Ghalib at Dusk Read online

  The customer is always right, Moin sahib told them again and again. Ladies who came in wearing sunglasses, like this one, were fussier than those who didn’t wear them. It was one of the rules Saima had made up. When a woman walked into the store, Saima tried to guess which section she was going to go to. She imagined the details of the big houses they lived in. One of her other rules was that rich Muslim women were prettier and fairer. She was dark herself. On Fridays she rubbed a paste of ubtan and turmeric on her face and neck. She had read in Akhbar-e-Jahan that it lightened skin colour.

  Once Moin sahib had said to her he liked her eyes. Just once, but it was enough to let her dream. She had peered into the small mirror in her room and decided she’d never get glasses even if she needed them. She started lining her eyes with kajal. Her dreams were like silk, soft and shimmering, their details not quite clear. She didn’t have to decide whether he loved her. Or think of how she had to stay back for him when all the others had gone home to their families. The dreams were an intoxicating thing. She could close her eyes and inhale their essence, like Moin sahib’s colognes. She could be entirely oblivious of the jolty bus ride on days when she could dream like that.

  ‘Madam, this dress just came in.’ Saima bent down to get a blue and white floral pattern dress that had no ribbons or frills from the glass cabinet.

  ‘Is this all you have?’ the lady said irritably.

  Saima ignored her remark and looked past her at Moin sahib sitting at the back of the store.

  ‘Such an expensive shop but such uncooperative sales girls. I know Mr Moin. I’ll let him know what I think of you. I see him all the time at Gymkhana.’

  The woman picked up her purse and glasses and left. She was out of the store before Saima could focus her eyes away from Moin sahib’s empty chair. It happened in a moment. He had got up about the same time as the woman was saying she’d tell him.

  Saima felt the blood trickling down faster. At this rate, she’d have a crimson shalwar soon. She pressed her thighs together and wondered what would happen if the lady really complained to Moin sahib. Would he fire her? Or would he laugh it off? She picked her steps carefully over the carpet, as if walking slowly would help restrain the flow.

  Inside his office, Moin sahib was seated in his swivel chair, facing the window. Bright sun beat on the glass panes but inside it was mossy and cool. The air conditioner purred softly. Except for the one window, the others were covered by thick crimson curtains. It was peaceful in here. Outside, in the store area, it was hot. She saw his face in profile. The frown was still there, she could tell. A cigar sat smouldering in the ashtray. She didn’t walk up to him and let him kiss her as she ordinarily did.

  She rushed to the bathroom. There were two big bright stains in the crotch of the shalwar. She could handle that. It always felt much worse than it really was.

  ‘In such a hurry?’ Moin sahib said, and swivelled round to face her as she stepped out. ‘No greetings for us today?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I had to—’

  ‘Never mind, jaan-e-man, come here.’

  She cringed when he called her that—that was how the prostitutes she had seen in some Indian movies on her neighbour’s VCR were addressed by men, the cheap ones, who loitered in the streets, all dressed up, and gestured to men who passed by.

  After he had kissed her and fondled her breasts, he let her go.

  ‘Until this evening, then, jaan-e-man,’ he said, picking up the cigar from the ashtray.

  ‘Sir … Moin sahib … not today … I’m sorry, sir.’ She stared at the glowing orange tip of the cigar as Moin sahib stuck its other end into his mouth.

  ‘Why not?’ His bushy eyebrows knit together, and in his voice she read anger.

  ‘I … it’s … I can’t stay today.’ A dull pain started somewhere in the small of her back and radiated round to her abdomen. She didn’t have any aspirin with her. She was becoming so forgetful.

  ‘Aha—the princess begins to give herself airs. All of you two-paisa girls are the same … Give you a little money, a little attention, and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘Sir, I’m sorry sir,’ she said.

  ‘Listen, Rafi told me you had him call me at the house this morning. Why did you do that? I don’t want you putting ideas in my wife’s head.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ she repeated, sucking in a great quantity of air with her last word. It should be very simple to explain, but the words had left her. Her brain palpitated inside her head. She knew it could be explained in a sentence. But anger and confusion made it difficult to speak. Everything became clouded by his calling her a ‘two-paisa girl.’ She had never denied him anything. She felt a stab of pity for herself that made her tearful. He had never spoken to her so harshly before. Was he getting tired of her? She might as well go to that lady doctor and get the pills. What was she saving herself from? She could tell him she didn’t need this job anymore.

