In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (3 page)

Nawab put his hands together in supplication. ‘I beg you, I’ve got little girls, thirteen children. I promise, thirteen. I tried to help you. I’ll drive you to Firoza, and I won’t tell anyone. Don’t take the bike, it’s my daily bread. I’m a man like you, poor as you.’

‘Shut up.’

Without thinking, Nawab lunged for the gun, but missed.

Dropping the motorcycle, the man stepped back and shot him in the groin.

Nawab fell to the ground, holding the place where it hurt with both hands, entirely surprised, shocked, as if the man had slapped him for no reason.

The man dragged the bike away from the fallen body, stood it up, and straddled it, trying to start it. It had flooded, and not owning a motorcycle, he didn’t know what to do. He held the throttle wide open, which made it worse. At the sound of the shot the dogs in Dashtian had begun to bark, the sound fitful in the breeze.

Nawab, lying on the ground, at first thought the man had killed him. The pale moonlit sky tilted back and forth, seen through the branches of a rosewood tree, like a bowl of swaying water. He had fallen with one leg bent under him, and now he straightened it. His hand came away sticky when he felt the wound. ‘O God, O mother, O God,’ he moaned, not very loudly, in a singsong voice. He looked at the man with his back turned, vulnerable, kicking wildly at the starter, not six feet away. Nawab couldn’t let him get away with this. The bike belonged to him.

He stood up again and stumbled toward the motorcycle, tackled the thief, fell on him, pushing him to the ground. The man rolled over, kicked Nawab, and stood up.

Holding the gun away at arm’s length, he fired five more times, one two three four five, with Nawab looking up into his face, unbelieving, seeing the repeated flame in the revolver’s mouth. The man had never used weapons, had only fired this unlicensed revolver one time, to try it out when he bought it from a bootlegger. He couldn’t bear to point at the body or head, but shot at the groin and legs. The last two bullets missed wildly, throwing up dirt in the road. Again the robber stood the motorcycle up, pushed it twenty feet, panting, and then tried to start it. From Dashtian a torch jogged quickly down the road. Dropping the bike, the man ran into a little stand of reeds by the side of a watercourse.

Nawab lay in the road, not wanting to move. When he first got shot it didn’t hurt so much as sting, but now the pain grew worse. The blood felt warm in his pants.

It seemed very peaceful. In the distance, the dogs kept barking, and all around the crickets called, so many of them that they made a single gentle blended sound. In a mango orchard across the canal some crows began cawing, and he wondered why they were calling at night. Maybe a snake up in the tree, in the nest. Fresh fish from the spring floods of the Indus had just come onto the market, and he kept remembering that he had wanted to buy some for dinner, perhaps the next night. As the pain grew worse he thought of that, the smell of frying fish.

Two men from the village came running up, panting.

‘O God, they’ve killed him. Who is it?’

The other man kneeled down next to the body. ‘It’s Nawab, the electrician, from Dunyapur.’

‘I’m not dead,’ said Nawab insistently, without raising his head. ‘The bastard’s right there in those reeds.’

One of the men had a single-barreled shotgun. Stepping forward, aiming into the center of the clump, he fired, reloaded, and fired again. Nothing moved among the green leafy stalks, which were head-high and surmounted with feathers of seed.

‘He’s gone,’ said the one who sat by Nawab, holding his arm.

The man with the shotgun again loaded and walked carefully forward, holding the gun to his shoulder. Something moved, and he fired. The robber fell forward into the open ground. He called, ‘Mother, help me,’ and got up on his knees, holding his hands to his waist. The gunman walked up to him, hit him once in the middle of the back with the butt of the gun, and then threw down the gun and dragged him roughly by his collar onto the road. Raising the bloody shirt, he saw that the robber had taken half a dozen buckshot pellets in the stomach, black angry holes seeping blood in the light of the torch. The robber kept spitting, without any force.

The other villager, who had been watching, started the motorcycle by pushing it down the road with the gear engaged, until the engine came to life. Shouting that he would get some transport, he raced off, and Nawab minded that the man in his hurry shifted without using the clutch.

‘Do you want a cigarette, Uncle?’ the villager said to Nawab, offering the pack.

Nawab rolled his head back and forth. ‘Fuck, look at me.’

The lights of a pickup materialized at the headworks and bounced wildly down the road. The driver and the other two lifted Nawab and the robber into the back and took them to Firoza, to a little private clinic there, run by a mere pharmacist, who nevertheless kept a huge clientele because of his abrupt and sure manner and his success at healing with the same few medicines the prevalent diseases.

