Kahani Read online

  So. The account of his birth.

  And this is the testimony of an aged midwife with twisted hands.

  — Maria was always concerned that there wasn’t a hospital around here, not even a dispensary. How long can people survive on herbs and roots and incantations? Someone should at least set up a maternity centre. We’d actually taken her for a doctor at first, and we’d land up at her door with our aches and pains and blisters. The poor thing would begin to weep and say in gestures, I’m no doctor, she’d say, but you couldn’t expect them to believe her. The result was that she’d be relieved of all the medicines she’d brought along for her own use. This time she’d spoken to all the big shots around and they’d ended up unloading their own woes on her; doctors won’t work here, they said, they don’t like it, they want to stay on in their big cities where money is good. Maria was left in tears once again.

  — I’d say, trying to console her, don’t worry, there’s always God. Then she took off. And look at the ways of the Lord, mother and daughter delivering their babies at the same time, and I tried to take care of both of them. Both of them gave birth to males. I bathed them and dressed them, and when I took Gul Bibi’s son to the mullah and asked him to whisper the name of God in his ear, he panicked and put him down on the ground as if the child were the devil’s spawn. What kind of child is this? he roared. Hair like corn and eyes like sapphires. He was terrified. I gestured to him to keep his silence. He’s given to us by God, so do your duty and whisper His name in his ear. And when Gul Bibi his mother saw the boy, her smile vanished in tears, and then she quietly died.

  — Afzal Khan, Gul Bibi’s son-in-law, still asks me every time he catches me alone: Are you sure my mother-in-law gave birth to this child? Then raise your hand in the direction of the Ka‘aba and swear that my wife has nothing to do with him.

  — And each time I’ve raised my hand and said: Mahgul’s only connection with the child is that he came from her mother’s belly. He’s so young, the boy, and the woman whose mother’s womb harboured him doesn’t have it in her power to protect him, for her husband wakes her up at night and demands: Tell me the truth, is this child really your mother’s, or did the midwife place him by your mother’s side in the middle of the night just to protect you? If that’s the story, then I swear by God I’m going to shoot him with this bullet. And he shows her the bullet and says: So that … so that … he can never again play such games with someone else’s life. That’s why Mahgul begged Janet, who was leaving the place after a long sojourn there, Madam, she said, take him away with you, since Mother died I’ve even been afraid to give him a piece of bread, he doesn’t have a well-wisher or a protector.

  Yes, Mahgul, he isn’t a trout, he doesn’t belong to a protected species. So you have to be patient. We both have to be patient. And wait for the time when …

  In my distress, I’ve come out here, to the bazaar. On the slope leading down to it is a mosque made of wood, from which I can hear the muezzin’s (unamplified) voice. He never sings before or after the call to prayer, but just now he’s reading aloud from the Quran. And when the woman who was buried alive is asked: What was the crime for which you were executed – what then?

  That will be the hour when

  The sun will be enveloped

  And the stars will lose their light

  And mountains will walk

  And the seas will become flames

  And the book of reckoning will be opened

  And the skin of the skies will be ripped away

  And all, in this hour of revelation, will be revealed.

  And watching all this the walls of a city weep, and within me the walls of my being are drenched in the drizzle of my silent weeping.

  And bright letters proclaim on the hills of Margalla:

  WILD ANIMALS ARE A NATIONAL RESOURCE!

  TO PROTECT THEM IS OUR DUTY!

