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  Mumtaz said nothing, and Shabanu pressed her fiercely against her breast for a moment. Then they walked holding hands to the canal, which ran like an opal ribbon through the morning haze.

  chapter 2

  Rahim returned from Lahore during the day, and that evening Shabanu sat at her dressing table and watched in an ivory-framed mirror as Zenat took a heated rod from the fire. The old ayah arranged curls around Shabanu’s face to soften the strong line of her chin.

  Shabanu removed the silver cuff from her ankle and replaced it with a fine gold chain.

  Mumtaz sat quietly watching the ritual of her mother adorning herself for her father. Shabanu lifted strands of pearls and rubies from red velvet cushions and twisted them together, then held them up for Zenat to fasten at the back of her neck.

  “How do I look?” she asked, glancing from the mirror to Mumtaz’s face. Mumtaz stuck a finger into her mouth and ran to her mother.

  “Like Papa’s birds,” she whispered, and clasped her arms about her mother’s waist. She buried her face in the silken folds of Shabanu’s deep red sari, which hung from her knees heavily, weighted by embroidery of golden thread at the hem.

  “Come away, Mumtaz. You’ll mess your mother,” said Zenat, circling the child’s wrist with her clawlike fingers.

  “Oh, let her be,” said Shabanu. “God knows there’s little enough time for her to sit in my lap like a baby.” She hugged Mumtaz, who breathed in deeply, as if she wanted to keep her mother’s rich, dark perfume all to herself.

  Shabanu put the child to bed, telling her a story of the desert wind. The wind, she said, was a poet whom God had sent to live in the desert. His love dwelt among the stars. He could never reach her, and was doomed to spend eternity singing among the dunes.

  When Rahim’s servant rapped on the wooden door, Shabanu blew out the candle, kissed the smooth curve of her daughter’s cheek, and left her in the careful guardianship of Zenat.

  Rahim’s servant held a lantern aloft, and its light glittered in the mirrors of his black velvet waistcoat and gleamed from the starched fan at the front of his turban. Zenat lifted the wedding chadr on which Shabanu’s mother had embroidered desert flowers so perfect the individual stitches were invisible, and Shabanu bent her head like a bride as the ayah arranged it over her hair.

  Rahim was standing before the heavy wooden mantel of the fireplace in the grand front room of the old house when Shabanu entered. The electricity was off in the house, diverted to the pumps that carried water from the tube wells in the farthest fields, where the cotton was newly planted. Candles glowed from silver holders on the mantel, and crystal oil lamps beside the draped windows threw golden glints from the mirrored ceilings. The ancient mud walls were painted with fat melons and trellises bent with the weight of heavy-headed flowers.

  Rahim’s square shoulders belied his sixty years. Shabanu lifted her head and removed the chadr, letting it slip down over her shoulders, and Rahim watched her silently. The turbaned servant reappeared at the door with a silver tray and offered Shabanu a glass of apple juice.

  “Are you well?” Rahim asked, his voice rich and warm. Shabanu nodded. The incident with Leyla was not important enough to bother him with, especially not on his first night home. She saved the most serious of Amina’s and Leyla’s acts of malice for her argument that she must find a place away from Okurabad where she might live with Mumtaz one day, when Rahim was no longer there to care for them. He was forty-two years older than Shabanu, and she was truly afraid to be at the farm without him.

  “See!” she’d said to him two weeks before, when she’d presented him with the body of Mumtaz’s favorite puppy. She had found it with its neck wrung at the edge of the stable yard. “What will become of Mumtaz and me when you are no longer able to protect us?”

  As always when these things happened, an acceptable explanation was found for the puppy’s death. It was said that Mumtaz played with the pup in the stable, which was forbidden. Rahim and his brother Mahsood kept their stallions there. The least disturbance could cause a hormonal storm that might rage within the high-strung beasts for days.

  “You must keep the child under control,” Rahim had said to her. He dismissed her fears, and she’d had to let the matter drop.

  Rahim put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead gently.

  “My old soul is always better when I’ve laid eyes upon you, my love,” he said.

