At a town—not even a town, a crossroads, with two samosa stands and a cigarette shop—my driver turns off the K.L.P. road, Karachi-Lahore-Peshawar, and onto the Shahi road, the royal road, the Nawab of Bahawalpur’s road. This is the moment when I know that I’ve come home. We skirt the desert to our south, Indian Rajasthan and Jaisalmer not more than three hours away through the dunes, if the border had not been closed for decades, moving quickly, as if surging toward food and rest, having driven ten hours already, down to the farm where I am to live much of my life these next twenty-five years.
This is cane country, canal country, desert reclaimed by the British, country well entered, white from salt on waterlogged flats, elsewhere green, drawing you into its center. From the canal-head works, running five kilometres to the boundary of the bit of property that my grandfather bought on spec in 1916 and never once visited, there were only two or three scraps of cultivated land when I showed up that day in 1987 with my fresh-minted Dartmouth degree in English lit. Today, from the head works to my farm, and thirty-five kilometres on to the Indus, where the plain ends, there is hardly a patch of ground large enough to pitch a tent that is not cropped, to cotton or sugarcane, mangoes or wheat. This was the last wild place in the Punjab, and I watched its wildness fade, the Rajasthani colors almost lost. The Mahrs, the nomadic desert people, have bought land now, selling their herds.
The adventure began, as adventures sometimes do, with a summons and a forking choice. Sent away at thirteen, from my home in Pakistan to an American boarding school, then to Dartmouth, I knew one thing in my senior year, as I fished away at an honors thesis on the obscurities of James Merrill’s poems: I needed more time, time to gain experience, to read, and finally to write the deathless poems that bubbled up almost within reach of my consciousness and which I then believed would inscribe my name in the skies. As graduation loomed, in New Hampshire, my father had been sending by every post letters asking and ordering and suggesting and hinting that I return to Pakistan, where he would unfold his plans for me. There I knew I would have leisure, would find subjects, color, conflict. If I was serious about becoming a writer, it seemed the best way forward.
Pakistan had, in any case, exerted a fascination upon me throughout my foreign schooling which arose not only from intense nostalgia but also from my divided identity, my sense of being perhaps more like my American mother than like my Pakistani father, aware even as a child that I observed the place from a remove. My father’s family had been Lahoris for generations, city dwellers who owned farmland, rather than country people translated to the city. Nevertheless, the nub of the identity that I sought to capture lay not in Lahore but on my father’s lands.
The two farms that my father owned, one near and one far from Lahore, were as different from each other as the moods of two towns or two landscapes can be, the near one long-settled, tractable, easy of access and familiar; and the far one unhinged from my ordinary life, distant, the land still being tamed—a frontier. I always asked to celebrate my birthday there, or to go at vacation time, making the place particularly mine as a way of differentiating myself, not least from my brother, who was a year older and looked much more Pakistani. We were intensely close, and yet we chose differently in this: he chose Lahore and the things of the city, played high-handicap polo at thirteen, and I chose the distant farm. Among many other things, this defined our relationship, our twinlike division of the world.
In those years, we always travelled to the farm in the south by overnight train. Arriving at the Lahore station by night, in two or three straggling cars, among hissing gas lanterns on venders’ carts and the shouts of red-coated porters greasing their way through the crowd with suitcases stacked on their heads, we were bustled into a cream-and-green railway bogie, onto a train that seemed always to begin clanking and rolling just as we boarded, onto the Tezgam, the Khyber Mail, the Karachi Express, so that bedrolls and hampers of food and bottles and leaking thermoses, cases of tinkling silverware and rattling dishes, enormous leather-strapped suitcases would be thrust up into the moving vestibule, and Ghulam Rasool, my father’s portly valet, galloping alongside the surging locomotive, would make a last desperate lunge, both feet seemingly in the air and his torso blown sideways in the slipstream, and be triumphantly hauled in by numerous hands.
