1

Dinner was served at eight o’clock.

Bilqis Ara Begum, matriarch of the Khan family, cast a contented look around the table. Her brother and sister, her niece, her son and his new wife were all sitting there, waiting for her to say the benediction, the Bismillah: “Praise be to Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” She said it in a whisper, a furtive, almost bashful gesture of faith, and the family fell silent, concentrating on their meal. Bilqis had ordered her servants to cook a bhujia with spinach and potatoes, a kofta dish, kebabs, a chicken curry and another bhujia with okra. The kebabs were laid out on a white china platter in the center of the table. The rest of the food was served in beaten brass bowls to keep it warm.

The Khan family had gathered for the wedding reception of Bilqis’s son, Samad, who had recently married an Australian girl of European descent. The wedding itself had taken place in Melbourne, but the couple had flown to Karachi to give Samad’s family in Pakistan a chance to meet the bride. Mahbano, Bilqis’s sister, and her husband and daughter had fl own in from Lahore and Bilqis’s brother, Sikander, who had rooms at the Sind Club, had driven over in his old white Mercedes. It was March 1985, and spring was nearly at an end. The reception was in two days’ time.

Bilqis presided over the table with a sovereign but kindly air. She watched the guests as they ate, and coaxed and cajoled them if they resisted. The last rays of the sun, streaming in through the window, emphasized her Mughal features—the small mouth and chin of her aristocratic mother, and the high cheekbones, hooked nose and long, arched eyebrows of her father. She was a tall and elegant woman in her late sixties. She wore a white shalwar kameez, her hair was gray, swept back and held by pins. She had stopped dyeing it when her husband passed away. Her skin was fair and slightly freckled. The backs of her hands showed a web of veins. Her wrists were small, delicately fashioned, and her fingers long like those of an artist or a pianist. The way she held up her head, her straight back, her gestures, the way her stern face broke into a smile—all these expressions, at once light and graceful, and quite without affectation, hid successive generations of breeding. They were not so much acquired as inherited, and as much a part of her fiber as flesh and bone. But if they revealed the origins of her patrician forebears, they also concealed a conservative streak, a moral pride that the turbulent times had transformed into an inflexibility of manner, a disdain for change and a nostalgia for lost glory.

The enormous chandelier hanging over the table gave her dining room an imposing and rarefied air, but its light was dim and the old Empire furniture in the adjacent drawing room was already lost in the shadows, mute witness to the hunting scenes on an immense Persian carpet, where tigers and deer had come to life and were fleeing the arrows of a handsome archer, who galloped serenely on horse back across a meadow strewn with flowers. A narrow glass table was cluttered with family photographs in silver frames, which occasionally included a famous face, here a politician, there an author, all gone now, scattered to the winds. The shadows also camouflaged signs of decay. The once-springy carpet was balding in patches and there was dust inside the mahogany-and-glass cabinet that held captive a Dutch flower girl, missing her porcelain arm from when some servant, lost in a daydream, had let her slip out of her hands.

Bilqis turned to Zainab, her niece. Mahbano’s daughter was a cheerful young woman with sparkling eyes. She wore a black shalwar kameez of her own design, the lines of her dress long and flowing. The subdued colors drew out her fair skin, the thin waist highlighted her tall, slim figure. “You must eat, my dear,” Bilqis said in an affectionate tone reserved for indulging children. “Don’t misunderstand me, but you look a little anemic. What are you afraid of? I oversaw the cooking myself. Not that one should eat to excess, but you barely touched anything. What, do you mean to refuse me?”

Zainab relented but Bilqis gave the recalcitrant a final glance, a rejoinder and an acquittal. A fine girl, she was thinking, as she ladled out the chicken curry on her plate. Why had her son not married her? Such marriages strengthened families and kept them together. Their children would have been beautiful, the match perfect, mending bridges and settling scores. It was just one more of her dashed hopes, misplaced and improbable. Marrying cousins was no longer in fashion, Bilqis reflected. People would frown upon it. A first cousin was like a sister to Samad. The relation was too close, too familiar. And besides, it was too late.

