Milkweed Editions

Afshan accepted her lot cheerfully. She helped her mother-in-law, chaffed the maize, tended and milked the two goats and frolicked her way through her chores. Occasionally, when his mother scolded her, Qasim felt wretched. He loved her vivacious, girlish ways and was totally won by her affection. He teased her and played pranks. When he was particularly unkind or obdurate, his wife and his mother combined to give him a thrashing. Then Qasim would shout, “I am your husband. How dare you!” and he would hate her.

The earth is not easy to carve up. India required a deft and sensitive surgeon, but the British, steeped in domestic preoccupation, hastily and carelessly butchered it. They were not deliberately mischievous—only cruelly negligent! A million Indians died. The earth sealed its clumsy new boundaries in blood as town by town, farm by farm, the border was defined. Trains carrying refugees sped through the darkness of night—Hindus going one way and Muslims the other. They left at odd hours to try to dodge mobs bent on their destruction. Yet trains were ambushed and looted and their fleeing occupants slaughtered.

Sikander cut his way frantically through the ripe wheat as he ran towards the mud walls of his hut. His wife Zohra, standing in the courtyard, watched him. In the heat-hazed dawn neat squares of rippling wheat stretched towards the horizon and—riding on sudden swells of the breeze—came the distant chants of “ Hari Hari Mahadev!” “ Bole so Nihal. Sat siri Akal!” and an occasional, piercing, “ Ya Alieeee!” An ugly bloated ebb and flow of noise engulfed everything. The corn, the earth, the air, and the sky seemed full of threat.

Qasim, as far as he knew, was alone. He moved swiftly, in shadows, aware that he had to cross the border before daylight.
He had barely started when suddenly a short form hurtled out of the dark at him. He stopped, his heart pounding. That same instant he realized it was a child, a little girl.
Clinging to his legs, she sobbed, “Abba, Abba, my Abba!” For a moment Qasim lost his wits. The child was the size of his own little Zaitoon lost so long ago. Her sobs sounded an eerie, forlorn echo from his past. Then, brutally untangling her stubborn grasp, he plunged ahead.
The child stumbled after him, screaming with terror.
Fearing the danger from that noise, Qasim waited for the child to catch up. He slid his hand beneath his vest and triggered a switch. A long thin blade jumped open in his hand. His fingers were groping for the nape of her neck when the girl pressed herself to him for protection.
Qasim gasped. Was it a trick of the light? Quietly, with one hand, he closed the knife. She looked up and in the mold of her tear-stained features, he caught an uncanny flash of resemblance to his daughter thrashing in the agony of her last frenzy.
Kneeling before her, he sheltered the small face in his hands.
The girl stared at him. “You aren’t my Abba,” she said in accusing surprise.
Qasim drew her to him. “What is your name?”
“Munni.”
“Just Munni? Aren’t all little girls called Munni?”
“Just Munni.”
“You must have another name . . . Do you know your father’s name?”
“My father’s name was Sikander.”
Her use of the past tense startled him. It showed a courage and a forbearance that met the exacting standard of his own proud tribe.
“I had a little girl once. Her name was Zaitoon. You are so like her . . .”
She leaned against him, trembling, and he, close to his heart, felt her wondrously warm and fragile. A great tenderness swept over him, and recognizing how that fateful night had thrown them together, he said, “Munni, you are like the smooth, dark olive, the zaitoon, that grows near our hills . . . The name suits you . . . I shall call you Zaitoon.”
A simple man from a primitive, warring tribe, his impulses were as direct and concentrated as pinpoints of heat. No subtle concessions to reason or consequence tempered his fierce capacity to love or hate, to lavish loyalty or pity. Each emotion arose spontaneously and without complication, and was reinforced by racial tradition, tribal honor and superstition. Generations had carried it that way in his volatile Kohistani blood.
Cradling the girl in his arms, he hurried towards Lahore.

“I have a wife. Does it offend you to hear me tell of my own womenfolk?”
Qasim glanced at him sheepishly.
“She’s barren.”
Nikka detailed the probable causes of her barrenness, mentioning her ailments, her temperament, her age, and Qasim blushed up to his pale eyelashes.

Here comes trouble, Nikka guessed. He had been expecting a confrontation of sorts: a test to establish his trading rights. Glad of the opportunity, he turned to the stranger.

The crowd cheered the taller pehelwan, the acknowledged leader among the local roughs. Two policemen stood by watching the fight with professional detachment.

gradually edged out Bentleys and Morrises and, the seductively swaggering American Agency for International Development (A.I.D.), the last sedate vestiges of the British East India Company

Lahore—the ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings, the courtesan of Moghul emperors—bedecked and bejewelled, savaged by marauding Sikh hordes—healed by the caressing hands of her British lovers. A little shoddy, as Qasim saw her; like an attractive but aging concubine, ready to bestow surprising delights on those who cared to court her—proudly displaying Royal gifts . . .

Jinnah died within a year of creating the new State. He was an old man but his death was untimely. The Father of the Nation was replaced by stepfathers. The constitution was tampered with, changed and narrowed. Iqbal’s dynamic vision of Muslim brotherhood reaching beyond the confines of nationality—a mystic-poet’s vision—became the property of petty bureaucrats and even more petty religious fanatics.