The warmth of the green compartment made me sleepy, and my father would stroke my hair when I laid my head on his lap, as he looked out of the window, speaking of grownup things with my mother, their conversation serene and reassuring. My brother and I would clamber onto the upper bunks, the beds upholstered with thick green velvet, and be rocked to sleep. In the morning, we were woken before dawn, as the train powered through a last long stretch of desert, and then glided into the station, which came suddenly to life, the porters jumping into the moving cars and arguing over which one would get the fare.
I suppose I will never again experience freedom as I felt it then on the farm, at five and eight and twelve, the gold and the green of it and the dust in my sandals and the cow-heavy smell of the village, piles of white warm cotton as high as houses to be climbed, and the smell of oil pooled where the tractors were kept, and where I wickedly hunted sparrows with an air gun that made a most unsatisfying sound when fired, as if it were spitting. At eight, I received my first real gun, a .22 rifle, good enough for sitting doves, though I rarely hit one; and a year later a handy little lady’s shotgun, which finally put me on the way to hunting game—deer in the nearby desert, duck on the ponds left over from the great flood of 1973, snipe in marshes that became as familiar to me as my back yard in Lahore, so that I drew them according to plan, cunningly, moving the birds about the marsh without driving them away into the distance. My shikari, or guide, who died between two visits—my first significant death—had six toes on each foot and carried an ancient muzzleloader, with which he would shoot sitting coot and long-legged wading birds, black-winged stilts, birds that no other person would eat, boiling them for hours in a stewpot that he never cleaned or emptied but simply topped up with whatever he happened to bag. In the early morning, as we knelt waist deep in reeds waiting for the flighting duck, patches of fog burning off as the sun rose, the water icy, he would groan and mutter, saying, “O God, O God, my ass is getting bumps like a peanut shell.”
And so, years later, grown, I bought a one-way ticket to Lahore, my mother, who had separated from my father and resettled in New York, waving me into a cab that whipped me out over New York’s great nighttime bridges to J.F.K. My father, a stoic with the manner and the rationality of Aurelius, was living out a life of virtue in Lahore after years of government service. Ill, and no longer able to visit his inherited lands, he lived in threadbare stateliness, aristocratic decline, his large house infested with flunkies and hangers-on. Behind every great fortune a great crime, Balzac professes. Our crimes took place in the eighteen-thirties and forties, when, as the British chronicles tell it, Kashmir groaned under the exactions of my ancestors, who were sent there as overlords by Ranjit Singh, ruler of all Punjab, possessor of the Koh-i-Noor, and the man who during his lifetime stopped the inexorable British conquest north to the Khyber Pass. On his death, the British usurped his domains, and my family silkily changed allegiances and flourished under their rule, being rewarded with more lands and small honors, suitable for small gentry. By the end of the century, the family’s expansion had ceased and a contraction began, as the next generations dribbled away the property, whole bazaars sold to feed some whimsy, expending old gold on elaborate hospitality, and subjecting themselves to the ministrations of sharper, hungrier men, whom they could not be bothered to oppose.
My father pushed back against the tide, administering his land with an indulgence toward the managers that bred corruption, but also with a genial, creative, experimenting mind: planting kiwis and papaya among his mango trees, practicing intercropping, exhibiting an enthusiasm for the new fertilizers, importing machinery—his the first tractors seen in those districts—visiting two or three times a year and suggesting innovations that the managers also indulged, distracting him with radical plows and foreign seeds while they quietly milked the place. All this innovation and control ended as age robbed him of force, and he came to accept and even perhaps to welcome, as old men will, the deluge that he expected would follow his death.
On my return from college, he gave me a day or two to settle down and then laid (my) cards on his card table—he had just finished a morning of bridge with his usual foursome. “As you know,” he stated, “I have divided my property among you boys and the children of my first wife, giving the senior branch the lands near to Lahore. The managers at your farm in the south are forwarding to Lahore less and less money. I can no longer look to it. Perhaps you wish to make a life in America, and if you do I will support that. However, if you wish to continue controlling your land after I am gone, you must take charge there.” He threw up his hands, as if to disinvest himself of the problem.
This gift and abdication cannot have been easy, as I now understand, having been steward of the land myself for many years. Looking back, I wonder how he rated my chances of succeeding at the farm. He died shortly afterward, to my great sorrow, for not only did I lose his support and love, I also lost the opportunity to show him what I was made of, how much I was made like him.
