The Pakistani Bride (2 page)

 

Afshan sat amidst the huddle of women. Her head bowed beneath a voluminous red veil, she wept softly as befitted a bride. Her heavy silver bangles, necklaces, and earrings tinkled at the slightest movement. She also wore an intricately carved silver nose-pin. Thrice she was asked if she would accept Qasim, the son of Arbab, as her husband and thrice an old aunt murmured “yes” on her behalf. Then the mountains reverberated with joyful huzzas, gunfire, and festivity.

It was almost midnight when the sleepy bridegroom was told, “Now, son, you are to meet your bride. Smarten yourself up: don't you want to impress her with all your finery?” The crest of Qasim's turban was perked up, his eyes lined anew with antimony, and the gathers on his trousers puffed out about his legs.

The drowsy boy was propelled into the bridal chamber amidst a clamor of catcalls. He heard the bolt shut from outside and was on his own, suddenly terrified. For a while he stood backed up against the door, his eyes fumbling over the dimly lit room: then they focused on the stooped and veiled form of his bride. She sat on a brightly colored quilt spread on a string bed, with her back to him.

Afshan knew her husband was locked in the room with her, and her body trembled with anticipation. Overwhelmed by modesty, she bowed her head still further. The edge of her veil almost touched her toes.

It had been drilled and drilled into Qasim that he was to walk up to his bride and lift the veil off her face. The docile, huddled form of the girl gave his frozen heart courage and he padded towards her in a nervous trance. Reaching down, he lifted the edge of the veil and threw it back.

He stood rooted in panic. Before him was the modestly slumped form of a young woman instead of the girl playmate he had expected. He had been instructed to tilt up her chin and look into her face, but he dared not.

His bride had shut her eyes in confusion. When in all that time there was no flicker of movement, she peered through slit lashes and saw the sandaled feet of her husband, and then the
shalwar
-clad legs. Her heart constricted with dismay: she was married to a boy! Hastily she looked up. She stared in amazement at the childish, frightened face and the slanting, cringing eyes watching her as if she were about to smack him.

Was this a joke? She glanced beyond him, fervently hoping to see the man who had pushed his small brother forward to tease her. But there was no one.

“Are you my husband?” she asked incredulously.

Qasim nodded with woebegone gravity. The girl didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She had been told that her groom was very young, but she had thought that he would be, like herself, at least fifteen. She began to laugh, while tears of disappointment slid down her cheeks. She laughed uncontrollably and Qasim, stung to the quick, rushed for the door. He threw himself against the bolted door and, rattling it savagely, shouted, “Open! Open! I want to get out.” A distant sound of tired chatter crept in through the door. Flushed with anger and embarrassment Qasim sidled to a corner of the room. Sobbing angrily, he at last fell asleep.

Years later, Afshan recalled their marriage night to her husband when he asked her, “But how did you feel? What had you expected?”

“I used to wander by streams,” she said, “or sit on some high place dreaming of my future husband. Gusts of wind enveloped me and I'd imagine the impatient caresses of my lover. My body was young and full of longing. I'd squeeze my breasts to ease their ache . . .” she paused mischievously. “Instead, I very nearly suckled my husband!”

That first night Afshan had lifted the sleeping boy to her bed. Brushing his tear-streaked cheeks with her full red mouth, she had tucked his legs between her thighs and fallen asleep.

Afshan accepted her lot cheerfully. She helped her mother-in-law, chaffed the maize, tended and milked the two goats and frolicked her way through her chores. Occasionally, when his mother scolded her, Qasim felt wretched. He loved her vivacious, girlish ways and was totally won by her affection.
He teased her and played pranks. When he was particularly unkind or obdurate, his wife and his mother combined to give him a thrashing. Then Qasim would shout, “I am your husband. How dare you!” and he would hate her.

One afternoon, some years after their marriage, Afshan was washing herself at the stream when Qasim strolled up and sat on a rock watching her. He was fourteen years old and gangling tall. A fine down lined his lip and cheeks. For some time now he had been persistently aware of his manhood. The wet black shirt clung to Afshan's body, the front strings open. Unselfconsciously she poured the icy water over herself. Qasim had often filled the containers while she washed and she looked on him as a younger brother. Dousing her face, she suddenly blinked and opened her eyes. Qasim was staring at the white undulation where her shirt parted. Her breasts and the taut nipples were clearly visible through the wet cloth.

