Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

‘His teeth are like yours. Plus you two think alike.’ She saw that Rafik really did think like the baby, he would sit all afternoon playing with it, engaged with it and seeing the world through its eyes, until it tired. When she opened her blouse to feed the baby, Rafik would look away, embarrassed, lighting his hookah as a distraction, while it smacked and sucked, its tiny throat moving.

Happy months passed, then a year, Saleema became more rounded, she was at the peak of her strange long-faced beauty. Her breasts were heavy with milk.

Rafik sat cross-legged on the lawn one morning, holding the baby. He heard the screen door leading from Harouni’s room open, and the master came out. Rafik quickly stood up.

‘ Salaam, sir.’

‘Hello Rafik.’ He was in a good mood. ‘Is this Saleema’s baby?’

The master touched the baby with the flat of his hand. The baby, which had been sleeping, smacked its lips. Rafik always dressed him too warmly, a knitted suit with feet, a floppy hat.

‘I must say, he’s the spitting image of you,’ Harouni said, teasingly.

Rafik’s face broke involuntarily into a broad smile. ‘What can I say, Hazoor, life takes strange turns. These are all Your Honor’s blessings.’

Harouni shouted with laughter. ‘There are some blessings that you shouldn’t attribute to me!’

The old retainer’s gentle face colored.

A letter arrived from Rafik’s wife. He kept it in his pocket all day, and that night showed it to Saleema. She literally began trembling, sat down on the bed with her head bowed.

‘Will you read it to me?’

‘All right.’ The village maulvi had taught Rafik to read as a boy, so that he could recite the Koran. He took his battered glasses from a case in his front pocket and began.

As-Salaam Uleikum.

I am writing to you because you have not been home in so many months more than eighteen months and your sons and also I miss you and speak of you at night. The old buffalo died but the younger one had two calves both female so we will have plenty of milk though for a short while we have none. Khalid asks to come to Lahore and find a job there you can find a job for him perhaps with God’s help. Your brother’s shop was robbed but they found no money and now he wants to buy two marlas of land so he will not have cash which is better. The land is on the other side of Afzal’s piece. Everything else is well. Please dear husband come home when Mian Sahib can spare you. We all send our respects.

As he read the salaam, Rafik had breathed, ‘Va leikum assalaam.’

She had signed the letter, written by a neighbor, with an X . ‘Look,’ said Rafik, ‘she wept on the paper.’

‘Or watered it. What will you do?’

‘I’ll have to go.’

She turned her face to the wall and held herself rigid when he touched her.

‘Have I done you some wrong?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve done you wrong.’

‘My wife is sixty years old, little girl. She and I have been together for almost fifty. She stood by me, she bore me two sons, she kept my house, my honor has always been perfectly safe in her hands.’

‘Honor.’Saleema began to cry. ‘That’s bad. You’re tiring of me and this situation. Imagine how it feels for me.’

He tried to reassure her, but she could tell that the letter had shaken him, as a man of principle. The baby and her love had made him gentler and more philosophical, taking a long view of life as he began to grow old — but the same gentleness would bend him toward his duty, which always would be to his wife and grown sons. He would punish himself and thus her for not loving his wife and for loving Saleema so much and so carnally.

She made him give her a phone number before he left, of a shop near his house, and every evening she wanted to use it, the paper burned in her pocket; but she never dared, what would she say, who would she say was calling? When he returned to Lahore he had changed. He had told his wife about little Allah Baksh.

A few days later, Rafik’s son and his wife came to stay in the Lahore house. Saleema was dusting the living room and happened to see them arrive, through a window looking out onto the drive in front. She heard the harsh puttering of a rickshaw, and then an old woman emerged, led by a young man with glistening hair and a strong manner. She knew immediately who this must be, her destruction come in this feeble guise. Panic overcame her, mixed with jealousy and a strange pride that came of knowing they had traveled with her in their minds, planning against her. She watched as they walked up the drive and through the passage to the servants’ area. Suddenly remembering her son, who was with Rafik, she raced through the house to the back. But she arrived too late, the old woman had come to the quarters and found Rafik playing with the baby. Saleema walked past the open door, pretending to be on some errand, expecting to hear shouting and tears. The old woman sitting on the bed looked up at Saleema with rheumy eyes that expressed neither reproach nor disliking but simply a flat dismissal. She knew who this young girl must be.

Rafik brought the child to Saleema’s quarters, where she had retreated.

‘At least this one belongs to me,’ she whispered.

The grown son, when he met Saleema later that afternoon in the servants’ sitting area, said to her, ‘ Salaam, Auntie.’

I’m younger than you, you country fool, she thought spitefully. She would much rather have been attacked, for then she could react.

That night she sat in the kitchen until midnight, the sleeping baby in her arms, watching the cockroaches scurry across the dirty floor. Finally going to her own room, she roughly pushed her husband over on the bed. He had become so thin that his face looked like a broken steel lantern, a gash of mouth and skin stretched over wires.

‘Don’t smoke,’ she ordered. ‘And don’t touch me, stay against the wall.’

‘I lost all that long ago.’ He knew why she had come back to his bed.

Lying and staring at the ceiling, nursing the baby when it woke, she felt her love for Rafik tearing at her breast, making her a stranger to herself, breaking her. Now she slept again next to this man who disgusted her, while her love must be sleeping beside his ancient wife, who had known him in his youth, who knew all about him. How she loved the baby, its tiny feet and hands, its contented smacking noises and warmth beside her.

The next day she hid in her room with the doors closed. When Rafik knocked she said, ‘Please, I beg you. You’ll only hurt me. Tell them I’m sick, and leave me alone.’

‘ Are you sick?’ he asked, concerned.

‘What do you think?’

She heard his measured footsteps walking away.

She thought, If just once he would act rashly or even quickly, suddenly, without thinking. But he wouldn’t. She remembered how slowly he had surrendered to her.

Three days passed. She and Rafik barely spoke, and when they passed each other she saw from his broken and haunted look that he missed her as she missed him. Yet also she saw how resolutely he had turned from her. Just once, when they were alone in the kitchen, at night, he reached over and touched her hand.

‘You know, don’t you …’ he said.

The well inside her stirred, all the sorrows of her life, the sweet thick fluid in that darkness, which always lay at the bottom of her thoughts, from which she pulled up the cool liquid and drank.

‘I know.’ And they knew that she forgave him.

Still she hoped. The wife sat in Rafik’s room all day, the door open, cross-legged on the bed, eyes not responding to passersby, heavy and settled — Saleema couldn’t help walking past on her way to the latrine.