Turquoise Read online

  Aamer Hussein

  TURQUOISE

  Saqi Books

  Contents

  1. Cactus Town

  2. Electric Shadows

  3. What Do You Call Those Birds?

  4. The City of Longing

  5. Adiba: A Storyteller’s Tale

  6. Turquoise

  7. The Needlewoman’s Calendar

  Acknowledgements

  Cactus Town

  He brought me white roses,

  White muscat roses,

  And asked me gently: May I

  Sit with you on the rock?

  Anna Akhmatova

  1

  He fell in love with Nuria when he saw her walking on fire. Live coals had been laid out on parched summer grass and she walked over them faster than the other virgins. He wasn’t supposed to be there but he was watching from his place behind an almond tree. She crossed the burning ember field and fainted.

  Sakina was thirsty. Abbas went out to look for water and they riddled him with arrows. Kasim the bridegroom was shot down on his wedding night. Hussein’s horse returned sand-matted and blood-soaked without his master.

  All day long the desert wind blows. Birds fall to the ground. On the tenth night of Muharram blood streaks the sky. He weeps for them all and his eyes are red but he never wept as bitterly as he did for Nuria.

  2

  Aunty Mehri tried to grow all kinds of flowers in her garden. Hydrangea, hibiscus, black rose. But everything withered there. Only wild flowers kept blooming and cactus thrived. It’s the desert, she said. The salt and the sandy wind kill plants in this town. But in Chand’s garden, you could see blossoms of every colour, finely trimmed hedges, fruit trees heavy with green mangoes and papayas.

  Aunty Mehri – Begum Meher Taj Shah – was Nuria’s aunt, not really ours. She was the widow of our great-uncle, who’d been killed by the Japs in Malaya in 1944 when she was thirty-two. We knew him as the Picture on the Wall. On holidays, her family visited his tomb with flowers and incense as if he were a saint. She had three children: her daughter was with her husband in our embassy in China, her son Tahir had a house across the the lane from us, and her youngest son Mahir, the light of her eyes, was studying in England: he only came home in summer. Mehri lived in a turreted mansion her husband had built in the thirties, in the old part of town by the sea. We called it Cactus Town. A lover came to visit her now and then, from Rawalpindi where he kept his wife.

  Mehri was tall and pale with lacquered short dark hair. She dressed in black chiffon at night and in white lace with matching gloves and scarves in daylight. Every few weeks she swooped across town to visit us; we knew she wanted Tahir’s wife to see her arrive. Ten years ago she’d looked for a bride for her son among the daughters of her own patrician family in Hyderabad Deccan, but she settled instead on her husband’s niece, seventeen-year-old Nazar Zahra, and changed her name to Chand because her face was bright as the moon. Mehri had hoped that Chand’s big dowry would be the making of Tahir. But Chand’s great misfortune was that she’d married a man who loved good whisky more than he loved his marriage bed. The docile girl turned into a lazy woman. Much to her mother-in-law’s chagrin, she’d rise at midday and play mahjong all afternoon. In the evenings you could see her walking alone in her garden, up and down and up again, prayer beads in her hand, waiting for her husband to come home, but he never came home until after midnight, when we’d wake up from our dreams and hear the powerful engine of his car roar up our lane and the black iron gates shut behind him.

  3

  On Sundays we play by the lakes. There are two lakes, one blue, one green. They call the green one the Maneater: it claims a few people each year. They say ill-starred lovers and ill-treated wives go there to give it their lives. We play by the blue one, or get in ear-deep though we’re not allowed to; we’re not afraid of typhoid or diphtheria.

  My name is Kamran. I’m nine. I have grey eyes and very dark skin. Nuria comes here with her cousin’s children, Mahnur, who’s my age, and Mehriyar who’s eight; they’re my cousins too. Sometimes Abbas, Chand’s brother, who’s thirteen, brings them to play. Nuria is eleven. She sits on the grassy bank, braids flowers into garlands, and sings:

  I’m off to chase shadows of echoes

  in the country where butterflies sing

  – Snaggletooth, raggyhair, snotpicker, stinkbomb, elephantfoot, who’s going to marry you, Nuria?

