TRANSLATED FROM THE GUJARATI BY HELI VORA AND MANOJ CHHAYA

The sun was setting behind the towering walls of the fort as Roshan looked back sluggishly. The shadow of her house with red roof tiles stretched across her courtyard. She observed the sparrows in the dust of the courtyard and wondered if these sparrows would find the grains from the dust.  Suddenly, a gust of wind raised a small cloud of dust. The sparrows flew away.  Roshan, sitting cross-legged on a jute sack in her veranda, turned her head back to see the sparrows. She heard a crow on the grass and gasped slightly. She could not see the crow but kept hearing it. Roshan could see the crow only when the three children in her courtyard chased the crow. Roshan stared idly at the dried neem tree trunk in the courtyard. It used to be lush and green, and birds would make the leaves rustle early in the morning.    Roshan did not understand why such a green tree suddenly was losing itself. At first, the leaves turned yellow one by one – then the twigs, and then the whole tree dried up. Abhu, who stayed in the neighborhood, declared that the tree had termites at its roots. Roshan was devastated to see the only tree in her yard dry up.  She kept watering it even when it dried up. Abhu warned her that the stump might hurt someone. He tried to fell the forked trunk as Roshan stood numb watching it, but she did not allow Abhu to cut it. A four-feet trunk stood like a pillar in the courtyard. Deep down she hoped to see some fresh leaves springing! Roshan would often stare at the dry trunk. Sometimes she held the trunk in her arms and looked at the towering walls of the fort. On the full moon and no-moon days, the sea waves would reach all the way up to the fort. Roshan could tell whether that day was a full moon or a new moon day from how seagulls squawked.

It was evening now.  The aroma of the red chili paste being roasted in cooking oil wafted into her nose. Karimabai’s daughter-in-law, who had a house behind Roshan’s, was cooking. Karimabai used to praise her daughter-in-law’s culinary skills and would share a fried fish with Roshan.  Seeing the gaping dead eyes of the fried fish lying on the plate, Roshan would be stunned. She would feel the sea ramming into the towering walls of the fort and reaching her courtyard. She would put the plate outside her house and a crow would snatch the fish from the plate. She had finally stopped eating fish. When Karimabai came to know about it, she said, ‘Foolish woman, fish is our life, our earning, our food; Our livelihood depends on it. How can we live without it?’

Newly-married brides in the neighborhood used to ask their mothers-in-laws about Roshan, whom they would spot sitting in the veranda during the day and who lived alone. They would stare at her for some time and later perhaps they forgot about her. But Roshan did not forget anything. Every day she slowly walked up to the walled fort. The walls of the fort were dilapidated now. The arch of the gate had collapsed. The stepping stones were stolen by the people. Roshan was sitting on one of the rocks of the broken gate looking at the sea water. Seeing the waves rising in the distant water, she imagined those waves coming very close, and imagined someone rising from the waves – striking his wet hair and laughing heartily. The hair on his chest soaked and stuck to the skin, a drop of water about to fall from the copper neckband worn around the neck. Roshan was jolted out of her vision suddenly by some neighboring woman who came blabbering and grabbed Roshan’s arm to drag her towards her house. It was already night. The courtyards of the few houses nestled near the vast fort resounded with the loud voices of men, and then all the doors were shut. The sea kept banging its head on Roshan’s threshold. The days passed without anyone’s conscious attention. The fort cast shadows from morning to evening – before getting enveloped in the black sheet of darkness at nights. The men living around believed that sooner or later Roshan would go insane. They anyway already found her eccentric.  Whereas the women believed that Roshan was jinxed. Roshan’s ears listened to everything. 

Suleiman’s son Vaiyyal passed by Roshan’s house. Roshan smiled a little. She gestured for Vaiyyal to sit beside her. Vaiyyal placed the net on his shoulder and sat cross-legged in front of Roshan and said – ‘Aunty, aren’t you hungry?’

Like a small child, Roshan shook her head in denial and said – 

‘Why is everyone home today?’

Vaiyyal looked into Roshan’s eyes and said – ‘Aunty, it seems the sea is upset. My father said two days back that the color of the sea did not look good. Maybe there will be a storm. All the fishermen are back.’

Roshan’s eyes glowed a little. Her lips quivered. She felt as if her veins were twitching. She leaned towards the boy a little and said – ‘When the storm is about to come, the water appears like a sheet of ice! As if there is no life in the sea. Then suddenly, the devil beneath it wakes up and makes waves rise like a hill – as if they are going to conquer the fort and make it collapse. Your uncle used to say that to me.’

Vaiyyal felt that Roshan’s body was filled with sea now. He offered, ‘Tell me if I can help you in anyway?  Uncle Mamad took me to the sea for the first time – Do you remember?’ 

