Pigeons, Ledges, and Streets

YOU COULD SAY that this story is about Gamay, the pigeons, the rooftop ledges, or me. But really it is the story of Maasi Ayshan. Not too long ago, I tried to visit my ancestral home in Batala, back in India, and, searching everywhere for the family home, I finally happened upon the home of Maasi Ayshan. At least I think I did. Whenever Mother used to talk about our Batala home, Maasi’s house would always come up. “Our house was on a small hill, and my brother’s courtyard was on the left side of the bazaar. On the right was Maasi’s.” Our homes were always mentioned in the same breath.

The two men who were sent by the doctor-poet of Batala to help me find the house were exasperated. “Sir-ji, sometimes you say right, sometimes left.”

“We’ll find it. There is lots of time. Why are you in such a rush?”

They were running me ragged and would not let me stand in any one place for a minute. All I wanted to do was stroll through the streets and neighbourhoods. Whether or not I find the house, who cares? This was the place we left behind.

“Your home was on the right, or the left?”

“It was here, somewhere in these streets.”

Maasi Ayshan’s house was on the street in front of our house. Reaching out across time, the voice of my mother flows through me from within.

Maasi Ayshan’s house in Lahore was near the last bus stop in Krishan Nagar, our old mohallah, just a few streets from our house. It was a bit far off if you went straight from the market on the main road, but if you went through the lanes, it was quite close. After Partition, their family arrived after being robbed and abused all along the way. They hung onto any place they could get. But then Maasi made a mistake. She settled into her house on the second floor and let others take the ground floor. It was an old house, decaying before our eyes until it dwindled down to almost nothing. But for Maasi it was all she had, so she wouldn’t leave it. Some time passed in the warmth of sharing with the residents of the lower floor, but at last they brought a case in court. Maasi was enraged.

“I was the one who let them in. ‘Okay, you can stay on the lower floor, and we can stay upstairs.’ Who kept a careful eye at that time? Any house could be repossessed. We all thought that we’d be going back, anyway. Who thought they were going to sit here forever? So many houses were empty. God bless your uncle, who worked in Lord Sahib’s office in the Secretariat. He showed us so many places. My husband, Popa’s father, said, ‘Now that we have settled here, this is fine.’ Could we ever have thought something like this was going to happen to us?”

Uncle, Maasi Ayshan’s husband, had already passed away before we knew what was what. Perhaps that was at the root of my mother’s and Maasi’s secret, shared pain: that both of their husbands had passed away in the prime of their youth. Maasi had three sons. Two went abroad and one had stayed with her. Nothing was known about the eldest. All we knew was that he was in some snow-filled country somewhere. But he had neither sent a letter, nor made an appearance in all those years. We didn’t know when or where he had gone. The second one was in England. He would always send spending money back home, and it was that which kept the house running. Maasi’s first son was born in Batala, which went to India at Partition, but the others were born in Lahore. The youngest was in university and was four or five years older than me. When the military dictator got his comeuppance, he was at the head of the procession against him in our mohallah. But we school children were not allowed to go beyond the Laat Sahib’s office, the Punjab Secretariat, and he would send us away with threats.

When the new People’s Party’s government came into power, Maasi’s son became enmeshed in it. He used to come home late at night. We had been going to Maasi’s house since our childhood, so we could all share in our Batala past. After her husband passed away and her two sons went abroad, Maasi’s house—which was already quite old—was empty too. The youngest son would go to university and Maasi was left alone all day at home. We used to bring groceries and look after her. After every second or third day, some cooked food would be sent to her, or she herself would come home and gossip with my mother for hours. When we would go to her house, she would be waiting for us. On the second floor, there were two big rooms, a tiny courtyard and to one side, a small room. Gamay and Rakhi lived in that small room.

Oh yes, I was going to tell the tale of Gamay and the pigeons, wasn’t I?

The tale of Gamay, like our ancestral home in Batala, is fading away. But she was there throughout our childhood. She used to wash the family dishes in Krishan Nagar. But Gamay’s story couldn’t be completed without Rakhi. Just as in Batala while searching for my own home, I was also looking for the home of Maasi Ayshan, so with the story of Gamay, I have to tell the tale of Rakhi too.

