‘He’s gone mad,’ she whispered, clutching Dia. ‘I shouldn’t have told him.’
Told him what? Dia wondered.
Today, up in the tree, a book of fables pressed heavily in her lap. The weight was partly psychological. She should have been studying. She’d failed an exam and ought to be preparing for the retake. Instead she flipped through the book’s pages, where lay miscellaneous clippings about history and bugs. She found a page ripped from a Gymkhana library book and read it aloud:
‘Silk was discovered in China more than four thousand years ago, purely by accident. For many months Emperor Huang-ti had noticed the mulberry bushes in his luscious garden steadily losing their leaves. His bride, Hsi-Ling-Shih, was asked to investigate. She noticed little insects crawling about the bushes, and found several small, white pellets. Taking a pellet with her to the palace, with nothing but instinct she ventured on the best place to put it: in a tub of boiling water. Almost at once, a mesh of curious fine thread separated itself from the soft ball. The Empress gently pulled the thread. It was half a mile long. She wove it into a royal robe for her husband, the first silk item in history. Since then, sericulture has remained a woman’s job, in particular, an empress’.’
Dia tucked the stolen page back into her book. The best episodes from history were of discovery. She liked to slow the clock at the moment before the Empress thought to drop the cocoon into the water – just before she metamorphosed into a pioneer. What had moved her not to simply crush the little menaces, as most people disposed of pests today? How relaxed and curious her intellect had been, and how liberally she’d been rewarded!
The setting fired Dia’s imagination too. It would be an arbor at the top of a hillock, with plenty of sunlight, a long stone table, basins, and attendants ready with towels and disinfectants. When they’d made a circle around the Empress, Dia commanded the minute hand to shift. The Empress dropped a cocoon into the water.
It shriveled and expelled its last breath: a tangle of filament the Empress hastened to twist around her arm like candy-floss on a stick. The attendants gawked. Their mistress was sweating. The wind was soft. The sun snagged in the strand, a blinding prism growing on the arm of the Empress, as if she spun sunlight. When the sun went down she’d cooked all the cocoons from the imperial garden. Miles of thread hung in coils around both her arms. The attendants dabbed at her brow and helped her down the hill, back to the palace. The Emperor called for her all night. But she couldn’t sleep beside him with arms encased so. The maids burned oil lamps, dias, and she sat up alone, occasionally looking out at the moon and down at the mulberry trees, making a robe for her husband that by morning would reflect the rays of the sun, and by next evening, the moon.
Dia smiled contentedly. Now she’d play What If, and retell the story.
If, for instance, the Empress Hsi-Ling-Shih had suspected how her discovery would shape the destiny of others, would she instead have tossed away the threads, never to speak of them again? If she’d known that a thousand years later, several dozen Persians would pay with their lives for trying to smuggle silkworms out of China, would she have made that robe? If she hadn’t, perhaps one of the many innocent daughters of those murdered men might have one day stood the chance of discovering something else.
Would the Empress have squashed the caterpillars if she’d known what would happen twenty-five hundred years after her find? If so, the Sicilians who’d been trying to make silk from spider webs wouldn’t have kidnapped and tortured their neighbors, the Greek weavers, to elicit their knowledge. Instead, the Greek weavers might have lived to a ripe old age, and one of them would perhaps have borne a great-great-grandchild capable of unraveling … the mystery of Dia’s father’s death?
Or, what if the Empress had seen even further into the future? Seven hundred years after the agony of the Greeks, history repeated itself. Now it was the Bengali and Benarsi weavers who suffered. If she’d known how the British would chop off the nimble thumbs that made a resham so fine it could slip through an ear-hole, perhaps the Empress would have trampled over the maggots. Then the subjugated nation’s exchequer would not have been exhausted importing third-rate British silk.
If all that wouldn’t have stopped her, then would the death of Dia’s father?
Dia stopped the clock and reconstructed the scene.
His mangled body drifted down the Indus, past one coastal village after another. The villagers had seen too much destruction to care about yet another corpse. They stood with sticks pressed into the muddy banks and stared in silence. Finally, after four days, word reached a coroner. Mr Mansoor’s bullet-ridden remains were heaved out of the river like sodden fruit and the village psychic swore that for five hundred rupees she could wring him back to life. She demanded one toenail, a dot of his saliva, another dot of his sweat and one of his seed. At the latter a few onlookers snickered. Dia recognized two reporters from the night her father was up in the tree. She lunged for them, but was gently ushered aside by the cook Inam Gul. But she’d already seen the only part of her father left uncovered: his bloated feet, themselves a blue and branching river. Inam Gul tried to cover her ears but she heard the rumors: his kidneys had been shot through with electric currents, his thumbs snapped, arms sliced, and he’d been made to walk on spikes and broken glass. Because of his weight, the barbed bed had cut through bone.
If four thousand years ago the Empress had never discovered silk, where would Dia be now?
The elders tried to teach her that Fate could be postponed – maybe by a year or several hundred, by his naughty sister Chance – but not altered. How one’s destiny unfurled was not to be second-guessed. Perhaps it would take a longer story, with unexpected players, but eventually, it followed the course that it was meant to take.
Eventually. The timing nagged. Who could tell actual time from postponed time? If all detours lead to a predetermined outcome, it hardly mattered, then, if one was early or late, if a meeting was held today or tomorrow, if a letter was couriered or the stamps pocketed. People talked of how the country was in a state of transition. Soon the dust would settle, and miraculously, the violence in Sindh that had claimed her father, among others, would vanish. But they couldn’t say when, how, or who would bring about the course that was ordained. In fact, they liked to add, come to think of it, the dust hadn’t settled anywhere – even the industrialized West had problems. In fact, it had never settled. What else had history shown? The river always flowed into the sea. Which branch entered first was irrelevant. Leave tomorrow, they advised, in God’s hands.
Only her mother believed otherwise. She said the elders wanted to saturate the world in indifference, to wrap a bandage around it that would hold back all the things that could move the country forward. It was all a ploy to keep things working in their own favor. Take marriage, for instance. They wanted it to remain a union that suited them, not the couple. She told Dia the worst thing she could do was listen to that, and perhaps was the only mother in the country to repeatedly warn her to marry only out of love, not obligation.
* * *
With the book in hand, Dia made her way swiftly down the tree.
The garden exploded with the twittering of tufted bulbuls and squawking mynas. Jamun and fig trees were in bloom. She turned down a path that led to the pergola beyond which her family had taken tea every evening, barring rain. With one brother in London, and the other in love and computers, now only she and her mother were left to keep the tradition.
The thought of visiting the silkworm farm tomorrow lifted Dia’s spirits. The caterpillars had begun spinning their cocoons. Though they were notoriously private when conducting their artistry, in previous years she’d learned an art of her own: stillness. She could freeze even in a room with humidity of over seventy per cent, with sweat dripping from her brows, and binoculars swiftly fogging up. She’d watch tomorrow.
But then Dia remembered a promise to a friend.