The Pakistani Bride (22 page)

Noticing her pallor and worried by her erratic behavior, Farukh secretly surmised that at long last his wife was pregnant.

Early in the morning, not wishing to disturb Carol, he dressed quietly. Before leaving, he tiptoed round the bed to kiss her goodbye and, finding Carol's eyes wide open in unseeing reverie, inquired, “What's the matter, darling? Anything wrong?”

Carol shook her head. “No. Oh, I feel sleepy. Are you going?”

“You don't look well. I think it's the altitude.”

“At only five thousand feet above sea level?” Her voice curled a contemptuous question mark.

“That's high enough to upset anyone not used to the mountains. You look pale. I think we should return to Lahore.”

“Lahore . . . sure, it's up to you.” Carol kicked the quilt, and turned away irritably.

Having heard of the irascibility of expectant women Farukh held his temper. He sat docilely on the edge of her bed.

“Bye, darling. I'm going,” he whispered, nervously touching the bare arms that covered her face.

 

Mushtaq returned from Pattan an hour after Farukh had left for Bisham, the hill reputedly garrisoned by Alexander the Great on his way to India.

He glanced at his wristwatch. It would take Farukh four hours to cover that distance. That gave them ample time. Knocking lightly on Carol's door he went in.

Carol stood in the glow of the log fire. She was wearing a flimsy slip and was gratified by Mushtaq's startled look of possessive admiration. He went to her quickly.

Cupping her breasts with both hands, Mushtaq pressed against Carol impatiently. She lifted her mouth and Mushtaq kissed her. He seldom remembered this preliminary caress and Carol's insistence on it amused him. Kissing was to him a gesture of affection. He kissed his wife with the same quality of feeling he reserved for his children. From romantic scenes in foreign movies he surmised that kissing represented the act of love, indicating what in Pakistani films was conveyed by a pair of converging lotus flowers. He found kissing Carol mildly pleasurable, but chiefly because of the excitement it aroused in her.

“There's something I want to say to you,” she said seriously.

“Can't it wait?”

“Please.”

Carol stepped back and, curling her legs beneath her, she sat down on the stuffed sofa to one side of the fire. Mushtaq perched on its arm, hungrily ogling the rich, flame-licked hues of her body.

“What is it, sweetheart?”

Carol held his eyes: “Marry me.”

Mushtaq blanched at the unexpected demand. A block of ice plopped into his stomach.

“I love you, darling,” she breathed. “I can't bear to live without you. You don't know how I feel,” and she pressed her breasts against his coat sleeve, lowering her head. “God, I'd do anything for you. I would really—wear a burkha if you wanted me to.”

Growing up in the 1950s, Carol was inexorably conditioned to marriage. She had only one recourse with which to reconcile her feelings and her actions. She had found her true love. He must marry her.

“Oh, if you stopped loving me, I'd kill myself!”

Mushtaq stared. Carol, despite her egotism, must realize he was having a fling, merely killing time. She knew he had a wife and four children to whom he belonged irrevocably.

“What about Farukh?” he asked lamely.

“I don't love him, you know that! Even if you don't marry me, I shall leave him,” she declared. “Oh, darling, please get me away from him or I'll die,” she sobbed.

Her tears aroused in Mushtaq a bewildering desire to discard everything and marry this woman; possess forever her eager childless body. Inflamed by the sleek configuration of creases he could see through the filmy nylon, by the malleable curve of her breasts so rich to his touch, he knelt before her. Nuzzling his face between her thighs, he cried, “Of course I will marry you, sweetheart, if that's what you want.”

They lay on the carpet near the fire. Carol was covering Mushtaq's face with rapturous, moist kisses. “I love you,” she sighed.

 

“Let's see to the fire,” he said.

Pushing her aside gently, he rose.

“You'll have to break the news to Farukh. Oh dear, I wonder how he'll take it,” Carol mused aloud.