Passing through the streets of Krishan Nagar, I could never forget Gamay and Rakhi. Rakhi would hold onto the edge of Gamay’s kameez from behind, and Gamay would put her face straight forward and rush on; Rakhi would follow behind her on bare feet with almost running steps, clutching her small cloth bundle, as if she were also a part of Gamay’s body. I can’t draw a picture of just one of them in my mind. They were one body, two souls. Neither had any relatives or connections. They would live with whomever would have them. Then, after much quarrelling wherever they went, they came to Maasi Ayshan’s. There at last they became part of her family. As long as Maasi lived, they lived with her in that house.

After many years when Auntie Appa Ulfat came from America, I asked her about Gamay. She was very surprised, “Don’t you remember? We met her at the same time.” But then she told as much as she knew.

“I saw Gamay when she first came from the village. She was well off, as far as her family background was concerned. By caste she was a malik, a landowner, and they had lands near the Ravi River. When she was married, she kept Rakhi with her. Rakhi was one of God’s special people—you know, something was not quite right with her—perhaps since birth. Or maybe she got that way later. Who knows? But nobody did anything for her, until Gamay. After Gamay got married, her husband threw her out because of Rakhi. “You can keep Rakhi, or live with me,” he said. After she quarrelled with her brothers, too, she came with Rakhi to live at Maasi Ayshan’s. It is said that there was also a dispute with the brothers over land. But she never discussed it. We always saw her at Maasi Ayshan’s home. Nobody ever came to see her.”

Fair-skinned, Gamay was a sturdy peasant woman, with a full, strong body and a ring in her nose. No one dared even look at her the wrong way. She, in contrast, would never look at anyone. She was always quietly lost in her work. There was something on her face, something in between anger and nervousness; you couldn’t quite call it annoyance. It seemed as if there was something unacceptable around her, or a sense of the world’s indifference. There was also a kind of sadness. As the Sufi poet Madho Lal Hussain said, “Neither happiness nor grief should find their place in the heart.”

Gamay used to do only one thing: wash dishes. She wouldn’t touch anything else. Scrubbing or wiping or something like that she would never do. Sometimes women would get fed up, but she didn’t let anything bother her. She would say, “If you want your dishes washed, great. Otherwise, it is up to you.” She would do her work with great attention, however. For her, there was only her work.

Rakhi was truly touched by God. Physically, she was like a skeleton, without a bit of flesh on her body. She would just keep waving her hands in front of her face madly as if she was talking to or calling someone, or trying to stop them. I don’t know which, but it was either fearsome or fearful. Or she would just laugh, showing her teeth. She wouldn’t leave Gamay for a single moment. When Gamay would wash dishes, she would sit close to her and open the small sack she carried and laugh, showing her teeth. She had hidden all the world’s treasures in that bag. There were hair clips, hair pins, a soap box, empty packets of cigarettes, a toothbrush, pillow covers, small children’s toys, glass beads, empty tiny bottles of scent, small empty nail polish bottles, empty powder boxes, and God knows what else.

She wouldn’t allow anyone to touch her bag. Whenever anything got lost, everybody would say, “Search Rakhi’s bag, it must be there!” But you would have to get a hand on it first! If you tried to take the bag, Rakhi would try to hide behind Gamay, clinging to her. Gamay would pay her no mind and remain absorbed in her work. In the end, if you tried to snatch the bag forcibly, she would desperately throw it away. All the things inside would scatter. Then you and whoever else was behind the mischief would feel ashamed. You’d be forced to collect all the things yourself and try to give her back the bag. But then Rakhi would stand apart and wouldn’t touch it. By the next day, though, she would have the bag back in her armpit, carrying it everywhere.

There was a small room or storage closet on top of Maasi’s house. The pigeons lived there. No one knows from where and when the pigeons had settled there. Maybe they were from before Partition. But we used to call that room “the pigeon house.” For us, it was a place of freedom, but for Maasi, it was her rooftop. Maasi would stay in her room downstairs all day and we would spend all day on the roof. We would let the pigeons fly, make wagers on which would fly best, and play games. There were so many pigeons you couldn’t count them. The cooing of pigeons and the slight sting of the smell of their droppings permeated the area in all directions. It would come to you, stinging your nose, as you climbed the stairs to Maasi’s house. The more respectable members of our family stopped going to Maasi’s: why would one go there, just to smell pigeon droppings? If a woman visited, she would pull her dupatta, her long scarf, over her nose while talking. In truth, that was all just a pretence. They did not want to go to see Maasi anyway. She was not of their class.