  The deep lines in his face softened as he smiled in the flickering light. His hair was gray as his silk shalwar kameez. A woolen Kashmiri vest fit flat over his middle, and his trousers billowed out from under the tunic before narrowing again above his soft polished shoes. He was straight and slim, but Shabanu thought he looked weary, and wondered what weighed so heavily on him.

  “Would you like to visit Zabo?” he asked, and Shabanu’s heart lifted.

  “When?”

  “I’m going to Mehrabpur tomorrow. I thought you and Mumtaz would like to come along.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said quickly, and lowered her eyes. Shabanu was afraid to show pleasure at the thought of seeing her one friend, for fear something would happen to prevent her going. It had been so long since Shabanu had been with anyone her own age with whom she could talk freely.

  Rahim lifted her chin and looked into her eyes.

  “I wish I could do more to make you happy,” he said. She did smile then, and his eyes lost their dark worried look for a moment.

  “It will make me very happy to see Zabo.”

  Rahim tapped her chin with his knuckle.

  “But I need your help,” he said. “I am going to ask Nazir for Zabo to marry Ahmed. Will you persuade her?”

  Shabanu thought at first that Rahim was mistaken; he couldn’t mean Ahmed!

  “But Ahmed is … not right!” said Shabanu.

  “He’s been to doctors in Lahore, and he can give her children,” Rahim said quietly, not looking at her.

  “But what if they’re like him?” Poor Zabo! She was lovely and fair as a spring day in Cholistan. Shabanu’s stomach tightened and her mouth felt dry.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Rahim said softly. “But she’ll be safe here with Ahmed. You and she can spend all your time together. You need someone to talk to and laugh with. You will persuade her?”

  “If Zabo marries Ahmed, she’ll never have anything to laugh about—ever again!” she said. “Must you?” She looked into Rahim’s face, but his eyes would not meet hers and finally she looked away.

  “I must find ways of forcing Nazir to cooperate after Leyla’s marriage to Omar,” he said, his voice taking on the formality he used as a shield against her. Nazir, Rahim’s youngest brother, was greedy and difficult. He was known for his huge appetites for food, drink, and women, and for cruel treatment of his wife and servants. And he was known for taking anything that caught his fancy.

  Nazir was jealous of Rahim and Mahsood, their middle brother. The marriage of Leyla to Mahsood’s son, Omar, would reunite the clan’s land for the first time in two centuries. And this no doubt had increased Nazir’s jealousy.

  “Nazir has tried to find a suitable match for Zabo since she was ten,” Shabanu said. “But no decent family wants a son, even a lowborn son, to marry Nazir’s daughter. And he’d never accept a son-in-law unless he had a large landholding.”

  Rahim remained silent. Among Pakistan’s landowning classes it was the custom for cousins to marry in order to keep land within the family. Marriages were never made without thought of expediency.

  “You can’t ask me to persuade my only friend to marry an idiot boy who would give her idiot children!” said Shabanu.

  “Zabo will marry anyone her father wants her to marry,” said Rahim.

  “You’ll have to deed thousands of acres to Ahmed to get Nazir’s agreement,” she said. “Do you trust your brother not to grab such a large piece of your land?”

  “Ahmed will listen to me,” Rahim replied. “He may be slow, but he kno
ws enough not to trust Nazir. He’s a good boy, Shabanu. Zabo would—”

  “Zabo would be miserable!” Shabanu’s eyes snapped.

  “His mother and I have decided,” Rahim said, and she knew there would be no more discussion.

  Shabanu suddenly saw clearly Amina’s hand in the arrangement. It was better to obscure such a cruel union as that of Ahmed and Zabo in the shadow of a major event like the wedding of Leyla and Omar.

  One day Omar would inherit the family’s largest landholding. His marriage to Leyla would be the marriage of the century. It would rejoin thousands of acres of ancestral land that had been divided and divided again by feuds that spanned every generation since the clan had settled in the Punjab. The future leadership of half a million clansmen depended on the sons Omar and Leyla would produce.

  No expense would be spared in the preparation. Nothing would be left undone. Talk of clothing, jewelry, the house where they would live, the ceremony, the food, the dowry—details heaped like grains of sand on a dune—occupied the entire household. Already there were wagers on the timing of the birth of the couple’s first son.