A dour, self-pitying anger welled up in Mushtaq. He had been coerced. His capitulation to her proposal was born of
his long separation from his family, his need for a woman in the loneliness of his remote posting. The quicker he set things straight, the better. All this talk of dying and demented passion! She would get over it in time.

“Talking of marriages,” he said, “I was invited to a wedding feast. Remember the girl, the one with the old watchman from Lahore? Her father sent the invitation. I was to take as many guests as I liked.”

Carol sat up. “I'd have loved to go. Why didn't you take me?” she cried excitedly.

“Certainly not, young lady!”

“I've often thought of the girl, you know. I felt I understood her . . . No . . . it's more as if she'd explained something to me. I'd like to know her better: how she grew up, what she did after she stopped going to school. How she laughs and talks with her friends. Her life is so different from mine, and yet I feel a real bond, an understanding on some deep level. She was so self-conscious with us, I wonder what she dreams about . . .”

But Carol, a child of the bright Californian sun and surf, could no more understand the beguiling twilight world of veils and women's quarters than Zaitoon could comprehend her independent life in America.

Reflecting on this Mushtaq said, “It wouldn't be easy for you really to understand her. You'd find her life in the zenanna with the other women pitifully limited and claustrophobic—she'd probably find yours—if she could ever glimpse it—terrifyingly insecure and needlessly competitive.”

“Perhaps you're right. All the same I wish you'd taken me to the wedding.”

“You know I wouldn't take you across the river again. For all we know, those ruffians from the ledge would most likely have been there. You wouldn't have liked that.”

Carol frowned. “You are getting abominably like Farukh; with your caution and sermons.”

“Yes, and soon you will loathe me as much.”

“Never, never!” protested Carol vehemently.

“Yes, you will,” he said, “and then you'll find yourself a dashing brigadier.”

“Not if we were married.”

Mushtaq tapped her forehead playfully. “Knock those silly ideas out of your head, will you? However much I'd like to you know I can't. Nor for that matter can you.”

“You could get a divorce.”

“No. It's not so easy.”

“It's easy for you Muslim men. All you have to do is tell your wife “
talak
” three times and wait three months. I know it.”

“You don't understand at all. In spite of what you hear about our being able to have four wives, we take marriage and divorce very seriously. It involves more than just emotions. It's a social responsibility . . . For one thing, at the very least, my wife's life would become unbearably confined, drab, and unhappy. And we're cousins, you know. Our families would make my life—and yours—miserable. We'd be ostracized.”

He knelt above Carol and, holding her crestfallen face between his hands, shook it affectionately. “Don't be silly, darling. You know I love you, but Farukh is my friend—and there are so many obligations—you have them too, you know. Come on, give me a smile?”

Carol's eyes were closed. Mushtaq kissed her. “You'll realize it's better this way. Come on, smile.”

“Why not?” she said, “but first . . .”

Her furious eyes blazed open. Swinging her hand deliberately, she slapped Mushtaq full in the face. She laughed when anger blotched his skin.

“All right, now you smile!” she said quietly.

Z
aitoon wandered far from the village one morning in her search for kindling. Her feet were now somewhat used to the uneven land and she set herself to climb a steep hill. While she caught her breath, her eyes scanned the barren place for brushwood.

One-by-one, hacked by ancient settlers, the fir trees that once stood here had been destroyed. Later, whole hills, purchased by wealthy merchants, were stripped. Logs floated down the Indus to the plains until no tree was left. Barely distinguishable from the slate rocks near Zaitoon, humped an ancient, withered, sawn-off trunk.

Abstractedly lifting her glance, Zaitoon noticed a faint, incongruous line stretched across a distant mountain as if someone with a brush-stroke had tried to mark the center of the hill. Zaitoon's pulse quickened. It had to be the road on which she and Qasim had traveled. She could not see the river, but by tracing the sinking line of worn-away granite she sensed the passage of the river gorge. Desperately she wanted to see again the turbulent waters of the magnificent river. Looking about, and satisfied no one was watching her, she hurried down the hill.

It was rough going. She skirted the base of a towering peak through a maze of defiles and ridges. Finally she came upon a path that led to the river.