Every three or six months, Maasi would bribe us, and we would put on our shorts or hitch up our lungis to wash the rooftop while the pigeons soared above. We would fill and carry up buckets of water from below and soon all the stairs down to the bottom would be flowing with water and pigeon droppings. Whoever would come would lift the legs of his shalwar and back away saying, “Oh my God, forgive me.” The people from the ground floor would have something to say about it too. The pigeons would fly high and then they would come down again all at once on the roof or would fly low above it like a cloud. Whenever the pigeons would take off like this, everybody would be surprised: “How can Maasi keep so many pigeons?” The huge flying mass of Maasi’s pigeons hung in the sky and dimmed the sun, creating a huge shadow. Any bit of bread that was left in our house was earmarked for Maasi’s pigeons. Quite a few houses around would send old, dry bread for them. It is Maasi’s pigeons that remain in our minds now, flying and cooing.

Sometimes a cat would come and launch an attack. If by chance the door of the pigeon house was left open, or someone had forgotten to fix the latch, the cat would come upon the birds in the middle of the night. The story of the cat’s attack would make its way around the neighbourhood for days. The children of our mohallah would come to see the dead and wounded pigeons over and over again. Maasi would burst into tears, and we could not hold back our cries. When the cat attacked at night, it was as if we could hear the voices of thousands of feathers sobbing heavily, as if some huge wounded bird was circling the house. It was terrifying. Then, after completing her task, the cat would disappear into the shadows. Behind her, she would leave broken pigeon feathers, the dark red splatter of blood on the walls, half-dead naked pigeon bodies, and the writhing and wriggling of infant birds and broken eggs. Then we would bring buckets full of water to wash the walls. The pigeon house couldn’t be locked so that the pigeons would continue to come in and out to peck at their food as we worked.

I was free in those days. After taking the basic high school exams at the end of tenth grade, which decide who can study further and who cannot, I roamed here and there. Everything looked new and full, and my heart longed to act, to do something, with love and care and passion. Emotions rose like the pigeons to touch the skies; my eyes filled with the deep blue colour, spilling over. One needs proof of one’s existence at that age, more than ever before or again. This is that age when the lover weeps in hiding if their beloved turns away. When the newly grown hair on the face starts to look good but is accompanied by the desire to shave it away. Life never again changes as much as it does in tenth grade.

Popa’s room was filled with books. He was never at home; God knows when he used to read them. I read Gorky’s Mother from among his books. Those books brought me awareness of the idea of sharing wealth for the sake of all and understanding of the pain of the dispossessed. Popa was frail; he was quiet and furtive. He thought of me as a child. Deprived of blood, his face burned like smoke; he was fond of tea and smoking. He didn’t take interest in any household activity. Every once in a while, his friends would come on a Sunday, smoke too many cigarettes, drink a lot of tea, and gossip. The dustbin would fill with cigarette butts and the teacups would fill with ash. His mother had nothing but love for her son’s friends. Let it be—at least he is at home this way.

Maasi wanted to find some way to get her son married. The first two sons had flown away like pigeons who wouldn’t return. Maasi would sound out the older women of the mohallah about each of the eligible girls and would then sit with my mother for long hours, reviewing each young girl’s background and potential. She would inquire particularly after those girls in Lahore who had come from Batala and Gurdaspur, now in India. Then a strange thing happened. Someone—either one of Maasi’s close relatives or from farther afield—sent a young girl to live with Maasi. Her name was Naina. Her mother sent her, saying that Maasi couldn’t do her household work anymore.

If she had come earlier to live with Maasi, I wouldn’t have noticed. But I was at that age when I would sit on the rooftop all day long and peer into other houses, just for the chance to see something. The girl was nice enough looking, medium height, with a colour neither pale nor dark, but somewhere in between. She was like a wild pigeon. She came to serve Maasi, but as time passed, Maasi decided that she wanted her son to marry her. But Popa had no time for it; he didn’t even look at her. I had developed a great connection with Popa in those days. We were like brothers. Now sometimes I think it was all because he was one of those men who is anti-women. He used to say that a man would lose his resolve if he became too close to a woman. Or maybe not. Maybe he had set his heart on someone at the university. Naina would come in when we were sitting and talking in some room and he would wink at me. Then everything would get lost in laughter and noise. She was otherwise very hardworking and, whenever I used to come to see Maasi, she would always have some job or other for me to do. Do this, do that; bring this from the bazaar, or bring that. She was the same age as Popa, just a bit older than me by three or four years.