  Leyla also was Amina’s child, but the mother’s ambition for Ahmed, her only son, was fierce. Ahmed had little sense. He had a limited ability to learn some things—such as riding and caring for horses and hunting deer and birds in the desert—all things he loved to do. At other things, such as his formal lessons, he proved hopelessly inept. Ahmed was a good-natured boy, but there were times when his brain seemed to depart his body, and he would sit rocking by the day on a straight-backed chair, his eyes glazed, a thread of spittle attached to his chin, wetting his shirt.

  “I shall come with you and console her,” Shabanu announced, reaching for the bell to signal the servants to bring dinner.

  chapter 3

  The next morning they arose early. Shabanu had returned at midnight from Rahim’s bed in the big house to her room beside the stable. While the sun still lurked below the line of trees beyond the garden wall, she sat with Mumtaz between her knees, brushing the tangles from her daughter’s newly washed hair and thinking of the day she’d first met Zabo.

  Rahim had sent Zabo to help prepare Shabanu for her wedding. Both girls were barely thirteen. Shabanu had made her farewells to the desert; to the sapphire night sky that dazzled with more stars than anywhere on earth; to the shimmer of sunlight on the water in the toba where she’d spent her childhood; to the red dog-faced blossoms of the kharin that crunched peppery and sweet between her teeth; and finally to the camels, whose grace and courage had been the center of her happiness.

  Her father had let her ride Xhush Dil, their finest camel, out of the desert the day she’d left. Usually when Shabanu rode Xhush Dil she’d sing, and he’d lift his great leathery feet in rhythm to her husky voice. But there had been no singing that day. And Xhush Dil had walked quietly, as if to acknowledge the solemnity of the occasion.

  They’d seen Zabo coming along the track through the shimmery white edge of the desert in a pony-drawn cart more than a mile off. Rahim’s servant Ibne accompanied her, riding his white stallion ahead of the cart.

  “Uncle Rahim wants us to be friends,” Zabo had said after making her salaams to Shabanu’s mother and father. Shabanu hadn’t looked at her directly at first. She kept her eyes on the ground, as befitted a bride and suited her mood.

  But later, when they stopped for tea beneath a stand of trees in the green area near the irrigated land, Zabo spoke with great sympathy, and Shabanu began to listen.

  “It’s very difficult, I know,” Zabo said quietly. “I’ve known my aunts all my life, and I still feel uncomfortable with them. But you’ll get used to them and learn to go your own way.”

  Zabo sat staring at her fingers as she twisted the edge of her gray chadr around them.

  “I don’t mean to sound disloyal,” she said quickly, and her soft brown eyes searched Shabanu’s for understanding. “Uncle Rahim is very kind and fair.”

  Shabanu could see from Zabo’s eyes that she too was unhappy. She soon learned why. Zabo lived a prisoner’s life. Despite her beauty no one wanted a son to marry Nazir’s daughter, and Zabo was considered unmarriageable. Nazir was the least prosperous of the three brothers, and he guarded Zabo’s virtue as his greatest prospect for gaining more land.

  As the other women of Rahim’s household came to despise Shabanu, they also hated Zabo for being Nazir’s daughter. While both the girls were young and beautiful, they also were very different: Zabo was tall and slender, while Shabanu was small and compact; Zabo spoke Punjabi, the upper-class language of the area, and Shabanu spoke Seraiki, the poetic tongue of the desert. Perhaps what the others despised most of all was the unpretentious and open affection between the two girls—so rare a quality within the hothouse of intrigues that shaped the other relationships at Okurabad.

  Together Zabo, Shabanu, and her family reached the farm at the edge of the desert where her sister, Phulan, lived with her husband and his family. Phulan’s belly was swollen with her first son. Her beautiful sloping eyes radiated contentment.

  Zabo began by teaching Shabanu the Punjabi language and what she needed to know about the strange customs of the wedding—so formal and stiff in comparison to the joyous cacophony of family weddings in Cholistan.

  She made Shabanu wear shoes with heels on them. They laughed together as Shabanu tottered and finally fell headlong into the dust.

  “U-ma! You’re pulling too hard!” Shabanu jumped at Mumtaz’s cry and finished off the end of the plait with a piece of thread. Tears glistened in the corners of the child’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry, pigeon,” Shabanu said, smiling at her daughter. “Go tell Zenat to get your pretty blue shalwar kameez ready. We want to show Auntie Zabo how grown-up and pretty you are!”

