In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2 page)

‘Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have earned these gray hairs’ – here he bowed his head to show the gray – ‘and now I cannot fulfill my duties as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud hunger within than disgrace in the light of day. Release me, I ask you, I beg you.’

The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.

‘What’s the matter, Nawabdin?’

‘Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir, on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery fell on me – I cannot any longer bicycle about like a bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I first had the good fortune to enter your employment. I beg you, sir, let me go.’

‘And what’s the solution?’ asked Harouni, seeing that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly care one way or the other, except that it touched on his comfort – a matter of great interest to him.

‘Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could somehow limp along, at least until I train up some younger man.’

The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him ‘Uncle,’ and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing. He could now range further, doing a much wider business. Best of all, now he could spend every night with his wife, who had begged to live not on the farm but near her family in Firoza, where also they could educate at least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni lands. The road ran on the bed of an old highway, built when these lands lay within a princely state. Some hundred and fifty years ago one of the princes had ridden that way, going to a wedding or a funeral in this remote district, felt hot, and ordered that rosewood trees be planted to shade the passersby. He forgot that he had given the order within a few hours, and in a few dozen years he in turn was forgotten, but these trees still stood, enormous now, some of them dead and looming without bark, white and leafless. Nawab would fly down this road on his new machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump, seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his arrival.

Nawab’s day, viewed from the air, would have appeared as aimless as that of a butterfly – to the senior manager’s house in the morning, where he diligently paid his respects, then sent to one or another of the tube wells, kicking up dust on the unpaved field roads, into the town of Firoza, zooming beneath the rosewoods, a bullet of sound, moseying around town, sneaking away to one of his private interests, to cement a deal to distribute ripening early-season honeydews from his cousin’s vegetable plot, or to count before hatching his half share in a flock of chickens, then back to Dunyapur, and out again. The maps of these days, superimposed, would have made a tangle; but every morning he emerged from the same place, just as the sun came up, and every evening he returned there, tired now, darkened, switching off the bike, rolling it over the wooden lintel of the door leading into the courtyard, the engine ticking as it cooled. Nawab each evening put the bike on its kickstand, and waited for his girls to come, all of them, around him, jumping on him. His face often at this moment had the same expression, an expression of childish innocent joy, which contrasted strangely and even sadly with the heaviness of his face and its lines and stubble. He would raise his nose and sniff the air, to see if he could find out what his wife had cooked for dinner; and then he went in to her, finding her always in the same posture, making him tea, fanning the fire in the little hearth.

‘Hello, my love, my chicken piece,’ he said tenderly one evening, walking into the dark hut that served as a kitchen, the mud walls black with soot. ‘What’s in the pot for me?’ He opened the cauldron, which had been displaced by the kettle onto the beaten-earth floor, and began to search around in it with a wooden spoon.

‘Out! Out!’ she said, taking the spoon and, dipping it into the curry, giving him a taste. He opened his mouth obediently, like a boy receiving medicine. The wife, despite bearing thirteen children, had a lithe strong body, her vertebrae visible beneath her tight tunic. Her long mannish face still glowed from beneath the skin, giving her a ripe ochre coloring. Even now that her hair had become thin and graying, she wore it in a single long pigtail down to her waist, like a young woman in the village. Although this style didn’t suit her, Nawab saw in her still the girl he married sixteen years before. He stood in the door, watching his daughters playing hopscotch, and when his wife went past, he stuck out his butt, so that she rubbed against it as she squeezed through.

Nawab ate first, then the girls, and finally his wife. He sat out in the little courtyard, burping and smoking a cigarette, looking up at the crescent moon just coming onto the horizon. I wonder what the moon is made of? he thought, without exerting himself. He remembered listening on the radio when the Americans said they had walked on it. His thoughts wandered off into all sorts of tangents. The dwellers around him in the little hamlet had also finished their dinner, and the smoke from the cow-dung fires hung over the darkening roofs, a harsh spicy smell, like rough tobacco. Nawab’s house had all sorts of ingenious contrivances, running water in all three rooms, a duct that brought cool air into the rooms at night, and even a black-and-white television, which his wife covered with a flowered doily that she had herself embroidered. Nawab had constructed a gear mechanism, so that the antenna on the roof could be turned from inside the house to improve reception. The children sat inside watching it, with the volume blaring. His wife came out and sat primly at his feet on the
charpoy,
a bed made of rope.

‘I’ve got something in my pocket – would you like to know what?’ He looked at her with a pouting sort of smile.

‘I know this game,’ she said, reaching up and straightening his glasses on his face. ‘Why are your glasses always crooked? I think one ear’s higher than the other.’

‘Come on, if you find it you can have it.’

Looking to see that the children all had become absorbed in the television, she kneeled next to him and began patting his pockets. ‘Lower  ... Lower  ...’ he said. In the pocket of the greasy vest that he wore under his
kurta
she found a wrapped-up newspaper holding chunks of raw brown sugar.

‘I’ve got lots more,’ he said. ‘Look at that. None of this junk you buy in the bazaar. The Dashtis gave me five kilos for repairing their sugarcane press. I’ll sell it tomorrow. Come on, make us some
parathas
. For all of us? Pretty please?’

‘I put out the fire.’

