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  ISSUE 112

  EDITOR John Freeman

  DEPUTY EDITOR Ellah Allfrey

  ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Michael Salu

  ONLINE EDITOR Ollie Brock

  EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Emily Greenhouse, Patrick Ryan

  PUBLICITY Saskia Vogel

  DESIGN INTERN Daniela Silva

  FINANCE Geoffrey Gordon, Morgan Graver, Craig Nicholson

  MARKETING AND SUBSCRIPTIONS Anne Gowan, David Robinson

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  SALES MANAGER Sharon Murphy

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  TO ADVERTISE IN THE USA CONTACT Emily Cook, [email protected]

  IT MANAGER Mark Williams

  PRODUCTION ASSOCIATE Sarah Wasley

  PROOFS Sarah Barlow, Lizzie Dipple, Katherine Fry, Lesley Levene, Jessica Rawlinson, Vimbai Shire, Mirza Waheed

  ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Eric Abraham

  PUBLISHER Sigrid Rausing

  CONTENTS

  Leila in the Wilderness

  Nadeem Aslam

  Poem

  Yasmeen Hameed

  Portrait of Jinnah

  Jane Perlez

  Kashmir’s Forever War

  Basharat Peer

  Poem

  Daniyal Mueenuddin

  Ice, Mating

  Uzma Aslam Khan

  The House by the Gallows

  Intizar Hussain

  Butt and Bhatti

  Mohammed Hanif

  High Noon

  Green Cardamom with a foreword by Hari Kunzru

  Arithmetic on the Frontier

  Declan Walsh

  Poem

  Hasina Gul

  A Beheading

  Mohsin Hamid

  Pop Idols

  Kamila Shamsie

  Restless

  Aamer Hussein

  Mangho Pir

  Fatima Bhutto

  White Girls

  Sarfraz Manzoor

  The Trials of Faisal Shahzad

  Lorraine Adams with Ayesha Nasir

  The Sins of the Mother

  Jamil Ahmad

  Notes on contributors

  Copyright

  GRANTA

  LEILA IN THE WILDERNESS

  Nadeem Aslam

  AYAZ JOKHIO

  Mother and Child, 2008

  Acrylic on canvas, gold frame. 1.1 x 1.5cm

  © Ayaz Jokhio

  And my soul is a woman before you …

  – Rilke

  I

  In the beginning, the great river was believed to flow out of a lion’s mouth, its size reflected in its ancient name – Sindhu, an ocean. The river was older than the Himalayas; the Greeks had called it Sinthus, the Romans Sindus, the Chinese Sintow, but it was Pliny who had given it the name Indus. One night under the vast silence of a perfect half-moon and six stars, a mosque appeared on a wooded island in the river, and Leila was woken by the call to prayer issuing from its minaret just before sunrise. It was the day she was to be blessed with a son.

  As she knew there was no mosque within hearing distance, her initial impression was that the air itself was singing. Leila manoeuvred herself out of bed and went towards the door, making sure not to disturb her mother-in-law who had taken to sleeping in the same room as her in these last days before the birth. The servant girl appointed outside the door had fallen asleep, and as Leila moved past, a bad dream caused the girl to release a cry of fear.

  Leila was fourteen years old, thin-framed with grey, glass-like eyes and a nervous flame always burning just beneath her pale skin. She pursued the song of faith drifting in the fifty-roomed mansion that had been in her husband’s family for several generations. The river with its boats and blind freshwater dolphins and drowned lovers was half a mile away, and there was nothing but rocky desert and thick date orchards between the riverbank and the mansion.

  Long after the voice withdrew, she continued her search for its origins, now and then placing an ear against a wall. Earlier in the night she’d heard momentary fragments of other songs from the men’s side of the mansion, where her husband was celebrating the imminent arrival of his first son in the company of musicians and prostitutes. No doubt they were all asleep by now.

  The windows in the women’s section of the house were inaccessible, nudged up against the ceiling, so the light poured in but not enough air. Leila was looking up at one of them when she heard someone come in behind her.

  ‘You shouldn’t be down here,’ Razia, her mother-in-law, said, unable to conceal her alarm. ‘If you needed something you should have asked one of the servants.’ Her attenuated face was wheat-coloured and pitted with smallpox scars. She had long white hair and every other year a doctor would inject liquid gold into her bones and joints to counter the ravages of time. ‘You should be resting,’ she said. It was the tone she had employed a year earlier when Leila came to the mansion as a bride, a tone suitable for the child that Leila had been back then. Someone who longed for her dolls and frequently misplaced her veil. But as soon as she became pregnant there was no end to Razia’s devotion and love. Along with the abundant care came the vigilance, an ever-present awareness that the girl was not mature enough to know the importance of the asset taking form inside her body.

  Razia summoned the servants and they led Leila back up to her room.