The clinic smelled of disinfectant and of bodily fluids, a heavy sweetish odor. Four beds stood in a room, dimly lit by a fluorescent tube. As they carried him in, Nawab, alert to the point of strain, observed the blood on some rumpled sheets, a rusty blot. The pharmacist, who lived above his clinic, had come down wearing a loincloth and undershirt. He seemed perfectly calm and even cross at having been disturbed.

‘Put them on those two beds.’

‘
As-salaam uleikum,
Doctor Sahib,’ said Nawab, who felt as if he were speaking to someone very far away. The pharmacist seemed an immensely grave and important man, and Nawab spoke to him formally.

‘What happened, Nawab?’

‘He tried to snatch my motorbike, but I didn’t let him.’

The pharmacist pulled off Nawab’s
shalvar,
got a rag, and washed away the blood, then poked around quite roughly, while Nawab held the sides of the bed and willed himself not to scream. ‘You’ll live,’ he said. ‘You’re a lucky man. The bullets all went low.’

‘Did it hit  ...’

The pharmacist dabbed with the rag. ‘Not even that, thank God.’

The robber must have been hit in the lung, for he kept breathing up blood.

‘You won’t need to bother taking this one to the police,’ said the pharmacist. ‘He’s a dead man.’

‘Please,’ begged the robber, trying to raise himself up. ‘Have mercy, save me. I’m a human being also.’

The pharmacist went into the office next door and wrote out the names of drugs on a pad, sending the two villagers to a dispenser in the next street.

‘Tell him it’s Nawabdin the electrician. Tell him I’ll make sure he gets the money.’

Nawab for the first time looked over at the robber. There was blood on his pillow, and he kept snuffling, as if he needed to blow his nose. His thin and very long neck hung crookedly on his shoulder, as if out of joint. He was older than Nawab had thought before, not a boy, dark-skinned, with sunken eyes and protruding yellow smoker’s teeth, which showed whenever he twitched for breath.

‘I did you wrong,’ said the robber weakly. ‘I know that. You don’t know my life, just as I don’t know yours. Even I don’t know what brought me here. Maybe you’re a poor man, but I’m much poorer than you. My mother is old and blind, in the slums outside Multan. Make them fix me, ask them to and they’ll do it.’ He began to cry, not wiping the tears, which drew lines on his dark face.

‘Go to hell,’ said Nawab, turning away. ‘Men like you are good at confessions. My children would have begged in the streets.’

The robber lay heaving, moving his fingers by his sides. The pharmacist seemed to have gone away somewhere, leaving them alone.

‘They just said that I’m dying. Forgive me for what I did. I was brought up with kicks and slaps and never enough to eat. I’ve never had anything of my own, no land, no house, no wife, no money, never, nothing. I slept for years on the railway station platform in Multan. My mother’s blessing on you. Give me your blessing, don’t let me die unforgiven.’ He began snuffling and coughing even more, and then started hiccupping.

Now the disinfectant smelled strong and good to Nawab. The floor seemed to shine. The world around him expanded.

‘Never. I won’t forgive you. You had your life, I had mine. At every step of the road I went the right way and you the wrong. Look at you now, with bubbles of blood stuck in the corner of your mouth. Do you think this isn’t a judgment? My wife and children would have begged in the street, and you would have sold my motorbike to pay for six unlucky hands of cards and a few bottles of poison home brew. If you weren’t lying here now, you would already be in one of the gambling camps along the river.’

The man said, ‘Please, please, please,’ more softly each time, and then he stared up at the ceiling. ‘It’s not true,’ he whispered. After a few minutes he convulsed and died. The pharmacist, who had come in by then and was cleaning Nawab’s wounds, did nothing to help him.

Yet Nawab’s mind caught at this, looking at the man’s words and his death, like a bird hopping around some bright object, meaning to peck at it. And then he didn’t. He thought of the motorcycle, saved, and the glory of saving it. He was growing. Six shots, six coins thrown down, six chances, and not one of them killed him, not Nawabdin Electrician.

