CREATIVE WRITING

Oct 17, 2010 The Arts Forum

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Prologue to: A Lantern in the Wind

A Novel in Progress
by Ameena Gafoor

Continued from last week:

Butter-bean and karyla vines intertwined and simply took possession of the wallaba division between Kadir and his southern neighbour. His creole fowls and wisi wisi ducks were still penned up after the stormy night. He waited to hear the lusty azaan of the muezzin from the nearby mosque — AllahOAbkar AllahOAkbar – and then read his Fajr Namaaz without uttering a single word to his silent wife. Zainab, already dressed for the day in her printed gangri and julha with rumaal, had meantime lit a Dutch bottle lamp with a flaming wick and was stirring about in the kitchen, a narrow lean-to extension to the cottage.
He mitigated with a long and earnest Du’a in trembling Urdu, and recited Tasbee and Qur’anic verses while waiting for the dawn. He would feed his fowls and ducks and wait for Zainab to bring him his paratha roti, dhal and bhaigan choka in his deep white enamel plate, and a large enamel cup full to the brim of green tea with a tip of freshly boiled cow’s milk, as was her wont. Not yet forty years of age, her hazel eyes were alert like a squirrel’s, her back straight despite daily toil, child bearing and child rearing, her teeth like chipped sugar-cake.
The slender woman gathered her long cotton skirt in front of her, squatted on a low bench before the freshly daubed chulha, arranged and rearranged the sticks of wet bramble firewood, fanned and blew through the pukhnee, her eyes and nostrils streaming. Instead of bright flames she choked on blinding smoke, her thoughts and reflections sealed behind her serene brown face. Thoughts of her daughters always tugged at her heartstrings but she was pressed with the here and now, the race against time to reach the back-dam. She had long abandoned hope of returning to India but would often picture her parents at the Maharaj Ganj with their trays of assorted spices and condiments, candied ginger, ground grains of every kind, cumin, turmeric and chutneys, under the spreading poplar trees.
The courida sticks and wallaba short ends caught into a steady fire. Zainab held the coconut oil bottle up to the light of the bottle lamp and peered at it closely before pouring it to chunkay the dhal; word had spread in the village that a scorpion had found its way into a dark green bottle of lemonade and thence into someone’s stomach. She would have to hurry before the sun rose in the skies, walk the half a mile to the bateau and paddle another mile and a half to their back-dam farm; she, too, worried whether all her labours had been lost to last night’s deluge.
Against a wall of the lean-to kitchen stood the granite massala sil and its lorha for pounding and grinding the turmeric and coriander, onion and garlic and other spices for her dishes. A shelf along that wall held yellowish bottles of varied sizes lined up like in Dr. Ogle drug store a few lots away, containing ground amchar massala, cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, saffron, mango and ginger, tomato chutneys and dhals of different types, green, yellow, orange, black, mung. Under the shelf a small square table held a pot of dahi to which was added daily the creamy top of the boiled milk after it was cooled.
Zainab seized a long pestle and squatted in front of the mortar, hurriedly pounding the just-boiled green plantains and deftly shaping them into round balls of foo foo resembling half ripe grapefruits. She packed food for their midday meal in a two-tiered metal saucepan and packed portions for her sons to take to work.
Kadir was thankful that both his sons had found employment in the village, one at the pumping station and the younger at AB’s textile and haberdashery store, for he distrusted the ways of the city and did not care for his sons to go there on a daily basis. On the whole, he distrusted the influence of western schooling, particularly on his girls, and would often complain, “suppose-am huch time me talk-am two hords, Hapizan talk-am ten hords” – he would replace all the “w” sounds with an “h” as he grappled with the loss of the old world. When Zainab returned in the evening she would cook more dhal, fried chowrai bhagie, eddoe curry. She made saada roti in the open face of the chulha where the embers are usually glowing.
While Kadir waited, his mind wandered back to the time when he had laid at the Depot Hospital at Garden Reach taken with a fever while waiting to embark on the Ganges. He recalled the building, a three-storeyed palace deserted after the King of Oudh was ousted; the top floors were turned into a hospital for the emigrants in transit with an abandoned Bear Pit on the ground floor where numerous jackals and cobras were still in residence. Demolition of the inner walls of the extensive buildings had disturbed the jackals that bayed mournfully scaring the life out of the sojourners. He did not know whether he feared the journey into the unknown ocean more than the baying of those unseen jackals, the thought of the fat snakes crawling up the stone stairs and into their beds had left him frozen with fear.
