Nadeem Aslam - Season of the Rainbirds

Maulana Hafeez asked for silence. ‘It will be nothing like those months. The whole country is now blessed by the grace of God. The General is a God-fearing man and, as a result, for the first time in over a decade there is peace and prosperity.’

The statement was met with silence.

All day, Maulana Hafeez had been aware of a papiha’s singing; it was now somewhere just outside the mosque. ‘As for this town,’ he continued, ‘it is going to be safer than ever in a few months’ time. It will be fortified, like a castle, once the gates have gone up.’

‘Gates, Maulana-ji?’

Maulana Hafeez nodded earnestly. He had intended to include the news in his Friday sermon. Mujeeb Ali, he explained, had decided that every street in town was to have, at either end, huge cast-iron gates. The gates would be locked at night by the nightwatchman — still to be chosen — who would be responsible for the keys. Every household was expected to contribute something, although the bulk of the cost would be borne by the Alis.

‘The gates will be unlocked by the nightwatchman at the end of his rounds at dawn,’ Maulana Hafeez smiled contentedly. ‘It will be like living in the walled city of some Mogul emperor, at a time when Islam ruled the entire subcontinent — before the arrival of the degenerate British.’ And, with a grappling gesture, he tugged the folds of his robe to himself. A furious smile played in his eyes.

Mother promises she’ll buy me a whole rupee’s worth of falsé if the postman calls today. She is expecting a letter. I sit on the doorstep. The postmark is five wavy, river-like lines across the top of the envelope, overlapping the stamp. Father has gone away to find work in Saudi Arabia. Mother had to sell her bangles and her necklace and the five-fingered punjangala. If the postman likes a stamp he tears it off, and the letter arrives in an envelope which has one corner missing .

The flowers of ishq-é-péchan grow in clusters. Each flower has five petals at the end of a long hollow stalk. The thin stalk can be bent into a circle and inserted into the hole at the centre of the five petals. A wedding ring. Rings can be looped into each other to make a chain — a necklace for the bride or a garland for the bridegroom .

Nothing used to grow in the courtyard. Then Sujata told Mother to pour sheep’s blood on to the soil. The blood came in an aluminium bucket. In the bucket, and on the soil, the blood looked dark, almost black; but during its journey from the tilted bucket to the barren soil it was bright red — ruby-coloured. A bucketful was added every month. And now we have jasmine and seven-winged gul-é-lala in the courtyard. Birds come to eat the nectar. A young bird pecks at a dry seed concealed in the webbing of a mat .

Sujata and Mother grew up together. After Father left, Mother told her her dreams. She seemed to fall through a hole, and continued to fall for such a long time that, above her head, the rim of the hole disappeared … Nothing but darkness, and yet she still kept falling .

She stops by on her way back from the bazaar and tells Mother who she saw at the shops. She buys satin ribbons and dragonfly hair-clips for my hair. She makes two plaits — four-stranded! — and arranges one before the shoulder and the other behind. She paints my lips red and inserts a sprig of lilac into my hair, just above the nape of the neck. And then she plants a kiss on my forehead. A tiny silver snake holds her index finger in a fivefold embrace. Her fingernails look like rose petals .

Sujata’s bangles chime inside the room. Mother is laughing .

Mimosa encircles the window frame, the leaflets sparkling in the sunlight. The thin branches are held up by strings tied to drawing-pins pushed into the wall. Some strings have lost their colour — bleached away by the sun; others were recently put up, attached to the younger branches. Purple flowers peer into the room. Mimosa leaves react if you touch them; the leaves snap shut like a Japanese fan. I look through the glass into the room. The mimosa leaves contract at the touch of my skin, and light enters the room — a small blue clearing in the darkened room. Sujata’s mükaished stole is on the floor. Her arms are wrapped around Mother’s body; their lips touch each other. Behind them, on the shelf, the yellow rose swivels through an arc in its vase, almost as though it’s stretching and yawning. Father’s picture looks down into the room, one shoulder higher than the other .

The postman knocks on the door. Birds fly above the courtyard in curved paths like sagging marquee roofs. Singing, they cut the air into strips with their scissor beaks. I take the letter into the room. When you step out of the sun into the shade your forearms notice the cold before the rest of you. Sujata’s face is covered in flaky pink powder as though she had opened a large box and a thousand butterflies had rushed out, leaving rainbow dust on her skin. Mother reads the letter. Father says he’ll be home for Eid this year. He will bring a television. He tells Mother she is not to hit me, ever, ‘not even with a flower on a stem’. The night before he left, Mother says, he stayed awake and stroked my face and hair. Sujata is eating a hill-station apple, her fingers curved around the fruit like the little prongs that hold a ruby in a ring. Her brother-in-law also went away to work and has sent them a television and a camera. In the evening me, Lubna, Uzma, Aamar, Mitho, Sabahat and Farzana go to Sujata’s house to watch cartoons .

Slow and awkward, Yusuf Rao negotiated the puddles outside the barber shop. The rain had long ceased and a hot Wednesday was emerging — a Wednesday not much different from the previous one. Swollen drains drowned the edges of the street. The acrid grey water was still, except directly above the openings of the drains where the escaping jets caused great wrinkles. Inside the shop the barber sat sweltering in the heat — the electricity had been cut off sometime during the night and the fan was not working. He was practising the trick with the charged comb that had appeared in the children’s supplement last week.

‘Making your own electricity, Nabi?’ Yusuf Rao said as he climbed on to the platform.

The barber let drop the comb covered in tiny squares of paper and stood up. ‘Ah, a customer,’ he said good-humouredly. ‘Even if he is a lawyer.’

Yusuf Rao stepped squarely into the shop and commented on the heat before settling in the chair. The barber folded down the collar of Yusuf Rao’s shirt, tucking it into the shirt. Then he wrapped him in a white sheet. The sheet was cut like a woman’s dress pattern, or like a side of meat.

‘It is hot,’ he said over the click of the scissors. ‘It’s a time for sleeping out on the veranda. But we’ve been sleeping behind locked doors since last week.’

Yusuf Rao murmured a mild curse. ‘What a mess. And all because of some silly letters.’

The barber rebuked him gently for the bad language. ‘Isfahan Butt has sent his wife back to her parents, without the children. Apparently, it has something to do with those letters.’

Yusuf Rao forced his head up. ‘Apparently?’ he smiled. ‘According to whom?’

The barber pushed his head back down.

‘That’s how rumours start, Nabi.’ Yusuf Rao laughed into the folds of the wrap; he was sweating.

The barber went to the shelf to exchange the scissors. The new pair chirruped like a metal sparrow. Five minutes later the barber required Yusuf Rao to lift his head. ‘Are you asleep?’