  – I’ll marry Nuria.

  – Hey, dress up the bridegroom, here comes his elephant, dress him in gold.

  They rub dust in my face. And in Nuria’s hair. They push Nuria into water. I follow. Pebbles, like marble, washed sky-smooth beneath our feet.

  4

  Meher Taj had once had a brother. Everyone thought Alezamin was dead. But truth to tell he’d simply disappeared. He’d left behind a wife and a son and a daughter. His grass widow was a hapless thin creature with straw-coloured hair and staring great eyes. We heard she’d been a Hindu whose family had deserted her when they went over the border. Aunty Mehri, who was working then with destitute women as she now worked with unwanted children, had found her in a camp and, when she said she had nowhere to go, had taken her home as a kind of superior servant because she seemed educated. She renamed her Sadia. Alezamin, who’d recently arrived from Hyderabad, had seen her at Mehri’s and immediately fallen in love. He’d married her against Mehri’s wishes.

  Many years later, soon after he disappeared one night, Sadia came to Mehri’s door for help: she said she’d found work in an airline office, and she’d sent her son to a boys school as a weekly boarder, but she wanted someone to take in her daughter. She couldn’t make enough to feed herself and two.

  No one could understand why Aunty Mehri refused to take in the child. She lived alone and could have done with a little girl’s company. No one could understand, either, why after refusing to help Sadia, she told her – almost as an afterthought – to visit Chand. Because Mehri and Chand had cordially detested each other since mother-in-law had forced daughter-in-law to abort her third child which was, she claimed, the result of Chand’s wanton interlude with a passing lover. And Chand had pleaded with Tahir to take her away from his mother’s kingdom; they’d live in the house she had built on the other side of town.

  Chand took in Sadia’s daughter, and brought her up with her own children Mahnur and Mehriyar. The girl stayed in the shadows, helped with minor chores, and went to a charity school down the road where she was taught to sew, cook and keep accounts in beautiful handwriting.

  And when she came home, the luminous name her father had given her, Nurafshan, Light-sprinkler, had somehow become Nuria.

  5

  – Can you really hear the butterflies singing, Nuria?

  – Sometimes.

  – How far can you follow an echo, Nuria?

  – As far as your breath takes you.

  – Will you marry me when we’re big?

  – Silly boy. Wait and see.

  – Please?

  – If you want me to I will.

  6

  At the seashore. Nuria sits on moist whitish sand with her toes in water and watches the spray rise. She listens to the sea singing. She thinks it brings her messages, written in foam on the waves. The sea tells her a bridegroom will come for her, his face covered in flowers. Gold so heavy on her body she’ll faint. Her feet bathed in milk. The Five Blessed Ones will bless her wedding. She’ll wake every morning in a bed of silver.

  I bring her translucent shells, dead starfish, and a conch which, when she puts it to her ear in her bed at night, will sing her the sea’s songs.

  Far away, etched against the grey horizon, there’s a single red, blue and yellow sail.

  Aunt Chand has a fat Iraqi friend named Farkhanda who can
tell fortunes from tea leaves and coffee grounds. There’s no sun today, but May is so hot that even the sea’s on the boil and we’re close to wishing we weren’t here. The ladies lie on deck chairs, smoking menthol cigarettes, mugs of coffee sweetened with condensed milk beside them. Farkhanda calls to Nuria, who’s lost in her dreams of what the sea will bring her:

  – Come, child, let me tell you who you’ll marry.

  And Chand, in imitation of her children, says:

  – Who’ll marry Nuria, she’s so plain...

  – Plain? She’s stunning, Farkhanda says, looking at tall Nuria’s fifteen years. Come and sit down here and give me your hand. Yes, I see a tall dark man, with a gun in his hand, who fights to save his land, a brave soldier...

  – Don’t put silly ideas in the child’s head, Chand says.

