Property of woman by Sara Suleri

Yes! Of course, there were seventeen-year cicadas in Pakistan, only their arrival was annual.
They came just before the rains, at a point in time when every tiny bone in each eardrum
was hammering so loudly to the rhythm of the heat that no one really stopped to notice
what the cicada chorus came to add. Its piercing shrillness made no difference to nights of
such astonishing degree that there could- they would- be only mateless. Lie alone, enjoined
the sun. We did and like a fist the good heart beat on, lumbering amidst the faultless finesse
of summer, until there really was no pointing paying attention to the formula through which
the insect could arrive, mate and die. And then their carcasses simply lacked the time to call
upon our notice: they were not shells that had the leisure to lie crisping in the sun, beach-
brittle to those feet that walk on sand and wonder at each compacted tread, “what did I
archeologize right now; what did that crunch create?” For before any iridescence touched
upon a cicada’s discarded wings, the monsoons would arrive, with the monsoons habit of
changing the texture of the universe.
Other examples would serve a similar purpose. But certainly, a cicada-shell had short lease
on life in a world of where every surface was constrained to function as a cup for a wetness
so demanding as to be imperial, causing the will of the wet to impose its medium on
whatever once possessed some clarity and edge. Edges left the land to fold instead into
receptacles for an incessant rain, so that definition was no longer at stake for the sharp
blades of burnt grass, or the mano pits whose blond hair once petrifying in the sun, or all
that the cicadas had been. And so, although they came annually, the very fidelity of the
cicada’s return registered as redundance: their being was brief and unremarked, quite lost
within the pleasurable nuisance of the rain. The sun had been severe, but we were tired by
what we wanted weary in advance by such a preponderance of moisture, which suggested
that heat could indeed retreat from its exactitude to render us back an obsolete sense of a
world organic and blurred.
And thus no insect-wing could fill the span of our attention, not upon the onslaught of the
rain, even when we made pause to muse, “what is the thing I did not notice that the rains
will wash away?” But memory would perforce give way before the great mirage of Lahore
in monsoon green, a spectacle too luminous for acts of individual recollection. The cicadas
with their chorus of desire had come and gone while our distraction was elsewhere: perhaps
in some future summer we would have the time to notice their appearance, except that
Lahore had so habituated us to more startling patterns f disappearance. Too many examples
could follow. Let it suffice us to recall that in Lahore; an event of equally troubling invisibility
was the arrival-on each seventeenth year- of the man named Pathar Nadi.
His habit was to come in the winter and thus he could not have known the sensation of
waiting for the rains that always bring too much rain; nor the steamy joys of wet July flanked
by evanescent fruits- falsas and jamans, choicest berries both, of seasons so fleeting as to
make mourning colours of the deep purple that covers berries both. Coming betimes into
the town, Pathar Nadi would not have known the counterpoint that winter offers to
summer rhythms of Lahore. For October introduce the possibility of movement to a
populace that has just endures the heat, enjoyed with a quick intake of breath the first
arrival of the rain, that has exclaimed when the falsas reach the market place and in a
fortnight disappear.
On each seventeenth year, his eyes must have instead felt somewhat blank at being made
privy, latterday, to the densities that invade a December sky in Lahore. Surely he had not
sufficient foreknowledge to understand those benignities of blue, created when a sun that
has been so much the sun suddenly turns shy at its own brilliance and now chooses merely
to be charming. No notion of the astringencies of falsas could have predated his surveillance
of the great fruit stalls when, in the enchanted light of a January afternoon, he walked
through the Anarkali bazaar to notice only temperate berries, their sweetness dominating
the market. Having missed the precision of the heat, he probably could not have imagined
the keen prelude to which each mildness made response: here were white apricots that
drooped upon the bone, for more treasured than their firm and orange sister; peaches like
globes, encased in treacherous and lip-disturbing skins; and citrus, of an abundance that
could run to riot in even the steadiest gaze. These sweets were soft, so how could an
itinerant apprehend the commentary they nonetheless posed to the preceding summer?
