Athurayyaa followed her husband. He was buried a stranger in Bombay, and she was buried shrouded in her daughter Hasina’s cloth—the daughter who had emigrated a bride, and of whom there had been almost no news ever since. After his mother’s death, the loneliness of the house closed in around Mansour. Bint Aamir’s wailing for her friend put him in such a state of agony that he warned her she would lose her one good eye if she kept it up. He left the house, seeking companionship in the village alleyways.
Mansour was on that rocky, hard-to-climb path between adolescence and young adulthood. Somehow, he could not quite throw off the weight of his seventeen years and move on—as though he found the prospect of taking on his own personhood unbearable, not to mention the shop, the house, and the orchard he had inherited from his father. Caught miserably between sudden orphanhood and the hard glare of an abrupt freedom, he did not know how to be. He tried to keep his orphan self at bay, but he didn’t know how to handle his freedom. He informed Bint Aamir that the shop would be closed for a period of mourning, and he roamed the streets and quarters of the village. He raced other boys his age through the little ponds left behind by rainstorms. He competed with them at hitting birds with a slingshot. He took out his father’s rifle and polished it and began going on excursions into the desert for days at a time, returning only after he had bagged several birds or wild rabbits. Whenever he showed up, he found his mattress ready and his supper hot. Bint Aamir no longer pulled him by the ear, or even chastised him. That gave him a lump in his throat. He was a man now; and anyway, she was not his mother.
Summer came. Some Bedouin men visited Mansour to negotiate renting his date palms, whose yield they would sell. He agreed on one stand of date palms but retained the other. Now he began entertaining himself by going along with other youths his age to watch the Bedouin as they picked the dates, perched at the very tops of the palms. Their women clustered below, ready to pick up the fresh dates, filling their plaited palm-leaf baskets with the good ones and separating out the bad ones, which they would feed to their animals.
Watching them, it did not take him long to notice that among the women were some younger ones who, impatient with the ongoing work, exchanged glances and went off together to splash water over themselves at the falaj, in full view of him and his companions. And so he put on a show to end all shows. He lay down on the ground, spread his arms wide, and inhaled deeply, puffing out his bare chest, while his companions lined up across his body the live scorpions they had hunted for days. The lethal creatures crawled across his skin as if they were simply making a little day trip across their home territory.
The girls called out and acted terrified. Their families were not slow to scold them, and they had to hurry away. Except for one.
This girl went on watching the performance, motionless and silent. When Mansour had brushed off all the scorpions—none had harmed him in the slightest—she shrugged and walked off.
Mansour followed her, staring at her all the while. His long, steady gaze had been deepened and made more sensitive by this new orphan state, and then scarred by a rough passage into sudden manhood. But she did not return his tender, aching look. He followed her all summer long. All his other destinations ceased to be; she was the only one. Wherever she headed, that was what gave him direction: the fields by day, and her father’s livestock enclosure out in the desert by night.
She was the robust color of early youth, she was the brimming freshness of dawn breaking, she was the delicate outline of a half-visible dream. Mansour’s wishes were vast and his longing was fierce and hard to endure. Through him pulsed white-hot rivers of desire, and on them Kaaffa flooded his being, a storm wind that would not subside. She was a kaleidoscopic assemblage; she was bounty itself, joy, birds, little mirrors, cardamom, ginger, dates, ambergris, dawn prayers, the tiger skin hanging on the wall of his home that had been the gift of the twins.
He called out to her, as if he were just coming out of a stupendous, enormous dream. “Marry me!”
But she, Kaaffa, the picture of serenity, the cloudless sky, the summit of beauty. . . Kaaffa, beneath the lucent veil of her perfection, hid a wearied and restless nature, a bent for freedom as vast as the heavens. She had grown up in a sheltered open-air compound roofed with palm fronds not far from her father’s animal enclosure. It was a happy place despite the presence of her father’s wife and her father’s wife’s daughters, despite the smoky smell and the coal-blackened walls and the way the fragrance of bread buried in the sand always mingled with the camel-dung smell coming from nearby. There was one love in her life. Her father.
The summer ended. Coyly, she murmured words to Mansour, words that meant refusal and acceptance together. Words that promised abundance and absence. Words that said, “I am in my father’s hands.”