The Pakistani Bride (14 page)

“No, a tree felled perhaps.”

“It frightened me. I've heard the tribals can be trigger-happy.”

Carol's pink nails nervously plucked at her blue sweater.

“Trigger-happy? Yes, I suppose so.”

The Major frowned. Eerie and violent, the atmosphere had already affected her. She had arrived with Farukh only yesterday, and the Major wondered why her thoughts should fasten on death at such slight provocation. Did she realize that life here meant little? A man killed was a candle snuffed out, a tree felled, no more. Lately he had been finding his work in the desolate mountains a burden. After almost two years, he was looking forward to a transfer. His wife had refused to stay in the remote camp. She occasionally visited him from Peshawar where she was living with her parents.

“It's so good to have you and Farukh with me in this wilderness,” the Major repeated for the third time that morning.

“It's nice of you to have us,” Carol replied. “Setting up the second foundry really took it out of Farukh. There were delays in obtaining sanctions. When it got going the furnace blew up! Dr. Zaffar said Farukh must get away . . . and you know how much he loves the mountains!”

She stretched her legs and arms and threw back her head. Her sweater rode up to reveal a slip of firm white stomach. Mushtaq turned a little. Smug behind his dark glasses, he gazed obliquely at the tidy fork between her trousers. A glass of orange juice and a childish-looking box of smeared watercolors lay open on a small table beside her. Carol shut the paint box absently.

“I went down the gorge earlier and tried to paint the river. It's such a lovely color, but I can't get it right. I thought I'd go down again this afternoon.”

Languidly, she moved her long, trousered legs further apart and looked at the snowcapped mountains beyond the immediate range. She knew the direction of the Major's eyes and was warmed by an exultant female confidence. He must be around thirty-six, she thought, and in comparison to Farukh so easygoing and self-assured.

Farukh's absent person, his nervous, suspicious face, suddenly became hateful. The hell with Farukh, she thought, and his whining explosions of jealousy. Always in the mad mornings, noons and nights, put-puttering through the crackle of the phone, between the lines of a letter, his insatiable suspicions, his morbid craving for what he called “the truth.” “Be honest with me. I can take it.”

“Then what happened?” Farukh would say.

“I told you, he tried to touch me.”

“Where?”

“You know where.”

“Like this?” his hand would crawl up, hurting her, “like this?”

“Yes. Stop it! Yes. But I told you I hated it. I slapped him. He stopped.”

“You're lying. You enjoyed it. Every bit of it. Most likely you encouraged him. You welcomed him. You devoured him. You opened your arms wide thrusting out your pink tits!”

“My pink tits! There's nothing special about them!”

“Oh, you're changing the subject. Don't be smart with me! You widened your legs like this, and . . .”

“Stop it. You're insane!”

“Insane? I'm insane? If I am it's because I don't know what to believe. You are driving me mad.” Farukh pulled his long fine hair and little tufts of it came off in his fists. “Be honest. You enjoyed it. Don't lie! I can take it. I can stand anything but deceit.”

He was upon her, shaking her, his pale brown face flushed with ugly red blotches, his eyes insanely wide.

“Okay, okay. If you say so, I enjoyed it.”

“If I say so? Who're you trying to fool?”

“Yes, yes. I enjoyed myself. I admit, I enjoyed myself.”

The eternal dissection of the slightest details, an interminably reopened wound.

“But I love you so much, you see, you understand? I love you so much. Come on now, be nice to me. I can't bear it. You're driving me mad.”

To hell with your madness. Your sadistic, possessive, screwed up love . . .

The scene occurred with monotonous regularity. Now lounging on the chair, facing the Major, her bitterness boiled up. God, I'll show Farukh. I'll give him something to be jealous about! And to think she had at first found his jealousy
endearing! Of course, it had blossomed into full monstrous bloom only after they were married and in Lahore. She hated what it had done to her. It had corroded her innocence, stripped her, layer by layer, of civilized American niceties. She was frightened to see a part of herself change into a hideously vulgar person.