  Mumtaz skipped off, trailing her tattered blanket behind her and happy to be finished with the ivory-handled hairbrush. Shabanu sat silent in the lantern light, turning the brush over between her brown fingers.

  The day she left Cholistan, Shabanu felt as if she’d entered an alien land inhabited by people like her sister, whose happiness was difficult to comprehend.

  “The secret is keeping your innermost beauty, the secrets of your soul, locked in your heart.” Shabanu could hear the words of Sharma, her wise aunt who lived with her daughter, Fatima, in the desert. “Trust yourself. Keep your inner reserves hidden.”

  At the time, Shabanu had thought she hadn’t any inner reserves to hide. But Sharma’s advice had guided Shabanu’s life. She tucked away each small happiness so that it glowed within her. And Sharma was right: Rahim was mesmerized by her mystery. He reached out to her in every way he knew, but he never quite touched her.

  “Uma! It’s time to go!” Mumtaz came clattering in her patent leather pumps, her toes turned slightly inward. She looked like a calf, her elbows and knees grown too large as the baby fat fell away.

  Shabanu handed Mumtaz her sewing basket, and Zenat carried a canvas bag sagging with thermoses of tea and water, hot fried bread, and roast chicken wrapped in a towel. They waited in the curtained backseat of the huge sedan. Mumtaz sat daintily on the white linen covers that crunched over leather seats, and ran her hands gently across the tan velvet curtains that shielded the windows.

  A crowd of Rahim’s constituents, humble people from the desert wearing turbans on their heads and lungis around their thin hips, stood in their bare feet inside the gate, although the sun was still below the horizon.

  The driver stood at attention beside the door of the European sedan, a gun strapped across his chest. He had been up for hours, checking and polishing the car. The secretary came after Rahim as he adjusted a shawl around his shoulders in the doorway and gave instructions to the farm manager, who stood inside. The secretary wrote down everything Rahim said. The crowd fell silent, then pressed forward, waving petitions and shouting to ask Rahim to hear their cases.

  “I’ve been here all week!” shouted one.

  “My son is
dying!” said another.

  “Please, Sahib! Sign this!”

  “My cousin has taken my cow, and now my toba!”

  The driver and another guard rushed forward and pushed the crowd aside with bamboo sticks held horizontally like fence rails.

  Ibne held the car door open for Rahim, who stepped in beside the driver. A cloud of French scent entered the automobile with Rahim, and Mumtaz bounced up and down on the seat.

  Another car left the long, palm-lined drive ahead of Rahim’s, sending up sheets of dust that the sedan parted with its shiny snout. The great lion carved over the gate in the ancient garden wall bade them farewell. The crowd of petitioners would be there when they returned.

  As they gathered speed, two men leaned from the windows of the car ahead, shouting to clear the road of goats, sheep, and cattle being driven to market. The two cars hurtled through a green tunnel of acacia trees planted by the British colonists eighty years before. They sped past camel carts loaded with timber, oxcarts with wooden wheels, overcrowded Bedford buses that looked like huge, luminescent beetles with charpois and crates of chickens tied on top. Men stood beneath the trees staring at the official car with green provincial assembly emblems above the license plates and important people inside.

  Everyone in the district recognized the sound of Rahim’s horn more than a mile before they saw the car. But each time it passed they stood by their cycles or sat in their carts and stared, not in awe or fear or envy—simply stared, slackfaced and dull with the inevitabilities of poverty.

  Rahim and Shabanu spoke little, he not knowing what to say to her in her anger, and she having nothing to say to him. She would never change his mind about Ahmed and Zabo.

  The trip lasted an hour on the main road along the canal. If the road had not been cleared of carts, pedestrians, bicycles, and animals, it might have taken three hours to reach Mehrabpur, a dusty village where flies rose in clouds from carts piled with fried dumplings.

  On the other side of the town stood Nazir’s house, invisible from the road except for the thick mud walls of the fortress within which he lived. Nazir was ten years younger than Rahim. He was a less important politician and landowner, but he had more enemies.