By this time I had been at the orphanage for a number of years and watched half a dozen of my sisters get married. Their ages ranged from thirteen to thirty. Out of the six, we escorted three to the train station and one to the bus. One disappeared, nobody knew where, and one was married to an elderly clerk in the local municipality office who was, happily, receptive to bribes from the needful. This man had thrived and could afford a lavish wedding in a real wedding hall—Lala’s Shadi House near Data Darbar. My sisters and I, therefore, had occasion to put on our best dresses, and we danced and sang at the baaraat party to our heart’s content. It remains one of my fondest memories.
The wedding hall I was in now made the other seem like a shanty.
It was the grandest room I had ever seen or would. Pentagonal in shape, flanked by pillared archways, it was strewn with rose petals at the entrance and the far end. Motia and bright feather wreaths decked the walls, as did colorful mosaics and tapestries (these blurred when I passed them so I could never make out the images). Persian rugs were arranged in geometric patterns on the floor and spiraling crystal chandeliers sparkled and glimmered overhead. Candelabras lined the walls and threw a chiaroscuro of light and shadow such that the rugs (so fine they felt like extensions of my skin) seemed to shift beneath my passage.
My memory of the room is perfect, so vivid that it still lives behind my eyelids. I can shut my eyes now and see everything in profuse detail.
At the far end of the room was a cage on a raised platform. A bridegroom and his bride sat cross-legged on an embellished takht inside it.
I walked forward. The groom wore a sherwani glittering with sequins, and garlands of red flowers and rupee notes around his neck. His face was covered with a veil of charred feathers. The woman wore a gold-red wedding dress and was laden with jewelry from head to toe. Wherever her skin was exposed it was painted with henna. She was breathtaking.
Now I noticed other cages secreted away in arched recesses on either side of me. Silent men and women in colorful shalwar kurtas and saris sat inside on wooden perches and swings. Their eyes followed me as I moved down the hall. Their lips were parted. From each mouth protruded what I first thought were albino tongues. A second look dismissed the idea. The objects were pale and card-shaped.
Soundless, the doors of all cages slid up. The inmates rose and stepped outside.
I was surrounded by the wedding procession now. My nostrils filled with a smell as organic as it was old.
In a flurry of blue and green and black we marched to the couple’s cage. Their door swung open, revealing a three-step deck carpeted with red feathers and fall leaves. The crowd surged forward, elbow to elbow, carrying me on its breast. Their footfall was perfectly silent. I couldn’t even hear their breathing.
We halted before the stage.
Two men in raven black swept across the hall, up the stair deck, into the cage. They held a bowl of milk. The bridegroom swung his veil of burnt feathers aside and sipped. The raven men presented the bowl to the bride. She dipped her head coyly (but not before I saw that her eyes were large and different-colored) and drank until the man gently removed the bowl from her lips and placed it on the step deck.
Mano the wedding cat appeared from behind the stage. He sauntered up the steps and began to lap up the remaining milk. Come to me, Mano, I tried to say, but the words wouldn’t leave my lips. Satiated, Mano yawned, licked his haunches, and started circling the wedding cage.
A woman in all white with a birthmark beneath her left eye was beside me. She was built like a briefcase, short and squat and business-like. She gazed at me for a moment and pointed at the ceiling.
I looked up.
The hall’s ceiling was covered in the fresco of a giant bird. The bird was perfectly captured in mid-flight, its golden-dark serrated wings scything a blue sky. It had a rainbow plumage, black horns, and a peacock tail. Glinting feathers, like embers, showered from its underbelly. In the flickering light, the painting appeared to cast a vast shadow over the proceedings.
I lowered my gaze and the woman was gone. In her place was one of the raven men. Gray sparrows sat on his shoulders and pecked at his hair. He held out an enamel basin in front of him. Liquid sloshed inside. Its vapors made my eyes water.
The raven man bowed and began walking to the wedding cage.
Now rose excited chittering as the guests removed the card-like objects from their mouths and showered the wedding couple with them. Prayers, cheers, shouts, and the wailing of women overcome by the prospect of a daughter’s separation mounted, until you couldn’t tell if the procession were celebrating or mourning.
Mubarak! Mubarak! Be blessed in your husband’s house.
May you never have cause to leave that home. May you never be short of dowry.
May your firstborns be healthy baby boys.
May your mother-in-law never hate you.
May you never return to your parents. Should you return, come only as a dead body
and
may you stay safe from the stove, the stove, the stove!
Now burst the wedding songs from a hundred throats, ancient, powerful, entrancing, loving, imprisoning, humiliating; and yet the raven man walked, he walked toward the bride with the basin of slopping liquid that gave off fumes.
