Raheel’s mother Parveen was unmatched for stubbornness but eventually even she had to crumble before fate. Yes, she said—the words like a scorpion on her tongue—go find me a decent Mehsud girl for my son.
Her own sisters had cunningly given birth to their daughters too soon, or too late, to be promised in marriage to Raheel. Parveen couldn’t undo their timing.
They had well-formed sons themselves (besides those useless girls) and wept for her misfortune. Their sympathy smouldered like ashpiles in her heart.
Who else would accept the boy? Raheel was lovely—intelligent, sweet as milk—but his hunchback was hard to gloss over. The family hadn’t the wealth that makes such things invisible.
He was thirty-five, now, with a respectable job. That fine new bedroom built so hopefully onto the house sat quietly unused upstairs, a plastic-sheeted showroom no one visited.
Parveen gave up on all those beautiful wheat-colored girls in the matrimonial listings. Fifty thousand rupees will buy a snow-white, green-eyed angel.
***
Afsheen had the classic face of a king’s huntsman.
“She can throw him over her shoulder like a stack of firewood,” the aunts giggled, out of Parveen’s hearing.
The middleman had been blunt. Those lily-and-tuberose girls go to a higher-end market, he told Raheel’s uncles. “What’s your problem? She’ll breed like a rabbit—if your nephew can manage to shoot straight!” Raheel’s uncles smiled painfully.
Of course the wedding festivities ended a little sooner than custom usually demands. No banquet from the girl’s side here! Afsheen, adorned with just enough gold to keep Parveen’s head high, was silent under her shimmering red veil, cheating the guests of the accompaniment of a bride’s heart-rending sobs while everyone else dances.
***
She spoke a crunching Pushto dialect that strikes the ear like rockfall, but Afsheen had a little Urdu too; even up in the mountains the girls like to watch soap operas.
“Pretend you don’t like me,” she warned Raheel, as she got up to wash before making the morning chai, on their seventh dawn together.
Each night they lay staring into each other’s eyes, comprehending strange and unhoped-for things swirling into focus. She wasn’t stupid; he wasn’t cruel. She wasn’t mocking; he wasn’t monstrous with lust.
On the eighteenth night, he whispered, “Your eyes are like the ocean”—he’d been to Karachi once; and she whispered, “Your skin is like cinnamon.”
On the twenty-sixth night, he whispered, “You are my orchard.”
On the thirty-sixth night she unbound her hair, spreading it over both of them like a magic shawl, and whispered, “See? You are perfect now.”
Of course Parveen, swearing in a slurry of Derawali whenever she ran out of patience, had to train the girl up smartly. She, known for the richness of her gravies and her unmatched hand for pickles, with a daughter-in-law who came from a place where a handful of cut onions are thought sufficient relish for a meal!
Raheel had no guile in him but was learning to interpret every flicker of Afsheen’s eyelids. He barely acknowledged her when he returned home each afternoon; he kissed his mother and teased his sisters; he asked respectfully after his father’s day. He took his chai from Afsheen’s hand almost absently; Parveen had not yet suspected the flowering of such a profoundly traitorous love.
***
During the winter rains, the perpetual ache in Raheel’s back exploded into brutal pain. Parveen had always wept while massaging him, murmuring “my poor little boy, my poor boy;” she knotted black threads into charms against the evil eye that had blasted him while God was busy with other things.
Now Afsheen felt her way along the twisted pathways of tendon and bone under Raheel’s skin, puzzling out the topography of his suffering. She was used to hard work; Raheel would fall asleep beneath her hands before she began to tire.
Just once, when the deepening agony had become an electric monster and he a broken fish flailing in its jaws, he’d looked at Afsheen, his voice ragged, and asked why?
“God is Master,” she’d said, wiping his face with her dupatta. What more can anyone say?
***
“Where is a son for my son?” A year, and nothing. For what other purpose had Parveen endured this?
“God is Master,” said Afsheen, and Parveen slapped her.
By the time Raheel came home, Parveen was lying on her own bed, worn out with sobbing. Raheel’s sisters sat cross-legged, pressing their mother’s feet.
Afsheen, sitting in the kitchen on a little wooden chowki, pounded green chilies and coriander leaves into chutney to serve with the dal.
“Ammi,” said Raheel tenderly, “it’s not right for you to be unhappy in your own house.”
Parveen smiled tremulously through her hurt, gratefully pressing his hands against her sodden face.
“Tomorrow I’ll ask for a transfer to Lahore. You’ll have the kitchen to yourself again, you’ll have no one in your way.”
Parveen stared at him.
“I’ll get a housing allowance, of course; we’ll just be able to manage.”
That we was the most horrible word Parveen had ever heard. She started crying all over again.
The shouting lasted all evening. “Do you want to kill your mother?” Raheel’s father roared while Parveen lay moaning. His sisters shook in counterpoint.
Raheel didn’t argue. He and Afsheen ate, then he took her hand in front of all of them and led her to their bedroom.
He came back and sat patiently until his father ran out of noise, and then he bent awkwardly and started gathering up the dishes from the dastarkhan.
His father shouted for Raheel’s sisters. They saw Raheel contorted into a jalebi to do that women’s work, and began crying all over again.
Raheel’s father cleared his throat. “How will your wife manage, so far from us? It’s better that you stay.”
“We must all sacrifice,” said Raheel, “for Ammi’s peace of mind.”
“Well,” said his father, “let’s not be hasty. Women get emotional; nothing to up-end the world over. They’ll be laughing together in the morning. Talk no more of this.”
“Abba-ji,” said Raheel, “God is Master. But I’ll try to discover His will.”
_______________________________
An earlier version of this story first appeared in an editorially-curated online magazine.
More. More.
This is a very fine writing, I enjoyed it very much, thank you.