In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (24 page)

Their words gained no traction in Murad’s mind. He made a joke of the encounter, telling Lily the details. They both took strength from the perception that they were striking off into new territories, survivors, he from the wreck of his family, she from the superficialities of the life she had fallen into. His overwhelming mother, cut from the same pattern as his aunts, had destroyed his father by inches – that was one of their bywords, that they would achieve an infinitely better accord with each other. Another was that despite her past Lily at heart was a homebody, the efficient one, the one who took care of matters, of injuries. She had always been self-sufficient, as a girl kept a nurse’s kit and doctored the household servants when they were sick, and as a grown-up she had always taken care of herself financially, tending the exclusive little atelier she had set up in the basement of her parents’ house, with a single seamstress and an old tailor, making very expensive wedding clothes. That kept her grounded, and had always earned enough to keep her afloat, that and rent money from a few shops in Lahore that her grandfather had given her as a baby. She felt it important that she brought this to the relationship, not the money but the stance, and they both acknowledged an intention to join together protectively and go forth.

Before the engagement they had driven to Lahore to call on his father, through the Salt Range, off the Pothohar Plateau and down to the plains, across the rivers, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi. The father had entirely ceded his Islamabad house to Murad after his wife died, finding it too painful living in the bedroom where she had endured her last weeks and months, racked by cancer. He moved to Lahore, to a huge run-down house that had fallen to his lot at the time of the partition with his siblings. The size of the house impressed Lily as much as its dilapidation shocked her, the front lawn bare of grass, with servants’ children playing cricket in the center, quite at their ease.

The house had been built in the twenties, with many dark passages, musty fraying carpets, enormous ugly sofas and armchairs poked here and there, arranged quite irrationally, as if they had of their own volition waddled in from a furniture graveyard and huffed down and settled in for a long wait. Black dirt crusted the door, which scraped heavily against the floor, wheezing. The ancient valet greeted Murad with affection, one of the old school, corrupt, running the household for profit, taking a cut from the cook, the drivers, but nevertheless indulgently proud of his master’s ordered purposeless day, the master’s hand which had never turned to work, and his connections with the old Lahore aristocracy.

‘He’s been waiting for you since yesterday afternoon,’ confided the valet. ‘He comes alive again, sir, before your visits. He almost missed his nap this afternoon.’

It’s a little dying world,
she reflected, this household, these servants, the old man at the center. She had seen this before among her own relatives, one of her great-aunts who lived on into her nineties, quarreling with her maidservants, absorbed in prayer, ill-tempered, reputedly with boxes full of cash and gold salted away, though none of it turned up after her death. She was known for being tremendously miserly, yet when Lily went to call on her, as she took her leave, the old woman would tell one of the serving women to bring her gargantuan handbag, and would pull from it a surprisingly large amount of cash, saying, ‘Now remember me when I’m gone, young lady.’

Murad’s father met them sitting up in bed, wearing a thick green tennis sweater, the sheets on the bed freshly starched – the valet must have changed them when Murad called from the motorway to say they were approaching the city. Murad kissed him affectionately, then introduced Lily, who felt suddenly that she had worn the wrong clothes, too fashionable, too bright – a costume halfway Western, the
shalvar
more like slacks, the
kurta
fitted. The poverty of the room spoke of hours spent with nothing to do, the cracked imitation-leather slippers, the ugly cream-colored thermos of water – and the profusion of medicines.

The father really was very weak, with a fringe of long white hair and a sweet expression like a child, eyes straining. A mild and correct gentleman, he had never made anything of himself, had been selling land all his life to keep up appearances, himself the son of a great landowner, and an almost complicit victim of his elder brother’s machinations at the time of their inheritance. His wife had propped him up for as long as she could, the years wearing her down until her love shaded into contempt, difficult to hide, especially as the cancer cut away at her.

When they entered the room the father’s eyes lit up and his face became animated. He spoke gallantly to Lily.

‘My dear, you’re prettier even than Murad told me. He’s a lucky young man, you’re both  ... Very lucky  ...’

