Muscle

Back in the nineteen-fifties, when old Mian Abdullah Abdalah rose to serve as Pakistan’s Federal Secretary Establishment, a knee-bending district administration metalled the road leading from the Cawnapur railway station to his Dunyapur estate. They also pushed out a telephone line to his farmhouse, the first phone on any farm in the district. Even now, thirty years later, there was no other line nearby. A single wire ran many forlorn miles from Cawnapur city through the flat tan landscape of South Punjab, there on the edge of the Great Indian Desert, then alongside the packed-dirt farm tracks laid out in geometric lines, and finally entered the grounds of a small, handsome residence built in the style of a British colonial dak bungalow.

Now, for the second time in a month, the Chandios had stolen a section of the telephone wire, which served for all the area as a symbol of the Dunyapur estate’s preëminence. The Chandio village sat far from the road at the back end of the estate, buried in an expanse of reeds and derelict land, dunes that had never been cleared. Testing Mian Abdalah’s grandson, Sohel, who had returned from college in America six months earlier and moved onto the estate, they had been amusing themselves and bearding him by cutting out lengths of the wire that passed near their village and selling them for copper somewhere across the Indus.

Sohel drove in to Cawnapur with the farm manager, Chaudrey Zawar Hussein, to see the superintendent of police about the matter. Despite the alarming state of the farm’s finances—brought home to him over many afternoons spent sweating through deviously knotted accounts, woven by Munshi Zawar Hussein as a screen to hide his thefts—Sohel had bought himself a used jeep, not a sleek vehicle that would impress the locals, but a boy’s toy, a jacked-up four-by-four with a ragtop. Chaudrey Zawar Hussein always seemed comically unsuited to the vehicle, a tall man with steel-gray hair, never smiling. His heavy demeanor and black-framed square glasses made him look for all the world like a mid-century European intellectual, with that gravitas and that ponderous air of having threaded a way through complex revolutions. Sohel took a grim satisfaction in watching the manager clamber up onto the front bench seat, his dignity ruffled. As they drove out, he would say, “But, Mian Sahib, why not take my car? You’ll be more comfortable, and it looks better. After all, what’s mine is yours.”

Sohel left unsaid the corollary, What’s yours is mine. So much that belonged to the Abdalahs had through the years been tickled over with a catfishing guile to the munshi’s portion.

The superintendent of police, the senior-most policeman in Cawnapur, had offices in a crumbling whitewashed-brick building near the old city, with deep verandas and archways. Various additions made the place gaudier and more in keeping with a policeman’s appreciation of his own dignity, including a tin-roofed portico painted with glossy red-and-blue stripes, like a wedding marquee, sheltering the S.P.’s official jeep. Gilded with insignia and sirens and lights, the vehicle defied the general dilapidation. A peon wearing a dirty white uniform resembling a sailor suit, with brass buttons, guarded the door.

Sohel had never been to this office. “Mian Sohel Abdalah,” he said to the peon, putting on an air of importance. “Please tell the S.P. Sahib.”

Chaudrey Zawar Hussein leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “You can just go on in.” In the room, five or six men were sitting in chairs arrayed in a line in front of an enormous desk decorated with a pair of crossed miniature flags of the Punjab police, blue and red. Behind the desk sat the S.P., a short, plump Punjabi with very thick black hair parted at the side, wearing elaborate golden-framed glasses, with the interlocking Chanel monogram on each side. His uniform had been starched to the stiffness of sheet metal, and his numerous badges were matched for brilliance only by his gold pen, which lay on his desk in front of him, pinning down some papers. By contrast, the guest chairs were rickety, the floors bare concrete and slippery with dust. A strong smell of urine escaped from a little toilet that had been built by walling off a corner of the room, the S.P. presumably being unwilling to enter the even fouler common latrines.

The S.P. looked up owlishly, regarded Sohel, and continued speaking to one of the men arrayed in front of him.

“So, he told the son of a bitch that, judge or no judge, they were confiscating those filthy videotapes. . . . ”

Sohel took one of the seats pushed against the wall, uncomfortably aware that the other visitors were of a crude social class, hangers-on to government officials, penny lawyers, and various kinds of fixers.

With a sugared smile on his face, Chaudrey Zawar Hussein stepped forward to the desk.

The S.P. jumped up and, not content with shaking his hand, walked around to the side of his desk and embraced him.

“As salaam uleikum, Chaudrey Sahib. What a pleasant surprise, what an honor!” Still looking into the manager’s face, he reached blindly around on the desk with his other hand, found the telephone, lifted the receiver, and muttered to the steno to send tea. Chaudrey Sahib beamed at the S.P.; the S.P. rebeamed at Chaudrey Sahib.

“Please, please.” The S.P. flicked a hand at the men sitting in front of the desk, who instantly vacated their chairs. Sohel awkwardly rose from the seat he had occupied on the periphery and moved to one of the places of honor, facing the officer.

The officer for the first time looked with interest at Sohel.

“You must, in fact, be the young master of Dunyapur, Mian Sohel Abdalah.”

With half a dozen pairs of amused eyes upon him, Sohel launched a long-winded description of his recent movements. “Yes, I’ve come to take control of the farm. I’ve only been here a few months. And I’m afraid it’s all new to me, I’ve been out of the country, in college and then before that in high school abroad also.” He spoke through a fixed smile, intimidated by the setting, the officer and his uniform, the spectators leaning forward in their seats, as if expecting something tremendous, not wishing to miss a word. “Abroad. In America, I mean. My parents sent me, you know.”

“So sorry, so sorry.” The S.P. cut him off. “I see, very sorry. And you are most welcome, I see. So, Chaudrey Sahib, how are your crops? All is well?”

“With your blessings,” the manager replied, lowering his eyes piously, as if right there receiving the blessings of the S.P.

The peon brought mixed tea in small, crudely made cups, with a rose design, and also a little plate of biscuits. He served Sohel first, and when Sohel proffered the biscuits to the S.P. he demurred, in English, “Please, you take some, I take after you.” He even put another biscuit onto Sohel’s plate. “Have more,” he said, again in English.

One of the men sitting on the chairs backed against the wall asked, “Are you then the grandson of Mian Abdullah Abdalah?”

The S.P. gestured. “This is Mr. Aftab, whose father-in-law is both a leading advocate of Cawnapur and our vice-chairman district council.”

Aftab leaned forward and shook Sohel’s hand.

The S.P. removed an imported cigarette from a box lying on the table and snapped open a trick lighter shaped like a tiny pistol. “Do you smoke?” Sohel declined. Fixing his eyes on Sohel, the S.P. gulped the smoke greedily, held it, allowed trickles to escape his mouth, and inhaled it again up into his nose, a cycle. His eyes blazed with interest.

As if he had come to some decision, he stubbed the full cigarette in the ashtray, excused himself, and went into the improvised toilet at the end of the room. Because the walls didn’t reach to the ceiling, the bystanders could hear him moving about, then silence, and more silence.

“Should I come give you a hand? Just a little tug? I’d love to do that for you,” called Aftab.

“The ones that are really planning on coming never ask,” the S.P. riposted over the wall.

They heard him pissing, and then the S.P. resumed his desk, buttoning his fly as he walked across the room. Sohel was unsure how to respond to this strange insult. Awkwardly speaking up, he said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve come because of an issue I have. The Chandios, you know them, next to my farm.”

The policeman laughed merrily. “Oh dear. I should have introduced you properly. This is Mr. Aftab Chandio, in fact. His uncle is the senior member of the Chandio clan. He was just speaking to me of this whole matter. Don’t worry. We’ll have it all sorted out. It seems someone else has been troubling you and been blaming the Chandios. They respect you, sir. They respect your grandfather’s name. You rest assured. And I’m here for you, too. We’re all here.”

He turned now to Aftab Chandio and began discussing something about a new watercourse, very clearly having finished with Sohel, who finally stood up and said he must go.

“How dare he treat me like that?” Sohel said to Chaudrey Zawar Hussein, as they drove through the bazaar. “And what’s that with the Chandio happening to be there? Did you tell them we were coming?”

“Oh, Mian Sahib, not this again,” the manager lamented. “Of course I didn’t. What would be in it for me? You know how it is. These people are all politicians. There are two or three hundred houses in the Chandio village, and every old lady and every baby and even the fresh graves in the cemetery can be counted on for a name and an I.D. card when it comes time for us all to fill out ballots at election time.”

Back at the farm, at dusk, Sohel sat in the living room before a mango-wood fire, typing away at a letter to Klara, his first love, the American girl he’d dated his last two years at college. He wrote too often, too many pages, while she increasingly sent little more than a note, written in haste, late for class, going out with friends, and the poverty of his own nights seemed so much greater for it. In the fall she had begun a master’s at Columbia, and already he glimpsed through the scrim of her letters that her concerns were drifting away from him, as she settled in the city and found her way. He knew that he thought of her much more often than she thought of him, and that made him angry at the farm, made his troubles here more galling.

From Cawnapur it took hours of dialling and negotiating with the operators to call Lahore, much less abroad. Even from Lahore, international calls had to be booked through an operator, and were limited to ten minutes, Sohel booking another as soon as the operator cut off the first, Klara sitting in her New York apartment waiting for the phone to ring, becoming frustrated, and always the line would get cut just when they reached some crux, or some resolution, as if the operators took a gremlin pleasure in impeding this love. They spoke of her coming to Pakistan next summer, but Sohel knew what the villagers would think of his bringing a single woman here, what the servants would think, and Zawar Hussein. On the phone during his last visit to Lahore, when he described his projects at Dunyapur, hinting at a political role, she had laughed and said something about his being a big frog in a small pond, silencing him. He couldn’t write to her of his visit to the S.P.’s office, of all the men sharking around him. He wanted to make the place seem attractive, romantic, and his own role benevolent. She glowed there across continents and oceans, competitive among prickly hyper-political graduate students, discussing Lacan, eating vegan, and proud to be broke. Seen from New York City, his feudal preoccupations must appear so crude, and he imagined her pitiless and dared not speak of his vulnerability.

Looking up, he startled at the face of the old majordomo, Fezoo, framed in the windowpane of the door.

“For God’s sake, Fezoo,” he shouted. “I’ve told you, knock.”

“Yourself, sir, you told me,” Fezoo mumbled, aggrieved. “Just this morning. No knocking.”

“I told you not to hammer as if you were trying to rip the door from its frame.”

Fezoo’s square head, with a single wart above his left eye, his odd gold-colored skin, and his green eyes, like an Uzbek spy, had made him since Sohel’s childhood an unsettling figure, sidling about the house, sullen and always seeming weighted down by unspoken reproaches.

“Anyway, I’m sorry. What do you want?”

“Chaudrey Zawar Hussein Sahib begs a moment of your time.”

Few things spoiled Sohel’s evenings as completely as these managerial visits, which always signalled some unpleasantness—overturned tractors, oxen thefts. With each passing day, emergencies on the farm seethed up with greater regularity, a gathering storm that had not yet reached its fury.

“Why in God’s name doesn’t the Munshi Sahib come tomorrow, during the day?” Sohel moaned. It irked him that the manager came and went pursuing his own agenda, with some irrefutable excuse always ready if Sohel questioned where he had been.

Fezoo looked at Sohel with a dull expression. “Allah knows best, sir. Perhaps his personal business in the city keeps him busy?”

“Are you trying to be humorous, Fezoo?”

“Sir?”

“Forget it. Seat Chaudrey Sahib in the living room. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Zawar Hussein sat in front of the fire that had been lit in the long, high-ceilinged room, in anticipation of Sohel’s dining there. He sat with one leg extended and his gaze fixed in the flames, as if considering weighty matters, in repose wearing a much shrewder expression than the one he invariably presented to the young master of these lands and villages.

“Hello, Munshi Sahib,” Sohel said, declining to use the Chaudrey honorific. “What can I do for you?”

The manager hesitated a beat before rising to meet Sohel, expressing something between reluctance and tired bones.

“Mian Sahib.”

“Please sit down.”

They both faced the fire in carved wooden wing chairs, flickering light on their faces.

“So what is it this time?”

“The Chandios, sir. That young one who’s been throwing his weight around, one of Ghuman’s sons. Sadique.”

“Not again! Now they’re doing it every other day.”

