Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

One morning very early she heard the master’s bell ring, and then people rushing around. She rose and went to the kitchen.

Hassan told her as soon as she walked in, ‘The old man’s sick, they’re taking him to the hospital.’

The other servants milled around the kitchen, no one spoke. The household rested on Harouni’s shoulders, their livelihoods. Late that night he died. The daughters had come, Kamila from New York, her sister Sarwat from Karachi. Even Rehana, the estranged middle daughter, who lived in Paris and hadn’t returned to Pakistan in years, flew back. A pall fell over the house. Already the bond among the servants weakened.

Hassan disappeared to his quarters, his face fallen in.

The house was full of mourners, the governor came, ambassadors, retired generals. There was nothing to do, no food would be served.

Rafik sought her out. He came to her room, where she sat on the bed, contemplating the emptiness of her future. Even the child had become silent. When Rafik came in she stood up, and he leaned against her and sobbed.

She couldn’t understand what he said, except that he repeated how he had fastened the old man’s shirt the last evening in the hospital; but as he told the story he kept saying butters instead of buttons . He couldn’t finish the sentence, he repeated the first words over and over. Finally he became quiet, face streaked.

That was the last time ever that she held him. After a week Sarwat called all the servants into the living room. She sat wearing a sari, her face pinched and eyes ringed, arms hung with gold bracelets.

‘I’m going to explain what happens to you. Rafik and Hassan I’ve spoken to, as well as the old drivers. The ones who’ve been in service more than ten years will get fifty thousand rupees. The rest of you will get two thousand for each year of service. If you need recommendations I’ll supply them. You served my father well, I thank you. This house will be sold, but until it is you’ll receive your salaries and can stay in your quarters.’ She stood up, on the brink of tears, dignified. ‘Thank you, goodbye.’

Crushed, they all left. They had expected this, but somehow hoped the house would be kept. It must be worth a tremendous amount, with its gardens and location in the heart of Old British Lahore, where the great houses were gradually being demolished, to make way for ugly flats and townhouses. That all was passing, houses where carriages once had been kept, flags lowered at sunset to the lawns of British commissioners. Gone, and they the servants would never find another berth like this one, the gravity of the house, the gentleness of the master, the vast damp rooms, the slow lugubrious pace, the order within disorder.

She found Hassan in the kitchen, muted for once.

‘What’ll become of me?’ she asked. After all, something must come of his intimacy with her. She had slept with him, held him. The stark fact of her body shown to him, given to him, must be worth something. She wished for this, and knew that it wasn’t so. With Rafik it had been different, he had raised her up, but Hassan had degraded her. She saw her hopes receding. Again she became the stained creature who threw herself at Hassan, for the little things he gave her.

‘You came with nothing, you leave with nothing. You’ve been paid and fed for some time at least. You have decent clothes and a little slug of money.’

‘What of you and Rafik?’

‘We’re being put in the Islamabad house.’

‘And did Rafik say anything to the mistresses about me?’

‘Nothing,’ Hassan said cruelly. ‘Not a word.’ He put his hands on the counter and looked directly in her face. ‘It’s over. There never was any hope. I spent my life in this kitchen. Look at me, I’m old. Rafik’s old.’

So Rafik had renounced her. At the end of the month she had found another place, with some friends of Harouni, who took her because she came from this house.

Before leaving she said to Rafik one day, ‘Meet me tonight in the kitchen. You owe me that.’

She found him waiting for her, under a single bulb. He had aged, his face thin, shoulders bent. Worst of all, his eyes were frightened, as if he didn’t understand where he was. K. K. Harouni had been his life, his morning and night, his charge, his wealth.

‘What of the child?’ she asked. ‘Will you help him? When he’s grown will you find him a job?’

‘I’ll be gone long before that, dear girl.’

‘Say that once you loved me.’

‘Of course I did. I do. I loved you more.’

Within two years she was finished, began using rocket pills, which she once had so much despised, lost her job, went on to heroin, leaving her husband behind without a word. She knew all about that life from her husband and father.

The man who controlled the lucrative corner where she ended up begging took most of her earnings. This way she escaped prostitution. She cradled the little boy in her arms, holding him up to the windows of cars. Rafik sent money, a substantial amount, so long as she had an address. And then, soon enough, she died, and the boy begged in the streets, one of the sparrows of Lahore.

SEATED AT DINNER in Lahore one winter in the late 1970s, for the third time in a week Mr. K. K. Harouni was forced to endure a conversation about a Rolls-Royce coupe recently imported by one of the Waraiches, a family no one had heard of just five years before. The car had been specially modified in London and cost an absurd amount of money, and the mention of it inevitably led to a discussion of the new Pakistani industrialists who at that time were blazing into view. Like other members of the feudal landowning class, Harouni greeted the emergence of these people with condescension overlaying his envy. He had capital, as he observed expansively. Why shouldn’t he play along a bit, how difficult could it be? Toying with the idea in the following weeks, then deciding, Harouni resolved not to do things by halves. He began selling tracts of urban land and pouring more and more cash into factories, buying machinery from Germany, hiring engineers, holding meetings with bankers. Caught up in these projects, he spent increasingly less time at his family estate in the southern Punjab, relying instead upon his manager, the formidable Chaudrey Nabi Baksh Jaglani. Tall and stooped, wearing heavy square-rimmed glasses, his face marked with deep lines of self-control and resolution, Chaudrey Sahib grew paramount in Dunyapur, the place along the Indus where the Harouni farms lay.

Thus, Chaudrey Jaglani’s moment struck. The more money that Harouni sank into the factories, the more they seemed to decline in a bewildering confusion of debts and deficits, until finally his bankers advised him to fold. A few months after this catastrophic event, Harouni summoned Nabi Baksh Jaglani to his house in Lahore. When the manager went into the landlord’s study, a dark place with a famous ceiling painted by the great surrealist Sadequain, and incongruously adorned with Indian miniatures and temple bronzes of dancing girls and Hindu gods, he found the old man sitting with his steno. Jaglani remained standing.

‘Come on, Chaudrey Sahib,’ said his master. ‘After all these years you can sit down.’

They enacted this scene every time Jaglani came to Lahore. He complied, not quite sitting at the edge of his seat, as the steno Shah Sahib did, but keeping himself rigid.

‘How are things on the farm?’ asked the landlord.

‘The crops are good but the prices are bad.’

‘How are land prices?’

Jaglani had been expecting this and saw in a flash where it would take them. ‘Low, buyers get nothing from the lands, so they don’t pay much for them. The Khoslas sold four squares at sixteen hundred an acre.’ He failed to mention that this land stood far from the river, at the tail of an unreliable canal.