Fiction - A Spoiled Man
by Daniyal Mueenuddin
September 15, 2008
New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/09/15/080915fi_fiction_mueenuddin?printable=true
Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and elsewhere, spent his early childhood in
There he stood at the stone gateway of the Harounis' weekend home above
The car continued up the winding flagstone drive and disappeared among the rows of jacaranda trees, blooming purple now in late April. Below lay the roadside town of Kalapani, the bazaar pierced by the horns of buses collecting passengers; above stood these walls, which enclosed ten acres of steep land, planted with apples, pine, jasmine, roses, and lilies that the wife had brought from America. The wind blew with a rushing sound through the pine branches and combed the fresh green grass sprouting all over the hillside after the winter rains.
He made himself useful. In May, pickup trucks full of summer flowers were brought from the nurseries that surrounded the city on the plains below. When the first truck arrived, he stood at the gate, watching the gardeners unload the pots, handing them down to each other and then carrying them up to the house—the loaded vehicle couldn't climb the steep drive. Without asking, he passed through the gate, which he had never done before, took one of the clay pots in his arms, and walked up to the house with it, rolling slightly on his down-at-heel shoes.
"Hey, old man, you better leave that before you hurt yourself," called a gardener standing in the bed of the pickup.
"I'm from the mountains, brother," Rezak said. "I can carry you up on my back, and one of these in each hand."
The pickup driver, who stood to one side smoking a cigarette, grinned.
The old majordomo, Ghulam Rasool, had strolled down to watch the show, a potbellied figure with a tall lambskin hat resting at a slight angle on a fringe of white hair. He sent one of the gardeners up to get his hookah and, comfortably settling himself in the watchman's chair by the gate, looked out over the valley below. At midday, he said to Rezak, "Come on then, and break bread with us."
Rezak looked down at his feet. "I'd need to put stones in my gizzard like a chicken to digest the rich food that you good people eat."
The majordomo tried to convince him, and the gardeners also pressed, but Rezak remained stubborn. "You didn't ask for help—you don't owe me anything."
"Suit yourself then," Ghulam Rasool said finally. The gardeners walked up the drive, talking, and Rezak stood watching them, wishing he had accepted. He was alone now. In the distance, he could see a swimming pool with curving sides, overhung by chinar trees and willows. Melancholy invaded him, and also peace, borne by the whirring of cicadas nestled among the rocks that punctuated the grounds of the estate. He took a bag from his pocket, undid the elastic band, and tucked a quid of tobacco in his cheek, chopped green naswar.
In the Kalapani bazaar, he ate at his usual teahouse, day-old bread soaked in milk, prescribed by a quack homeopath against a fistula that had tormented him for many years. The waiter brought the sopping bread and, when the crowd subsided, came over to have a few words about the flow of tourists up to Murree, more each year, this season begun so early. Lonely as he was, Rezak relied upon his welcome in the teahouse, his connection with it. When the older chickens at the poultry sheds where he worked were culled, Rezak would bring down one of the healthier birds, asking the teahouse to cook it, as a holiday from his bread diet. He shared with whoever was there, insistent, forcing his friend the waiter to eat.
"There, look, I've taken some," the waiter would say, pulling off a wing. Even he, hardened by a diet of stale leftovers from the kitchen, was dubious about eating this time-expired bird.
"No, you have to really eat." Once, Rezak even became angry about it, leaving abruptly, the chicken still on the table.
After finishing his lunch, Rezak walked through a government pine forest to the poultry sheds. The owner had bribed the wardens to allow construction extending into the forest, and each summer his men set fires at the base of pines planted by the British a hundred years earlier, in order to kill the trees and open up more space. Rezak came to his home—not the workers' quarters attached to the sheds but a hut that he had built for himself, a little wooden cubicle, faced with tin and mounted on thick legs. Several decades before, in his early twenties, he had fallen out with his step-brothers over shared property up in the mountains, a few acres of land on which they grew wheat and potatoes, bordered by apricot trees. Outmaneuvered, dispossessed, he had come down to the plains, vowing never to see his family again. This box had become his home and consolation. Each place he worked, he set it up, and then, when he quarrelled with the other workers or the boss, as he invariably did, he would take it apart and cart it away—always he kept a store of money, untouched no matter what, enough to pay for trucking this little house, this nest, to whatever place his heart had set on next. This was his guarantee of independence.
