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THEIR LANGUAGE OF LOVE Bapsi Sidhwa is an internationally acclaimed author. Raised in Lahore, Pakistan, she now lives in Houston, Texas. She has written five novels— Ice-Candy-Man, The Pakistani Bride, The Crow Eaters, An American Brat, and Water—which have been translated and published in several languages. She has edited the anthology City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore which was published in 2006. Among her many honours Sidhwa received the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest national honor in the arts, and the LiBeraturepreis in Germany and the 2007 Primo Mondello Award in Italy.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK ‘In this collection of stories, Bapsi Sidhwa recreates a lost world . . . Sidhwa’s understanding of human relationships is subtle and deep . . . Throughout, Sidhwa wastes not a single word and the plots flow with liquid ease. With this book she has once again proved her stature as one of the subcontinent’s finest authors . . . Their Language of Love will undoubtedly win her many more enthusiastic readers’—Gillian Wright, India Today ‘Sidhwa’s style is extremely visual, which gives great colour and mood to her narratives . . . Her writing is serious without turning sombre, playful without regressing into farce. For those who are familiar with her work, the collection will provide great joy; and, for those who are not, here’s the place to get started’—Pioneer ‘[Contains] telling and often witty observations on life, marriage, migration, expatriates and on the Partition’s effect on people that make Their Language Of Love worth reading’—DNA

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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2013 Published in Penguin Books 2014 Copyright © Bapsi Sidhwa 2013 All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. ISBN 9780143418528 For sale in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives only Typeset in GoudyOlSt BT by R. Ajith Kumar, New Delhi

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For my son Khodadad Kermani (Koko) and the childhood years lost to us both

Conten t s

Foreword

ix

A Gentlemanly War

1

Breaking It Up

29

Ruth and the Hijackers

56

Ruth and the Afghan

101

The Trouble-Easers

131

Their Language of Love

150

Sehra-bai

173

Defend Yourself Against Me

208

Author’s Note

251

Acknowledgements

253

Forewo r d

Bapsi Sidhwa’s latest collection Their Language of Love marks a turning point in this author’s distinguished career. For the first time she turned to the genre of the short story, a form much favoured by her chosen mentors such as Saadat Hussain Manto. In her acclaimed novel, Cracking India (also published as Ice-Candy Man), Sidhwa’s narrative turns to a piercing tale entitled ‘Rana’s Story’, in which she supplies in graphic detail the horrors of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent. Their Language of Love takes this connection even further: rather than focusing on Partition and its several dismemberments, these stories take the reader into the realm of a post-colonial diaspora. Each story intricately places the protagonists in a cusp of several cultural worlds where they must negotiate differences of language, class, and creed. The characters in these stories seem to be in a perpetual state of displacement – unlike the ‘compressed world’ of Cracking India the latest stories are full of travels that are far from romantic, but instead deal with dingy urban spaces such as airports, train stations, and buses. In the title story, ‘Their Language of Love’, the character Roshni is met by her ix

x

Foreword

husband at an airport, her Gujrati fellow traveler assumes that she is Hindu: ‘Roshni, who is dark for a Parsi and self-conscious about it, had decided during her teens to use her smallfeatured chocolate looks to advantage the way the South Indian girls did. She took to wearing vividly coloured saris with contrasting borders that complemented her sultry beauty, and coiled her long hair in a silken knot at the back’. In other words, even the indigenous populations of India are unable to recognize one another instinctively. The norms that delineated cultures and religions have been obliterated by the pitiless give and take of migrancy. Several of the stories are written in the objectivity of a third person narrative, yet others are given the intimacy of a first person voice. The poignant tale ‘Defend Yourself Against Me’ is such an example of a story that combines the present tense with a first person narrator who is unable to bridge the gap between generations, let alone between cultures. The story ends with a quotation, as though the narrator herself can only exist in translation. In fact, many of Sidhwa’s protagonists seem incapable of articulating their voices except in other vernaculars, other languages. A key tale in this volume is ‘Sehra-Bai’ which links a disjuncture in speech with a concomitant disjuncture between generations. The distance between mother and daughter is only exacerbated by the creation of new

