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A House Divided—page 4
With the Hasan sisters trailing behind, we proceeded through the narrow, wood-paneled corridor beyond the drawing room—called the gallery, because my father had furnished it with rails on which pictures could be easily hung, removed and rotated. In the middle of the little gallery, on the left, was the door to the dining room, which was quite bare. Its fireplace—all the main rooms had fireplaces—seemed not to have been used in years. We stepped into my mother's bedroom, which still had her big almirah, or cupboard, built into the wall and resting on two pedestals. Then we walked through the connected bathroom to my father's corner room. It seemed both bedrooms were being used.
Throughout the tour, the Hasan sisters kept up a stream of nervous chatter. "You say Sheikh Sahib was your father's friend," the older Miss Hasan said, referring to our old Muslim neighbor. "But that crafty Sheikh Sahib has never been a friend to anyone ... Your crafty Sheikh Sahib emptied this house. He took all the furniture, pictures and valuables, and furnished a whole other house with them."
"A lorry pulled up here in the middle of the night and took everything out," the younger Miss Hasan said.
"He tried to take this house and install his sister-in-law here," the older Miss Hasan said.
We were now on the back veranda, where an old, bulbous electric fan with banana-leaf blades was slowly turning, barely stirring the miasmic air. We walked up the internal staircase, our footsteps echoing in the mostly empty house. The banister was dusty to the touch, and my sisters' rooms were locked up. On the roof, the chimneys, rain shelter and high brick parapets were all there, but like everything else in the house, they seemed in disrepair. There wasn't so much as one cot, either on the roof or in the rain shelter. We immediately turned back.
The rooms to one side of the courtyard, in which my older brother and I had lived, were also disorienting. My older brother's room was shut up, and mine, which was being used as a prayer room, was bare except for bamboo matting and some bolsters. The single window looking out onto the lane, which had served as my private access to the outside world, seemed permanently sealed with layers of dirty paint.
Everywhere the plaster on the walls and ceilings was cracked, and the whole house had an unkempt, lonely air. The Hasan sisters seemed to have no one else living with them. I asked about all the vacant rooms.
"Oh," the older Miss Hasan said, "before we moved in, the house was partitioned between two families." Her use of the word partitioned in reference to our house, and in English, was so unexpected that I caught my breath. "Now only two of us are living here."
"Have you ever thought of taking tenants?" Shahnaz asked the women.
"No," said the older Miss Hasan. "I'll never give any rooms to tenants. They'd never leave."
As we went back toward the front of the house, I suddenly noticed that underfoot were not the marble chips that had been used to finish the floors but rough cement. Without realizing what I was doing, I stamped my foot petulantly like a child. "What did you do with our marble floors?" I cried.
"This house had no farash when we moved in," the older Miss Hasan said distantly.
"Farash?" Shahnaz repeated, somewhat puzzled. "She can't mean, Ved, that your house had no floors for you all to walk on."
"I distinctly remember my father had all the floors treated with marble chips," I said. "I remember the floors were so smooth that I used to slide across them almost like a skater."
"No! No!" the older Miss Hasan exclaimed, somewhat annoyed. "I'm telling you, there was no farash in the bathrooms."
It dawned on the Aijazuddins and me at the same time that she was talking not about farash—the floor—at all but about the flush system. It was brought home to me with the force of lost memory that when I was growing up practically no houses in Punjabi cities had flush systems. We all had commodes with removable pots, which had to be manually emptied by the untouchables who skulked in morning and night through the back doors of the bathrooms of British, Hindu and Muslim houses. We never knew where they deposited the waste. That was beyond the reach of our curiosity, as were the lives of the untouchables themselves, who, in religion, were considered as polluted as the miserable office of their karma.
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