  ‘I don’t mean to be harsh with you,’ Razia said mildly, accompanying them up the staircase. ‘If only you knew about the behaviour of my own mother-in-law and husband towards me. When I failed to conceive within the first few months of marriage, I was marked for days from the beating I received. But Allah heard my cries and granted me my son Timur.’

  ‘I went downstairs because I heard a voice, a call to prayer,’ Leila said as she settled on the bed and the servant girls began making her comfortable with pillows and cushions. ‘Somewhere not too far.’

  ‘You did,’ Razia answered. ‘I heard it too. I have just been talking to Timur, and he says that a mosque has appeared on the island in the river.’

  The air in the room changed.

  ‘Who was the muezzin?’

  ‘No one knows. People woke at his call and followed the sound to the bank. There was the mosque, with a green dome visible through the trees and the mist of the river. But they say that when they rowed across to the building they found it empty.’

  With great tenderness Razia neatened a stray lock of hair on Leila’s forehead and kissed her on the temple. ‘These are very auspicious hours. This miracle augurs great things for the boy about to be born.’

  Leila had been told about the day Timur, her husband, was born. How Razia had been given one hundred and one gold necklaces, five hundred and one finger rings, and one thousand and one pairs of earrings. It was declared that if you could see the smoke of the cooking fires, no matter how far away you were, you should consider yourself invited to the feast – the festivities lasted an entire month. And similar things would no doubt occur after the birth today, though Leila knew she would not be allowed to wear any of the ornaments presented to her. Ten years ago, Razia had taken the oath that the women of the family would strictly abstain from jewellery until the daughters of Kashmir and Palestine were free of their Indian and Israeli oppressors.

  Razia motioned to the shelf where an oversized book bound in green moss-like velvet lay, and two servant girls carried it to her. Since they were Christian, the girls could not touch the sacred volume and so carried it slung on a
shawl between them. They placed it on a table and stepped back. It was the family Book of Omens. An image was painted on each of its right-hand pages, with the explanatory text occurring on the opposite page. During the previous weeks, Razia had asked Leila to open the book at random several times. And on each occasion the day that was just dawning was revealed to be the day of her grandson’s entrance into the world.

  Now once again she brought the book to Leila and it opened on a portrait of Muhammad. He had been painted in a robe of dark blue brocade, with a white turban and crimson boots that curled at the tips, his face unseen behind a veil. He was raising his hand to split the moon in half, the text on the opposite page reading:

  O augury user! Know that the star of your ascendant has come out of malevolence, and your enemies have been disgraced and made contemptible by the grace of the Purest of Men. All your difficulties cease forever from today.

  To others the augury might have appeared cryptic; but according to Razia’s personal logic, there could no longer be any uncertainty about the day of the birth. A retinue of servant girls was installed in Leila’s room. The midwife arrived, and brought with her fresh news of the river-island mosque, how the faithful were crowding the one available boat, a few throwing themselves into the waves to swim towards the work of angels, each swimmer wishing to be the one who would say the second call to prayer from the minaret.

  As the morning progressed, excitement heightened in the mansion. A desiccated Flower of Mary, brought back from the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, had been placed in a bowl of water: a tight knot of wooden tendrils, grasping itself to itself, it opened slowly in the water and was believed to absorb the pain of the mother into itself during birth.

  By the time of the noon prayers, however, when they heard again the call from the minaret, Leila still hadn’t given birth. And Timur’s child had not been born by the time of the afternoon prayers either. Leila, with a dreamlike expression, contemplated every nuance of the muezzin’s call both times, but it wasn’t the same voice as at dawn.

  With the sun moving towards the west, the mother-in-law became acutely anxious, an anxiety that proved baseless because Leila’s pains began, at last, just as the evening prayers approached – the hour every Thursday when the dead visited the living.

  Timur was being kept informed via a mobile phone that a servant girl operated for Razia. Initially he stayed in the men’s section of the mansion, but as time passed he came closer and closer to Leila’s room, until eventually he was just on the other side of the door. He was a man of exact speech who seldom smiled even when alone, and he had carried Leila away from her village a year ago to be his bride, her eyes seeming to cast a brief spell on him. Like his father and grandfather before him, and the fathers and grandfathers before them, he would have needed time to think if asked how many people he had killed or caused to die.

  That evening he was exhausted because he had slept very little during the previous seventy-two hours. In addition to the revelries for the upcoming birth, during the last three nights he had been supervising a group of workers as they secretly built the mosque on the island owned by his rival landowner. Lushly fertile, it was prime terrain and Timur had always been envious of it, always looking for a way to claim it as his own. The mosque was the ideal method to begin depriving the enemy of it. The masons and labourers had to work with minimum light, overcoming fear of snakes, djinns and scorpions. Only once did they think they were about to be discovered – when a truck broke down close to the riverbank and its driver and passengers got out to repair it, their voices reaching the island, the truck’s headlights visible. But they were members of a jihadi organization returning from Faisalabad, the city full of textile factories from whose markets chemicals used in explosives could be bought in bulk without raising suspicion. That was the sole incident. And the plan seemed to be working. Timur had sent word to surrounding villages about the miracle of angels, and the arriving crowds were threatening to tear his rival and his men to pieces if they pulled down the sacred structure, or hindered anyone’s access to it.

