As Swallows Fly Read online

  ‘It is better we do our stitching first,’ said Malika.

  The next night, she lay awake in bed wondering what to tell them, where to start. She wished she had a book to help her. She could feel Tahir listening in the darkness from the other corner as she turned and fidgeted beside Ayesha’s warm body. She hid her fears beneath her clothes as she dressed in the morning, and then set the fire for chapattis. In the end, she made a decision to start with arithmetic, although she remembered only a few of the laws and formulas her teacher had begun to show her. She half hoped they would forget about the number games, but after a token effort with their stitching the girls wrapped their handiwork in cloth and placed their packages at the base of the tree before gathering around her. Malika took a deep breath and began.

  After some weeks, Malika resorted to writing down number problems at night, so there was something for the class to start with during the day. Sometimes, Tahir stared at her in the faint glow of the kerosene lamp, his dark eyes flashing. He asked her once, in a whisper so Ayesha would not wake, what she was doing.

  ‘It is a game for the other girls,’ Malika whispered back.

  ‘Games are for children,’ he said, and rolled over to the wall. Minutes later, she heard him snoring. For a few moments, they were in time with Ayesha’s loud snorts, and Malika lowered her head and smiled.

  In the class, she began to recite numbers, forcing the girls to remember them in sequence, and giving them simple problems to work out in their heads. It didn’t seem to matter what she did or which tasks she set, the girls were always on time, bubbling with excitement and eager for the next lesson. Soon, they would not leave until their mothers came looking for them, and some walked around the village reciting their tables or explaining division and multiplication to their brothers.

  One day, the elders called Malika to an evening meeting. Ayesha stood behind her as she explained her lessons to the circle of stone-faced elders. Ayesha stayed when Malika was asked to walk home. The next morning, Ayesha told her that the elders had banned the classes.

  Malika ate her breakfast slowly and later that morning spoke to Fatima at the latrine.

  ‘We must continue our work,’ Fatima said. She directed the hose at the concrete gutter and waited as Malika followed with the broom.

  ‘They could make things worse,’ said Malika. ‘They might stop our stitching, too.’ She paused her sweeping to take a breath then, holding it, she shoved the excrement into the bucket at the end of the gutter. She exhaled. ‘We should be careful.’

  ‘That is true,’ Fatima nodded.

  Malika leaned on the broom. ‘I have an idea. We have paper and pencils. We can pass problems between us. So we do not gather together, except for stitching. I could make up a code.’ Her face became doubtful. ‘Perhaps it is too dangerous.’

  Fatima’s face beamed. ‘No! That is a good idea, my friend. It can be our own secret code.’

  ‘We will need to be careful of displeasing the elders.’

  ‘What of Ayesha? She is almost an elder.’

  ‘She will not mind,’ said Malika.

  One Sunday, the priest arrived early for Mass. He manoeuvred his small, red car along the largest of the lanes and parked it at the edge of the square, beneath a branch of the fig tree. He stood for a moment, his hands on his hips, and then wandered over to where the children worked on their sewing. One of the mothers now supervised the children to make sure they worked. The priest gazed at the gathering before smiling at the woman.

  ‘May I speak with them?’ he said to the woman, who ordered the girls to lay down their work.

  The priest was easily the tallest man that Malika had seen, taller even than the policeman. His hair was red like autumn leaves. His accent spoke of foreign lands as he told them of the child Jesus visiting the temple, and how his holiness was visible even then, even by those who didn’t believe. Malika had heard the story before. She glanced at Fatima, who had been working on a puzzle that Malika had given her that morning as they threw grain to the chickens. Fatima nudged the girl next to her and slipped a folded sheet of paper in her hand. The girl waited until the priest had turned away before leaning across to Malika. But she was not careful enough and the woman saw the folded paper in the girl’s hand.

  ‘What nonsense are you making, Lubna?’ she hissed. She stepped between the girls and snatched the note from the open-mouthed girl, before burying it in her clothes.

  ‘What is that?’ the priest asked.

  ‘It is foolishness,’ said the woman. ‘A foolishness the elders have forbidden.’