Roshan asked, ‘Will you take me to the sea, Vaiyyal? No one lets me go there. Everyone thinks that the sea will eat me up.’

‘Aunty, one should not go to the sea at night. Anyway, I am sending Sharifa now. Today she must have made delicious fried rice.  I had asked her to do it.’ Roshan kept looking at Vaiyyal’s muscular back as he walked away. Her ears extended towards the sea. She could hear the shrill squealing of seagulls. She imagined what the evening would look like on the sea – seawater turning saffron, and a lone fishing boat appearing like a dot in the backdrop of the horizon, gradually giving way to the canopy of darkness spreading itself on the houses.  

Behind the fort, the sea roared in the dark and kept banging its head against the shore till morning. Roshan wanted to climb the wide wall of the crumbling fort and stare in the direction of sunset. She wanted to keep staring at the dark sky, the sky full of stars; at the water getting illuminated in the flash of the lighthouse for a second.  She did not want to look away from the sea and the sky.  She wished the night never ended, the sun never rose, and daylight never broke! 

She remembered how surprised she was to see the fort for the first time after she got married into this village by the fort. She wondered how long it must have taken for someone to build such a massive fort.  An outsider approaching the village would assume that the village inside the fort must be a grand village, but it was just a tiny messy village inside, with wild shrubs and ruins all around. The remnants of the grand stories were fallen and scattered here and there. There were barely thirty houses in the middle of the huge fort. She used to go out in the afternoon without caring about the women around. She used to walk along the edge of the bulwark. Sometimes she used to climb to the highest point of the fort and look as far away as she could. A storm raged in her young heart. The other women of her village warned Mamad – “Mamad, it seems your wife is insane! She keeps roaming all around the fort, she climbs the walls of the fort at any odd hour. She does not know that this area is haunted. Some day if she is possessed, you will have to take care of a crazy woman throughout your life!”

But Mamad knew Roshan was like a bird. She was as playful as a young child at heart and so Mamad used to laugh and retort – ‘It would be good to have a crazy woman in our village!  There is none here anyway!’  Roshan was different and unusual.  Her eyes sparkled when she spoke.  She laughed out loud at every talk. She walked as if she was running. She, at times, forgot the ritual of covering her head while meeting someone elderly. If a woman criticized or corrected her, she would curl up her lips in dislike. After her arrival in this village as a bride, she was a topic of gossip. 

After Roshan’s marriage, her mother voiced her dislike every now and then about the place where Roshan was married.  She would often say – ‘What is there in your village except dust and salt water of the sea? I could not go against your father’s stubbornness. Otherwise, my darling daughter would never have been sent to such a desolate village.’ Roshan would laugh and say, ‘Ma, you know, kings and queens live in a fort. Look, how peaceful it is here!  No noise, no nuisance – you should also stay here for a few days. In the evening, the sea looks so bright and I will take you to the sea behind the fort at night. Do you know that the lights on the Karachi shore line can be seen from the top of the fort at night?’ 

Roshan’s mother would remark, surprised as if she were dealing with a teenager, ‘You are crazy! I am surprised that you do not get bored coming here from the village of your parents, teeming with people. Lights look the same everywhere – be it Karachi or Kotda.’ Ma would promise to stay for three days but would leave the next day! 

While starting back from Roshan’s place, the mother would bless Roshan at the gate and advise her to convince Mamad to leave this deserted village and come to the village where Roshan lived, before she got married. The mother would say to Roshan, ‘Do you even spot a single bird flying anywhere? One cannot spend one’s life in such a village.’ Roshan used to laugh then. She would say to herself, ‘Mother does not know what treasures lie here! This fort, the distant desert, the sea, the birds hiding in the rocks – and my husband– a fort in himself, with the tidal waves rushing through his veins!’

Roshan was fascinated with the sea and the fort. Every day, the village would be still after the fishermen started their work at the sea. Only women and children were left behind – in the village surrounded by the fort.  A small school building was at the eastern end of the fort. A few village children attended the school if they were in the mood. Occasionally, the sound of counting or numbering would be heard from that building.  Except for this sound, the fort was sunk in silence throughout the day.   Late in the evening, the fishermen would return and the village seemed populated for a while. The smell of bidi smoke and the smell of fishes getting fried mingled with each other.

The well-built limbs of the fisherman returning from the sea in the evening seemed to carry with them the dripping sea waves to the village.  Roshan could smell the sea in Mamad’s curly hair on a bright night. Sitting next to Mamad lying on the charpoy, running her hands over his muscular arms, she would say – Take me with you one day. I want to see what the fort looks like from the sea. Seeing Roshan’s shining eyes and the roar of the sea flowing in her veins, Mamad used to laugh and say – ‘You are crazy! I can’t take you to the sea with me! Women panic at the scary waves of the sea.’