Opening the heavy padlock, he lifted the door hatch and climbed in, tucking his shoes into a wooden box nailed below the cramped hatch. Tiny red lights, run off an electrical connection drawn from the poultry sheds, were strung all over the ceiling and warmed the chamber. He could sit but not stand inside, and had covered the floor with a cotton mattress, which gave off a ripe animal odor, deeply comforting to him. A funnel and pipe served as a handy spittoon, a mirror and shelf allowed him to shave without getting out of bed, an electric fan cooled him. Photographs of actresses plastered the walls and ceiling, giving him company. Fickle and choosy, he shuffled and moved them, discarding one, stripping the photographs from the wall with a cold expression. For several months, he had been favoring a Pathan actress known as the Atomic Bum, who had wagged her way through a string of hit movies in the past year.
A few days later, loitering around the gates of the Harouni estate again, Rezak decided to go in, stepping through a narrow entry set into the wall. The owners would be in
He found Ghulam Rasool sitting in a chair under a tree, reading a newspaper.
"Ah, the volunteer," he said amiably. "Come on then, have a pull on the hookah."
Rezak sat down on the edge of a charpoy, dangling his short legs. "I'm killing myself with this poison instead." He spat and then dipped coarse green tobacco under his gum.
"You work up in Ayub's sheds, don't you?"
"When Ayub needs me, I work. He pays me in dying chickens and loose change." He tried to make a joke of it.
"That's what I hear—Ayub shaves both sides and then trims out the middle piece."
Rezak laughed mirthlessly. "The way I'm going, soon I'll be eating grass." He paused. "I've been thinking. I can do woodwork. I know about trees. I'll carry things, work in the garden. Feed me and I'll work here and do whatever you want. You don't even have to give me a room. I've got a portable cubicle that I live in—you can stick me in some corner."
The owner of the estate, Sohail Harouni, the son of a man who made a fortune in cement and other industries, had, while he was at university in the
And yet, though she insisted that she loved
It happened that, soon after Rezak made his plea to Ghulam Rasool, Sonya had a huge row with her husband and ran away to Kalapani. The next morning, she sat drinking coffee on the sunny terrace, which had a view out over the government forest, now heavily logged by poachers, and then down to
Ghulam Rasool came up from the garden, coughing so that she would not be startled. Of all the servants, he was the one she most trusted with her son. She herself felt comfortable with him, with his gentle, stoic manner, with his prayers and his superstitions.
Her blond hair held back by a black velvet band, she wore a simple white blouse, white slacks, and lay on a divan, immaculate, reading a slender volume of poetry. She had been an English major, and turned to a handful of familiar books as a restorative—Yeats or Rilke, Keats, to be taken as needed.
"Excuse me, Begum Sahib. I wanted to ask, it's time to think about the roses."
She knew that he wanted to soften her attitude toward her husband. In any case, she liked him to come and talk with her, and they used as a pretext his supervision of the garden, although he had always been a valet and knew almost nothing about flowers or trees.
She put down her book, and they considered the roses and the placement of the annuals.
"Begging your pardon, the local people drive their goats into the Ali Khan orchard, and they're destroying the saplings that you brought from
But she wanted to give the old man the same as all the others. It made her happy to think of spoiling him in his old age.
Newly hired, Rezak moved to the Ali Khan lands, a walled parcel of four or five acres just up the road from the main house. Like the other servants and gardeners, he received a salary of nine thousand rupees a month, more than he had ever made in his life. The gardeners from the big house transported his cubicle in pieces, then helped him reassemble it next to a hut that was already standing there, a single stone-walled room, with an open hearth, which Rezak could use as a storeroom and kitchen. The land had no electrical connection, so he bought oil lamps, which glowed soothingly as he went about his evening chores, his routine of dinner and bedtime.
The season turned hot just as Rezak moved to his new home, coloring the green fruit on the apple and peach and pear trees imported from
One day, the master and his wife took some guests to the Ali Khan land for a picnic lunch. In the morning, servants brought carpets and divans, tubs full of ice for the wine, grills for the meat, firewood in case the party lasted into the night. Rezak spent the morning hours ferrying boxes and chairs and rugs down from the main road to the picnic spot, taking the biggest loads, pushing himself forward, claiming precedence on his plot of land.
The guests arrived, Pakistanis and foreigners, a dozen or so of them, and were soon sprawled on the carpets, drinking wine, resolved into several groups. Walking briskly down the steep path, sure-footed, holding a floppy yellow sun hat with a trailing ribbon in her hand, Sonya had said to Rezak as she passed, "Salaam, baba." His heart, his soul melted, as if a queen had spoken to a foot soldier. She had given him charge of the garden, of the trees that she had brought from her homeland, and now she was seeing the results of his husbandry for the first time.