The whole soul-searing episode of his reaching Demerara played out before him . . . The thunderous claps of the gangplank as the Ganges entered the foaming channel. The start of six long weeks, from the Hoogly River into the Indian Ocean, stopping at Madras to load up more workers to make up the four hundred-odd souls, and then into the calmer Atlantic, with only the gulls overhead, the stars keeping silent watch and pani like sheet glass stretching to the horizon. . . when he had joined the train at Howrah station with their bright-eyed, curly- haired three-year-old daughter, no one even noticed Zainab’s pregnant condition. His son was born two weeks before the ship sailed into Demerara. What is normally ten to twelve days journey to tea plantations lengthened into weeks and weeks on endless oceans under a mute sky.
His dream had opened a faucet he could not turn off… the promises in the depot of an easy life sifting sugar under tropical palms in Demerara with no idea where this Demra might be, across how many oceans? How many nights? . . . Life was brutally short in Maha Dawal: his mother had died in childbirth, his sister’s husband crushed beyond recognition in the twinkling of an eye and his brother’s wife given up to tuberculosis all in their prime . . . the longing for relief from the weariness of their bodi- and tomato-bearing existence: the endless stalls of grains, spices and sweetmeats stretching along the dusty public road; the stone-hearted agents of the zamindars constantly hounding them for rent; the frequent monsoons followed by punishing droughts in equal measure that kept them pinned down in one place; the tired bullock carts trundling on the dirt tracks; the damp hut . . . the rope cots; the gloom in the winter months. They had no acres of fields to plant, all their land mortgaged to moneylenders with no hope of getting by . . . and now with four more children, Basti was only a memory.
Kadir brushed away the trend of thoughts and began to hum a Moonajaat. He had served out his bondage at Success estate and settled in the ways of the village. He had consoled himself with letters from his siblings until one missive brought the news in Urdu that Elahi had passed away and then the letters became fewer. Kadir ate his morning meal joylessly.
As a Moulvi with powers of seeing far, Kadir was perplexed by the dream . . .  He pondered, “Abraham’s dream was to test his faith…not an order to murder his son…. But this was a test of what?” He didn’t know what to think.
All he knew was that the brothers had grown up before his eyes with his own children, stealing estate sugar canes from loaded punts, catching birds with slingshots in the back-dam, shrimps with girgirha in the trenches and bundaries on the seashore in the rain; they went to school and cinema together, played marbles with awara seeds every afternoon, cricket on Sundays, and danced with Tadjah bands on special days.
Silver dew glistened on the leaves in his backyard and misshapen blue-black clouds, like lagoons in a grey sea, blocked the first rays of the sun from coming through, but just as the blackbirds and long-beaked hummingbirds announced the awakening of the living world with their twittering and chirping from tree to tree, Kadir went to the wattle fence and called out to his neighbours, “Ragbeer momma, na sen Ragbeer and Jagbeer a tung tiday.”
Mrs. Gopaul, sindhoor in the middle part of her hair, stuupps her teeth; she twitched her madras headkerchief playfully and scoffed at this bit of unsolicited advice: “Leh Kadir read Qur’an an fly he lang kurta an guh masjid eb’ry aftanoon. Abhi a duh puja eb’ry maanin.”
Kadir did not know whether to feel pity or indignation for this woman. He started to say, “Suppose-am . . .” but words failed him and he staggered away from the fence like a rat that had eaten bait. And, indeed, in the tiny temple at their gate where bright coloured triangular jandhi flags were stuck on bamboo poles beside a frangipani tree with ceres flowers, the Gopauls made daily offerings to Shiva, Krishna, and Lord Ganesha, the all-knowing God, and to Sita and Laxshmi, the wise and beautiful goddesses.

Continued next week….

The full length of this Prologue appears in THE ARTS JOURNAL Volume 4 Numbers 1 & 2 (2008).

To contact the Editor of The Arts Forum Column, Ameena Gafoor: E-mail: [email protected] or Telephone: 592 227 6825.

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