Extract

2008-08-15T18:23:00.000-07:00

Dinner was served at eight o’clock.

Bilqis Ara Begum, matriarch of the Khan family, cast a contented look around the table. Her brother and sister, her niece, her son and his new wife were all sitting there, waiting for her to say the benediction, the Bismillah: ‘Praise be to Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.’ She said it in a whisper, a furtive, almost bashful gesture of faith, and the family fell silent, concentrating on their meal. Bilqis had ordered her servants to cook a bhujia with spinach and potatoes, a kofta dish, kebabs, a chicken curry and another bhujia with okra. The kebabs were laid out on a white china platter in the centre of the table. The rest of the food was served in beaten brass bowls to keep it warm.

The Khan family had gathered for the wedding reception of Bilqis’s son, Samad, who had recently married an Australian girl of European descent. The wedding itself had taken place in Melbourne, but the couple had flown to Karachi to give Samad’s family in Pakistan a chance to meet the bride. Mahbano, Bilqis’s sister, her husband and daughter had flown in from Lahore and Bilqis’s brother, Sikander, who had rooms at the Sindh Club, had driven over in his old white Mercedes. It was March 1985, and spring was nearly at an end. The reception was in two days’ time.

Bilqis presided over the table with a sovereign but kindly air. She watched the guests as they ate, and coaxed and cajoled them if they resisted. The last rays of the sun, streaming in through the window, emphasised her Mughal features—the small mouth and chin of her aristocratic mother, and the high cheekbones, hooked nose and long, arched eyebrows of her father. She was a tall and elegant woman in her late sixties. She wore a white shalwar kameez, her hair was grey, swept back and held by pins. She had stopped dyeing it when her husband passed away. Her skin was fair and slightly freckled. The back of her hands showed a web of veins. Her wrists were small, delicately fashioned, and her fingers long like those of an artist or a pianist. The way she held up her head, her straight back, her gestures, the way her stern face broke into a smile—all these expressions, at once light and graceful, and quite without affectation hid successive generations of breeding. They were not so much acquired as inherited, and as much a part of her fibre as flesh and bone. But if they revealed the origins of her patrician forebears, they also concealed a conservative streak, a moral pride that the turbulent times had transformed into an inflexibility of manner, a disdain for change and a nostalgia for lost glory.

The enormous chandelier hanging over the table gave her dining room an imposing and rarefied air, but its light was dim and the old Empire furniture in the adjacent drawing room was already lost in the shadows, mute witness to the hunting scenes on an immense Persian carpet where tigers and deer had come to life and were fleeing the arrows of a handsome archer who galloped serenely on horseback across a meadow strewn with flowers. A narrow glass table was cluttered with family photographs in silver frames, which occasionally included a famous face, here a politician, there an author, all gone now, scattered to the winds. The shadows also camouflaged signs of decay. The once springy carpet was balding in patches and there was dust inside the mahogany and glass cabinet that held captive a Dutch flower girl, missing her porcelain arm when some servant, lost in a daydream, had let her slip out of her hands.

Bilqis turned to Zainab, her niece. Mahbano’s daughter was a cheerful young woman with sparkling eyes. She wore a black shalwar kameez of her own design, the lines of her dress long and flowing. The subdued colours drew out her fair skin, the thin waist highlighted her tall, slim figure. ‘You must eat, my dear,’ Bilqis said in an affectionate tone reserved for indulging children. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, but you look a little anaemic. What are you afraid of? I oversaw the cooking myself. Not that one should eat to excess, but you barely touched anything. What, do you mean to refuse me?’

Zainab relented but Bilqis gave the recalcitrant a final glance, a rejoinder and an acquittal. ‘A fine girl,’ she was thinking as she ladled out the chicken curry on her plate. Why had her son not married her? Such marriages strengthened families and kept them together. Their children would have been beautiful, the match perfect, mending bridges and settling scores. It was just one more of her dashed hopes, misplaced and improbable. Marrying cousins was no longer in fashion, Bilqis reflected. People would frown upon it. A first cousin was like a sister to Samad. The relation was too close, too familiar. And besides, it was too late.

Zainab’s nemesis sat next to her. The girl’s name was Kate. She had brown shoulder-length hair. She had painted her nails and wore lipstick, but her make-up was subtly done. If she had any blemishes, they were not visible. She looked older than Samad, although she was a few years younger. Western women always looked older than their age, Bilqis thought. She looked at the gentle swell of her chest, the line of her nose, the chin and the eyes and the distance between them—all these details were inspected for the hundredth time. She was outspoken and a little too confident, attributes which were not becoming in a daughter-in-law, but at least she was not presumptuous. She was genuine and courteous. She thanked the servants each time they brought her something. To please her mother-in-law, she wore bangles and plaited her hair in a braid. Slim and attractive, she looked at everything with fresh curiosity, like a child. Bilqis was quite taken by the girl’s charm, but her concerns had not been excised from doubt. From time to time, old prejudices emerged from the shadows. The girl was pretty, but there was something incongruous about this prettiness, as if she were a succubus in disguise. History was littered with tales of foreign sirens who had ruined good men. Had Cleopatra not rolled at Caesar’s feet, he might not have died on the stairs of his Senate. And were not the fires that raged in the Middle East lit when Delilah lay with Samson?