Zainab’s nemesis sat next to her. The girl’s name was Kate. She had brown shoulder- length hair. She had painted her nails and wore lipstick, but her makeup was subtly done. If she had any blemishes, they were not visible. She looked older than Samad, although she was a few years younger. Western women always looked older than their age, Bilqis thought. She looked at the gentle swell of her chest, the line of her nose, the chin and the eyes and the distance between them—all these details were inspected for the hundredth time. She was outspoken and a little too confident, attributes that were not becoming in a daughter-in-law, but at least she was not presumptuous. She was genuine and courteous. She thanked the servants each time they brought her something. To please her mother-in-law, she wore bangles and had plaited her hair in a braid. Slim and attractive, she looked at everything with curiosity, like a child. Bilqis was quite taken by the girl’s charm, but her concerns had not been excised from doubt. From time to time, old prejudices emerged from the shadows. The girl was pretty, but there was something incongruous about this prettiness, as if she were a succubus in disguise. History was littered with tales of foreign sirens who had ruined good men. Had Cleopatra not rolled at Caesar’s feet, he might not have died on the stairs of his Senate. And were not the fires that raged in the Middle East lit when Delilah lay with Samson?

“I remember the last time I came, there was a badam sapling in your driveway,” Mahbano said to her sister. “It’s not there anymore. What happened to it?”

“It’s still there,” Bilqis said. “I had it replanted next to the plum tree, because it gets more sunlight there. You can see it from the drawing room.”

Kate listened to the conversation with relative ease. The family conversed in English for her sake. Sometimes they lapsed into Urdu, but there were so many English phrases thrown into their speech that she understood generally what was being said.

“What’s a badam tree?” she asked.

“An almond tree, if you like,” Bilqis said. “Almonds do not grow in Karachi, so badam is actually a misnomer. It’s a wild unnamed fruit that grows on that tree, like the green fruit that grows on my Virginia creepers along the side of the house. They look like grapes, but they aren’t grapes. You should never eat them.”

 “I love it when the blossoms come out,” Mahbano said.

“Would you like to take some seedlings back with you? There’s a nursery I know that’s not far away. I could arrange for the chauffeur to drive you there.”

“You make it sound all too easy.”

Bilqis allowed herself a pause, knowing that after hiring and dismissing a number of gardeners Mahbano had taken up the spade herself. Her sister’s hobbies never lasted long. “You’ll need manure,” she said.

Mahbano was eight years younger than her sister and looked more youthful than her age. She liked telling people that living in Lahore had kept her young. Lahore had everything going for it, charm, culture, architecture—white Mughal minarets, pink Edwardian façades and, once out of the city, orchards of orange trees and checkered fields of green and gold all the way along the Grand Trunk Road to the foothills of the Himalayas. The town of Murree, the old hill station of the Raj, was a day’s drive away. One could leave the seething plains in the morning and wake up to the sight of snow on faraway peaks the next. Where could one go in Karachi except to the beach, where the water was like mud?

“Young Chambeli performed at the Alliance Française last night,” Sikander remarked. “The whole of Karachi is rushing to see her. It is an open-air show under the stars. The mosquitoes suck you dry but everything is hush-hush and clandestine, which makes it exciting. I half expected the police to barge in at any moment and bust us. You should go before the mullahs put a ban on it. They will come around to it sooner or later.”

Bilqis wondered if he had a drink before dinner. She tried not to smile at his fondness for dance, and for whiskey, of which she disapproved. “I used to see the girl dance when she was a child,” she said. “Her mother was known to me, you know, but courtesans of those days were not what they are now. The fault does not lie with them. It lies with the times, of course. She is delicate and has the good taste and impeccable manners of her mother. She charmed you?”

“Well, at my age and with my vices, all daughters of Eve look charming. I was perfectly enchanted!” said Sikander good-humoredly. He was the middle sibling, a tall, straight- backed man with a thin mustache who retained a passing likeness to the graying Clark Gable. He was dressed in a white short- sleeved shirt and wore smart khaki trousers. A graduate of the Indian Military Academy, he had fought with the British Indian Army in Italy and Burma during the Second World War but resigned his commission after the Partition of India in 1947. A journalist of some repute, he had never capitalized on his looks or his fame. It was a matter of everlasting dismay for Bilqis that he had remained a bachelor, but he was a content and happy man. He played cards with his friends, drank a little and pounded away his regular columns for The Dawn on a typewriter. Marriage would have intruded on his habits.