An unusual scent wafted from her hair and a light burned in her eyes. It looked to me as if she might have been weeping, because it seemed that her eyes were always wet. She seemed as if she was very fragile, dying of hunger. I didn’t understand what was beautiful in her. Yet she looked so good and sweet, and my heart longed for her to remain near me. If only she could live forever at Maasi’s house. Perhaps her presence alone was her beauty. Her cheeks were sunken in, and there wasn’t a hint of flesh on her body. But Popa was just like that too.

The issue of Gamay’s marriage came up again at that time. Some men and women came to look her over. The thing I didn’t like was that no matter how much I brought for them to eat, they ate it all. I disliked them, such ill-mannered people. Then, all of a sudden, the marriage date was fixed. I was very surprised that Gamay would leave forever. Nobody thought of Rakhi. Everybody had forgotten her, as if standing before all of us, she had faded away and disappeared. Then Gamay said: “She will live with me, will always be with me. Why should I leave her? I don’t trust anybody to take care of her.”

Gamay dug out an old trunk and from inside appeared jewellery and other clothes. God knows where it came from. Our family also lent its support. After polishing the trunk, everything was neatly arranged in it. After sewing some suits, the ritual of the dowry was also completed. Gamay’s husband-to-be was a widower and there had been some negotiating over the fostering of two or three children from his previous wife. They all came in a horse-drawn cart, the Maulvi Sahib, the cleric, recited some Qur’anic verses, and just like that, Gamay was seen off by all. There was no trumpet or clarinet playing. All of it was done quietly. Maasi’s home then became desolate and quiet, and Naina took charge of the house.

One day I came to Maasi’s and heard loud talking from outside. It seemed that some guest had arrived. A handsome young boy wearing a tight-fitting sweater was talking animatedly and Naina, Maasi, and Popa were laughing loudly in the front room. I learned that he had come from Karachi for a tour of Lahore. He was also from among Maasi’s relatives, like Naina, and was training with the Air Force. I was astonished to see Naina so enamoured of him. She served him with relish. I was in no place to say anything, but I didn’t like it one bit. I didn’t go to Maasi’s place for many days after that. I just wandered around, grief-stricken. I didn’t even visit the pigeons. Maasi kept calling for me, sending messages through my mother.

At last I went one day. I found out that Naina had gone to watch a movie with the guest from Karachi. When would this bastard leave? He had just got stuck, like glue. I was there when they came back, laughing and dilly-dallying along the way after watching the movie. Naina disappeared after seeing me and didn’t face me. Maasi told me that their guest would leave the next day.

The next morning I got the message from Maasi that a cat had attacked the pigeons during the night. I took a long time in coming. I had never done that before. The guest was ready to go. He was wearing his tight sweater, too much cologne, and was at full alert, guarding his suitcase, waiting for the taxi. He got a quick hug from Maasi, shook hands with me like a stranger, stepped downstairs and went away in the car standing near the door. It was rare to hire a taxi for personal use at that time. Then he was gone, happy and carefree. I swear to God, what did we have to do with him anyway?

I climbed quickly to the rooftop. The walls of the pigeon house were covered with blood. Half-dead, wounded bodies and broken feathers were scattered all around. I couldn’t see Naina anywhere. I became absorbed in washing and cleaning. I brought buckets of water from below and started to wash the pigeon house and walls. Then I heard sighs from behind the pigeon house. Naina was squatting on the floor, her heels touching the ground, her face tucked into her legs. She was sighing and sobbing, hesitantly and silently. Her thin body trembled. I was shocked and confused. I kept doing the only thing I could do: bring the buckets of water and wash the blood. I washed the blood spots with the water, gathered all the broken feathers, swept them into a pile and chased away all the pigeons. I shooed them from the ledges on the rooftop, waving a stick like a mad man. In a moment, all of them seemed to be touching the sky, high above. If anyone of them tried to come down, I became mad again, running to chase them off. “Go! Fly away, fly away, fly . . . away.”

Tired, I stood up near the ledge. After a long time, Naina came and stood near me. She put her hand on the ledge, watching the flying pigeons rise into the sky. Her face lowered, cheeks hollow and sucked in, like a dead pigeon’s body. The evening slowly descended from Krishan Nagar’s old ashen ledges to chase away the dim light of the streets and was lost. Dark ledges and dark alleys lay below. Naina, the ledges, and the evening were all at once blended into a single colour.