. . . And the atmosphere of repressed sexuality in Pakistan had not helped. Slowly Carol had begun to realize that even among her friends, where the wives did not wear burkhas or live in special, women's quarters, the general separation of the sexes bred an atmosphere of sensuality. The people seemed to absorb it from the air they breathed. This sensuality charged every encounter, no matter how trivial. She was not immune. Her body was at times reduced to a craving mass of flesh . . . It was like being compelled to fast at a banquet . . .

“A penny for your thoughts?” Snapping his fingers beneath Carol's nose, Mushtaq smiled into her eyes.

Carol started, “Oh nothing really . . . It's so peaceful here, it makes one dream.”

The Major removed his sunglasses. Carol had particularly noticed his eyes the night before in the glare of the hurricane lamp at coffee after dinner. Major Mushtaq, with the unit doctor and a few officers, had joined Carol and Farukh in the Mess sitting room. After coffee they had played Scrabble. Carol had basked in a surfeit of attention. The Major's tawny eyes, flecked with black like a leopard's coat, glancing now at her, now at Farukh, had obliterated the presence of all others. He had maintained an uncanny balance, keeping Farukh off the brink of gloom and suspicion even though Carol's vivacity would normally have been enough to secure his jealous anger. Instead Farukh had himself been warm and relaxed in his friendship with the Major.

Later, alone in their room, Carol and Farukh, for once, had not quarreled.

Now, looking into Mushtaq's raffish eyes, she felt light-headed. He had this strange effect on her. She wanted to revel in the appreciativeness of his stare. But she knew better. Earthy and brazen, the men here expected subtlety from women. She had already responded too much.

Besides, they were too exposed to the curious stares of tribals filing across the steep track overlooking the lawn.

Carol's face hardened. Three tribesmen had stopped on the track looking down at her. They held the ragged ends of their turbans between their teeth and their eyes examined her insolently. Primly she crossed her legs. Observing her discomfiture, Mushtaq lifted his head. At once the men turned away.

He laughed, “They haven't seen the likes of you!”

Carol was furious. What did he mean? After all, she was not naked! The hell with them, she thought, removing a cigarette from her packet of Gold Leaf. At once Mushtaq leaned forward with his lighter. She drew a quick breath and exhaled.

“Maybe I should wear a burkha!” Her voice was sharp with annoyance.

“It's not as bad as all that . . .”

“It is,” she snapped. “Haven't they ever seen a woman before?”

“Come now, I should have thought you'd like being noticed,” teased the Major. “You know how it is with us—segregation of the sexes. Of course, you only know the sophisticated, those Pakistanis who have learned to mix socially—but in these settlements a man may talk only with unmarriageable women—his mother, his sisters, aunts, and grandmothers—a tribesman's covetous look at the wrong clanswoman provokes a murderous feud. They instinctively lower their eyes, it's a mark of respect.
But let them spy an outsider and they go berserk in an orgy of sightseeing! Don't take it personally. Any woman, whether from the Punjab or from America, evokes the same attention.”

“I . . . I felt they were undressing me.”

“That's why I told you last evening not to go wandering off on your own.”

Carol looked away.

“Do you know,” he continued, “this morning I had to post a picket to guard you while you painted the river?”

Unexpectedly she glowed with excitement. “Did you really? I didn't see them. Where were they?”

This was it! A sense of being catered to and protected—servants and leisure. Unhurried sessions with the dressmaker and languid gin-and-tonics on well-groomed lawns. These compensations made her stay despite Farukh's morbid jealousy. They prevented her from carrying out her repeated threats to divorce him—to go back home. Prolonged morning coffees and bridge, delicious sessions of gossip with the band of women who increasingly formed her social group—American, Australian, British, and other Europeans, married to Pakistanis, who otherwise had very little in common. Sunk into cushions of leisure they shared confidences and wept with homesickness on each other's shoulders. In moments of lonely alienation, turning hostile, they sneered at strange customs, at modernization not yet achieved, at native in-laws, and dirt, and dust, and primitive plumbing.