“No, much worse than just stealing wire. Sadique Chandio found Bahadur Khan drinking tea by the bridge this afternoon and beat him up. Then his brother came and started brandishing a pistol around. Firing shots in the air.”

“My God! Why would anyone hurt Bahadra?”

Bahadur Khan had been Sohel’s childhood servant, the man in Dunyapur most identified with him. They had secrets together, which the little boy knew not to tell. The old man would spirit Sohel away on his shoulders into the village, a row of mud-walled compounds where the field-workers lived, to see the hutch of rabbits, the newborn goats, Sohel finding intimacy there, playing in the dust with Bahadur Khan’s ragged children. Before Sohel’s father entirely abandoned himself to hard daily drinking, the family would come from Lahore to Dunyapur every winter for a week or so—Sohel, his parents, and a couple of their drinking buddies. His father’s father, Mian Abdalah, never joined them but came separately on formal tours of inspection. The drinks cart would come out at noon, and the adults would be tight as lords by evening, shooting off guns and having huge fires made in the garden, once ordering tractors to be brought after dark and hilariously racing them on the cricket pitch, smashing one into a tree. During all those years, when otherwise Sohel might have been quite untended, Bahadur Khan had been his keeper, his protector and playfellow, with his long white beard even then and rheumy eyes, a simple man, willing to sit for hours and sail leaves down the watercourses with a little boy, conjuring up countries and great storms. Thinking of all this, his man, the lap where he rested, the arms that held him, Sohel choked with anger. He walked away to hide the tears that had started into his eyes, going to a side table and pouring himself a glass of water.

“Those fucking bastard sons of bitches.”

Zawar Hussein made a clucking dismissive sound. “Mian Sahib, what good is swearing now? It’s less than a year since we said your grandfather’s funeral prayer, and already this is how they’re toying with us. I’ve been saying for months that we need to have them pulled into the station and then run the rod over them a few times. They’re begging for it.”

This had been a refrain for the past six months, that he needed to take a firmer hand. Chaudrey Sahib put very little credence in Sohel’s ambition to manage the farm according to new humane principles. He would say, “All that works fine in your America. Here they only understand one thing.”

“And I keep telling you, I came here to make things better. Otherwise what’s the use of all my education?” Sohel circled around the humiliating fact that, this morning, when they called on the S.P., he had barely been offered a cup of tea.

Since he moved here, it had been getting worse. The Chandios cut down and carted away overnight a massive rosewood tree planted on the boundary of Sohel’s land, with the claim that the bulk of the roots grew on the Chandio side. A motorcycle disappeared from the dera, the administrative center of the farm, and everyone said they’d taken it—a couple of their boys ran a business in lifting motorcycles. Then the phone wire. The first time, with the rosewood, when Sohel summoned the Chandio elders they came and touched his knees and pulled at their beards, saying that it was beneath him to notice such a minor issue. They trooped with him to the site and showed him the particulars, convinced him, belittled Zawar Hussein. He saw their point of view and accepted it. The tree wasn’t worth more than two or three thousand rupees. When he summoned the Chandio elders about the motorcycle, they sent just a couple of men to declare that they had nothing to do with it, even becoming testy at being accused. Lying awake at night, Sohel had been fearing this—an affront that couldn’t be borne. He wanted to help these people, to show them a better way, and he would wonder, as he sat alone at dusk after coming back from the lands, why must they be this way? Why this press and urge to test him and expose him?

“Let this pass,” Zawar Hussein said, “and we won’t be able to leave the farm after the sun goes down. All those guys are armed. And the police are right with them.” The Chandios moved all the heroin and hash in the area, and made drums of booze from industrial spirits, selling little plastic shooters of it—three of those and you were ready to kick cobras and uproot trees, and fuck the laws against alcohol. The police wouldn’t act against them unless forced to. At best a pickup with a few constables would roll up for a pro-forma raid, giving plenty of advance notice, and that would be the end of it.

Worst of all, Sohel had to go out to the servants’ sitting area and see the old man, ashamed to be so powerless that people beat his own Bahadur Khan. He lay groaning on a charpoy outside, next to the garages, and would not be stopped from painfully rolling off the bed and falling at Sohel’s feet, his arm in a crude sling.

“Mian Sahib, there’s only you and God above—” He broke into racking blubbering sobs, sorrow rather than pain. They had told him Sohel would come; he had awaited this moment to let himself go. “I beg you. I carried you on my shoulders. All the ministers and presidents know you. The Chandios will eat me up—that was just the first bite.” His sobbing fell into a rhythm, turning inward.

Tenderly, Sohel lifted him back onto the bed, inhaling his heavy sweet smell, so well remembered. Pity and sadness pricked Sohel’s anger. How thin the old man had become, light, as if hollow-boned. Sohel himself needed comforting. In this very spot, on this same oversized charpoy built from Dunyapur wood, Sohel had sat on Bahadur Khan’s lap and been allowed to sip tea clotted with milk from the old man’s share. They hid this tea-drinking from his mother, another of the festivals in their private world, their play.

In the light of a bare bulb hanging from a tree branch, several people stood watching this scene between Sohel and Bahadur Khan—the old man’s useless son who drank and kept getting fired from the estate, a sweeper, one of the gardeners. Sohel should be enraged, resolute, dramatic, and instead he listened with one ear to the breeze in the leaves overhead and felt strained and fearful and dissociated, as if this violence could be wished away.

He patted Bahadur Khan’s cheek, couldn’t imagine what to say.

“Now those guys will hear from us,” he said finally through gritted teeth. “Don’t worry. We’ll fuck them up. They’ll beg your forgiveness.”

Just a flash of incredulity passed through the injured man’s eyes, humoring Sohel, as when he was a boy and railed against his naptime. None of the people watching this scene knew what to believe.

Zawar Hussein had not followed when Sohel went out to see his old keeper. Now he sat in front of the fire in the shadowed living room, leaning forward and warming his hands as if at a campfire.

Sohel threw himself into a chair, shook his head. “These people are animals, Chaudrey Sahib. There’s not a single fucking person I can rely on. No one!” In his frustration, he encompassed the manager in this lament.

“Mian Sahib, why do you think I’m here?” Zawar Hussein asked theatrically. “If you don’t trust us, who can you trust? Here you don’t need to be afraid of anyone.”

“I’m not afraid. I’m frustrated. I came here to help, and all you people do is push at me and pull at me. Look at that old man, lying there. His only fault is that he took care of me as a little boy. It’s disgusting.”

“Anyway, it’s not so bad as that. These villagers are like cats. You can smash their heads in and they crawl into some hole and live for days.”

Smashing cats’ heads! thought Sohel. What a fucking shithole.

He said nothing, the moment heavy between them. Zawar Hussein’s jaw had tightened, defying Sohel’s general condemnation. Sohel recalled that this, too, was a man who would personally beat peasants caught stealing.

“Go on, you should rest now,” the manager said. “I’ll put guards outside. Tomorrow we’ll figure out something.”

Sohel rose and went to the fire, savagely kicking at a log, which threw out a shower of sparks.

“No. I’m not going to take this. We’ll do it the old way now. I’m sending you tomorrow to Khirka. I’m bringing in Malik Sarkar. I don’t like to, but that’s what these Chandios want.”

“Malik Sarkar Sahib! That’s a name to frighten children with. But your grandfather never brought any of that lot here. And then, will he come? He must be eighty now.”

“My grandfather went himself to see the governor about a pardon when they were going to hang Malik Sahib’s nephew for a murder. These goondas remember such things. They’ll make this right.”

“You know better than we do, sir.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Chaudrey Sahib. Don’t pretend. I’ve told you a hundred times what I want. You people won’t follow me.”

“Well, it’s the police or do something ourselves.”

“All right then, I’ve decided. Call Malik Sahib.”

The munshi stood up to leave. “It’s as you wish, sir. Show your hand once and be done with it forever.”

With Munshi Zawar Hussein off in Lahore to deliver the summons, Sohel did nothing all day. Outside the walls roamed the Chandios. He wasn’t afraid, he assured himself, but he mustn’t allow them to insult him unprotected. In truth, he found it not frightening but somehow embarrassing to face the villagers without the manager present. He felt fraudulent, the villagers touching his knee and making the correct obeisance, but with a sullen look on their faces, as if they didn’t quite know who he was. He had once caught Zawar Hussein motioning behind his back to a group of the villagers to come and make their salaam.

Throughout Sohel’s childhood the garden had not been walled. When Mian Abdullah Abdalah, rising up through the ranks of the Civil Service, came to the farm, the entire district administration waited upon him, and villagers came from miles around and sat in the garden as if in a public space and watched the proceedings, Mian Abdalah holding court. Then Sohel’s father, Tony Abdalah, had thrown a wall around three acres of orchard, not wanting the villagers to see his buddies and their wives drinking and lounging, the women in sundresses with arms and legs bare. Those party weeks still imbued this property with a melancholy glamour in Sohel’s mind, his father and mother members of the fast set in the Lahore of the nineteen-sixties, boozing, sleeping around, flying to London to gamble, importing fabulous cars. They had died in one of those cars, too, in Sohel’s first year at college—moving between parties on New Year’s Eve, rammed into a truck full of steel rebar on Lahore’s Main Boulevard.

His mother had wanted him schooled in America, the furthest place she could imagine from the parties and all the excesses of her life with Tony, the little boy seeing them drunk and disorderly once too often. Her great stroke, very much against her father-in-law’s inclination, had been sending Sohel to a boarding school outside Boston, which she knew would lead inevitably to an American college. She went alone to see the old man, when he refused money for the fees, and said, “They’ll make him clean and hardworking and then he’ll come back and do what you wish. It costs me a lot to say this. I don’t want him spending his life like his father.” Mian Abdalah nodded sourly and said nothing, but the next day sent a check to her private account. Five years playing lacrosse and wearing a jacket and tie to chapel with Boston Brahmins and the older New York money had made Sohel nostalgic and romantic about Pakistan and the farm, so that returning for holidays seemed an adventure and a release from schoolboy insecurities, travelling alone on the flight through Europe, landing in the comforts and privileges of Lahore and Dunyapur. Now his encounters in Dunyapur were quickly teaching him new manners and sensitivities, for he saw aroused in the beady eyes of the S.P. and all the Zawar Husseins of the district a hunger to pluck and swallow this little foreign pullet.

His parents’ violent deaths, followed by his grandfather’s passing just three years later, made Sohel master of these lands at twenty-two, the only son of the only son. His father would have kept selling land if he had lived, till it all flowed away, after him nothing. Throughout Sohel’s childhood, as they were selling, there were huge fights between his parents and his grandfather, who could not finally resist them—his mother and father forming a team against the declining old man. When Mian Abdalah refused to sign some deed or document, his parents would seethe and say they would rather live as free paupers than under the thumb of despotism. Blowing up, they would withdraw to London, first class, staying in good hotels, and then later in a flat that they bought—fruits of selling land here at Dunyapur, the London flat itself sold at the end. Mian Abdalah always gave in, wanting them back in Lahore with him, living in the big house, settled in their separate wing, having dinners together, warming his old age.

Sohel walked around the garden, thinking of his parents. A November wind, fresh and almost chilly, blew through the hundred-year-old rosewood trees that stood at one end of the garden, home to a vast swarm of crows, which came from miles around at evening and settled in noisily. Yes, this was home to him too, as much as Lahore was home. He’d been based here at Dunyapur since June, and now it was November. Every three weeks he drove down to Lahore in the ragtop Land Cruiser, which had no air-conditioning and was incredibly hot in summer, but rather pleasant now in the cool fall days, smoking cigarettes, sharing cigarettes with Mustafa, his driver—or, rather, Munshi Zawar Hussein’s driver, who came to Sohel on secondment. In Lahore, however, the large, fusty house made him sad. The old bearer brought in the cocktail trolley that all through his childhood had signalled the commencement of his father’s daily drinking session, tinkling into his parents’ sitting room. He had no close friends, only a cousin who would invite him over for a drink, a few others, five or six whiskeys, rolling up joints of black-tar hash. Sent abroad at thirteen, he had lost touch with the boys his age who had gone through grade school with him.

