‘God damn,’ Arjumand said to her mirror, unconsciously reflecting the former habit of her mother alone in Mohenjo, ‘life is shit.’
It was once explained to me by one of the world’s Greatest Living Poets – we mere prose scribblers must turn to poets for wisdom, which is why this book is littered with them; there was my friend who hung upside-down and had the poetry shaken out of him, and Babar Shakil, who wanted to be a poet, and I suppose Omar Khayyam, who was named for one but never was – that the classic fable Beauty and the Beast is simply the story of an arranged marriage.
‘A merchant is down on his luck, so he promises his daughter to a wealthy but reclusive landowner, Beast Sahib, and receives a lavish dowry in exchange – a great chest, I believe, of broad pieces of gold. Beauty Bibi dutifully marries the zamindar, thus restoring her father’s fortunes, and naturally at first her husband, a total stranger, seems horrible to her, monstrous even. But eventually, under the benign influence of her obedient love, he turns into a Prince.’
‘Do you mean,’ I ventured, ‘that he inherits a tide?’ The Great Living Poet looked tolerant and tossed back his silvery shoulder-length hair.
‘That is a bourgeois remark,’ he chided me. ‘No, of course the transformation would have taken place neither in his social status nor in his actual, corporeal self, but in her perception of him. Picture them as they grow closer to each other, as they move inwards over the years from the opposed poles of Beautyness and Beastdom, and become at last, and happily, just plain Mr Husband and Mrs Wife.’
The Great Living Poet was well-known for his radical ideas and for the chaotic complexity of his extramarital love life, so I thought I would please him by commenting slyly: ‘Why is it that fairy-tales always treat marriage as an ending? And always such a perfectly happy one?’
But instead of the man-to-man wink or guffaw for which I’d been hoping (I was very young), the Great Living Poet adopted a grave expression. ‘That is a masculine question,’ he replied, ‘no woman would be so puzzled. The proposition of the fable is clear. Woman must make the best of her fate; for if she does not love Man, why then he dies, the Beast perishes, and Woman is left a widow, that is to say less than a daughter, less than a wife, worthless.’ Mildly, he sipped his Scotch.
‘Whatif, whatif,’ I stammered, ‘I mean, uncle, whatif the girl really couldn’t bear the husband chosen for her?’ The Poet, who had begun to hum Persian verses under his breath, frowned in distant disappointment.
‘You have become too Westernized,’ he said. ‘You should spend some time, maybe seven years or so, not too long, with our village people. Then you will understand that this is a completely Eastern story, and stop this whatif foolishness.’
The Great Poet is unfortunately no longer living, so I cannot ask him whatif the story of Good News Hyder were true; nor can I hope for the benefit of his advice on an even more ticklish subject: whatif, whatif a Beastji somehow lurked inside Beauty Bibi? Whatif the beauty were herself the beast? But I think he might have said I was confusing matters: ‘As Mr Stevenson has shown in his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, such saint-and-monster conjunctions are conceivable in the case of men; alas! such is our nature. But the whole essence of Woman denies such a possibility.’
The reader may have divined from my last whatifs that I have two marriages to describe; and the second, waiting in the peripheries of the first, is of course the long-hinted-at Nikah of Sufiya Zinobia Hyder and Omar Khayyam Shakil.