And then his voice trailed off and a set look came into his eyes, of resignation, of indifference – she found this fading in his manner disconcerting, expecting him instead to be distant and firm. Murad had not prepared her for this, the old man’s helplessness. The father patted the bed next to his leg and told Murad to sit down. After asking Lily several questions about her family, her mother and father, quite evidently not listening to the answers, he asked Murad questions about the farm, mechanically, each question unrelated to the one that came before, as if a set number of inquiries must be made. Lily sat quite close to him, on a chair that had been placed for her before they came into the room, and as she sat she absorbed the odors and the presence of this man, the father of her beloved, earthy and rank, some sort of pomade that old people wore, talcum powder, clean heavy bedclothes, dusty curtains. She noticed that, in the midst of his indifference, the old man stroked his son’s arm, tenderly, unconsciously.

‘Excuse me, I just need to speak to the accountants,’ said Murad, as they had planned – he had begged her to spend a little time alone with his father.

When Murad had gone out, the father’s expression became strained, the skin tight around his eyes. He appeared not to know where he should look. Just as she formulated an inconsequential question to break the silence, the old man looked up at her.

‘He mostly resembles his mother, do you know.’

She heard an apology in this, for the state in which she found him, lying in this bed.

Reaching beside him, the old man took a bell on a cord and rang it to call a servant. Then, turning to her, shrewd, he said, ‘The dance goes on, doesn’t it, young lady. He’ll be a good husband. And for you, I hope you’ll keep the faith. Perhaps it doesn’t matter either way. But I’m an old man, it would be better if you had waited until after I’m gone.’ He fell silent, the dentures in his mouth shifting and making a clicking sound.

In a photograph Murad had shown her of his father as a young man at Oxford many years ago, lanky, with Murad’s long and delicate face, not quite smiling, wearing an overcoat, a scarf tied tightly around his neck – already he looked cautious, insulated, at a loss.

He yawned like a little boy, his eyes flat, as if unseeing, and she observed that his hair standing up from the impression of the pillow looked exactly like the tuft of a bird. She didn’t comprehend his statement.

The valet came in and then Murad returned. As they left, returning to Islamabad, the old man pulled her close to him, kissed her on the cheek, and said, ‘Bless you, young lady.’

If at first she didn’t understand the old man’s words, later she dated from this experience the first blow against her belief that marriage would allow her fundamentally to change herself. This old man, whose embrace of his formidable wife had been enough like final love that her death ruined him utterly, nevertheless took so limited a view of what marriage could offer his only son, what Lily could offer. Perhaps he knew of her past, probably he did – Murad would have told him something, to inoculate against later disclosures made by mean-spirited relatives, the aunts or others.

She knew the feeling to be irrational, but this half-welcome into the family, though issuing from the stream of a life that had lost its force, hurt her deeply and persistently.

Right until the last minute the old man insisted he would be at the wedding, held in Islamabad at the house of Lily’s parents. It mattered a great deal to Murad, and she knew this, but they didn’t speak of it. She thought of him as strong, going directly to his purpose – as he had in his pursuit of her, or as she had seen once when his managers came to Islamabad with the quarterly budget from the farm, the respectful and straightforward way in which they approached him, the tough respect he accorded to them, and their businesslike application to the work at hand.

Yet with regard to his father his strength failed, as if his father’s weakness infected him too, sapped him. Two days before the wedding Murad came to her and said in a broken voice, ‘He’s not coming, I knew he wouldn’t.’

‘It doesn’t matter, darling. He’s sick, he wanted to be here.’

‘That’s just it,’ he said angrily. ‘He never wants to be here. He sold the best parts of the property for nothing, because he couldn’t be bothered to oversee the sales. He let my relatives take all the shops in the city, the valuable city land. And then, after puttering around doing nothing for most of his life, he took to his bed. I always felt unprotected, and I still do. I always felt that he took the view,
Aprés moi, le déluge
. My mother wouldn’t forgive him, even when she was dying. I was the stolen prince living in a stable, while the other branch of the family ate up whatever they could reach. Now I’ve come back and taken some of what’s mine, but my father is still there, still refusing me.’

