Rasheed did not much care for flippancy on serious subjects. He did not think paradise was on earth: certainly not in Brahmpur, certainly not here in Debaria, nor in his wife’s virtually illiterate village.
‘You look worried,’ said Maan. ‘I hope it isn’t anything I said.’
Rasheed thought for a few seconds before answering. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t your answer exactly. I was wondering about Meher’s education.’
‘Your daughter?’ asked Maan.
‘Yes. My elder daughter. She’s a bright girl – you’ll meet her in the evening. But there are no schools like this’ – he waved an arm towards the nearby madrasa – ‘in her mother’s village – and she will grow up ignorant unless I do something about it. I try to teach her whenever I’m here, but then I go to Brahmpur for a few months, and the illiterate environment takes over.’
It never struck Rasheed as odd that he loved Meher every bit as much as his own daughter. Perhaps one element of this bond was precisely that Meher had at first been for him purely an object of love, not of responsibility. Even when, a year or so ago, she stopped calling him Chacha and started calling him Abba, some of that sense of the uncle – who would come home and spoil her with presents and affection – remained. With a start, Rasheed recalled that the baby was about as old as Meher had been when her father had died. Perhaps this too had been in her mother’s mind when she had lost control of her emotions and broken down at the station.
Rasheed thought of his wife with tenderness, but not with passion, and he felt that she too felt no passion for him, merely a sense of comfort when he was with her. She lived for her children and the memory of her first husband.
This is my life, the only life I will live, thought Rasheed. If only things had been different, we might each have been happy.
At first the very thought of sharing a room with her for an hour had troubled him. Then he grew used to the brief visits he paid to her in the middle of the night when the other men were asleep in the courtyard. But even when fulfilling his obligations as a husband he wondered what she was thinking. Sometimes he imagined that she was close to tears. Had she begun to love him more after the baby had been born? Perhaps. But the women of the zenana in her father’s village – her elder brothers’ wives – were often quite cruel even when they teased each other, and she would not have been able to express her affection for him openly, even if there had been much to express.
Once more Rasheed began to unfold the letter he had received, then stopped and said to Maan: ‘So – how is your father’s farm?’
‘My father’s farm?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ said Maan. ‘It should be all right. Not much going on at this time of the year.’
‘But haven’t you just visited the farm?’
‘No. Not exactly.
‘Not exactly?’
‘I mean, no. No, I meant to, but – I got caught up in things.’
‘So what have you been doing?’
‘Losing my temper mainly,’ said Maan. ‘And trying to kill wolves.’
Rasheed frowned, but did not follow up these interesting possibilities. ‘You are being flippant as usual,’ he said.
‘What are those flowers?’ asked Maan, to change the subject.
Rasheed looked across the tank to the far shore. ‘The purple ones?’
‘Yes. What are they called?’
‘Sadabahar – or evergreen,’ said Rasheed, ‘because it’s always spring for them. They never seem to die, and no one can get rid of them. I think they’re beautiful – though they often grow in foul places…’ He paused. ‘Some people call them “behayaa” – or “shameless”.’ He was lost in meditation for a long while, one thought leading to another.
‘Well,’ said Maan, ‘what were you thinking of?’
‘My mother,’ said Rasheed. After a pause he continued in a quiet voice: ‘I loved her, God protect her spirit. She was an upright woman, and well-educated as women go. She loved my brother and me, and only regretted that she never had a daughter. Perhaps that’s why – well, anyway, she was the only one who appreciated my wish to educate myself, to make something of myself and do something for this place.’ Rasheed said ‘this place’ with such bitterness that it sounded almost as if he detested it. ‘But my love for her has tied my life up in knots. And as for my father – what does he understand of anything outside property and money? I have to be discreet even in what I say at home. I’m always looking up towards the roof and lowering my voice. Baba, for all his piety, understands things – things one might not expect him to. But my father has contempt for everything I revere. And it has become worse lately with the changes in the house.’ Maan guessed that Rasheed meant his father’s second wife.