Omar Khayyam finally screwed up the courage to ask for Sufiya Zinobia’s hand when he heard about the betrothal of her younger sister. When he arrived, grey respectable fifty, at her marble home and made his extraordinary request, the impossibly old and decrepit divine Maulana Dawood let out a scream that made Raza Hyder look around for demons. ‘Spawn of obscene hags,’ Dawood addressed Shakil, ‘from the day you descended to earth in the machine of your mothers’ iniquity I knew you. Such filthy suggestions you come to make in this house of lovers of God! May your time in hell be longer than a thousand lifetimes.’ The rage of Maulana Dawood created, in Bilquìs, a mood of perverse obstinacy. In those days she was still prone to lock doors furiously, to defend herself against the incursions of the afternoon wind; the light in her eyes was a little too bright. But the engagement of Good News had given her a new purpose, just as Rani had hoped; so it was with a fair approximation of her old arrogance that she spoke to Omar Khayyam: ‘We understand that you have been obliged to bring your own proposal because of the absence of your family members from Town. The irregularity is forgiven, but we must now consider in private. Our decision will be communicated to you in due course.’ Raza Hyder, struck dumb by this reappearance of the old Bilquìs, was unable to disagree until Shakil had left; Omar Khayyam, arising, placing grey hat on grey hair, was betrayed by a sudden reddening beneath the pallor of his skin. ‘Blushing,’ Maulana Dawood screeched, extending a sharp-nailed finger, ‘that is only a trick. Such persons have no shame.’
After Sufiya Zinobia recovered from the immunological catastrophe that followed the turkey massacre, Raza Hyder had discovered that he could no longer see her through the veil of his disappointment in her sex. The memory of the tenderness with which he had lifted her out of the scene of her somnambulist violence refused to leave him, as did the realization that while she was ill he had been beset by emotions that could only be described as arising out of fatherly love. In short, Hyder had changed his opinion of his retarded child, and had begun to play with her, to take pride in her tiny advances. Together with the ayah Shahbanou the great war hero would play at being a train or steamroller or crane, and would lift the girl and throw her in the air as if she really were still the small child whose brain she had been forced to retain. This new pattern of behaviour had perplexed Bilquìs, whose affections remained concentrated on the younger girl … at any rate, Sufiya Zinobia’s condition had improved. She had grown two and a half inches, put on a little weight, and her mental age had risen to about six and a half. She was nineteen years old, and had conceived for her newly loving father a child’s version of that same devotion which Arjumand Harappa felt for her father the Chairman.
‘Men,’ Bilquìs told Rani on the telephone, ‘you can’t depend on them.’
As for Omar Khayyam: the complexity of his motives has already been discussed. He had spent seven years failing to cure himself of that obsession which relieved him of vertigo attacks, but during those years of struggle he had also arranged to examine Sufiya Zinobia at regular intervals, and had ingratiated himself with her father, building on the gratitude Raza felt towards him for having saved his daughter’s life. But a proposal of marriage was something else again, and once he was safely out of the house Raza Hyder began to voice his doubts.
‘The man is fat,’ Raza reasoned. ‘Ugly also. And we must not forget his debauched past.’
‘A debauched life led by the child of debauched persons,’ Dawood added, ‘and a brother shot for politics.’
But Bilquìs did not mention her memory of Shakil drunk at Mohenjo. Instead she said, ‘Where are we going to find the girl a better match?’
Now Raza understood that his wife was as anxious to be rid of this troublesome child as he was to see the back of her beloved Good News. The realization that there was a kind of symmetry here, a sort of fair exchange, weakened his resolve, so that Bilquìs detected the uncertainty in his voice when he asked, ‘But a damaged child: should we look for husbands at all? Should we not accept the responsibility, wife? What is this marriage business where such a girl is concerned?’
‘She is not so stupid now,’ Bilquìs argued, ‘she can dress herself, go to the pot, and she does not wet her bed.’
‘For God’s sake,’ Raza shouted, ‘does that qualify her to be a wife?’
‘That frogspawn slime,’ Dawood exclaimed, ‘that messenger of Shaitan. He has come here with his proposal to divide this holy house.’
‘Her vocabulary is improving,’ Bilquìs added, ‘she sits with Shahbanou and
tells the dhobi what to wash. She can count the garments and handle money.’
‘But she is a child,’ Raza said hopelessly.
Bilquìs grew stronger as he weakened. ‘In a woman’s body,’ she replied, ‘the child is nowhere to be seen. A woman does not have to be a brainbox. In many opinions brains are a positive disadvantage to a woman in marriage. She likes to go to the kitchen and help the khansama with his work. At the bazaar she can tell good vegetables from bad. You yourself have praised her chutneys. She can tell when the servants have not polished the furniture properly. She wears a brassière and in other ways also her body has become that of an adult woman. And she even does not blush.’