  Translated and abridged by Aamer Hussein

  KHADIJA MASTOOR

  Godfather

  The hideous midnight silence seemed to whisper a murderous plot. And Godfather walked with assurance down the middle of the tarmacked street as if it was made just for her. Guardian sentries whistled, somewhere nearby. A strange terror emanated from the menacing silence. Godfather was oblivious to the sounds of the whistles. The metal head of her walking stick ground the tarmac and her heavy, masculine boots made a racket. Despair dripped from her face. She sighed deeply, over and over again, then looked at the sky with weary eyes as if there, too, hung a heavy lock. She was muttering something – swearing or praying, who knows? The sentries were approaching her now but she strode on, step upon balanced step, with the same steadiness. ‘Who are you?’ The voice was so near, she had to stand still. There was such despair and grief in the way she stood – perhaps she didn’t want to stand. The sentry ogled her, amazed. Such a strapping figure of a woman, stick in hand, wearing men’s shoes and a big loose shirt, enormous, wide-trousered shalwar and no dupatta. Godfather remained silent for a moment, watching the gawping soldier, as if to say, ‘Brother, let me walk my fill today.’ The soldier turned and let out a loud whistle. The sentries’ footsteps came nearer. ‘Who are you? Are you dumb – is that why you won’t speak?’ the soldier yelled and his voice smudged into the far distance.

  ‘Why are you bothering me, my man? Get on with your business,’ Godfather said quietly.

  ‘Mind my own business, you slag! Tell me, who you are.’ The sentry pounced on her.

  ‘I’m your father, you bastard!’ She came to life, bashing the pavement with her stick. The fragility of the world seemed to turn into a curse, beating on her face like rain. The sentry hissed an obscenity. ‘Come on – to the station. Roaming around at 2.00 in the morning with a truncheon. Slag.’

  ‘You’ll take me to the station, will you?’ She fell on the soldier. ‘Take me to the station. I’ll show you: take me to the station.’ She dusted his leg with her stick. Then, as he fearfully went for his truncheon, she brought it down on him with such force that she split open his head. Its metal tip scattered his brain around. She was muttering who knows what, under her breath. In the sallow, insipid moonlight, the living, pulsing blood flowed black. The steps of the other sentries sounded close.

  Bemused, Godfather saw the blood and her feet lifted, ready to run. She had only gone a few paces when six soldiers surrounded her, divested her of her cane and handcuffed her. Leaving two soldiers to guard the corpse, the other four flanked her, two on each side, and set off for the nearby station. The soldiers spoke about their dead companion and swore at Godfather. But she walked silently, thinking who knows what. And the night seemed to spit with fury like the soldiers.

  Godfather was detained at the station for three days. They didn’t need to investigate, she’d been in jail several times. They had her entire history. They kept her all those days just to find out why she hated the dead sentry – and to get her lover’s address. She insisted she had no lover now, no acquaintances even. But no one believed her and the female jailers gave her a sound thrashing. On the fourth day they put her in an armoured car and transported her to prison where she was shut in a cell until her case was decided.

  When Godfather was brought to that solitary cell, she wasn’t laughing as usual, calling the cell a lovely house, she didn’t tease or joke with the sentries but remained absolutely silent, and when the iron door of her cell was shut, she spread out a mat on the mud platform, placing her head where it had been raised to form a pillow. All day she stared silently at the ceiling. Some watery, split-pea lentils sat in an aluminium pot alongside two coarse, thick chappatis, trying to tempt her. At night, they force-fed her. But her demeanour didn’t change much. Outside the iron door, guard duty was in progress. The yellow light of the lanterns glimmered from here to there. ‘Barrack no. 1, barrack no. 2. Everything’s fine, everything’s fine,’ the female wardens’ voices responded to each other. Godfather kept sighing. Perhaps today the memories of her life, begun in a meagre household, had returned
, bent on tormenting her.

  Perhaps that was what she replayed, lying in the dark, watching something.

  Those days when her father worked as a butler in a nearby house and her mother grumbled, eking out the month on fifteen rupees. In those days her name was Kaneez, not Godfather. Fifteen rupees and six lives. She never had a stomachful to eat. So she had become quarrelsome. She never felt the slightest shame in grabbing her four sisters’ share of food, to fill her own belly. Mother would chastise her, citing the gratitude and restraint of her sisters, but come mealtimes, she pranced into the kitchen, forgetting all admonitions, and snatched their portions like a monkey. Mother consoled and cosseted her other offspring in their hunger. She cursed Kaneez and wished her evil. Kaneez cried as she watched Mother lavishing her affection on her siblings and, for a bit, withdrew into silence. But when she entered the kitchen she would again leap and prance, in the process smashing several of the clay pots and containers. Mother pounded her breast and once or twice even beat her with sticks of firewood. Yet when the women who lived round about criticized her and called her names, Mother said hopefully that she would grow out of it. But Kaneez’s habits deteriorated. Around the age of thirteen, she was confined to purdah but her ways didn’t alter a shred. Nor did her father’s salary increase. Now she learned new tricks. She spent hours twisting her neck round the door of their servant’s quarters and when the women from the grand houses came out dressed in their finery, she’d clap loudly and start shouting:

  ‘I wish to God these eaters of pulao and sweet rice would die. I wish to God these wearers of finery would die.’ She would stop the travelling vendors of pakoras and sweets, then run in without buying anything, provoking their abuse. And one day she surpassed herself. She swore at the wife of her father’s employer, cursing her for not increasing his salary. That day, he nearly lost his job. He was ordered to vacate the quarters and it was only by falling at his mistress’s feet and begging her to excuse the prating of an immature child that he continued to earn his crust. When Father came home, he flogged her so severely with a stout stick, she couldn’t leave her bed for days. After that the door was always locked.

  Around fifteen she was, when Mother arranged her marriage, to put her to rights. They borrowed twenty rupees and the preparatory period began. During that time, she didn’t fight for food and radiance shone out of her face in spite of a half-empty stomach. Some of her friends had married recently and they told her that quite apart from food and new clothes, a bride receives the kind of love from her husband that no one else can give.

  After leaving for her husband’s home, Kaneez forgot her past woes. Her husband loved her wholeheartedly and her mother-in-law was so caring that she fed Kaneez with her own hands, noon and night. But when she lifted her bridal veil and wanted to see the house, she realized she was only the mistress in name. The orders came from her horse-toothed mother-in-law. Her husband’s twenty-rupee salary was also handed over to his mother. Swiftly, she said farewell to her bridehood and tried to take control of the household. But her mother-in-law turned vicious as a witch. She locked Kaneez out of the room which contained three enormous tin trunks, banned her from so much as peeping into the kitchen and wouldn’t let her touch a penny of her husband’s salary. That apart, she denied her the delicious titbits that her husband pilfered from his master’s kitchen. Consumed with jealousy, she began to measure out Kaneez’s meals in mean portions, unconcerned that she was going hungry. Finally, Kaneez tried, gently, to fill her husband’s ears but he took offence. ‘If you say a single word about my mother, there’ll be no one worse than I. My mother worked with her nose to the grindstone, trying to bring me up. Everything in this house is hers.’

  For all her efforts to show her mother-in-law in a bad light and win her husband round to her way of thinking, Kaneez only succeeded in alienating him. He began avoiding her. There were constant rows. She tormented her mother-in-law who swore back at her, cried and screamed, day in and day out, and wasn’t content even after gaining the sympathies of the entire neighbourhood. Spitefully, she doled out such meagre amounts of food to Kaneez, it wasn’t enough to line her belly. When Kaneez pushed her way into the kitchen to eat, the hag’s invective became ferocious. Her husband, fed up with the loud and constant bickering, hit her and she wreaked her revenge on her mother-in-law. Despite her father’s death, she threatened to leave home and her mother-in-law, looking pleased, taunted, ‘Where can you go?’ And true enough, Kaneez’s threat remained a threat.

  Then for a few days the fights stopped because she was due to have a baby. After a month’s confinement, she arose from her bed with her infant in her arms, but her mother-in-law couldn’t bear her to have the power acquired from mothering a son. Nor could she bear the thought of her only son falling under his wife’s influence because of it. Kaneez turned tigress. As soon as she was strong enough, she grabbed her mother-in-law by her hair and beat her. That night, her husband and mother-in-law snatched the suckling boy from her breast and threw her out.

  She didn’t know the town, whose help to seek, where to find refuge. Tangled in her burqa, she was walking aimlessly, when the wife of the local tonga-walla saw her. She had often visited Kaneez and regaled her, in foul language, with the neighbourhood gossip. Now she took her home and showed her great tenderness but she could not stem her tears. Kaneez beat her breast and wept, lamenting as she pointed to the drops of milk soaking through her shirt. That night when the tonga-walla parked his horse and cart, his bizarre friends came uninhibitedly into the house, whispering and mumbling. Then they locked the doors and began to gamble and smoke pot. The wife sat with them on the floor smoking a reefer, then forced Kaneez to have a whole one, too.