How can Pathar Nadi be faulted, if he did not hazard a guess: what education could he have
had of the jaman’s capacity to wither on the palate until it drew from each taste bud in
Lahore a complete and profound apprehension of the wry? From the beginning, therefore,
the man must be forgiven his distance from the summer, his ignorance of a prior persistency
of sun that made each night a coffin, around which the cicadas died unnoticed, in
commotion.
I never met that Himalayan hillman, Pathar Nadi. Word of him reached me quite by
accident, in keeping with the way that issues of arrival and departure always accrue in the
city of Lahore, placing upon the map of that municipality another question-mark, a groan.
He thus registered as an event in keeping with the city’s invisible habit of self-eviction, a
statement similar to the headlines that blazed forth in London during the war of 1965-
LAHORE HAS FALLEN- when its residents were forced to wonder, had we? And if so, into
what? Perhaps, we thought, the seismic activity of warfare had sent us tumbling into some
musical vein, allowing us to enjoy the operatic dimensions of local history. For fine music
attended us during those two weeks in early September, songs in the patriotic vein over
which we would shake our heads years later, admitting that September 65 had been a
wonderful war for songs. Nur Jahan, no longer “Baby Nur Jahan” but at age fifty reluctantly
accepting the alternative title of “Queen of Melody” indeed sang melodiously about the
magnetic force of our brothers: oh my golden town, Kasur; my golden town Kasur,” she
sang. The war of 1971 produced nothing of such musical calibre and struck no chords in us
such as those of 1965 when, as London proclaimed our fall, we sat listening on some
vertiginous edge to a thousand radios in a hundred times as many darkened homes. They
gave us casualty-lists; they gave us music, lyrics, composed overnight to sing songs of praise
for us, Lahore. When the news and music ended, faint sounds of muffled war travelled the
seventeen miles from the Indian border to suggest that- as we fell asleep- metal made noise
to; that the cicada would no longer be alone in its command of our unhearing.
And then the years would only grow increasingly unlistening. No songs were sung that
actually could explain why Bhutto was to die in the way he did (“put it away,” they say he
said, looking at the rope, “put it away”), much as few were moved to music when General
Zia chose in his zeal to be spread like compost over the Bahawalpur district, never the most
arable of Pakistani terrains. There was something of the cicada in the air, some absence of
resonance to the sounds that we surely heard even when we would not listen. Perhaps
Lahore was tired of history: in some medieval time, we used to have monuments; music, we
thought, was the burden of modernity; but then followed a more difficult phase in which
neither monument not music could suffice to tell us exactly what we should not be seeing,
not be hearing. But what has silence, what has the necessary excision in utterance that
attends each battle in Lahore, have to do with the absent story of Pathar Nadi?
He would not have been there during the wars, I think. No, when I imagine his journeys
down from the Khyber Pass and along the lengthy miles into Lahore, peacetime curiously
dictates his journey. Peshawar would be merely a beauty of intimacy to him, although to us
it is still a town of passing that begs in some future generation to be better known, only then
Peshawar will be there no longer. His bus ride down from that city in the direction, of
Rawalpindi would be routinely wild and desperate: once the bus has turned a crucial corner
of the road that lays down miles below a gleaming curve of the Attock river, then the
hillman would have known that he had left behind the predominating mountain grey of the
frontier for some different landscape. After that flash of gleaming grey and blue- the river
lying in tiny dignity some miles beneath his sight- Pathar Nadi would then have had to steel
a foreigner’s soul in preparation for his entry into the ravishing browns of the dissected
plateau of the Pothwar. He was travelling after all along the Grand Trunk Road, a route upon
which foreigners have been known to be insistent. No particular interest could he have
taken in his passage through the military town of Rawalpindi, but something would
doubtless quicken his eye as he reached the great plainlands of the Punjab and passed
through Jhelum, where the river Jhelum cuts with arrogance through that ancient city.