The following afternoon, Sohel sat in the garden, wisps of trailing cloud screening the pale blue sky very high up, the sun just too warm for a sweater. He heard the slamming of car doors. Munshi Zawar Hussein must be back. Two cars stood in the circular drive, not intruding into the curving portico. Walking down the steps into the sunlight, Sohel went to embrace Malik Sarkar, a tall, very straight-backed man with one of those lined faces that are old yet seem boyish, a boy grown old, wearing an immaculate white dhoti wound around his waist, a costume that very few wore anymore, a man of the fading generation. He held Sohel with one hand on each shoulder and looked into his face, studying him, then broke into a smile.

“Mian Sahib, you look exactly like your grandfather now that you’re almost grown.”

“The way he looked at my age, I suppose, which you would know better than anyone.”

“I served him then, I serve you now.”

The Maliks from Khirka had been Sohel’s family muscle for a claimed six generations, called out when some land mafia threatened a property—force used against crude force. Their dera lay outside Lahore, but within striking distance, and for generations they had preyed upon the weak and the foolish in that city, like wolves circling a herd of bison and pruning out the stragglers, serving themselves and also serving Sohel’s ancestors, symbiotic. For Sohel’s family, certain challenges could be met no other way, with holdings so large, shops and tenements in Lahore, or strips of city land liable to adverse possession. His grandfather had treated Malik Sarkar with a ceremony just a degree less formal than he reserved for the heads of great families, the Tiwanas or Noons or Qizilbashes, the Mians of Bhagbanpura. Sohel had once asked his grandfather about such distinction bestowed on a killer, and was told sharply, “These are hard men who served us in hard times. They’ve done what we couldn’t do. They live on their pride, remember that, young man. I’ve never once failed to ask Malik Sahib to be seated when he visits me, and he’s never once accepted. Or only once, when they hanged that poor boy.”

Three men emerged from the second car, a beat-up old Toyota Corolla. They stood stretching, spitting, adjusting their balls, retying their turbans, looking around at the house with its rounded portico and columned veranda, the massive old rosewood trees filled with a chorus of bulbuls and crows, parakeets that fed on the guavas, sparrows hopping around in the dusty curving driveway, enjoying dust baths in the warm sun reflected off the whitewashed building.

A fifth man stood behind Malik Sarkar. He alone was dressed in city clothes, a starched white shalvar kameez, paired with a blue blazer, like a senior district official or a sharp businessman of the rising class.

“My nephew,” Malik Sarkar said offhandedly, gesturing at him. “Take a look—even the Maliks of Khirka have become gentlemen in this generation. Rather, my grandnephew. Malik Sharif.”

The man, six or seven years older than Sohel, stepped forward and made a formal obeisance with the old feudal gesture, bending his knee slightly as he took Sohel’s hand in both of his own. His slender figure and the quickness of his movement lent him grace, and he finished it with a disarmingly sweet smile showing his small, very white teeth.

Sohel had debated with himself the delicate question of whether Malik Sarkar should be lodged in the guesthouse—which ordinarily would not be offered to a person of his class—or in the dera, the complex of buildings and stores in the village itself where lower-status guests would be entertained by the munshis and brought to meet his grandfather as required. Under the circumstances, better to bow too low, he had concluded, than not low enough, easing his sense of propriety with the thought that Malik Sarkar had been of his grandfather’s generation.

“I’ll say my prayers now and rest, thank you,” Malik Sarkar said, “but I’ll go back to Lahore this evening. Old men don’t like to spend the night away from home. If I am to die tonight, I wish to be in Khirka.”

At tea, Sohel contrasted the old man’s dignified bearing with his rough manners, pouring tea into the saucer and slurping it up. When Sohel insisted that he at least stay for dinner, Malik Sarkar couldn’t manage a fork and knife, but called for chapatis and ate with his hands.

“This is no time to be on the K.L.P. road,” Sohel said, when Malik Sahib took his leave. “You won’t be home before dawn.”

Malik Sarkar made his only reference to his calling. “Don’t worry, Mian Sahib. Men like us are accustomed to travelling in the night.” When Sohel had broached the Chandio issue, Malik Sarkar said, “Tell this all to my grandnephew. Now these boys handle everything. I’ve only made this journey to pay Mian Abdullah Abdalah’s grandson my respects. You summoned me and I came.”

Young Malik Sharif did not eat dinner with them, and he kept back in the shadows when Sohel saw off the old Malik. Sohel remembered so many other nighttime departures from this veranda, returning to Lahore after a week’s sojourn with his father and mother, last drinks and running late, a line of jeeps sputtering and spicing the air with their exhaust, managers waiting to say their salaams, off to catch the up-country train from the old colonial railway station at Cawnapur—the Khyber Mail, Tezgam Express.

Turning just as he stepped into the car, Malik Sarkar took Sohel’s face in both his hands, almost tenderly, and said, “This is my first visit to your family’s Dunyapur. This land is your gold mine. Thank you for showing it to us. And don’t worry, we’ll settle everything now.” The look that passed across Malik Sarkar’s face reminded Sohel that he had certainly killed men in his long career. His flamboyant mustache extended from tight lips, a thin mouth. “Now you will be the one we call Mian Abdalah, since your father and grandfather have left us.” Then he kissed Sohel on the forehead, and touched his head, a gesture of blessing more commonly extended to a daughter or a niece or a young child.

When Sohel asked at breakfast if Malik Sharif had eaten, Fezoo replied, “What can I say, Mian Sahib? They asked for food at two in the morning, and they called me twice more to make tea. They kept saying, ‘What’s this watered-out railway-station tea?’ Everything’s a joke to them.”

After breakfast Sohel walked with Zawar Hussein on one of the distant farms, where they would not run into the Chandio brothers. At lunchtime, Malik Sharif still had not emerged, though he and his men had called for food, so again Sohel went out, now rather annoyed. He carried a revolver, his grandfather’s Webley from his service days, as he walked among fields of mature sugarcane standing more than head high. The land, so flat, so dusty, had a mood that he loved at evening, when the light settled down upon it, and he thought of the horizon, of the desert just to the east, open there all the way to India, to Jaisalmer, Bikaner. He felt his family’s uncertain place here as a longing. The people still called them Punjabis, implying that they were carpetbaggers from the north—the villagers all long settled here, most of them Riyastis, lieges to the Bahawalpur nawabs whose reign had passed just a few decades ago.

Driving into the dera, he saw Malik Sharif sprawled on a chair in the sun, reading an Urdu newspaper, and his three men on a charpoy. The young man’s shalvar gleamed white, his shoes polished as if dipped in some bright substance, hair smoothed back and rather long, foppish. He had no more the deferential air that he assumed in front of his granduncle, but strolled up to Sohel wide-armed, an easy, open approach.

“Mian Sahib, oh Mian Sahib. You farm like an Englishman! Our people never bother going out to their lands.” He gestured around at the dera. “Why not do your business here? There should be guys tied upside down in the trees and a line of their families come to beg their release.”

His men continued to lounge on the charpoy, one of them smoking a hookah. “Get up, you donkeys! Are you blind, or didn’t you see Mian Sahib come in?”

They grunted themselves up, grinning broadly. One of them carried a stubby little Kalashnikov, cradling it under his arm, barely showing.

“Glad to see your men came prepared.”

“What can I do? I have so many enmities.”

“I hope I don’t add another one to your list.”

“Don’t worry, your Chandios are just a snack for my boys.”

“Come to the house and have tea. Let’s talk it over.”

“I didn’t know the lands around here were so rich,” Malik Sharif said. They were sitting in the middle of the garden that fronted the house, looking onto the cricket pitch laid out by Sohel’s father. “This garden itself would be a good-sized field, if you put in sugarcane.”

“That’s a fine idea, Malik Sahib. I’ll plow up the flowers and put in something better paying.”

Malik Sharif looked at him sharply. “Do you really think so, Mian Sahib?”

“I was planning on getting some horses, actually. I could graze them here.”

“That’s better. It’s a good safe place for riding if things get ugly. You wouldn’t want to do that out on your farm with the Chandios and the Kandios and the Bandios and God knows what else. Thank God for your nice high wall. But you need more guards. You don’t have any fighting men at all.”

“But I have you!”

“Yes, you do. And lucky I’m here. We need to show these Chandios exactly who’s boss on this farm. Then you’ll be free to ride wherever you want. After my fellows are done, these bastards will salute you by shitting their pants when you pass by.”

Sohel winced at the phrase, yet he felt almost for the first time since he came to the farm that with these goondas he outgunned the many desperate men plaguing the district. Going out on the farm that morning had been an act of bravura. Walking through alleys of sugarcane, he had been thinking that surely the Chandios must have a plan of escalation, if they had gone to such extremes as to beat up his childhood caretaker.

“In a minute I’ll call in Munshi Zawar Hussein,” Sohel offered. “The Chandios have a pretty good connection with the S.P. in Cawnapur. As you know, under their uniforms the police are cousins to the thieves. That’s why I didn’t bother calling them before I sent to Malik Sarkar Sahib.”

Malik Sharif looked at Sohel appraisingly.

“You didn’t call them, eh? Better not to unless you know they’ll come. And another thing. Your Zawar Hussein is too clever by half. He’s been here for quite a while, I gather. We always say, rich men’s sons with new cars and old munshis soon end up losing it all. You should change your manager every two years. But let’s not worry about him; we’ll sort him out later.”

This tickled Sohel’s sense of loyalty to the manager, almost family over the years.

“My grandfather used to say that there’s as much beneath the ground where Munshi Sahib stands as above.”

“What’s buried under there, Mian Sahib? All the money he’s stolen?”

“My grandfather meant that he’s solid, he’s planted,” Sohel said, bristling.

“Of course,” Malik Sharif said soothingly. “But we’ll be careful with him. Your grandfather’s generation were very trusting, and they could afford to be.”

Sohel felt obliged to invite Malik Sharif for dinner. He tried not to drink at the farm, for he knew all the stories, going back to British times, of the dangers of drinking alone out in the field, one drink at night leading ultimately to whiskey for breakfast. That evening, however, he made an exception and sneaked in a couple of stiff ones before calling in the gangster.

“Come in, come in,” Sohel said, having put away his glass when Fezoo announced his guest.

“You have a fire,” Malik Sharif said. “Your own wood, so you can afford as many fires as you like. And yet my men are swimming during the day. That’s your desert weather.”

Munshi Zawar Hussein had brought this up earlier with Sohel, that the three goondas had been sporting at the old swimming pool, built near the village in the nineteen-sixties, not just swimming but lathering up and then lying around in the sun with cloths around their loins. In Sohel’s childhood, the whole family would swim there in the afternoon, unmindful of the villagers, who must have thought it strange that his mother would bathe quite naked, as they considered it, for all to see. Sohel’s father, an aristo to his fingertips, would have been amused to think of a Dunyapur peasant having an opinion on the matter at all, and might have called him over to enjoy his discomfiture in the presence of the Begum Sahiba’s bikini.

“I actually wanted to mention that,” Sohel said. “The village women walk past there all the time. Only the little boys swim there.”

“Say no more, say no more. I’ll keep them cooped up in their room during the day.”

“But that’s not what I meant. It’s just that the women have to pass nearby.”

“Did someone complain?”

“Nothing like that. Maybe you could suggest to your men that they bathe at the canal. Or there’s the shower right where their rooms are.”

“They’re city boys at heart. They think the canal is dirty. Nobody more fastidious than these bloods. Anyway, I’ll keep them on a tighter leash, Mian Sahib. I’ll cut them down an inch or two. I went off into town to see the S.P. Sahib, and they started playing around in my absence.”

Sohel thought back to his own experience with the policeman, taking a loud piss and bantering with the Chandio about it.

“So you know the S.P.?” asked Sohel.

“Of course. I know the police all over Punjab. Sanghera Sahib’s last posting was in Kasur, just next to us, and we used to see him all the time. He’s a good guy.”

Fezoo brought in glasses of lemon sherbet, but Malik Sharif declined to take one. When the servant left the room, he said, “Mian Sahib, I don’t suppose you have something a bit stronger in the house. In the evening I like to have a little glass, if you wouldn’t mind sharing one with me.”

“Not at all. I should have asked.”

“And you were just having one?”

Sohel laughed. “You’re right, I was.”

Though Sohel didn’t like to advertise that he was drinking with the goonda, he was obliged to ring for Fezoo, ask him to bring the drinks.

“How will you have it?” Sohel asked.