“What are you looking at?” she asked severely. Before she could shield herself, Qasim had slipped off the stone and into the water. With a thrust of his young arm, he gripped her breast, “Let me . . . Let me,” he begged in his cracked young voice. Afshan smacked his arm off. Aghast, she stared at his sheepish face. Again he tried to hold her and again she slapped him hard. Qasim cowered, shielding his face, while Afshan berated him, “. . . you shameless dog, you jackal, you! I'll teach you to be brazen.” She wept with embarrassment, lashing out and hitting him wherever she could. Qasim scrambled from the rushing stream. He stumbled. Afshan fell on him with a stick, screaming abuse.

Attracted by the rumpus, a stranger from the next village came upon the scene. His tribal sense of chivalry was outraged by the assault on the girl. He dragged the boy to his feet and with heavy blows started punishing him. He might have maimed him, had not Qasim, red with fury, cried, “But she
is my wife. Let go, she is my wife!” The man, tightening his hold on the boy, looked at Afshan. “Is he your husband?” he asked incredulously.

Breathless with exertion and frightened, she panted, “Yes, yes, let go, don't touch him.”

The man released Qasim. He stared at Afshan's wet body, at the color that flushed her cheeks and at her suddenly darkening eyes. His expression changed. A wary indecisiveness crept into his features. He snickered, leering at her. Afshan covered herself quickly.

Edging sideways, drawn by the momentum of his new interest, the stranger sidled towards Afshan. Qasim's fear exploded into loathing at the stranger's lewd glance. Picking up a large rock he flung it at him straight, and then another. The man bent over and squatted in pain. His teeth glistened ferociously between cracked lips. But before he could get back his wind, Qasim, holding Afshan's arm, was skittering away through the winding gullies.

 

After this, their relations changed. Qasim still teased Afshan, but with an awkward gentleness. She in turn seemed unduly severe and shy.

At sixteen Qasim became a father.

By cultivating the steppes, granting clearance to occasional smugglers from Afghanistan, and rearing a meager string of cattle, Qasim and his family managed to survive. Survival being the sole aim of life in those uncompromising mountains, they asked for no more.

By the time he was thirty-four, Qasim and Afshan had lost three children, two to typhoid and one in a fall off a ledge. It did not matter really, because two sons and a daughter survived—a fair enough average. Then a fugitive from Soviet Kirgiz visited.
He left the next day, and within a month they heard that he had died of smallpox.

A few days later Qasim returned to find Afshan weeping by their hut.

“What is it?”

She forced herself to be calm, lest “Mata” the dreaded Goddess, so easily enraged, do even more harm.

“Zaitoon is not eating, ‘Mata' has honored her with a visit.” Qasim's throat contracted. He loved his daughter, a child with wide, tawny eyes, and limbs of quicksilver.

Brushing away tears with the edge of her tattered shawl, Afshan led him into a darkened corner of the room. Listlessly, the small five-year-old Zaitoon lay on the floor on a straw mattress. Her bright-eyed face and her small naked body were disfigured by a scabby eruption of pus-filled sores.

They did everything within their power. The dank, dung-plastered cubicle was darkened further, for the “Mata” could not stand light. Herbs and leaves, procured with great difficulty, and reputed to have a cooling effect, were strewn near the girl's burning body. Zaitoon's needs were ministered to with great obedience, for the Spirit in her body was ruthlessly demanding.

The disease spread to her mouth and throat and to her intestines. The child thrashed about in agonized frenzy.

Neighbors slipped like shadows across the door, leaving behind some small gift of food or apparel in token of their awe. A holy man of their tribe hurried from afar at the summons of the “Mata.” He placed amulets by the child and sprinkled her with holy water. But the girl, her eyes blinded by sores, grew worse. Finally, mercifully, she died.

The two boys were stricken also, and then Afshan, worn to a splinter, contracted the illness.

Within a month, Qasim, who had survived an attack of smallpox as a child, was the only one left of his family.

He was inconsolable. His face swollen with tears, and his throat hoarse with wailing, he flailed his chest with his huge fists, but death, swift, premature and grotesquely unfair, had to be accepted.

