The early showers of the monsoon had struck the night before with full rage. Soon, the streets of Lahore would become rivers in August, carrying mud and filth. The frightening thunder was heard up till the end of the night, and the single wooden door in the room, which opened to the balcony, seemed already wet and swollen. Masud paced back and forth in his room, impatiently and nervously, like a caged cat. His face was dark and haggard. Eyes small but deep, restive, and shoulders bent as if an invisible weight rested on them. If one looked harder, one saw a little cut under his pointed chin which he was in the habit of rubbing occasionally. He stopped for a second next to the table and lit another cigarette, staring at Imroz, the Urdu newspaper folded on the table. The desire to read the paper had deserted him. She was usually very punctual, he reasoned, for her survival depended on it, but now, as it continued to pour buckets outside, she was more than an hour late.
He stopped pacing and, looking out towards the balcony, saw the dark, vicious clouds which filled the frame of his balcony door. The wind caused the rain to fall at an angle, away from it ─ the rain water was running aslant on the balcony floor to a hole in one corner, falling on the muddy sidewalk like a waterfall. He went out to the balcony and stood under the tin roof. Resting his hand on the metal grille, he looked out to the back of her house―the pale, yellow wall being whipped by the merciless rain. From four stories up, he could look at her window which opened into the back alley, but now was shut tight. It would remain so throughout the monsoon. The rain fell on the tin roof like an unpleasant, out-of-tune melody of a sitar, and, feeling irritated, he stepped back in.
He sat down on a chair, jumpy, his legs shifting positions, his feet shaking slightly, and every time he moved, the chair squeaked because of its loose joints. Now, he was aware of the emptiness that suddenly gripped him.
Smoke rings drifted from his lips while his eyes raced all over the wall and its cracked surface. He needed her―the monsoon, the smell of the earth in the air, the subdued noises of the human beings out on the street, soaked and hurrying, the howling of the wandering dogs, and the solitude within him made him ache for her company. The comfort of her flesh, the odor of skin. Was he addicted to her? He could not answer. She had never skipped a work day, he reflected, as he paused again, even when she’d had a light fever three weeks ago.
He decided on impulse to walk to her house and inquire what stopped her today. Or perhaps it was the crying rain that called him out to see her naked misery. He grabbed his umbrella and, putting on his rain coat, walked down the dirty stairway, which stank with such severity that it reminded him of rotten flesh every time he came to it. He could arrange for someone else, he thought as he descended, but, no, he enjoyed her presence. Was she on her way? He might even run into her on the street. The thought pleased him momentarily.
Masud Sheikh lived in a decrepit building, one of the remains of British rule, a red, thin-tiled building with the Victorian façade. The landlord rented out the small rooms to bachelors or married men, and some women too, who came to Lahore from other places to find work. But Masud had lived all his life in this city, in the old city encased behind thirteen decaying gates and, unlike others, rented this place in order to forget the past.
At the foot of the building were five shops―a bakery, a laundromat, a grocery store, a hardware store, and a barber shop. At the barber shop people sat gossiping all day long, listening to the radio tuned to Noor Jahan, or to Ashfaq Ahmed’s Hidayat Allah every evening at seven. In the morning to the Radio Pakistan, Lahore and in the afternoon to Akashwani (All India Radio). The men played cards, drank tea, and discussed political matters.
Jumma Khan, the barber, was the fulcrum of information and subject matter to these gossips―he was how the stories really spread.
It was Jumma who, one afternoon, out of consideration, had suggested that Masud hire a cleaner, one of the Christian women from the nearby slums.
"Arrey, Masud sahib, you should get a sweeper for your room. It keeps the place clean," Jumma had said, looking at him in the stained, warped mirror, his scissors dancing clip, clap.
"Do you know any, Jumma, whom you can trust?" Masud had asked with the same subtlety.
"Not at the moment," Jumma had said, gripping Masud’s hair between his fingers and pulling it up, "but I will certainly keep my eyes open and let you know." And Jumma had smiled into the mirror, becoming a secret sharer. Later, Jumma had added, "Even Allah doesn’t prescribe loneliness, Masud bhai!"
Masud remembered the conversation now as he climbed down the last steps out to the street, into the rain, breathing hard. Having come out in the open, he felt a nakedness creep into him as he faced Jumma, who knew every terra incognito a heart could know and every truth hidden behind a pair of eyes, light or dark. The news of his desperation, he feared, would spread now among the card players, the indolent tea sippers, and then the other neighbors. Masud saw Jumma Khan from the corners of his eyes and hurried his steps.
"Ah-ha! Masud bira . . . ader, where to, in this rain?" Jumma’s voice replaced the thunders of the monsoon. Mostly to annoy Masud, he liked to enunciate the word biraader by breaking it into its paused syllables.
Masud stopped under the umbrella, the rain beating as hard as possible to subdue any sound. "To the post office, Jumma. How have you been?" waving his hand.