‘So light it. Or rather, you just sit here, I’ll light it.’

‘You can never light it, I’ll end up doing it anyway,’ she said, getting up.

The smaller children, smelling the
ghee
cooking on the griddle, crowded around, watching the brown sugar melt, and finally even the older girls came in, though they haughtily stood to one side.

Nawab, squatting and huffing on the fire, gestured to them. ‘Come on you princesses, none of your tricks. I know you want some.’

They began eating, pouring the brown crystallized syrup onto pieces of fried bread, and after a while Nawab went to his motorcycle and pulled from the panniers another hunk of the sugar, challenging the girls to see who would eat most.

One evening a few weeks after his family’s little festival of sugar, Nawab was sitting with the watchman who kept the stores at Dunyapur. A banyan planted over the threshing floor only thirty years ago had grown a canopy of forty or fifty feet, and all the men who worked in the stores tended it carefully, watering it with cans. The old watchman sat under this tree, and Nawab and others of the younger generations would sit with him at dusk, teasing him, trying to make his violent temper flare up, and joking around with each other. They would listen to the old man’s stories, of the time when only dirt tracks led through these riverine tracts and the tribes stole cattle for sport, and often killed each other while doing it, to add piquancy.

Though spring weather had come, the watchman still burned a fire in a tin pan, to warm his feet and to give a center to the little group that gathered there. The electricity had failed, as it often did, and the full moon climbing the horizon lit the scene indirectly, reflecting off the whitewashed walls, throwing dim shadows around the machinery strewn about, plows and planters, drags, harrows.

‘Come on, old man,’ said Nawab to the watchman, ‘I’ll tie you up and lock you in the stores to make it look like a robbery, and then I’ll top off my tank at the gas barrel.’

‘Nothing in it for me,’ said the watchman. ‘Go on, I think I hear your wife calling you.’

‘I understand, sire, you wish to be alone.’

Nawab jumped up and shook the watchman’s hand, making a little bow, touching his knee in deference, a running joke; lost on the watchman these last ten years.

‘Be careful, boy,’ said the watchman, standing up and leaning on his bamboo staff, clad in steel at the tip.

Nawab kicked over his motorcycle with a flourish, and in one smooth motion flicked on the lights and shot out the threshing floor gates, onto the quarter-mile drive that led from the heart of the farm. He felt cold and liked it, knowing that at home the room would be baking, the two-bar heater running day and night all winter on pilfered electricity. Turning onto the black main road, he sped up, outrunning the weak headlight, as if he were racing forward in the globe of a moving lantern. Nightjars perching on the road as they hunted moths ricocheted into the dark, almost under his wheel. Nawab locked his arms, fighting the bike as he flew over potholes, enjoying the pace, standing on the pegs, and in low-lying fields where the sugarcane had been heavily watered, mist rose and cool air enveloped him. At the canal he slowed, hearing the water rushing over the locks.

A man stepped from behind one of the pillars, waving a flashlight down at the ground, motioning Nawab to stop.

‘Brother,’ said the man, over the puttering engine, ‘give me a ride into town. I’ve got business, and I’m late.’

Strange business at this time of night, thought Nawab, the taillight of the motorcycle casting a reddish glow around them on the ground. They were far from any dwellings. A mile away, the little village of Dashtian crouched beside the road – before that nothing. He looked into the man’s face.

‘Where are you from?’ The man looked straight back at him, his face pinched and therefore overstated, but unflinching.

‘From Kashmor. Please, you’re the first person to come by for over an hour. I’ve walked all day.’

Kashmor, thought Nawab. From the poor country across the river. Each year those tribes came to pick the mangoes at Dunyapur and other nearby farms, working for almost nothing, let go as soon as the harvest thinned. The men would give a feast, a thin feast, at the end of the season, a hundred or more going shares to buy a buffalo. Nawab had been several times, and been treated as if he were honoring them, sitting with them and eating the salty rice flecked with bits of meat.

He grinned at the man, gesturing with his chin to the seat behind him. ‘All right then, get in back.’

Balancing against the dead weight behind him, which made driving along the rutted canal path difficult, Nawab pushed on, under the rosewood trees.

Half a mile down the road, he shouted into Nawab’s ear, ‘Stop!’

‘What’s wrong?’ Nawab couldn’t hear over the rushing wind.

The man jabbed something hard into his ribs.

‘I’ve got a gun, I’ll shoot you.’

Panicked, Nawab skidded to a stop and jumped to one side, pushing the motorcycle away from him, so that it tipped over, knocking the robber to the ground. The carburetor float hung open and the engine raced for a minute, the wheel jerking, until the float chamber drained, and then it sputtered and died.

‘What are you doing?’ babbled Nawab.

‘I’ll shoot you if you don’t get away,’ said the robber, on one knee, the gun pointed.

They stood obscured in the sudden woolly dark, next to the fallen motorcycle, which leaked raw-smelling gasoline into the dust underfoot. Water running through the reeds in the canal next to them made soft gulping sounds as it swirled along. When his eyes adjusted Nawab saw the man sucking at a cut on his palm, the gun in his other hand.

When the man went to pick up the bike, Nawab came and touched him on the shoulder.

‘I told you, I’ll shoot you.’