The Blue Notebook (21 page)

Lying under the table, protected by the chairs, I hear a knock at the Tiger Suite’s main door. The bedroom door opens and I can see Iftikhar’s legs. He unlocks the main door. A tray of food has arrived and he orders it to be taken to the bedroom while he stands (guard?) by the door. He switches off the television in here before locking the main door again and returning to the bedroom. He does not look for me or speak. The bedroom television is on, but an hour or two later it is silenced. I assume that he has gone to sleep. It is too quiet here. I miss the sounds of the Common Street that have for so long been a part of my rhythm.

Despite the silence, I fall asleep under the table. I half awake with the sunrise as the first sun showers into the room. When I wake up, the carpet where my head has been is stained with darkened blood and my face aches. I need to go to the toilet.

I tiptoe across the main room and silently rotate the door handle of the bedroom. The right door gently swings open. There is a tiny whine of the hinges but not enough to stir the sleeping prince. I inch across the bedroom to reach the bathroom door, which Iftikhar has left open. He is a silent sleeper.

Once I reach the bathroom, I am faced with a dilemma: how best to urinate. If I go in the toilet, I will have to flush it, which will be far too noisy. I cannot climb up onto the sink, and so I decide to urinate in the empty bath. I pull the red dress up over my hips and walk silently up the three stone steps to the bath. I step into it and stand as close as possible to the plug hole and allow my bladder to release itself. The urine is dark and smelly and trickles over the floor of the white tub and down the drain. Once I climb out of the bath, I pull a few pieces of toilet paper from the roll and wipe away any traces of urine, then throw the paper in the trash.

He awakens long before he appears. As soon as I hear movement from his room, I hide what I have been writing behind the cushion of the armchair. I hear him use the toilet, run the bath, and speak on the phone. He switches on some modern music. It must be at least an hour before he comes out from the bedroom. He is wearing a long white robe and his messy hair is wet. I have a strange impulse to go and dry his hair but this urge only crosses my consciousness like a rustling of leaves in the breeze. He walks over to me. I do not fear him but look
downward in a show of deference. It is not by design that my eyes fall to the spot on the floor where I had been his football the night before. “Here,” he says, and thrusts a piece of paper toward me. “Thank you,” I say as I take it from him. “Read it,” he says. It is a poem.

My Sword

My sword is made from the finest steel

And flies at every thrust

It parries opposition

To never break my trust

My arm is always forward

My eyes have focused sight

My guard is always ready

I never lose a fight.

His handwriting is far tidier than mine and the penmanship is flowing and without correction, which leads me to believe that he wrote a draft and that this is the final copy. It is the poem of a boy. I look up at him and smile. “It is brilliant, master.”

I see he is not accustomed to praise, as he smarts. “Well, it is certainly better than yours,” he says. “Yes, it is … would you teach me to write like you?” I ask. “Well, first of all, a poem has to rhyme. Yours didn’t rhyme properly—it was rubbish.” “Next time, master, I will write in a rhyme, if I can. Will you let me write you another poem, I beg of you?” He answers, “Well, I have to go out today with Father. Write me a poem while I am out and I will read it tonight.” I answer, “I will try my best … but please do not be angry if it is not good … I will have to study if it is to be like yours.” This angers him; my attempted
subservience was in error. He throws his head back and raises his voice. “If you think someone like you can ever write like me, you are more stupid than I imagined.” I fall at his feet and grasp his ankles. “Please, master, give me another chance. You are right, you are so right. I will never write as you do … I can only try my best.” I feel the tension alter in his feet muscles as he adjusts his body against my hands. I press my head to his feet. He orders me to get up. “Thank you, thank you, Master Iftikhar,” I whimper. He orders, “Switch on the television and clean yourself up.” I switch on the television and hand the control box to his outstretched hand. I go to the bathroom, which is becoming my refuge. Iftikhar was not tidy; water has pooled on the floor and wet towels are strewn everywhere. Just before I turn on the bath, I hear him talking on the phone again.

I smile as I lie in the hot water; I have been compelled to write all day long at the bidding of my master.

I did not stay for long in the hot water. I dried quickly, put the dress back on, and returned to Iftikhar. He was watching television. I entered silently but he heard and called to me, “Come here.” I went over to him and sat on one of the armchairs; I did not lean back, as the furniture invited me to do, but instead sat upright. The morning sun was shining in my eyes. I had no sense of his current mood; suffice it to say he was not exuberant. “Get on your knees.” The hot water had stung my abrasions and my face pounded from the previous night. I knelt in front of him. I knew from experience that the encounter would
not take long but I feared the consequence of its brevity. I started to stroke his thighs through his robe and almost immediately saw his bhunnas hardening. I was trying to work out how best to proceed when fate intervened.

Fate is a misplaced retreat. Many people rationalize an unexplained event as fate and shrug their shoulders when it occurs. But that is not what fate is. The world operates as a series of circles that are invisible, for they extend to the upper air. Fate is where these circles cut into the earth. Since we cannot see them, do not know their content, and have no sense of their width, it is impossible to predict when these cuts will slice into our reality. When this happens, we call it fate. Fate is not a chance event but one that is inevitable; we are simply blind to its nature and time. We are also blind as to how fate connects one occurrence to another.

There was a knock on the door. “Hell,” Iftikhar said, “breakfast is here.” He stood up and I fell off him. “Come in,” he shouted. The bulge through his robe was still evident as a gentle shadow in the morning sunshine. The food man entered carrying a tray of breakfast and laid it on the table. He was the same man I had seen the previous day, but this time he glanced at me with dislike rather than flirtation. The seemingly ever-present, ever-invisible doorman sealed me back in with Iftikhar when the food man left; two pickles in a jar.

