FOR MONTHS ANJUM LIVED in the graveyard, a ravaged, feral specter, out-haunting every resident djinn and spirit, ambushing bereaved families who came to bury their dead with a grief so wild, so untethered, that it clean outstripped theirs. She stopped grooming herself, stopped dyeing her hair. It grew dead white from the roots, and suddenly, halfway down her head, turned jet black, making her look, well…striped. Facial hair, which she had once dreaded more than almost anything else, appeared on her chin and cheeks like a glimmer of frost (mercifully a lifetime of cheap hormone injections stopped it from growing into an all-out beard). One of her front teeth, stained dark red from chewing paan, grew loose in her gums. When she spoke or smiled, which she did rarely, it moved up and down terrifyingly, like a harmonium key playing a tune of its own. The terrifyingness had its advantages though—it scared people and kept nasty, insult-hurling, stone-throwing little boys at bay.
Mr. D. D. Gupta, an old client of Anjum’s, whose affection for her had transcended worldly desire long ago, tracked her down and visited her in the graveyard. He was a building contractor from Karol Bagh who bought and supplied construction material—steel, cement, stone, bricks. He diverted a small consignment of bricks and a few asbestos sheets from the building site of a wealthy client and helped Anjum construct a small, temporary shack—nothing elaborate, just a storeroom in which she could lock her things if she needed to. Mr. Gupta visited her from time to time to make sure she was provided for and did not harm herself. When he moved to Baghdad after the American invasion of Iraq (to capitalize on the escalating demand for concrete blast walls), he asked his wife to send their driver with a hot meal for Anjum at least three times a week. Mrs. Gupta, who thought of herself as a Gopi, a female adorer of Lord Krishna, was, according to her palmist, living through her seventh and last cycle of rebirth. This gave her license to behave as she wished without worrying that she would have to pay for her sins in her next life. She had her own amorous involvements, although she maintained that when she attained sexual climax, the ecstasy she felt was for a divine being and not for her human lover. She was extremely fond of her husband but was relieved to have his physical appetites taken off her plate, and therefore more than happy to do him this small favor.
Before he left, Mr. Gupta bought Anjum a cheap mobile phone and taught her how to answer it (incoming calls were free) and how to give him what he described as a “missed call” if she needed to speak to him. Anjum lost it within a week, and when Mr. Gupta called from Baghdad the phone was answered by a drunk who wept and demanded to speak to his mother.
In addition to this kind-heartedness, Anjum also received other visitors. Saeeda brought the apparently heartless, but in truth traumatized, Zainab a few times. (When it became apparent to Saeeda that the visits caused both Anjum and Zainab too much pain, she stopped bringing her.) Anjum’s brother, Saqib, came once a week. Ustad Kulsoom Bi herself, accompanied by her friend Haji Mian and sometimes Bismillah, would come by in a rickshaw. She saw to it that Anjum received a small pension from the Khwabgah, delivered to her in cash in an envelope on the first of every month.
The most regular visitor of all was Ustad Hameed. He would arrive every day except on Wednesdays and Sundays, either at dawn or at twilight, settle down on someone’s grave with Anjum’s harmonium and begin his haunting riaz, Raag Lalit in the morning, Raag Shuddh Kalyan in the evenings—Tum bin kaun khabar mori lait…Who other than you will ask for news of me? He studiously ignored the insulting audience-requests for the latest Bollywood hit or popular qawwali (nine out of ten times it was Dum-a-Dum Mast Qalandar) shouted out by the vagabonds and drifters who gathered outside the invisible boundary of what had, by consensus, been marked off as Anjum’s territory. Sometimes the tragic shadows on the edge of the graveyard rose to their feet in a dreamy, booze-or smack-induced haze and danced in slow motion to a beat of their own. While the light died (or was born) and Ustad Hameed’s gentle voice ranged over the ruined landscape and its ruined inhabitants, Anjum would sit cross-legged with her back to Ustad Hameed on Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s grave. She would not speak to him or look at him. He didn’t mind. He could tell from the stillness of her shoulders that she was listening. He had seen her through so much; he believed that if not he, then certainly music, would see her through this too.
But neither kindness nor cruelty could coax Anjum to return to her old life at the Khwabgah. It took years for the tide of grief and fear to subside. Imam Ziauddin’s daily visits, their petty (and sometimes profound) quarrels, and his request that Anjum read the papers to him every morning, helped draw her back into the Duniya. Gradually the Fort of Desolation scaled down into a dwelling of manageable proportions. It became home; a place of predictable, reassuring sorrow—awful, but reliable. The saffron men sheathed their swords, laid down their tridents and returned meekly to their working lives, answering bells, obeying orders, beating their wives and biding their time until their next bloody outing. The saffron parakeets retracted their talons and returned to green, and camouflaged themselves in the branches of the Banyan trees from which the white-backed vultures and sparrows had disappeared. The folded men and unfolded women visited less frequently. Only Zakir Mian, neatly folded, would not go away. But in time, instead of following her around, he moved in with her and became a constant but undemanding companion.
Anjum began to groom herself again. She hennaed her hair, turning it a flaming orange. She had her facial hair removed, her loose tooth extracted and replaced with an implant. A perfect white tooth now shone like a tusk between the dark red stumps that passed for teeth. On the whole it was only slightly less alarming than the previous arrangement. She stayed with the Pathan suits but she had new ones tailored in softer colors, pale blue and powder pink, which she matched with her old sequined and printed dupattas. She gained a little weight and filled out her new clothes in an attractive, comfortable way.
But Anjum never forgot that she was only Butchers’ Luck. For the rest of her life, even when it appeared otherwise, her relationship with the Rest-of-Her-Life remained precarious and reckless.
As the Fort of Desolation scaled down, Anjum’s tin shack scaled up. It grew first into a hut that could accommodate a bed, and then into a small house with a little kitchen. So as not to attract undue attention, she left the exterior walls rough and unfinished. The inside she plastered and painted an unusual shade of fuchsia. She put in a sandstone roof supported on iron girders, which gave her a terrace on which, in the winter, she would put out a plastic chair and dry her hair and sun her chapped, scaly shins while she surveyed the dominion of the dead. For her doors and windows she chose a pale pistachio green. The Bandicoot, now well on her way to becoming a young lady, began to visit her again. She always came with Saeeda, and she never spent the night. Anjum never asked or insisted, or even made her feelings manifest. But the pain from this one wound never deadened, never diminished. On this count her heart simply would not agree to mend.
Every few months the municipal authorities stuck a notice on Anjum’s front door that said squatters were strictly prohibited from living in the graveyard and that any unauthorized construction would be demolished within a week. She told them that she wasn’t living in the graveyard, she was dying in it—and for this she didn’t need permission from the municipality because she had authorization from the Almighty Himself.