She sat in her cage, placid as a sea, ageless like a vow unfulfilled. Only when the man reached her and doused her in the vaporous liquid did she stir. Her jewels slid and chinked. The tapestries on the walls darkened. The groom’s veil of charred feathers dropped from his head and the red of the bride’s dress deepened until it turned a perfect black.
The procession rejoiced.
May you stay safe from the stove!
Mano was between my legs. The wedding cat flicked his tail and tripped me. I flailed my arms, stumbled, and when I looked up, the wedding hall was gone. The cages, the guests, the beautiful bride with her splendid mismatched eyes (which I have seen in dream many times since), the elegant ornamentation—all vanished.
Just an orphan’s room, empty of poise and promise.
I was afraid. I wasn’t afraid. I was crying. I went back to the courtyard and looked at the sky. So many stars that night, and the blue moon, it watched the world as it always had. A bulbous bird staked to the heavens, it spread its vast gaze over all our affairs. Its eye was filled with something deep and raw. Now when I close my eyes and imagine that moon, I think what I saw was mystery and memory and a longing so old it makes me shudder.
I went to deliver the tobacco (still in my pocket) and as I passed Sangeeta Apa’s door, the sounds of hushed conversation came, as did soothing odors of incense, earth, and rubbing oil. When I returned from Bibi Soraiya’s quarters, the door was ajar. Leaves rustled. I glanced up to see a figure, bulky, as if with a thick garment, clinging to the tree (which tree?) outside her room.
The moon fled behind a cloud. When it returned, the ghostly figure was gone.
The wedding dinner was short and sweet. There was biryani, sweet lassi, mangoes, and lychees (it was summer). Rumors of silver-papered firni-in-jotas from Gawal Mandi floated for a while before Bibi Soraiya dismissed them.
The groom was a looming, forbidding man who bowed his head again and again and made squeezing gestures with his fists when too many of my sisters crowded him. Sangeeta Apa and he wore matching wedding outfits. She wouldn’t look at him but peeked from behind her ghoongat, smiling, when Neha and I tried to steal his brown leather shoes—Joota Chupai is an accepted custom. Bibi Soraiya yelled at us and we reluctantly returned them.
They left for Gujranwala the next day by train.
I have not seen nor heard of my Sangeeta Apa since. If she called or wrote letters, Bibi Soraiya didn’t tell us, which was strange because my others sisters stayed in touch—for a few years, at least, before life overtook them. The unsettling shadow of Apa’s absence grew, but even after I was all grown up, if I asked about her, Bibi’s eyes would change. With age, Bibi developed a tremor in her face and limbs, and mere mention of Apa would send her shaking to bed.
It got so bad that I stopped asking.
In ensuing years, Neha and many of my other sisters were married off. Sorted out, arranged, and packed away. Bus stops with their tang of sweat and diesel on your tongue. Train stations odorous with dust and cheap perfume and the ashy smell of sparks from rail tracks. Young girls appeared and replaced my sisters—a ceaseless commotion of laughs and shouts and dopattas flying in the courtyard wind. I loved them all, but, bless my memory, I remember few. Sometimes when I peered at their faces, it seemed as if their features blurred and ran together and one familiar mask emerged, winter breath rising from its lips like smoke. When that happened, I would get up and walk to the entrance of the orphanage. I would stand there and watch the world beyond those walls, an unfettered landscape stretching away beyond the limits of my vision. Somewhere out there, I thought, you didn’t need to be wedded to resignation or despair. There was stuff in between. Hearths instead of stoves. If you got too warm, you could step away. You could leave. You didn’t have to leave. You didn’t have to fear leaving, or falling, or ceaselessly circling and not ever coming to rest.
You could travel to the ends of the earth. You didn’t have to fear remembering.
By then I was busy helping Bibi run the orphanage. I had to put such thoughts out of my head. Still, I sometimes dreamed. Of discomfiting things that became grainy, wispy echoes in the morning. Crossroads with signs askew pointing this way and that; graveyards planted next to wedding halls; windows that shuttered open and closed; doorways that seemed to lead to more doorways, their gaping mouths atremble with flickering light; and in the distance, always, the flutter of dark wings. I would wake from these dreams with my fists darkened by sweat and dust, the taste of smoke already fading from my tongue.
The bird man still visited. He crouched on his shawl and twittered and chirped and spread the gilded envelopes, waiting for his parakeets to tell his admirers’ fortunes. Maybe I was getting older or he, but his bird music seemed duller to me, as if his voice had aged. Once he came inside the orphanage to talk to Bibi Soraiya about something and my sisters gathered around him. I sat and watched him play to the girls. He turned his head from side to side. His turban fell off. I picked it up and handed it to him.
“Thank you,” he said, dusting it with his large earthy hand. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s time to take this off for good.”
“Why?”
