Revolt
Praise for Qaisra Shahraz
‘A lean, lyrical meditation on tradition and independence, sensuality and sacrifice, set against the mortal background of modern day Pakistan, Shahraz’s debut beguiles throughout’ The Times
‘Gripping, hugely involving and very satisfying’ Kate Mosse
‘Full of vivid details about the lives and loves, the duties and desires in Muslim family life’ Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
‘An international bestseller … an extraordinary story of love and betrayal in rural Pakistan’ Manchester Evening News
‘An absorbing adventure, from a vivid imagination’ She
‘A riveting family saga’ Bradford Telegraph and Argus
‘Stunning debut novel. An intricate study of love, family, politics and sacrifice’ Eastern Eye
‘Compulsive reading … An intriguing tale of love, envy and jealousy’ Asian Times
‘A real story-telling gift’ Sue Gee
‘A very moving tale of love, passion and Islamic traditions … difficult to put down’ BBC National Asian Network
REVOLT
Qaisra Shahraz
For my beloved sister Farah
Contents
Praise for Qaisra Shahraz
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1 The Girl
CHAPTER 2 The Closed Doors
CHAPTER 3 Laila
CHAPTER 4 Jubail
CHAPTER 5 The Elopement
CHAPTER 6 The Return
PART TWO
CHAPTER 7 Daniela
CHAPTER 8 The Jewels
CHAPTER 9 The Surprise
CHAPTER 10 The Evil Shadow
CHAPTER 11 The Goorie
CHAPTER 12 The Visit
CHAPTER 13 The Jilted
CHAPTER 14 The Fairy
CHAPTER 15 The Servant’s Revolt
CHAPTER 16 The Betrayal
CHAPTER 17 The Sisters’ Agony
CHAPTER 18 The Goldsmith’s Wife
CHAPTER 19 The Kidnapping
PART THREE
CHAPTER 20 The Friends
CHAPTER 21 The Cousins
CHAPTER 22 The Intruder
CHAPTER 23 The Sisters
CHAPTER 24 The Meeting
CHAPTER 25 The Party
CHAPTER 26 The Jealousy
CHAPTER 27 The Falling Out
CHAPTER 28 The Departure
CHAPTER 29 The European
CHAPTER 30 The Adoration
CHAPTER 31 The Wooing
CHAPTER 32 The Rivals
CHAPTER 33 The Lovers
CHAPTER 34 The Row
CHAPTER 35 The Housekeepers
CHAPTER 36 The Sisters
CHAPTER 37 The Kiss
CHAPTER 38 The Making-Up
CHAPTER 39 The Feast
CHAPTER 40 The Mission
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 41 The Visit
CHAPTER 42 The Proposal
CHAPTER 43 Time of Need
CHAPTER 44 The Potter’s Son
CHAPTER 45 The Farewell
CHAPTER 46 The Cry
CHAPTER 47 The Wedding
CHAPTER 48 The Reunion
CHAPTER 49 Rashid
CHAPTER 50 The Door
Epilogue
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About the author
Copyright
Prologue
Barefooted, Massi Fiza panted up the marble stairs and dashed straight through the mosquito-netted door and the brocade drapes, into the village goldsmith’s lounge. Clutching her jute laundry bag against her flat chest, she hovered over the seated figure of her friend Rukhsar, exclaiming: ‘Another suicide bombing!’
Perched on a pile of cushions, an aluminium casket of gems in front of her, the village siniaran was engrossed in the nimble task of inserting tiny pearls into a gold bridal collar set.
‘What?’ Rukhsar cried, abandoning her work, not relishing this sudden intrusion late in the evening, just when the next episode of her favourite Indian drama was about to start.
Shabnum, Rukhsar’s 24-year-old eldest daughter, sitting reading a play on the sofa, gawped; the house linen had already been collected. Nevertheless she cheerily offered:
‘A cup of our Italian coffee, Massi Fiza?’
The jute bag slipped out of Massi Fiza’s hand. Grimacing, Shabnum quickly reached to retrieve it from their kashmiri silk rug, rolling her kajal-lined eyes in disgust. The laundrywoman rarely had time to wash this item.