All the other servants knew what to do—Ghulam Rasool poured the wine and passed the hors d'oeuvres, a cook readied the fire and skewered kebabs on metal rods, the gardeners spread out as a kind of picket, to prevent anyone from looking over the walls. Rezak's shyness and diffidence contested with a desire to take part, to show off all the work he had done in the orchard. He squatted under an apple tree, trying not to look at the sahibs, pulling up sprigs of grass, tying them into figures and knots, hoping to be summoned. Restless, he knelt down by the cook and took over the job of tending the fire, pushing aside the weedy boy who acted as the cook's helper.
Sohail Harouni was a handsome, cheerful man with not a care in his life, who enjoyed giving parties more than anything else. After a few glasses of wine, he called a young valet and told him to bring the stereo from the main house and hook it up. A driver raced to Murree, ten kilometres up the mountain, and bought a roll of heavy wire. Glasses in hand, the guests and even the host enthusiastically helped string the wire from a roadside shop down through the trees.
When the party had come far along, when Harouni and the guests were standing in a circle, drinks in hand, gesturing expansively, speaking loudly, Sonya walked away from the group. Looking along the length of the valley, she caught sight of Rezak's cabin, several terraces below the picnic spot. Finding the path, she picked her way toward it, and Rezak, who had been watching her, quickly followed, leaping down a steep bank so that he could receive her at his little hut, saluting.
"It's wonderful!" Sonya exclaimed, circling around the cubicle, Rezak at her heels. "Hey, everyone," she called to her guests, going over to where she could be heard. "Come see."
Short, bowlegged Rezak bustled around, showing off the appliances and the refinements—the pipe that drained the inside spittoon, the cupboards and drawers set into the outside walls for his tools and clothes and kit, windows that could be propped open or removed entirely, a skylight of red glass, thick rush matting on the roof to keep the inside cold or hot, with a rubber bladder fixed to the walls that shot water up through a pipe when he squeezed it, wetting the rushes—evaporative cooling. Sonya poked her head inside the stuffy, lurid chamber, considered the photographs of movie starlets plastered on the walls. The guests peered about, inspecting this nest, its door and windows ajar, like a car on a dealer's lot with hood and trunk propped open.
"If there's electricity, then it's really something," Rezak said, eager, grinning with all his teeth, surrounded by the sahibs and the memsahibs. "I used to have colored lights inside. There's work to be done, that's true. It's all broken from carrying it up and down and all over." In his exuberance, he pulled at a cupboard door that wouldn't open till it tore off in his hand. Even this didn't dampen him. "See, that's one way to take it apart!"
"That's the man's whole life in a nutshell, isn't it?" the Australian Ambassador, a tall man with a correspondingly tall forehead and ginger hair, remarked.
As they were returning to the picnic, Sonya said to her husband, "The poor man should have electricity for a radio and for lighting. He lives all alone here—imagine how bored he is."
"Are you kidding?" Harouni said. "These guys don't get bored."
But, after the party, the wire that had been laid temporarily so that there would be music remained in place—for the next party. Rezak strung lights on the outside of the cubicle, like wedding decorations, and hung a light bulb in the stone hut where he cooked. He bought a radio and, finally, a cheap television, something he had never even thought of wanting. He would lie in his little cocoon, soft red lights glowing, the television volume turned up, and drink cup after cup of tea kept hot in a vacuum thermos, a refinement that made him smack his lips with appreciation.
Sitting in the Kalapani teahouse one morning, Rezak met a young man who lived near his childhood village, high in the mountains.
"The government pushed the road up to Koti," the man told him. "The bus runs from Kowar now. That changed things, you can bet."
Hearing of the places he had known all his life made Rezak restless. He had left home determined never to go back. Now he wondered what his stepbrothers had told the neighbors about his disappearance. He wanted his family to know of his success.
"You and I grew up drinking from the same streams, breathing the same air. You have to accept my hospitality now that we've met. I beg you. Come for a cup of tea, and then I'll walk you back down here." He took the man by the arm and almost dragged him out of the tea stall.
He hurriedly carried a charpoy onto the terrace in front of the stone cooking hut, put a pillow on it, ran inside and lit a fire in the hearth, then brought out a table, wiping it with a rag. Luckily, he had a packet of biscuits and he arranged these on a plate and carried them out with the tea.
The man knew of Rezak's family, but had little news of them. Forgetting his bitterness and the wrong they had done him, Rezak began speaking of his stepbrothers and nephews, of their fertile land, of the well near their fields.
"God has been good to me, more than I deserve. I have only one wish, that he had given me sons of my own, as my brothers have." He ran his hands over his face.
Rezak had not been able to resist boasting of his salary.