Surely the deserted Sikh temple precariously ready to topple into the river would have
caught his attention, much as earlier- passing through a village named “What Beauty” – he
must have noticed the ruins of a Grecian University. For when Jahangir the Mughal had
passed though that winsome hunting lodge, “Wah,” he had exclaimed in appreciation,
“Wah,” causing the local townspeople immediately to rename their village, calling it Wah,
what else is there to say, what beauty. Once in that environs of Lahore, however, the
hillman would instinctively feel himself within the ambit of a city that neither emperor nor
nationalism could rename. Even before he crossed the Ravi river and saw Jahangir’s tomb
glimmering to his left, Pathar Nadi must have known that he was on the verge of entering a
city that for centuries had sought to become its name. Now he was in plainland, on soil as
flat and alluvial as only the tedium of the Punjab could dictate: with no mountain ranges to
grasp at his equilibrium, he could only know the vertigo generated by even the flattest of
land when it is occupied by a city that sit in history. For what is Lahore but a great
confluence of historic and geographic fiction, causing the ruined gates of its once – walled
city to suggest that an instinct sense of dislocation will be most keenly felt at the point when
one crosses it city – limits?
Lahore is where it happened. It is only accidental that Lahore is where Pakistan happened
too, and Pathar Nadi would never have noticed the unfortunate monument built to
commemorate the Lahore Resolution. Instead his eyes would have dwelt on the more
abiding isolation of the Badshahi Mosque, whose triple domes enclosed within four
outstretched minarets indicate that worship can be upright as well as elegant. And then the
fort, the red fort of Lahore that he must have seen, even if he did not know better to realize
that he had also passed the mausoleum of the poet Iqbal and the shrine of Guru Nanak,
founding father of the Sikhs, and was soon to pass the tomb of Data Ganj Buksh, the first
Muslim, we are told, to arrive in the eleventh century Lahore. Instead of noticing memorials,
Pathar’s travel fatigue would have been more immediately engaged in the crazy traffic of
the streets, both impeding and impelling his entry into a city and a story. For the intruder
has arrived in ignorance of what it means to come upon Lahore when peace is in the air, at a
time when no voices sing on our behalf, when nobody speaks of danger. It is fitting Now, the
man will enter a tale to ravish the relationship between peacetime and warfare, unwitting
though his deeds may be: he has arrived; peace like terror violates the airspace in which he
must become the story of a body missing in action.
HALIMA
It was Halima who gave him to me. Lean-faced and wheaten-skinned Halima, a woman who
cleaned houses and told stories, was much given to educating an audience when her voice
appeared to have the least to say. Many condensations of narrative expertise were distilled
into the angle at which she held her head upon the telling of a tale. On occasion, the burden
of eloquence could make her battle worn, ready to declare cease- fires long before her plot
had reached any terrain of decidability. Halima cleaned my father’s house each day and, in
moments of brief respite, it was her pleasure to sink upon her haunches, drink deeply on a
cigarette, and then talk to me, when I was most intent at being audience to her tale. Yet
which of us was audience? Between us, the idea of auditorship was an issue as intense as
the ghost of gunfire in the Lahore of 1965, when to listen to the rhythm of distant thuds was
to shudder into a posture of unlistening, or a manner that begged to be spared envisaging
bodily recipients for the trajectory of metal to which those sounds referred. Perhaps such
casualties were in Halima’s mind on the black morning when she chose to ask me if I had
ever missed a body. “there are many people for whom I long”, I gravely said, “if that is what
you mean by missing.” No, it was not. I could tell that she wanted to being a story, the
telling of which perhaps would too fatally indicate its end: “some other day, perhaps, Bibi”,
she told me, “when the story feels less like the body”.
With her fleet of sisters, Halima cleaned houses in Gulberg 5, a somewhat serene subsection
of the residential spread that constitutes the gulberg of Lahore. Its serenity is largely linked
to its proximity to the canal, a man- made conduit of water that makes a lateral cut along
Lahore’s most tree- lined street, the Mall, Eucalyptus tress border the canal, which in turn
are bordered by the hundred regimented nurseries, selling rose-cutting and hibiscus’ shrubs
and infant palms to the men who work as gardeners in the houses of Gulberg. When
resident of Gulberg 5 take to sitting in their gardens, they have perforce to ponder at the
texture of an air at once astringent with the sharp reminder of eucalyptus trees, addictive
with the sweetness routinely sent forth by the nurseries’ infant flowering trees, and
melancholy with the alluvial weight emanated by a water-way built to replenish the
overworked agriculture of the Punjab.