  ‘May I see it?’

  The woman hesitated but then did as he asked, looking at Malika with malice as she handed it across. He scanned the note for a minute, then looked up. ‘Who wrote this?’ he asked.

  Malika stood and he beckoned her forward as he read the note again, this time frowning.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked finally, looking in her eyes.

  ‘It is a puzzle,’ she answered.

  ‘They are lines without meaning.’

  She took the paper. ‘No, it is a code,’ she said. ‘Each line is a different number. We are deciding what size the square would need to be if all the harvest from the field had to be stored here, if it reached the same height as the wall.’

  ‘The elders have forbidden it, Father,’ said the woman again, staring at the seated children. She clutched at her robes. ‘We must work, not play idly.’

  The priest held up his hand and turned back to Malika. His eyes narrowed. ‘And what is the answer?’

  ‘The others are working on it,’ said Malika, looking around. ‘I do not want to spoil it.’

  The priest laughed. ‘Perhaps that is because you do not know it.’

  ‘Three and a quarter chains on each side,’ she said immediately, looking at him.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I saw the answer when Tahir told me they hope to fill three silos this year.’

  ‘But the silos are round.’

  ‘Cylinders. Yes.’

  He leaned forward, his hands on his knees. ‘My name is Father Louis Andreas Salvador Prader.’ He smiled when she hesitated. ‘My friends call me Father Louis.’

  ‘Then I will do that,’ said Malika. The girls were behind her, she knew, but none of them had moved. She felt the woman’s anger at her back too. Father Louis seemed about to talk again before changing his mind. He handed back the note. ‘You say you saw the answer. Do you mean you calculated it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Then tell me how you explain it to the other girls.’

  ‘I do not know how. I see it, then I work it out as I explain it.’

  ‘Sit with me,’ he said. ‘Let us spend some time together.’ He spoke to the woman. ‘Rasheed, please, could you make me some tea? I will watch the children.’

  That afternoon, after Mass, Father Louis spent time talking with the elders in the large building that served as the church on the Sundays he was there. It was a long discussion. As she always did on such days, Malika relaxed with the women and girls in the square, but on this day she had to try hard to ignore what was happening inside the church. She ate the late lunch, drank tea and made jokes, laughing at the young children as they ran around chasing each other. Older boys had begun a game of cricket on the other side of the tree. While she sat, her eyes kept drifting to the path she knew Tahir would take to the square. He was not forced to come to Mass, and instead usually worked in the fields in the morning.

  He arrived grasping a scythe, his slender limbs now strong with muscle from the field work. His skin glowed in the afternoon sun. He had long grown out of his jubba, and wore the same grey top and pants as the others. But the village barely saw him outside the Sunday meal, and even then he would take food from the table and either sit alone or occasionally find shade with a few of the older boys from the field and watch the activities in silence. Tahir did not mix; the whole village knew that. Sometimes though, she knew he looke
d at her, especially when she was looking anywhere but at him.

  Long shadows had formed across the square by the time the priest came out of the hut. He walked across to Malika. ‘I think we have an understanding,’ he said.

  She looked up. Sweat moistened his face, as if he had been working under the sun. His shirt was wet too, with an acrid odour that caught the breeze.

  ‘Treat Father with respect, girl,’ scolded Ayesha, pushing her to her feet.

  ‘You must stop the teaching,’ Father Louis said, gazing into her face.

  She nodded. In the corner of her eye Fatima was pretending not to listen.

  ‘You will not teach,’ he continued, ‘but I will bring you books on the Sundays I take Mass, so I can teach you.’

  ‘I can learn alone.’

  ‘Mathematics, perhaps. But you might find English more difficult.’

  ‘What is English?’

  ‘Another language.’ He smiled, showing many large teeth. ‘You will see.’

  ‘And Fatima?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘The elders will not relent.’

