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Getting off the train he rode to the Indus on the motorbike and on towards the mansion.
Why had he gone so far away from here? Because he had to take Wamaq’s body to Lahore, because Wamaq had always said he would be buried in the same cemetery as his namesake poet
. Walking away from his brother’s grave, his mind had stumbled into the void from which it was only now emerging.

It was fully dark by the time he climbed the mansion’s boundary wall and entered the room at the back. As he crossed it he felt the presence of the animals and birds in the darkness around him, the stags with antlers weighing a third of their bodies, the glittering Gilgit butterflies under their glass dome, the cheetah whose spots made it look as though it had come in out of a black rain. Silent, he stopped in front of the door.

She undid the latch on the other side and blindly reached out her hand to take his, the absence of light so complete around them that their strongest glances were absorbed and utterly disappeared. He led her to where he knew there was a divan covered in a dust sheet.

They undressed and in the glow of the gold attached to her skin they saw each other for the first time since becoming separated all those years ago. Gently they touched each other, he mindful of her torn back, she kissing his mouth and throat and chest, the parts of his body he used for singing. No one – not even they themselves – knew the origins of their attachment. Perhaps the earliest incident had been the mullah beating Qes for not having memorized his Quranic lessons, and bruises appearing on Leila’s body.

As they picked up their clothes afterwards, he noticed the small rips and tears in various locations on her garments. But she was smiling with happiness just to be near him. Dressed, they were once again in the darkness.

‘I need something from my room before I go.’

‘All right.’ There was no fear or hesitation in the voice. They stepped into the corridor and with complete self-possession walked towards her room, entering a hall and going up a flight of stairs. He saw her wooden bed with the many nails driven into it, making outlines of her body. She went to the picture above the bed. Throwing aside the knife she took from behind it, she opened the frame and removed the picture. On its back she had written down the secret names that she had given to her four missing daughters.

They were descending the stairs when they saw Timur in the large hall. They stopped.

He was looking at one of the doors that opened on to the hall – it led to the suite of rooms occupied by the new wife. They watched as a devastated Razia opened the door and fell into his arms. ‘It’s not a boy,’ she said, weeping. In her right hand was the ancient dagger with which the umbilical cords were always cut.

Timur separated himself from his mother and stood looking at the floor in a dazed state. Picking up the table that held a vase of plastic lilies, he hurled it against the wall with an immense roar. Leila moved backwards on to a higher step but Qes remained where he was. Razia was weeping, her eyes shut.

As the moments passed and they waited for Timur to look up and discover them, Leila came back down and stood beside Qes.

At that moment, a dozen of Timur’s men entered the hall, all of them armed.

‘What do you want?’ Timur turned to them and bellowed.

One of them came forward and prepared to speak up. He was wearing black clothes and only when red spots materialized on the floor below him did it become obvious that he was bleeding. ‘Nadir Shah is on the island. He has complete control.’

‘Why is Allah punishing us good Muslims?’ Razia exclaimed.

‘That fucking island!’ Timur shouted. ‘Set fire to it – the building and everything in it, the trees and every last blade of grass. Burn even the water around it!’

The old woman let out a cry of horror. ‘What are you saying, Timur?’

The man in black said, ‘We can’t get near it. They have
rocket-propelled
grenades and there are landmines all along the edge of the island. We don’t know where they got them from. He and his sons must have developed links with the jihadis.’

‘I don’t care. Take every bandit and son of a whore in this house and go and burn it all to the ground.’

Razia grabbed his arm. ‘You can drive him off another way. Allah is on our side, remember.’

‘Where is your Allah and how many cannons does he have?’ Timur said. ‘Stay out of it, it doesn’t concern you.’ Then he turned squarely to her. ‘And it’s your fault that I am alone against him and his sons – why didn’t you perform your duty as a woman and give me brothers?’

Razia raised the hand with the dagger to her mouth and bit her knuckles, the long dazzling blade with the verses of the Quran etched on to it jutting from her fist. She stepped away from him, the eyes ringed with white lashes wide with surprise, the head lowered as she seemed to recover and, with a fixed empty smile, said, ‘The fate of the mosque does concern me. It concerns me as a Muslim. Angels sent by Allah Himself built that mosque …’

Leila tightened her grip on Qes as Timur struck the old woman hard on the face, knocking her to the ground, the elegant dagger rattling to the other end of the hall. ‘I am sick of all this,’ Timur said and he bent down and grabbed hold of the thousand-bead rosary and tore it to pieces, sending the little black spheres flying in all directions. Some of them even slipped under the door to the new wife’s rooms. He straightened and turned to his men.