He moved on without waiting for Jumma’s answer, but he had hardly gone a few steps when he heard Jumma exclaim, "Alhamd-o-lillah! followed by a spiteful laugh. And it was then he remembered, irritated by the laughter, that the post office was in fact in the other direction. He felt a shrinking sensation as he walked away from the building, and a sense of panic on the street.
He had become deaf to every other sound except that of the rain. Turning right from the Pakki Thatti sherbet shop to the Choora basti, he walked three streets south, along the meat market, and faced the wall with the hole―there were advertisements painted on the wall on each side of the hole. People went through this hole instead of going half a mile farther to the iron gate installed by the city municipal corporation. He ducked his head down and came out the other side, having closed and reopened his umbrella. He stood in the neighborhood of the servant class, mostly the dark Christians who were, as some believed, the crop of British seed and fertilizer.
After the masters had vanished, the leftovers from the British domain had become the rags of this society, a society which claimed human equality its basic pillar. At the corner of the two extremely narrow alleys to his left he saw a small paan shop―a small boy squatted behind a glass box and a few empty cold drink bottles. A tin shade jutted out from above giving shelter to two skinny men, standing, drinking their tea. The men gave Masud a curious look, then laughed and went back to their conversation.
It was windier on this side of the street―he tightened his grip on the umbrella. He noticed as he walked on the children of different ages, though mostly boys―some naked and some in shorts, running in various directions playing the rain games―accepting the gift from heavens. Sheltered underneath his umbrella, he examined the houses to the right and left, registering the paleness of the walls and the doors which hung askew even though they were chained and locked. It was a long row of small, one room houses, huddled together as if scared, often without an alley between their walls or a verandah on the front. No tree grew on this street.
Here, the rain water in the middle of the earthen street was already a few inches deep. He walked on the narrow sidewalk, slippery with mud. He made out her house and halted in front of its soaked, uneven wooden door, from which a lizard-like chain dangled. As he decided to strike his knuckles against the door, an unknown fear surrounded his innards and checked his hand. He felt weak in the knees, his fist remained suspended in the air. The frost of his breath appeared in rapid compressions. Closing his eyes, he jangles the chain, weakly, as if in a dream. He looked to the street where the weak, lean children played with an old tennis ball, throwing it to each other with loud, shrieking sounds, jumping up and down, sinking their dark legs into the brown water. Though he could hear their sounds, it seemed that the yelling and shrieking did not reach his ears but his heart, piercing to the middle. Suddenly he reacted, as if caught off guard to the creaking door and its rusted hinges, and turned his head with a start to see a gaunt face emerging from the lightless room, grimacing at him without teeth.
Two alarmed eyes flickered in the old man’s deep sockets. But then his face softened, his gaze moving from scared, to perplexed, to barely concealed contempt. His stare penetrated Masud’s and Masud felt guilty of some inexplicable crime, as thought that he had something, even if vaguely, to do with this man’s fate.
After an awkward silence, the host, moving aside, motioned Masud to step inside, having guessed who he might be.
"Come in from the rain, bau-ji," he said. "Nasima is home."
Masud stepped in with hesitation, folding his wet umbrella and shaking the drops of water onto the dried mud floor. The man’s hospitality was already beginning to oppress Masud. He tried to adjust his eyes to the darkness of the room. A stove made the room smell of kerosene oil. He made out the figures of a woman and two children standing next to the stove to stay warm; the flame cast a faint, dancing light on them. The woman’s face was stricken with surprise, or fear―one could not tell. The man closed the door. On the wall Masud noticed a cheap calendar with Hazrat Jesus―arms stretched benevolently above the months of the year.
"Salaam-alaikam," the woman mumbled.
"I thought you might have hurt yourself," he said to Nasima, though not meeting her eyes.
The water dripped at equal intervals from the ceiling into a tin bucket, tip, tip, tip, in the middle of the room, splashing onto the mud. The sound of the leak inside, somehow, seemed louder with each silent second like an explosion.
Coming a little closer to him, to the centre of the room beside the bucket, she said, "It’s been hell here, Masud saab, the leak and the children . . ." but her voice trailed off when she saw his uninterested face, and the subjugated desire in his eyes. His prolonged silence made her uneasy―however she managed to speak again: "I thought you wouldn’t mind my not coming in the rain today, and..." Her voice sank into the sound of the water dripping.
Masud saw her lips moving, but did not hear what she said. His mind was somewhere else. In his mind he was back in his room, Nasima’s naked body on the bed beside his. Then suddenly he saw the same bed empty, and was reminded of his loneliness. He remembered the first time he’d seen her dark, naked back, as if made of sandal wood, and her hair like a black river. Vexed, he looked at her husband, who stood crossing his arms to hide his naked, hairless chest, except for the grayish patch around the navel, and the old man smiled faintly upon meeting Masud’s eyes. Masud wondered briefly how such a broken old man had acquired such a lovely young wife, but the subject did not really interest him. Masud looked away to the flame in the stove, and cleared his throat.