Soothing him, touching his face, she thought of the blessing the father had given her, almost malevolent. ‘I’m the same way, darling, that’s why we found each other. I’m cut off too. We’ll do it together. We’ll have our own new separate life.’

She didn’t press him more than that, and soon the moment passed, Murad covering his anger and grief by throwing himself into the last-minute preparations.

A manager arrived the night before the wedding, bearing the old family jewelry in a leather handbag that must have belonged to Murad’s mother, the
tikka
ornament for Lily’s head wrapped in a faintly scented handkerchief, a gold cloisonné choker set with pearls and rough diamonds, and two long strands of emeralds, the largest of them the size of toffees.

Lily insisted that the two main ceremonies, the
shadi
and the
valima,
be telescoped into one, that it be more or less merely a celebratory dinner, to the chagrin of both her family and his, cousins, uncles, old family friends, hangers-on, sponges, all inveterate marriagegoers – aunts and great-aunts, who hobbled around the party wearing flesh-colored socks and high heels under their brilliant but ancient Indian saris, complaining about the food; and sly second cousins, who thought this curtailed wedding the last and best stroke delivered against propriety by Lily, the perfectly aberrant coda to her career. On Murad’s side several personages attended, out of consideration for his father – a governor of twenty years ago, several old hostesses, beauties and battleaxes from a generation back. Before the wedding Lily had dreaded it all, kept joking with Murad about eloping; then on the day of the ceremony worried that it would be a sad inadequate affair, had cried in her bathroom, piling on the misery by imagining herself as an orphan, as unloved. A tent had been set up in the garden, air-conditioned against the heat of the September night, and she had feared that the tables, decorated by Mino with calla lilies that he somehow procured from Karachi, would be empty. But the tables were full, her parents had acted exactly as they should, her closest friends had flown in. Girls she had known when she was little had crowded around her, and it was with them, surprisingly, that she had found the most joy in the occasion, as if she had been translated back to that time, to the person she was then.

Just before the guests arrived, Murad had whispered to her, ‘Come with me for a moment,’ and they had slipped away from her parents’ house to the cottage. He wore a long formal coat, a
sherwani,
embroidered with gold thread, and she wore a green shot-silk gown designed by herself, heavily worked, and flowing pants, wearing his family
tikka
pendant on her forehead. Standing in front of the mirror in her bedroom, he said, ‘Look at us.’ There they were, the two of them in their wedding clothes. ‘We’ll do it now,’ he said, ‘our own way.’ Very serious, looking into her eyes in the mirror, he swore, ‘I marry you, Lily, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, in happiness and sorrow, till death do us part.’ She repeated the words, and that had been for her the real wedding, that is when tears had started into her eyes. From his pocket he took a ring that had belonged to his mother, an emerald intaglioed with a single iris just coming into bloom – he described it that way.

As he gave the ring to her, with a queer smile on his face he said, ‘I hope this isn’t the wrong thing, coming from her – the poisoned chalice.’

They had spoken of his troubles with his mother, his fear of being consumed by a woman. ‘We already agreed,’ she replied, soothing, dismissing. ‘That was in the past.’

Only a small crowd remained, it was late, her parents had gone to sleep, and the party had moved to Lily’s cottage, where the bar had been set up in a screened verandah looking onto the garden. She went up to her bedroom, looking for Murad, who had disappeared somewhere, wanting a moment with him, to see him and believe it was real, that they were finally and entirely married, forever. Entering, she saw that he wasn’t there, only the candles they had lit earlier flickering and guarding the room. Someone had strewn rose petals on the bed – this little pure gesture touched her. Her mother must have done it, a blessing, given as lightly as she was able. Opening a tall glass door, Lily walked out onto a balcony. The night, warm and sweet with the scent of jasmine, hung over the city, the music in the room below her expanding out into the darkness, the lights of the tent in the garden dimmed. Some men were standing in a dark corner of the driveway, smoking a joint. Not even listening, simply taking a moment of quiet under the night sky, she heard one of them say, very distinctly, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll peel the bark off him soon enough,’ and the others laughed, crude, delighted. It took a second for her to absorb it, and then she could only narrow her eyes and look up at the stars.