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

sound of gongs and plunks from the bells of animals reached them from where the dunes undulated into the desert. Withinmoments the unmistakable husky voice of Shabanu’s Auntie Sharma shouted out above the melody of the bells, and Shabanu thought she’d never heard a sweeter sound.
    They saw the goats and sheep first, then the ancient female camel carrying Sharma and her daughter, Fatima, slipped into view like an apparition from behind the edge of a dune.
    “Ho! Can you have such a gathering of women without me?” Sharma demanded.
    Shabanu hiked her skirt to her knees and ran headlong toward her aunt and cousin. The three clasped one another’s waists and danced in circles, their bare feet sending up clouds of dust so thick it muffled their laughter.
    Sharma was Mama and Dadi’s favorite cousin. There were many who disapproved of Sharma because they said she had been a disobedient wife. Many believed she was a witch. Shabanu believed she was the wisest woman on earth.
    Sharma’s husband had beaten her after Fatima’s birth. He was disappointed when she’d failed to produce a son. Sharma had accepted her punishment and said nothing. Slowly she began to build the herds of goats and sheep she tended at the edge of the desert near Fort Abbas, where her husband owned a small farm. Every week she would bring a twig whisk or a bowl or a blanket from her house and bury it in the sand. There, unbeknownst to her husband, she’d builtholding pens of thorn branches for her rapidly growing herds. In the last week she also brought red clay pots filled with
ghee
, a sack of flour, and goatskin water bags.
    One day during the cotton harvest, which coincided that year with a series of sandstorms in the desert, Sharma strapped Fatima to her back and announced to her husband that she was going to pick cotton in the fields of the local
zamindar
.
    Her husband was a proud man, and he objected to Sharma’s working in the fields. But Sharma’s will was powerful, and her husband, ever greedy for money, had acquiesced. Sharma gathered the muslin sacks she intended to fill with cotton and walked down the road toward the
zamindar
’s fields.
    There she made a sling of her
chadr
and tied it between the branches of thorn shrubs that were strong enough to hold Fatima but supple enough to bend with the breeze. She left the infant to be tended by the older children of the women who worked in the field beside her. She spent the day picking cotton, bent from the waist until she felt her back would break.
    A storm rose in the afternoon, and Sharma thought surely it indicated that Allah had blessed her plan.
    Instead of taking the cotton she’d picked to the weighing station, Sharma headed toward home with Fatima strapped to her back and the bulging sacks ofcotton piled high atop her head. She leaned into the wind, and clouds of blowing sand stung her face and arms. Halfway home, she left the road and circled around to where her husband’s camels were tethered.
    She took the oldest female, because it was the quietest and most dependable animal in the herd. Also, the old camel never strayed, so her husband never hobbled and tethered her. In a sandstorm he would think she had wandered away, and he would miss her least of all his camels when she failed to return.
    Then, in the midst of the howling wind, which tossed baskets and branches and small trees about as if they were as light as the sand itself, Sharma and Fatima struck out to gather their penned herds and entered the desert several miles away.
    It never occurred to her husband that Sharma, a mere woman, would have the strength to ride a camel four days and four nights through a storm without stopping, until she was so deep in the desert that he’d never find her. It never occurred to him that she could find her way among the dunes under such conditions with the skill of a tracker. It never even occurred to him that she’d have the courage to leave him, despite his regular beatings and