In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘Thank you, I feel better for talking to you, Uncle.’
    In her room, she sat on the bed cross-legged, closed her eyes, leaned back against the wall, and thought, After all, why not? Why shouldn’t I ?
     
     
    Saleema avoided Rafik during the next few days, watching him, but not presuming on the intimacy of their one conversation. She had never been discreet, so that although she did this almost unconsciously, it suggested to her new possibilities of relation, defined not by constraint – which she understood – but by delicacy. Then fate stepped in to reward her. Every year, at the time of the wheat harvest, K. K. Harouni went for a week to his farm at Dunyapur, on the banks of the Indus. His daughter Begum Kamila that year accompanied him, and therefore Saleema went too.
    Early on the morning of the departure the two cars stood in front of the house, one under the portico, for the Sahib and Kamila, and the other for the servants. The drivers polished the cars while they waited, leaning over to clean the windshields, experts. Saleema had tied her clothes in a bag. She had bought a new pair of sandals the day before, and now the red plastic straps were cutting into her feet. When the master came out, leaning on Rafik’s arm, those who were sitting on their haunches stood up sharply. He got into the car, called Shah Sahib the accounts manager over, spoke to him briefly through the lowered window, and then the car pulled away, passed under the alley of ancient flame-of-the-forest trees, and turned out the gate. Everyone relaxed, Shah Sahib lit a cigarette, looked without interest over the scene, and returned to his office.
    ‘Come on, come on, get it done,’ Samundar Khan driver said to the gardeners, who were loading provisions into the trunk of the second car.
    Hassan sat in the front, wearing a lambskin cap that brushed the roof, Rafik and Saleema in the back, a basket of food on the seat between them. She had never before ridden in a private car. Sitting with her hands on her knees, she looked out the window at the old shops along the Mall, Tollington Market, where Hassan went on his bicycle to buy chickens and meat, then the mausoleum of Datta Sahib.
    I suppose people looking in must wonder who I am, she thought.
    As they came across the Ravi River bridge she asked if she could open her window, not so much because she wanted to, as to register her presence. Hassan and Samundar Khan were arguing about whether the fish in the river had been getting bigger or smaller in the last few years.
    ‘O for God’s sake,’ said Hassan, ‘what do you know about it. I’m a cook, and I’ve been cooking fish longer than you’ve been breathing. Listen to me, once upon a time the fish used to be half as big as this car.’
    ‘For you old guys everything used to be bigger.’
    With Hassan, this could go on for hours. Saleema asked again, ‘Can I open the window please?’
    They were stuck in traffic going through the toll.
    ‘Go ahead,’ Samundar Khan said. ‘The air’s free.’
    She couldn’t find the handle. Rafik leaned over and touched the button, and the window glided down. He pointed out at the river. The rising sun threw a broad stripe of orange on the chocolate brown water. Bicycles and donkey carts and gaudy Bedford trucks streamed in and out of the city over the bridge. He gestured with his eyes at Samundar Khan and Hassan debating nonsense in the front.
    ‘Wisdom against youth,’ he whispered.
     
     
    Saleema drove back into her childhood, through towns the same as those around her home a hundred miles to the east, rows of ugly concrete buildings, crowded bazaars, slums, ponds of sewage water choked with edible water lilies, then open country, groves of blossoming orange trees, the ripe mustard yellow with flowers; but she rode in an immaculate car instead of a bus crashing along thick with the odor of the crowd. She had painted her nails the night before; her hand rested on the sill of the window, the