‘Massi Fiza!’ The goldmistress, now quite rattled, reached up to shake her friend’s arm. ‘You OK?’
‘Another bombing!’ Massi Fiza repeated as if in a trance.
Rukhsar was now on her feet. ‘What? Where?’
‘In two mosques in Malakand.’
‘Oh, Allah Pak, not another one! What’s happening to our poor country? So many innocent people killed by explosions and those American drones!’
‘My sons! What if …?’ Massi Fiza stopped short, lowering her gaze.
‘What would they be doing in Malakand?’ Rukhsar’s eyes narrowed. ‘Have you got their phone numbers?’
Massi Fiza shook her head; numbers just did not tally with her brain cells and technology of any sort frightened her. Therefore she had never learned to use those ‘silly’ mobile phones, as she called them.
‘Sit and relax, Massi Fiza. Shabnum will make your favourite coffee from the expensive pot, whilst I finish the pearlwork on this necklace.’
Massi Fiza pulled herself out of her trance but remained standing.
‘What are you reading, Shabnum?’
‘Ruhi’s book, Othello – a sad Engrezi love story. A drama by William Shakespeare.’ Shabnum cheekily held it up, her cheeks heavy with laughter. What would the semi-illiterate laundrywoman know about literature?
‘Engrezi kitab? Weelly Speer?’ squeaked Massi Fiza, staring in awe at the English book.
The English alphabet had always intimidated her; her punishment for mixing up the upper and the lower cases in her fifth class was a good telling-off from her sour-faced teacher, who, as known to the entire village, had only been educated to a tenth jamaat class herself. Massi Fiza did triumph in some areas, however, managing to master words like ‘cat’ and ‘dog’.
‘Never mind “Willy Speer” – let’s talk.’ Rukhsar chuckled at Massi Fiza’s struggle with the name of the great English Bard. The laundrywoman’s five primary classes in an under-resourced village school never quite qualified her to sample Shakespeare’s masterpieces. Rukhsar’s twelfth class, however, in the posh college in town, did. Romeo and Juliet still remained the goldmistress’s favourite Shakespearean drama.
‘Whose set are you working on now, Rukhsar-ji?’ Massi Fiza’s envious eyes were hawked on the necklace.
‘Saher’s … the lawyer woman’s wedding.’
‘Of course! What an exciting week, Rukhsar-ji,’ Massi Fiza smirked, colour rushing back into her gaunt mahogany-brown cheeks.
‘Is it?’ Rukhsar challenged, settling back on the soft pile of cushions in the middle of the room, sure that her neighbour had plenty of salacious news to share; her keen eyes behind the large designer glasses assessing both the emotional landscape of her friend’s face and the necklace still to be completed. Rukhsar happily forfeited her favourite Indian drama serial in order to acquaint herself with the goings-on in Gulistan.
‘So! Tell me!’ Rukhsar eagerly prompted, her high-cheekboned face coquettishly sloped to one side, adding a healthy jowl to her neckline.
Forgetting about her wicked sons and the suicide bombers, Massi Fiza, her grey eyes alive and mischievous, took a deep breath and proudly announced:
‘The landowners’ “princes” are
back this week!’
‘Princes?’
‘Yes, the zemindar “princes”. Haughty Mistress Mehreen’s son Ismail is coming from London for his wedding. Gentle Mistress Gulbahar’s son Arslan is flying in from New York tomorrow morning. And sour Mistress Rani is busy preparing for her daughter Saher’s wedding. And …’ Fiza stopped, tiptoeing to stand in front of Rukhsar’s tall fan to cool a hot flush stinging across her shoulders and up her scrawny throat. Enjoying the welcoming breeze, she lifted the three amulets garlanding her neck.
‘Go on then …’ her friend slyly goaded. The village dhoban was now in her element, ready to part with the juiciest piece of news.
‘She’s back!’
‘Who?’
‘Laila! The potter’s … after years!’ Massi Fiza abruptly stopped again.
‘Oh!’
‘Well! Did you not expect it – with him returning? You must have seen her? The door is opposite yours.’
‘No, I’m too busy with my work to peer over roof terraces and eavesdrop on the goings-on in my neighbours’ houses, Massi Fiza!’ Rukhsar scoffed good-humouredly before asking, ‘What will happen?’