My God, how penny-bright and clueless I was, arriving at the farm that day in 1987, to be met by the managers—the Committee, as I came to think of them. (Because they or their progeny still today carry weight in the environs of the farm, I have assigned them fictitious names.) They should have been standing there in order of size as my jeep chugged up the drive: tall, volatile, vicious Shakil at one end of the line—in a cartoon, he would be the slavering Doberman, no brains but lots of bad muscle between the ears—and, at the other end, dumpy, lame Shafik, the accountant, born to be a sidekick to some rogue, who spent the next four or five years trotting around me in circles as I struggled to understand the double-entry bookkeeping system he had devised expressly to be intelligible only to him. In lore and reality, these managers are a type as well defined as the English butler, but of a very different temper. Every absentee landowner has them, and most believe that theirs alone are honest.
In those days, I drove—I rolled in—an ancient, Pakistani-made Naya Daur jeep. The name means New Era, and its production, at least of the one model built before production collapsed, did indeed signal a new day, a flowering of Pakistan’s newly organized kleptocratic command economy of Bhutto’s nineteen-seventies, built with a shoddiness that would have drawn an appreciative whistle from a Soviet metalworks manager. That first day, rumpled and dust-covered after the ten-hour drive from Lahore in this crate, I was met, as I would be met each time I drove back in the early years, by these suave, ruthless, cunning operators, lined up in the farmhouse portico and waiting to embrace me, size me up, and then retire—like a conclave of Renaissance cardinals—to plot my confusion.
The man among this crew who dominated the farm, who blooded me most persistently, I smiting his head, and he smiting my heel, was one Chaudhry Sameer. How I resented him, even hated him, and yet how I relied upon him in those early years. He had a round face like a lollipop, very dark skin, a little tuft of hair, brilliantly white teeth, and a strong body with the muscle equally distributed and the limbs seeming to be of equal length—resembling a tough, lumbering, earth-loving animal, a badger, perhaps, that would fight silently and without relenting if cornered. His charm derived from his strength—he had a way of grooming imaginary threads from the shoulders of my kurta which felt both deferential and sinister—and I relied upon his knowledge, for he was, among other things, supremely competent. Drop by drop, he would dole out bits of information or misinformation about the farm, not only about agricultural techniques but also about personalities and power structures, shaping my understanding of the place. He held long views, and I suppose imagined that, when I tired of the struggle and returned to the fleshpots of the West, he would be left as my representative, the faithful servant.
It took me years to establish that the managers had been nibbling away at my family’s land since the nineteen-seventies, like the monkey in the fable, who evened the two shares of the cookie by chewing it away. Although he denied it with eyes heaven-raised, I suspected that Chaudhry Sameer stole water and fertilizer and labor and tractor hours from the farm. My father—amazingly!—had given the other managers unlimited powers of attorney, and I guessed (later knew) that they had acquired some of their holdings, which were scattered around my farm, by erasing reference to that land from the farm ledgers, transferring title to their nominees, servants and family, and getting local revenue officials to backdate the transfers into the miasma of the past. Some nominees later disgorged their plunder, some didn’t, depending upon the proofs that I gathered. Later, when we sat with gold pens and signed documents reversing the transfers, we all maintained that the old mutations had been justified when made, a matter of rationalizing boundaries, of defending against ownership ceilings, if there should ever be real land reforms.
Over the years, I have learned the stories of how the transfers into the managers’ names were made, how the local land-revenue officials came secretly to the farm, and held their meetings in my living room. Musing, like a man imagining his wife’s adulteries, I imagine their crimes. I once asked the son of my father’s first manager, who lives a voluptuary life on his father’s takings, “Everyone tells me you’re a substantial farmer. Where is all this land you own?” And he turned his feral head sideways, shook his shovel beard, and then, with a wheezing laugh, replied, “Let’s put it this way. Where you have land, I have land.” Even today, I see the son’s red tractors brazenly cruising around, plowing and disking the fields all around me, like bees circling my bonnet, the drivers waving offhandedly.