“However you take it. Give me the same as yourself.”

“Cheers,” Malik Sharif said, lifting his glass and making a little moue—the first time Sohel had heard him speak English. He drained half the glass at a go, with the same abstracted expression that Chaudrey Zawar Hussein wore when downing a glass of water after a meal, as if taking medicine. It seemed to do Malik Sahib a world of good, for he immediately relaxed, sat back in his chair, and smiled, showing his small, even teeth. The living room in which they sat was packed full of heavy, carved-teak furniture that had been banished from the Lahore house by Sohel’s mother. Three poorly painted family portraits hanging above the fireplace showed large plush men of the late eighteen-hundreds, muttonchops and mustaches all around, one of them holding a sword, one with a double-breasted jacket that might have suited a captain on the P&O Lines, with epaulettes and big buttons.

“These must be your elders?”

“The one on the left is my great-great-granduncle, who bought this land.”

“There it is. They were buying land, and now you’re selling it.”

“I’m not selling. That was my father.”

“God bless him.”

They were silent for a moment.

“Do you know, they’re watching over you,” Malik Sharif said gravely. “You must believe that. Yet why would you bother with this farming and dealing with Chandios and danger and inconvenience? You’ve been in America. You can never be settled here. You weren’t brought up for this. Bad things happen—you could lose everything.”

“Well, we’ve been farming in my family for six or seven generations.”

“Your grandfather wasn’t farming. Your family have been in government. Do you know, I met your grandfather only once. Malik Sarkar Sahib always went to see Mian Abdalah Sahib alone. None of the rest of them would have known how to behave. But, when my cousin was going to receive the Black Warrant, then we all went, every single member of my family. Our village was empty. Your grandfather himself went to the governor, not once but twice.”

“You all camped in the garden,” Sohel said. He remembered his grandfather, long retired, with no power left, connections lost, going off and coming back, the men from Khirka camped out on the driveway of the big Lahore house for days, the coming and going. “I remember my grandfather visiting Governor’s House. He tried very hard.”

“He tried. Ten years earlier the governor would have listened. Or if your father had followed your grandfather into service. But Tony Mian was a prince.” He laughed. “I remember Tony Mian’s car, from that time. We boys were naughty, at night we snuck into the garages and sat in it. It had a machine in it to make tea and a spotlight that you could move from inside. I even remember you. One day you kept riding a bicycle around that big circular drive in front of the house, and every time you passed we all stood up. Your grandfather wondered why all of us were jumping up and down, and then he saw you and took your bike away.”

“That’s so funny!” Sohel said.

“Later we used to tell that story, us young ones. The older ones could never joke about those times. After they carried out my cousin’s sentence no one in my village laughed for a year, at least not in front of my grandfather.” He leaned over and touched his glass to Sohel’s. “Cheers,” he said again in English. “Mian Sahib, we used to talk about you. When Tony Mian and your mother passed away, God receive them in heaven, Malik Sarkar Sahib said that now no one would protect our clan, that we’d lost the cover that had shaded us for six generations.”

“I would like to protect you,” Sohel said, on the verge of tears at the memory of his parents, just four years buried side by side in the old family graveyard in Lahore. “I will protect you, if I can.”

“Of course you will,” Malik Sharif said.

“You must come and see me whenever you like in Lahore. Times are changed. You should meet some of my friends.”

“Yes,” Malik Sharif said. “Do you know, we Maliks have perhaps as much land as what’s left here in Dunyapur. It’s not good land, not like this. But now the property dealers all want to buy it from us. Lahore is growing in our direction. It might be worth even more than your Dunyapur. So I’m a landlord, too, in a way,” he said, proud of it.

“Why not?” Sohel said, nodding in agreement, though he could see no equivalence. “Who cares about landlords anymore?”

When Fezoo came in to ask about dinner, Malik Sharif said to him, before Sohel could answer, “Not yet, boy. Mian Sahib will call you.”

Though Malik Sharif had been rattling the ice cubes in his empty glass, Sohel did not offer him another drink, minding this presumption with the servant. Still rattling the glass, Malik Sharif stood and went to the sideboard, poured in three fingers of neat whiskey.

“This is how we drink. Straight. But we don’t usually have this nice liquor. We take what we can get. If my father knew, I’d be beaten. Still, even at my age.”

Sohel had drunk two whiskeys before Malik Sharif came, and two more now. He had warmed to the young man, wanted to understand him, to make common cause with him even. The Maliks of Khirka had been loyal for generations, and it seemed right that, now, in these modern times, there should be less formality, more acknowledgment of that bond.

“Really, did your father beat you?”

“Mian Sahib, you don’t know how we’re brought up. We’re brought up with slaps and blows. There are more things happening all around than you can dream of, Mian Sahib. These Chandios of yours are nothing.”

He shook his head, as if embarrassed by the disclosure, and Sohel noticed for the first time that he had a dimple, like a little cut framing his lip on one side.

“That’s how we were brought up, Mian Sahib. That’s our school in America.”

Sohel flipped another chunk of wood into the fire, then stood for a moment with his back to Malik Sharif. When he turned, he saw Malik Sharif’s eyes intent upon him.

“If the wood falls out, you’ll burn your valuable carpet,” Malik Sharif said.

“Well, anyway, the house is made of brick. It won’t burn.”

“Let’s hope not.” In a single gulp Malik Sharif finished the glass of whiskey. He stood up, unsteady for a moment. “Now that’s enough, Mian Sahib. You’ve unbended yourself too much for me. Thank you for this liquor. It’s not my place to eat dinner with you. Your Munshi Zawar Hussein wouldn’t like it.”

“Please don’t—have dinner with me.” Sohel did not want to end it this way.

“Thank you. We eat differently, my guys and me. We use our hands. I’ll eat with them.” Then, looking at Sohel’s concerned expression, he laughed. “Mian Sahib, don’t get all serious. We go back a long way, and a few drinks can’t come between us.”

Leaving, he shook hands making the same deferential gesture as on the first day, holding Sohel’s hand with both of his own.

The next morning, when Sohel went out after breakfast, he was surprised to find Malik Sharif awake and standing by the jeep in the portico, smoking a cigarette. The previous evening, smoking cigarette after cigarette as he did when drinking, it had not occurred to Sohel to offer one to Malik Sharif.

“Do you smoke, Malik Sahib?”

“Forgive me for smoking in front of you, Mian Sahib. But now the ice is broken between us.”

“Of course it is. I should have offered you one last night.”

“Well, perhaps it’s better you didn’t. Your servants might think I was taking liberties.”

“Would you like to come out on the farm with me? See the crops?”

“I think not. Keep business and pleasure separate. But I’ll send a guy with you.”

“Do I need it?”

“No. It would be just for show. While I’m here these Chandios won’t make a peep. Last night the S.P. Sahib’s men made a raid on them. They’re all scattered across the river now, hiding in mud up to their necks. For good measure S.P. Sahib hauled in some of their women to the station last night.”

“Why take the women?” Sohel said. “My grandfather wouldn’t like it. We never did any of that. We never bring the women into it, not in this village.”

“Is that right?” Malik Sharif said, grinning. “Don’t worry, these ladies are like sisters to the sepoys. Not sisters. Like distant cousins. It wouldn’t be the first time they were invited to a dance party at the station.”

When Sohel drove in to the dera in the afternoon for his daily session with the accountant, he found that Malik Sharif had ordered that one of the farm tractors should be hitched with a plow and made ready.

“Mian Sahib, it’s time to turn up the heat a little bit more. My boys are getting bored, and that’s not good for their appetite or their temper. I’m told your Sadique Chandio owns an acre of fodder on the other side of your orchard. Let’s go over there and plow it under, and if the boy shows up then we’ll have a chat with him. I sent him a message to come see me here in your dera, and the motherfucker hasn’t shown up. Didn’t even send a reply. Makes my throat dry just thinking of it.”

“I thought all those guys had gone into hiding. Maybe he didn’t get the message. Why don’t we give him a bit of time?”

“He got the message. Anyway, what’s the harm? We’ll beat the bushes and see what pops out.”

“Let’s go have a cup of tea, anyway, and make a plan. We can talk it over with Zawar Hussein.”

Malik Sharif let out a big false laugh, like a gangster in the Bollywood movies. “Again with Zawar Hussein! We should hitch him to the plow and make him pull it. It would be good for him to oil the earth with his sweat. He’s fat but he’s strong, eating all the nice biryani around here. Forget it, Mian Sahib. It’s time. It’s too late now. I’ve been insulted. And look at you. They beat your personal servant days ago and haven’t heard a word about it. I insist that your Sadique Chandio comes and touches your old man’s feet and begs his pardon. Otherwise, people will say that the grandson of Mian Abdullah Abdalah summoned the Maliks from Khirka but they came and did nothing.”

They were standing under a tree, at a slight distance from the drivers and from some villagers who had gathered in the dera to gawk at the armed outsiders. The goonda put his hand on Sohel’s arm and squeezed the muscle, then led him to the jeep, still holding his arm.

“Let’s not waste time, Mian Sahib. I’ll ride with you.”

They drove to the Chandio field in procession, Malik Sharif and Sohel in one jeep, Zawar Hussein and the goondas crammed in another, and the tractor behind, going through the little Dunyapur bazaar with mute-faced villagers watching. Everyone knew of the ongoing confrontation, and Sohel felt their hostility as a tightness in his throat, the people unfriendly, not greeting him.

“All the people in the bazaar should salaam when you pass,” Malik Sharif said laconically, as they pulled up to the field. “It’s respect.”

The tractor driver balked at plowing into the fodder. “I’ve got little children, for God’s sake. Don’t get me involved, I beg you.”

“Look at this guy!” Malik Sharif said. He went and whispered in the driver’s ear, then called over one of his men. “Are you more afraid of the Chandios or this gorilla?”

The goonda pointed at the tractor with the barrel of his Kalashnikov. “Come on, sweetheart. Saddle up. Do it.”

Malik Sharif turned to Sohel. “And you, Mian Sahib. Go home and relax, have a cup of tea. There’s no need for you to be here anymore. Everyone will know you came and showed us the spot. Now it’s time for my guys to do their thing. Tell your cook to make some samosas for them. They’ll be hungry. I’ll be with you as soon as I sort this out.”

Relieved, abashed, Sohel got back in the jeep and let the driver take him back to the house. The people in the bazaar knew something was about to happen.

A little running track ran along the perimeter of the garden, another of his father’s follies, since no member of the family had ever jogged. Sohel strolled the circuit, birds in the trees clamoring, while he thought of the tractor plowing up the Chandios’ fodder. He shouldn’t have let that happen. What happened to college days and marching for justice in South Africa and in solidarity with ship workers in Poland? Worst of all, he was afraid, relieved not to be standing there while they ruined the field of ripe fodder. It was out of his hands.

He had just completed a fourth round of the track when he heard voices. Emerging through the trees, he saw Malik Sharif sitting at the tea table on the lawn and Chaudrey Zawar Hussein standing behind him.

“Come, Mian Sahib,” Malik Sharif shouted, without rising. “Have a seat.”

The goonda looked different, enlarged, and in a buoyant temper.

“What happened, Zawar Hussein?” Sohel asked. His hands trembled as he lit a cigarette, for he had been expecting that there would be unpleasantness, and that he would have to get involved—that the Chandios would have driven Malik Sharif away.

“Ask Malik Sahib,” the manager said.

“These things happen,” the young gangster said offhandedly. “Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out. I’d say you go to Lahore in the morning. You’ll need to talk to someone.”

“But what happened?”

“My man, you know, the one with the Kalash. He’s got a terrible temper. It’s really too much of a good thing.”

“Mian Sohel Sahib,” Zawar Hussein whined. “Mian Sahib.”

Malik Sharif looked at the munshi. “Don’t you get in the middle of this, Munshi Sahib. Don’t exaggerate.”

The munshi shook his head from side to side, as if shaking off water.

“So what exactly happened?” Sohel asked, again.

“Nothing, really. The boy came, and he started insulting my men. And my guys just don’t know how to put up with that sort of nonsense. So that big one, you know the one? The one with the AK? He, I don’t know. Let’s say that he hit the man.”

“It seemed pretty bad,” Zawar Hussein muttered. “I didn’t watch. I left.”

