to the corner, she bent down on purpose to pick up her shirt, letting him see her. She saw reflected in his eyes the beauty of her young body. They made love, he came almost immediately, then lay on her.

  ‘Stay inside of me,’ she said.

  Her thoughts were racing, from idea to idea. Oh would he marry her, and she knew he wouldn’t. She had been taken by so many men; could have given herself to him so much more pure.

  ‘Now turn off the lights,’ she said.

  ‘No, let’s go out in a minute. Let’s go in the garden and look at the flowers.’

  In the garden he even held her hand. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘If you have strange thoughts, remember it’s the bhang. Be happy.’

  ‘Well, it’s warm,’ she said. The sun beat down, the dust on the roses seemed heavy, under a banyan tree the grass didn’t grow. She kicked off her shoes, felt the cool earth.

  ‘Lie down here,’ she said, ‘next to me, hold me.’

  And though they might have been seen, he did.

  All the afternoon they walked around together, even in the house, looking at the paintings, the furniture. Rafik wanted to sit with the drivers, but she said no, she wanted to be with him alone. Hassan banged around the kitchen, he had eaten too many of the samosas.

  That evening she said to Rafik, ‘I’ll be back in half an hour.’

  She went to her own room. Her husband lay on the bed, on his pills, twitching his fingers.

  ‘Look,’ she said, standing over him. ‘You’re a mess. You’ve been a mess for two years. Now I’ll never sleep in your bed again.’

  He began to cry, his emaciated face, his long yellow teeth. This she hadn’t expected. He sobbed, real tears. She sat down on the broken chair in the corner, looking at the shelf on which she
kept her few things, a metal jar of eyeliner, a tin box thrown out by Kamila that once held chocolates.

  ‘Will I still get my money?’

  Then she stood up again. ‘Yes, but if you ever say one funny word, that’s it.’

  She took some clothes, and when she hung them from a nail in Rafik’s room he said nothing. She held him all night, his face in her breasts.

  Only once, waking, she thought, That was our marriage feast, drugged samosas, and she felt sad and worn and frightened.

  Now she slept each night in Rafik’s bed, leaving her husband to his addiction. Fall and winter came, the leaves fell, at night they slept under a heavy quilt that the managers at the farm sent to Rafik as a present. She slept naked, which still after five months disturbed him. Rafik woke before dawn, to say his prayers, then went into the kitchen and had tea with Hassan. The Sahib woke early, and Rafik had duties until mid-morning. When he came to wake her, she would pretend still to be asleep, face hidden in the quilt – she always slept with her head covered. He would bring a cup of tea and some toast.

  ‘Come in with me,’ she would say, moving over in the bed, leaving a warm spot, and sometimes he would. Her long hair hung down, and she would brush it, while he told her about the guests who had come for bridge, or about some feud in the kitchen. He read the Urdu paper New Times, sitting in the morning sun, wearing ancient horn-rimmed glasses with thick lenses. She bought him a warm woolen hat and carefully washed and mended his clothes. She wanted everyone to see how well she cared for him. She said, ‘You wear me on your back, and I wear you on my face.’ Her face had softened.

  She missed one period, then a second, but said nothing to Rafik.

  They had finished making love one afternoon, and were talking, her head on his shoulder.

  He was stroking her belly.

  ‘I might as well tell you. See how I’m bigger? I’m pregnant.’