B005OWFTDW EBOK (6 page)

Nothing lay around the 300-year-old shrine except low,
cactus-covered
hills and sand dunes, and ancient time. Shaken by the ferocity and organization of Nadir Shah’s raid – unsuccessful though it proved in the end – and to try another path towards a male child, Timur had married again. The marriage took place within weeks of the attack. At twenty-one, the new bride was five years older than Leila. She lived at the mansion with them and was expecting a child any day. The
Book of Omens
predicted it to be a boy. Timur continued to demand from Leila what she owed him, however; insisting she make up for the years of torture to which she had subjected him.

The saint who lay buried at the shrine had had control of certain female djinns – those that guarded the souls of dead warriors, conducting them safely from the battlefield to Paradise. The
she-djinns
also guided the souls of those women who had died giving birth to boys, for having sacrificed their lives to provide future warriors.

A group of nine sacred men resided there now, renowned throughout the country – and throughout the Pakistani immigrant communities around the planet – for helping women to have male children. Prior to lying down with her husband with the intention of conceiving, the woman would spend one whole week in strict seclusion with the nine exalted personages, praying, meditating and eating the simple food they cooked. Afterwards, the woman would speak of holy visitations, of intense dreams and hallucinations. She would have no recollection of entire hours of the seven-day period. If she failed to have a male child, she would return to beg forgiveness from the saint and the nine men, for not having cleansed her mind and soul of impurities thoroughly enough, for having trespassed on and squandered their valuable time.

Just before midnight Razia brought Leila to the room where she was to spend the week with the holy personages. They walked to the wooden bed in the far corner and she made Leila lie down on her right side, so she could face Mecca. One of the servant girls was carrying a box of one-inch iron nails and a hammer, and, working slowly all around Leila, Razia nailed her clothes to the bed. This didn’t have anything to do with the nine holy men. This precaution was taken at the mansion too: it was the result of her leaving the mosque’s white room on the night of Nadir Shah’s raid. Whenever possible, if she was to be in a place for longer than a few minutes, Razia had her clothes fixed to the walls or floor.

Razia and the servant girls would be sleeping in rooms on the other side of the shrine, and they left after they had secured her, leaving behind the nails and hammer so the holy men could resecure Leila after she attended to her toilet.

Leila, with the thirty spikes holding her immobile, waited anxiously for the men to come to her room. When they entered they brought with them a cool serene scent of violets. They did not approach her, arranging themselves on the other side of the room instead, eyes closed in prayer. Now and then one of them would come, mouthing sacred words as he walked, and after blowing those words softly along the length of her body, he would withdraw.

She fell asleep as the hours passed, listening to the sandstorm outside the window. Her body woke her in the middle of the night and she saw that all nine men were approaching the bed. They came and surrounded her, their hands in contact with the intimate places of her body. She fought against the nails in her clothes but didn’t have enough strength to uproot herself, wanted to shout out but found her tongue paralysed. She felt terror and then a rage and grief the size of the sky, the rage of the damned and the abandoned, and she imagined once again her mother on the dawn lake, struggling powerlessly in the mist with her assailants. She clearly saw the wings emerge from her body, their movement leaving a scribble of clarity in the gold and silver vapour of the lake.

The desert shrine was roused a few minutes later by the confusion and shouts of the nine exalted men. Razia went into the room and saw how the window had had its panels shattered and was now open to the violent sandstorm. The empty bed where Leila had been lying was covered with syllables and smears in a radiant silver liquid. The nails that outlined her body had small pinches of fabric and fine threads attached to them, like tiny brilliant feathers, shaking in that great wind from the broken window.

‘I suspected right from the beginning that this girl was not real,’ one of the nine men said. ‘So much beauty cannot be human.’

The sandstorm continued to howl past dawn, and in the morning when the air and sky cleared at last they spread out on to the dunes. There was so much static from the storm that sheets and jagged fibres of bright blue electricity danced on the ground all around them, climbing silently up their bodies as they walked. They found marks on the sand indicating the recent presence of jackals, gazelles, snakes and beetles, but there was no sign of her in any direction. And then, almost a mile away, her tracks suddenly began, halfway up the low incline of a dune. The footprints were enclosed within two lightly scored continuous lines, as though she had been dragging two sticks behind her. It was early but already the sun was baring its teeth, the heat intense. Her tracks disappeared into a large flock of demoiselle cranes in the distance and they found her at the centre of it, lying face down, exhausted from thirst and the sun.

They brought her back. Razia didn’t know what to do when she saw her, in despair at the provocations Leila continued to throw at her son.

‘That scan at the hospital five months ago didn’t reveal anything of this,’ she said as she stared at the wings on Leila’s back. She had disapproved of Leila having the ultrasound scan to determine the sex of the foetus, because Muhammad had said that no one but Allah held the answers to such mysteries as the country of a person’s death and whether the child growing in a woman’s belly was a boy or a girl. But Timur, saying that these were modern times and that the world was moving on, had insisted – so that the foetus could be aborted if female. To the joy of everyone, the scan showed the fourth child to be male, but when the time came Leila had given birth to a girl yet again. Razia saw it as a punishment from Allah for doubting Muhammad’s word.