  2

  The summer rains passed and her second autumn in the village approached. Malika saw her girlhood departing. By the time the winds from the north had turned cool and the harvest had given its last, she found she was already taller than Ayesha. Her breasts had swelled, and in the cracked and scratched mirror next to the door, her lips were fuller, her hair long and strong. Her heart jumped to see she was like her mother. She began to wear her hair the way her mother had worn it, using a band to keep it off her face. One day, she found an old magazine in Ayesha’s tin box. It had a faded picture of a pale-skinned princess on the front. She must have been a princess; no one else could have been so beautiful. When Ayesha was out, Malika would practise pulling up her hair and turning her face the way the princess did in the magazine. It annoyed her that unlike the princess, dark hairs had begun to grow from beneath her armpits.

  When frost began to cover the fields in the mornings, Ayesha said it was time for Tahir to sleep with the men in the large shed at the end of the village. He looked at her a minute, his face immobile, and then he picked up his small bag of belongings and stepped out of the hut into the cold sun. Ayesha looked at Malika as he left.

  ‘It is better he goes now,’ she said. ‘He is already looking at you and the village is starting to talk. He needs to be with the other men.’

  As she went about cleaning the breakfast dishes, Malika did not tell the woman what had happened a week earlier. In the glow of the fire embers, as she prepared her hair for sleep, she saw him watching her from his straw mat. It was a look that chilled her heart and made her turn away, clutching her hand to her breasts. That night, with the faint smell of smoke in the air, she lay in the dark beside Ayesha, listening to three people breathing. She asked herself why she feared his stare. The next morning as they ate their barley porridge, Tahir had spoken his customary few words to her and the woman before leaving for the fields. Malika decided some things were best forgotten.

  She rarely saw him after he left the hut. She did not miss him but they shared a past and, apart from Father Louis who now came every second Sunday, he was her only contact from the world beyond the village. Each morning and evening as the men passed on their way to and from the field, she would look out for him, hoping he might also look for her.

  The winter set in hard, with freezing nights and colder mornings. Rain had not fallen since the autumn, and slowly its absence crept into the village talk. Everyone knew the number of days since the last rain, and when the creek beyond the rail line slowed to a trickle anxiety began to mix with fear. It sat among them as they gathered at night and it was in the eyes of the women as they scanned the horizon uneasily during the day. A single cloud was enough to fill the conversation for the morning. The men left early to make the most use of the light and were at their ploughs even as the women cooked breakfast. Malika hoped she would be asked to walk with the group to bring the men food. They joked and teased in ways the women did not. But usually it was the older women who went, and she and the other girls were given empty bowls to clean.

  Some mornings, on her way to the deepening well for the day’s water, Malika’s feet would first take her to the outskirts of the village. She would stand between the tracks on the train line, watching as the men in the fields shouted at the lumbering water buffalos that were yoked to ploughs, while a string of women and older children walked behind, clearing the waste. Then, she would look along the tracks and gaze far into the distance until they became a single point. She wondered what a great city looked like. Once, as she turned and picked up her buckets, she saw Tahir. He was working a plough on his own while the men were busy with another that had stopped midfield. She smiled at his resolute figure standing pencil straight behind the giant animal. It saddened her that he kept himself apart from the rest of the village. He did not join the nightly prayers for rain and a good crop; instead, after drinking deeply from the buckets left in the cool of the tree, he would disappear to his quarters. The men talked of seeing him there on his knees, praying.

  Beneath the fig tree as they prepared their wares for the bazaar, the women asked Ayesha, ‘We have given him life. Why does he not show us gratitude?’

  She shrugged. ‘He chooses not to be one of us. How do I know what he thinks?’

  As the drought deepened and whispers and resentment grew within the village, Father Louis intervened.

  ‘Christians and Muslims believe in the same God,’ he said to the congregation one Sunday at Mass. ‘In God’s eyes we are one. To believe means we must accept His ways as we must accept all His people.’ He scanned the room, challenging each of them with his stare. ‘All His people,’ he repeated. ‘Christ died for the sins of all men, not just the faithful. Belief is nothing if it is not seen in our actions.’ He proceeded to speak to them of Job and of the need to persevere, not to lose sight of hope. They had not heard the sermon before and the villagers’ hearts were more open as they ate lunch that day. A woman took a plate of food and some water across to Tahir. Wide-eyed, he took it from her, eating it quickly but then disappearing soon after. As those who saw him leave looked at each other and shook their heads, Malika followed him down the path. She found him among the ploughs, in the field behind the shed.