Now Malik Sharif turned and stood halfway up. “Are you trying to piss me off, Munshi Sahib? Are you trying to make me angry?”

The munshi had put up his hands, as if fending off a blow.

“Anything more, Munshi Sahib?” Malik Sharif asked. He lowered himself comfortably, crossed his legs, lit a cigarette, and smiled at Sohel. “Go on, Zawar Hussein, check on the samosas for my guys. Try to calm down. Mian Sahib will handle this.”

They drank tea, Sohel alarmed and fearful and yet not wanting to know the details.

“Tell me about America,” the goonda said. “I’ll go there someday. You can get me a visa.”

Sohel told him of the orderly people there and the discipline, too voluble, running away from the awful subject at hand. In his telling all the American policemen were honest and all the politicians virtuous. If anyone dropped a gum wrapper in the street, he would be stopped; it had happened to Sohel himself. He exaggerated and then saw that Malik Sharif didn’t quite believe him, had lost interest, kept saying, “Well, well, well,” and “Oh, my.”

As they parted, Malik Sharif said, “Good, now you’ve told me everything about America. And you ask no questions, that’s also good. But, Mian Sahib, now you have to do a little bit of work. Please go to Lahore tomorrow first thing and talk with one of your relatives. Just have them phone to the D.I.G. Police in Multan. He’s the real boss in this division. Just so it doesn’t get blown out of shape. There’s some Chandio on the other side of Multan who’s in the provincial assembly. We better keep him out of it. I’m sure these guys will go to him.”

Sohel left at dawn, eager to be in Lahore and to read a foreign newspaper, to have a phone line to America, to call Klara, after six weeks without hearing her voice. He borrowed Chaudrey Zawar Hussein’s car because it was faster and more comfortable than his own jeep. Sohel wryly remembered his father joking with his own father about the manager having a nicer car than the master.

“Really, Daddy,” Tony would say. “If you’re not careful he’ll steal your false teef, and then we’ll be feeding you on bananas and porridge.” The lisped teef was always good for a laugh.

Smoking cigarette upon cigarette, lighting one each time for the driver, Sohel felt his anxieties fade as he left the farm behind. It would have been unthinkable for a driver to smoke in front of his grandfather, or even his father. The only child of an only child, sure to inherit the property, Sohel should never have been sent abroad, certainly not for boarding school as well as college. Even as a teen-ager he had been aware of the vultures circling around—the boy too soft, too mannered, too Westernized. His grandfather, anyway, had always taken the position après moi, le déluge, a principle that Tony Abdalah had embraced in every sinew of his soul, if his soul were judged by his behavior. Bold bold Tony sold, those sorts of nonsense word games rang in the air, as Tony and his racy group of lightfoot lads gambled and drank, Sohel’s mother retiring early, her little pills washed down with a last drink to make her sleep. Sitting alone at Dunyapur these past months, the scorpions nibbling at his heels, Sohel had sometimes thought, I wish I’d been the one burning away the money all night. Dunyapur when Sohel arrived was really just the rump of the estate, so much had been sold over the years.

These were the thoughts passing through his mind as the dawn light scraped his eyeballs, the sun orange in the Punjabi haze of a late fall morning, driving the rutted K.L.P. road, the old British road from Karachi to Lahore, the life of the country awakening into the fields. They drove through little ugly towns made of concrete, steel-gated shops clanking open, men sitting on their haunches pissing into little clumps of greenery, crowding around tea stalls.

When asked by Sohel at dinner about the incident with the goondas, Fezoo claimed not to know anything.

“Come on, Fezoo. A mouse doesn’t fart around here without everyone talking about it.”

But Fezoo wouldn’t speak.

Now, as they drove along, the usually loquacious driver kept his silence, until finally Sohel asked him, “Really, Mustafa. You have to tell me. What happened yesterday?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Oh, come on, you’re one of the few guys who talk to me straight. I need to know.”

“What do you think happened, sir? They grabbed the boy and laid him out and thrashed him till he cried like a dog.”

“I guess that’s what he did to Bahadur Khan.”

“Maybe. I hear they broke Sadique’s leg. Or legs. There’s all kinds of stories going around. No one who was there would talk.”

“That’s unusual.”

“This was unusual. Someone said they drove the tractor over the boy’s knees.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not possible.”

“Everything is possible.”

They drove on. After a few miles, the driver broke his silence. “Mian Sahib, please take things into your own hands. Take control. I’ve eaten Chaudrey Zawar Hussein’s salt, but I say this to you. We all beg you. In the village. Then you’ll have the police to do these jobs. They know how much to do and how much not to. These Maliks don’t know where to stop.”

Entering Lahore in the late afternoon, they drove along the canal that bisected the city, then into the shaded neighborhood where a few big houses stood next to old British government bungalows. The same bent chowkidar from Sohel’s childhood saluted them through the gates of al-Abdalah, a large pinkish pile built in the nineteen-thirties in the Art Deco style that prettily touched down for a moment in this corner of the Empire. The house wearied him, the committee that would trickle out to greet him, his grandfather’s old phlegmatic secretary, who lived on in a suite of rooms capping an administrative building near the stables, all the old servants, and the sense of failure that hung over the house, of lives passed by and glories not to come again.

Dismissing everyone, he slipped up to the room he had occupied since his parents died, his mother’s retreat—she had called it her pinjra, her cage—up a flight of stairs and onto the roof. A wide balcony overlooked a side garden, now unkempt as it had been since her death, her roses blown and leggy, the seasonal flower beds empty. Afzal, his grandfather’s old majordomo, followed behind on the stairs, mumbling through his ill-fitting false teeth. He grumbled that he had been informed only at midday of Sohel’s arrival, so that the cook hadn’t gone to the market, only dal and chapatis to eat, the house still shuttered.

“Come on, old man. You’re losing it, I swear. Don’t worry about it. Bring me a whiskey, or, better, bring the bottle and ice and water.”

The room had still the scent he remembered from childhood—to him the sweetest scent—of the woven reed floor mats that his mother ordered specially made in Rawalpindi. He remembered her at the desk, typing, writing her novel, which had never seen the light of day, cigarettes overflowing the ashtray, her long hands, long face, sadness. When the servant came back he said, “Afzal, go on, twist one up.”

“One?”

“Make it two.”

Old Afzal, himself a late-night toker, looked up at Sohel affectionately. “As you wish. I’ll do it here, so that no one smells when I heat it.”

“Oh, come on, as if they didn’t know. Anyway, sit down. I need company.”

The servant sat down on the floor, emptied cigarettes, heated the hash, refilled the tubes, while Sohel sipped whiskey and read the International Herald Tribune, which he had picked up at the Intercontinental Hotel on the way into town, the first news he’d seen in six weeks. A review of a Bonnard retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris—Bonnard, his mother’s favorite. She had that, those choice tastes, had taught him that—perhaps too well, he had reflected in the past months as he waded into the combats around Dunyapur. In the back of his mind loomed the horror of the Chandio confrontation, which seemed now very far away, all those miles driven across the plains of the Punjab, all those towns, villages, crops, orchards behind him, between him and the rude fact of Sadique Chandio lying on a charpoy with mangled legs, his clan around him, and Malik Sharif and his men prowling the old house that Sohel’s great-grandfather had built. It horrified him that he’d done this, allowed a man to be beaten, becoming just like the other landlords. When Afzal learned of it, as he certainly would, he would approve of the beating administered, a line drawn. Six months taking care of business in Pakistan, and already Sohel was coming to accept these violations.

And what of Klara? He thought of her living, breathing, at that exact moment on the other side of the globe, and it gave perspective to his troubles. In New York it would be morning. How bad could the Chandio incident be, if she was still there? He could board a flight and be with her in a day, and perhaps make a life in America with her—or at least it soothed him to think so. He wished for nothing more than for her to come here and live with him, give him strength—for what? The strength to do the right thing. Soon, before he smoked the first joint, he would book a call to her in New York.

One of his mother’s oldest friends, a courtesy aunt, had once invited them to tea at her Upper East Side apartment. Under this scrutiny, Klara had been mannered, slightly false, and expansive about her ambitions: to publish, to teach, making no reference to Pakistan. Watching the two women fencing, Sohel had felt excluded, felt that the two were fighting over him without any consideration of his presence, as if he were a child. Afterward, when Sohel asked his aunt what she thought, the old lady cagily suggested that Klara was perhaps a personality too strong for him.

The booze helped, one drink and then another. Later still, he would call Hisham, his much older second cousin. He did not like going hat in hand, though his parents and Hisham’s had drunk deep on many nights in many drawing rooms. He had nowhere else to turn. Hisham’s senior branch of the family held the original ancestral lands nearer Lahore, the family jagirs from before the British annexation of the Punjab. Both Hisham and his father had been in the National Assembly. If only he would, Hisham could help clear up this case, could settle it as such things had always been settled by Sohel’s grandfather, a phone call to someone at the top, and an order sent down like a thunderbolt.

Sohel lay back on the bed, working through the newspaper, which brought to mind again all that lay a twenty-hour flight distant—an afternoon taxi in from J.F.K. to Klara’s studio somewhere on the Upper West Side, described to him in letters but never yet seen. He imagined them making love under an open window with drapes blowing, for in his fantasy it was always summer when he returned to her. After lovemaking, dinner, a slow descent down Broadway to one of those restaurants where they serve decent Italian food, good enough to make Dunyapur seem an illusion, though he would have been away from Pakistan for less than a day. He remembered what his aunt had said, in final dismissal. “She wouldn’t make a go of it back in the home country, my dear. She couldn’t or wouldn’t be bent to our weird shapes.”

“This is the thing, my boy,” Sohel’s cousin Hisham said as they sipped their drinks the next evening. “This is the thing you must understand. In Pakistan, every problem is a lock, and to that lock there is a single key. Your job is to find that key—that’s what farming is all about. Or business, whatever you like. Politics.” He shook his cigar more or less in Sohel’s face. “That, Sohel, is your job.”

Hisham’s abstract response to Sohel’s plea for help made him feel again his own helplessness. He had been counting on Hisham as a one-stop solution to what was, after all, a rather minor issue, a man beaten up who had first beaten Sohel’s personal servant. It made him squirm, ashamed to approach his cousin as a supplicant, ashamed of his role in Sadique Chandio’s beating. He must characterize the issue as serious enough to merit Hisham’s full exertion, while trying not to show himself as an old-school landlord—dentists and surgeons, as they called them, rearranging teeth and dismounting knees and elbows. Hisham would laugh it off, even approve, and that seemed worst of all.

“Good boy,” Hisham said. “You’ll get the hang of it in no time. Maybe we should put you up in the next election. It’s pricey, but it pays in the end. With your education we’ll get you a ministry after a few years. Most of our respected members sound like a Hollywood desi when they’re speaking English. With your education you can be one of the gentlemen we set up facing the Americans. You can’t go wrong fiddling for them.”

They were sitting in Hisham’s drawing room, arranged with white-upholstered sofas, glass-topped tables, a bar at one end of the room, many mirrors, and an entire elephant’s tusk as an accent piece on the fireplace mantel, a finial of beaten silver cupped around the massive base end. A dozen or so years older than Sohel, Hisham always glittered and made the right moves—a measured harvest of wild oats as a teen-ager from an old Lahore family, no more than a bit of trouble in the vicinity of the Punjab Club and the polo ground. After that, a degree in America, something vague at a good university. On returning, he quickly set up a spinning mill, with fortunes to be made in textiles, and, after a few years, won his father’s seat in parliament. His father had been in the army, retired as a colonel, and there had been stories about a bit too much money made a bit too quickly, when he was given appointments in the administration after retirement. There were also current stories in the family about Hisham playing hardball with his younger brother’s property, shoving him off to America, and that, too, added to his gloss, made him appear a man willing to do whatever it took, princely in that way.

Getting up to refill his glass, Hisham rang a bell.

An old servant entered. He knew Sohel, greeted him as a family member, touching a hand to his forehead, sly and informed as the servants of powerful men are.

Throwing a fistful of peanuts into his mouth, Hisham said, “Tell Sheikh Sahib to put me through to Mian Salah. He’s in Multan, not the Karachi number.”

