In those days, Muji looked like the original for that sculpture of Lucifer I once saw in a museum. Burned everything he touched to the bone.
He was the only one of my new husband’s friends to look at me resentfully. It's true some of them wondered why such a stunning act of rebellion—this marriage—had been wasted on me. But almost all were charming in that self-mocking intellectual way that means they've already given up any sort of hope for themselves.
I’d gone to make chai in the pathetic kitchen we had in Peshawar and brought in the tray to find Muji lying with his head in my husband's lap, his wild hair spread like the wings of the bad angel. Pissed the hell out of me. That languishing act they perform with their friends because they can't get their hands on girls—usually it means nothing, though later my husband told me Muji slept with anything that moved. As long as it was beautiful, he'd find a way to screw it.
He fought longer than most; imagined himself an aesthete in that godforsaken place he came from and his mother and father had nobody good enough to offer him.
But finally they battered down his will; by the time we went back to Pakistan sixteen years later even he was a family man.
He came to greet us at my in-laws’ compound in Dera—we were staying there now too, and you’d have thought he was an old man dying of cancer. Just skirting forty but there was no life left in him anywhere, except for the trembling fingers holding a cigarette.
In the end they obey their parents but give them no joy of it.
Early one morning the call came—Muji was dead of a gunshot. My husband rushed out and I sat waiting to hear the rest.
Muji had come home drunk and waved around a pistol; his wife grabbed for it and someone found the trigger.
The family called it suicide to keep her name out of it. You pay off the authorities and unless they have a grudge somewhere, they’re glad to be clear of your mess.
We went to pay condolences. A pair of heron cranes were walking around that compound, calling. Muji had solaced himself by creating a few more captive creatures with no way out. He'd cut their wings so only death could free them, even in his absence.
His wife was at the center of a big circle of women in the courtyard, rocking back and forth, striking herself and moaning his name over and over and over. Her voice was already worn away. Finally I told them to grab her and lay her down.
There was no friend to her in that circle, though she was blood to all of them. She wasn't going to have a day of life afterwards no matter how long she lives. His sisters will see to that.
They told me his brother was inside with the rest of the men and wanted to see me. In these circumstances you can stretch decorum a little.
The brother had been ill in the head for a long time. He looked at me, hope lighting, and asked when Muji was coming home. I took his hands in mine and said, soon, he's coming. Aram karo, theek hojayiga. Be easy, it'll be OK. My Urdu is lousy but they all understand what I say.
I sat there with him for maybe fifteen minutes, pressing his hands and repeating it over and over because he wouldn't stop asking when Muji was coming home. The rest of them murmured approvingly in the background because I was handling the crazy brother so well.
Muji's family had gotten what they wanted, obedience and that marriage to an auntie's girl; Muji tamed. The wife—the widow—was a big heavy turnip now and she could never have had anything Muji valued. He'd never once looked at her in even the way he'd made cow eyes at my husband all those years before. He'd gotten a few kids on her and you know he hadn't done it in sweetness.
Under the anguish she had a gentle face and I'd say she'd been as much worthy of love as any human being is. She hadn't had any choice in it but Muji could have searched for some spine under all that fire of his and saved them both.
But over there, all the classic stories end in death. Lovers who have only the one night, joy and terror and all of time collapsed into a pinpoint of exquisite pain before the vengeful families catch them—that's everyone's favorite. No interest in anything that ought to come after—waking up next morning and getting on with life.
And I shouldn't have been so foolish—believing we’d been uniquely charmed. That place had taken care of whatever spine my husband might have been born with. He’d been twisted into inoperable deformity no matter where he went, and the bones kept cracking and fracturing till none of us escaped the pain.