This was true. The alarming reddenings of Sufiya Zinobia were, it seemed, things of the past; nor had the turkey-assassinating violence recurred. It was as if the girl had been cleansed by her single, all-consuming explosion of shame.
‘Maybe,’ Raza Hyder slowly said, ‘I am worrying too much.’
‘Besides,’ Bilquìs said with finality, ‘he is her doctor, this man. He saved her life. Into whose hands could we more safely place her? Into nobody’s, I say. This proposal has come to us from God.’
‘Catch your ears,’ Dawood shrieked, ‘tobah, tobah! But your God is great, great in his greatness, and so he may forgive such blasphemy.’
Raza Hyder looked old and sad. ‘We must send Shahbanou with her,’ he insisted. ‘And a quiet wedding. Too much hullabaloo would frighten her.’
‘Just let me finish with Good News,’ Bilquìs said in delight, ‘and we will have a wedding so quiet that only the birds will sing.’
Maulana Dawood withdrew from the scene of his defeat. ‘Girls married in the wrong order,’ he said as he departed. ‘What began with a necklace of shoes cannot end well.’
On the day of the polo match between the Army and Police teams Bilquìs shook Good News awake early. The match was not scheduled to begin until five o’clock in the afternoon, but Bilquìs said, ‘Eleven hours dolling yourself up to meet your future husband is like money in the bank.’ By the time mother and daughter arrived at the polo ground Good News was in such tip-top condition that people thought a bride had abandoned her wedding feast to come and watch the game. Haroun Harappa met them by the little table at which the match commentator sat surrounded by microphones and led them to the chairs he had saved for them; the spectacle of Good News’s get-up was so overpowering that he came away with a clearer impression of the design of her nose-jewellery than of the fortunes of the game. Every so often during that afternoon he ran off and returned bearing paper plates heaped with samosas or jalebis, with cups of fizzing cola balanced along his forearms. During his absences Bilquìs watched her daughter like a hawk, to make sure she tried no funny business like catching the eyes of other boys; but when Haroun returned Bilquìs became unaccountably absorbed in the game. The great star of the Police team was a certain Captain Talvar Ulhaq, and in that time of the Army’s unpopularity his annihilation of their polo squad that afternoon turned him into something of a national hero, especially as he conformed to all the usual heroic requirements, being tall, dashing, mustachioed, with a tiny scar on his neck that looked exactly like a love-bite. This Captain Talvar was to be the cause of the wedding scandal out of which, it could be argued with some plausibility, the whole of the future grew.
From the stammering and awkward conversation she had with Haroun that day Good News discovered to her consternation that her future husband had no ambitions and a tiny appetite. Nor was he in any hurry to have children. The confidence with which Naveed Hyder had stated, ‘I’ll fix him,’ ebbed out of her in the physical presence of this pudding of a young man, so it was perhaps inevitable that her eyes should become glued to the upright, capering, mythological figure of Talvar Ulhaq on his whirling horse. And maybe it was also inevitable that her excessive dressiness should attract the interest of the young police captain who was famous for being the most successful stud in the city – so maybe the whole thing was Bilquìs’s fault for dressing up her daughter – at any rate, Bilquìs for all her vigilance missed the moment when their eyes met. Good News and Talvar stared at each other through the dust and hooves and polo-sticks, and at that moment the girl felt a pain shoot up her insides. She managed to turn the shuddering moan which escaped her lips into a violent sneeze and cough before anyone noticed, and was assisted in her subterfuge by the commotion on the polo field, where Captain Talvar’s horse had inexplicably reared and thrown him down into the perils of the flying hooves and sticks. ‘I just went stiff all over,’ Talvar told Naveed later, ‘and the horse lost its temper with me.’