  But then... I can tell you what happens, I am watching, just surfacing from the waves:

  A great big car with windows curtained in black drove up to our hut. The tall man who was driving leapt out to open a door. Aunty Mehri emerged from a cocoon of lemon-scented airconditioning, immaculate and cool as always in lilac georgette. She took the youth’s arm and came up to us.

  – I didn’t know you’d be using our hut today, she said to her daughter-in-law. Her tone was faintly venomous, her smile lopsided. But Chand wasn’t listening. She’d stood up to fling her lovely white arms around the dark neck of her young brother-in-law, Mahir. He lifts her off the sands, swings her round, and then, as they laughingly disengage, I see Nuria’s face, her lips parted and trembling, her teeth shine, her lashes throw shadows on her cheek. She’s in a trance; she seems to be praying.

  7

  – Where can you hear a butterfly’s song, Nuria?

  – Silly boy. How can I tell?

  – How long is the shadow of an echo, Nuria?

  – As long as the nose on your idiot face.

  – So you won’t marry me, Nuria?

  – Didn’t you hear what Khala Farkhanda said? I’m going to marry a fighting man with a gun.

  – I’ll become a hero for your sake. I’ll get a gun.

  – Silly.

  – Give me back my starfish and my shells.

  8

  At seventeen Nuria, oiled braids hanging down her back and crushed dull cotton clothes, becomes voluptuous. She spends her spare hours reading bright-covered romances about girls called Naela and Romana; orphaned, or separated from their families at Partition, they cry a lot in corners for cousins who fight for their land and their nation.

  Mahir’s married now, to a girl from Ilford. He met her when he was on holiday, in her father’s pub where she worked. He brings her home to meet the family. Her name’s Brenda; it’s obvious their child will be what we call a seven-month baby. Mehri meets her with icy courtesy, but we’ve been briefed: kindness to Brenda amounts to letting down the side. If we do talk to her, we should make her feel like a Martian, a freak from a travelling carnival.

  Wrapped in a colourful cheap nylon sari she’s been given by Mehri, Cockney vowels and glottals contending valiantly with multisyllabic names, freckles riotous and skin reddening in the June desert sun, Brenda looks, poor girl, outlandish. We’re sure it won’t last; Mahir’s exploits in town, before he left, were legendary; he’d been sent away, in haste, after two beatings by friends whose girls he’d stolen, and a murder threat from a betrayed husband. We hear that Mehri has offered her the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if only she’ll run off to get it, back to Ilford, maybe, where Mehri implies Brenda can open her own nice pub with her takings. But Brenda is a barmaid with a pot of gold for a heart. She’d wanted to please her redoubtable mother-in-law when she first came here, but now she’s rolling up absent sleeves to fight for her hero.

  Soon Mahir and Brenda are far, far away from us, back in England; living, we hear, in Essex, from where, with his Cambridge education, Mahir commutes to his job as a chartered accountant in Leadenhall Street.

  9

  This season we’re all in love with love. We’ve put away our James Taylor and our Melanie records; we’re listening, instead, to Tahira Syed singing ‘Abhi to main jawan hun’, we’re reciting verses by Faiz. It’s our last year here before we leave for foreign universities; Mahnur will read philosophy at Cambridge, Mehriyar is going to the London School of Economics, and my father wants me to study law. As for Nuria, she’ll stay behind with Chand: she wants to be a dressmaker.

  The white moonflower, with its many petals, blooms from its cactus-like vine on our white wall and Mehri descends on the house to look at it. Hanging overhead, there’s a huge red moon like a lantern; it’s supposed to be so bright you can read by it. Nuria, in white like a Chughtai painting, comes to the garden with rose sherbet, rock candy and milky sweets on a silver tray decorated with frangipani; she’s in competition with the white flowers and the fiery moon. Mehri, who’s never yet had a smile or a blessing for her, is looking her over tonight like a buyer in a cattle market selecting a calf.

  Then, when the long fasting season has whittled down the moon to a sliver of silver, Chand’s brother Abbas comes over from his military academy, in time for the big Eid. He whistles film tunes and wears tight bright shirts with enormous collars and flared trousers that flap as he jumps off his motorbike. His hair is short, because he’s a soldier, but he’s hung up his uniform for now.