In all the trouble of dealing with these men, there were moments and days of happiness, and, more, of an almost ecstatic happiness. Those were my twenties, and I took pride in my strangeness, in days that seemed jewelled and mysterious, pierced with loneliness. Although I lived among many people—house staff and farm managers, cotton buyers, wood merchants, neighboring farmers—I had no one with whom I could discuss the books I was reading or the poems that I was then writing, the constant anxiety I felt about the farm, about being overpowered, manipulated, outmaneuvered. I would escape into books, I lived in them, reading unsystematically, often to the point of sickness, of being surfeited. After jogging in the twilight, I lay on the grass at the far end of the garden, which spread out like a green tongue from the U-shaped house, staring up into the sky, through a swarm of mosquitoes hanging above my head, and thought of infinity and the purity of my soul.
If I was fatuous, it was in part because I was struggling to preserve a virtue that was not simply ridiculous but actually crippling and even dangerous, as I struggled with Chaudhry Sameer and his buddies. They might so easily have palmed a few drops of some poison in my tea, and so put an end to my troubles and theirs. I raged against Sameer like a woman in love with a man who is no good. I longed for him to turn his plotting mind to some better purpose, one that I shared. Fatuous! I dreamed of rewarding him, for virtues that he would never possess, for helping me run this farm on model lines. I minded his ridiculous mustard-colored cap, with earflaps, minded that he sat cross-legged in the accounts office, picking at the callus on his big toe, while for the twentieth time we added up tractor-repair bills that I knew, but could never prove, had been inflated. If I became too excited, he would take me outside and have someone pour a gunnysack of old tractor parts on the ground. See, there are the pistons, those are the rings we replaced. A pile of metal. He thought me obtuse, I’m sure. Why would I want to live here in the middle of nowhere, when I had a perfectly comfortable house in Lahore, the bright city, or could even live in the West? He would certainly have been willing to make a deal, for me to back off, to return to Lahore and become a pensioner, as my father had been at the end; and he would increase the yearly payments.
He tried me in various ways. Soon after I showed up at the farm, walking in the fields one afternoon while the village women picked cotton, a girl caught my eye, so that in days following whenever I passed her I became embarrassed, striking up some absurd conversation with Sameer, averting my gaze—I had not spoken to a girl since I shipped out from New York, several months earlier. Now I found myself encountering this beauty everywhere I turned, seemingly every time I left the house, as if she had proliferated and been posted across the farm, discovering her in the orchard with demure eyes downcast, or cutting fodder with quick swipes of her little hand. Sameer might as well have thrown her over the wall of the house and into the garden with a catapult. But I disappointed him; I would not be caged so easily. I knew that, if once he delivered a girl into my bed, he could ever after toss it in my teeth, point out that I, like him, had bowed to life’s exigencies.
I had been at the farm perhaps six months, arriving in the fall cotton-picking season, the wheat-planting season. Now the wheat had ripened, yellow-eared in the fields, and every day I sat in the farm stores and weighed the bags of threshed grain as they were brought bouncing in on trolleys, the farmhands perched atop the bags, ready to unload. The summer heat had struck, here just across the Indus from the town of Sibi, supposed to have been the hottest place in British India. That evening, I walked back to my house as the sun went over the horizon, my kurta salty with sweat, the sky muted with dust and heavily orange. I did not allow Sameer to come into the garden, as he usually did, in order to hash out the day’s events.
“You go home. I’ve done enough business today.”
Showered, cooling, I sat in the garden and smoked the rough local cigarettes, because I could not get imported ones closer than Lahore. A pedestal fan swung back and forth, blowing on me. The majordomo, Fezoo, walked through the rooms of the house behind my back, snapping on the lights, a progressive transformation. I felt vulnerable and exposed. In my childhood, we always travelled with servants from Lahore, maintaining the bubble that kept my father comfy. Fezoo, who had haunted this house from before I was born, was not my familiar, had treated even my father with a propriety that substituted for his emotions, which were locked behind an unlined, beardless Asiatic face and green eyes, the features of some long-ago ancestor from the north again pressed into being. He would sell me out for a few sacks of wheat, for nothing. Why shouldn’t he? Everyone thought that I would soon be gone. Even my countenance betrayed me, not just my pale skin but my expressions, the indecision of my smile, the absence of cunning, and, most of all, the absence of command—an American face.