Saleema

SALEEMA WAS BORN in the Jhulan clan, blackmailers and bootleggers, Muslim refugees at Partition from the country northwest of Delhi. They were lucky, the new border lay only thirty or forty miles distant, and from thieving expeditions they knew how to travel unobserved along canals and tracks. Skirting the edge of the Cholistan Desert, crossing into Pakistan, on the fourth night they came to a Hindu village abandoned by all but a few old women. They drove them away and occupied the houses, finding pots and pans, buckets, even guard dogs, which grew accustomed to them. During Saleema’s childhood twenty years later the village was gradually being absorbed into the slums cast off by an adjacent provincial town called Kotla Sardar. Her father became a heroin addict, and died of it, her mother slept around for money and favors, and she herself at fourteen became the plaything of a small landowner’s son. Then a suitor appeared, strutting the village on leave from his job in the city, and plucked her off to Lahore. He looked so slim and city-bright, and soon proved to be not only weak but depraved. These experiences had not cracked her hard skin, but made her sensual, unscrupulous – and romantic.

One morning she lay on the bed of the cramped servants’ quarters in Lahore where she and her husband lived. He was gone for the day, aimless and sloping around the streets, unwanted at the edge of the crowd in a tea stall. Though he knew right away that she slept with Hassan the cook, in this house where she served as a maid, the first time he opened his mouth she made to slap him and pushed him out of the room; and next day as usual he hungrily took the few rupees she gave – to buy twists of rocket pills, his amphetamine addiction.

She picked at the chipped polish on her long slim toe, feeling sorry for herself. Her oval face, taller than broad, with deep-set eyes, had a grace contrasting with her bright easy temperament. At twenty-four this hard life had not yet marked her, and when she smiled her dimples made her seem even younger, just a girl; she still had some of the girl’s gravity. It was true, the cook Hassan had gotten everything from her, as always she’d given it too soon. She had been a maidservant in three houses so far, since her husband lost his job as peon in an office, and in every one she had opened her legs for the cook. She’d been here at Gulfishan, the Lahore mansion of the landlord K. K. Harouni, only a month, and already she’d slept with Hassan. The cooks tempted her, lording it over the kitchen, where she liked to sit, with the smell of broth and green vegetables cooking and sauce. And she had duties in the kitchen, she made the
chapattis
, so thin and light that they almost floated up to the ceiling. She had that in her hands. Mr. Harouni had called her into the dining room at lunch one day and said he’d never in seventy years eaten better ones, while she blushed and looked at her bare feet. And then, the delicacies that Hassan gave her – the best parts, things that should have gone to the table, foreign things, pistachio ice cream and slices of sweet pies, baked tomatoes stuffed with cheese, potato cutlets. Things that she asked for, village food, curry with marrow bones and carrot
halva
.

The entire household, from the Sahib on down, had been eating to suit her appetite.

‘Ask for it, my duckling,’ said Hassan in the mornings, when she drank her tea sitting beside him, hunched together in the kitchen. ‘I need to fatten you up, I like them plump.’

‘Don’t talk that way, I come from a respectable family.’

‘Well, whatever kind of family, what should I stuff that rounded little belly with today?’

And he wobbled off to market on his bicycle with a big woven basket strapped on the back, riding so slowly that he could almost have walked there faster, pedaling with his knees pointed out.

But that had ended soon enough. Why are cooks always vicious? She knew that at lunchtime today she would go silently into the kitchen and begin making the
chapattis,
that Hassan would be standing at the stove, banging lids, ignoring her. She hadn’t done anything, she had told the slut sweepress who was always hanging around the kitchen to fuck off somewhere else, and he exploded. Hassan ruled the hot filthy kitchen. He made food both for the master’s table and for all the servants, more than a dozen of them. For days on end the servants’ food would be inedible – keeping with Hassan’s policy of collective punishment. Once, when the accounts manager had quite mildly commented on Hassan’s reckless padding of the bills, they had eaten nothing but watery lentils for more than a week, until the manager backed down. ‘Well, I’ve got to cut corners
somewhere,
’ Hassan kept saying, shaking his grizzled head. Anyway, Saleema knew that he was through with her, would sweeten up and try to fuck her now and then, out of cruelty as much as anything else, to show he could – but the easy days were over, now she had no one to protect her. In this household a man who had served ten years counted as a new servant. Hassan had been there over fifty, Rafik, the master’s valet, the same. Even the nameless junior gardener had been there four or five. With less than a month’s service Saleema counted for nothing. Nor did she have patronage. She had been hired on approval, to serve the master’s eldest daughter, Begum Kamila, who lived in New York, and who that spring had come to stay with her father. Haughty and proud, Kamila allowed no intimacies.