  He didn’t look up as she sat on a plough handle behind him. She waited as a minute passed.

  ‘Hajira was kind to bring you lunch.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘They want to help you. We all want to help you.’

  ‘I do not want help,’ he said. He looked to the distance. ‘I want justice.’

  ‘Can I do nothing?’

  ‘Only Allah brings justice.’

  She stood and folded her arms. ‘Why must you be this way?’

  He paused, then turned to her. ‘My family saw it. The policeman said it when he brought us here.’

  She remembered the day they arrived on the dray.

  ‘It is my test,’ he said. ‘My fate. Allah is truly great.’

  He turned away and she stayed for a moment, before walking back to the village. Close to the square, she dropped her head so her hair fell forward and her face was hidden from those returning to their huts. She deviated around the square and waited inside her hut until her lessons with the priest began.

  Once the crops had been sown and Christmas had passed, Malika filled her spare hours with her lessons. Her night-time studies forced Ayesha to buy more kerosene for the lamp. Father Louis brought Malika four books: mathematics, chemistry, physics and English. They spent their time on English before Christmas. She needed the new language to make sense of the other books. She laughed the first time she opened the English book; it started where the end should have been. Dressed in his white shirt, with a gold cross on each collar, Father Louis took her through simple and then more complicated English passages. After a few months, he insisted that they speak only English when they talke
d together. He gave her lists of words to learn from one week to the next. By the end of winter, she could read simple books and began asking for more. The mathematics book she completed in a month; the same period for chemistry and physics combined. He tested her when they met. She saw the answers before the priest had finished reading the question, laughing when he turned to the end of the book to check.

  As they pounded the clothes clean at the creek, Fatima would sometimes ask about her studies. The pain in her eyes prompted Malika to begin teaching her secretly, on afternoons when the women were cooking together in the square. She tried first with mathematics.

  ‘Let us solve two equations at once,’ she said, opening the book and laying it flat on the bed.

  Fatima read through the chapter with her as they sat on the bed. At the end she turned to Malika. ‘I do not understand this x and y. How can they be numbers when they are also letters? And then, how can the same letters be different numbers in the next question?’

  Malika nodded. ‘Let us look at physics.’ She opened the book and flicked through the pages to the first chapter. Atomic structure. Despite her translation, it was like showing a blind person the sun. The concepts were beyond her. After a few tries Fatima rolled back on the bed with her legs in the air.

  ‘Too hard!’ she laughed, and poked out her tongue. She picked up the English book. ‘Let me try this.’

  To Malika’s surprise, she took to the words with ease. After only a few lessons, she could say the words clearly; her tongue found a way around syllables that Malika still found difficult to pronounce. Once, Fatima corrected her pronunciation and Malika fumed, smiling reluctantly when her friend placed a worried hand on her wrist.

  As the days warmed, Father Louis and Malika came out from the large hut to sit beneath the great tree after Mass. He brought more books, as well as pens and paper, and spoke to her of things outside the village. She began writing in the new language, sometimes tasks the priest set and sometimes purely for herself. Father Louis would take it all away with him on Sundays and return her work covered in comments, and sometimes corrections, when he next arrived. Sitting at a makeshift table made from an upturned wooden box, they discussed and argued, sometimes hard, and it was not beyond Father Louis to slap the table or the tree beside them to make a point. Malika found herself doing the same. She surprised herself by the way her feelings were set free at these times. When she knew she was right, no force in the world could turn her. Entranced, jealous or bored, the young men of the village sat on stools around them or sprawled along the nearby wall. Occasionally, she would glance up as Fatima crossed the square and once, Tahir stopped on his way. He stood for a moment listening, before squatting near them. She felt his eyes on her as she tried to convince the priest of her solution to a maths problem. When she had finished, the priest handed her the solution the professor at the university in Lahore had given him. She read it through and saw she had made an error right at the start. She blushed and looked up. Father Louis smiled and winked at her.