Roshan would say with sweet anger – ‘Yeah? There is only one way to know whether women should go to the sea – take me to the sea!’ Suddenly, one day the sea moved far away from the fort. The shore was sandier everywhere. The men who came back from the sea said that they had seen Mamad’s fishing boat go but did not see it coming back. That night there was a storm. The sea reached the highest steps of the fort. A few women sat by Roshan till late night and consoled her. Lying alone in the dim light of the lantern later, Roshan’s heart was beating like a fish out of water. Roshan remembered that there had been sudden lightning the previous night. She saw another lightning striking her. The disappearance of Mamad and his fishing boat was discussed for days. Someone dreaded that Mamad might have been caught by Pakistani marines.  In that case, they would torture him to hell – they said. Those words were imprinted in Roshan’s mind. Gradually, the sea that was rising in Roshan’s eyes turned into a desert. Roshan’s ears pressed against the walls of the fort. The sea continued to roar. Waiting for Mamad for days and months, Roshan kept listening to the tragic sound of the sea roaring ominously behind the walls of the fort. The walls of the fort were getting dilapidated day by day, she felt. The gate to the fort crumbled down. Days and years passed by.  The sea had many ebbs and tides.  Roshan’s parents and the in-laws tried convincing Roshan to give herself a second chance.  But Roshan could see nothing beyond the sea and the fort.  

Roshan’s parents used to come and visit her once a month, her mother begged her to join her, but Roshan neither cried nor accepted her parents’ words. Her parents had already given up. Slowly, various rumors were spread about Roshan. One or two old ladies labeled her jinxed.  It was better for the village if she left the place as soon as possible. Roshan knew everything, but did not react. She used to sit at the western gate of the fort and look at the sea. She often wished the sea approached her and she could run and embrace it.  

The fried rice given by Vaiyyal’s wife was cold now. Roshan remembered Vaiyyal’s advice on not going to the sea at night.  But at midnight she got up, looked at the open door of her house and slowly lifted her feet. A dog lying in the middle of the road raised its ears and then lowered them. It was very dark. The huge fort wall looked giant and intimidating. She was standing right in the middle of the gate. She faced the sea and had turned her back to the village. There was a faint sound of seagulls. She descended the steps and walked towards the sea. Her feet touched smooth cool sand. She sat cross-legged like a monk sitting down to do penance while gentle waves caressed her.  Roshan gazed at the sea water engulfed in darkness. Her ears yearned to hear the waves thunder.  It seemed to her that the sea was slowly approaching the fort, but the waves of the sea were very far from her. She kept on staring at the sea, hoping that the thundering waves would embrace her fully.  Roshan stared at the sea all night but nothing of the sort happened. A flock of seagulls that arrived early in the morning dotted the shore. Looking at the sea in the dim light of dawn, she felt as if she were sitting not in front of the sea, but in front of a lake. A wry smile tugged at her lips.

‘Aunty…..!’ Vaiyyal’s surprised voice reached her ears, reverberating from the fort walls. She looked back. Vaiyyal ran down from the gate steps. She stood up with a disdainful look at the sea. Vaiyyal said with a gasping voice while running, kicking the sand – ‘I saw your windows unshut. The lantern was out of fuel. I got scared. Why are you here so early?’

‘Why have you come so early?’

‘I am preparing for fishing. Good thing the storm didn’t come.’

‘Scared! The cowardly sea!… didn’t come forward to face me! Take out your fishing boat. I want to crush the sea under my feet. How long can I put up with the curses of the village, Vaiyyal? I want to break new grounds.’  Vaiyyal was looking at Roshan with astonishment. Roshan’s body was filled with a storm. As if ready to take revenge, she tied her stall around her waist tight and stepped into the fishing boat. As the boat glided away on the calm waters of the early morning sea, Roshan looked at the fort with her hands on her waist. The fort looked like a tiny toy. She said to herself – ‘Mamad, despite your belief that women cannot sail on the sea, your wife will be surfing this sea!’

 She looked at the waves and smiled. Suddenly, a fish jumped up and landed at her feet. Seeing this, Vaiyyal said – ‘Aunty! What an auspicious sign! The sea is pleased to have you! Pick it up and throw it back in the water before it dies!’

Roshan took the fish in her hands, felt its redolence, and let it go in the water.

Vaiyyal was opening the net. She started helping Vaiyyal.  The distant fort and the wide sea still appeared to be gaping at Roshan.

Also, Read The Marriage of Abu Lahab by Noon Meem Rashid, Translated from The Urdu by Huzaifa Pandit and published in The Antonym.

The Marriage of Abu Lahab— Noon Meem Rashid

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