“Vanity be damned, it’s just an old turban, you know.” He laughed, a loud, booming sound that startled me. “One can dream, but that won’t change it to a crown.” His eyes looked a little feverish. He said, “You know sparrows are a delicacy in Gujranwala. They trap dozens in nets and roast them slow on large stoves. My father used to go eat with friends once in a while, but my mother would get angry. She said the poor things had no meat on them at all and it was a sin to take so many tiny lives for nothing.”
I must have frowned or my face lost color, for he changed the subject. Shortly after, he left.
The oddest thing I remember after Apa’s departure?
Exactly forty days after Bibi took her to the train station, all the birds, the silent birds, the soaring, splendid birds that came to us from every corner of Lahore, stopped visiting. The courtyard trees grew heavy with unpecked fruit, the electric poles became forlorn. Long after they vanished, the courtyard remained filled with the rich, old smell of bird. (These days, the odor makes me break out in a sweat.)
And in our rooms the mirrors rippled and moonlight changed and people from the past walked restlessly back and forth between places of someone else’s making.
Pigeon from Hell
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
I would have done CPR if there’d have been any chance of CPR working. I’m certified, I mean. You don’t get to put your name up on the babysitting board at church unless you’re certified.
For the whole month after what happened, that’s what I kept wanting to tell Tad and Kim Rogers. That, if there would have been even the slightest chance, even the whisper of one, even the ghost of the ghost of a hope, then I would have straddled Ben’s small body in the street, never mind my new skirt, or the toes of my new shoes, or getting blood all over me, never mind any of that. I would have sat right there on him in the middle of traffic and everything, and I would have breathed all the life I could into him, and then pressed on his sternum with the heel of my right hand, my left hand on top of it, heavy but not too heavy. What I wanted to tell them, to show them, was that I would have done that until the ambulance screeched up, and then the medics would have had to pull me off. But I would have been clawing at the asphalt, trying to get back, to pump his heart just one more time. To get one last breath into his chest.
Promise.
Really.
Kara could have done it too, if she’d been there, instead of crying into the phone about she didn’t know where he was, that’s why she was calling, goddamnit.
Who she was calling at that point, it was the cops.
Thing was, it could have been me on my knees by Tad and Kim Rogers’s breakfast bar at six thirty on a Friday, their phone dragged down with me. Except it wasn’t my turn.
We were trading babysitting jobs, Kara and me. She’d get one, then I’d get one. The idea was that, if we traded like that, our money would save at the same rate, so when we went shopping together right before our senior year, we’d have the same amount, could get the same halter tops and skirts we were planning to own the school with.
Ben was Kara’s turn, though. I’d had him the week before, for the church’s bingo night. What Kara had him for was Tad and Kim Rogers’s fifth anniversary. It didn’t hurt that she was kind of in love with Tad, either. Not in any bad kind of way, just—he was somewhere in his midtwenties, was a thousand years younger than our dads but so much more mature than her college-brother Samuel, and, importantly, he adored Kim, he doted on Kim. Kim could do no wrong, as far as he was concerned.
What girl doesn’t want to live on a pedestal like that?
I thought Tad was all right too, but this is all before, of course.
Losing a child, it ages a person. It sounds like something you’d see needle-pointed onto a pillow, but we don’t need to see it spelled out, anymore; we can just look at Tad. The time off from work hasn’t helped him.
You’re not supposed to judge, I know.
I try not to. It’s sad, though. Hard to look away, I mean.
One night, maybe two weeks after that Friday, I’d decided to just tell them, to get it over with, but I lost my nerve a few houses down, had to pull over to cry. It wasn’t fake, either. Puffy eyes and smeared makeup wasn’t going to be any kind of disguise, any cheap tactic. That was really going to be me.
But when I looked up from the heels of my hands, there was Tad, on the sidewalk by their mailbox. He had Ben’s stupid rehab pigeon balanced there in his palm.
I shouldn’t call it that, I know, but Ben being gone doesn’t make that pigeon smart, I don’t think.
He’d found it flapping in the gutter with a broken wing the day of his preschool graduation, and cradled it all the way home. Kim told me she’d seen it first and tried to steer them away, but it must have been fate.
Some boys have puppies, or iguanas, or fish.
Ben had a dirty gray pigeon.
When I’d babysat for bingo, Ben had let it out of its cage (a converted raccoon trap), and it flap-walked all over the house, finally hid under Tad and Kim’s bed—the room Kim had politely asked me not to go in if I didn’t need to. Under their king bed, I found out why: the clear flat tub rolled under there was where Kim kept her lingerie. It made me study Tad in a new way. A better way.
When it was Kara’s turn to babysit Ben, she had that tub open as soon as Ben was in the bath. I know because she called me, so she could do her thrilled whisper about all of it—crotchless? seriously?
Seriously, girl. Yes.
I dared her try to them on, and try not to think about Tad when she did.
This isn’t where Ben drowns in the bathtub. He never drowns in the bathtub.
If only.