The game ended shortly afterwards, and Good News went home with Bilquìs, knowing that she would never marry Haroun Harappa, no, not in a million years. That night she heard pebbles rattling on her bedroom window, tied her bedsheets together and climbed down into the arms of the polo star, who drove her in a police car to his beach hut at Fisherman’s Cove. When they had finished making love she asked the most modest question of her life: ‘I’m not so great looking,’ she said, ‘why me?’ Talvar Ulhaq sat up in bed and looked as serious as a schoolboy. ‘On account of the hunger of your womb,’ he told her. ‘You are appetite and I am food.’ Now she perceived that Talvar had a pretty high opinion of himself and began to wonder whether she might have bitten off more than she could chew.
It turned out that Talvar Ulhaq had had the gift of clairvoyancy from childhood, a talent which assisted him greatly in his police work, because he could divine where crimes were going to be committed before the thieves had worked it out themselves, so that his record of arrests was unbeatable. He had foreseen in Naveed Hyder the children who had always been his greatest dream, the profusion of children who would make him puff up with pride while she disintegrated under the awesome chaos of their numbers. This vision had made him willing to undertake the extremely dangerous course of action to which he was now committed, because he knew that Raza Hyder’s daughter was engaged to be married to the favourite nephew of Chairman Iskander Harappa, that the invitations to the wedding had already gone out, and that by any normal standards his situation was hopeless. ‘Nothing is impossible,’ he told Naveed, got dressed, and went outside into the salty night to find a sea-turtle to ride. Naveed emerged a little later to find him whooping with joy as he stood on a turtle’s back, and while she was enjoying his simple pleasure the fishermen came and grinned at them. Afterwards Naveed Hyder was never sure whether this had been a part of Talvar’s plan, whether he had signalled to the fishermen from the back of the weeping turtle, or if he had visited the Cove in advance to plan the whole thing, because after all it was well-known that the fishermen and the police force were great allies, being regularly in cahoots for smuggling purposes … Talvar, however, never admitted any responsibility for what happened.
What happened was that the fisherman’s leader, a patriarch with an honest and open face in which an unblemished set of white teeth gleamed improbably in the moonlight, informed the couple pleasantly that he and his fellows intended to blackmail them. ‘Such ungodly goings-on,’ the old fisherman said sadly, ‘it is bad for our peace of mind. Some compensation, some comfort must be given.’
Talvar Ulhaq paid up without arguing and drove Good News home. With his help, she managed to climb up the rope of bedsheets without being discovered. ‘I won’t see you again,’ he said at their parting, ‘until you break your engagement and allow what must be to be.’
His second sight informed him that she would do as he had asked, so he went home to prepare for marriage and for the storm which would surely break.
Good News (let us remind ourselves) was her mother’s favourite daughter. Her fear of forfeiting this position fought inside her with the equal and opposite fear that the fishermen would continue their blackmail; the insane love she had conceived for Talvar Ulhaq wrestled with the duty she owed to the boy her parents had selected; the loss of her virginity drove her wild with worry. But until the last evening before he
r wedding she remained silent. Talvar Ulhaq told her afterwards that her inaction had brought him close to the point of insanity, and that he had resolved to turn up at the wedding and shoot Haroun Harappa, whatever the consequences, if she had decided to go through with the match. But at the eleventh hour Good News told her mother, ‘I won’t marry that stupid potato,’ and all hell broke loose, because love was the last thing anyone had been expecting to foul up the arrangements.
O glee of female relatives in the face of unconcealable scandal! O crocodile tears and insincere pummelling of breasts! O delighted crowing of Duniyazad Begum as she dances upon the corpse of Bilquìs’s honour! And the forktongued offers of hope: Who knows, talk to her, many girls panic on their wedding eve, yes, she’ll see sense, just try only, time to be firm, time to be gentle, beat her up a little, give her a loving hug, O God, but how terrible, how can you cancel the guests?
And when it is clear that the girl cannot be moved, when the delicious horror of it all is out in the open, when Good News admits that there is Someone Else – then Bariamma stirs on her bolsters and the room falls silent to hear her judgment.
‘This is your failure as a mother,’ Bariamma wheezes, ‘so now the father must be called. Go now and bring him, my Raza, run and fetch.’