At the farm, I lived more and more according to routines, because only that way could I escape the paralyzing dread that sometimes came over me, the sense that I could trust no one, and that soon I would be driven away, to do God only knows what, to leave Pakistan a failure and work in America. Fezoo brought tea out to me, as he did each evening, in the center of the lawn, and then, returning into the house, came out with a platter covered with a white embroidered handkerchief.
“What’s this?” I asked, sniffing the scent of fried food. I had decided, while living at the farm, to keep to a strict diet: no booze, protein for breakfast and lunch, fruit for dinner, no snacks. At afternoon tea, Fezoo was to give me exactly three biscuits, in the evening, none. Though I drank endless cups of tea and glasses of lemonade, I lived with a little, gnawing hunger, a mortification.
“Chaudhry Sameer Sahib sent this, from his own kitchen, made by his wife,” Fezoo answered. “Samosas.”
“I’ll take just one,” I said, lifting the white cloth, which was dabbed here and there with the oil that had soaked through.
The samosas were smaller than they usually are, two bites, very crisp, and fragrant, but with a minty fragrance. I lifted one of the carefully folded delicacies, looked at it, and then crunched into it. Delicious! Hot beef minced with spices crumbled onto my tongue. Fezoo had put the dish on the table, next to the tea things, and now I waved him away. “That’s fine, that’s fine,” I said.
Six more samosas, like browned pats of butter, sat on the dish. The layered crusts flaked off onto the plate, which had an oily sheen. Sameer’s wife had even taken the trouble to heat the platter, to keep the treats warm. I washed my palate with milky tea, then lifted by its corner another of the dainty triangular morsels. Fabulous! This one had a different filling, little bits of potato, almost crunchy, and so spicy that my eyes watered. Another bite and it was gone. I must stop.
Pouring myself more tea, adding milk and sugar, I eyed the platter, still charged with five delicate samosas. Each one seemed particular, unique, itself. I laughed. “For fuck’s sake,” I said to myself. “Don’t be such a fucking prune.” My stomach growled with eagerness. I took a sip of the newly poured tea, too hot, almost burning my tongue, then reached for another samosa. Different again! This one had a tomato-and-chicken filling, sweetish, but generously peppered. I worked my way through all the food on the platter, all the samosas, then finally, completely abandoning myself, licked the platter itself, and even that had a complex nutty flavor, the flakes of crust melting in my mouth.
Sitting back, I took out a cigarette and lit it. I felt better. The chorus of birds that earlier had filled the garden now was silent, and had been replaced by the sound of the night insects, a steady humming background, with some different genus occasionally breaking in with an aria. The breeze came up. The moon came up over the high mud walls that surrounded the garden. All the dogs in the village barked, then fell silent. The food that the cook prepared for me had no personality, no love in it. He used the most expensive ingredients but assembled the food without care, without harmony of flavors. These samosas had been made with close attention, with something akin to love.
I had not had any human closeness, any loving contact, for six months, since I first came to Lahore and to the farm; but this food touched me, it had a message of concern in it, of interest, like a letter. I had never met Sameer’s wife, whom he could afford to keep in purdah, but I imagined the little courtyard in the manager’s house, shaded and cemented, with a separate kitchen outside, and the fat woman—she would certainly be fat—who with clean hennaed hands folded the paper-thin dough of the samosas. She dropped the filled, bulging savories one by one into boiling hot oil, furiously churning. I imagined the spattering and popping oil, the ladle with which she removed the browned little morsels. Perhaps Sameer sat by while she cooked, telling her to be careful, to make them well.
