Read Online In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin - Free Book Online

recommendations I’ll supply them. You served my father well, I thank you. This house will be sold, but until it is you’ll receive your salaries and can stay in your quarters.’ She stood up, on the brink of tears, dignified. ‘Thank you, goodbye.’
    Crushed, they all left. They had expected this, but somehow hoped the house would be kept. It must be worth a tremendous amount, with its gardens and location in the heart of Old British Lahore, where the great houses were gradually being demolished, to make way for ugly flats and townhouses. That all was passing, houses where carriages once had been kept, flags lowered at sunset to the lawns of British commissioners. Gone, and they the servants would never find another berth like this one, the gravity of the house, the gentleness of the master, the vast damp rooms, the slow lugubrious pace, the order within disorder.
     
     
    She found Hassan in the kitchen, muted for once.
    ‘What’ll become of me?’ she asked. After all, something must come of his intimacy with her. She had slept with him, held him. The stark fact of her body shown to him, given to him, must be worth something. She wished for this, and knew that it wasn’t so. With Rafik it had been different, he had raised her up, but Hassan had degraded her. She saw her hopes receding. Again she became the stained creature who threw herself at Hassan, for the little things he gave her.
    ‘You came with nothing, you leave with nothing. You’ve been paid and fed for some time at least. You have decent clothes and a little slug of money.’
    ‘What of you and Rafik?’
    ‘We’re being put in the Islamabad house.’
    ‘And did Rafik say anything to the mistresses about me?’
    ‘Nothing,’ Hassan said cruelly. ‘Not a word.’ He put his hands on the counter and looked directly in her face. ‘It’s over. There never was any hope. I spent my life in this kitchen. Look at me, I’m old. Rafik’s old.’
    So Rafik had renounced her. At the end of the month she had found another place, with some friends of Harouni, who took her because she came from this house.
    Before leaving she said to Rafik one day, ‘Meet me tonight in the kitchen. You owe me that.’
     
     
    She found him waiting for her, under a single bulb. He had aged, his face thin, shoulders bent. Worst of all, his eyes were frightened, as if he didn’t understand where he was. K. K. Harouni had been his life, his morning and night, his charge, his wealth.
    ‘What of the child?’ she asked. ‘Will you help him? When he’s grown will you find him a job?’
    ‘I’ll be gone long before that, dear girl.’
    ‘Say that once you loved me.’
    ‘Of course I did. I do. I loved you more.’
     
     
    Within two years she was finished, began using rocket pills, which she once had so much despised, lost her job, went on to heroin, leaving her husband behind without a word. She knew all about that life from her husband and father.
    The man who controlled the lucrative corner where she ended up begging took most of her earnings. This way she escaped prostitution. She cradled the little boy in her arms, holding him up to the windows of cars. Rafik sent money, a substantial amount, so long as she had an address. And then, soon enough, she died, and the boy begged in the streets, one of the sparrows of Lahore.

Provide, Provide
    SEATED AT DINNER in Lahore one winter in the late 1970s, for the third time in a week Mr. K. K. Harouni was forced to endure a conversation about a Rolls-Royce coupe recently imported by one of the Waraiches, a family no one had heard of just five years before. The car had been specially modified in London and cost an absurd amount of money, and the mention of it inevitably led to a discussion of the new Pakistani industrialists who at that time were blazing into view. Like other members of the feudal landowning class, Harouni greeted the emergence of these people with condescension overlaying his envy. He had capital, as he