But Punjabi mud serves many functions. It was certainly the life-blood of a small collection
of dwellings that lay to the left of Gulberg 5, in the warren of mud-houses where Halima
lived. Across the road from the lawns and the clipped hedges, there was an clave of homes
at least as susceptible to the rains as were the remnants of a cicada. For when the day’s
work was done, where did they go, the gardeners and the cleaning-women and the
washermen, but to such scrupulously constructed areas of the city that monsoon itself
would collaborate in the annual function of washing their homes away? The dwellings
amidst which Halima lived were designed to capsize under the weight of water and the
preponderance of rain: no sooner was the landscape dry than the homes sprang up again.
Dealing in rapid imagination with their own obliteration, the washermen and cleaning
women worked in their spare time to pull the alluvial soil of the Punjab back into some
semblance of habitation. Each year, later into the summer, first the homes melted and then
were built back: shaped differently, perhaps with a new configuration of mud rooms, but
always as though catastrophe was perfunctory, a habit. For Halima had no son or brother in
Kuwait or the Gulf states to ship home his income as did others more fortunate, allowing
them the novel purchase of brick. Instead, she thrust her narrow wrists into the urgency of
clay and was annually a trifle abstracted as she went about her profession. Did it make he
hale the rain, I could not help but ask her? Hate? No, not quite, it was water’s way of
encouraging the inventiveness of life.
That must be it, the rhythm of annual construction, which allowed the rain to seep into her
tales in order to suggest – just as her habitation could yearly-wash away-all conversation
would be founded on the fluidity of rebuilding. Living in houses that did not fall, her
employers ran the risk of being incapable of comprehending the trick through which
Halima’s tales muddied the distinction between Lahore peaceable and Lahore warring. I did
not know Halima when, in the September of 65, Peanut Alam was gladdening the eyes of all
those who lived in solid house by performing intrepid dog-battles in our skied, but she- her
bones tired, bemused-must then have been a child, distracted. Before her parents’ walls
again slapped back into place and the soothing odour of drying clay had filled her head, that
war must have been done. And during the winter when Tiger Niazi lead the army of West
Pakistan into carnage and the loss of is Eastern wing, one young woman in Lahore was
surely preoccupied with more immediate duties, “those wars”, Halima confided to me years
after the bitter reaping of their aftermaths,” I could not see them; I could not feel”. And
theft in her habit of questioning, she added, “Tell me, Bibi - would it help if I could read?” I
affirmed it at the time, but that was years before I understood how much the fluid houses of
Lahore had to instruct the solid on their own versions of illiteracy.
In one spring when both wars had been done, I drove down the main thoroughfare of
Gulberg to realize yes, it must be March, for the gypsy vendors almost seem to be packing
up their wares. Each winter in Lahore, Himalayan gypsies flood the city, bringing with them
wares of which the most seductive are jaunty gypsy representations of horses, constructed
out of illiterate papier Mache, ghostly Grecian relics that are them sold upon the residential
roadsides of Lahore. It would happen each December, when suddenly the major road of
Gulberg is lined with memories of Troy, and we as passers-by say “Yes, it must be winter;
the gypsies have returned.” The paper horses themselves are arches and purple, vestigial
replicas of the images that Alexander must have left behind in debris, when he so
precariously crossed a treacherous gash of sub-continental mountain. Perky, incongruous
shapes, they crowd our winter pavements as though to say, “Buy us, buy us: you are a
populace at home with incongruity”. For that is winter in Lahore, the coming and going of
war or horses, with the gypsies leaving for mountain abodes the moment that the onslaught
of snow no longer banishes them to the sunny plain.