‘We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we, as it’s all happening at the white hevali? And that’s where I’ll be, first thing in the morning. Good old Begum tells me everything. Of course with quite a bit of bossing in between! Shabnum, my ladli, where’s my coffee? You’ve heard everything now!’
The topic of bombing was duly thrust aside. What happened elsewhere could not be helped, as long as it had nothing to do with their Gulistan or intrude into their lives.
‘In any event what can I, a humble laundrywoman, do to stop such atrocities?’ she silently bewailed.
Then she paled, a sombre thought crossing her mind, remembering the long, thick, black beard framing her son’s narrow face the last time he had visited her. ‘What if my sons have got in with the wrong company? And been brainwashed by those horrible men!’ Then laughed aloud at her runaway imagination, making her friend raise her head from the bridal collar set in her hand.
Massi Fiza immediately straightened her face; there were some things you did not share even with good trusted friends.
‘Oh, Allah Pak! I forgot the box!’
‘The box?’ Rukhsar duly dropped the pearl between her fingers.
‘The Gujjar’s poor son … waiting thirteen years for the American green card is returning home in a box! Guess what, he got the card, but two days later snuffed it … heart attack or sugar problem. His poor family is at the airport to collect the body. Can you imagine it? All those years of waiting and cheating on his wife?’ Massi Fiza hastened to explain as Rukhsar’s neatly plucked, arched eyebrows had shot up. ‘You know he kept a Hispanic mistress in Chicago! The besharm man made no bones about it, openly boasting, and in front of us women, too, about cohabiting with her … to get that yellow card! Fancy abandoning your wife and kids for years, and when it’s time for the poor lot to join him he shoots up to the heavens! Bad timing or what! No one dares to mention his American haram brood he has left behind. Two lots of children on two continents! Terrible!’
Making a face in distaste, Rukhsar nimbly picked up another tiny pearl from the casket. ‘I hate this modern curse – this migration thing, Massi Fiza! It destroys families! My heart bleeds for his poor Zubeda, patiently biding her time for years and now left with a house full of luxury items, tears, four children to wed, not to mention looking after his elderly parents for the rest of her life! She’ll not see America, I tell you! Do you think anyone will let her go now – unless her son takes her!’
‘Well, it’s not that bad!’ Bristling, Massi Fiza went on the defensive, thin mouth tightly pursed. ‘Migration – going to velat must be good or why else would all these young people go raring off to foreign lands, with their families eagerly packing them off? Even their wives remain contented – delighted with their bank balances. Look at their homes, their standard of living, Rukhsar-ji!’
Massi Fiza would not eliminate the raw envy from her tone. That was how she felt. So why bother hiding it from her friend? How she craved that somebody would arrange for her two good-for-nothing sons to migrate to somewhere in the Middle East. Then she, too, could add a second storey to her house as her neighbours had done.
It still rattled her that the bricklayer had turned their humble dwelling into a grand two-storey villa entirely swathed in marble. Not an inch spared! All from their son’s hard work, digging roads under the scorching Abu Dhabi sun.
Massi Fiza was particularly annoyed because the bricklayer’s house not only dwarfed her three-roomed humble house, but its high walls aggressively blocked half the sunlight that her laundry business desperately needed. The bricklayer was now a bricklayer in name only, since his son’s foreign remittances padded his bank account. And the airs of his womenfolk, especially the illiterate, big-mouthed mother Jeena, grated on Massi Fiza. Within months they had graduated into a class of their own on the village social ladder, particularly on the scale of snobbery.
‘Rich but no manners!’ Massi Fiza fumed in front of her many clients. The bricklayer’s household delighted in repaying her animosity by packing off their laundry to the other village laundry house, the dhobi ghat.
‘Well, it has not made a two paisa difference to the quiltmaker’s home! Poor Zeinab is still digging holes in her fingers from all the darning she does with those long needles. The floors of her house are still brick-lined and the roof, I believe, still has a mud veneer that she annually slaps on herself with her calloused hands,’ Rukhsar stridently reminded her friend, now quite worked up on the subject of migration; hating people who abandoned their families to migrate elsewhere.