The man considered for a moment, his eyes alighting on a locked trunk inside the cooking hut that must be full of clothes and who knew what else. He looked at the neat vegetable patch and at the two goats—Rezak had bought another when fodder ran low in the forest and they were cheap. The man had been shown the weird little cubicle, furnished with a radio, a television even.
"Look, my cousin has a daughter. Something went wrong when she was born, and she's a bit simple. But she can cook and sew and take your goats out to graze. She's quite pretty even. She's young enough to bear you a son. Her father can barely take care of his other children. Why don't you let me arrange a marriage?"
"You're making fun of an old man," Rezak replied. But hope and desire pierced his heart when he thought of it. A woman in his house, even one who was not right in the head! And she could bear him a son, and that would be worth anything at all. Now that Rezak had money, the boy would go to school, he would learn to read and write, become—Rezak could not even imagine what. The son of an old servant at the main house had become a doctor and now continually begged his father to retire and come live with him. Rezak would die happy after that.
They spoke back and forth all afternoon. In the end, they agreed not only that the girl would be without a dowry but even that Rezak would pay a quite substantial amount of money for her, which the family would take in installments.
A few days later, the father delivered the feebleminded girl. The girl's family had not come, and the two men did not celebrate the marriage, but brought the maulvi quietly to perform the nikah. When the father left, the girl followed him and cried, until they were forced to lock her in the hut.
After seeing the father onto the bus, Rezak wandered down through the bazaar, stopping to talk for a minute with the man who sold samosas, saying nothing of his marriage, but saving it for himself. He felt more equal now among these people, the shopkeepers, passersby, families. Someone waited for him also, the house he returned to would not be empty.
The poor girl must be frightened, he thought, and turned homeward, stopping to buy a three-kilo box of sweets, fat yellow ludhoos, ghulab jaman, barfi, shahi tukrah.
He rattled the chain as he opened the lock, so that she wouldn't be startled. She wore makeup, lipstick that had smudged, rouge that made her cheeks almost pink, new clothes made of shiny white cloth—at least that much had been done to celebrate their wedding day. It pleased him that she reached and covered her head with her dupatta—shy before him, her husband.
He sat across from her. She kept her eyes cast down.
He opened the box of sweets, carefully unknotting the string, took a ludhoo, and held it out to her on his palm, whispering, "Take this, it's O.K., don't be afraid." He held it there. "Go on." And after a moment, without looking up, she reached out and took it.
Gradually, she became accustomed to living with him. Once he saw that she would not run away, he let her roam as she wanted. The girl, a tiny thing of nineteen or twenty, had an impediment and spoke not in sentences but rather in strings of sound, cooing or repeating words—her condition was really worse than Rezak had expected—but when she settled in he found that she could more or less cook.
He let her sleep in the stone hut, until one night, as he was watching television in his cubicle, she cautiously lifted the door flap, stood absorbing the lit red chamber for a moment, and then nimbly leaped in, eyes fixed on the television. After that, she always slept with him.
As an adolescent boy, Rezak had been married, so long ago that he couldn't remember what his bride looked like. She had died in childbirth, less than a year after the marriage, and the child had died, too. Now, after so many years, Rezak again had a companion in his home. Life and hope, the flames of individuality that had burned out to nothing, to smoke, again flickered within him. Returning at night from the bazaar with a treat of late-season mangos or a bit of meat, or stopping work in the orchard at noon to have his midday meal, which the girl warmed and served to him with hot chapatis, he looked forward to her chattering. She had a pretty, almost animal way of watching him while he ate, perched beside him, and after he finished she brought him a glass of water from the clay pot. In the evening, before he came in, she made tea, and when he groaned because of the aching in his legs she massaged him. Gradually, he found himself able to communicate with her, and, more important, she communicated with him, showed happiness when he returned at night, cared for him when he felt ill or sad. She did not, however, bear him a child.
Now that his wife cooked for him and pastured the goats, Rezak had less to do, especially after the trees lost their leaves and work in the orchard ceased. His wife sat in the dark smoky hut, cooing to herself. He would often go down to the teahouse in Kalapani bazaar and sit for several hours, watching buses fill and lumber off up the mountain to Murree or to Kashmir, or race, brakes squealing at the curves, down to the cities, honking their horns to call the passengers. He strolled idly through the bazaar, wearing a new woollen vest and carrying a walking stick; or he went to the big house and sat smoking a hookah with Ghulam Rasool.
Returning to his hut at dusk after one of these excursions, he found that the fire had burned out in the hearth and his wife was gone. The goats, too, were missing, although she should have brought them in by this time. Sitting in the cold room, he stared at the calendar nailed up on the wall, which showed an elaborate Chinese pagoda. He rubbed his hands together, trying to control his anger. Twice before, she had disappeared at nightfall, and he'd found her far down in the valley, cowering behind some rocks. When he approached her, she grew frightened and covered her face with her hands.