  She stood there until he asked her to leave.

  Moin sahib always gave her a ride home on days when she stayed back. That night, when he dropped her off at the head of the alley, she still had the strange taste in her mouth. She had stood for a long time at his bathroom sink and rinsed her mouth, but the film of fluid remained. She ran her tongue over the roof of her mouth repeatedly to get the hair that seemed stuck there, but there was nothing. She walked the few yards to her apartment building without looking back as his car sped away. He was always in a hurry to let her out and be gone. He never waited to see her reach the building where she lived.

  It was dark, but she could see her way with the light coming from the windows of buildings on both sides of the alley. The nine o’clock Urdu news was coming to an end. She could hear the loud voice of the man reading the weather report through the open windows. The entrance to her building was blocked by two or three dark figures. Someone had stolen the light bulb again. She heard voices. It was Asif and his good-for-nothing friends, standing there smoking. She could see the glowing tips of their cigarettes. They could have seen her get out of the car, they were always watching. They were idle boys, worse than old ladies. She was friends with their mothers and sisters. She felt a thrill when she thought they couldn’t possibly know what she had been doing just a half hour ago. They stopped talking as she got close. She went past them and up without speaking to them. Their eyes seemed to follow her up the stairs in the dark.

  She was up one flight when one of them said, ‘Yaar, karanti girls will do it in a car if you pay them enough.’

  Cheap, obscene laughter followed. She stopped, and almost raced down and slapped him. She kept going up, though. She didn’t want them to think she had heard.

  Inside their two-room flat, which her brother had bought for them a few years after he went to Dubai as an auto mechanic, Papa was sitting on the floor near the kitchen. Ammi handed him the platter of rotis wrapped in cloth, and a bowl of curry, as soon as she saw Saima enter.

  ‘Asalam-alaikum,’ she said loudly. She always used the Muslim greeting. She went to church sometimes and her surname was Jones. You could tell Sally D’Souza was a Christian at a glance from her weepy features and her broken Urdu. But there was nothing about Saima’s looks or speech or even her first name that gave her away. She looked like all the Muslim girls who lived in her alley. ‘You two should have eaten,’ she said. ‘You know what the buses are like. Poor Moin sahib saw me waiting at the stop and brought me home,’ she made up the half-truth without effort. It was easy to lie to these two. They would believe anything.

  Moin sahib had looked at her application and said, ‘Jones? So you’re Christian?’ He had seemed surprised. ‘You don’t look like a Christian,’ he said, like he was complimenting her.

  There was something in his voice that had been loud as a siren. Sally’s face as she was leaving had come up before her. A month or so later, when he asked her to come to his office, and kept her there for an hour, the siren rang louder and louder. Yet she stayed on, listening to him, smiling sh
yly at the compliments he paid her, eyes lowered, saying little. He asked her why she had decided to work. She said because her father’s factory had closed down. That was not a lie, but it wasn’t the truth either. Her brother Michael sent them enough money. She let him take her home, letting his hand slide down her back and pull her close to him in the car. All that night she didn’t sleep well and she was sure she wanted to quit. But she went back to work the next day.

  She went into the bedroom that she shared with her parents and fell limp on the bed. The window was open and the white cotton curtain ballooned gently inward with the breeze. Even though the October days were scorching, the nights were cool. Her face touched the soft cool pillow. A small tear trickled out and she felt its warm path as it slid down her face and disappeared into the pillow.

  Moin sahib’s face had been red when she had finished, and there were beads of sweat on his moustache. He had moaned with pleasure. Afterwards, she had stood at his bathroom sink and thought she was going to throw up. She waited for him on a chair after she came back from the bathroom. Moin sahib lay on the couch as if he had fainted. His eyes were closed. One leg was on the couch, the other dangled on the floor.

  Ammi came in and asked her to come and eat.