After a few minutes, the phone on the table next to Hisham softly purred. He settled back, with an alert, amused look on his face, as if about to tell a joke, a hand toying with his cigar, tapping it in the ashtray. Very quickly, leaving out all the details that Sohel had so painstakingly explained, and mixing up the facts, Hisham described the problem at Dunyapur. The voice at the other end spoke at length, almost audible to Sohel, while Hisham nodded, took a puff of his cigar, said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and then, “All right, excellent, I’ll tell him.” He spoke a mixture of English and rich Punjabi, some words not comprehensible to Sohel, who had been brought up on servants’ Urdu.

About to hang up, settling into the choreography of goodbye, body relaxing, suddenly he leaned forward and put down his cigar.

“Oh, by the way, sorry. What happened with that Nazim Shah thing? Have you spoken to the D.C.?”

Again, like a fire almost extinguished and then blazing up, the conversation became animated, complex, something to do with a shipment of machinery held up in Karachi’s port. Sohel watched with admiration as his cousin worked through his own business, joking about the other man’s lack of initiative and pressing him, listening and then remonstrating, “But, Mian Sahib, these are your men. Who but you?” He laughed. “Who but you, my dear?” and then, with no more ceremony, hung up.

Turning back to Sohel, he said, clucking his tongue, “There, that should help. He’s a good man. God willing, he’ll sort this out for you. But he says the best thing may be for you to go through the courts.”

Just then, Hisham’s wife came in, a suave woman in evening clothes, seeming to Sohel intimidatingly grownup, like his own mother.

“Hello, Sohel,” she said, coming up and kissing him lightly. “I didn’t know you were here.” Her enigmatic tinkling laugh always seemed to Sohel both a flirtation and a judgment.

Sohel had stood up when she came in.

“Look at you being so formal. Next you’ll be calling me Aunty Shahnaz.”

Turning to her husband, she said, “We’re going to be late, you know. It always takes you so long to get ready.”

“When have you ever been on time for anything, my darling?”

“When am I ever anything but on time?”

“True. Your understanding of time is finer than the rest of us. Peasants like us can’t make these nice distinctions.”

“Poor you.”

“Quick drink?” Hisham asked.

“And make one for Nisa, too. She’s just coming.”

She sat down and began asking Sohel rote questions about his health and his state of mind. After a few minutes, the door opened and a younger woman came in, also dressed to go out.

“Come sit. Sohel, Nisa is the younger sister of my oldest, closest friend. And Sohel is Hisham’s cousin. He’s back from America and running his farm.”

“Amazing,” Nisa said.

“Nisa and you must be the same age, but I suppose Sohel went off to school too soon for you to know each other.”

“Actually, I know you, Sohel. You’re exactly a year older. I came to your birthday once, when we were in primary school. And when I was little my parents would bring me to al-Abdalah at Eid, and your grandmother would always give me a fifty-rupee note, which was more than anyone else did. I always loved that house, I suppose because I associated it with the fifty-rupee eidee.”

She cut into a wheel of brie that the bearer had brought in, and, smearing a dab onto a cracker, offered it to Sohel. “Here you go.”

As she passed it to him, he became uncomfortably aware of her proximity, of her rounded biscuit-colored bare arm and the red-polished fingernails on the hand holding the cracker.

“I’ll be right back,” Shahnaz said. “I have to see to something.”

Hisham sat back in his seat, heavyset but sleek, smoking his cigar reflectively and watching the two young people.

“I say,” he observed. “You two are about the same age. Maybe Shahnaz should get you two hitched up.”

Nisa made a clicking sound. “Great idea, Hisham. And you’re so subtle, too.”

“What’s subtlety got to do with it? He’s got land and a nice house in Lahore, your families have known each other for generations, and you’re the prettiest girl of your batch.”

Sohel found himself blushing, much to his discomfiture.

“Look at that,” Nisa said. “How sweet!”

Just then, Shahnaz swept back in.

“All set,” she said. “Sohel, I’m throwing you out. My husband has to get ready. Why don’t you come for dinner tomorrow?”

“I’m afraid I have to go back to Dunyapur in the morning.”

“What a bore. Oh, well, we’ll see you next time then.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Hisham said.

As they left the room, Nisa called behind him, “Bye, Sohel!”

Driving home, Sohel’s relief at having unbuttoned himself to his cousin warred with his sense of having been hurried away, treated with less ceremony than he had hoped. Go through the courts! Nobody ever went through the courts unless they had no power. If he would only do it, Hisham could solve this thing in a minute.

People said that Shahnaz, the wife, was the real brains of that operation. That’s what Sohel should do, of course, marry one of the girls whom he’d seen around the polo ground since childhood, the girls of his class, someone like Nisa. Choose one with connections, not like his father’s legacy friends, his drinking buddies, all the gilded youth of that Lahori generation, who spent their lives pawning off the gilding. He needed someone like Shahnaz, someone to pull the wires behind the scenes. It would be no hardship to see that dimple and that smile over breakfast every morning, however double-edged the mind behind it. Perhaps Nisa’s presence had not been accidental, he reflected. As Hisham had observed, it would be just like Shahnaz to set him up, take the credit for a useful marriage.

The long driveway to the Dunyapur house ran near the old swimming pool. Through the trees Sohel saw Malik Sharif’s men bathing, one of them bare-chested in the water, another sitting and combing his long hair in the afternoon sun. They had piled their Kalashnikovs on a charpoy beside them, and, when they saw Sohel, they watched him pass with blank faces.

“Look at that,” Mustafa, the driver, said. “The village women go past to get water, and these guys are sitting half-naked.”

Back at the house, Sohel called in Chaudrey Zawar Hussein.

“What’s the story with Malik Sharif’s men bathing in the old swimming pool? I specifically asked them not to.”

“What can I tell you? All they do is order beef pilau and chicken pilau and sit around smoking hashish.”

“They’re smoking hash?”

“Openly. And walking around with their guns.”

“What about Malik Sharif? Where is he?”

“He went into Cawnapur this afternoon.”

“Did he take the jeep?”

“No, he’s got a car now. Some more of his guys drove in last night. That makes five of them total plus Malik Sharif.”

“Tell Fezoo to give me dinner right away. And, when Malik Sahib returns, tell him I’ve retired for the night.”

That evening Sohel received a phone call, with much crackling on the line, which once again had been patched up.

“Hello, lonely Mr. Crusoe. It’s Shahnaz.”

It surprised him that she should be calling, rather than Hisham.

“Is everything O.K.?”

“Of course it is. Listen, Hisham has some business in Bahawalpur, of all places, and so we’re all going to see old Begum Latifa. For some reason she insists on living there. And we thought we’d first come and spend a couple of nights with you. If you’re not too busy. I was going to mention it the other night, and then I forgot.”

“Busy doesn’t happen around here. Please come and never leave.”

“It’s just us, and then Nisa, my friend from the other night. And her father, old Uncle Tiffy.”

“So that’s who Nisa is! You should have said Uncle Tiffy’s daughter. He was part of my dad’s whole group.”

“Group indeed. Look, this connection is terrible. We’ll be there tomorrow afternoon. Thank you a million. I’ve heard so much about Dunyapur, and now I can see it. Big kiss.” And she hung up.

They arrived in a convoy, Hisham’s black Mercedes with M.N.A. plates—Member, National Assembly—and then two other vehicles, Nisa and her father in a little sports car, and a big jeep with Hisham’s people, a bodyguard and his valet and a couple of managers from his factory. Hisham had brought his friend Zulfi, a business type from Karachi, a slim, groomed man in a blue pin-striped shirt and cream slacks, milk from the top of the bottle. Flicking open a gold lighter and inhaling a deep drag from a cigarette, he looked placidly about, as if waiting for the show to start.

The group stood in the portico, stretching, gazing about as people do when arriving at a place that they have heard spoken of.

“Nice wheels,” Sohel said to Nisa.

“Not bad, right? I drove all the way myself.”

“That’s a serious effort. I was wondering how you could fit a driver in that thing. The back seat there would be like eight hours in a dog carrier.”

Shahnaz drifted over. “What are you two laughing about?”

“Nisa driving from Lahore by herself.”

“I know. Isn’t she a nut? We couldn’t keep up with her.”

Showing them around the house and then the garden, Sohel saw through their eyes the hundred-year-old banyan tree around a pavilion at the far end of the garden, its aerial roots dropping from branches all around the bole, so that the single tree formed a mysterious grove. It gave him weight, that this belonged to him—the ancient trees, the mellow brick of the walls. The guesthouse at the far end of the lawn had been yet another of his father’s follies—an architect manqué, people said—with three domed rooms and a round, sunken bathtub that was more like a swimming pool.

“This is so much nicer than your Ranmal Mohra place,” Nisa said to Hisham. “Your farm looks like some industrialist plonked up a brand-new, mega-sized Lahore house with a helicopter and dropped it in the village.”

“I have to overawe the locals, and that’s what works. Sohel here is a prince like his father. I doubt he knows the name of any revenue official in the district.”

Sohel laughed. “Not yet! I’ve still got that fussy American stomach. I get queasy.”

They went and sat in the middle of the central garden, where Uncle Tiffy had been waiting for them, with the sun just going down.

“Well, young man,” he said. “You think that you’re the master here, but in fact I got here long before you. I came with your father and mother the first time in 1971, during the war. Everyone thought the Indians would be in Lahore in a few days, eating lunch at our tables and using us for footstools. A whole caravan of us came up here, showing our bravery by showing our backs.” He greeted his own story with a huge laugh, his face marmalade golden and shining, satyric, and curling lovelocks around his ears, hair just slightly too long. “I hope you don’t mind,” he continued, stretching his legs forward and looking up at the sky and into the branches of the old pipal tree. “I’ve asked Fezoo to bring the drinks cart and something to eat. Excuse my taking the liberty, but I feel I’m at home here.” Sohel did mind but brushed it aside. This Uncle Tiffy had been close to his father, and that counted a lot. Still, he remembered something that his grandfather had said, when Tiffy showed up once too often exactly when the drinks were laid at al-Abdalah. Tiffy had gone to the toilet, and his grandfather made one of his very rare jokes, and even rarer criticisms.

“Do you know what Tiffy brings to a potluck dinner?” he asked. “A spoon.”

The servants lit a bonfire in the garden, and later served an immense meal that Chaudrey Zawar Hussein had conjured up from the city, chicken tikkas and beef tikkas, a pilau, chicken karahi, all the food that a group of boozers would need to keep themselves from going bottoms up, as Uncle Tiffy remarked happily. He called in Zawar Hussein and became familiar with him, saying, “You rogue, you used to spoil us with these dinners back in Tony Mian’s day, didn’t you! You villain!”

“Thank you, sir,” Zawar Hussein said, his expression less benevolent than his words.

In English Tiffy said to the group, “The old dog’s probably lapping it up himself out back there in the servants’ area. A bottle disappears and nobody knows the difference!”

Zulfi, the friend from Karachi, laughed. “Brilliant, Uncle Tiffy. That should be on your coat of arms: A bottle disappears and nobody knows!”

After dinner the women were cold, and so they all went into the living room, had the fires lit. The conversation turned to the problem on the farm with the Chandios, and Sohel described what had happened, making his own role seem more judicious and strategic than vindictive, and diminishing the Chandio beating to a couple of well-deserved slaps.

“Quite right, to bring in these goondas,” Tiffy said. His accent grew more and more British as the evening progressed. “That’s all these people around here understand. The stick. The carrot and the stick. You have to show them who’s in charge.” He poked a finger toward Sohel. “Young man, remember, you’re the grandson of Mian Abdullah Abdalah, and these people should be grateful to you and your family for all you’ve done in this area. You’re like a father to them.”

Nisa sat next to Sohel, making a little corner with him, watchful, amused rather than amusing. Shahnaz slowed down, but Nisa drank one for one with the men, chain-smoking cigarettes. Slurring and confidential, Tiffy launched inconsequentially into a story about one of the village women back in the old days, calling her the Pride of the Punjab.

“Whoops, mixed company, mixed company!” he wheezed.

“Come on, Abu,” Nisa said, standing up. “Time to go to sleep.”

“But why!” He clenched his teeth and made a stand, but she managed to lead him out.

“It’s all right, Uncle Tiffy,” Hisham said. “I’m going, too. I’ve got to make some calls.”

“To your bookie?” Tiffy warbled. “Put down a thousand for me.”

