‘It is a friend of Joshi's,’ Sufyan said mildly, and continued, turning to Chamcha, ‘Please forgive, – the unexpectedness et cet, isn't it? – Anyhow, may I present my Mrs.; – my Begum Sahiba, – Hind.’
‘What friend? How friend?’ the croucher cried. ‘Ya Allah, eyes aren't next to your nose?’
The passageway, – bare-board floor, torn floral paper on the walls, – was starting to fill up with sleepy residents. Prominent among whom were two teenage girls, one spike-haired, the other pony-tailed, and both relishing the opportunity to demonstrate their skills (learned from Jumpy) in the martial arts of karate and Wing Chun: Sufyan's daughters, Mishal (seventeen) and fifteen-year-old Anahita, leapt from their bedroom in fighting gear, Bruce Lee pajamas worn loosely over T-shirts bearing the image of the new Madonna; – caught sight of unhappy Saladin; – and shook their heads in wide-eyed delight.
‘Radical,’ said Mishal, approvingly. And her sister nodded assent: ‘Crucial. Fucking A.’ Her mother did not, however, reproach her for her language; Hind's mind was elsewhere, and she wailed louder than ever: ‘Look at this husband of mine. What sort of haji is this? Here is Shaitan himself walking in through our door, and I am made to offer him hot chicken yakhni, cooked by my own right hand.’
Useless, now, for Jumpy Joshi to plead with Hind for tolerance, to attempt explanations and demand solidarity. ‘If he's not the devil on earth,’ the heaving-chested lady pointed out unanswerably, ‘from where that plague-breath comes that he's breathing? From, maybe, the Perfumed Garden?’
‘Not Gulistan, but Bostan,’ said Chamcha, suddenly. ‘A I Flight 420.’ On hearing his voice, however, Hind squealed frightfully, and plunged past him, heading for the kitchen.
‘Mister,’ Mishal said to Saladin as her mother fled downstairs, ‘anyone who scares her that way has got to be seriously bad.’
‘Wicked,’ Anahita agreed. ‘Welcome aboard.’
This Hind, now so firmly entrenched in exclamatory mode, had once been – strangebuttrue! – the most blushing of brides, the soul of gentleness, the very incarnation of tolerant good humour. As the wife of the erudite schoolteacher of Dhaka, she had entered into her duties with a will, the perfect helpmeet, bringing her husband cardamom-scented tea when he stayed up late marking examination papers, ingratiating herself with the school principal at the termly Staff Families Outing, struggling with the novels of Bibhutibhushan Banerji and the metaphysics of Tagore in an attempt to be more worthy of a spouse who could quote effortlessly from Rig-Veda as well as Quran-Sharif, from the military accounts of Julius Caesar as well as the Revelations of St John the Divine. In those days she had admired his pluralistic openness of mind, and struggled, in her kitchen, towards a parallel eclecticism, learning to cook the dosas and uttapams of South India as well as the soft meatballs of Kashmir. Gradually her espousal of the cause of gastronomic pluralism grew into a grand passion, and while secularist Sufyan swallowed the multiple cultures of the subcontinent – ‘and let us not pretend that Western culture is not present; after these centuries, how could it not also be part of our heritage?’ – his wife cooked, and ate in increasing quantities, its food. As she devoured the highly spiced dishes of Hyderabad and the high-faluting yoghurt sauces of Lucknow her body began to alter, because all that food had to find a home somewhere, and she began to resemble the wide rolling land mass itself, the subcontinent without frontiers, because food passes across any boundary you care to mention.
Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, however, gained no weight: not a tola, not an ounce.
His refusal to fatten was the beginning of the trouble. When she reproached him – ‘You don't like my cooking? For whom I'm doing it all and blowing up like a balloon?’ – he answered, mildly, looking up at her (she was the taller of the two) over the top of half-rimmed specs: ‘Restraint is also part of our traditions, Begum. Eating two mouthfuls less than one's hunger: self-denial, the ascetic path.’ What a man: all the answers, but you couldn't get him to give you a decent fight.
Restraint was not for Hind. Maybe, if Sufyan had ever complained; if just once he'd said, I thought I was marrying one woman but these days you're big enough for two; if he'd ever given her the incentive! – then maybe she'd have desisted, why not, of course she would; so it was his fault, for having no aggression, what kind of a male was it who didn't know how to insult his fat lady wife? – In truth, it was entirely possible that Hind would have failed to control her eating binges even if Sufyan had come up with the required imprecations and entreaties; but, since he did not, she munched on, content to dump the whole blame for her figure on him.
As a matter of fact, once she had started blaming him for things, she found that there were a number of other matters she could hold against him; and found, too, her tongue, so that the schoolteacher's humble apartment resounded regularly to the kinds of tickings-off he was too much of a mouse to hand out to his pupils. Above all, he was berated for his excessively high principles, thanks to which, Hind told him, she knew he would never permit her to become a rich man's wife; – for what could one say about a man who, finding that his bank had inadvertently credited his salary to his account twice in the same month, promptly drew the institution's notice to the error and handed back the cash?; – what hope was there for a teacher who, when approached by the wealthiest of the schoolchildren's parents, flatly refused to contemplate accepting the usual remunerations in return for services rendered when marking the little fellows’ examination papers?
‘But all of that I could forgive,’ she would mutter darkly at him, leaving unspoken the rest of the sentence, which was if it hadn't been for your two real offences: your sexual, and political, crimes.
Ever since their marriage, the two of them had performed the sexual act infrequently, in total darkness, pin-drop silence and almost complete immobility. It would not have occurred to Hind to wiggle or wobble, and since Sufyan appeared to get through it all with an absolute minimum of motion, she took it – had always taken it – that the two of them were of the same mind on this matter, viz., that it was a dirty business, not to be discussed before or after, and not to be drawn attention to during, either. That the children took their time in coming she took as God's punishment for He only knew what misdeeds of her earlier life; that they both turned out to be girls she refused to blame on Allah, preferring, instead, to blame the weakling seed implanted in her by her unmanly spouse, an attitude she did not refrain from expressing, with great emphasis, and to the horror of the midwife, at the very moment of little Anahita's birth. ‘Another girl,’ she gasped in disgust. ‘Well, considering who made the baby, I should think myself lucky it's not a cockroach, or a mouse.’ After this second daughter she told Sufyan that enough was enough, and ordered him to move his bed into the hall. He accepted without any argument her refusal to have more children; but then she discovered that the lecher thought he could still, from time to time, enter her darkened room and enact that strange rite of silence and near-motionlessness to which she had only submitted in the name of reproduction. ‘What do you think,’ she shouted at him the first time he tried it, ‘I do this thing for fun?’
Once he had got it through his thick skull that she meant business, no more hanky-panky, no sir, she was a decent woman, not a lust-crazed libertine, he began to stay out late at night. It was during this period – she had thought, mistakenly, that he was visiting prostitutes – that he became involved with politics, and not just any old politics, either, oh no, Mister Brainbox had to go and join the devils themselves, the Communist Party, no less, so much for those principles of his; demons, that's what they were, worse by far than whores. It was because of this dabbling in the occult that she had to pack up her bags at such short notice and leave for England with two small babies in tow; because of this ideological witchcraft that she had had to endure all the privations and humiliations of the process of immigration; and on account of this diabolism of his that she was stuck forever in this England and would never see her village again. ‘England,’ she once said to him, ‘is your revenge upon me for preventing you from performing your obscene acts upon my body.’ He had not given an answer; and silence denotes assent.