The Lady from Lucknow

THE LADY FROM LUCKNOW / Bharati Mukherjee WHEN I WAS FOUR, one of the girls next door fell in love with a Hindu. Her father intercepted a lovenote from the boy, and beat her with his leather sandals. She died soon after. I was in the room when my mother said to our neighbor, "The Nawab-sahib had no choice, but Husseina's heart just broke, poor dear." I was an Army doctor's daughter, and I pictured the dead girl's heart—a rubbery squeezable organ with auricles and ventricles—first swelling, then bursting and coating the floor with thick, slippery blood. We lived in Lucknow at the time where the Muslim community was large. This was just before the British took the fat, diamond-shaped subcontinent and created two nations, a big one for the Hindus, and a littler one for us. My father moved us to Rawalpindi in Pakistan two months after Husseina died. We were a family of soft, voluptuous children, and my father wanted to protect us from the Hindus' shameful lust. I have fancied myself in love many times since, but never enough for the emotions to break through tissue and muscle. Husseina's torn heart remains the standard of perfect love. At seventeen I married a good man, the fourth son of a famous poet-cum-lawyer in Islamabad. We have a daughter, seven, and a son, four. In the Muslim communities we have lived in, we are admired. Iqbal works for IBM, and because of his work we have made homes in Lebanon, Brazil, Zambia and France. Now we live in Atlanta, Georgia, in a wide, new house with a deck and a backyard that runs into a golf course. IBM has been generous to us. We expect to pass on this good, decent life to our children. Our children are ashamed of the dingy cities where we got our start. Some Sunday afternoons when Iqbal isn't at a conference halfway across the world, we sit together on the deck and drink gin and tonics as we have done on Sunday afternoons in a dozen exotic cities. But here, the light is different somehow. A gold haze comes off the golf course and settles on our bodies, our new house. When the light shines right in my eyes, I pull myself out of the canvas deck-chair and lean against the railing that still smells of forests. Everything in Atlanta is so new! "Sit," Iqbal tells me. "You'll distract the golfers. Americans are crazy for sex, you know that." He half rises out of his deck-chair. He lunges for my breasts in mock passion. I slip out of his reach. At the bottom of the backyard, the golfers, caddies and carts are too minute to be bloated with lust. But, who knows? One false thwock! of their golfing irons, and my little heart, like a golf ball, could slice through the warm air and vanish into the jonquil-yellow beyond. The Missouri Review · 29 It isn't trouble that I want, though I do have a lover. He's an older man, an immunologist with the Centers for Disease Control right here in town. He comes to see me when Iqbal is away at high-tech conferences in sunny, remote resorts. Just think, Beirut was once such a resort! Lately my lover comes to me on Wednesdays even if Iqbal's in town. "I don't expect to live till ninety-five," James teases on the phone. His father died at ninety-three in Savannah. "But I don't want a bullet in the brain from a jealous husband right now." Iqbal owns no firearms. Jealousy would inflame him. Besides, Iqbal would never come home in the middle of the day. Not even for his blood pressure pills. The two times he forgot them last month, I had to take the bottle downtown. One does not rise through the multinational hierarchy coming home in mid-day, arriving late, or leaving early. Especially, he says, if you're a "not-quite" as we are. It is up to us to set the standards. Wives who want to be found out will...