“Well, there is something to look forward to,” Bilqis remarked, turning to her sister. “I haven’t seen her performance yet, but she learned kathak at her mother’s feet. She dances very well. You need an outing. I’ll take you if your husband doesn’t. We don’t want him to suffer for our sins now, do we?”

The sting in this last remark was meant for Shahid, her brotherin-law, who was late for dinner, as he had been offering his prayers in a room upstairs. A stout man, he now waddled across the room in his starched white shalwar kameez, with feet splayed and meaty arms rowing by his side as he took his seat between Sikander and Zainab.

“Did I hear someone mention me?” he asked, glancing around the table.

“My sister was suggesting that you might take me to a dance,”

Mahbano said.

 “Then I will, of course.”

“But do you approve of it?” Bilqis asked.

“If you approve, then how can I disapprove?”

“Oh father!” Zainab groaned.

“Now don’t be waylaid by these women, Shahid,” Sikander said. “If you go to hell for their sake then who’s going to plead for sinners like me?”

Bilqis watched Shahid plunge with zest into his plate of koftas. He rolled up his sleeves, murmured, “Bismillah,” and began eating with the proprietary air of someone who knows that his star is rising. It was widely known that in a few months he would become a member of the Provisional Assembly and in a few years he would be a minister in the straw parliament that the stone-faced newsreader on the state-run television station insisted on calling the National Assembly.

Bilqis did not doubt his piety, but she had to avert her eyes from his face, where there had materialized the characteristic callus that comes from the Muslim practice of prostrating the forehead onto the ground five times a day. A lifetime of prayers was usually required for the callus to appear, although in his case, it had already arrived in middle age. Not that there was anything untoward in its appearance. After all, didn’t the Irish nuns at Loreto House teach her long ago how the stigmata manifested themselves on the bodies of saints overnight? It seemed still quite a coincidence that beards, bruises and other hallmarks of piety were appearing among the populace at the same time as mullahs were rising to power.

Old resentments rose and clutched at Bilqis’s heart. Mahbano’s was a love marriage, something that Bilqis had always looked upon with disfavor. Shahid came from feudal Punjabi stock, with generations of farmers and village headsmen going back into the proverbial mist. His elders could neither read nor write. They used thumbprints as signatures and invented a family name because official forms required one. Bilqis had expected that the differences in class and upbringing would lead to a tumultuous marriage instead of the seemingly untroubled union that it was. Of course, one could never know for certain the truth that lay behind any marriage. Mahbano was not unhappy, which is not the same as being happy, but it is better than being downright miserable; and as for Shahid, well, the marriage had civilized him, admitted him into society and made him powerful. The sisters had made their peace long ago, but occasionally Bilqis could taste the crow she had eaten, and then she would remind herself that the matter was forgiven—forgiven, yes, but not quite forgotten, for Shahid had married outside his proper station, married a woman with a considerable dowry, in fact, and earned himself a place in society that no amount of money could ever buy.

“The kebabs are marvelous,” Shahid remarked, licking his fingers, and making a sign to his wife to pass him the white platter for another helping. “If I succumb to gluttony to night, then let it be known that the fault lies not with me. It lies with the hostess,” he added, glancing at Kate. He spoke bad English with confidence.

“But I did not cook them,” Bilqis replied.

“You have a superb cook then,” Shahid said, without missing a beat. “I cannot tell the difference.”

The process of gentrification, Bilqis could see, had begun. It was in its infancy, as he still had a boisterous manner suggestive of underlying coarseness, but all the same Bilqis did have regard for him as a result of all the favors he had done for her. He managed her affairs. He protected her from red tape. Whether she needed a new passport or a visa to travel overseas, he arranged everything without asking for anything in return, but each favor was a validation of his power, which corresponded to a decline of her own, and so she had to display a certain indifference. She made a show of punctiliously fussing over the fork and spoon that Mumtaz, the servant girl, had scattered carelessly around her plate, but she was pleased by the compliment. She had decided which dishes were to be prepared, tasted the food and mixed the spices, but Mumtaz had prepared the dinner and, for once, she had done it nicely.

