Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Look for the ghost trees, memsaab , the college chowkidar had told Noor, grinning from ear to ear, and indeed the road to Mohenjo-Daro was lined with them. Rows of acacia, jand, and Indian lilac stood shrouded in clouds the color of steel filigree. Noor pressed her nose to the window, watching the treetops blur and disappear in the half-breathing ether. The November dawn was clear and without a hint of fog, but the strange gray clouds stretched amebic limbs in either direction mile upon mile as if the Sind riverbank was haunted by a limitless phantom coiling around the foliage. When the school bus sped past one such tree, the wind rush pulsed the specter until it filled with sunrise. Branches red-dark emerged in glistening veins.

Locust swarms, insect hordes, cotton candy — Noor’s brain groped for an explanation. Sunlight twitched in one of the cocooned trees and the illusion of giant blood corpuscles recurred. Noor’s vision misted; her temple sizzled. For a moment she feared the onset of a cluster headache. The last was two months ago just after she’d joined the cadet college and it had disabled her for two days. Now was not the time.

She stretched her neck from side to side, and flinched when Junaid touched her shoulder. The headache flared. Angrily she turned toward him. His starched white collar jutted into his neck. The striped red tie with the cadet college crest — crossed scimitars underlaid by pine boughs, surrounded by a half moon — looked uncomfortable, but he was beaming, brown eyes sharp and arrogant. He jabbed a stubby finger past her face.

“Spiders,” he said and widened his thin lips.

“Don’t touch me again,” Noor said, voice cold as glass. When he continued to grin, she looked to the roadside. White crab spiders — hundreds of them dangling in the gossamer mass blooming from the trees. Gently they swayed in the wind, milky beads studding the latticework — which she now realized was webbing.

“Have you seen any flies or mosquitoes since you came, Miss Hamdani?” Junaid’s hand rose crablike to sprawl on the headrest in front of her. “The locals told me this happened after all that flooding last year. Thousands of spiders took refuge in the trees.”

Out of the corner of her eye she watched him finger a strip of leather peeling off the seat. His nails were perfectly manicured. He tore off the strip, drew it into his mouth, and spoke around it, “Everyone was worried about malaria outbreaks. Guess the ghost trees took care of that,” and when Noor didn’t respond, “What? Don’t tell me you’re still angry.”

“I’m not,” she said sharply.

“Come now. It’s Eid. Let’s be festive and forgiving.” He was sitting next to her in a row three seats wide and his breath stirred the edge of her hijab. She edged closer to the window. He smiled and began to chew the leather strip. “Kids are watching. Have to be model teachers now, don’t we?”

Good point, asshole, she thought and closed her eyes. Another reason, other than his over-inflated ego, she’d spurned his advances since her arrival. Then again, this display of dickhood wasn’t limited to him. Many of the faculty — all male except for a quiet burkah-clad parttime lecturer, who disappeared as soon as her classes were over, and Tabinda who now sat left of Junaid in the third seat — took turns leering at her during morning assembly or talking down to her at lunch. Most were graduates of cadet colleges or military academies and had carried the attitude into their professional lives. That she taught English and not history or Islamiat hardened their stance for some reason.

Her students didn’t seem to care. Even though they were clearly not used to female teachers, her hijab gained her a bit of respect; something she’d seen frequently in this area. Part of the rural tradition, she supposed. Briefly she wondered how they would react if she whipped out Oxford jeans and long white shirts, her preferred dress back in her high school days in New Hampshire, instead of the plain shalwar kameez and dopatta she wore now.

She glanced at the boys. They’d set out raucous and excited at predawn, but the motion of the bus had lulled them and they were dozing in their seats. Twelve teenage cadets, heads back, eyes closed, athletic arms crossed over their chests or dangling off the armrest. Dara, the tall muscular kid with sharp green Pashtun eyes, was the only one awake and staring at her. She nodded to him. He raised his chin and looked away.

There’s another friend I made, Noor thought and covered the smile rising to her face with a hand.

About half past ten they entered Dokri. Junaid pointed out Cadet College Larkana to the boys as they passed it: a pink structure flanked by red brick wings and triangular arches opening onto the first- and second-floor classrooms. A cast iron gate blocked the driveway leading up to the school building.

“This is my alma mater. Hundreds of acres. Large grounds, lots of football and hockey fields,” Junaid announced. “We’ll stop here on the way back if you like.”

They left the town with its streets bustling with cloth merchants, laborers, and food vendors. Noor watched the last of the driver-hotels disappear in the distance and, as always when leaving a town, was filled with loneliness, an incomprehensible nostalgia she couldn’t displace no matter how hard she tried.

The feeling lasted until they stopped ten minutes later to fuel up at a small, peeling gas station, and the boys poured out to use the restroom and grab snacks from the mart. While Junaid and the bus driver chatted up the pump attendant, Noor slipped away. She stood behind a row of ghost cypresses and poplars along the riverbank and watched the smoke from her Marlboro Light spiral its way through the spider cocoon swaying above her. Dozens of insects hung dead or twitching in it. Hundreds of eyes glinted. If she reached out with her cigarette, could she set the whole thing ablaze?

“Quite a sight, isn’t it,” said a familiar voice.

Noor snuffed out the smoke on the bark of the nearest tree before turning. Tabinda leaned against a poplar, gazing thoughtfully at the water shining through gaps in the verdure.

“Cigarette?” Noor said. She’d never seen the professor smoke.

Tabinda smiled. She was a plump woman in her sixties with a bovine face and horn-rimmed glasses. Her teeth were rotten but her smile reached her eyes. “That shit you smoke? Nah.” She thrust a chubby hand at Noor as if offering to shake. “Look at my hand. Near the wrist. See where the two tendons join? It used to be easier to find when I was thinner, but can you see the dip in the skin?”

Noor looked at the concavity at the base of the woman’s thumb where it met the wrist. The skin was tinged orange, and paler compared to the dark brown surrounding it.

“That’s called the anatomical snuffbox.” Tabinda lowered her hand. “I used to snort real homegrown tobacco in my younger days, see? Place a pinch in there and snuff it right up. Quit about ten years ago when my doctor found a spot in my mouth. He took it out, biopsied it. Turned out it was pre-cancerous. And that was the end of that.” She nodded to herself and turned back to the river.

Noor watched the sun paint the woman’s cheek golden. They’d talked a few times before. Shared a few superficialities about families. Noor told her about her mother back in the U.S. and how long it had been since she had seen her; how difficult it was to live a translocated life. Tabinda told her about her marriage to a wife beater in Lahore and how she escaped by moving a thousand miles away to teach Pakistan Studies to this unruly military lot in Petaro. Commiserated about Noor’s transfer from Karachi to this “shit-hole town,” as she put it. She had a Punjabi accent and a nasal voice. Noor found it easy to like her; she was so jaded and sassy.