At dark, she still had not returned. Rezak took the lantern, lit the tiny flame, and went out, the two goats scrambling in, bleating, when he opened the wooden gate that led down into the valley.
One of the neighbors called, "Hey, Rezak, can't it wait till morning?"
"What can I tell you. My poor old lady's disappeared again."
The neighbor sent a little boy to help with the search.
Rezak walked all over and called and called. He went home, hoping that she would be there waiting for him, but he saw no glimmer of light in the cooking hut. As he sat in the cold, the sound of twigs breaking as he laid the fire seemed particularly loud. The fire caught, crackling, slowly warming the room. Mechanically he threw a handful of tea in the kettle, boiled the water, mechanically poured it into the cup. He didn't have it in him to be angry now. Without eating dinner, without turning on the television, as he did every night, he lay alone in the dark cabin, wondering what could have become of her. What if she was lying hurt somewhere in the forest?
In the morning he woke before first light, hurriedly dressed, and went out. He didn't know where to look, which direction to turn. Living alone for years, he had learned not to ask for help. Neighbors would do whatever they could once or twice or five times, but, ultimately, they would grow cold and resentful. He walked along the paths that she might have taken, then deep into the woods to the places where she cut grass. Once, he saw a cloth that he thought might be her shawl, but coming close he saw that it had been rained on and must have been lying there for days.
Finally, he went to ask the Harouni retainers for help. Going into the servants' common room, he found Ghulam Rasool lying peacefully on a charpoy, his unlit hookah beside him. The fireplace chimney had backed up, as it always did, filling the low-ceilinged room with layers of acrid pine smoke.
As Rezak walked into this familiar room, he broke down for the first time. His arms hung loosely as he shuffled up to the bed and stood with his face contorted.
"My wife disappeared," he blurted out, before he had even said salaam. "I can't find her anywhere. She's gone." Flat tears slipped out of his gummy eyes and disappeared into the wrinkles of his face. Remembering himself, he reached down and shook Ghulam Rasool's hand respectfully.
"What do you mean, disappeared?" Ghulam Rasool asked, startled. Squeezing Rezak's arm to make him sit on the charpoy, he called out through the door, "Hey, one of you boys, come here."
Four gardeners answered the summons and, after asking a few questions, ignored Rezak. They huddled together and laid out their plan, eager as a pack of hounds, then headed out, their wooden staffs tapping quickly as they walked off on separate paths.
Late at night, they straggled back, one by one, having found no trace of the woman. In the morning, early, they went out again, determined to find her. They searched the mountains, the farthest terraced fields, went to the nearby villages. The next day, again they searched from dawn to dusk, and then the next, but with less and less determination. One of them asked at every bus stop from Murree down to
Finally, only Rezak kept searching. He forgot where he had already been, returning to the same places, as if this time he might find her there.
One morning, getting ready to go out and continue the search, he sat down again, took off his coat, and lay down on the bed. Imbecile, chattering—but she was gone, dead or stolen, taken to the brothels of Pindi or
Every year at Christmas, the Harounis gave a big party at Kalapani, with roast goose, a twenty-foot tree in the entrance hall of the house, and a ho-hoing Santa Claus for the children. Trucks brought logs for a bonfire from the Harounis' farm down on the plains, so that late at night the servants could grill spicy, greasy kebabs on the coals for the heavy drinkers and mull cauldrons of spiced punch for the rest. The guests came up from
Before dinner, the mistress came into the kitchen. The cook stood rubbing his hands on his apron, sidelined in his own domain, as she took a big bowl under her arm and poked with a spatula at the mashed potatoes, which the cook had already beaten to a creamy smoothness.
Ghulam Rasool had been following her impassively as she performed her inspection.
"Excuse me, Begum Sahib, may I trouble you with a small request?"
"Of course," she said, touching him lightly on the shoulder. He had become accustomed to this, although at first it had disturbed him.
Briefly, he explained about the disappearance of Rezak's wife.
"But Ghulam Rasool, you should have told me right away. What can I do?"
Ghulam Rasool had an encyclopedic knowledge of his master's friends, their power, their wealth, and he took great pride in these connections. When he saw Omar Bukhari, the son of the Inspector General of Police, arrive at the party, he had sent a gardener to fetch Rezak and told him to wait in the kitchen.
"If Bukhari Sahib would speak to the police in Murree . . ."
She went into the living room and found Bukhari looming over a French girl, who had come with someone else, insisting that she must let him arrange a trip into the tribal areas of the Frontier, which were off-limits to foreigners.
