The Dance of the Peacock, Part 2
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We recommend reading Part 1 first.
The peacock was now an intermittent visitor to the garden at Sakoonat-e-Siddiqui, just as Sumaira’s cheerfulness had become more and more an occasional companion. She couldn’t help drawing a comparison between the bird seeking out her garden and her wellbeing seeking the outdoors.
She was not a woman who wavered in the face of unexplained apprehensions but lately she had begun to feel the chills of superstition in her heart. This house – even its walls – reeked of secrets and forebodings lately. When she felt especially dispirited, she would get into the car and drive around the city, seeking quiet green glades where she would stop and breathe.
Her own beautiful garden awaited in magnificent repose and yet she sought serenity elsewhere. The irony didn’t escape her. But the ghosts of something – of someone – now pursued her there, making her feel anxious and guarded.
Sumaira however dug her heels in. She was the queen of her new home and the occasional rush of doombound thoughts was not going to deter her from living the life of her dreams. She had managed to organise a grand reception at Sakoonat-e-Siddiqui and had invited all her friends and relatives from Lahore.
The haveli had, unsparingly and graciously housed twenty-five of her guests. The rest were put up at the Sultan Grand Hotel. For three days the guests enjoyed the largesse of the house and its hostess.
Zahid made it back on the last day; he had been away in Lahore to attend to Kulsoom who had refused any sustenance for the last three days. She had looked at her husband of fifteen years almost questioningly when he had come into her room. Was there a celebration at their home? she asked with her clear, bright-eyed gaze.
He mumbled something unintelligible and then cajoled Kulsoom to eat something. She acquiesced quietly. He was used to her strange connection with the universe; with her uncanny instinct to pick up on people and their vibes in ways that appeared confounding and bizarre.
He had stayed on that night and the next day in Lahore to ensure Kulsoom had abandoned any ideas of fasting indefinitely and then he returned to Sheikhupura the day after.
Sumaira was sitting in the veranda while a cool, crisp breeze blew around her. It was the tail end of February, and the morning still came upon the world with a fortifying vigour. She closed her eyes and let the wind sweep her up on its bracing wings.
She suddenly felt an odd discomfiture sink over her; she opened her eyes. There in the garden, right in front of her, stood the peacock. Sumaira hadn’t seen it in a couple of months and now it perched there like it had to watch her.
She shivered slightly and felt the hairs stand on the back of her neck. The peacock fanned out its tail, turned around, and walked away with graceful, rhythmic steps. It was dancing.
Even as it unfurled its lustiness onto the world, Sumaira felt something squeeze her insides; a sense of foreboding joined hands with the tightness in her chest. She swallowed hard and looked away from the scene of excessive beauty. It seemed like nature was enjoying a farce in her garden.
“Guria, chai,” said a papery voice from the doorway. The old retainer had watched Sumaira looking at the mesmeric scene in front of her with a long thoughtful look of her own. She had muttered a little prayer and had then made her presence known.
“It has been many years since I last saw a peacock come to the garden so frequently,” she said as she rolled out the trolley with its solitary cup of tea.
“It was when Zohaib baba left us. He was only eight years old, you know. The amaltas were blooming just like this and the peacock had danced then too. Tauba Tauba! Allah khair karay. (May God keep us from harm!)”
Sumaira stared at the older woman uncomprehendingly at first and then with a sudden burst of visceral, raw rage. Her hammering heart had found the vent it so desperately needed to keep from coming out of her chest and dropping to the floor.
She launched at the older woman. She voiced the kind of calamitous, hideous thoughts that were already lancing at Sumaira’s insides and she always seemed to know more than the lady of the house ever would.
“Don’t talk rubbish! Keep your sordid superstitions to yourself!” Sumaira felt her breath come out in ragged gasps as she turned around away from the shadowy face of the old retainer. “Now leave me alone!”
An hour later, Sumaira still sat outside. Why had she felt like the older woman had jabbed her finger to Sumaira’s very core? It was as if they had both seen her world ending and the ancient one had been there to announce it.
She had tried to calm herself, to grasp at logic and reality, but both had turned like feeble wraiths in the face of foreboding phantasms. The gusting February wind seemed to further give the spirits temerity and substance, and carried them to every corner of the garden.
