one of the two would give his shoulder a rest and lay the weapon on his lap, with the muzzle at her. In the last five years she often wondered which was the greater risk – going with or without them. She was never permitted to know. It was believed her father had been kidnapped on this stretch.
Three rumors spread after the murder. One: it involved the synthetic dye company that had lost its contract. Two: it involved the cocoon importers who’d lost theirs. Three: the killers were fools to target the man and not his wife.
The sericulture project had been entirely Riffat Mansoor’s. It was she who introduced a silk line in their textile mill, and she who questioned the wisdom of importing the seeds when silkworms could be bred at home. The climate suited the growth of mulberries, the food of the insect, and she owned a large plot of land near Thatta on which to cultivate the trees.
Dia’s childhood was spent shuttling from farm to factory, the one an enchanted semi-tropical paradise, the other a whirlwind of equally enchanting activity. At the mill, she’d walk wide-eyed around the workshops where thread was woven into sheets of shimmering white cloth, dyed in cauldrons of bubbling color, and painted into breathtaking designs. Back at the farm, she danced between the trees, gay with her own version of things. The irrigation canals were the boiling cauldrons. The twigs her reel. She unraveled her cotton dress into a skein of thread, and twisted these over the reel, till a pattern spread. She dipped it in the canal, and tossed it up to dry. It billowed down softly, a puff of her breath. She wore the breath around the farm, and everyone swore they’d never seen a finer silk.
It had taken her mother’s vigor to make the project work but eventually, after several false starts, fifteen acres of mulberry trees successfully yielded the sixty tons of leaves required to feed the one and a half million silkworms needed to produce roughly nine hundred pounds of raw silk. Riffat’s fully self-sufficient side business gave the mill, already successful in cotton, an added allure. Throughout Karachi, women swore only by Mansoor Mills.
Dia was ten years old by the time her mother’s project was a nationally conceded achievement. Her fellow-schoolgirls regarded her as queerly as men and women regarded her mother. Nissrine told Dia that people snickered about Riffat’s appetite being as voracious as the caterpillars she bred – only it wasn’t leafy greens she was after. Her husband may have given her free reign of his business, but could he satisfy her at home, in the bedroom, when she came out of her cocoon?
Dia shut her eyes and leaned back in the car seat, simmering at the gossip.
But when she recalled her parents together, the picture was no consolation. They spoke to each other only about work or children. Dia had never seen Riffat glow or throw back her head and laugh her beautiful, silvery laugh around her husband. The two never touched. They barely even argued. They were business partners, not lovers. Yet, her father wanted Dia to read him stories full of promises of eternal love, of Sassi waiting on the banks of the Indus for her lover’s ship to roll in. Stories of earthly tragedy, but with attainment in the afterlife.
Dia opened her eyes again with a start when she realized her slouching position pressed her further into the guards. She sat up. Her back was beginning to ache, as it always did by this time in the drive. They hadn’t even gone halfway. The land outside was still thirsty and desolate. Not even a kingfisher in sight. She smelled the sweat of the guards. They could probably smell hers. She tried not to wonder if this aroused them.
Whatever transpired between them, her parents became the topic of even more gossip when Riffat decided to discard chemical dyes. They were expensive, hazardous, and not even colorfast. Though organic dying was a method none of the other factories relied on, it had once flourished in the subcontinent. There was evidence enough to support this. Three-thousand-year-old madder-dyed cloth and indigo vats had been excavated in Moenjodaro, barely 300km north of where Dia rode in the car now. The technique seemed right outside Riffat’s doorstep, and had been for centuries. Could it really be lost?
She discovered most colors could be obtained from plants easily grown here. She also learned which part of each plant needed to be harvested, how long this took, and what color it would give. Turmeric and myrobalan produced yellow; henna, madder, and pomegranate red; indigo blue; tamarind and onion black; chikoo brown. So she reserved the remaining five acres of the farmland for cultivating the crops.
Within two years, they yielded consistently and the contract with the dye company was annulled. They began receiving angry telephone calls.
Riffat grew tense. Her temper ran high. The family ceased piling into their Toyota Corolla for weekends at the farm. Her parents went from rarely speaking, to frequently fighting. And still the phone kept ringing. And more customers pledged loyalty to the mill.
On the night before his death, her father climbed up the mulberry tree planted when she was born. Why? Was it to turn back the clock and have her that small in his arms again, back before the threatening phone calls and gossip about his wife?
Dia had huddled indoors, petted by the cook, while her brothers argued with the crowd outside and her mother, for the first time in her life, stood frozen with shock. Her husband cowered in the foliage like a child, while the world laughed. But then at some point in the middle of the night, he must have climbed down and left the house before anyone awoke. He was never seen alive again.
The cook maintained that the answer to her father’s death lay in nothing as obvious as an angry minister with shares in a severed company. According to Inam Gul, Dia’s father was simply unlucky. He was in the way. The province was seething with free-flowing anger. Probably, the killers had known absolutely nothing about him. He was a random target, or a victim of crossfire. There were hundreds of such deaths in Sindh that year. There was no reason for it besides the will of Allah. The same will that had made killers out of some and gentle, caring folk like her father out of others.
But Dia could not accept that the death had been mere fluke – a simple detour. It pained to think that if it hadn’t been his battered and bruised body, it would have been someone else’s. This meant that even when alive, he’d been nothing but a mere number. And so was she. And Nini and Inam Gul. Everybody.
A quartet of armed guards paced the farm’s exterior. The boundary wall extended into five rungs of barbed wire. The iron gate was topped by a plethora of slender spikes pointing up at the grayish-yellow sky. Inside the gate sat two more guards, but unlike her private escorts and the sentinels outside, these two were draped in soussi lungis from the mill. The cloth was dyed indigo and mint and shimmered like cock feathers in the sun. Together, they formed a friendly duo: they were two of Inam Gul’s three sons.
Their bare arms and torsos glistened with sweat and the lungis wrapped them so tightly she could see the contours of their very different body types. On Shan, boyish and slight, the cloth rippled around the curves of a small tight bottom. But on Hamid, it hugged a pair of bulky thighs. She noted also his solid, wrestler-like gut. He would have been very handy with a pair of oars on a stormy night at sea.
The cook and his family had come into Dia’s household two years before her father left it. They’d moved to Thatta from their village, driven out by the trawlers that invaded the local fishermen’s zone. Mr Mansoor had seen Inam Gul’s family outside the tombs of Makli Hill, close to the farm, and offered them work here.
As Dia entered the grounds, the two sons lowered their Kalashnikovs to let her through. ‘How is everything?’ she piped, relieved to stretch her legs and be in congenial company again.
‘We’ll have to see,’ said