‘I remember the last time I came, there was a badam sapling in your driveway,’ Mahbano said to her sister. ‘It’s not there any more. What happened to it?’

‘It’s still there,’ Bilqis said. ‘I had it replanted next to the plum tree, because it gets more sunlight there. You can see it from the drawing room.’

Kate listened to the conversation with relative ease. The family conversed in English for her sake. Sometimes they lapsed into Urdu, but there were so many English phrases thrown into their speech that she understood generally what was being said.

‘What’s a badam tree?’ she asked.

‘An almond tree, if you like,’ Bilqis said, ‘Almonds do not grow in Karachi, so badam tree is actually a misnomer. It’s a wild unnamed fruit that grows on that tree, like the green fruit that grows on my Virginia creepers along the side of the house. They look like grapes, but they aren’t grapes. You should never eat them.’

‘I love it when the blossoms come out.’ Mahbano said.

‘Would you like to take some seedlings back with you? There’s a nursery I know that’s not far away. I could arrange for the chauffeur to drive you there.’

‘You make it sound all too easy.’

Bilqis allowed herself a pause, knowing that after hiring and dismissing a number of gardeners Mahbano had taken up the spade herself. Her sister’s hobbies never lasted long. ‘You’ll need manure,’ she said.

Mahbano was seven or eight years younger than her sister and looked more youthful than her age. She liked telling people that living in Lahore had kept her young. Lahore had everything going for it, charm, culture, architecture—white Mughal minarets, pink Edwardian facades and, once out of the city, orchards of orange trees and chequered fields of green and gold all the way along the Grand Trunk Road to the foothills of the Himalayas. The town of Murree, the old hill station of the Raj, was a day’s drive away. One could leave the seething plains in the morning and wake up to the sight of snow on faraway peaks the next. Where could one go in Karachi except to the beach where the water was like mud?

‘Young Chambeli performed at the Alliance Française last night,’ Sikander remarked. ‘The whole of Karachi is rushing to see her. It is an open air show under the stars. The mosquitoes suck you dry but everything is hush-hush and clandestine, which makes it exciting. I half expected the police to barge in at any moment and bust us. You should go before the mullahs put a ban on it. They will come around to it sooner or later.’

Bilqis wondered if he had had a drink before dinner. She tried not to smile at his fondness for dance, and for whisky, of which she disapproved. ‘I used to see the girl dance when she was a child,’ she said. ‘Her mother was known to me, you know, but courtesans of those days were not what they are now. The fault does not lie with them. It lies with the times, of course. She is delicate and has the good taste and impeccable manners of her mother. She charmed you?’

‘Well, at my age and with my vices, all daughters of Eve look charming. I was perfectly enchanted!’ said Sikander good-humouredly. He was the middle sibling, a tall, straight-backed man with a thin moustache who retained a passing likeness to the greying Clark Gable. He was dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and wore smart khaki trousers. A graduate of the Indian Military Academy, he had fought with the British Indian Army in Italy and Burma during the Second World War but resigned his commission after the Partition of India in 1947. A journalist of some repute, he had never capitalised on his looks or his fame. It was a matter of everlasting dismay for Bilqis that he had remained a bachelor, but he was a content and happy man. He played cards with his friends, drank a little and pounded away his regular columns for The Dawn on a typewriter. Marriage would have intruded on his habits.

‘Well, there is something to look forward to,’ Bilqis remarked, turning to her sister. ‘I haven’t seen her performance yet, but she learnt Kathak at her mother’s feet. She dances very well. You need an outing. I’ll take you if your husband doesn’t. We don’t want him to suffer for our sins now, do we?’

The sting in this last remark was meant for Shahid, her brother-in-law, who was late for dinner as he had been offering his prayers in a room upstairs. A stout man, he now waddled across the room in his starched white shalwar kameez, with feet splayed and meaty arms rowing by his side as he took his seat between Sikander and Zainab.

‘Did I hear someone mention me?’ he asked, glancing around the table.

‘My sister was suggesting that you might take me to a dance,’ Mahbano said.

‘Then I will, of course.’

‘But do you approve of it?’ Bilqis asked.

‘If you approve, then how can I disapprove?’

‘Oh father!’ Zainab groaned.

‘Now don’t be waylaid by these women, Shahid,’ Sikander said. ‘If you go to hell for their sake then who’s going to plead for sinners like me?’

Bilqis watched Shahid plunge with zest into his plate of koftas. He rolled up his sleeves, murmured ‘Bismillah’ and began eating with the proprietary air of someone who knows that his star is rising. It was widely known that in a few months he would become a member of the Provisional Assembly and in a few years he would be a minister in the straw parliament that the stone-faced newsreader on the state-run television station insisted on calling the National Assembly.

Bilqis did not doubt his piety, but she had to avert her eyes from his face where there had materialised the characteristic callus that comes from the Muslim practice of prostrating the forehead onto the ground five times a day. A lifetime of prayers was usually required for the callus to appear, although in his case, it had already arrived in middle age. Not that there was anything untoward in its appearance. After all, didn’t the Irish nuns at Loreto House teach her long ago how the stigmata manifested themselves on the bodies of saints overnight? It seemed still quite a coincidence that beards, bruises and other hallmarks of piety were appearing among the populace at the same time as mullahs were rising to power.

Twilight/The House of Bilqis

Extract