Soon she was able to make out the unmistakable roar of the waters.

The track went all the way down the gorge to the river-beach and into the soft white sand.

Prepared for the shock of icy cold, Zaitoon leaned to touch the water. Something seemed to float towards her from the depths, a shadow about to break the surface. Reliving her bad dream, she imagined the blurred movement of a hand about to reach out . . .

A thick bundle of entwined flotsam churned up to be dragged under again almost at once. She looked about her and was stricken by a sense of her isolation.

Scampering frantically up the cliff face, Zaitoon climbed to a high ledge. A wide view here lifted the pall of loneliness. Right across the broad span of the river, level with her, was the road; a line of winding gray—cleaving to the gorge as though afraid of losing its way in the wilderness.

A heavily loaded truck rumbled into view, changed by distance to a mechanical toy. Zaitoon followed its passage, and the world resumed its rational perspective: the river once again was a gorgeous mass of water, widening at times into flat blue lagoons, and cascading into a froth where it was forced down a tortuous incline.

Zaitoon settled comfortably on the ledge. She had not felt carefree in a long while. A jeep passed, bumping and bobbing: Two men sat in front. Eagerly trying to decipher the khaki uniforms, she fancied Ashiq at the wheel and next to him the Major. Recalling the Major's concern for her and the tender eyes of the dark jawan, she wished she had waved to them. She knew she belonged with them.

A small pebble clattered down the vertical stone massif behind her. Striking a rock a few paces away, it leapt outward and she watched its jerky fall all the way to the sand. Glancing up to scan the impassive cliff, she saw no movement, heard
no untoward sound, but just the same an uneasiness slowly gripped her heart.

Keeping to the shelter of the rocks, she quickly retraced her steps to the track. The sun was low and the trail cold with wind and dark. It wound like a tunnel between the hills.

Yunus Khan observed the girl's fearful retreat. He had witnessed her scramble up to the ledge, and the elation that lit her face at seeing the jeep. Naturally quiet, with no apparent effort at stealth, he shadowed her with an easy tread. A few paces ahead he heard her slip and stumble. Waiting a moment, he caught her gasping breath.

Circling wide of Zaitoon's route, Yunus Khan idly made his way to the hamlet, arriving almost fifteen minutes ahead of her.

Sakhi that day had gone to a neighboring village. They wanted a goat for a marriage feast and Sakhi, who had one to barter, drove a hard bargain. When he approached his village late in the evening, Yunus met him. They embraced and sat on a rock talking late into the freezing night.

Zaitoon was asleep when Sakhi snuggled roughly up to her under their common quilt. Disturbed, she muttered heavily.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“You're late.” Her tongue was thick with sleep.

“Yes,” Sakhi lay still for a while. “You went to the river?”

Zaitoon's mind leapt awake. She paused a second before replying: “U-hum . . .” She feigned a drowsy nonchalance.

“Don't go there again.”

His peremptory tone was charged with malice.

Zaitoon lay awake long after Sakhi had fallen asleep.

Early the next morning Sakhi left, shooing the bartered goat before him with a small stick.

Zaitoon rushed through her chores. Sakhi's cryptic injunction of the night before weighed down her spirits with the dull
despondency of a half-remembered nightmare. She longed with all her heart to be by the river, to look upon the road that hushed her misery. Certain that Sakhi would not return until much later, she scurried circumspectly down the track. She slid between a clump of rocks, concealed from view by an overhang of the cliff. Reasonably confident of her privacy, she muttered a silent prayer.

Traffic on the road was desultory. A convoy of three trucks finally lumbered by, and thereafter nothing. Zaitoon feasted her eyes on the river, on the dust so slow to settle back on the road. She had a momentary twinge of guilt, instantly drowned in the roar of the water. She tarried. Compromising with caution, she swore to start on her way back the moment another vehicle passed.

It was an hour before the jeep droned into view. The solitary figure at the wheel was barely perceptible. Zaitoon sat up. On an impulse she smiled and merrily waved her hands.