Sumaira breathed in deeply. With each measured breath, she felt her perspective gradually shift from the occult to the real, from the spirit world to the spring-laden one around her – where the peacock was just a bird that found solace in her garden as much as she did, and where nature’s extravagances were pleasurable blessings rather than premonitions of doom.
Sumaira looked behind her at the darkened doorway. She was now washed over with a sense of remorse that was almost comforting in its safe, earthy feel. She sat for a while longer, bolstering her confidence in the rational, sensible, ghoul-free universe around her. She then got up to look for Khala, intending to repair the damage done by her outburst.
The older woman had seen her fair share of ups and downs, and had over the decades, negotiated through the myriad tempers of the ladies of the house – the begums and their offsprings included.
She chuckled and grinned toothlessly at Sumaira when she was offered an apology. “Koi baat nahin guria. Kabhi khushi, kabhi gham. (Don’t worry little one. Life is sometimes joyous and sometimes sorrowful.)”
Sumaira came away not entirely sure of the older woman’s state of mind but glad that the state of their hearts was again restored.
***
The next few months passed in quiet harmony as Zahid remained mostly in Sheikhupura with only a fortnightly visit to Lahore.
May 16th, their anniversary, approached. Sumaira marveled at the briskness with which a year had passed; a whole year since she had become Mrs. Zahid Siddiqui and the lady of Sakoonat-e-Siddiqui. She still couldn’t see herself as the Matriarch because there were older things and beings in the haveli.
These older things – older beings – impaired her dominion of the great house. She often hesitated when she entered certain rooms, assailed more than a few times by the strange uncertainty of the almost vaporific presence of the feeble old retainer.
The latter seemed to be almost on standby, to be waiting for something – someone.
Sumaira had begun to counter the assaults of the uninvited, unfriendly thoughts inside her head by changing her environment.
She had redone the master bedroom soon after she had come to the house. That was followed by the lounge and the dining room and recently the room which had always made her shudder with foreboding: The space that had been Kulsoom’s sanctuary where she was said to escape for hours at a time to get far from the madding crowd.
That crowd, Sumaira mused, would have included not only people but the painful cacophony of Kulsoom’s own thoughts.
Sumaira had seen the look on Peeno Khala’s face when she had the ancient teak furniture removed piece by piece. The deep lines on the old retainer’s brow grew shadowed with premonitions of an almost palpable gloom. Sumaira ignored this, as she did the unsettled feeling in the pit of her stomach.
On the eve of their anniversary, Zahid was called away to Lahore again. Kulsoom had been hospitalised after a series of seizures. They were in the process of doing some diagnostics but they thought that she had suffered a stroke.
When Sumaira got the news, she felt like a veil had been lifted from her heart’s eyes – a veil of her own making. The peacock, the constant unsettled feeling, the premonitions of doom. They had meant something!
And Sumaira understood it now: Kulsoom was going to die.
This is what the haveli had been telling her as it held her in its almost sentient embrace over the past year. It was telling her to wait, to be patient – she would finally get what she had worked for – what she truly deserved.
She suddenly felt a strange elation that stole her breath.
She would go to Lahore. She would stand by her husband’s side even as he stood by the side of his dying ex-wife. She would show him and the world that she had a heart so big that she could graciously, lovingly fit everyone into it including “the other woman” – the woman who had made constant demands on Sumaira’s husband’s heart and mind.
Yes, she would go to Lahore. She would go to the hospital and look down at the depleting woman, and she would forgive Kulsoom for all the intrusions into her marriage and into her life.
She got into the car and started on her journey.
***
“It was so untimely… So strange.”
“May Allah bless her with Jannat al Firdaus! (The highest place in heaven)”
“May her soul rest in peace.”
“Allah knows best….”
***
Zahid Siddiqui sat in the great drawing room at Sakoonat-e-Siddiqui surrounded by friends and family pouring forth their condolences. A month had passed since the burial and the house was flooded with well-wishers.
“I have arranged for fresh flowers for the grave. Come, have something to eat,” said Kulsoom as she led Zahid and the guests into the dining room that shimmered in the late afternoon sunlight.
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Mahvash Mohtadullah
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