(You can read Chapter 1 here.)
Pahlawan Khan, originally from Multan, had gotten into the lac business based in Bengal and was starting to make a fortune. He moved his family to Kulachi, built a big cement house with an ingenious system of pipes and flues to heat the bathroom floor in winter.
He was a huge hearty man with a tiny bright blackbird of a wife who had the mind of a general. He was away six months at a time and she ran the household like an army garrison expecting siege at any moment. Always kept a year’s worth of flour, sugar, oil, pickles; nothing ever ran out before Pahlawan Khan came home.
He was three months’ late once, having been jailed in Calcutta at the instigation of a business rival, and got back to find his wife feeding the poor as usual.
When he arrived home one day and announced the lac business was finished because some damned Angrez had invented synthetic varnish, his wife showed him the safe bolted to the storeroom floor and handed him the key and he learned she’d been saving whatever’d been left over from the monthly household expenses and turning it into gold bars.
Pahlawan Khan had seen the world and enjoyed it, and now he settled down and opened a cloth shop with two of his sons; it was time to start enjoying the grandchildren his sons were giving him.
It was necessary, thought Gul Khan, it was necessary that his brothers be married. The house in Sukkur, who would end up in that house? God forbid the boys marry Sindhi women.
Pahlawan Khan’s daughters were like young lionesses now, said all the old women here. Their father wouldn’t let the little one go yet, but her sisters Shamim and Asya—what are you waiting for?
Hanif’s house was built to Pahlawan Khan's own standards: two-storied, with marble chip floors cool beneath the feet even in the worst of summer. Latif’s was nothing compared to it, but it was right next door, and he worked for his brother, he would be fine, the girls would be as good as living together.
Gul Khan sent his emissaries and Pahlawan Khan was satisfied; the boys were respectable, they were hardworking, they’d done well for themselves; make the first two marriages and Ghalib could take his bride later.
***
Then the floods hit—water rushing down from the hills and the terrible great roiling disaster of politics—people drowning and suffocating and some of them burned alive or hacked to pieces by their neighbors.
In a long overnight, the city fell in on itself and awakened unrecognizable. People left, left, kept leaving.
Some wrung themselves out and followed the course of the Indus to Dera and Multan and Sukkur and finally to Karachi where it flowed into the sea.
Others were forced across the plains to Amritsar and Delhi and down to Bombay.
Gul Khan’s chests and cupboards, filled with the words that linked him to the universe—words that clothed the nakedness of existence—had to be dug out from an avalanche of mud. Fatima delved for every scrap of paper, scraped and cleaned and smoothed it and laid it in the sun under mulmul dupattas, pressed it flat again under dishes and pots and teacups.
But Gul Khan learned from this that the words revealed to him in the secret fastnesses of many nights and years, that he had faithfully transcribed and patiently safeguarded, were not meant to be disclosed to this generation of dunderheads.
His brothers learned every disaster makes money for someone.
The walled city of Kulachi—planned and laid out and built according to the desire of a clear-eyed king but suddenly bereft of industry, will, intent and pride—was within five years nothing more than a village dumped carelessly in the center of a hot, dry, dusty, soul-scorching land and now known only for the glory of its watermelons.
***
Gul Khan, increasingly pierced by a feeling of otherness, felt time galloping away from him. His anger rose up and overflowed but gave him no relief.
He looked at his students sweating over their wooden slates and shouted at them for their incomprehension. He argued with his neighbors and his tenants over property lines and water rights and the dates that rents were due. In the afternoons, when most people were sleeping, he sat on an old wooden bench set up in the middle of one of his fields, caressing a shotgun and waiting for the trespassers whom he knew hid in the wheat like jackals. He could smell the stink of them, these kaminay who hadn't the balls to face him man to man.
Hanif came for a visit and urged Gul Khan to sell whatever land could be disposed of and move to Dera, forty miles west on the banks of the river. People were snapping up good-sized parcels, it was the time to make a move—
Shouting, shaking with rage as though his brother had told him to prostitute his wife and sell his children, Gul Khan threw Hanif out of the house.
Well, Hanif was too big now to throw anywhere. He topped the rest of the brothers by a good four inches and they were all fine men. Just entering his thirties, he’d grown into the heft of an elder.
It was a strange emotion Hanif felt as he left the house, laying his hand for a moment on Fatima’s covered head as a father might. He would no longer consult with Gul Khan about anything, he was no longer bound by his judgment. He made his way home, across the river by ferry and then downcountry by rail to Sukkur.
***
Gul Khan shriveled and sank beneath the uncontainable fury that poured out of him. In the end he refused everything, even the tea that Fatima held patiently to his mouth, taking a new cup from the cupboard to replace each one he smashed. She said nothing when he died, nothing when the women came to console her while the men carried him to the graveyard.
Hanif and Latif couldn’t get there in time for the burial, only Ghalib stood by Shahrukh’s side, but they and their wives stayed a week after.
Fatima simply stopped eating as though someone had turned off a switch. She stopped nursing the baby, there was nothing for him. She cooked meals for Ghalib and the children and washed the clothes, she did all her work until one day she seemed to tip over in slow motion.
The little girl who came every day to help cut vegetables and wash dishes ran to get help while Rani, trembling with terror, bathed her mother’s face and hands with cold water, and by the time Shahrukh was called out of school and sprinted home, Fatima was sunk deep in another world.
Ghalib sent telegrams and his brothers hurried back to Kulachi in time to carry Fatima to the graveyard.