Irritated, she was about to scold, ‘Massi Fiza, I wish you would wear a bra sometimes!’ but stopped short. Instead, she averted her gaze from her friend’s brown nipples poking through the thin lawn fabric of her kameez. Rukhsar knew the cheeky answer her friend would throw her way. ‘Allah Pak has not blessed me with your large bosom! There’s practically nothing for the cups to hold! So why bother, and in the summer heat?’
Rukhsar proudly glanced down at her own perfect bosom to make sure that it was not ‘swelling’ out of the neckline of her kameez from her crouched position.
‘That’s because her son-in-law’s wealth has gone into his parents’ city house,’ Massi Fiza scoffed, unaware of her friend’s train of thought on nipples and breasts. ‘Oh dear, I must be off.’
‘Don’t forget to keep me informed.’
‘Of course I will! Especially about what’s happening in the homes of the three zemindar sisters. Master Arslan is coming tomorrow morning. Begum tells me that there’ll be a big homecoming party that Master Haider will host. But will they let her through the door? That’s the big question. We’ll have to see, won’t we! It’s going to be quite an exciting time in our Gulistan.’
‘For you, Massi Fiza, yes! But I’m stuck here in chardevari, behind these four walls, working on these gold machlis!’ Rukhsar gently teased.
‘Must hurry. Need to soak the whites!’ She scurried out of the room; for once without drinking Shabnum’s Italian coffee. Meeting the grey-haired master goldsmith on the stairs, she blushed, hurriedly draping her red-dyed muslin shawl over her chest. With a shy smile Massi Fiza sidled past him, muttering her ‘salaams’ at the bottom of the steps, whilst shuffling her feet back into her green, bleached, plastic sandals.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
The Girl
In Gulistan village, the morning sun was high up over the sugarcane fields. Nine-year-old Shirin, in a white frilly frock with matching chooridaar pyjama, her auburn curls swinging around her shoulders, hopped along the dusty path to her favourite spot – the large termite mound.
Thrusting back her thick fringe with her small hand, she excitedly peered at the mound; colander-like dotted with holes. Yesterday she had delightedly watched hundreds of lively ants swarming out and zigzagging down the dry cakey o
uter crust.
Disappointed, Shirin aggressively poked holes with her sharp twig. A small crust, alive with dozens of little ‘beasts,’ came away in her hand. Shrieking she dropped it. Scrambling out of the holes, the stringy rows of ants were marching down the sun-baked mound.
Startled on hearing the sound of horses’ hooves and the imperious voice shouting, ‘Get out of our way, girl!’ she stepped back, stumbling over a stone.
Shirin fell straight onto a dry tuft of grass and tangles of brushwood, their sharp blades digging into her soft thighs. Howling in pain, she blinked up at the towering horse’s white legs. The rider with his thick crop of reddish-brown hair glinting fire in the morning sun glared down at the girl. Her lower lip quivering, Shirin’s vision blurred. Then Ali, another rider, appeared, coming to an abrupt stop near her, gripping tightly onto the reins of his horse. It was the girl!
The man with the reddish-brown hair pulled tightly at his reins and sped his horse towards the village, leaving a heavy screen of warm, dewy morning dust behind him.
‘Are you all right, piari shahzadi?’ Ali whispered.
His gentle tone and endearing words, ‘lovely princess’, triggered the flood of tears Shirin had been holding back.
Distressed on her behalf, he asked, ‘Shall I take you home?’ reaching down to pull her up onto his horse.
‘Ali!’
Ali’s hand tightened on the girl’s arm as he faced his master. Trembling, Shirin turned a bewildered look at the other rider glaring at them from a distance and then pulled herself away, staring down in horror at the grassy stains soiling her favourite frock.
His mouth an angry slit, Ali asked. ‘All right, princess?’
Shirin nodded; mouth a beguiling small pout and eyes two shimmering blue gems. She liked this man; he had brought them food the other night and always called her piari shahzadi.
Satisfied that the girl was OK, Ali sped up the path to the village square, stealing a look over his shoulder and flashing another kind smile at her.
Shirin remained staring after them, until she felt the tiny bites on her bare toes. Ants were scurrying around her feet.