TWO MEN HAD died of heat stroke the day before. It was a record summer for sweltering temperatures. Annette felt irritated by the mindless cruelty of the sun, remembering how hushed and still all the birds in the aviary had been the day before, how listless all the magnificent cats were. Surely, it had to stop. One hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit was a ridiculous peak to maintain, enough to turn the most dedicated sun worshippers into apostates. At the best of times, Lahore Zoo was not a perfect place for animals; these temperatures were putting their lives at serious risk. It must stop soon.
She dropped the corner of the heavy curtains flinching from the glare, cherishing the last few moments of the cool darkness before she went out to face the sun’s white hostility.
Her short sun-bleached hair spiked away from her face as she pushed weary fingers through it. Feeling wizened and faded, she rubbed the sides of her skirt with both hands in a vain attempt to iron out the creases. Time to go. It was nearly five o’clock, but the sun, not seeming to notice this, still blazed down vengefully on the breathless, parched scene below.
‘Sahib aa gaya?’ she asked in her heavily accented Urdu as the lime-juice-with-soda appeared from behind the curtain magically. Kammu’s timing was always perfect.
‘No, Memsahib,’
his tone was mildly apologetic as he answered, eyes averted respectfully, the
tray held out before her.
‘Thank you. Tell
driver five minutes.’ She sought the aid of her hands to mime her meaning this
time.
Not back yet.
Won’t see him now until dinner. He was supposed to go for golf at five-thirty.
So, he’s changing at the club again. He could have telephoned. Nine years of
this and it still hurts. She tried to block the hurt from her mind as she got
her things together. A little navy parasol, beige straw bag, sunglasses and the
vet’s handbook permanently borrowed from the British Council Library.
The heat outside lashed
her face as she hastened into the cool protection of the blue Toyota. The zoo
was not far from their house on the G.O.R. estate. Thirty-seven years after the
British left, it was still the most privileged address in Lahore with its
exclusive Government Officers’ residences, still standing in their vast lawns
behind exclusive boundary walls, faded but desperately holding on to the
aloofness of their old masters.
It was past
locking-up time at the zoo, five o’clock; but in the absence of the threatening
finality of a bell it took the efforts of the entire staff to persuade people
to believe that the gates would shut at five and that they must head for the
way out or risk being locked inside. Reluctant children dragged their feet,
sucking ice creams that dribbled down their fingers in the intense heat faster
than they could gulp them down. The adults, ready for the shade, flapped
around, anxious for whatever transport (or lack of it) awaited them outside the
gate.
The gatekeeper
interrupted his role of town crier to open the gates for Annette’s car. They
drove towards the depot past the last few stragglers and the superintendent’s
residence located at the far end. Hussain was all prepared for her arrival,
books and registers, buckets and pans laid out in the veranda where he sat on
what looked like a dried out chair, his feet, cracked and dusty, sticking out
of the thongs of his chappals. He stood up promptly to receive her.
Brief formalities exchanged, his daily offer of a cold drink declined as usual,
they got down to business.
Annette now sat on
the shaky chair and looked through the entries in all the ledgers while Hussain
rummaged about in the store, weighing up and measuring out the grain for the
birds and the fruit for the monkeys. Madam preferred to check the weight of the
fish and the meat, so he would only weigh those when she’d finished reading all
the entries for food delivered into the stores that day. It took about forty
minutes to get all the food ready and then the two boys, whose main job was to
assist the head-gardener in tidying the lawns, would come to help Hussain feed
the animals under the watchful eye of the Memsahib.
He wondered about
her sometimes. Who she was, where she came from and what kind of love of
animals this was that brought her out in the afternoon sun when most other
women of her class still dozed in darkened rooms. He knew that he had this job
because of her, in a way. It was common knowledge that the previous
superintendent had been sacked because of her intervention. The gatekeeper had
told him the story many times: how she came to visit the zoo about two years
ago, saw that the animals looked thin and under-fed and decided to complain.
She wrote letters, made approaches and got them to change the Super.