Nisa managed to lead him out, helped by Hisham, who winked and whispered to the room, “I’ll be back.”

Returning after a few minutes, Nisa said, “All right, bring it out. Who’s got the dope?”

“Why not?” Zulfi said. He had been egging on Uncle Tiffy as he became more and more sodden, refilling his drinks. “Come on, Sohel Mian, if you don’t have any dope, then amuse us somehow. Show us your weapons or whatever it is you get up to here. What about this Punjab Pride? Or her daughter. Or granddaughter.”

“Are you serious!” Nisa said. “That’s offensive.”

Shahnaz clapped her hands and began to stand up. “All right, gentlemen, I’m off then. I know how this goes. It’s straight downhill.”

“Calm down, Shahnaz,” Zulfi said. “If you go, we’ll all go. What about this goonda then? Bring him out, offer him a drink.” When telling them about his evening of drinking with Malik Sharif, Sohel had made a joke of it, exaggerating his own coolness and Malik Sharif’s deference. “He’s a bit of a tough guy,” Sohel had told them. “He has to be. But you’d hardly know it—he can fit in. He’s actually not bad company.”

Nisa had been looking at the books on the shelves, a lot of mysteries and P. G. Wodehouse and old books that might have been found in a Gymkhana Club library back in British times, but also Sohel’s mother’s books, her poetry and novels. “What a nice collection,” Nisa said to Sohel, calling him over. “It’s a time capsule, isn’t it? It’s beautiful. The books of a certain moment in the sixties. I wonder if your mother wasn’t lonely here, with my dad and your dad and all that. It’s a place to make a home, you know, if it weren’t for all the nonsense.” She had picked Mary McCarthy’s “Birds of America” from the shelf. “I love this.”

“Truthfully, I’m surprised you’ve even heard of it,” Sohel said. “I always wanted to read it, because of the title, but I never got around to it. For the longest time I thought it was one of those field guides.”

She laughed and put her hand lightly on his arm. “I’m not as dim as they make me out to be, you know.”

Sohel took Nisa to his study, to show her his mother’s collection of poetry first editions, and when they returned to the living room Zulfi had taken it upon himself to ring the bell, sending Fezoo to ask Malik Sharif in for a moment.

“For the record, I warned him against this,” Shahnaz scolded. “My husband won’t approve when he gets back from wherever he’s disappeared to.”

Sohel didn’t want to ruin the fun. “Maybe the women should at least put away their drinks.”

“Oh, come on,” Zulfi said. “Don’t be a bad sport. It’s not as if this chap doesn’t know that Lahori women drink. In Karachi some of these gangsters give the best parties.”

“We’re not in Karachi,” Sohel said. “But it’s fine—you’re the guest.”

The men made a great show of politeness to Malik Sharif, rising when he came in, offering him the best chair.

“Please, I’m comfortable here,” he said, slipping toward a sofa placed against the wall.

But they wouldn’t allow it and insisted he sit in front of the fire. Without asking, Zulfi poured a drink and brought it to him.

“Malik Sahib, will you do us the honor of joining us?”

He sat too far back in the low, deep seat, then struggled forward and set himself upright, his feet together on the floor. “As you wish, sir.”

They spoke of generalities, Malik Sharif clearing his throat with low humming noises between sips of his drink, Zulfi with an amused expression on his face.

“Isn’t this exciting!” Nisa, who sat curled with her feet under her, whispered. She put her feet on the ground, found her shoes, stood, and went over to the bookshelf again.

Malik Sharif watched her walk across the room, then turned to Zulfi.

“May I ask where you come from?”

“We drove from Lahore. But I’m based in Karachi.”

“Are you doing business there?” He spoke in Urdu but said the word business in English—“bijness.”

“Yes, bijness.”

“And do you know Hajji Jajji Baba Soreja?”

Zulfi laughed. “The One-Eyed Hajji!”

“Yes. Hajji Sahib is a friend of ours.”

“You have powerful friends! Come on, drink up, and we’ll have another.”

After taking Malik Sharif’s glass and returning with the refill, Zulfi stood by the fire, examining Sohel’s family portraits.

“So, tell me, Malik Sahib, what is your business?”

No one moved. Malik Sharif looked around the room, over at Nisa, who was standing by the bookshelf, watching the men ranged by the fire, a little smile on her lips, very delicate, very pretty, waiting to hear what the gangster would say.

“Does your friend speak our tongue?” he asked Sohel in Punjabi, indicating Nisa.

Directing Malik Sharif’s attention away from Nisa, Sohel pretended to think that the question referred to Zulfi. “Zulfi Sahib here is a businessman, so he knows all the languages.”

“But he’s not a Punjabi,” Malik Sharif said. “I’ll speak in Urdu. I’ll explain it this way. Our business is your business. Wherever you have business we have it too. Let me give you an example. Mian Sohel asked me up here to settle a little dispute with one of his neighbors. Now, it happens that the S.P. in Cawnapur is obliged to my grandfather for something that happened in Lahore a few years ago. The S.P. is Malik Hashim Hayat Sanghera; he used to be in Kasur, outside Lahore. You may have heard of him. Sohel Sahib knows him. These policemen are also businessmen, like all of us.”

Malik Sharif commanded the city people’s attention, none of them moving, all eyes fixed upon him, the room still but for the wavering fire.

“So I drove to Cawnapur and went to see this friend of ours, this Malik Sanghera. We had tea, we spoke of mutual acquaintances. Then he said to me, ‘You’ve come, and I need you to do something for me. We’re going to pick up this badmash who’s been causing trouble in the area.’ It was nothing to do with Sohel Mian’s Chandio guys, someone else. We get in his private jeep, three or four police wagons with us, we drive to some village, and when we get there Malik Sanghera says, ‘Please, do this. For you it’s all in a day’s work. Or maybe you’ve never done one before.’ ”

Shahnaz, who had been sitting back in shadow, stirred up. “What in the world are you all talking about?”

Though she spoke in English, Malik Sharif understood her. “Encounter, Bibi jee. This is the way they settle this business. The police wish someone else to do the job. That way they put the blame a little bit away from themselves, for the enmity, you know. This man in that village had fifty-six cases against him, and not one could be settled, because the judges are afraid or they’re bought, and he keeps getting bail. So they pulled him out, threw him in the back of a pickup, we drove out to the desert to a quiet spot, and then we finished the job.”

“And did you? Do it, I mean?” Zulfi asked, offhand, still looking up at the family portraits on the wall.

“Someone had to do it, anyway. Who knows? When you eat a chicken someone has to cut the neck first. He’d got in the way of business, and that’s how we dealt with it. An inch of lead, nice and hot. They couldn’t pry him out of the back of the pickup. We just did it in there, finally.”

Nisa called over, “Seriously, Zulfi. You can tell this one in Karachi. About dining with panthers.”

A look of disgust on her face, Shahnaz stood up. “That’s so awful,” she said, also in English. “It’s disgusting. All you men are disgusting. It’s horrible.” Wrapping her shawl around her shoulders, not looking at Malik Sharif, she whisked up and out. From outside the door she called back, “You’re an idiot, Sohel.”

“But why blame poor Sohel?” Zulfi murmured.

Malik Sharif sat unmoving, a muscle twitching in his jaw, looking fixedly at the corner of the room in front of him.

“I’m sorry, Malik Sahib,” Sohel said, after a moment, going over and taking the gangster’s glass. “My cousin’s wife isn’t feeling well. You know how women are. Let me get you another drink.”

“I think not, thank you. I’ll beg my leave, so you can see to her. Your women seem to require more attention than ours do.”

“At least have some dinner, Malik Sahib. Join us. Let me tell them to put it on.”

“Thank you, Mian Sahib. Thank you, no.” He went and shook Zulfi’s hand with an excess of politeness that bordered on insolence, standing in front of him, bowing his head for a long moment. Coming to Sohel, he closed his eyes as if in prayer. “I was just remembering your grandfather and Malik Sarkar Sahib,” he said, in Punjabi, and then backed out the door, giving it a last loud jerk as he pulled it shut behind him.

“Not cool, Zulfi,” Sohel said, when he was sure that Malik Sharif had left.

“He’s right,” Nisa said. “Now I’m a bit nervous. Call Hisham, please.”

Returning from making phone calls, Hisham listened to the story with a grave expression.

“How well do you know this guy, Sohel? Is he going to keep boozing it up out there? This was not a good idea.”

“I agree. I was in the other room when they called him. Zulfi here thought it would be entertaining.” Sohel tried to make light of it. “Anyway, Sharif is old school, or at least his people are all old school. They still have that respect. He’s Malik Sarkar’s grandnephew, as I said. You know all about it. From that old connection.”

“You told us you’d been sitting with him the other night, and that seemed fine,” Hisham said. “I wish I’d been here, but then it wouldn’t have happened. Let’s hope he’s more evolved than the run of them. And let’s get to bed, turn out the lights, and everything will be better in the light of day. I’ll meet him tomorrow, just to settle him down.”

Zulfi evidently felt himself unfairly blamed. “I’m sure he didn’t understand what Shahnaz said. His English isn’t good enough.”

“Dream on,” Hisham replied. “He knew exactly what she thought of him. From what you told me, my wife didn’t mince her words. That fellow could take ‘You men are disgusting’ pretty far in the wrong way, bad English or good.”

“I hope Sohel won’t need goondas to relieve him of his goondas!” Zulfi said, tittering.

As she left, Nisa squeezed Sohel’s hand. “Thanks for the excitement.”

Waking early, looking up at the high ceiling in the chilly, still room, overcome by a feeling of dread, Sohel considered that last night Malik Sharif had been insulted in his living room.

He rang the bell, and when Fezoo came he said, “Is Malik Sahib awake?”

“Malik Sahib left early this morning for Lahore. He got called away.”

“And his men?”

“He left them all behind. They’re shouting for breakfast.”

Hisham and the little party stayed another day. After a boozy lunch in the garden, with champagne that Zulfi had brought as a host present, Hisham asked Sohel to call in Zawar Hussein and then interrogated him about Malik Sharif.

“You better get to Lahore and call this man and put him in his place,” Hisham warned, after dismissing the munshi. “There you’ll be in a fourteen-kanal house right in the middle of G.O.R., with the commissioner’s residence a few houses down, and all your staff around you, and he’ll be intimidated. Don’t let him be familiar. And then you better get his men off your farm pronto.”

They went to sleep early, the party too long by one day, the conversation stale, everything already said. Sohel’s room seemed particularly bleak that evening. Life alone here could dry up so easily; his plastic slippers fussily lined up by the bedside told him that, the bare bulb and his face in the mirror in the stark bathroom as he brushed his teeth. Fezoo had not lit the fire, as he usually would, and Sohel knew that if he brought this up in the morning the servant would put on a pained expression and refer to the burden of the guests. He reflected that Fezoo had no real attachment to him, despite having worked in this house all his life, seeing the family come and go, never here for long.

They had all agreed to sleep late, and, though Sohel sat in bed reading for almost an hour after he woke, he heard nothing. After dressing, he went to the kitchen and called from outside. He tried never to go in, for the place was filthy, village style, and he couldn’t bear in these early days back at the farm to tackle these matters of housekeeping.

It surprised him then to hear Nisa’s bright voice responding.

“Hey, you, you’re up! Come and check it out.”

Sohel went in. “Good lord! Look at you in this grubby corner of my little kingdom.”

She was standing in front of the stove, the cook beside her flustered. “It’s fine. In Lahore now all the houses have two kitchens—one for the begum sahiba, to play around at making her little desserts or whatever, and the other one that they call the dirty kitchen for the servants to do the real cooking. They actually call it that. I’m teaching your guy how to make pancakes. I thought I’d work on your breakfast menu.”

“I guess it’s true—breakfast isn’t our strong point. They hardly eat it themselves. The only thing this guy knows is greasy omelettes with that awful bread.”

“Bunny’s Bread. The worst brand in the world. It sounds like fun till you taste it. You should eat parathas and honey for breakfast, you know. Your cook could manage that. Anyway, the dinners have been excellent.”

“I’m not sure. Zulfi picked out one of the bones from the curry last night and wondered if it came from a brontosaurus.”

“He’s a jerk, isn’t he, just between us. He’ll dine off that goonda story for weeks when he’s safely back in Karachi, telling them all about how he was roughing it in South Punjab.”

