Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
PART 2
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
PART 3
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
VIKING
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Copyright © Micromegas Pty. Ltd., 2008
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY of congress CATALOGING In PUBLICATION DATA
Abidi, Azhar.
The House of Bilqis / Azhar Abidi.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-01173-7
1. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 2. Culture conflict—Pakistan—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.4.A25H68 2009
823’.92-dc22 2008029021
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FOR KAREN
Listen to this reed how it complains: it is telling a tale of separations
—Jalal al-Din Rumi “The Song of the Reed”
PART 1
1
DINNER WAS served at eight o’clock.
Bilqis Ara Begum, matriarch of the Khan family, cast a contented look around the table. Her brother and sister, her niece, her son and his new wife were all sitting there, waiting for her to say the benediction, the Bismillah: “Praise be to Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” She said it in a whisper, a furtive, almost bashful gesture of faith, and the family fell silent, concentrating on their meal. Bilqis had ordered her servants to cook a bhujia with spinach and potatoes, a kofta dish, kebabs, a chicken curry and another bhujia with okra. The kebabs were laid out on a white china platter in the center of the table. The rest of the food was served in beaten brass bowls to keep it warm.
The Khan family had gathered for the wedding reception of Bilqis’s son, Samad, who had recently married an Australian girl of European descent. The wedding itself had taken place in Melbourne, but the couple had flown to Karachi to give Samad’s family in Pakistan a chance to meet the bride. Mahbano, Bilqis’s sister, and her husband and daughter had flown in from Lahore and Bilqis’s brother, Sikander, who had rooms at the Sind Club, had driven over in his old white Mercedes. It was March 1985, and spring was nearly at an end. The reception was in two days’ time.
Bilqis presided over the table with a sovereign but kindly air. She watched the guests as they ate, and coaxed and cajoled them if they resisted. The last rays of the sun, streaming in through the window, emphasized her Mughal features—the small mouth and chin of her aristocratic mother, and the high cheekbones, hooked nose and long, arched eyebrows of her father. She was a tall and elegant woman in her late sixties. She wore a white shalwar kameez, her hair was gray, swept back and held by pins. She had stopped dyeing it when her husband passed away. Her skin was fair and slightly freckled. The backs of her hands showed a web of veins. Her wrists were small, delicately fashioned, and her fingers long like those of an artist or a pianist. The way she held up her head, her straight back, her gestures, the way her stern face broke into a smile—all these expressions, at once light and graceful, and quite without affectation, hid successive generations of breeding. They were not so much acquired as inherited, and as much a part of her fiber as flesh and bone. But if they revealed the origins of her patrician forebears, they also concealed a conservative streak, a moral pride that the turbulent times had transformed into an inflexibility of manner, a disdain for change and a nostalgia for lost glory.
The enormous chandelier hanging over the table gave her dining room an imposing and rarefied air, but its light was dim and the old Empire furniture in the adjacent drawing room was already lost in the shadows, mute witness to the hunting scenes on an immense Persian carpet, where tigers and deer had come to life and were fleeing the arrows of a handsome archer, who galloped serenely on horseback across a meadow strewn with flowers. A narrow glass table was cluttered with family photographs in silver frames, which occasionally included a famous face, here a politician, there an author, all gone now, scattered to the winds. The shadows also camouflaged signs of decay. The once-springy carpet was balding in patches and there was dust inside the mahogany-and-glass cabinet that held captive a Dutch flower girl, missing her porcelain arm from when some servant, lost in a daydream, had let her slip out of her hands.
Bilqis turned to Zainab, her niece. Mahbano’s daughter was a cheerful young woman with sparkling eyes. She wore a black shalwar kameez of her own design, the lines of her dress long and flowing. The subdued colors drew out her fair skin, the thin waist highlighted her tall, slim figure. “You must eat, my dear,” Bilqis said in an affectionate tone reserved for indulging children. “Don’t misunderstand me, but you look a little anemic. What are you afraid of? I oversaw the cooking myself. Not that one should eat to excess, but you barely touched anything. What, do you mean to refuse me?”
Zainab relented but Bilqis gave the recalcitrant a final glance, a rejoinder and an acquittal. A fine girl, she was thinking, as she ladled out the chicken curry on her plate. Why had her son not married her? Such marriages strengthened families and kept them together. Their children would have been beautiful, the match perfect, mending bridges and settling scores. It was just one more of her dashed hopes, misplaced and improbable. Marrying cousins was no longer in fashion, Bilqis reflected. People would frown upon it. A first cousin was like a sister to Samad. The relation was too close, too familiar. And besides, it was too late.
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