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.Lulled by her chocolate world, Pinky smiled in her sleep, which the old ayah took as a sign of the little girl having been sent straight from heaven by the angels.Just look at the child’s pink cheeks, like apples and roses, the old woman thought to herself, and leaned forward to chuck the child’s chin.In the daytime the child was given over to an English governess, who taught her how to speak and act like a little mem, but at night, Pinky belonged to the faithful old village woman, who sang her Sindhi lullabies and kneaded her arms and legs affectionately with her gnarled brown hands.Besides chocolate and her father, her other great love was to sneak away from her room in the middle of the afternoon and go to the kitchen in the hopes that the servants would share with her the remnants of their lunch.Pinky was made to eat proper food: potato and leek soup, roast chicken with potatoes and carrots, and mounds and mounds of boiled beans and spinach.She hated all of these foods, even though she was told by her governess, Miss Lucy, that they would make her strong.But she longed for the spicy bite and greasy welcome of daal and salaan and muttur pulao on her tongue, not the bland English food that her mother ordered cooked for Pinky and her brother Mir and sister Sunny.Her baby brother Shah was the most unfortunate of all: he only got to eat ground-up apples and rice from a plastic bowl, not a china dish like the rest of them.Pinky would pretend to eat her food (hiding most of it under her fork and knife, or sneaking it onto her brother’s plate when Miss Lucy’s back was turned—her brother didn’t mind; he had the appetite of a horse and would happily eat two or three servings of any food that was offered to him, English or otherwise).Then she would wait until everyone was taking a nap after lunch, and run downstairs to the kitchen in a pair of rubber chappals that only squeaked a little bit.She would burst into the kitchen and imperiously demand from Aftab the Cook a plate of chicken karahi with naan hot from the marketplace tandoor; she would sit on a small stool, hunched over her illicit meal, and slurp the mouthfuls down delightedly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and even letting out a small burp or two, something Miss Lucy would never have allowed at her table.It was during one of these secret feasts that she heard Aftab talking about his son to one of the other housemen.“The doctor calls it epli—epil—epilseppy,” Aftab said mournfully.He was a short, squat man, who was said to have cooked for the governor-general of Sindh back in the days before Partition, which Pinky knew from listening to her father talk with his guests was something to do with parting your hair so that there was as much hair on the left side of your head as there was on the right.She listened to them curiously, as she chewed slowly, her eyes fixed firmly on her plate so that they would not suspect she was eavesdropping.“What is that, brother?” said the majordomo, Babu, a loyal and longtime servant of the household.“Oh, it’s a terrible affliction: my son suffers fits, his eyes roll back in his head, he falls to the floor and shakes for ages, and foams at the mouth.I’m so afraid that one day he will swallow his own tongue and die, brother.”“Tauba, tauba!” Babu stroked his ears and nose in fear.Pinky, too, touched her own nose and ears, then frowned when she realized she’d dirtied them with her greasy fingers.“Is there no cure?” breathed Yusuf, another houseman who was Sindhi like the others who all hailed from Papa’s village in Naudero, but was Sheedi, with dark African features and a powerful, muscled body.Pinky had observed him with his shirt off once as he washed Papa’s car, and he looked to her like the photo of a boxer she’d seen in the newspaper.But Yusuf was not very intelligent; once Mir had come in with an ice cream cone and said to Yusuf, “I don’t think this is very good, will you smell it for me?” Yusuf dipped his head obligingly to the ice cream, and Mir thrust his hand up quickly so that Yusuf had ice cream all over his nose.The other servants laughed and jeered, and Yusuf joined in good-naturedly, but Pinky, who had seen Mir play this joke a dozen times before, would never have fallen for it herself.Aftab sighed.Pinky felt her own heart do a somersault of sadness with him, her plate of food long forgotten.“There are medicines, but we’ve tried them—Saeen has been very kind and given me extra money to pay for his treatment.Still, they don’t seem to be doing anything for him; he just gets worse with each year.I’ve taken him to a Pir in our neighborhood but he hasn’t been able to do anything, either.It must be the will of Allah that my son must suffer so.We are cursed—cursed!”Babu patted him consolingly on the back.“Don’t say that, brother.There is always a way.You just have to have faith [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]