  This was her first experience of hashish. It blew her senseless and she fell on the bed, calling out to her baby, her jewel, all night. A few days later, when her tears had not yet abated, the tonga-walla’s wife told her that a friend of her husband’s had fallen in love with her. Crying would not do. If she wanted to enjoy herself, she should run away with him. He was promising her a life of luxury. Kaneez refused, insisting she wanted a reunion with her husband and mother-in-law. She would endure anything if they took her back. She’d go hungry but wouldn’t say a word. If they forbade her to hold her baby, she wouldn’t stretch out her arms; if she was told not to look at him, she’d blind herself. She just wanted to be near him. In the end, the tonga-walla went to see her husband to get an agreement but he returned with the divorce papers. Like a madwoman, Kaneez tore her hair, pummelled her flesh, shrieked and cried. Her new lover consoled her with all his heart. The tonga-walla tenderly reassured and sustained her with a flood of invective against her oppressors but nothing made sense to her. She called to her baby all night, spoke to him, shrieked incessantly and smoked hashish.

  Two weeks went by and eventually the tonga-walla’s wife said she could support her no longer. Kaneez had a perfect suitor and she should set up home with him. So, at last, she agreed to leave on condition that she could see her jewel just one last time.

  But she discovered that her husband and his mother had moved to another town. After the news she neither cried nor lamented, just fell silent as if she’d turned to stone. The very next day her lover took her to a bleak, little-known alley of the town where she soon discovered that he made a living from theft. She didn’t object. Whatever he brought home from the sleight of his hand, he cast into her lap. And though he laid himself out with adoration, she couldn’t find a civil word to say to him. She swore at him at every turn, smoked heaps of hashish and languished in bed. But thieves and scoundrels just want a woman and the wretch had found a woman after a long time. He wouldn’t say an angry word to her. And many days passed that way.

  Confined to bed, she had herself examined by all the local mid-wives and found out quite quickly that she was infertile because her mother-in-law had skimped on a proper midwife. After this revelation she became even stranger than before. She lay in bed, beat her breast, swore, smok
ed and ate so excessively that she messed up her system.

  A year later, she insisted that she would help her man by going to work for a rich woman. He was pleased with the idea and very soon taught her the simpler tricks of the trade. As a precaution, he also taught her to break locks and a few days later, she relinquished her burqa and began staking out houses to make his job easier. Now the two were in clover. Instead of crying and lamenting, she laughingly devoured litres of milk and stopped being so nasty to her lover. Then, one day, who knows what got into her – instead of stealing her mistress’s possessions, she abducted her suckling infant. But she was caught soon enough, smothering the child with kisses. She and her partner were jailed for seven months each, with hard labour. They met after their release and returned to work in the obscure streets. But her partner warned her that if she did something so foolish again, she would die for nothing. A proper ‘Godfather’ doesn’t get caught by the police. And when she asked him the meaning of Godfather, she learned that that was the name they used for crime lords in Bombay and that he had lived for quite a while with such crime lords.

  Two or three days later, she demanded he call her ‘Godfather’ in future. If he called her Kaneez again, she would smash in both their skulls. Her lover tried to convince her that the title was inappropriate for women but she repudiated her womanhood. After she assumed the name of Godfather, she started to stake out houses again and once, without consultation, burgled clumsily. She was imprisoned for a month and her lover was forced to suffer a six-month sentence. This time when they met after their release, Godfather’s behaviour was more bizarre than ever before. So much so, that even her lover couldn’t understand her. She would roam the streets in broad daylight wielding her stick. Her partner and his criminal friends warned her she would get everyone in trouble if she carried on like this but she didn’t care. She wandered around, got smashed on pot and crashed out in bed. Finally, fed up with her ignoring all his pleas and warnings, her partner abandoned her. She lay hungry and thirsty for ages, watching the sky. That night she broke into a house with a big bang and ended up in jail for six months.