The House on Bahadur Shah Zafar Road

Grandfather is agitated when I return from school today. He’s wearing his favorite red pajamas, nineteenthirties vintage. The hem for the drawstring is unraveling, but he refuses to have it sewn. His beige slippers come from a vintage shoemaker in Delhi, who recently passed away.

I like to eat watermelon on the patio, as I think the plantation owners of the American South used to do in the nineteenth century, before the civil war put an end to their lassitude.

There seems to be a gathering storm. Time for a proper monsoon bath, which would be the first this June. In the garden, Meimoona, the fifteen-year-old who’s set to take Zainab’s place—Zainab’s understudy, you might call her— talks to some of the older servants’ grandchildren. She’s telling them how Moses flung down his stick, turning it into the largest of the serpents, scaring off the competing magicians in the Pharaoh’s employ. The children sit in front of a basket of jamuns, the purple juice of the fruit dripping down their chins and necks.

Grandfather walks up to me in short, shuffling steps. “You heard the news?”

I assume he’s talking about Zainab’s impending departure. He has a soft spot for her. I know because whenever she doesn’t bring him breakfast to his study, he spends the whole day being cross. And I’ve had occasion to pick up other, more obvious signals.

“The news these days is all predictable, unexciting,” I say with a worldly air. It’s the kind of attitude that drives my friends and family nuts, except for grandfather, who accepts it on level terms.

“She must take care of it, of course. We must help her take care of it.”

What he’s saying sinks in. “You mean, an…an abortion? Is that what you mean?”

Frail and blue-veined, the sparse frizzy hair on his head standing up, his bifocals hanging on a string reaching his midsection, outside the sacred precincts of his study grandfather is just another old man, waiting for death.

The aura is missing. But his words still have the power to stun.

“We also have to find the bastard who did it. And put him out of business.”

“The bastard who did it is probably one of the servants next door,” I reply. “Some stud who can’t keep it under control.”

“What are these children doing here?” grandfather says, noticing the kids congregated around the jamun basket.

“And who’s this girl?” He stares at Meimoona.

**

“Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.” Mishal rests her head on my shoulder.

“Oh, Abid, doesn’t she have a way with words? I wish I could write poetry like that.”

I put away the bottle of domestic beer that tastes like stale piss. “But you do write poetry.”

“I don’t know how to write poetry,” says Mishal.

I’m beginning to feel drowsy. The news from England isn’t good. My aunt Riffat—a spinster of forty-five, rumored to have a bevy of admirers—has written from Oxford, where she is a lecturer in sociology, that admissions are tougher than ever. I can’t understand her demeaning attitude. I resent anyone who implies anything is too difficult for me.

“To write great poetry, you need great material,” Mishal continues. “Like Wordsworth in the woods, Byron at war, Hardy with his country girls.”

I try to placate her. “Being in love is usually enough.”

She talks about the aforementioned three poets, giving far too much credibility to their idiosyncratic perceptions.

But I remain quiet.

At the end of the harangue, she starts saying, “Before you go to England—”

I know what’s coming next. “I can’t, I really can’t. It wouldn’t be fair to you.”

I’m being a cold-hearted monster, but I think it’s best for her. She’s been carrying around a secret engagement ring from me. Until now, she’s wanted no one else to know.

“I knew you’d say that.” She moves her head from my shoulder, then turns her face away. I know she’s crying, but I can’t bring myself to put a comforting hand on her back.

“I think you should go now,” I say wearily.

Tomorrow evening, she’ll be back, and we’ll perform the same routine. We’ll start off by talking about something intellectual, the way we began two years ago, then it’ll turn into reproach and weeping. I hate this melodrama.

I’m surprised when she doesn’t depart in a huff, leaving no trace of her behind, as she normally does at the end of one of our disputes. Today, she breaks into a weird laugh. Then she talks about how she’d like to travel the world and become a peacemaker, directly contradicting her usual conviction that she’d like nothing better than to stay at home and read novels and poetry until she loses eyesight, like Milton and Joyce.

**