Free Haveli by Suzanne Fisher Staples Page B

with her marriage to Ahmed unless she knows she won’t have to live as his wife. I want to send her to you, to stay in Cholistan. And then someday …”
    “The time to plan is now,” said Sharma, leaning forward, her face barely an inch from Shabanu’s. Urgency thinned out her voice. “Times are dangerous. Rahim could be gone tomorrow.”
    “They watch me so closely that it’s hard to do anything without their knowing,” said Shabanu. “It’s not just Amina and Leyla—even the servants watch and listen. Sometimes it seems the house has eyes and ears!”
    “Send word to me when you’ve come to your senses,” Sharma said. “I will be there within a day. So—now we will make a plan for Zabo.”
    They talked then of how Zabo would get to Sharma just after the wedding, and again Shabanu felt a great burden had been lifted from her. When she was with Sharma she felt somehow hopeful, no matter how impossible the situation looked.
    The day went too quickly, and it seemed no time at all before the
tonga
cart returned to take Shabanu and Mumtaz back to Okurabad. Shabanu kissed her relatives good-bye.
    She fought unexpected tears when they asked how soon they could see her again. She would find a way to persuade Rahim to allow her and Mumtaz to come again within the next month, she thought. But first she must persuade him that they must come to Lahore.

chapter 7
    I n the weeks that followed Ibne’s dismissal, Rahim was quiet. He no longer mentioned the incident. Shabanu still couldn’t tell whether he believed the cook’s story—or perhaps he might be trying to protect her from the gossip that had spread through the compound and the village, and no doubt all the way to Lahore.
    Shabanu knew what they said about her: that Mumtaz was Ibne’s child—or perhaps the product of some other liaison—definitely not Rahim’s. She’d heard this from Zenat. Poor Zenat came every afternoon after Mumtaz’s nap, dreading Shabanu’s questions, then trembling with fear when she returned to the house, where the women gathered to gossip.
    They were beginning to say things about Zenat, too—that she arranged Shabanu’s assignations and protected her. It was suggested that the old woman put a sleeping draft into Rahim’s tea so Shabanu could slip away at night.
    Finally Shabanu had had enough of the women and their gossip, enough of wondering what Rahim thought. When she had decided it was time, she spoke.
    “Rahim,” she said one evening. “Zabo’s wedding is just a few months away.”
    They were in his study. He looked up from his papers. She sat in a small chair opposite his large leather-topped desk, a smock for Mumtaz in her lap. The electric lights flickered. In the distance she heard the whistle and
whump
of a dozen diesel-powered tube well pumps. It was almost time for the electricity to be diverted from the house to electric pumps in other fields.
    “I would like to shop with her in Lahore. Don’t you have to go there soon to meet Omar?” Leyla’s fiancé was due to return from America, where he had spent five years studying agriculture at a university. Shabanu knew Rahim was eager to see him.
    Rahim said nothing for a moment, and she kept stitching, her fingers sure and strong with the steady rhythm of the needle.
    “If you’d like, you may come with me,” he said, and she knew at once it hadn’t occurred to him that she might like to help Zabo prepare for the wedding, despite Zabo’s having neither mother nor sisters to help her arrange the most significant event of her life. Perhaps he had put Zabo’s marriage from his mind, so carefully was it hidden amidst the excitement of thewedding preparations for Leyla and Omar.
    Even the lowliest tenant farmer’s wife understood that Leyla and Omar’s marriage would secure the future of the tribe and their land for another sixty years, and the joy it inspired was no different than that which accompanied each such union over the centuries since the clan had