Free You're Not Proper by Tariq Mehmood Page B

used to load trucks with rocks. One day, when he was loading a truck, there was a landslide and he was crushed to death.’
    Dad went silent like he was back there. Letting out a deep sigh, he continued, ‘It took them two days to move the rocks and get his body out. I got to Pakistan as his body was brought to his house and helped to give him his final
ghusal
, his final wash. When the time came to carry him to the graveyard for his funeral, his wife came and insisted on helping to lift his body out of her house. That stupid old Imam Butta said women weren’t allowed to do this, but she ignored him. I let her hold her husband’s bed and she helped to lift it up and placed it on my shoulder. She started walking with the men and Imam Butta told her to stop. Women aren’t allowed to do this. She ignored him and walked with us. I thought she would stop where the other women stop, just where the last house of the village is and then they come and stand outside the graveyard until the men finish reading the funeral. But she didn’t stop. She kept walking. When everyone recited religious chants, she kept quiet. Not crying. But silent. Along the way a woman tried to hold her hand to stop her going, she snatched it free and kept on walking with us.
    â€˜Just as we got past the last house, she sang in a voice so loud and so clear it tore right through me.’
    Dad looked at me with sad, sad eyes and sang:
‘Baghe ander hik bulbul alarnaan paee see banandhi Ajay na charya toor Mohammed, ud gaee ay kurlandhi.’
    My Dad sang these lines so beautifully, in a voice I didn’t recognise, a voice that came out from some depth within him, a place where he didn’t go very often.
    Before I could ask him what it meant, he translated: ‘A nightingale was building her nest in the garden, Oh Mohammed, it had yet to be finished and she flew away screaming.’
    Dad looked behind and rowed away from some branches that were hanging into the lake. Pulling out into a sunny bit of the lake, he looked at me and said, ‘I love you, Kiran.’
    â€˜Love you too, Dad, now, can you sing it again?’ He did.
    And then I asked him to sing it again and he did.
    I hadn’t noticed we had done a full round of the lake and were going round again.
    As we went past the first curve, I saw Shamshad standing close to the bank, near some bushes. She bent down, picked something up and held her hand out as though to lob it at us. Just then I saw a startled bird fly, screaming out of a tree above her.

Shamshad
    On the way back home from the park, each time I saw a bird, I thought I saw the one that had screamed out from above me, and each time I heard it, it was as though it was the first time I’d heard it. Had I not heard such a frightful cry of a bird above me, a cry that cut deep into me, I would’ve lobbed the stone at Karen.
    That night I kept falling in and out of sleep, waking up all sweaty. In my dreams, I kept seeing a thick, rolling cloud, changing into faces, mocking faces, faces I should know, but to which I could put no name.
    After putting on my bedside lamp, I opened the bottom draw of my chest of draws, carefully so as not to wake anyone else. It is a deep draw, with a secret section, which I made myself by placing a bit of matching plywood at the bottom. In this, I keep my secret, secret things, especially my drawings.
    On a blank A4 piece of paper, I sketched the outer lines of the cloud.
    The lines got thicker and deeper, as though my hand had a mind of its own. A face began to form, a disfigured, horrible face, with accusing eyes, fiery eyes, sorrowful eyes and then just a dark smudge.
    I felt cleansed after I finished this drawing. I took out my notebooks from the bottom drawer, lifted the plywood false bottom, placed the drawing on top of the others and went back to sleep: a deep, peaceful sleep.
    I woke up late the next morning, glad I wasn’t going to see
her
ugly face for a