The day Hussain took
charge she was there with a letter from the governor that said she had his
permission to ‘inspect’ the food before it was given to the animals and that
she would personally ensure the animals had a proper diet. To this day, she had
never been late. Hussain got into a routine of being ready for her, terrified
of what might happen if she became angry again. The gatekeeper, Maaja, thought
her an interfering busybody. ‘Poor Nawaz Saab, thrown out with his family of
eight in such disgrace, he’s still not found a job, and he’s a good man
really.’ He always ended with a sigh. At this point in the conversation,
Hussain would lose interest in the story and walk off, remembering something
important that needed doing.
Annette, exhausted
with the heat that day, sticky summer dress clinging to her body, sat down to
rest herself on a bench shielded by a grove of jasmine and hibiscus bushes. The
heat that day made it impossible for her to trail Hussain on his round to feed
the animals, which she always did. The heavy perfume of the flowers battled
with the odor of the animal cages; water was a problem in the summer months and
the cages smelt foul two-thirds of the time. She was worried about Heera. He
seemed even more listless than he’d been the day before, quite disinterested in
the meat that Hussain pushed into the cage unceremoniously. She opened her
manual wondering if they should be getting in touch with the vet, or whether
she should just observe him more closely. She was fond of him. He was popular
with many of the staff too. They had nicknamed him Heera because of the diamond
glint to his eyes at night. He was as lively and mischievous a cheetah as any
you could find in the Sundarbans, but this summer had really knocked it out of
him. She picked up her bag and started walking slowly, unthinkingly, and back
toward his cage, the sound of her footsteps muffled by the soft mud.
Instinctively, she
drew back out of sight when she saw the woman. She had not seen or heard
Annette, intense, absorbed, she was circling the cage slowly, carefully moving
inside the forbidden inner perimeter of the white railings. Only members of
staff were allowed into that area. Even Annette respected that boundary. She
watched awestruck.
The woman had an
eye on Heera but she didn’t seem unduly worried. Annette almost gasped as she
saw her lean forward and put her arm through the bars to lift a couple of hunks
of meat and slip them speedily into a limp polythene bag. She was a tall woman,
thin, lithe; her mission accomplished, she rose and dashed swiftly away with
such speed, as would have done Heera credit. In the dusky gloom, Annette felt a
frantic need to sit down as her body swayed, weak with shock. She waited to
collect herself for a few moments wondering what had held her back from
challenging the woman. Surely she should have yelled at her? That was what she
was supposed to be doing; preventing the pilfering and thieving that had been
going on for years now. Heera got up slowly and ambled towards his dinner,
sniffing the meat delicately before applying himself to the effort of eating.
It was much later than usual when she finally summoned her energies to leave.
The men were
hanging about the gate waiting to see her off. It wasn’t altogether unusual for
her to leave a little late. She found the quiet and peace of the afterhours at
the zoo sustaining and sometimes sat watching the animals settle down as long
as the light permitted.
Darkness always
fell suddenly as the sun dropped behind the high mud walls of the aviary at the
western boundary of the zoo, forcing her to drag herself away slowly. Today she
felt drained as the car drove past the gate and she lifted a limp hand to
acknowledge their salutes.
She found herself
desperate to talk it over with Saleem that night. He seemed absorbed and distant
over dinner but she raised it all the same. His laugh sounded curt and cold.
‘Didn’t you ring the police?’
‘No.’ Faced with
his amusement, Annette felt uncomfortable. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘Your policing:
the sort of moral crisis you’ve come to.’ His laughter had an unpleasant chilly
edge to it, widening the distance between them.
‘Moral crisis?’
‘I think that’s
what they call it.’ He seemed intent on his fish, picking out the bones with
his fingers. She looked away. After a pause, he asked, ‘did I ever tell you the
story about Mrs. Howe?’
‘I don’t think you
did. Who is she?’ Annette felt irritated by his tone.
‘Was. Yes. Mrs.
Howe was the wife of the Consul-General in Teheran when Papa
was posted there, back in the forties. She loved horses, loved them very much
indeed. Her routine was to go out every afternoon, scouting around the city,
such as it was then, in search of any sick and maltreated horses so she could
take them in.