‘What are you still doing here? Didn’t you hear my orders?’

‘Call them back, in the name of Allah,’ Razia pleaded as she wept on the floor.

He stood above her with his loud breathing and then walked over to the dagger. He picked it up, went to the door behind which the birth had just taken place and kicked it open with his foot. Screams and cries went up in the room, the sounds of panic. Leila attempted to stop Qes but he stayed her gently and went down the staircase at great speed, she following a few steps behind.

‘For the last time, don’t do that to the mosque,’ Razia was saying wretchedly, scrabbling around for her rosary beads with her fingers, as Qes and Leila went past her. They heard Timur give a great enraged shout and then an immense silence descended on the world.

Leila and Qes entered the room and saw that the new mother, with her hands red and an expression of crazed hatred on her face, was standing above Timur, who lay on the floor, his mouth still open from that shout. The woman stepped back as he pulled the dagger out of his breast and, the instinct for force still undamaged within the confused and dying mind, stabbed his own stomach with it, once, twice, driving the blade most of the way in each time as the blood welled out of his mouth through gritted teeth. He plunged it blindly into his thigh and groin, and into his face below the right eye, and lastly into the house itself, stabbing the granite floor beside him. Against the walls stood the motionless servant girls, and the midwife clutching the minutes-old human being. She came forward and handed the baby to its mother.

Timur’s blood roamed the floor. Razia, having finally gathered the remains of her rosary from the hall, entered and slowly began to pick the beads off the bedroom floor, each new one bringing her deeper into the room, and closer to Timur’s body. Many of them she collected out of his blood. One lay near his hand – the hand that held the dagger embedded up to the hilt in the stone floor. Only then did she seem to see him.

B
rushing against the stationary animals in the darkness, Qes and Leila crossed the room and went out into the night. They stood looking at the sky, taking the galaxies on to their faces, the tide of scents from night flowers. But a minute later he brought her back to the room and switched on the lights. He opened all the windows one by one and began to move the animals so that they faced the door to the outside. When she understood, she lifted the glass dome off the emerald butterflies and carried them to a windowsill. He climbed on to the shoulders of the tiger and raised his hand to unhook the opening of the cage in which a paradise flycatcher sat, bound to its swing with thin wire. He moved towards the tiger’s haunches and opened the cage of the blossom-headed parakeet. Without touching the ground he stepped on to the table and then on to the back of the lioness and on to the blue antelope, opening all the cages suspended from the ceiling that was painted like a garden. When they left they made sure both panels of the door were open behind them, each cage swinging on its long chain.

The next song he’d make up for her would be about a lamp in a room where two lovers met – so engrossed did the flame become in watching them that it continued to burn when the oil finished.

Translated by Waqas Khwaja

Jane Perlez

 

W
hen a Pakistani friend won a promotion to a powerful job in Peshawar I went to congratulate him on his new sinecure. He is a cultivated man with a beautiful home from the British colonial era and tentacles all across Pakistan’s tormented tribal region, where he once served as a political agent – the all-purpose government official who is supposed to act as lord and regent over the fractious tribes and the inexorably rising tide of the Taliban.

As always, my friend wore a starched and pressed white shalwar kameez. While we talked he carefully untied the green ribbons on stacks of well-worn cardboard folders, signed the government papers stacked inside with a fountain pen, and then tossed the retied folders on to the floor. Every half-hour, a clerk appeared and carried away the piles of completed paperwork.

Government offices are important symbols in Pakistan – size, furniture, scope of retinue. This one was handsome, a large room set off a broad veranda in the ersatz Moghul-era quadrangle of pink stucco. A white mantelpiece signalled the dignity of the office holder. Above it hung a portrait, more a sketch in dingy brown, of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The face was gaunt and elderly – an aquiline nose, sunken cheeks, unforgiving mouth. A peaked cap high off his forehead and a plain coat buttoned to the neck with a high collar gave the aura of a religious man. The picture reminded me of the first image I had ever seen of Jinnah: a mysterious, dark oil painting covered with glass hung high on a wall of the formal reception room at the Pakistani High Commission in London.