“And look at you, sleeves rolled up in my unwashed kitchen and cooking over coals. A real pioneer.”

She made a little curtsy, bobbing her head. “Thank you, thank you. Give me a few weeks and I’ll turn your cook into a cordon bleu.”

“And then you can teach him the tango. Better yet, you could polish up Zawar Hussein, and then get to work on the rest of my munshis too.”

In a corner of the garden, Sohel’s mother had made a breakfast nook, sheltered and with the sun coming off a whitewashed wall, so that it warmed quickly. Sohel took Nisa there after she had turned the pancakes over to the cook. Walking behind her on a little bridge over a watercourse, Sohel had been free to look at her neck, her shoulders, and the blue ribbon in her black hair. Now he said to her, “You know, the last woman I remember sitting here is my mother. You look a bit like her. Or you act like her. Like a foreigner almost.”

In the morning sun, Nisa glowed sleek, and her presence made him feel happier than he had in weeks. He tried not to look at her and felt a delicious embarrassment at being alone with her, his face stiff as if involuntarily smiling. They might have kissed in the night after drinks, she might have slipped into his room so easily, he might have touched that body, though he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t be unfaithful to Klara. His body ached, not just with desire but with the desire for connection, for the comfort of touch.

“I remember your mother. You’re right, there was something foreign about her. She was a little bit apart; she didn’t quite join in. Mostly I remember your father. One time I woke up in the morning and went into the living room at our place, and he was sitting there with my dad and the rest of the gang. The room was all smoky, with drinks lying all around, and they were playing Monopoly for real money. They’d been at it all night. You’ve probably seen that.”

“Seen rooms like that a hundred times. I don’t remember the Monopoly.”

He was sitting back, looking up at the morning sky. As always in South Punjab, it would be fine weather, the sky turning from blue to a mare’s tail of milky white when the light turned flat at noon, and then in the evening to orange. A chill in the morning breeze reminded him that it would soon be real winter, too cold at night to sit out, and the breeze in the rosewood trees spaced around the large garden poured down and cooled and emptied the space. Fezoo came with tea, put it on the table, and stood with his hands folded.

“That’s fine, Fezoo. Put on the breakfast in half an hour in the dining room. And light the fire.”

When he’d gone, Nisa said, “You’ve got quite a collection of old-time servants around here. Your parents’ old people. Or probably your grandfather’s. You’re lucky, even if they’re inefficient or corrupt or whatever. It’s continuity.”

She made him tea, and her gestures reminded him again of his mother. Handing him the cup, catching him in the act of watching her, Nisa looked him in the eyes. “You’re lonely here, aren’t you? Poor Sohel, and you’re all alone. I can imagine.”

Taking the cup, looking away, Sohel felt exposed, as if he would confess and break down. He wanted to say something light, but his emotion prevented it, not just his loneliness but his fear, and the knowledge that after lunch Nisa would go, along with the rest of them. He would be alone, with Malik Sharif’s men prowling outside, and all the concentric rings around him, all the people looking in toward him, the villagers, the Chandios, and the rest.

“Look at you,” she murmured. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I was just thinking of my mother.”

“Of course you were. Let’s talk about something else. Tell me about Klara. I’m so curious. She sounds like such an intellectual.”

Sohel had dropped the name several times, expressing the hope that Klara would soon visit Pakistan.

“If she comes, we’ll take her in hand,” Nisa continued. “We’ll doll her up for you and take her around.”

Sohel made a joke of it. “That doesn’t sound good. But let’s talk about something else. Tell me some Lahore gossip. I don’t know anybody or anything. You can tell me all the worst stuff and I won’t know who you’re talking about.”

Just then they saw Zulfi at the far end of the lawn, looking about, seeing them, waving and striding toward them.

“Oh, great, here comes Mr. Plastic. I should have told you some of the gossip about him,” Nisa said. “I hear his dad’s got some dealings in Karachi port that would make your goonda’s eyes water.”

They all spoke for a few moments, and then Sohel went to see about getting the breakfast, Nisa reminding him to order honey for her pancakes. Wanting a moment alone, troubled still by the emotion that Nisa had awoken in him, he returned to his room and took off his shoes, slipped under the covers. He thought of Klara, of having her there with him. That evening he would write a letter to her, telling of this visit and hinting about being set up with Nisa. Having kindled Klara’s jealousy, he would put it to rest. Watching Nisa when she was unaware, he had traced her figure with his eyes, and noticed how well she was put together, all the way down to her feet. But her feet were long, shaped clumsily, and she had thick ankles. He would say that, the ankles. Lying in bed with Klara he would sometimes encircle her ankle with his finger and thumb and say how delicately she was built. “You’re such a racist,” Klara had exclaimed, reassured, when he said before leaving her in America that he could never marry a Pakistani.

Yet in the past couple of days Shahnaz had been laying out Nisa’s merits and demerits, subtly but with purpose, and very much in the context of the predicament in which Sohel found himself, with the goondas and the issues with his neighbors.

“No doubt,” Shahnaz said, “her papa’s a tiny bit dotty. He props up the bar at the Punjab Club, and that’s about all he’s useful for. But Nisa’s a tough girl, and she’s a very good sport, and, if she has a bit of a past, well, that’s what happens when you send a girl abroad for schooling. She’s got ten first cousins, half of them in the army, and all of them know how to skin a cat ten ways.”

“I like the way you put things,” Sohel said. “Is that even a phrase?”

Then Shahnaz laughed her little tinkling laugh, her face lit and yet cold. “I think you understand my meaning. A girl like Nisa comes complete with an army, literally. She’s spent a lot of time abroad, not as much as you, but then you need some local masala in your mixture. I’ll be straight with you. You’ve been away since you were what, thirteen? If you’re going to put down stakes here, that’s a decision, too, just like going away.”

“I didn’t make that decision. My mother did.”

“I’m just being straight. I’m speaking as your cousin’s wife. And then I’ve known Nisa since she was a little girl.”

Yet seeing her father pouring himself drinks and making himself at home, and seeing Nisa’s little flirtations, done so well, Sohel couldn’t escape the feeling that he was being haltered and led. He was damaged goods—parents dead, schooled abroad too long, cut off from the oxygen of living in this place. Propertied as he was, he must prove himself, one way or another. Lying in bed the previous night, he had thought of Nisa’s body, her tight bodice, small breasts, how that might open to him, and, as he closed his eyes, imagined a tiny scarlet forked tongue darting out of her mouth.

After he had seen off his guests, the garden and the house seemed barren. He read all afternoon, didn’t go on the farm, ate his solitary dinner. Falling asleep, he remembered his loneliness, the insuperable difficulty—it terrified him to admit this—of bringing Klara here. And even if she came she would never stay, with her feminist principles and her thesis on Christine de Pizan. It had been so hard, especially at first, living alone in these rooms, where in all the years before he came here and set up camp no guest or even any member of the family had ever stayed more than a week.

The days streamed by him, like a flowing liquid, and he put off going to Lahore from one day to the next. One night he called Fezoo and told him to bring some bananas. That had become his ritual—dinner, green tea, and then just before sleep a banana, eaten slowly, voluptuously, while reading in bed. And, when Fezoo told him there were no bananas, none in the bazaar, he sent the servant away, turned out the lights, and began weeping, the quiet tears one sheds when perfectly alone.

Sohel had been back in Lahore for a week. He had brought Chaudrey Zawar Hussein with him, and twice sent him to invite Malik Sharif into the city from Khirka.

“Mian Sahib, this thing could become serious,” Zawar Hussein said, returning after the second fruitless mission. “I’m not sure what happened between you and Malik Sahib, but you should go yourself to his dera.”

“Did my grandfather ever go to Malik Sarkar’s dera?”

The munshi made a dismissive gesture, holding up both hands and shaking his head. “Mian Sahib, forget about what used to be. These days, the district commissioner Lahore goes to call on the Maliks of Khirka. They summon the superintendent of police and make him wait half the morning.”

Then, one evening, late, Afzal came up to Sohel’s room, after he had already gone to bed.

“Malik Sharif has come, Mian Sahib.”

“What does he want at this hour?”

“He’s brought someone with him, a policeman I think, and they came in a police jeep.”

“Put them in the drawing room.”

To Sohel’s great surprise, the S.P. from Cawnapur was with Malik Sharif, both of them in civvies, white shalvar and waistcoats, so that at first Sohel didn’t recognize the policeman.

“I’m afraid we’ve disturbed you,” Malik Sharif said, rising, saying the word “disturb” in English but mispronouncing it, dishturb. “It seems that you go to sleep very early, even in Lahore.” They had seated themselves on a sofa next to each other, got up to shake Sohel’s hand, and then dropped back down, Malik Sharif sprawling, the policeman upright and alert.

“Mian Sahib is careful with his health,” the policeman said.

“Please,” Malik Sharif said, “surely you remember my good friend, Malik Hashim Hayat Sanghera, who is also S.P. Cawnapur.”

“I’ve been meaning to come pay my respects to you in Dunyapur,” the expressionless policeman said. “When you were so kind to visit me first.”

“Mian Sahib is a very keen farmer,” Malik Sharif said. “He gives a lot of time to his lands.”

“It’s very difficult,” the policeman said. “These boys come back from abroad, and it’s so hard out in the sticks. You and I, Malik Sahib, we were born out there, it doesn’t bother us. That dust! And the heat!”

Despite their bravado, the two men seemed to Sohel diminished in this drawing room that had witnessed the great life of this city, ministers and generals coming in and out, sitting irritably playing bridge all through Sohel’s childhood.

“What can I offer you? Tea?”

Malik Sharif put his hand on the policeman’s arm and squeezed it, as if giving a signal. “S.P. Sahib only drinks tea at night when he’s working.”

The policeman nodded gravely. “It helps keep me awake.”

Fortunately, at that moment Afzal brought in three glasses of sherbet on a tray.

“Nothing,” Malik Sharif said. “We can’t stay. We just came to say our salaam to Mian Sahib. Now we’ll let him go back to sleep. Sanghera Sahib wanted to see Mian Sahib in his Lahore house. I had been telling him of it.”

Although he hadn’t wanted to, Sohel said, “Would you like a drink, perhaps?”

Malik Sharif, standing up, said with satisfaction, “Now Mian Sahib is offering us a drink.”

The policeman also had stood up and looked around and up at the twelve-foot ceiling.

“Big rooms! How much land is with this house?”

“Fourteen kanals,” Malik Sharif said. “It’s massive.”

“And whose name is it registered in?” the policeman asked Sohel.

Malik Sharif let out a big, thigh-slapping laugh. “Why, Sanghera Sahib, are you a buyer?”

“Only if Mian Sahib is a seller.”

Out on the circular drive, Sohel watched the departing taillights of the police jeep, followed by a second car that had four men in it, also in plain clothes. As they were leaving, the S.P. had said gravely, “Thank you, Mian Sahib, for allowing us to see all this wealth,” and then Malik Sharif, getting into the jeep on the other side, had said in vulgar Punjabi, “Oy, you, hop in, buddy. Leave him alone.”

They drove very fast down the long drive, so that the old watchman leapt to open the gate in time.

As Sohel turned back into the house, a siren began to wail, then drew away and gradually diminished, gone in the direction of the river and the Old City. This too was intimidation, the two men hooting away. The sound blended into the background hum of Lahore at night in winter.

Sohel dismissed Afzal, walked through the many rooms leading up to the roof, and stood on an open terrace at the very top, taking a moment beneath the stars, gathering his thoughts. There, far away, were the lights of the Intercontinental Hotel. He could map the quadrants of the city, the governor’s house in its fifty-acre grounds, where he swam as a boy when his grandfather’s closest friend became the governor. Lawrence Gardens, then the zoo, with its lions calling all night. Caped around al-Abdalah, like a village at the foot of a fort’s battlements, stood the commissioner’s house, the district commissioner’s house, all the officers’ residences since British times. He remembered the governor visiting his grandfather, other grandees calling, easy with one another, running the country by right. The goonda and his pet policeman would be going perhaps to the dancing girls in the Old City, or on some violent errand, pulling a trigger, breaking an arm. Prisoners in chains. All this was surely a lesson for him. Finally, if he would pay the price, all the power was his—or would be, could be.