‘She’d go round in
her jodhpurs, whip in hand, personally whip the guilty owner, and then take the
horse away. She became a dreaded sight. The owners usually got treated worse
than the horses, ended up in jail, and lost a working animal without
recompense.’
‘So?’
‘So, nothing.’ The
tension mounted. Then, ‘Mind you, those were days when a British man-of-war
would steam up to the shores menacingly, if, say, five men gathered in protest
over the price of sugar.’
‘I don’t know what
you’re suggesting, Saleem. What I’m trying to do here is different.’
‘Yeah. I hope so.
You weren’t in your jodhpurs and you didn’t call the police down. I was only
eleven then, much purer in my sense of iniquity than I am now, always for the
underdog. I can tell you though that I, for one, was never sure the horses were
the real underdogs.’
Annette felt a
hopeless, voiceless rage against his cruel remoteness. Hostility,
polarizations, oversimplifications. What had happened to them? She hated
scenes. But her chair scraped angrily as she dropped her napkin and rose to
leave the dining table. She stepped out onto the veranda, gazing abstractedly
at the fireflies in the still, suffocating darkness outside. The radicalism of
their Cambridge days had faded for both of them. In her case, it had dissolved
into a vague defensiveness about her own realities. It had become his style,
she thought angrily, to rub the entire guilt of the white nations into her soul
with a personal venom. Controversies and anger rankled, hanging solidly in the
air between them.
He knew well
enough, she thought sadly, how she felt about the animals at the zoo. They were
special to her, like family, her babies almost. It was as if someone had
deprived one of her own children. A wrong had been committed, and here he was,
confusing issues, blurring the boundaries between wrong and right, trying to set
up a parallel that wasn’t really a parallel at all. Just to humiliate her, show
her up. Not a glimmer of the old passion remained between them to buffer
differences of opinion.
There were other
women in Lahore she knew, white women she could have talked to, but in their
company too, she felt aware of gaps in convictions and assumptions, yawning in
the space between them intensifying her aloneness in this torrid city teeming
with people. He was reducing her, cutting the ground from under her feet,
putting her on the defensive again. She realized now that she’d been foolish
and weak. She really should have called, well, the men, the staff, if not the
police; that was the logical course of action. That night she decided she’d
take it up with Hussain first thing tomorrow.
Her resolution
faltered the next afternoon though, as she looked for a suitable moment to
raise the question. She forced herself to utter, almost under her breath,
‘There’s something I need to ask you, Mr. Hussain.’
‘Yes, Madam,’ he
was alert and politely attentive.
‘How many families
live inside the compound of the zoo?’ she asked.
‘Three, Madam.
Mine, the gatekeeper’s and the gardener’s.’
Somehow she could
not connect that woman with Hussain. She began reluctantly, ‘I — I saw a woman
stealing meat from Heera’s cage yesterday.’
He seemed
genuinely shocked. ‘A woman? Was she tall or short, madam?’ He lowered his
voice carefully.
Annette was aware
of the curious eyes of the two boys who were hovering in the veranda. ‘Tall,’
she said.
‘That’s Tara,
madam, Meraaj the gatekeeper’s wife. Shall I get her?’
‘Yes, please.
Afterwards. But you’ll have to stay and talk to her for me.’
She was already
dreading the interview.
It was certainly
not easy. Tara came, a poorly dressed but strikingly good-looking woman. A
mangy, snot-stained baby perched on her hip and a dust-encrusted toddler
trailed by her side holding on to her faded yellow shalwar. She
stopped to deposit them both on the patch of grass outside before she came in
and stood before them, looking rebellious and defiant rather than evasive or
contrite. For a few moments it seemed as though she would say nothing by way of
explanation or apology. She had turned her face away. Annette could feel a
righteous throb of anger building up inside her head. But then, quite suddenly,
the woman launched into a voluble emotional speech. Annette could not make much
of the words. She looked at Hussain for explanation. He coughed in some
embarrassment and tried to respond to Tara, but Annette held him back. ‘Tell me
first,’ she spoke imperiously.
