They say the river’s name is in the masculine form. I’d say it’s a mother’s curse eating this place to avenge the rape of her daughters.
***
Punjab means “five waters;” tributaries of the great Sindhu, the River Indus. Every inch of this vast abundance is conjured from the theft of water. As long as you have water you can grow anything here.
Dams and barrages and headworks and canals tame and direct the water’s lifeflow. Sometimes a little force is necessary in encouraging fields to yield up their fertility.
Every landlord who can afford to sinks his own tube well.
Poorer people only have handpumps; their homes are little deserts in all this sea of green.
***
Living in Peshawar, I was used to the atmosphere of futile anger that colors the Frontier and the easy swinging stride of the plains surprised me. Poverty kills these people but doesn't shame them first.
This was July, 1983. I was on the bus to Lahore with Hamid to see Beidi and the kids for Eid.
He was our office electrician and I’d become very friendly with the family when he’d moved them into the servants’ quarters behind our main building. After eleven or so years of marriage they still had no permanent home. It was Beidi’s mother’s village we were heading to.
***
I could see the stark beauty to Bibi’s compound but it made for a hard life. Two mudwalled rooms sat at opposite ends of the dirt courtyard, and a little roofless hut in between for one’s private business, with a can of ashes to cover it up afterwards. A sweeper came once a week to collect the dessicated waste.
Most important of all, the handpump on its little cement base.
The hollow for the cookfire was set beside a thin struggling tree that pretended at a gift of shade. People here knead cakes of buffalo dung for fuel. I watched Bibi do it, arms elbow-deep as she formed big patties to dry on the compound’s walls.
She was a tall lean handsome capable woman and carried herself like a free person, even in Peshawar when she came up by train with the heavy cotton mattress and comforter she’d made for me.
I’ve never in my life, before or after, tasted chai as good as Bibi’s, water and buffalo milk simmered over that musky grass-scented dung fire and served in little clay bowls.
Only in chai could I drink that water which slowly kills everything that needs it to live.
It was brackish, full of salt. All that plundering of river and groundwater was poisoning the land. Down in Sindh Province, even the sea itself was stealthily moving inland.
I was mostly an unfussy guest but I couldn't drink that water. I kept sending kids to the store for bottles of 7-Up. Everyone understood. If you're not used to that water, you can't get it down your throat.
***
Beidi and Hamid had two sons and three daughters and soon would have a fourth, but her brother and sister-in-law had just the one girl. A little fire-breather, that Fazila; in all that tumult of cousins she swirled around the compound like a dust storm. Bibi had bought her a tiny kid goat—miniature horns set in a head so delicate, I'd mistaken it for a gazelle.
Everywhere you looked you saw the persistence and resilience of life but death was an ordinary caller who everyone squeezed over for without flinching.
I never got used to that. Back home we write books about heroic struggles to hold him off, contests you can win if you have enough heart. But here, most of the kids you lose, life just leaks out of them.
Fazila went that way. Not a shadow on her, when we sat, all of us, eating parathas and drinking our chai in the dawn coolness, but she was dead by the time Hamid and Beidi and I came back from a round of holiday visiting. The body'd already been washed and wrapped and taken away, only the hollow-eyed parents left to mark the empty place. Not likely they'd fill it again—six years married and only the one child.
I don't know why I still remember Fazila. Knew her two or three days, almost forty years ago. She hadn't been endearing—a tough little number, without charm. Maybe she'd just seemed too alive to die.
I can feel the others' presences and taste the chai. You are a magician.