Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa Page B

“Now, what I can give you?” he muses. “Let me see ... Sit, sit,” he says and Ayah’s restiveness succumbs to the dual restraints of hand and promises.
    Although Ayah has been allotted quarters, she dwells and sleeps in our house. Soon the tabletops, mantelpieces, sideboards and shelves in our rooms blossom with embroidered, bosky-silk doilies.
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    The attentions of Ayah’s Pathan admirer also benefit our household. All our kitchen knives, table knives, Mother’s scissors and paper-knife and Hari’s garden shears and Adi’s blunt penknife
suddenly develop glittering razor edges. And it is not only our household the Pathan services. Gita Shankar’s, Rosy-Peter’s, Electric-aunt’s and Godmother’s houses also flash with sharp and efficient cutting implements. Even the worn, stubby knives in the servants’ quarters acquire redoubtable edges, for the Pathan is a knife-sharpener.
    I have often noticed him in the bazaar, plying his trade before streetside shops. He pushes a pedal on his machine and a large and slender wheel turns dizzily round and round. With great dexterity and judgment he brings the knife blades to the wheel, and in the ensuing conflagration of sparks and swift steel-screeches, the knives are honed to jewel edges. He wraps the loose end of his floppy turban about his mouth like a thug—to filter out the fine steel and whetstone dust.
    It is only when I see him in a sidewalk brawl with the restaurant-wrestler, looking bewildered and furious, his face no longer covered like a thug’s, that I recognize the face and connect it to the pink and tingly bottom we cycled past on our way to Imam Din’s village.
    The Pathan’s name is Sharbat Khan. He too cycles up our long drive, steel clattering and wheels wobbling over the rubble that sticks out of the mud. The cycle looks like a toy beneath the man from the mountains and involuntarily Adi and I grow tense, expecting the pistol-shot-like report of a punctured tire. It is late in the afternoon and we stand on the veranda, hypnotized by his approach.
    Sharbat Khan wears drawstring pantaloons so baggy they put to shame Masseur’s shalwar—and over them a flared tunic that flaunts ten yards of coarse white homespun. He cycles past our bedroom and Gita Shankar’s rooms to the back of the house. Adi and I scoot after him.
    Sharbat Khan parks his cycle against a tree and squatting by it waits for Ayah.
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    Ayah comes.
    Ayah is nervous in his presence, given to sudden movement; her goddess-like calm replaced by breath-stopping shyness. They
don’t touch. He leans across his bicycle, talking, and she shifts from foot to foot, smiling, ducking and twisting spherically. She has taken to sticking a flower in her hair, plucked from our garden. They don’t need to touch. His presence radiates a warmth that is different from the dark heat generated by Masseur’s fingers—the lightning strikes of Ice-candy-man’s toes.
    Sharbat Khan tells her of his cousin who has a dry fruit and naswar (mixture of tobacco and opium) lean-to in Gowalmandi. It is a contact point for the many Pathans from his tribe around the Khyber working in Lahore. He gives Ayah news of the meat, vegetable, tea and kebab stall owners and of their families, whose knives he sharpens. He is doing well. And not only at sharpening knives.
    Sharbat Khan cautions Ayah: “These are bad times—Allah knows what’s in store. There is big trouble in Calcutta and Delhi: Hindu-Muslim trouble. The Congresswallahs are after Jinnah’s blood...”
    â€œWhat’s it to us if Jinnah, Nehru and Patel fight? They are not fighting our fight,” says Ayah, lightly.
    â€œThat may be true,” says Sharbat Khan thoughtfully, “but they are stirring up trouble for us all.”
    Sharbat Khan shifts forward, his aspect that of a man about to confess a secret. Ayah leans closer to him and I slide into