‘She says
something about Heera, madam ... that he wants her to take some of his food,’
Hussain muttered, his disbelief in that theory filtering clearly through his
intonation.
‘What makes her
say this?’ The angry throb pounded even more impatiently in Annette’s head.
Intent, impatient, she gazed at the woman’s face as she spoke while Hussain
became more and more irritated and seemed anxious to dissociate himself from
this episode.
‘She says, Heera
won’t go near his food till she’s taken some of it and, she says madam, you can
stay tonight and see for yourself.’
‘That may be
because of the heat and partly because he’s not been well.’ Annette gestured to
Hussain to interpret; but her heart latched on to Tara’s words. She was less
skeptical than Hussain was. Before her eyes was a picture of Heera, sitting in
the shadows yesterday, disinterested in the food, allowing the woman to pinch
it without pouncing or even batting an eyelid.
‘Madam, she says
Heera is an animal with the spirit of a saint. He knows that her children often
have to go hungry so he can’t eat. He waits for her to take something and if,
if she doesn’t take it, the meat will lie around and rot.’ Hussain’s lip was
curling up with cynical disbelief even as he narrated the fantastic story.
A part of Annette
wanted to believe it but, officially she felt obliged to contradict the
proposition. ‘Tell her she’s mistaken would you please Mr. Hussain? Please tell
her she mustn’t do, it again,’ she repeated, in an attempt to bring the
incident to a dignified close.
Hussain felt
disappointed at a certain lack of firmness in Madam as he conveyed this to the
woman. She was not impressed. She was arguing; torrents of words pouring out of
her, as if she were egged on by the success of her initial defense. Annette
looked at her face once again, more closely. It was an open, honest face; her
dark skin glowed with an earnest intensity which completely banished the
righteous throb from her own head. Her story about Heera was like the
confirmation of genius in a child prodigy to an admiring, doting mother.
Annette concluded the interview with a mild warning and turned to leave,
intrigued but more satisfied with the outcome than she had expected to be.
It was Thursday
that day, barbecue night at the Lahore Gymkhana Club. She usually joined Saleem
there for dinner at about eight and they returned late in the evening,
together. She sat nursing her soft drink, waiting for him to come out of the
showers. He’d been playing golf. The usual crowd was there, usual gossip, usual
meaningless pleasantries. Annette waited with some impatience, her spirits
sodden with the emotional exchange of the evening and her brain obsessing with
the larger question mark which hung over her marriage, a question she had
blinked away for so long.
Plain as daylight,
it was all over. Children and mortgages, the aspic which magically holds
marriages together, had both been denied them. The house they lived in had
belonged to Saleem’s father and came to them unencumbered and, though she might
have loved having children, they had to learn to live with the disappointment
of not having any. It had not really been a deep regret, not to her, not so
far, but she secretly dreaded that, in this society, it could easily become
one. She’d thrown herself with energy into other things; the zoo was one of
them Tara had shaken all her certainties today. And Heera, of course. She
thought of her coming up the burning concrete pathway with her two children, of
her conviction that Heera wanted them to share his food. She saw herself in the
veranda of the depot, with Hussain, checking, weighing, inspecting all the food
and cringed a little.
Salem, forgetting
her dilemma of the night before, asked her absently about her day as the waiter
piled the barbecue dishes in ritualistic sequence before them: chicken breasts
followed by kebabs and spicy lamb tikkas, may be worth a day’s
wages for Hussain, two days’ wages for the gatekeeper.
She watched the
food, mesmerized as the appetizing glaze vanished along with the charcoal
flavor and it turned into bloody hunks of tough fibrous beef. She could smell
the raw wetness dripping down its sides. The morsel almost stuck in her throat
choking her with the obscenity of it all. She rounded on Saleem with a bitter
vehemence.
‘It’s over, isn’t
it?’ was all she could manage to say.
End!
Contributed by, Adeeb Ahmed Baloch
Read Summary of The Gatekeeper's Wife here