Foreword

xi

nations and several disparate venues in which to attempt a conversation. Ruby and Sehra-Bai cannot comprehend the distances between the mother’s coquettish youth and the daughter’s post-Partition life. As in the two stories involved with Ruth, the central character painstakingly attempts to understand the gulf between the imperial world and the configuration of nations that beset the sub-continent during the war of 1971. The lyricism and charm of this collection combines Sidhwa’s ironic sense of humour with her darkened view of contemporary culture and its necessary displacements. It is a most welcome addition to her distinguished oeuvre. Sara Suleri Goodyear Professor Emeritus of English Yale University

A Gentlema n ly wa r

It was 1965, and pakistan and India were at war. The bone of contention was, as always, Kashmir. The pakistan army—one seventh the size of the Indian army and beleaguered on more fronts than it could handle— had concentrated on the Kashmir and sialkot fronts. within a day of the onset of the war it was rumoured that the Indian forces had crossed the border into pakistan at wagah, only sixteen miles from Lahore. The Indian army had, in fact, advanced to a wide canal inside the border so easily that they had come smack-up against a psychological barrier: they did not believe that Lahore was left virtually unprotected. Certain that a cleverly camouflaged trap was waiting to be sprung—and calculating that a strategic retreat would be disastrously slowed by the narrow bridge across the canal—the Indians had brought their infantry, three-tonners and tanks to a precipitate halt. The rumour of the Indian army’s advance percolated with so much insistence that we guessed it was at least partially true. we were confident though that Lahore, a thriving metropolis of eight million, would never be left unprotected. 1

2

Their Language of Love

people like us—perhaps because we belong to a class privileged by some wealth, some education; a class linked by a web of friendship or kinship—often find ourselves in the peripheral swells that edge pakistan’s erratic political shores. This marginal connection is expedient. Affected by every shift in the balance of power, vulnerable to each new ideological nuance, this class cannot afford to be distanced from politics. Our family owns the only brewery in pakistan. soon after partition in 1947, my father (and later my brother), sensible of the politics of prohibition in an Islamic country, branched also into bottling fruit juices and the manufacturing of glass. when our ancestral wine shop in Lahore—redolent of liquors, whisky and wine that had leaked into jute sacks—was ordered shut during the stricter prohibition imposed by prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977, it was turned into a sad little affair stocked with toilet paper, pickles and lentils. Towards the end of his office, beset by the riots engineered by powerful opponents, Mr Bhutto had capitulated on many such issues. Ironically, when the religious and political right had earlier accused him of drinking alcohol, he had roared: ‘Yes, I drink . . . I drink whisky—but not the blood of the poor!’ And the adoring masses had swept him to electoral victory on such demagogic declamations. But to trace the fluctuating history of prohibition, which has existed since the inception of pakistan, is to track the incursion of religion in the opportunistic politics of the country. That is not what I aim to do. Rather, I want to trace my tenuous connection with Mr Bhutto—the ambience that

A Gentlemanly war

3

surrounded him before the crest of hope in our hearts surged him to power, and not our despair at the loss of hope when he was hanged. I want to give my particular (perhaps flawed) view of events as inferred from the currents that intersected our lives with pakistan’s history, notably the seventeen day war, with the compassion that is integral to the human heart. I first saw Mr Bhutto at the bar of the elite punjab Club in Lahore. The son of a feudal lord from sindh, he already had a reputation as a playboy. From the buzz that circulated about him, one knew that he had political aspirations. On the evening Mr Bhutto was pointed out to me, he sat in the bar of the punjab Club, leaning against the counter, facing us. His feet resting on the cross-bar of the stool, a casual arm thrown round a bar-buddy, he formed the centre of a convivial group of eager acquaintances. A lick of dark hair marked his bronzed forehead. In a face slightly flushed with drink, his eyes shone with amber light. Confident, debonair, aware of all the stares drawn to him, he appeared marked for success. I next saw him, after a lapse of about three years, under entirely different circumstances, at the Brewery Lodge in Rawalpindi. It was during the 1965 war. Mr Bhutto was, by this time, the ‘brilliant’ young Foreign Minister in General Ayub Khan’s Martial Law Cabinet. General Ayub Khan had requisitioned the Brewery Lodge, our residence in Rawalpindi, for state use when he shifted the capital of pakistan from Karachi to Islamabad. This was after my father died, during the first Martial Law. That was before the terror inspired by the military

Cover illustration by Alice Stevenson

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