  ‘In a little while,’ she answered.

  Ammi leaned over and asked whether the day at the store had been very tiring. No, not really, it was just that her period had started, she said. She always felt terrible the first two days. Ammi said why didn’t she quit this job, they didn’t need the money, and when was she going to get married?

  Once her mother got going on the business of marriage, Saima had to shock her into silence. ‘Do you really want to know when?’ she looked at her slyly. ‘When I’ve buried you two. How will you two live if I get married now?’

  Ammi put on a pained look and went away.

  When she went in a little later, they still hadn’t started eating. They were staring at the bowl of curry and the platter of rotis on the small square tablecloth on the floor. They looked like two little children who had been scolded. Papa coughed and said there was a letter from Michael. She nodded.

  She remembered how she had sung and been so playful at Michael’s wedding a year ago in that bright red dress. And how she had been lively and coy with that engineer friend of his from Dubai. His eyes had seemed to follow her everywhere. She had prayed to make him come to her door. Prayed hard because she knew even God would have had a hard time convincing a nice young Muslim to marry a Punjabi Catholic like herself. He wasn’t jowly like the dark moustached men, dressed in shirts they were bursting out of, whose photographs her aunt brought over. They were all factory workers like her father or mechanics like her brother. The better ones were office clerks. She would have been happy with the engineer. He was educated, he dressed smartly, and he looked cultured. But she never heard from him after the wedding was over. Not that she had expected to. His mother would have married him off to one of his tall, fair, slim, convent-educated cousins by now.

  ‘Did you eat your fruits today?’ she asked Papa.

  ‘What fruits? There’s only bananas,’ he complained. ‘Your mother doesn’t buy anything else. One day I’ll die coughing.’

  ‘You’d live longer if you complained less. I’ll try and bring you some oranges tomorrow,’ she said.

  The curry had gone cold in the bowl, a film of grease congealing on its surface. Ammi picked up the bowl and went back to the kitchen to reheat it. Steam rose from the bowl in waves as she put it down on the tablecloth. She served her father first and he took a roti from the cloth and started to eat. There were only two pieces of meat in the bowl. Ammi had placed one on Saima’s plate and one on Papa’s. For herself she had only some potatoes in the gravy. Saima stared at her plate. The brown gravy, lined with a golden border of grease, and the piece of meat sitting in it, turned her stomach. The grease and the film in her mouth were the same thing. She rose from the ground and went to the bathroom.

  She squatted near the water drum and opened the tap. She stuck a finger down her throat twice and waited until the bile rose from her empty stomach. She retched and spat and watched the bubbles of saliva flow towards the drain with the water. She waited a little longer but nothing else came out. She washed her hands and face and rose to go back. Her head swam and the sudden getting up from the ground made her dizzy. She held out a hand to the wall to steady herself. In a minute or so her head cleared and the darkness below her eyes disappeared. She took a few deep breaths. Things seemed better now.

  She returned to the sitting room.

  ‘I’m not very hungry,’ she said, and broke her piece of meat into two, putting the bigger piece on Ammi’s plate.

  Ammi peered into her face. Saima could see her mother was worried about her so she tried to reassure her by smiling—she had become her mother’s mother. Ammi had brought her into the world, but now seemed too fragile to have performed such a feat. Saima felt compelled to smile or be totally still. Words could be of little assistance. Words would be her undoing. But words were the only recourse. Papa had finished eating and was picking his teeth with the pointed end of a safety pin. He let out a loud burp and sighed.

  Saima began to eat and talk aimlessly to quell monstrous thoughts. She knew they waited for her to come home. They waited for gossip she made up about people at work, her sarcastic, amusing anecdotes, even though they pretended to wince at some of the things she said.

  But tonight she couldn’t make up stuff. Thoughts she didn’t want to let loose, had turned into words and escaped before she could hold them back. ‘Those boys downstairs, why are they always loitering on the stairs? All they do is smoke and talk nonsense,’ she said. ‘Asif’s sisters are going blind embroidering other people’s trousseaus. Why doesn’t he get a job?’

  ‘Beti, who are we to say? He doesn’t listen to his own parents,’ Ammi said.

