Haveli Read Online Free PDF Page B

without limiting Mumtaz’s freedom to play. That might defuse Amina’s complaints.
    Shabanu felt pleased with her decision and turned her thoughts to her first trip to Lahore to shop for Zabo’s dowry.
    Her mind buzzed with excitement long after Rahim had fallen asleep again.
    She had already decided that she and Zabo should stay at the
haveli
, the family’s ancestral house in the old walled city of Lahore. Rahim had lived there with his brothers when they were boys in school. His sister Selma, a widow, lived there alone now.
    Rahim’s elder wives hated the drafty old wood building. They all stayed in modern stone and glass bungalows in the more fashionable Cantonment area of Lahore. Selma looked after the
haveli
, and Rahimoften stayed there when the provincial assembly was in session.
    Shabanu had never seen the
haveli
, in the heart of the Mogul city. But now she imagined herself sitting in a window high atop the dilapidated old house, with trees and ferns growing out of drainpipes outside the third-story windows. She would look out through the carved wood screen onto the street, watching the horse-drawn carts as they clattered over the cobbles below.
    Long after the candle had flickered out in the tiny silver stand on the table beside her, she breathed softly and stroked her arms under the crumpled linen of the sheet. But she never closed her eyes. The thought of Lahore and the
haveli
electrified her.
    Before first light, she slipped out of bed and wrapped her shawl tightly about her. Rahim lay snoring, turned on his side, his shoulders lifting with each breath. She spread her jewels on the table beside his pillow, then folded her sari and left it on the floor under his shoes. She scrubbed her face in the basin and whipped her hair into a knot behind her head. She put on an old
shalwar kameez
she’d left in his cupboard, and slipped out.
    Mumtaz had not been afraid in the least the first night Shabanu had spent away from her. In the morning when Shabanu came back from the big house to bathe and breakfast with her, she found the child asleep with her arms around Bundr’s neck.
    Usually Shabanu rose early—earlier than the sun, earlier even than the serving women—and went to bathe in the women servants’ bath across the courtyard.
    This morning, after checking on her daughter, she took the brass bucket from her room to the pump, and her heart rejoiced at the splash and gurgle as only the heart of a desert woman can rejoice at the sound of water. She loved the way the darkness chilled her, as if she were the only soul alive.
    “Why do you want to spend your days in that dusty room behind the stable?” Rahim had asked her again and again. “There’s no water, no heat. You could be here with servants.”
    “I’m still a peasant girl,” she’d said, making her smile dazzle.
    It excited him to have her come to him in the evenings and leave again in the mornings. It was like an illicit love affair, though he continued to insist she move back into the house. But she held on to the room, and the arrangement continued in the same way, week by week.
    Living in the room behind the stable was as close as Shabanu had come to freedom since she’d left Cholistan, and the morning hours before the household awoke were her freest time of all.
    Streaks of green appeared on the horizon, outlining the inky black trees around the courtyard wall as she brought the bucket back and lit the fire in thestable yard pit. The darkness diffused slightly, and stripes of orange appeared beneath the green, and the stars dimmed, and the animals began to stir, and it seemed the day had begun to happen all in one instant.
    Shabanu loved being close to the animal sounds in the morning, as if the horses moving about, the cocks crowing, the cows lowing with their udders full were all intent on letting her know the world was safe for another day.
    By the time the water was heated, the light glinted watery and pale from the rim of the bucket,