And now there was this new difficulty.

The wings were gently alive, the feathers giving a slow hypnotic shake as the desert sand fell out of them. They were large and white and they were beautiful like those of the woman-headed steed that had taken Muhammad to Paradise from the minaret in Jerusalem.

‘It’s a miracle,’ a servant girl said.

Razia lost her temper. ‘A miracle? The mosque appearing on the river island was a miracle. This is an illusion, some example of the arts of the black realms.’

‘Yes,’ the bodyguard nodded, thinking. ‘It must be some trick.’

Razia muttered to herself, ‘A miracle! Why would Allah waste His attentions on a wife who allows her body to continue disobeying her husband and in-laws? On a Muslim who rejects the company of men as supremely spiritual as these nine?’

She sent for their sharpest scissors but all they could find was a large rusty pair the shrine-keepers used on thorn bushes. With them she tried to cut back the flight feathers a few at a time. They proved to be composed of too resistant a material, and it was noon by the time she managed to reduce each wing to just the bony outer ridge, the ceiling of the room covered with down and the segmented feathers – they had all floated upwards on becoming free. ‘There is an explanation for everything,’ Razia said as she watched them rising all around her. ‘It must be due to the static electricity.’

To prove that the wings were indeed an illusion, and weren’t connected in any meaningful way with Leila’s body, she summoned the butcher.

With an array of knives and cleavers beside him, the butcher positioned Leila on her side on the courtyard floor, held the tattered remains of the wings firmly in place by squatting on them, and made the first quick incision close to the shoulder blades. Leila didn’t feel anything, and for Razia it was a vindication. She reached out her finger and touched the wound and it was then that a trickle of blood appeared and Leila cried out in pain. She struggled to sit up, her violent movements causing the cut to become elongated and tear. They overpowered her, and with the pain making her scream to Allah and all of His 124,000 prophets for help, the butcher detached them with several swings of the cleaver. There was so much blood from the two appendages that it looked like a small massacre, and everyone and everything close by was freckled with red. Barely conscious, Leila sobbed and attempted to crawl away. But she was like a maimed animal. The servant girls struggled to hold her down again as the wounds were stitched up with shoemakers’ twine.

A journalist who happened to be present at the crumbling seventeenth-century shrine, to write an article lamenting the decrepit condition of Pakistan’s historical buildings and monuments, witnessed the entire procedure and immediately sat down on the veranda to write the story of the wings. Razia had noticed him earlier, looking horrified as he watched. Now she stopped on the veranda for a moment on her way indoors and said, ‘There was no need for you to be so upset, son. But then you men don’t understand anything about women’s bodies – we can take more pain than you.’

Inside, she said to Leila, ‘I hope you won’t take too long to heal.’ She was dusting the wounds with the ash of a reed prayer mat she had had burned for the purpose. ‘When we get home you will be ready to receive Timur again. The new wife is going to give him a son very soon, and yours too is bound to be a boy next time. It’ll be your fifth pregnancy and five is a fundamental number of our glorious religion. There are five prayers in the day, and Islam has five pillars.’ She gained eloquence as she talked. ‘Taste, smell, sight, touch and hearing. Allah in His wisdom gave us five external senses, and five internal – common sense, estimation, recollection, reflection and imagination.’

She spoke to the nine exalted personages to see if they would honour Leila with the favour of their continued presence. They not only refused, but also asked them to leave immediately. The men appeared afraid of the shrine itself now, looking stricken at the merest noise – three of them wondering if the she-djinns of the legend had returned to the building, two of them fleeing even before Razia and Leila had left.

Passing through a city on the return journey, Razia had the driver stop at a hospital so a doctor could examine Leila’s wounds. A commotion broke out while they were there. A woman who had just given birth began shouting that her newborn male had been exchanged with a female, refusing to accept that she had produced a girl, labelling the hospital staff liars and criminals and sinners, and calling down Allah’s fury on them. When the exasperated doctors said that if she did not relent they would carry out a DNA test immediately, she stopped protesting and agreed that, yes, the girl baby was hers. Her postman husband had warned her that she would be thrown out on to the streets if she brought home a seventh daughter.

‘I have heard that nurses and doctors at hospitals can be bribed to exchange female newborns with male ones,’ a woman whispered to Razia, and Razia shuddered, grateful that Allah had given her the foresight to keep her own daughters-in-law at home.

The black jeep arrived back at the mansion at dawn. Everything was silent. In the men’s section the party in anticipation of Timur’s son had ended some hours ago, a few revellers asleep among the rose bushes. Leila’s grey-glass eyes had remained closed throughout the journey, with a weak sigh escaping her lips now and then, and she was carried up to the bedroom. Razia stood by the bed hesitatingly for a few moments, but then went out to get the hammer and nails.

