Mrs Ali’s Road to Happiness by Farahad Zama

Author:Farahad Zama
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

The grey concrete slab of the terrace was still warm from absorbing the sun’s rays all day. It was bordered by a waist-high wall and punctuated at regular intervals by half-raised pillars. Between two of them, somebody had strung a line on which a yellow sari had dried to a crisp. The only other structure was a water tank on short stilts at the far end. There was no place to hide here and…Rehman had a sudden thought and went back to the doorway. He grimaced when he saw that the bolt was on the other side of the door, which made sense. Why would anybody want to lock themselves out on the terrace?

The building faced east and he didn’t dare to go that way in case the men gathered on the road below saw him. Along the length of the left-hand edge was the roof of his own house, but it was two storeys below and inaccessible. To his right was another building of equal height, but because the land sloped that way, it was at least seven or eight feet higher than where they were standing – not to mention the fact that there was at least a ten-foot gap between the two buildings.

He rushed to the far end, or the backside, as the watchman would call it, squeezed past the water tank and looked out. The land behind belonged to a widow who lived there with her daughter-in-law. Despite the land being worth millions of rupees, she survived on the money she made by grinding batter for dosas and the coconuts she sold from her own trees. The canopy of one of them leaned close to the wall.

Rehman studied the coconut tree carefully and turned to Vasu. “What do you think?”

Vasu shook his head. “If you are thinking what I think you are thinking, you are mad. We’ll both break our necks.”

“Did you get that dialogue from a movie?”

Vasu nodded.

Rehman said, “If…no, when we get out of here, I need to have a word with your mother about how many movies you are watching.”

If only it was any other tree, thought Rehman, they could have tried to climb down its branches. A coconut tree, however, is just a single cylindrical trunk with a crown of leaves on top. It was impossible to either ascend or descend it unless you were a monkey or a trained coconut picker – and even they used a special sling made of hemp rope and rubber to move up and down. Vasu was right: the coconut tree would lead to a broken neck faster than it led to freedom.

He and Vasu went back to the stairs. They could hear the heavy feet of the activists coming up the stairwell. Rehman became desperate. He was under no illusions what would happen. Once they recognised him, they would think that he was some sort of agent sent to infiltrate their ranks and, if he wasn’t actually beaten to death, he would be left fairly close to it.

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