Driving through Gulberg one March, I realized that it must be spring, that the gypsies’
sojourn must now be nearly over. We passed them by, to notice that Ifat Suleri was standing
on the pavement, in deep altercation with the gypsy vendor who addressed her. Her face
passed by in the flash of animation that we of Lahore had come to assume as our due: she
was laughing, while a gypsy vendor with a thin face and intent blue eyes seems only able to
look at her with an attention beyond transaction. She bent down to pick up a horse as we
drove by, engaged in dialogue, laughing, and completely absorbed in each moment of her
barter. Wanting to witness something more of the animation that Lahore considered its
property, we paused by our friend, and “what is it with you, Ifat?” we said. She was buying a
horse to light up the sick-bed eyes of her son, Taimur. “what better gift for Tamburlaine
than a horse from Alexander?” I was sorry that Taimur was sick, but Ifat of Lahore was
allowing me no room for pity. “Bibi, join me; buy a horse,” she urged. “Can you trust that
gypsies will return next winter?”
I could not, and thus bought a paper horse of bearing as proud as Alexander’s, in full
knowledge of the lie that such pride would represent to the veracity of heat, or the
terrifying exactitude with which summer could obliterate a gypsy complicity with winter.
“Oh, horse, how you will die,” I thought, “Even in the seclusion of a summer bedroom, out
its colour, nor your proud bamboo legs from withstanding the hatred of the sun.” I was
mourning for the horse already, even before the gaiety of his Grecian purple had found
habitat within my room. I felt could well be more fortunate, but “You will break in startling
fashion before you are prepared for it,” I told my purchase, “But until that time, you will be
perfect, horse.”
Spring in the city is elation. Its arrival is so totally concerned with the structure of brevity
and a preparation for hardship that the travelogue it represents says nothing cyclical, tells
only startling stories. Basant is one of them, a frail gaiety, and-in deference to the
astonishing bloom of mustard-seed amidst the fields that encircle the city-dresses the world
in yellow. I should not buy horses but kites for Halima’s children, I thought, when on the
following morning she came to clean the house. But that day the woman was not interested
in my train of thought, seeking me out with urgent intention in order to ask, “Bibi, what
have you done?” “What I have done, Halima?” Her face made an effort before she could
reply, “Do I have to see that horse in your room every day?” “Why not?” I asked, in
perplexity. “It’s pretty.” Halima’s intake of breath was sharp before she sank down upon the
floor and looked up as though she were unveiling. “Yes, it’s pretty,” she said slowly, “But
now I must tell you of Pathar Nadi”.
“Who is he, Halima?” for she always gave me stories when, the day’s cleaning done, she
would return to my room to squat and sway, to breathe deeply on the butt end of a
cigarette that I recognized as mine. Her pride was such that she could never accept a fresh
cigarette from the packet perpetually waved in her direction: instead, our decorum was that
I would leave at least three barely smoked cigarettes in the ashtrays that Halima was
required to empty. Later in the day she would produce one of them with care from one of
the several knots in her cotton veil, her clothing being full of provisional pockets, so that no
corner of her dress was not weighty with a secret. All of them danced, dangled as
adornments, when Halima sank back upon her thighs, pulled out her butt-ends, and began
to tell me stories.
From her I learned of the commotion caused by a black buffalo that her neighbouring
washerman wished to buy, to the scandal of his in-laws, who asserted that such a significant
sum of money should only be borrowed to conduct in full ceremony an eldest daughter’s
wedding. That nuptial, of course was to be held in the spring, after the village had
reconstituted whatever habits had collapsed during the autumnal rains. She told me of her
sister with the evil eye, a woman known to be summoned secretly into the homes of
Gulberg 5 to kneed at stomachs undesirous of another infant, and to wheedle away – with
the dexterity of digits alone – all that those abdomens no longer wished to hold. Then I
heard of her beggar – cousin, who led a glamourous and charmed existence in the Anarkali
Bazar, one of Lahore’s nerve centres. But Pathar Nadi was a new name to me, sitting me
wondering about its possibility of story. “Who is he, Halima?” I repeated to her silence.