A year later a clansman who worked in the plains persuaded Qasim to travel down to Jullundur. He secured him a position as watchman at an English bank.

T
hree years passed, and in the chaotic summer of 1947 there was serious political unrest in the North Indian plains. Savage rioting erupted and many minority groups felt insecure. One by one the hill-country tribesmen fled Jullundur. For a time Qasim, loath to return to his life in the mountains where he would be under pressure to remarry, stayed on. He did not want to expose himself again to the bonds of love.

Hysteria mounted when the fertile, hot lands of the Punjab were suddenly ripped into two territories—Hindu and Muslim, India and Pakistan. Until the last moment no one was sure how the land would be divided. Lahore, which everyone expected to go to India because so many wealthy Hindus lived in it, went instead to Pakistan. Jullundur, a Sikh stronghold, was allocated to India. Now that it was decided they would leave, the British were in a hurry to wind up. Furniture, artifacts, and merchandise had to be shipped, antiques, curios, and jewelry acquired and transported. Preoccupied with misgiving and the arrangements attendant on relocating themselves in their native land, by the agony of separation from regiments, Imperial trappings and servants, the rulers of the Empire were entirely too busy to bother overmuch with how India was divided. It was only one of the thousand and one chores they faced.

The earth is not easy to carve up. India required a deft and sensitive surgeon, but the British, steeped in domestic preoccupation, hastily and carelessly butchered it. They were
not deliberately mischievous—only cruelly negligent! A million Indians died. The earth sealed its clumsy new boundaries in blood as town by town, farm by farm, the border was defined. Trains carrying refugees sped through the darkness of night—Hindus going one way and Muslims the other. They left at odd hours to try to dodge mobs bent on their destruction. Yet trains were ambushed and looted and their fleeing occupants slaughtered.

 

Near Lahore, men—mostly Sikhs—squat on either side of the rail-tracks, waiting. Their white singlets reflect the moon palely. These Sikhs are lean and towering, with muscles like flat mango seeds and heads topped by scraggy buns of hair, loose tendrils mingling with their coarse beards. They are silent, listening, glancing at the luminous dials of wristwatches.

They have raised a barricade of logs across the tracks, and the steel rails swerve slightly where the lines disappear in blackness. On either side, ploughed stretches of earth spread black wings to the horizon.

At first the men, bunched in loose groups, welcome the diversion when a voice rises:

“I saw them myself—huge cauldrons of boiling oil and babies tossed into them!”

Then losing interest in what they have heard so often, their faces turn away. By now these tales arouse only an embarrassed resentment. They are meant to stir their nobler passions, but the thought of loot undermines that resolve.

An old Sikh stands up. He wears a loose white muslin shirt, which makes him look bigger in the moonlight. They know him to be the sole survivor of a large family in the Montgomery district. They whisper, “It is Moola Singh, cousin of Bishan Singh.”

Seething with hatred, his hurt still raw, Moola Singh resents their apathy. From the depths of his anguish, his voice betraying tears, he shrieks: “Vengeance, my brothers, vengeance!” He swallows hard. “I thought we would stay by our land, by our stock, by our Mussalman neighbors. No one can touch us, I thought. The riots will pass us by. But a mob attacked our village—Oh, the screams of the women, I can hear them still . . . I had a twenty-year-old brother, tall and strong as a mountain, a match for any five of them. This is what they did: they tied one of his legs to one jeep, the other to another jeep—and then they drove the jeeps apart . . .”

Moola Singh stands quite still. The men look away despite the dark. Their indignation flares into rage.

“God give our arms strength,” one of them shouts, and in a sudden movement, knives glimmer. Their cry, “
Bole so Nihal, Sat siri Akal
,” swells into the ferocious chant: “Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!” The old Sikh sinks to his knees.

S
ikander cut his way frantically through the ripe wheat as he ran towards the mud walls of his hut. His wife Zohra, standing in the courtyard, watched him. In the heat-hazed dawn neat squares of rippling wheat stretched towards the horizon and—riding on sudden swells of the breeze—came the distant chants of “
Hari Hari Mahadev
!” “
Bole so Nihal. Sat siri Akal
!” and an occasional, piercing, “
Ya Alieeee
!” An ugly bloated ebb and flow of noise engulfed everything. The corn, the earth, the air, and the sky seemed full of threat.