Cactus Town

He brought me white roses,

White muscat roses,

And asked me gently: May I

Sit with you on the rock?

Anna Akhmatova

1

He fell in love with Nuria when he saw her walking on fire. Live coals had been laid out on parched summer grass and she walked over them faster than the other virgins. He wasn’t supposed to be there but he was watching from his place behind an almond tree. She crossed the burning ember field and fainted.

Sakina was thirsty. Abbas went out to look for water and they riddled him with arrows. Kasim the bridegroom was shot down on his wedding night. Hussein’s horse returned sand-matted and blood-soaked without his master.

All day long the desert wind blows. Birds fall to the ground. On the tenth night of Muharram blood streaks the sky. He weeps for them all and his eyes are red but he never wept as bitterly as he did for Nuria.

2

Aunty Mehri tried to grow all kinds of flowers in her garden. Hydrangea, hibiscus, black rose. But everything withered there. Only wild flowers kept blooming and cactus thrived. It’s the desert, she said. The salt and the sandy wind kill plants in this town. But in Chand’s garden, you could see blossoms of every colour, finely trimmed hedges, fruit trees heavy with green mangoes and papayas.

Aunty Mehri – Begum Meher Taj Shah – was Nuria’s aunt, not really ours. She was the widow of our great-uncle, who’d been killed by the Japs in Malaya in 1944 when she was thirty-two. We knew him as the Picture on the Wall. On holidays, her family visited his tomb with flowers and incense as if he were a saint. She had three children: her daughter was with her husband in our embassy in China, her son Tahir had a house across the the lane from us, and her youngest son Mahir, the light of her eyes, was studying in England: he only came home in summer. Mehri lived in a turreted mansion her husband had built in the thirties, in the old part of town by the sea. We called it Cactus Town. A lover came to visit her now and then, from Rawalpindi where he kept his wife.

Mehri was tall and pale with lacquered short dark hair. She dressed in black chiffon at night and in white lace with matching gloves and scarves in daylight. Every few weeks she swooped across town to visit us; we knew she wanted Tahir’s wife to see her arrive. Ten years ago she’d looked for a bride for her son among the daughters of her own patrician family in Hyderabad Deccan, but she settled instead on her husband’s niece, seventeen-year-old Nazar Zahra, and changed her name to Chand because