"Really, Delphine, you should go—it's amazing, and you'll never have the chance otherwise," the hostess said. "Omar, can I pull you away for a moment?"
Bukhari followed her to the candle-lit dining room. "So, Ghulam Rasool Sahib, what's going on?" he asked.
The Harounis' friends all knew Ghulam Rasool and joked that he had more power than many federal ministers.
Ghulam Rasool explained, emphasizing the girl's attractiveness to make it seem like an abduction by one of the gangs who kidnap or buy women for prostitution—a scenario in which the police could help, since these things generally happened under their protection and they received a cut of the take.
"We'll break the bastards' legs when we catch them," Bukhari, who had been drinking quite heavily, said. "Go fetch the husband."
Rezak came in, trembling, and couldn't explain himself, but stood with a grief-stricken face, expectant, as if his wife might there and then materialize through the power of this important sahib.
Bukhari had dealt with many cases of missing women, and knew that the family was almost always involved. He fixed Rezak with a hard gaze. "Who took her? The father? Did the family take her back?"
"Only God above in his mercy knows, sir—I came home one night and she had gone, I couldn't find her, sir. I'm an old man, I'm nothing . . ."
Recalling the presence of his hostess, Bukhari relented. Flipping open his tiny cell phone, he punched a number.
"Get me the D.S.P. Murree." After a moment, a voice came on the line. "Hello, Qazmi, how are you? This is Omar Bukhari. Yes, everything's fine. I'm in Kalapani, at the house of Mr. Sohail Harouni. The wife of one of his servants has been abducted. I want her back by tomorrow night . . . Yes . . . No, come to the house in the morning and take down the details. I want you personally to handle this." Without saying goodbye, he snapped shut the phone.
He smiled at Sonya. "Done."
Rezak, who understood none of the conversation, which had been conducted in English, crouched and touched Bukhari's knee with both hands, began to speak and then fell silent, bowing his head. Ghulam Rasool raised him up by the arm and led him away.
In the morning, the Deputy Superintendent of Police himself showed up at the house, in his official Jeep, flying a police flag, and accompanied by a pickup full of policemen carrying beat-up rifles. Unfortunately, the Harounis and all the guests had already left for
"Where's the husband?"
Ghulam Rasool, the only one not perturbed by this policeman with stars on his shoulders, explained that Rezak lived at another property, down the road.
"Get him."
Rezak came in, breathless, led by a policeman.
"So, old man," the D.S.P. stated, "they tell me your wife has run away." He began asking questions, in a low voice. Though at first he spoke gently, his tone soon became irritated.
"What you're saying is, her parents sold her to you. Where did you get that much money?"
Ghulam Rasool stepped forward. "Sir, she's not well in the head—this man took her out of kindness as much as anything. And then our sahib is very good to us, he gives us everything we need and more."
"Women don't just fly away on their own. Either this man knows something about it or she's in
The D.S.P. looked intently at Rezak for a moment, clasping his hands on his stomach, then stood up.
"Please give my regards to Harouni Sahib," he said to Ghulam Rasool, speaking politely and almost formally. "I am always at his service." He begged off taking a cup of tea, claiming that he had an appointment.
Watching the policeman and his escort drive off, Ghulam Rasool said to Rezak, "Better stay away from the bazaar for a couple of days. He seemed like a pretty rude character."
Just after dusk, four policemen in an unmarked car picked up Rezak from his hut and took him to the police post at Tret, twenty kilometres down the road.
"Did you find her?" he had asked, when they came to his cubicle.
The youngest policeman, the only one in uniform, said, "Yes, yes, don't worry."
But he grabbed Rezak by the shoulder, took his arms, and handcuffed him. Rezak said nothing more, and allowed them to do as they liked.
Only when they put him in the back of the car did Rezak ask, "But what have I done? Where are you taking me?"
"Shut up, baba," said the young policeman, who up till then had been quite gentle.
They walked him into a windowless room in the police station and hung him up on a hook by the manacles around his wrists, so that his feet touched the ground only when he stood on his toes.
He hung on the wall all evening, long past the time when it seemed possible that the excruciating pain in his shoulders and back could be borne. In the next room, policemen came and went, but he was no longer aware of them.
At one point, a policeman who had just come in from outside asked, "Who's he?"
"No idea. The D.S.P.'s guys sent him in. Strip, polish, and paint, I suppose."
"Ah," the newcomer said. He went out, singing, "The night is made for lovers . . ."
After midnight, a large man wearing civilian clothes came into the room. Two uniformed policemen came behind him and shut the door.
"All right, let's see," the big man said. "So, what's your name, old man?"