The men who ran the farm, Sameer and his buddies, were Punjabis—that is what the indigenous tribes call them, not acknowledging them as locals. Many of their families had been resettled here in the nineteen-forties and fifties from my father’s farm near Lahore, when he geared up to bring this land under cultivation. Before, it had been desert, growing almost nothing, a few fields of chickpeas here and there, wherever the land happened to be level. Persian wheels watered bits of land around the wells, patches of green spreading in season like ink stains. The Punjabis, Sameer and his clan, came with their energy and knowledge and turned the place around, levelled the dunes, made watercourses to link with the canals that the British had built, channelling water from the Indus. The desert people, the nomadic Mahrs, looked on with bemusement at this huffing and hauling, this scraping and striving, out here in the desert. They kept to their old ways, taking their flocks to the desert when it rained, grazing them in the settled areas, around the borders of fields and by the roads, when the fodder out in the desert failed. My father gave one group of them, led by old Jhanda Mahr, corrals and houses at the edge of our property for his extended family, and land on which to grow fodder, in return for the manure from their animals, which we used in our fields.
The Punjabis persist in thinking the Mahrs witless and unenterprising, the Mahrs think the Punjabis vulgar and unprincipled; it is perhaps no surprise that when finally someone broke the code of omertà, which concealed the managers’ rapacities, it should be Jhanda. My old six-toed shikari did not know the desert. Only the Mahrs knew how to get around out there, and so as a boy whenever I hunted for chinkara antelope I took Jhanda with me in the open jeep, setting out past midnight, when all good children should be in bed, bumping through the night, then into the silkiness of the dunes, leaving the roads behind, the jeep’s little flat-four engine wailing in deep sand. Even Jhanda sometimes got lost under the stars, and would stop the vehicle, trudge up the ridge of the tallest dune, and look around, silhouetted in the moonlight, a figure as old as time, the man at night seeking the way—and then leap giant steps down the sand face, having found some star to steer by, some outline. We had shared the intimacy of the hunt, the kill; at ten or eleven, I shot my first deer under his eyes, had shared the cleanliness of the desert with him, been baptized by the dawn on the desert flats. Later, when I returned to claim the farm, the old man remembered all that.
A couple of years after I returned to the farm, he came to see me. At eight sharp, having already knocked back two cups of walnut-brown tea at my desk, and written half a dozen wispy lines of poetry, I would meet people—buyers and sellers, managers—sitting under a banyan in the garden. A servant led Jhanda Mahr across the grass, a worn man, his fingers like corkscrews, his knees and elbows loose like hinges on an old barn door. His cracked, club-hard feet had walked thousands of miles in his time, to the desert and through it and back, and I suppose the old men traversing the wastes of Palestine in Biblical times must have looked much like Jhanda.
Having seen to the formalities, the polite questions, and having insisted that he came only to see after my health, he settled into silence.
“Is there anything else?” I asked, for there always is. I expected that he had come to ask some favor, more fodder or a new corral—he sometimes presumed on the intimacy of our long-ago hunts, and I often obliged him, out of sentimentality.
“You ask what I came for. This, then. I came to ask why you keep people like me so distant. Why can I never see you, why do your servants always tell me you’re busy when I come to your house? People like me are turned away without so much as a cup of tea, and that never happened even in your father’s time, when no one rode herd on the managers from one year to the next.” I had intended to throw open my doors to all who came, but over time it dawned on me that Sameer’s agents stood guard and strained the flood with a fine-meshed net—managing my information flow. Jhanda’s voice had an aggrieved, nagging tone, which could only irritate me, reminding me that my own household servants wouldn’t do my bidding. “Do you know what they say,” he continued, “about the happy-go-lucky sons of rich fathers? You are trussed and tied and you don’t even know it. You’ve misplaced your trust.”
My anger rose. Me, happy-go-lucky! Old fool. Trying to get the inside track again, and being rude in the bargain.
He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a piece of dog-eared dirty paper, much folded, with wide lines as if torn from a child’s exercise book, and smoothed it on the table with hornèd hands, the nails all split from ropes and reins. Someone else had given him this; he couldn’t read or write.
“I’ve eaten your family’s salt since I could walk. These are Chaudhry Sameer’s C.P.R. account numbers at the mill. My camels have dragged your cane to the mill since the mill was built. Do you think I don’t know whose name and whose account they write in their books when I pass the factory gate? Your cane, Sameer’s account. There. It’s all there.”