  One look at Nuria dressed up in Chand’s opulent castoffs, her brown hair and golden skin and wide hips, and longing soaks him in sweat. He’s pined for her since he saw her fainting after she walked on fire last Muharram.

  – She seems like a homeloving girl, Abbas says. I bet she can cook.

  – She’s a comfort to me, Chand responds. Another daughter. A bit moody sometimes. Yes, of course she can. Cook, I mean.

  – Is she spoken for? I wondered if...

  We’d thought Chand might act as Mehri does about her men, but no: she tells her brother to wait a year or two to be married – they’re both so young, he’s waiting for his commission, and in any case long engagements are appropriate But come back, she says, in a month or two, with a ring. Nuria, when asked for her consent, nods wordlessly, brown eyes fixed on hennaed toes. Abbas brings her a ruby ring. The more unkind among the neighbours say: When he looks at his young cousin Nuria, the sleeping tiger awakens in Tahir’s eye. And Chand is afraid of a rival.

  Nuria begins to prepare her trousseau. Quiet, dull as usual in company, she stitches sequins on scarves, brocade on hems, embroiders endless flower patterns on napkins and pillowcases. She says her prayers three times a day. Abbas is heir to a fortune; we tell her she’ll become a fat bejewelled landowner’s darling in two years.

  When Farkhanda comes to visit and asks if Abbas – so gentle and mild – is what Nuria really wants, the girl replies:

  –It’s Chand Bhabi’s wish. Since she’s always done so much for me, it’s probably God’s will. And you told me I’d marry a soldier.

  10

  – Where’s your soldier gone, O Nuria, where’s your soldier gone, far, far away...

  – Guess what I’m doing, Kami.

  – What, Nuria?

  – I’m listening to the butterflies singing. I think I heard the echo of a shadow. Want to come with me to look?

  – Where can you ever hear butterflies singing, Nuria? That’s kid’s stuff.

  11

  Nuria was to marry Abbas in November. But suddenly Aunty Meher Taj heard the call of blood and binding family ties.

  –My beloved brother’s daughter, after all, she said, waving her Sobranie. Only I can give her away as a bride. This is her home, I’m her closest surviving relative.

  Sadia, of course, she’d forgotten. But it did appear strange that the bride-to-be should be sleeping under the same roof as her fiance. So Chand, saying she didn’t want to burden poor Sadia who lived in the distant suburb of North Nazimabad which none of us had had the misfortune of visiting, reluctantly agreed. Nuria packed all her bags and was driven across town from
Hill Park to Clifton to live in her aunt’s seaside palace. We couldn’t imagine her, so far away from Chand, in distant Cactus Town.

  We didn’t see her again till the smaller Eid. Mahir had come home on holiday from Ilford without his unloved wife, biting the bit after three or four years of suburban bliss. Handsome as ever, hair in waves to his shoulders, purple velvet jacket thrown over his arm, he delighted us with stories of swinging London. He’d driven Nuria over, with Mehri, for our biannual lunch, an occasion for family rituals and reconciliations. Nuria was transformed. Gold-streaked hair, artfully loosened from its braid, framed a painted face. Her eyes and even her lashes were tinted with turquoise kohl to match the transparent turquoise chiffon that swathed her, leaving inches of glowing shoulder and midriff on view.

  – What have you done to yourself, Chand hissed. You look like a tart.

  And Mahir looked like a man entranced.

  Desire and youth have done what Mehri’s money and wiles couldn’t. There are, as usual, as many tales as there are heads to tell them. Everyone knows and the news travels down to our lane from the sea: handsome Mahir has given his heart to his beautiful cousin Nurafshan. They’re all over town, at hotels, at the swimming pool, in the countryside, at the beach. Shameless, some say. An orphan who only just got engaged to a soldier. So what if Mahir’s ten years older? say others. He’s still only twenty-eight. A whole life ahead of him. It’s only right, it’s the way it should always have been, he’s going to leave his cheap slut of a foreign wife and come home to settle down with his maternal uncle’s daughter.