"Mohammed Rezak, sir." He began weeping and blubbering. "I beg you, I've done nothing, I'm innocent, and now you've hung me up here. I beg you, remember, there's a God above who judges everything . . ."
The large man became suddenly angry. "I see," he said menacingly, gritting his teeth. "I'm the one who's being judged? It's my fault, is it, I'm the one who's guilty?" He slapped Rezak with all his strength. "Where's your wife, you bastard? I know all about it. Nobody took her—you sold her down the road, you pimp, and now you'll tell me to whom and when and for how much." He walked to the opposite wall and back, then came up and looked closely into Rezak's face. "Or perhaps you killed her? She didn't have children? You bought a lemon? Ready for a new one, moneybags?"
He slapped Rezak again, cutting his lip. "You listen to me, I can make you fuck your own daughter if I want to, you'll hump her all night, like a dog fucking a bitch."
"For God's sake, for God's mercy, I don't have a daughter, sir . . ."
"You're really trying to piss me off, aren't you?" And then, to one of the men, "Take him down."
The two uniformed policemen lifted Rezak off the hook and threw him to the ground. Rubbing his hands together, the big man looked down at Rezak appraisingly, as if considering his next move.
"Stretch him out and bring me the strap."
They pulled down his shalwar, carried him to a bench, and stretched him on it, one pulling his arms and one pulling his feet. They had removed his kurta when they hung him up on the wall.
The big man brandished what looked like the sole of an enormous shoe, with writing on one side in thick black script. "See what this says? It says, 'Sweetheart, where did you sleep last night?' Understand?"
Without warning, he swung.
Rezak shrieked, a startled high-pitched sound. He never had felt pain like this, which spread flickering all through his body.
Another policeman came into the room when Rezak screamed and stood by the door, watching, with a grin on his face.
"Come here," the big man said. "You do it, since you're so interested. You need the practice, anyway."
Of course, he could tell them nothing. "I don't know," he sobbed. "She's gone, I don't know anything." After a few strokes, he fell into a rhythm, shrieking when they hit him, then, when they stopped, groaning, "O my God, O my God, O my God . . ."
After beating Rezak for five or six minutes, they threw him into a storeroom.
The D.S.P. stopped at the Tret post on his way down to
"What's going on? Anything new?"
"Call from Awaz Khan Sahib. He keeps asking why we haven't picked up those two clowns from Mariani."
They discussed this, something to do with a road contractor, villagers blocking the line of a new road—they needed to be shown the stick.
As he started to leave, the D.S.P. asked, "What about that missing girl?"
"Someone driving by must have seen her and snatched her. The Chandias say they didn't do it."
Only the most powerful of the gangster clans in the area would have presumed to abduct a woman without cutting in the police.
"And we pulled in the husband and worked on him—he's clean."
The D.S.P. made a face. "You didn't! This is some American woman's pet servant. Tell me you didn't do anything severe."
"He's fine, he's fine. Do you want to see him?"
"No. You're positive, right?"
"I'm definitely positive."
"No marks?"
"Well, sir, no visible marks. I have to work somewhere."
The D.S.P. laughed. "I suppose you do."
After thinking for a moment, he said, "I'll have to go see Bukhari Sahib and explain that she's disappeared off the face of the earth. It's a good idea to put in an appearance there anyway."
"What about the old man?"
"Dump him at home and tell him he better keep his mouth shut."
Shortly before dawn, almost tenderly now, they bundled Rezak into the same unmarked car and sneaked him back into his hut.
"You've tasted it once. Don't make us dose you again. Not a word to anyone—do you understand?"
Rezak stared at his feet. Finally, he nodded his head.
He lay all that day without sleeping, into the dusk, then the dark. His buttocks had swollen up, puffy and white like bread dough, so that he had to lie on his stomach. His mind whirled, without touching on any one thing for more than a moment—the wife he married when almost still a boy, who died so many years ago, then his second wife, the little mentally disturbed girl. His stepbrothers, who took his land, the fruit trees in the garden there in Kashmir and the fruit trees here, brought from
"Why should I complain? The policemen did as they always do. The fault is mine, who married in old age, with one foot in the grave. God gave me so much more than I deserved, when I expected nothing at all."
He made sure to be perfectly silent about what had happened.
After he recovered, he was left with one last wish. In Rezak's mind, good fortune and grace were wound together, so that the Harouni family's connections and wealth established not simply the power of the household but also its virtue. Ghulam Rasool had served the Harounis for more than fifty years, some of the other retainers had served almost as long. He could never equal that service. But nevertheless the family took him in when otherwise he might have begged in the streets. They gave him the money to live beyond his station, they made him hope—for too much. And when he lost the girl their instruments punished him for having dared to reach so high, for owning something that would excite envy, that placed him in the way of beatings and the police. Now he belonged to the Harounis. This was how he understood justice.