Halima leaned forward, and her thin hand gripped my knee. “Never let the children know it
could be said – they must not know his name was uttered by me.” She swayed in a hesitance
of discourse that I had rarely witnessed in her; then she rose, choosing a pragmatic
resolution to our unfinished conversation. Hand on the hollow of her back, Halima’s fingers
felt at the furrow of her spine. She was entitled to fatigue, I knew, and thus deserved the
right to hold her tongue and spine, but before she left my presence, Halima glanced behind.
“I’ll see him next year, though,” she added, ruefully.
What could I, Bibi of the privilege, tell Halima’s family but the nothing that I knew? They
themselves were far enough away, beyond the ken of those – whose houses did not vanish
in the rain. Halima’s husband we had met on those occasions when some minor family crisis
had forces him to stop in with a quick reluctant message, or on mornings when I drove by a
group of roadside labourers and recognized Halima’s husband’s absentminded air as he
stared at the ground, the spade/ for he was an itinerant labourers, most frequently
employed in the special squadron that the Sui Gas Company has specifically designed to dig
up all the freshly metalled roads laid down by the municipality of Lahore, and frequently not
employed at all. It made him surly, his wife told me, a quiet man with sudden fits of temper,
who obtained satisfaction as well as money when he watched those gleaming metalled
roads come into shape and knew that – at the behest of Sui Gas – could tear them up again.
Ghulam, his name was: Ghulam, a slave. Had he not been Christian, a city-dwelling second
generation convert, then some Punjabi version of rural Islam would have softened that
appellation, making him Ghulam Muhammad, Slave of the Prophet, or Ghulam Din, Slave of
the faith. But living in a city as a migrant worker in a group of homes that the rains most
regularly washed away had done away with such amelioration: Ghulam existed in the world
simply as he was, one whom his parents had – named, “slave.” Halima, in her sardonic
humour, would tell me tales of his surliness, his anger that his wife could clean and clean
and still come home with stories, whereas he could on occasion break up roads and often
come home with nothing. “It makes him angry, Bibi,” mused Halima, “But he is not a man
who knows how to make a worthwhile conversation out of anger.” “How many people do?”
“O,” she said, outrageous. “You would – you would each time that I annoy you, were there
not money between us.” She had won. I’ll pay her tomorrow, I thought, looking down, I just
could not today.
Ghulam and Halima had two children. Often – when the mud dwellings had no extended
home to proffer – both accompanied their mother as she cleaned and cleaned. Had we not
intervened, they would have helped her too, staggering in her walk with pails of water into
which her cloth would slip to wet the cool floors, robbing them of dust. The mother,
barefoot, used to move silently through the house, her daughter in tow with all the
appurtenances of cleaning, while her son sat outside in the garden, playing aimlessly. On
such occasions, Halima hardly spoke at all: she cleaned each room and left, avoiding her
employers’ eyes; Now and then she said a word or so to Gul Badan over her shoulder, but
mostly she was taciturn, she was as Ghulam.
Gul Badan was Halima’s oldest child. “Body”, she had called her daughter, “Body of a
Flower.” The others – the cook and the driver, the gardener in the garden – would look at
that brown curly-head and call her Gul, but I never heard her mother call her flower alone:
she was always, in a mother’s imperious locutions, “Body of a Flower.” And Gul Badan
deserved her name, I thought, as I watched her clinging to her mother’s hip in infant
fashion, or heaving buckets in Halima’s wake with a seriousness of the truly womanly. A
woman of six years old, Gul Badan often at beneath a twisted mango-tree in the garden to
wave bees and sundry insects of the slumbers of her brother, Allah Rakha. Allah Rakha –
God keep him – was four years her junior, and some intuitive apprehension, of disaster
made Gul Badan most attentive to his needs, as must have been his mother, when she
looked at her son to determine that the only befitting name could be an exclamation, “God
keep him!” At two, God Keep Him was a most amiable infant, ready to be regimented by
Body of a Flower, prepared to play for hours beneath a mango tree, while his mother
cleaned and cleaned. And these were the two from whom I had to keep at all available cost
the nothing that I had been told of Pathar Nadi?