Iftikhar surveyed the morning’s food. I remained sitting, perched on the edge of the armchair. Iftikhar sat at the place that had been laid for him at the head of the table. The plates were made from delicate, almost transparent white porcelain with a gold-patterned rim. The porcelain may have been delicate but Iftikhar was not. He drank tea like a common man,
holding the tea cup clasped in his hand rather than by the cup handle as Father Matthew did. As his sipped, he looked at me. “Turn the television so that I can see it.” He knew that I was watching him eat. I was hungry but I was well conditioned to be so.

At times in my nest I would dream of food, and on each occasion, the dream would contrive for me not to be fed. For instance, in one dream I was behind bars. I saw a feast in front of me in a far-off room, but could not break through the bars despite their being made of paper. In another dream I was swimming in the river when I saw a festival feast being laid out on the river’s bank, but however hard I swam I could not reach the bank, even though the water appeared still. In both these dreams my feelings deceived me, for on both occasions I was hungry but did not strive to eat. This is how I felt now, hungry but not wanting to be at the table.

I noticed that Iftikhar drank unsweetened black tea and liked a breakfast of eggs and sausages. For a little man he seemed to eat an incredible amount. He ate like a hungry person even though I knew he could not be. He held his knife and fork in an undignified style, grasping each implement in his fist. He jabbed at the sausage pieces the way I used to stab for fish in the river. He did not take his eyes from mine as he ate, that same steely gaze.

As he wiped his mouth on his sleeve he said to me, “Now, come over here and finish what you started.” It seemed that my previous dilemma had been postponed rather than canceled. He pushed his chair back from the table, half stood up, and pulled his robe up over his thighs. He sat back down with his entire lower body exposed and parted his legs. I knelt before
him and looked ahead between his legs. His bhunnas was hardening before my gaze. It was shorter than my fist. He had a dense patch of curly hair that extended up his upper thighs and stopped at his testicles, which were completely hairless. It looked as though the artist who made him had dabbed a splash of black paint down there for good measure but had then given up when she realized her painting was displeasing.

I placed my palms on the outside of his thighs again and gently started to stroke up and down. I lowered my head and started to kiss the inside of his right knee. I could taste remnants of soap on his skin. I heard him moan and then felt his thighs contract on my head. He cried out. I looked up and saw that he was emitting his essence skyward. It had taken seconds. They were short little white squirts, six of them. His bhunnas must have been slightly angled to the right, as some of the juice splashed onto his right thigh and then slid downward. The remainder was in my hair. I hesitated and then drove my head deep between his thighs and started hungrily kissing both his legs. I pushed my head into him so that his thighs divided and I started to kiss his scrotum. I moaned, “Oh master … oh master … thank you. You are …” Before I could finish my empty applause, he grabbed my hair in his fist, pulled my head up, and threw me away from him. As I flew backward, my shoulder hit the table’s edge. My head flicked backward and struck the table with a loud thump. The table shook. The force was so strong that my head flicked back a second time and hit the tabletop again, although the second impact was negligible. I slumped onto the soft carpet and knew to close my eyes and not to move.

Above me Iftikhar shouted out “Oh shit” repeatedly as a mantra of self-rebuke. First he lightly kicked me with his foot
to see if I would respond. I did not. Then he knelt down and shook my shoulder. He placed his hand on my head before quickly removing it and repeating his mantra; I realized my blood must be on his hand. My head was pounding, my shoulder stung, but I was fine. I wanted to be back on the street and I prayed my submission would get me there. Tiger was furious and roared. “Shh, shh Tiger. I am fine—behave yourself.”

Iftikhar ran for the main door, found that he had locked it, and pounded on it. He shouted out, “Help—open the door, open the door.” He ran to the bedroom, presumably to fetch the key, but I heard the door unlocking. Iftikhar ran back to the main room screaming, “Quick! Get Mr. Vas … get Mr. Vas.” The door opened. Within moments, a person knelt beside me who smelled of the streets. He gently shook my floppy shoulder and stroked my hair; he whispered in my ear, “Are you awake, little girl?” I was silent. I opened my eyes a slit to see the white hair on the back of the elderly doorman’s head. He was calling to Iftikhar, “Hurry, she needs a doctor, quickly call a doctor, call the doctor!” Iftikhar was on the phone. In a panicked voice he said, “Come. You need to come … right now … there’s been an accident with the girl … she fell.” Just as he put the phone down, I heard a woman’s voice coming from the vicinity of the door. It was Hita. She cried out, “Oh heavens, oh heavens, not again.” I could feel the rush of air ahead of her as she ran toward me. She knelt beside me and shouted at the doorman to get out. “But she needs a doctor,” he cried; Hita screamed, “Get out! Now!” The door slammed shut.

I felt Hita’s bony fingers on my neck and then she proclaimed to herself, “She’s alive … she’s alive.” I felt Hita kneel close to me. “I feel her breathing. Call Mr. Vas,” she ordered
Iftikhar. “I have already,” he answered in panic. She called in my ear, “Batuk, Batuk darling. Can you hear me?” She gently shook my shoulder as if to loosen a response from me that was stuck. “We need to get her onto the bed. Master Iftikhar, please help me.” Iftikhar obviously did not move since she repeated her request, which now sounded more like a demand. I felt three hands under my back and a hand under my head. I was lifted onto the bed. Iftikhar was told to go and get a towel and water. He did not know to warm the water first because its coldness made me start. “She’s moving,” Hita said, principally to herself. “Batuk, Batuk, wake up, darling,” she pleaded.