The girl came into the room bringing a bowl of rice. Shahid said a few complimentary words to her in Urdu, nodding at the food with his chin. Mumtaz looked at Bilqis in acknowledgment, as if the compliment and gratitude belonged to her, and returned to the kitchen without saying anything. She was pretty, slender and dark. Her black hair was tied in two long braids.

“‘Delicious meal,’” Samad translated at Kate’s side. “‘Well done!’”

“That’s Hameeda’s girl, isn’t it?” Mahbano asked.

Bilqis nodded. “I have taught her. She cooks. Her sister sweeps before going to school and the mother does the washing. I’d be lost without them.”

“She used to be a plain little child. I almost did not recognize her.”

“She turned twenty last year. It won’t be long before her family marries her off.”

Kate wanted to ask if she would get to choose her husband, but she resisted the temptation. It was her first trip to Pakistan and everything was foreign. While she had heard Samad talking of servants, and she knew about the babysitters and cleaners who were still familiar and middle-class figures in Australia, or even the butlers and scullery maids of Victorian novels, she had never experienced a life where people did not have to wash clothes, cook meals or clean the house because their servants did everything for them, from the moment they awoke to when they went to bed. Kate glanced at the family as they continued eating, fascinated by this effortless exercise of class superiority.

“I am very cross with you, Shahid,” Bilqis said, glancing at Mahbano and then settling her eyes upon her brother-in-law. “If you like my food then why don’t you stay with me? I know that you come to Karachi on business, but you never tell me in advance. I only hear about it afterwards. What am I to make of that?”

“I am like a journeyman,” said Shahid between mouthfuls. “I don’t wish to bother you with my comings and goings.”

“There is no bother. Good heavens! I have servants, don’t I? Who do I keep all these empty bedrooms for?”

Bilqis could do worse than have him as an ally, and Shahid, who missed nothing, knew what she was thinking. He chuckled with the pleasant air of a man who has everything under control.

Conversation fell into its usual ruts. The men talked, as ever, about politics, bickering about how the country was changing for better or worse. Bilqis and Mahbano exchanged notes on certain common ailments for which their doctors, apparently, had given contradictory prescriptions.

“Get a second opinion,” Shahid said to his wife. “Go to Dr. Iqbal and see what he says.”

“What if the diagnosis is different again?”

“Then get a third opinion.”

“You’d hope that the majority is right,” Sikander muttered.

He offered Shahid a cigarette.

“I don’t smoke . . .” Shahid started to say, but accepted. He had kicked the habit long ago but the temptation of the occasional nicotine fix was still irresistible, especially if the cigarettes were an imported luxury brand. Blue smoke rose toward the ceiling. Conversation turned to the referendum of the previous year, when the military dictator had legitimized his martial law in the name of Islam.

“General Zia won’t go easily now,” Sikander said. “When he overthrew Bhutto he promised to hold elections in ninety days—do you remember? Ninety days. Eight years later, he is still kicking around. That’s tenacious, to say the least.”

Bilqis told them how she had gone to vote at the polling station at three o’clock in the afternoon. The booths were empty, and the polling staff were busily filling out the forms and stuffing them into the ballot boxes themselves, all with “Yes” votes. “How many forms would you like to fill out?” the polling officer asked her pleasantly as if it were the most normal thing to rig a referendum. She cast a “No” vote and her servants all did the same, but then, she belonged to the heretical minority who had always disliked religious types. When the Electoral Commission result was announced, the General received an incredible 97.7 percent “Yes” vote.

“I did not know that the angels voted too,” she said.

“You need not despair,” Sikander said. “Most people would have voted ‘No’ had they understood that they were being asked three questions disguised as one: do you want all laws in conformity with Islam? Do you endorse the Islamization started by General Zia?

Do you support the transfer of power to elected representatives of the people? Three separate questions, not linked in my mind; at best, the link is ambiguous. That’s what’s dishonest about this referendum. It was rigged in favor of a ‘Yes’ vote by the way the question was framed.”

Shahid smiled at him knowingly. “When have elections solved our problems?” he asked, flicking his cigarette ash into an ashtray.

“When have we had free and fair elections?” Bilqis rejoined.

