Gul Khan

Chapter 1

What if Gul Khan had never gone mad?

Bad—even terrible—things might still have happened, but death might have come more ordinarily to some of his descendants.  A beautiful child wouldn’t have become a thirteen-year-old bride.  Different families would have been started.  I might have been cheated of joy.

All the other parts of Fruits of Winter are about what I know, what I saw, what happened in my own life here.

This part is built from what other people knew and saw and remembered, all of it from a long time ago and ravaged by pain and anger and grief and small and big cruelties; it tells a true story.  But there’s no one left to swear to the accuracy of the details, so I’ve changed almost everyone’s else’s name, except for Gul Khan himself.

He was my husband’s grandfather, Baba’s father.

It was from all this that Baba and Ammi somehow forged themselves into monsters.  I don’t know why.

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When Gul Khan was born, somewhere on the other side of the river, Kulachi was a walled city trading between the Seraiki-speaking people from the fertile plains of the Punjab and the Pushto-speaking tribes marauding down from the stony hills of the border country.  The fortunes of local traders rivaled those in the merchant cities southward all along the Indus, and they built houses that let them surpass the old khans in prestige.

Gul Khan spoke a pure Pushto but found that the Kulachiwals didn't sell land to outsiders. But he had that confidence which is often mistaken for arrogance.  Arrogance is fueled by fear and Gul Khan was afraid of nothing.  He had some money, God knows from where, and he began purchasing liens on the land that he couldn't obtain outright.

He had a teaching certificate from Peshawar and now, working in the local high school, he educated the children of many of the farmers whose paper he held, perversely determined to make them smarter than their parents.

At night, kerosene lantern glowing like the moon at his left hand, he wrote lines, couplets, ghazals—in that beautiful Persianized Urdu that no one could actually speak, in the husky Pushto of the mountains, in the whining earthy Saraiki which the Sufi poets of the plains had elevated into music.  He wasn’t a man who sought friends; he found community in the thoughts of men dead three hundred years and would have scorned to walk among the people of this degraded age.

He knew he wasn’t like other men and he held himself apart; he kept to a standard he knew his three younger brothers—Latif, Hanif and Ghalib—weren’t capable of achieving.

He looked around, sharp, considering, a man who saw ahead into the mists that obscured the vision of others, and purchased the means of a transport business for the boys.  The couple of trucks, shuttling back and forth between Kulachi and Dera, forty miles away on the banks of the river, moving vegetables and chickens, sacks of flour and crates of mangoes, made a decent living, kept them busy and out of trouble.

The eldest of his beautiful daughters, the twelve-year old Zainab, wept softly as Gul Khan buried his first wife.  Despite this early grief, Zainab saw the least sorrow of any of her father's children; she would marry a man settled in Quetta, city of fruit trees and cold mountain water, and none of her children would ever live in where she’d been born.

Gul Khan's second wife was an insult to all of Kulachi.  She’d let someone violate her purity and plant the vile fruit which proved it, and had neither run away like the gutter cat she must have been, nor drunk lamp oil so as to die in the agony which could have been suitably mourned by her family.  She had merely sat sobbing in one of Gul Khan's fields as though nothing at all were the matter with her, and Gul Khan, with that preternatural, that appalling confidence of his, had taken her home and married her.

The baby at least, had had the grace to die.  But its mother, the shameless Fatima, would go ahead and give Gul Khan what was indisputably his own son, the incomparable Shahrukh who would alter everyone's life, and then Rani, Jehanara, and the plump, tender little last baby, Jamshed.

Zainab had the nerve to love all of them, instead of showing the real jealousy and spite that a proper Kulachiwal would have done.  Dreadful disappointment to the neighbors, it was just as well she ended up in Balochistan, among people who crunched consonants like bones.

***

Hanif sat up one morning, startled, as though a messenger had come to him in a dream, told his brothers he'd be in touch, and went out to Quetta, that cool mountain city that had just been smashed by the biggest earthquake in memory.

Anyone who could carry two nails at a time was making money.  You couldn't take a step and not tread on a contractor's toes.  Hanif, bringing in lumber and cement, soon sent for Latif and had him turning around the truck so fast that he never ate two meals in the same district on the same day. 

Within two months the truck had bred itself into a little fleet, running up to Sukkur and Multan and hurtling back to Quetta; and Hanif, big and friendly but no fool and rapidly finding his own metièr, had met a local man, a khan who wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty, and together they were making money so fast they felt like they were living in a speeded-up film at the cinema.

But an educated man was a rarity, a teacher was a blessing.  Schools were being lashed together and tossed up as fast as you pitch a powindah's tent, and still people were desperate; students needing to take their examinations would weep at the feet of a man like Gul Khan, with his beautiful clear hand and his mouth that never swallowed the endings of words.  Hanif played it up to Gul Khan, pleading with him to come over, concocting an inspiredly absurd tale of the neighboring schoolmaster's Baloch accent massacring the ghazals of Rumi.  Gul Khan's eyes glinted at that like an old bear being roused, and after a week of brooding he packed up his books and his wife and his first two children and let Latif fetch him.

Fatima, nobody's business in that city a universe away from Kulachi, dared in her silent way to be happy, a secret and aching happiness as Shahrukh played with his father's pens, making elegant marks on scraps of paper while the baby who would be Rani pushed with knees and elbows and stretched her mother's belly bigger day by day.  Fatima sat in the courtyard of the little rented house that Hanif's partner had found for them, in the shade of the loquat tree which stood all a-kilter but had not fallen down, while Zainab scrambled up and gathered the sour-sweet fruit that eased Fatima's heart like the waters of Zamzam.

The land was itching at Gul Khan, though, the land in Kulachi that was his and not his, tied up endlessly by the rules of shufa whereby anyone might challenge a sale to anyone else, and all this money they were making, it was useless if you didn't buy land with it, only land was real.

He might have sat still a little longer, but Hanif had gone ahead without asking, without consulting anyone, and purchased two plots of land in Sukkur, not far from the river, where there was talk of a whole new housing colony being planned.  Gul Khan thought about the khans of Kulachi, keeping their land as they kept their women, away from the defilement of strangers, and he took his son, the son who had his, Gul Khan's face, and took his wife, who had Rani pushing at her belly from inside, and took Zainab, and brought them all back home where little pieces of land were waiting to be bought out from under the noses of the khans. 

It had to be done, he told Fatima; a proposal had come for Zainab, and he would send his daughter only from the threshold of his own house.  The boy was working in Quetta, making money, but his family was from Kulachi and the wedding had to be done there.

Everyone comes to a wedding, whether they love you or hate you; no one can stand to be excluded.  The barbers—the traditional caste of caterers—come with their giant degs that will hold enough pullao for one hundred guests at a time, and giant karahis in which to cook mutton and chicken for multitudes.

Gul Khan invited the neighborhood, the men eating in the big tent set up in the street, and the women crowding into the courtyard of Gul Khan’s house.

The women of Kulachi, balancing plates of zarda, the sweet yellow rice of celebration, sneered at Fatima’s tears as she sat with the tall, slim, graceful bride who would leave in the morning for Balochistan.  Crying for the money he’s spent on his poor motherless girl, they hissed as Fatima, eyes swollen, smoothed the red duppatta, heavy with gold work, around Zainab’s face.  And everyone clucked scornfully as they twisted their hands in the dance.

In the cold before dawn, as the three proud uncles prepared the convoy that would take Zainab and her dowry to Quetta, Fatima kissed the bride's hands again and again, pressing each hennaed finger against her own cheeks until Hanif finally had to go in laughing and pull Zainab out.