  Timur heard a cry from Leila’s room a few minutes before the call to the fifth and final prayer of the day sounded. He was at the door and the midwife emerging from the room in great panic ran into him. She stumbled to her knees and then, repeatedly begging his and his family’s forgiveness, receded towards the staircase, her bloody hands leaving smears on the floor. The servant girls were the next to come out, and they too fled. Finally, with a look of utter devastation on her face, his mother appeared. Timur went into the room where he saw Leila dead on the bed sheets, the crying newborn by her side. He knew she was dead, but then she made a movement and raised her eyelids to look at him. He approached and grabbed her by the hair and, lifting his free hand as high as he could, he struck her face.

  The minutes-old baby on the bed was a girl.

  II

  Never ever has a girl been born in this family,’ Razia said, an hour after the birth, tears running down her cheeks.

  No verification was required, as it was a fact known throughout the province. Nevertheless, and half-heartedly, because a part of her was unable to accept the calamity that had befallen her son, she opened her Quran and scrutinized the family tree inscribed on the endpapers. The book was once owned by the founder of the dynasty, who was believed to have arrived in the region in the train of Emperor Babur. Along with the ancient dagger with which the umbilical cord was traditionally cut, she had kept the Quran within reach in anticipation of Timur’s son, for his name and date of birth to be added on to the tree, in royal-blue ink if born during the day, in black if during the night.

  Razia knew her son would inevitably vent his grief at Leila for daring to transform his seed into a female child. She had to make sure it was not excessive: for a few minutes, while he was in there with Leila, she stood outside the door with an implacable expression on her face, her heart breaking at his immense sorrow, and then she went in. Timur’s temper when roused was ungovernable, but he always maintained the careful good manners of a son in the presence of his mother. ‘She has learned her lesson, I am sure,’ she said, shielding Leila from him. ‘Forgive her now.’

  Timur left the room and paced the grounds of the mansion until midnight, the moon and stars motionless above him. His mobile phone sounded three times in quick succession: twice it was friends calling from the celebrations wondering where he’d got to, and the third time one of those unsolicited texts reading: The prisoners of Guantanamo are crying out for a saviour, forward this SMS to 10 others. The air was briefly scored with a luminous arc as he hurled the instrument against a tree trunk. His child, his firstborn, was a female. His breast seethed with the fact, and he felt upon him the contempt and ridicule of his ancestors, of his friends and companions. Of the entire male population of the province, and of the women too. Sunk in darkest despair, he sat on the steps of a pavilion with his head held tightly in his hands. Lowering himself on to the pavilion floor, Timur fell asleep, waking up several hours later covered in dew. As one possessed of a sudden realization, he stood up with a jolt and went towards the house in long strides.

  His mother was on a balcony, facing the direction of the miraculous mosque and mouthing a prayer. She had hung her thousand-bead rosary around her neck, looping the length of it on to her right wrist several times. She heard him come into the room behind her. But when she went in she only caught a glimpse of him leaving: the gun cabinet was open, the glass doors swinging on their hinges. She shouted his name in alarmed distress, and although Timur heard her he did not stop as he hurried towards Leila’s room, taking the stairs two at a time.

  Leila, half asleep on the bed, tried to sit up when she saw her husband enter.

  ‘Who is he?’ he asked her, approaching and pressing the barrel of the gun under her jaw. ‘The child can’t be mine. The only explanation is that you have another man, someone inferior.’ He lifted the gun to the wall behind her and pulled the trigger, bringing the barrel back on to her
after the explosion of stone-dust. ‘Who is he?’

  Just then Razia entered, out of breath, and she grabbed the barrel, pulling it off Leila’s neck. ‘She is at fault but you must stop behaving like a madman,’ she said as she led Timur towards the door. ‘She has wronged you, but you can win merit from Allah by forgiving her. And I know just the remedies that will correct her internal mechanisms. There are a hundred ways to make her insides obey you.’

  ‘I remember a story that there was a tunnel under this house, so its inhabitants could escape in case of enemy attack,’ Timur said, almost to himself. ‘He could have got in that way.’

  They were nearly out of the room when Leila asked in a hollow voice, ‘Where is she?’

  Timur didn’t turn round. It was his mother who spoke.

  ‘Where is who?’

  Leila placed an arm across her eyes and began to weep.

  Razia – staying Timur with a touch of her hand – told her in a reasonable tone, ‘The bloodline has never seen an affront of this nature. It has been decided that the child cannot be accepted into the family. She has been sent away. It’s the best thing for all concerned.’

  Leila seemed unable to stop weeping. Razia sat down and took her into her arms. She waved a hand towards Timur who was staring at Leila with vehement hatred. ‘Leave us now. She will make it up to you within ten months.’