The local street person, Father Time as he was called, walked by in the street below, lifting one arm high on one side and knocking it against the doors of the houses in the lane. He threw and beat his other arm forcefully in every direction, swinging and waving it. He yelled in a high strong voice, “Go to you mother and ask her, what time is it? Go to your sister, and ask her, what time is it?”

We would tease Father Time, “Father, what time is it?” and then he’d start naming the asker’s mother and sister.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I slowly placed my hand on hers. She started and turned back. Her eyes burned like the descending sun at dusk. “You . . .”

“You . . . you wash the pigeon shit! If the cat attacks, you wash away the blood—the dead bodies . . .”

She cried out, trembling with anger, and raised her hands, gesticulating. Then she made a loud sound with her feet and pounded down the stairs from the roof.

Suddenly, there was a commotion below in the street: “She’s come, she’s come! . . . Our Gamay has returned!” The cart stopped at Maasi’s door. The coachman lifted the polished trunk and put it at our door. Gamay and Rakhi descended from the back side of the cart, the same as they always were, and exactly identical, joined together like an old painting on a wall, hanging in time. They arrived at the door. Gamay and Rakhi had returned from their newly married home, never to go back again. It was the same old story: “If you want to live here, Rakhi must go.” But how could Gamay abandon Rakhi?

The next day when I came to Maasi’s in the afternoon, Naina had already left.

The household work would again be taken care of by Gamay. As long as Maasi lived, Gamay lived with her.

We would tease Rakhi about marriage from time to time: “Let’s arrange Rakhi’s wedding! Let’s marry her off!” What an idea. “Ah ji! The bridegroom will come in the marriage procession for Rakhi! Ah ji! The young bridegroom will be here soon!” And she would want to die of embarrassment, and hide herself in her sack, away from everybody. Gamay never again raised the issue of marriage for herself, nor did anybody mention it again. She passed through the remainder of her youth at Maasi’s house, washing dishes.

Finally, when his hero Zulfikar Bhutto was hanged, Popa got caught. At first, we were too afraid to go to the police station. We couldn’t get any information about where he was being kept. Finally, Maasi and I exhausted ourselves looking in the courts and police stations. Maasi couldn’t be stopped. She went out to take part in Bhutto’s funeral when the whole street was full of policemen. The rest of the women from the mohallah climbed the stairs to the rooftop, which was covered in pigeon droppings, to watch the funeral procession. After a year, when Popa was freed from prison, Maasi reluctantly sent him to England to stay with her other son, so that when the country finally became free again, he could come back. How much time would it take for the country to get freedom? We’d been through all this before.

The sorrow of her son’s departure was still fresh when Maasi lost the twenty-five-year-long court case over the ownership of the house initiated by those living on the ground floor. But then she appealed, so it took many years for them to take possession. By that time, the house was about to collapse. There were one or two men living in the lower portion who were waiting to move in. They kept saying: Accept one or two lakhs and let it be over. But Maasi didn’t listen. The floors in the rooms were cracked and the roof was decaying. Only the stairs were intact, but only up to the second storey. There were columns and wooden bars to support the stairs leading to the top of the roof. Gamay’s small rooms on top were hardly standing, supported only by wooden planks, and there were holes in the floor. Our own family house was also sold by our uncles to build a bungalow in Defence, an elite area in Lahore. But Maasi’s Krishan Nagar house was still there. I used to go to court to see the trial; the case might have lingered on even longer but eventually Maasi herself breathed her last, and with her the case died.

Gamay lived with Maasi till the end. Three women alone, in that ruined house.

Maybe this story is really about Gamay, who remained committed to Rakhi to the last. She is still alive, and lives near the old graveyard in Krishan Nagar with Rakhi. Gamay always could find some kind of Maasi Ayshan to clean for.

My mother’s voice doesn’t leave me: “Maasi Ayshan’s house was there, opposite our house, at the other side of the street.” Searching for my own house in Batala, I think I was really searching for Maasi Ayshan’s house.

When I returned from my trip to India to see our ancestral home, the only survivor among my six uncles came to see pictures. Seeing one of them, and relishing the pleasure of recognizing it, he said at once, “This street used to go straight to Maasi Ayshan’s house.”