Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

‘Ask for it, my duckling,’ said Hassan in the mornings, when she drank her tea sitting beside him, hunched together in the kitchen. ‘I need to fatten you up, I like them plump.’

‘Don’t talk that way, I come from a respectable family.’

‘Well, whatever kind of family, what should I stuff that rounded little belly with today?’

And he wobbled off to market on his bicycle with a big woven basket strapped on the back, riding so slowly that he could almost have walked there faster, pedaling with his knees pointed out.

But that had ended soon enough. Why are cooks always vicious? She knew that at lunchtime today she would go silently into the kitchen and begin making the chapattis, that Hassan would be standing at the stove, banging lids, ignoring her. She hadn’t done anything, she had told the slut sweepress who was always hanging around the kitchen to fuck off somewhere else, and he exploded. Hassan ruled the hot filthy kitchen. He made food both for the master’s table and for all the servants, more than a dozen of them. For days on end the servants’ food would be inedible — keeping with Hassan’s policy of collective punishment. Once, when the accounts manager had quite mildly commented on Hassan’s reckless padding of the bills, they had eaten nothing but watery lentils for more than a week, until the manager backed down. ‘Well, I’ve got to cut corners somewhere, ’ Hassan kept saying, shaking his grizzled head. Anyway, Saleema knew that he was through with her, would sweeten up and try to fuck her now and then, out of cruelty as much as anything else, to show he could — but the easy days were over, now she had no one to protect her. In this household a man who had served ten years counted as a new servant. Hassan had been there over fifty, Rafik, the master’s valet, the same. Even the nameless junior gardener had been there four or five. With less than a month’s service Saleema counted for nothing. Nor did she have patronage. She had been hired on approval, to serve the master’s eldest daughter, Begum Kamila, who lived in New York, and who that spring had come to stay with her father. Haughty and proud, Kamila allowed no intimacies.

Saleema next angled for one of the drivers — forlorn hope! — a large man with a drooping mustache who didn’t ever speak to her. The two drivers shared quarters, a room next to the cool dark garage where two aging Mercedes stood, rarely driven, because the old man rarely went out. Day and night the drivers kept up a revolving card game, with the blades from a nearby slum, the fast set. She would linger past the door of the room where they sprawled on a raft of beds. At night they sometimes drank beer, hiding the bottles on the floor.

As she walked past their room a second time on a breezy spring morning, one of the men in the room whistled.

‘Go to hell,’ she said.

That made it worse.

‘Give us some of that black mango. It’s a new variety!’

‘No, it’s smooth like ice cream, I swear to God my tongue is melting.’

‘You can wipe your dipstick after checking the oil!’

One of them pretended to be defending her. ‘How dare you say that!’

She went into the latrine, holding back her tears. She didn’t even have a place to herself for that, she shared the same toilet as the men. The dark room stank, there were cockroaches in the corners. She closed the wooden door of the stall behind her, pushed her face and arms against the flaking whitewashed wall, and began softly to cry.

‘What is it, girl?’

Someone must have been in the shower, next to the toilet. Usually she called before entering.

‘Who the hell is that?’

‘Stay in there, my clothes are on the wall. I’m just finished.’

She recognized the voice of Rafik, the valet.

‘You can go to hell too. I’m done with you fuckheads.’

‘That’s all right, quiet down, I’m just leaving.’ His thin arm reached to take the clothes hanging from a nail pounded into the wall behind the door. She heard him dress and go out, pulling the door shut gently.

She squatted in the dark, pulling down her shalvar and trying to pee. Nothing came. His voice had been gentle. Three bars of light filtered across the air above her head, alive with motes of dust, and this filled her with hope. The summer would be here in a month, the cold winter had passed. She loved the heat, thick night air, and the smell of water and dust, the cool shower spraying her breasts, water splashing on the furry walls in the dank room; and her body, coming out into the evening, drying her hair, head sideways, ear to her shoulder, combing its hanging length.

Rafik sat in the servants’ courtyard on one of the dirty white metal chairs, smoking a hookah, not looking at her as she sat down on a low wooden stool, almost at his knees.

He cupped the mouthpiece of the hookah with blunt weathered hands, a heavy agate ring on his index finger. She had never before looked closely at Rafik. He wore clean plain clothes, a woolen mountain vest — spoke with the curling phlegmy accent of the Salt Range, despite having served in Lahore for fifty years. Black shoes cracked where the toes bent, polished. He said the five daily prayers, the only servant who did. A week earlier he had dyed his hair red with henna, to keep him cool as summer came. Hair parted in the middle, looking almost martial but without any swagger; a small brush of mustache, thick ears of an aging man. He must be sixty, came into service as a boy, fifty years ago. He spent more time with the master than anyone else, woke the old man and put him to bed, brought him tea, massaged his feet, dressed him, brought him a single whiskey at night. All of Old Lahore knew Rafik, the barons, the landlords and magnates and politicians, the old dragons, the hostesses of forty years ago.

She let herself cry a few more tears — she could cry whenever she wanted, she thought of herself, alone, her husband on drugs, that dried-up stick who picked her out of the village, when she thought he was saving her. She was still a girl, not just then, but now too. She cried harder, wiping her eyes with the corner of her dupatta .

Rafik’s mouth worked, distorting his patient resigned face. He took a long pull on the hookah, the tobacco thick in the air.

They were alone, they could hear Hassan in the kitchen making lunch, pounding something. The drivers sat in their quarters playing cards, the gardeners tended their plants, the sweepers were in the house washing the toilets or the floors, or sweeping the leaves from the long tree-shaded drive at the front of the house.

‘I know what you all think,’ she began. ‘You think I’m a slut, you think I poison my husband. Because of him I’m alone, and you all do with me as you like. I’m trying to live here too, you know. I’m not a fool. I also come from somewhere.’ Her words poured out clearly, evenly, angrily, entirely unplanned.

He didn’t say anything, smoked, his heavy-lidded eyes half shut.

After a moment she got up to leave.

‘Stay a minute, girl. I’ll bring you tea.’

He shifted to get up, putting aside the bamboo stem of the hookah.

‘All right, Uncle. But let me bring it.’ His offering this meant so much to her.

Going boldly into the kitchen, she ladled tea into two chipped cups — the servants’ crockery — from a kettle that simmered on a back burner morning until night. Hassan ignored her.

She brought the cups and handed one to Rafik, hoping as she sat down on a bench that someone would come and see them together.

Touching the hot tea to her lips, she peered at him.

He poured tea into the saucer and blew the clotted cream away, then sipped. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ he said.

She wanted to stop it, because it seemed too soon after her tears, but a smile came over her, rising up. She beamed, her girlish yet knowing face lit and transformed.