He said to Ghulam Rasool, "I beg you, ask our master to bury me here on this land, in one corner, whichever one he likes."
This became his dream and his consolation. He lived on for another year, then six months more, collecting his salary, never spending a rupee more than was sufficient to keep his body warm. He sold the television, sold the goats. At the end of eighteen months, he went up to Murree, to the stonecutter, and said that he wanted the very best gravestone in the shop, and carved marble to sheathe the rest of the grave.
After his night in the police station, Rezak walked gingerly and made grunting noises under his breath—everyone remarked on how he had changed after his wife disappeared. The stonecutter, seeing his bent, trembling figure, thought, This old bird doesn't know what good marble costs.
But Rezak took out a roll of bills, tied in a greasy handkerchief that he pulled from under his shirt. Blue notes, thousands.
"Well that's different," the stonecutter said, taking Rezak's hand and leading him into the back room. "Look at this piece, now. Look at the color, the grain. Look at the size of that. I swear to God, I've been saving it for my own mother."
No one had seen the old man for several days, and the gardener sent to inquire rattled and knocked and then found him dead in the little cubicle. Ghulam Rasool had the gardeners dig a grave along the wall of the property, and that evening they buried him, just a few people attending the janaza—the servants from the big house, a few men from the bazaar and from houses on the hillside next to the Ali Khan lands. A poor woman from nearby had been paid to wash the body, the maulvi from the mosque in the bazaar said the prayer.
The next Friday, Sonya came up from
The electricity had failed, as it often did up on the mountain. At dusk, by candlelight, the tall rooms of the stone-built house were solemn and chilled, like an empty church or a school when the children are gone.
"Poor poor thing. All alone, and his wife disappeared."
At moments, as now, she felt closer to Ghulam Rasool than to anyone else in Pakistan, his large dark compassionate face, heavy body, his shrewd and yet ponderous manner, his orthodox unshakable beliefs.
He was silent for a moment, then continued, "Please forgive me, but I took the liberty of having him buried in the Ali Khan orchard. He had asked me to speak with you."
Still not touching her tea, looking up at him, as he stood with his hands crossed on his belly, she said gently, "I'm so glad you did, Ghulam Rasool. Of course, Mian Sahib and I would want that."
The old servant had come far by knowing the ways of his masters. Saying no more or less than this, he withdrew quietly, leaving Sonya musing by the fire on having done the right thing for a lonely old man, having done a little bit for the good.
The next morning, slipping out of the house, Sonya took Ghulam Rasool and a single gardener and walked up to the Ali Khan lands. The smallness of the grave surprised her, the mound decorated with tinsel in advance of her visit, the marble stones he had bought stacked beside it. Ghulam Rasool and the gardener said the fatiyah, holding their upturned palms in front of them and silently reciting a prayer, and Sonya stood also with her hands upturned and eyes closed, thinking first of the old man, a life drawn to a close with so little fanfare, and then of her own dead, her father and mother lying under the snow in a Wisconsin graveyard.
When they had finished, she walked around the garden, looking at the fruit trees, the leaves colored and falling as the autumn advanced.
"What would you have us do with this?" Ghulam Rasool asked, leading her to the cabin, which sprouted a television antenna and bouquets of crude plastic flowers, their petals thick as tongues, bought by Rezak soon after his marriage, nailed up along the roof one day, to please his wife's innocent heart. "The old man didn't want his family to have anything from him."
It seemed to her vividly alive, a motionless hirsute presence, the antenna, the flowers, the four massive legs, the pipe that drained the inside spittoon trailing into the grass as if drawing nourishment.
She told them to bring it to the big estate and park it in a shaded corner somewhere not too visible, as a memorial. Her husband, a raconteur, could show it to his guests and tell them about Rezak, the old man who entered service bringing his own house.
At first, the cabin sat inviolate below the swimming pool, locked, Rezak's things still in the cupboards and drawers. Sonya went once to look at it, then did not return, her attention fading. Gradually, like falling leaves, the locks were broken off, one person taking the thermos, another the wood tools—files and a hammer, a plane, a level. The clothes disappeared, the last cupboard emptied, even the filthy mattress pulled out and put to use, taken by the sweeper who cleaned the toilets in the big house. The door of the little cabin hung open, the wind and blown rain scoured it clean. ♦
[Disclaimer: ALOCHONA Management is not liable for information contained in this message. The author takes full responsibility.]
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