Leila opened her eyes and sat up carefully, shivering and trying not to weep. She looked at the picture hanging directly above the bed – a man and a woman in a flowering grove, a peacock on a bough near them, the tail exquisite, the feet dry and gnarled. She had concealed a knife behind it the previous week, considering it the easiest place to reach during Timur’s upcoming night visits to her.

From her waistband she took the music box she had come across at the hospital – an orderly said he had found it on the stump of a jacaranda tree some years ago and that she could have it. Sitting there with her raw shredded shoulders, she began to turn the crank.

H
undreds of miles away in the city of Lahore, he placed the glass of water on the aluminium table in front of him and became very still. He had just finished work and was having a meal on the street named after the slave girl Anarkali, whom Emperor Akbar had had walled up alive for having an affair with the Crown prince. He worked as a driver for a printing press, delivering bundles of newspapers to various corners of the city before the sun rose. He had very few long-term memories and at times he was doubtful even of the most basic facts about himself.
Had that happened? Who was she and where is she now? Who was he?
During the previous months there had been hours that had come at him like spears, at different angles – sometimes it was his body that was in pain, at others his mind. Everyone believed him to be mute, a few even mad.

He got up and walked towards the motorbike, the sky glistening with light above him. Mynahs and crows that had been sitting without trepidation in the middle of the empty roads lifted themselves into the air briefly to let him pass. At the train station there was an unbroken beeping from the metal detectors that had been installed since the jihadi attacks began, but they were unmanned and everyone and everything was getting through, setting them off. He bought a ticket, indicating the destination by pointing to the chart on the wall. It was almost involuntary: it felt like falling, or like rising in a dream. The motorbike had to travel in the goods carriage and when they asked him for his name, to be put on the receipt, he spoke for the first time since the day he’d buried his brother.

‘My name is Leila.’

The train began its journey and he sat looking out of the window, the dead memory stirring as he went through the land he knew, past the basement snooker clubs full of teenagers, past the mosque whose mullah had decreed polio vaccination a Western conspiracy but had then made announcements in its favour after his own little daughter was taken by the disease, past the house of a dying man whose five children could not come to his deathbed because they had sought asylum in Western countries, past the policeman who stopped by the roadside to take a deep drag from a hashish smoker’s cigarette, past cart donkeys no bigger than goats who were pulling monumental loads along thoroughfares where humans were being beaten and abused in prisons, madhouses, schools and orphanages, past the words on the back of a rickshaw that playfully warned the driver behind it:
Don’t come too near or love will result
, past the
dark-skinned
woman who had used so much skin-bleaching cream that although she was now pale, she bruised at the merest of touches, past the college boy reading a novel in which the only detailed descriptions occurred during sex and torture or during sexual torture, past the beggars whose bodies had been devoured by hunger, past the green ponds above which insects the size of tin-openers were flying, past the towns and cities and villages of his immense homeland of heartbreaking beauty, containing saints and sinners and a gentle religion, kind mothers and dutiful fathers who indulged their obedient children, its crimson dawns and its blue-smoke dusks, and its unforgivable cruelty, its jasmine flowers that lived as briefly as bursts of laughter and its minarets from where Allah was pleaded with to send the monsoon rains, and from where Allah was pleaded with to
end
the monsoon rains, and its unforgivable dishonesty, its rich for whom the poor died shallower deaths, its poor to whom only stories about hunger seemed true, its
snow-blind
mountains and sunburned deserts and beehives producing honey as sweet as the sound of Urdu, and its unforgivable brutality, and its unforgivable dishonesty, and its unforgivable cruelty, past the boy sending a text message to the girl he loved, past the two shopkeepers arguing about cricket, past the clerk who was having to go and work abroad (‘I love Pakistan but Pakistan doesn’t love me back and is forcing me to leave!’), past the government-run schools where the teachers taught only the barest minimum so the pupils would be forced to hire them for private tuition, past the girl pasting a new picture into her Aishwarya Rai scrapbook, past the crossroads decorated with giant fibreglass replicas of the mountain under which Pakistan’s nuclear bombs were tested, past the men unworthy of the rights their women conferred on them, past the trucks painted with the colours of jewels, past the six-year-olds selling Made in China prayer mats at traffic lights, past the ten-year-olds working in steel foundries, past the poet who was a voice in everyone’s head telling them what they already knew, past the narrow alleys of the bazaars where it was possible to get caught in human traffic jams and stand immobile for half an hour, past the fields of sorghum and sugar cane and pearl millet, past the most beautiful, surpassingly generous and honest people under the sky, past the mausoleum of a saint who arrived on a visit and was murdered because the people knew his grave would bring pilgrims and trade to their village, past the men and women for whom it was impossible to believe that there was no God and that He wasn’t looking after them, because how else could they have been spared the poverty, destruction and random violence that lay all around them?