Read Online Haveli by Suzanne Fisher Staples - Free Book Online Page A

desert ages people too fast, Shabanu thought sadly. She’d never noticed before.
    Mama wore the same turquoise tunic she’d worn when Shabanu was married. It was worn and faded, but it still showed the strong lines of her mother’s tall, slim body.
    At Shabanu’s wedding the women of Rahim’s household had stared at the desert women’s rough handmade slippers and tunics sewn in graceful lines that fitted their full breasts and slender waists. The women of Okurabad wore more stylish cuts of splendid fabrics that hid their plumper figures. Shabanu still loved the simple embroideries and mirrored designs of Cholistan far more than the beaded chiffons the women of Okurabad wore.
    Her relatives wore their hair plain and pulled back in long thick braids, while the women of Okurabad wore theirs carefully coiffed in fluffy bobs. The hands of the Cholistan women were rough with calluses from hauling water, their nails cracked and split from patching the walls of their houses with dung and earth and water. The idle hands of the women of Okurabad were manicured, with long lacquered nails and soft white palms.
    Shabanu’s family had stood silent with a natural grace, while the women of Okurabad laughed at them behind their silken
dupattas
.
    Shabanu was glad to see every one of them—even Auntie, whose lips had grown thin and crooked fromyears of pursing them with disapproval. Shabanu embraced them, one by one, inhaling the desert-clean smell of their hair and clothing, as if to dispel the outer layers of the Okurabad woman she’d become to reveal the Cholistan girl who remained inside her.
    Auntie took Mumtaz by the hand, and they all sat beside the fire. Auntie had felt sorry for Mama and Dadi when they’d had no sons to provide for them in their old age. But now because of Dadi’s fine camel herd and Rahim’s generosity, they were far more prosperous than Auntie and her husband, who still worked as a government clerk in Rahimyar Khan and visited his family only occasionally.
    Auntie hugged Mumtaz and kept her close, perhaps mourning the daughter she would never bear.
    Mama handed Shabanu a cup of tea. She cradled it in her hands, and the warmth of her family enfolded her.
    Phulan held her newest infant son against her breast. Her second son, who was three, ran about, barefoot and bare-bottomed, herding chickens with a stick, while the third toddled after him. The eldest, who was five, sat nearby with the men.
    While Phulan seemed content and thoroughly absorbed in her four sons, the changes in her saddened Shabanu. Just seven years earlier, when she was married, Phulan’s skin glowed from weeks of massages with oil of jasmine and golden powders—turmeric, cumin, and saffron. Her hair shone fromrubbing it with a paste of sandalwood and mustard oil during the wedding preparations. Her arms and cheeks had been round and sleek from a diet of yogurt and honey, carrot pudding, nuts, butter, raisins, and sugar. She had been like a ripe peach, round and golden and fragrant.
    Now, Phulan’s skin was checkered and lined. Her hair was dull, with limp strands that flopped over her forehead. Her body was spindly and slightly stooped from hard physical labor on her husband’s farm. Although Phulan was still young, Shabanu could imagine clearly how her once-beautiful sister would look as an old woman.
    Men came and went throughout the morning, squatting with their backs against makeshift shelters, smoking and talking about prices for hauling produce. Dadi and his cousins contracted out their camels to haul sugarcane to market during the busy harvest season. They calculated how many more camels they’d need for the overlap of the cotton, mango, and orange crops as the season wore on.
    Late in the morning Shabanu’s mother brought out the old wooden bowl, and Shabanu took it from her to mix dough for
chapatis
. Her aunt brought out cloths folded and tied around sweets from the bazaar at Rahimyar Khan.
    As they were about to eat, the