Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

‘I walked down to the swimming pool, along the paths lit so beautifully with fires in metal pans, and I sat down in the shadows, on a bench placed under a little grove of chinar trees, beside the pool. People walked down toward the pool, but they kept veering off to the big lawn, where the famous Nizami Sahib was playing the sitar.’

Lily began to get up, to put another log on the fire. He took her arm, touching her with just the tips of his fingers.

‘Wait, I’m almost done. I sat there for perhaps half an hour, listening to the breeze in the pine trees. And then, a woman came down, but instead of going to the music she continued down to the pool. It was you, of course. You were wearing a long white tunic and a light blue shawl, your arms were bare, your hair was shorter then. You knelt down by the edge of the pool, do you remember? They had put candles in blocks of ice and floated them.’

And she said, ‘I didn’t see you, but I remember sitting there. I remember that I wanted to disappear into the water. I could see the moon reflected. Something had just happened, something bad, humiliating. I wanted to die, just for that moment.’

‘Don’t tell me what it was. Hear me out. You splashed the water so that the reflection of the moon broke up and then became whole again. You kept doing it, so much longer than I thought you would, looking so amazingly pretty, pale as you were, in the moonlight. Then some people came down, and I wondered if you would stay and talk to them, and I wanted so much that you shouldn’t. And quickly you stood up, so gracefully, and before they could see you, melting away like a wild animal, you disappeared, into the trees, away from the sound of the party. And after a moment I went home.’

Neither of them spoke, and then she said, ‘That’s the nicest story I’ve ever heard about myself.’

She drank more than he did, though neither drank very much, bringing the bottle and the ice bucket beside them on the floor. He told her about his farm, about the characters living there, the loneliness he felt, and also how he felt whole and committed only there. He told her about his vegetables, a new and expensive and difficult project.

At a pause in the conversation he sat back, stood up, and paced a few times back and forth across the room, smiling to himself. ‘There, I even told you about my greenhouses.’

She had become languid, sleepy. ‘You did, and I liked it. Usually men are so boring when they talk about business. I’d like to see your farm, you know. The only farms I’ve seen are the ones outside Lahore, where people give parties.’

‘Those don’t count. The people who own those lose money by the handful, and they don’t care. It’s disrespectful, of the land and the people who work it.’

‘Don’t be so serious.’ The call for prayer sounded from a nearby mosque.

Murad sat down again. ‘It’s almost morning, I should go.’

‘No, stay. Should we smoke a joint or something?’

‘I’m perfect the way I am. But I don’t want your parents to see my car.’

‘They’re in Lahore. It’s only the watchman and my old servant Fakiru. They’ve both seen it all, and they know enough to keep quiet.’

Looking into the fire for a long moment, he said, ‘I’m sleepy, but you’re right, I don’t want to leave.’

‘Why don’t you carry me upstairs and put me to bed in that case?’

He picked up a lighter and spun it on the floor. ‘No, let’s not do that now, let’s save it. Bring a cover and a pillow and we’ll sleep here by the fire.’

They lay down by the fire and held each other and finally slept. At midday when they woke, instead of asking the servant for lunch they drove out to Kausar Market and bought food for a picnic, eating it in her garden lying on a carpet the whole afternoon, with wine and cheese and all the good things.

Four months later, to the amazement of all concerned, they were married. When Lily announced her decision to her parents, they took the news almost silently, her father immediately giving his blessing. The illness of Murad’s father and the relatively recent death of his mother made it acceptable and even appropriate to have a small wedding, limited to family and just the essential friends. Her parents hadn’t imagined the day would come when they would marry her off, and they immediately liked and accepted Murad. They knew Murad’s family and were known to them, being of the same class.

Murad, on the other hand, had to pass through a raking broadside that his two formidable aunts delivered at tea one afternoon, poor Murad sitting alone on a sofa that at the moment seemed so large as to be a hallucination, and he the little boy sunk into it. His aunts, arrayed in wing chairs, one on each side, lobbed enormous, flaming, and unanswerable questions at him regarding his betrothed, quite openly stating that they believed her to be unstable and of poor reputation. They had been beauties, marrying well — and yet their lives had gone badly, just as his father’s had. One had been on morphine for a time in the 1960s, until finally she was dispatched to a discreet sanatorium outside Lausanne.

Their words gained no traction in Murad’s mind. He made a joke of the encounter, telling Lily the details. They both took strength from the perception that they were striking off into new territories, survivors, he from the wreck of his family, she from the superficialities of the life she had fallen into. His overwhelming mother, cut from the same pattern as his aunts, had destroyed his father by inches — that was one of their bywords, that they would achieve an infinitely better accord with each other. Another was that despite her past Lily at heart was a homebody, the efficient one, the one who took care of matters, of injuries. She had always been self-sufficient, as a girl kept a nurse’s kit and doctored the household servants when they were sick, and as a grown-up she had always taken care of herself financially, tending the exclusive little atelier she had set up in the basement of her parents’ house, with a single seamstress and an old tailor, making very expensive wedding clothes. That kept her grounded, and had always earned enough to keep her afloat, that and rent money from a few shops in Lahore that her grandfather had given her as a baby. She felt it important that she brought this to the relationship, not the money but the stance, and they both acknowledged an intention to join together protectively and go forth.

Before the engagement they had driven to Lahore to call on his father, through the Salt Range, off the Pothohar Plateau and down to the plains, across the rivers, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi. The father had entirely ceded his Islamabad house to Murad after his wife died, finding it too painful living in the bedroom where she had endured her last weeks and months, racked by cancer. He moved to Lahore, to a huge run-down house that had fallen to his lot at the time of the partition with his siblings. The size of the house impressed Lily as much as its dilapidation shocked her, the front lawn bare of grass, with servants’ children playing cricket in the center, quite at their ease.

The house had been built in the twenties, with many dark passages, musty fraying carpets, enormous ugly sofas and armchairs poked here and there, arranged quite irrationally, as if they had of their own volition waddled in from a furniture graveyard and huffed down and settled in for a long wait. Black dirt crusted the door, which scraped heavily against the floor, wheezing. The ancient valet greeted Murad with affection, one of the old school, corrupt, running the household for profit, taking a cut from the cook, the drivers, but nevertheless indulgently proud of his master’s ordered purposeless day, the master’s hand which had never turned to work, and his connections with the old Lahore aristocracy.