Chiral Mad 2 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Written Backwards
Published: 2018-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

BLOOD WOMEN

Usman T. Malik

YOU COULD SEE the blood women standing under the banyan trees any evening. All you needed was the right blink, Haider said.

This is the way we did it: we circled the graveyard three times, for three is the godly number. Haider on his father’s bicycle, me on my brother’s red and white Made-in-Pakistan tall rider, and ten-year-old Zareen on her three-wheeler clattering over stones, bird bones, and dry branches.

“Ready?” Haider would say, his eyes black as apple seeds.

We nodded, and together we blinked.

The blood women were not there.

“No such thing as blood women,” said Zareen the second time it didn’t work. “Liar.”

“Am not,” Haider said.

“Are too.”

“Am not.”

“Okay, shut up and let’s just try to figure out why they didn’t show,” I said. “Is there a prayer or mantar we should’ve chanted?”

Haider kicked a pebble. “Maybe we should’ve gone to the grove behind the older graves.”

I crossed my arms. “Mantar or no?”

He looked sullen. “Don’t think so, Asif. No one ever said anything about a mantar.”

“Let’s try again,” I said. Cross-linked hands binding us in a circle, we closed our eyes, imagining the shadows that the women must cast: bulbous, yet serpentine from dangling tresses, swollen from lack of any understandable shape …

We blinked rapidly, but they didn’t show. They would never show. Not in daytime, when sunlight fell in swatches of fungoid-yellow between the trees, turning Lahore into a bowlful of flesh stewing in tropical sweat. Not in darkness either, when the moon floated like a pale alien ship above the smoggy city landscape.

“They’re not real,” said Zareen, her eyes bulging, and licked her lips. (She had an iodine-deficient childhood, Mother said, so her neck glands swelled until they pushed her eyes out).

But they were, insisted Haider. On special days, when a suicide bomber hit an intersection, or a missing person was found in a body bag by the roadside, rumors of sightings rippled across our neighborhood. From the tea boys to the garage boys, everyone knew someone who’d seen blood women on the eve of murder.

As if the godly three meant nothing to them. As if the religion of blood was the only religion they believed in.

“How do you know?” I said once. “How do you know they’re real?”

Standing in the shade of the same banyan trees as the blood women might, Haider looked at me, eyebrows raised. His fingers came together and clutched each other like mating worms.

“Because this is where they found Ali,” he said.

~

In my dreams, sometimes, the blood women stood in a clasped-hands circle that shimmered in the heat haze. Murmurous, murmurous, their chants rang out, calling to passersby.

“A pint of blood for the sons of man, a pint of blood for the sons of martyrs. A pint of blood for the sons of jinns …”

~

Later we talked about it endlessly, but fact is no one knew what Ali was doing there that night.

Perhaps it was his father, his limping polio-struck father with his beggar’s bowl and that awful shisham-wood cane that never stopped swinging when Ali was around.

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