Once purged of their resentments they regained the sporty sense of adventure and curiosity that had brought them to this remote land in the first place. Their compensations were the Majors! The bright blue sunlit days!

Carol suddenly thought of Pam, still promoting lipsticks and lotions behind her counter, while she braved the Himalayas and lived in mountains teeming with handsome cave dwellers,
tall, sunburned ferocious men. She fashioned phrases for use in her letter to Pam. “The darling of an isolated camp deep in the Himalayas”—“venturing where no white woman had ever gone before”—“protected by pickets!”

Pam would circulate her letter. Carol viewed her old friends with the condescension she had bestowed on her arrival in Lahore on fat, garishly made-up begums. Jammed together they slumped on sofas at “dinner parties,” their tender jelly-bellies giggling.

T
he raucous stream hurtled headlong in a spray of foam into the main waters of the Indus. Half a furlong ahead, the purr of the river became a husky, pervading growl. From where she sat, Carol could see the bridge spanning the deep, secretive gorge of the Indus. Mushtaq's voice poured pleasantly into her ears. His eyes, barely glancing at her face, nibbled on the curves beneath her sweater.

“. . . this set off a string of counter-murders. Seven men dead in two days. The man who had actually molested the girl vanished across the river. But the girl's relatives are sure to get him one of these days.”

“Can't you stop this senseless killing?”

“Me?” The Major gave a wry smile. “It's like this,” he explained. “This side of the Indus, where we're sitting, is Swat Kohistan. There is a semblance of law and order here . . . at least a killer is fined! If he makes it across the river, we can't touch him.”

He turned in his chair and swept his arm towards the hills across the bridge.

“That part of Kohistan has no administration. It is inhabited by isolated pockets of feuding tribes, for centuries imprisoned by the Karakoram Range. They have their own notions of honor and revenge; a handful of maize stolen, a man's pride slighted, and the price is paid in bloody family feuds. Possibly they are better off . . . At least they know where they stand.”

Carol liked the way he talked, the flashes of earnestness that lit his face and his patient, didactic delivery.

“I'll tell you what happened just a month back. We had to take the construction of the road through a village. It had been evacuated and in compensation the Khan was paid six thousand rupees. Now, that's a lot of money: you can't imagine how poor these people are. I thought they'd use the money to better their miserable lot. Do you know what they did?”

Carol shook her head. Her hair fell forward in a flattering, sun-yellow filigree.

“The Khan shot the male members of an entire clan. The next day, a load off his mind and his conscience at ease, he paid his fine to the Wali of Swat. Six thousand rupees, the fine for ten murders!”

“How dreadful!” cried Carol.

“Had he killed them on the other side of the Indus, he would not have had to pay anything at all.” A hint of admiration crept into his voice. “The Kohistanis are quite untameable really. The British tried their darndest . . . They gave up after Sir Bindon Blood had fought and failed to subjugate them at the turn of the century.”

They remained silent for a while. The Major stood up.

“Well, young lady, it's been delightful sitting in the sun talking to you, but I think I should get back to work.”

“Oh, please don't go! What will I do all by myself?” begged Carol, eager to sustain the glow his eyes kindled in her. “Can't you take the day off? Farukh won't be back until nightfall and I'll be lonely.”

Mushtaq decided to stay.

A few minutes later she extended her hands. “Come,” she said, “let's try the ‘other side of the river.' Shall we?”

Mushtaq caught the proffered hands and drew her up. “Anything you say, my dear. Wait just a minute. I will arrange for a picket.”

Striding over to a khaki-uniformed jawan by the gate, he issued instructions and walked back to Carol.

“Put a scarf over your head and we will be ready.”

This concession to modesty, he felt, would have to suffice. Carol complied. She was too excited to make an issue of anything.

 

Carol and the Major leaned over the bridge. Fifty feet below them, the river thundered in blue turbulence.

“Oh, how beautiful . . . how absolutely lovely!” cried Carol. “How did you ever build it?”