Halima moved in silence for the next few weeks, allowing me to forget temporarily the
intrusive name of which I still knew nothing. Lahore was moving into April and a renewed
apprehension of the heat: already the latticed and sweet smelling khas blinds had been
installed every window; already the blinds were watered, to create within a habitat some
illusion of the rain. We met to work in unison, preparing the house for an onslaught of heat,
talking of minor matters in the way a resident of Gulberg 5 will address- the woman who
cleans, whatever friendship subsists between them. One morning, as I lingered over a
breakfast newspaper, Halima watched me for a minute to announce suddenly, “I know I am
illiterate, but have you ever read lines?” A quick theatre filled the dining-room. “Lines,
Halima?” I questioned. “What kind of lines?” “Those written by the body of the man whose
name I must not say.” Rising to hold her cotton-clad shoulders for some ghostly seconds, I
allowed her to guide me to the window where we both gazed somberly at the garden, to
witness how Gul Badan was gambolling with Allah Rakha, brown and indifferent to the
steadiness that constitutes an April sunlight in Lahore. “The lines of his face, Bibi,” Halima
finally added, “Demand to be read like the palms of a thousand hands.”
Now it seemed war again, times of intrusion and rampant censors. We gazed outside: Body
of a Flower had just smartly rapped God Keep Him’s knuckles, his hand aimed surely at the
flower-beds: God Keep Him whimpered for the duration of our silence, and then scuttled off
to some different corner of possible desecration. He was as visible to our watching eyes as a
startling silent documentary that we saw without really seeing Halima, I realized, wished me
to consider borderlines and their routine interdiction as a reconfiguration into the forbidden
territory of a face: laugh lines, age lines, I wondered, to myself, what does compassion
suggest that I now read? “Only lines to the illiterate,” Halima, finally repeated, “A face with
lines, and each line, with a meaning.” I answered quietly, “If ever you discover?” she turned
in rapid dignity upon the possibility mere curiosity. “Discovery is dangerous. Perhaps the
only safety is that each line has a meaning, that I could – if I would – discover. And then I’ll
give him to your limb,” Halima responded, “For my knowledge of him only comes in pieces.”
She had no other way of telling, then? “Nor has anyone, Bibi,” she gently scoffed in her
leavetaking, “It is the nature of adultery.”
So that was it, a thing so simple as to evoke the greatest terror of all, but as easily ignored as
the invasion of cicada. The nature of adultery caused Halima’s body to assume the
precisions of waiting: even when she had no reason to adopt the posture of attending on
something that possibly occur, it caused her to sit as hooded as a hunting hawk but as
equally prepared for the primacy of flight. It stayed with me, her sentence, as a plangency
over which the function of my day had no control, although I continued to be functional. In
the curious light of April – a cutting light but not as yet cruel – I watched the gestation of
Halima’s tale, coming to me in starts and flashes, intermittencies, even when we worked
together every day. Some sunny gesture of her son made me once exclaim as I came home,
“Halima, Allah Rakha is so sunny.” She watched me put down my bag and parcels where
they belonged and then volunteered, without quite looking at me, “Pathar Nadi had sunlight
in his bones, but he is not that infant’s father.”
This was the second time that she had used the stranger’s name, forcing me into an
acknowledgement of the piecemeal of her story. “His bones consists of sunlight. No
marrow, no honey, nothing but sunlight in the secrete of those bones,” Halima added. And I
felt chilled, such waiting should no be: has the dogged cleaning of your spirit that should not
be, I wished to say, or is it my homecoming to a house you’ve cleaned that makes you evoke
such bitter sunlight? I was disturbed by the new economy with which she fashioned this tale
for me, as though when confined to the most familiar plot of all, she had discourse alone
and nothing other in which to confirm her commitment to the extraordinary. For the
substance of what she’ referred to was all too ordinary, too predictable: Ghulam, a surly
man; an itinerant gypsy who possibly sold horses in Lahore; a meeting perhaps at Halima’s
beggar cousin’s abode. All of that seemed tawdry matter to contemplate, wearisome before
the facts were out in its reconfirmation of the futility of compassion. But still she held me,
despite all necessary doubts, to the conviction of her manner, which – even as did the
search of her spine – claimed to impart the promise of knowledge.