“The only time we had a decent election was in 1970, and the Bengalis decamped with half of the country. The Pathans and Baluchis are waiting in line to get their piece next. Keep having free and fair elections and we won’t have anything left.”

There was a momentary silence. The atmosphere in the room changed.

“Democracy does not work for us,” Shahid said. “It works in countries where everyone is educated and secular and thinks alike, like Britain and Australia. It doesn’t work here because we are poor. Our people are illiterate. They can’t even tell their left from right. What are they going to do with democracy?”

“What’s the remedy then? Are we better served by despots?”

“We need to return to the fundamentals,” Shahid said. “The message of Islam has been corrupted over the centuries. There has not been a pure and just Islamic society since the early days of Islam. We have to bring that back. We don’t need alien influences. All we need to sustain ourselves are the Koran and the Sharia. Until we restore Sharia, we will not regain what is our due.”

“What’s ‘Sharia’?” Kate asked, who was listening with interest.

“It’s the Islamic law,” Shahid explained.

“What law do you follow now?”

“English law. Our penal code is a legacy of the colonial times.”

Sikander dried his neck with a handkerchief and lit another cigarette, this time without offering one to Shahid. “Fine words, brother, fine words, but no one has ever explained to me how Sharia will solve our problems. How will it fix corruption? How will it put food on the table? Will it invoke a fiery jinn to do our bidding?”

Shahid went on eating. “The jinn will be out of the bottle soon,” he said, “and once it’s out, it isn’t going back in. Don’t tell me then that I didn’t warn you.”

Bilqis allowed herself a rueful smile. The litany of national wounds was at once familiar and true, but inside out, it rang hollow, narrow-minded, paranoid and self-righteous. Truth had been transformed into a rallying cry by people in quest of power themselves. Bad times, she thought, feeling a certain dimming of strength and authority.

Her face became even darker as she glanced at Samad, her beloved and difficult son. Like most of his wealthy friends, he had gone abroad after high school to study at Western universities and, like them, he delayed his homecoming. His visits became less frequent, which had made it hard for Bilqis to find him a suitable bride. Then, a year ago, he wrote to her saying that he was engaged to Kate.

The letter was remarkably candid. Samad wanted her to understand that he had thought long and hard before making the decision. He loved Kate. He had no intention of breaking the relationship with her, but he wanted his mother’s blessings. He was afraid that by marrying a foreign woman he was burning his bridges to his homeland, but he did not want Bilqis to think that he would abandon her to a lonely fate. After these assurances came a passage where he suggested that she ought to move to Australia. He was going to arrange a residence permit for her. Once she had the necessary paperwork, she would always have the option to come and live with him. Of course, she did not have to decide anything just yet, but it was nice to have choices in life. The letter ended on this optimistic note.

Most well-to-do families sent their young men to good universities abroad with the expectation that they would pay attention to their studies. It was also assumed, in an unspoken sort of way, that they might sow their wild oats and do the things that young men must do before settling down. As long as they kept their peccadilloes in the West, no questions were asked. They returned home to sterling careers and arranged marriages and no one was the wiser. There were of course always a few stories of boys marrying foreigners, mostly Germans, for some inexplicable reason, and the occasional English or Scotswoman, but the practice was frowned upon because the fate of mixed marriages was considered grim. The fellows who settled overseas with their foreign wives were never heard of again. Few dared return home to live, afraid that their wives would not adjust in Pakistan and lead unhappy lives.

Tall and thin, with a brooding air, Samad acted as Kate’s translator, explaining nuances, and passed her food. He ate little himself and said even less. Bilqis saw him as she always had—a mere boy, who was using exile as an excuse for other failings. An expatriate’s envy for the success of friends left behind, a son’s guilt for leaving home and the accompanying resentment of thinking that he had not been exonerated from duty—all these fleeting emotions passed over his pale, handsome face as he sat at her table.

Bilqis reached for the fruit platter. There was a tremor in her hands that she tried to conceal. An abyss was opening in her heart. It was not just her son’s wedding that made her unhappy. It was a succession of events, all interconnected and related, a pattern of setbacks, rebuffs and hindrances, both within and without, that had formed the fixed idea in her mind that her illustrious family had run out of luck.