Rukhsana, being a girl, did not figure in this algebra, but in the strange way of families, being a girl and the oedipal horseshit being moot, she was closer to Baba than any of her siblings, and he would often ask her to sit by him during the weekly mehfil gatherings, with my mother on the other side.
How do I know all this? Another part of my secret life. My mother used to sit me down, usually in the afternoons after I got back from school, while I ate my tiffin, as they called it, and the girls were out with Faiza, and she would explain my family to me: the tensions, the rivalries, the disappointments, the resentments, all anatomized and poured into my small pink ears. I think now it was cruel to do that to a child, loading me with the kind of insights a kid can’t really absorb, just as bad in its way as Bibiji’s bad-mouthing. I think it warped me, or maybe I was just warped to begin with. She probably did it because she was lonely, despite Baba’s and Farid’s kindness, and she seized on me as the one who could fix it. Or maybe it was because of the kindness. It’s harder to accept charity than to give it, especially if you’re half wild like she was, the way they say a wild animal kept for years and seemingly tame may one day without warning turn on its keeper and chew him up.
That’s one excuse. The other, which she actually told me when I asked her years later why she did it, was that she wanted to protect me from what might happen to me if anything happened to her, that this kind of knowledge, that penetration of motive and hidden interpersonal combat, would help me survive.
These séances were usually interrupted by the return of Faiza and the girls from wherever they’d been, to a public garden or the bazaar, and the change of air was astounding, like sun breaking through a muggy day. Aisha was seven at the time I’m thinking of, to my nine; she would arrive in a whirl of gangly legs and a spate of bright chatter, and instantly all the dark plots were blown into flying ash and dispersed. There was an elephant and the man let us feed it, but Faiza wouldn’t let us ride. A lady crashed her bicycle into a man and everything spilled and the pigeons escaped, oh, Theo, it was so funny! They brought halvah home, and news of the halvah-wallah and his tribe, in detail, with opinions and then comments on everyone who’d talked to them, and this was not a short list, because Aisha was the princess of the Urdu Bazaar; she could hardly go ten steps without someone calling her to talk, offering her a sweet. If a family is lucky it has someone like Aisha in it, the clearer of the air, the one for whose sake quarrels are stilled, the lens through which all the family’s love is refined and focused.
She loved me too, the big brother, the strongest, bravest, most handsome of brothers, as she would tell me in Urdu, where you can say things that would be ridiculous in English, and I wanted to cut off a finger every time I hurt her, times more frequent than I can now bear to think about. Farid worshipped the shadow of her passing, and my mother… well, there was a distance between them, I felt it at nine, and I suppose it was because even an angel child has to be disciplined and my mother was the one to do it, because Farid would give her anything she wanted.
Then my mother left again: I must have been nine or ten; one morning she was just gone without a word. My father said she had gone on haj, which I knew was a good thing to do, so I wondered why all the adults in the house were angry. That week in Bibiji’s court it was the only topic of conversation, mainly in nasty whispers so I couldn’t hear, but I heard enough, and when my grandmother said that my mother was no better than a fahisha I pulled away from her and stood up and said my mother was not a fahisha and I wouldn’t stand for hearing her called one; the fahishas lived in Tibbi, what Lahoris call the Hira Mandi, where Baba went to see them every Saturday night with his friends. I don’t recall how I knew that Baba visited the famous courtesans of Lahore in their special district; I guess I had picked up the servants’ gossip or maybe Wazir’s, who knew everything.
Whatever, we had a screaming match and I ran out of the perfume fog into fresh air. After that, I was not invited to sit with Bibiji and her friends; I had joined the camp of the enemy. After that, Aisha was the favorite, though a girl.
Because of these events and because my mother was gone, Aisha got indulged more than she would have. Not that she wanted much, a kid surrounded by that much love doesn’t need a lot of stuff, but one thing she wanted got me into the most trouble I was ever in while I was in Lahore and also saved my life. The thing was a Polaroid camera. She’d seen it at a party and she conceived a fierce desire for one and uncharacteristically nagged our father about it, and at her next birthday he gave her one, with a warning to be sparing of the film, hard to get in Lahore at the time, and never to take it out of the house.
Which of course she did, how could she deprive her friends throughout the bazaar of a look at her treasure? Besides, she wanted to give them each a Polaroid portrait of themselves. So she went out with it concealed in a straw market bag that she always carried in imitation of Faiza’s big one, and she was able to slip away from the ayah and down an alley. She met the ice-candy man and did his picture, a crowd gathering to see this wonder, and then, with the camera slung around her neck, she trotted off back up the alley. By that time some big kids were waiting for her, and they roughed her up a little and took the camera.
It was Wazir who told me who did it. Up as he always was on the gossip of the bazaars, he came into my room on the night after it happened-I could still hear Aisha weeping at intervals, being comforted by Faiza to not much avail-and told me it was the Barshawi brothers. These were a trio of teenage mopes, the sons of a local butcher who was also a ward-heeler type who did low-end political thuggery. The boys were in the habit of grabbing stuff without paying for it, and the father’s po litical connections made it hard for the bazaaris to get any redress. That’s Pakistan.
As it happened, Laghari Sahib was in Islamabad for a couple of days on judicial business, and Gul Muhammed with him, so we boys decided that the honor of the family had been damaged and like good Pashtuns we had to make it right. This was Wazir’s idea, naturally, but I took to it without much argument. Somehow, it never occurred to me to go to Farid. Anyway, Wazir was able to sneak off with one of his father’s guns and that evening the pair of us went down to the Urdu Bazaar. As the injured party, I got to carry the thing, a fully loaded.455 Webley Mark VI pistol jammed in my waistband under my long shirt. Arriving at the street of the butchers, we found the oldest Barshawi boy, Amir, in the act of unloading a live sheep from a motorized cart. I pulled out the pistol.
I was nine years old and small and this piece weighed two and a half pounds, a hunk of black steel the size of a leg of lamb. I could hardly aim it at all, and the single-action trigger pull is hard even for a grown man, but in the service of honor I got off my shot. Boom! The sheep gave a shrill despairing bleat, Amir let out a similar sound and went down, and the pistol’s mighty recoil snapped my skinny forearm back like a door hinge, sending the hammer into my forehead. I went down too with a face full of blood.
Wazir hauled me to my feet, picked up the pistol, and dragged me out of there bearing my first wound on the field of honor, blinded, deafened-not unusual conditions where honor is concerned-but reasonably satisfied. Fortunately, as it turned out, I’d whacked the sheep and not Amir, so Laghari Sahib was able to smooth things over when he returned the following evening. Then we had an informal judicial hearing in his study.