As though in apprehension of my possible mistrust, Halima suddenly spoke of labour.
“When I work hard and my bones ache at night, I like to think that his eyes are the sun,”
“Oh, come, Halima,” I expostulated in disappointment, embarrassed by what further
extravagances might follow, “Surely not so simple as the sun.” “Exactly as simple as the
sun,” she gravely said. For the skies of every brilliant day turned inverse in his eyes, she told
me, scoring about them bright daylight lines, radiants that elongate in the radiance of a
smile. Allah Rakha in the garden was still laughing, chasing part on the garden. “Why must
you tell me this Halima?” I asked finally. She stood up and held her back in a posture of
fatigue and impatience. “Because if I give him to you limb by limb and you are to listen, then
we never need to sit around and talk about his story.”
So it was a body that she designed to proffer me, a gesture, an appeal. “Set limits on this,
Bibi,” some voice said, “As though it were a salary.” “Yes, I am ready to listen Halima,” I
responded to the attendance that surrounded her waiting for my voice. “But then no more
metaphors, alright?” “Metaphors, what are they, Bibi?” “No more sunlight or honey or
radiance or anything that makes you seem like someone in an Urdu film on the verge of
bursting into song!” Halima’s eyes flickered at that, clouding suddenly into a pain at my
debasement of her manner from economy into poverty. She was wearing grey cotton that
day, muslin washed a thousand times that still stayed grey against the deep brown of her
skin. The professional in Halima made her bend to brush at a cobweb she had missed in the
corner of the dining-room, a filament that had irritated me for days. The filament between
her fingers, “But I thought you liked beauty, Bibi,” she softly said.
So it was beauty, then, that made her give me bones. Now I could envisage no respite from
this story. It was as though I had been, in a moment of good nature, lured into a Lahori
cinema-house and had only upon the dimming of the lights internalized the grim reality of
how hours of breath-taking melodrama I had now to endure. “I’ll hear of beauty; I’ll hear of
whomever you mention,” came my response, grasping to be firm, “But do not – do not – be
flowery…” Halima’s returning gaze did not quite call me cowardly: it was instead still more
preoccupied with the nature of its own self-exposure. “I will not bring you flowers,” she
said. In April, the light grew suddenly cruel, “I will not bring you flowers, not talk them,”
Halima continued, “But I shall tell you of other things that I entrust you to know. My eyes
are tired of looking for Pathar Nadi: he only is here on each seventeenth year, but every
morning when my eyes open, they are already tired of looking for him”.
The child in the garden could not longer serve as a fiction of distraction. Another fictiveness
had descended on us, and I as auditor could no longer impose and order, suggest a
regularity to a tale that promised predictable, that promised necessary disaster, I had one
weapon left. Sinking down upon a chair, I raged at Halima: “Seventeen years?” you say
seventeen years? Woman, you are barely in your thirties! How dare you imply that you have
Sunlight in his Bones more than once in you short and deprived existence?” Halima flinched
at this. “I think you would call it a metaphor, Bibi,” she said, and quietly left the room.
That night skied were turbulent over Lahore. An April night, a night in early May, should
suggest the serenity of the inevitable, when a dome of stars clusters over sleepers who
cannot but feel enlightened by the heat and the discipline it will demand. No such peace-
time was mine. I dreamt, that Peanut Alam was making his circuits again, only this time, his
jet-finger carried in its wake some secret message to the city, hardly legible to us down in
Lahore. And then someone switched on the radio to the urgency of Nur Jahan singing
patriotic songs. “Oh my golden town, Lahore,” she sang. “Oh my only town, Lahore,” she
sang, “In seventeen years, what will you be?”
Sleeping Bibi stirs. Somewhere, outside her dream, both Halima and Lahore travel in the
passage of disaster. In some further outskirt, a body with lines beyond longing till remains to
be read. Unwilling recipient of such stories, Bibi sleeps, one hand unfurled, the hollow of its
palm begging for more speech. Tomorrow, Halima’s story will return, tonight, not one
cicada disturbs the night with its superfluous desire.
549 lines.