  ‘If he were my son, I’d kick him out of the house,’ Saima said, shocked at the violence that lurked behind her words.

  After the dishes were done, Saima and Ammi went into the bedroom. Papa was already snoring softly. Ammi, too, fell asleep on the bed next to him after she said her prayers. Saima lay awake on the mat on the floor, listening to the sounds of the night coming in through the window. The woman downstairs was clanging her dishes. A night train sped past. She could feel its vibrations travelling up through the ground. Trains filled her with a desolate longing. She drew her legs into her stomach and huddled under the sheet. The walls cricked and the night creatures made their noises. A tree outside sighed with the breeze.

  Saima found herself lecturing the bastards on the stairs. She became eloquent in her silence. The words she had been so cautious about not voicing, tumbled out unchecked in a soundless stream. Her head cleared and she no longer quarantined her thoughts like she did in Moin sahib’s or her parents’ presence. ‘You haramis have too much food stuffed into your bellies. You boys better shape up or get out of this house. This isn’t a charitable orphanage, you know. If you can’t work, can’t study, why strain the world with your useless lives? Your sisters work, and then your wives will work, so you can eat and drink and smoke, and fatten up like cows. I’d rather see you dead. What sort of men are you? If you have an ounce of shame, go drown yourselves—’ She went on. The night breeze grew cooler. Some more trains passed. She was talking and those boys, shamed, were listening with their heads hung low. She was telling them not all karanti girls were whores, not all could be bought with money. And no, not all of them agreed to doing it in cars either.

  Finally, she ran out of things to say. She felt heavy with tiredness, yet lightened and safe in the darkness under the sheet. In one languorous movement, she stretched and yawned, curled her arms around her pillow, and drifted into sleep.

  Fishing at Haleji

  MAQSOOD ALI AND his daughter were riding the bus back to Sadar. He had taken Nasima to the doctor to discuss her options. But the doctor told him she had none. That is to say, not any
good ones.

  Dusk had descended early on the city of Karachi that December evening. It was Friday and the weekend traffic roared. Maqsood Ali glanced out of the window. The cars and motorcycles streaming towards Clifton reminded him of a wedding procession. He watched the anxious-looking women holding children, sitting behind husbands, wondering if they had dressed themselves and the children well only to feel outdone by better-dressed people. So much fanfare. Such futility. Money wasted on trifles. Desperate acts! Could any of it assuage the universe’s unconcern for human suffering? His suffering? He couldn’t make sense of the steadfastness with which people ventured out into the choked streets for meaningless pleasures they could barely afford. He refused to take his family out to the beach, or to those appalling seafront restaurants. The children had finally stopped asking why they never went out like other families. If he could only make them understand how he wanted to spare them the embarrassment, the impatience with which the waiter would take their order, while they, his unseemly brood, argued over how many plates of this or that to order, the disdain with which he would wait to clear their table of the remains of kebabs and parathas, and not even utter shukriya when given a tip.

  At the last stop more people clambered on till there was hardly any standing room left. Maqsood Ali exclaimed as the conductor made his way to the new passengers, ‘Isn’t there a limit? Is this a bus or a fish bazaar?’

  The conductor threw up his thin arms and smiled, baring paan-stained teeth. ‘What can I do, sahib?’

  There wasn’t a civilized man left in this city. They should never have been freed from British rule, Maqsood Ali believed. Freedom had resulted in this hotchpotch of chaos and lawlessness.

  Finally, they were nearing Sadar. More din, more mayhem. But unlike the multitudes drifting towards Clifton in search of fleeting respites, Sadar was at this evening hour, just like his bus, packed mostly with workers returning after a day’s toil to their homes on the city’s northern fringes. He felt a connectedness with them and a tad more at peace, though he couldn’t say why. The bus pulled up to the side of the street. He hoped Nasima would know they had to get off here. He jostled his way to the back exit, keeping a tight hand over his trouser pocket, as the bus lurched to a halt. His pocket had been picked before. Everyone wanted to get out at this stop but everyone outside wanted to get in first. The conductor was blocking the entrance, arguing with a couple of men outside who were shouting hoarsely.