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A House Divided—page 2
"I wonder why the tenants didn't put up a sign with their own names on it," I said.
"They probably like the look of your father's old marble," Shahnaz said.
"Or maybe they are just lazy," Aijaz said. "But some things have clearly changed. The big house of Sheikh Sahib, which stood opposite your gate, is now just a forlorn plot. Where exactly did you put down Sheikh Sahib's water pipe?"
Aijaz had read in a couple of my books that at the suggestion of Sheikh Sahib, our longtime family friend and Muslim neighbor, my father had arranged a few months before partition to install a pipe under the street to carry water from the Muslim's private tube well to our house. We had thought that extra water might help to save our house in case the rampaging Muslim mobs set it on fire, as they were doing to other houses in the area. The masons had done the installation on the pretext of repairing the plumbing so that the other Muslim neighbors would not know what we were doing. Even so, the work had to be done in the dark. In fact, the new political atmosphere was so poisonous that soon after introducing Sheikh Sahib's water, we had begun to worry that we might have compromised our drinking supply.
"The pipe was put down just where we're standing," I said. I smoothed the dirt, but the bricks under my shoe seemed undisturbed, evenly laid. "The pipe must still be down there."
The gate was unlatched. We pushed it open and walked in. Ahead was the little lane that led all the way back to the servants' quarters and the side entrance to the kitchen. To the left were a rose garden my mother had lovingly planted and tended, and a grape creeper she had trained to cover the servants' outhouse. The creeper was laden with thick bunches of grapes, as in our time. It was a hot, still August night, and the grapes' cloyingly sweet scent in the summer air, mixed with the acrid smell of ordure (ubiquitous here as in India), turned my stomach. I coughed and said, "I can hardly believe that my mother's grapes and roses are still thriving 32 years after we were driven out of our house."
We turned left into the little rose garden, where the child-high watering tank my father had put in still stood, and walked up the 10 or so steps to the front veranda. "We've arrived at such a late hour, without giving notice or asking for an appointment. What will the tenants think?" I said in a whisper.
"We thought it would be better to surprise them," Aijaz whispered back. "That way, they won't have a chance to deny your request to see the house and think up excuses."
On the right was the door to my father's corner room. (As in some Victorian houses, he had his own bedroom.) Straight ahead was the front door that led into the drawing room. I rang the bell—my pulse quickened.
The door was opened by two stout, elderly ladies. I told them I had lived in the house as a child and would be grateful for an opportunity to look through it.
The women hesitated, but then it turned out that they were sisters of Dr. Mubashir Hasan, a former finance minister in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government and then the secretary-general of the Pakistan People's Party, and that they and Aijaz were distantly related. In any case, they let us into the drawing room, which was sparsely furnished and had a sad look of neglect and disuse.
The two women seemed pleased to have company but were not altogether comfortable. To put them at ease, I said I was glad to see that the grapevine was flourishing.
"I've never eaten better grapes," the more docile of the sisters said. "Every season we have more grapes than either one of us can eat."
"But these ants!" said the older and more domineering sister, who introduced herself as Amartul Aimma Hasan. Neither of them volunteered the name of the quieter sister. Both of them seemed to make a point of speaking in Urdu, the language of the Muslim country. "You wouldn't believe them if you saw them. Whole hills of them—all ants. You walk in the garden; they bite your ankles off. I have seen mosquitoes plenty, but they are nothing compared to these ants."
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