He refolded the paper, laid it on the table, where it seemed to shimmer with portent. I knew immediately that I could not use it, that the mill accountants would cover for Sameer; but still, I had broken through, I had turned at least old Jhanda in my favor.
“Everyone knows what Sameer did to you,” he continued. “He practiced spells, he took herbs from an old man with an evil eye. It’s in you right now.” He held my gaze, his own eyes blurred by desert wind and sun, no longer seeing far. “Sameer fed you things, didn’t he?”
The little orgy in the garden had at the time seemed a harmless dissipation, but now a voice in my head spoke mockingly, “Remember gobbling those samosas and licking that greasy plate?” Surely Sameer believed in spells. His wife would have put something into the batter, the ash of a paper on which a spell had been written. Coincidentally, increasingly, he made me his creature. The farm scared me, business scared me; I knew nothing of crops, castes, police stations, fuel costs, bribery, revenue records, canal timings, cotton gins. I felt ashamed, standing there with Jhanda, confronted with my complicity in Sameer’s domination of me. Sameer pretended to serve me, and I pretended to believe him, sheltering behind his strong right arm, letting him have his way because I dared not be independent. My face burning, I rose, signalling to Jhanda that the interview was ended, and, as I did, it seemed that ropes coiled around me unclasped and fell limp at my feet, releasing me.
The relationship with Sameer hinged on this moment, the moment of before and after, the shift that sometimes happens in relationships based upon power. In the myth, this is the moment when the sword is found or the lamp broken. I thereafter worked consciously to develop my cunning, resolved to stand by myself, even at the cost of losing my way, of being exposed.
The end, a year or so later, came as quietly as a blown rowboat reaching shore. We had exhausted each other, but I had legitimacy and youth. During that last year, I cut away at his powers. I hired a couple of men whom I knew to be his enemies. A few times, sitting in a crowd, I ridiculed his advice and took an opposite line. His cards were all the compendium of his knowledge of the farm, and one by one he played them to me. He taught me what he knew, and I could now go on without him.
We were standing on a twelve-acre plot in a reach of scrub not yet brought under cultivation, an isolated place. At the far end, in a natural depression, water would collect during the monsoon; one of the marshes where I shot snipe as a boy lay nearby. The previous day, a bulldozer had scraped the saline topsoil to one side, clearing a stretch in order to bring it under cultivation, piling up a berm twenty feet high. Sameer and I had driven there at sunrise, and were waiting for laborers who would walk from the village with shovels and ropes, to mark out boundaries and watercourses on the raw land. We had climbed on top of the berm, with a rising dawn breeze blowing, and because of the flatness of the surrounding landscape we could see for a great distance, to the faraway village of Nizam Shah, hidden under the crown of a date plantation, smoke from morning cook-fires laced over it.
For a moment we had been silent, taking in the unfamiliar perspective, winded from the climb up on the loose dirt.
“The strugglesome life,” he mused, in English—the only time I heard him speak an English phrase, appealing to me in my first language, attributing my taste for struggle to that other self. “You and I both want the strugglesome life. Do you know that you’re the first person in your family ever to spend more than a week at one time on this land?”
“Yes, Fezoo told me something like that.”
“I’ve been here for twenty years,” he said, his voice freshening. “I’ve served your family faithfully, I built this farm. But I’m really at the end of my rope. You don’t understand these people, you trust too much, you let all sorts of jumped-up favorites bend your ear. The Saith from Pakka Larra has asked me to be his manager, and I honestly don’t know what to tell him.”
I thought of all the trouble that would flow from his leaving, but I knew I had to break with him, must strike hard now. “The Saith is a shrewd judge, he’s smart to choose you. You’ll do well with him. You’re right, it’s time for you to go.”
He looked over at me with an unblinking crocodile eye, appearing stunned, reproachful, but I knew his disguises. I steeled myself against pity. Suddenly he cried out, “None of this would have happened if your father were here!”
Strong praise, I thought, coming from you.
And that’s how we ended it. ♦
