The Year of Rice and Salt

'Sometimes,' Idelba said. 'It depended on the situation. The veil has a kind of power, in certain situations. All such signs stand for other things; they are sentences spoken in matter. The hijab can say to strangers, 'I am Islamic and in solidarity with my men, against you and all the world.' To Islamic men it can say, 'I will play this foolish game, this fantasy of yours, but only if in return you do everything I tell you to. For some men this trade, this capitulation to love, is a kind of release from the craziness of being a man. So the veil can be like putting on a magician queen's cape.' But seeing Budur's hopeful expression she added, 'Or it can be like putting on a slave's collar, certainly.'

'So sometimes you didn't wear one?'

'Usually I did not. In the lab it would have been silly. I wore a lab jellabah, like the men. We were there to study atoms, to study nature. That is the greatest godliness! And without gender. That simply isn't what it's about. So, the people you are working with, you see them face to face, soul to soul.' Eyes shining, she quoted from some old poem: Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder. – This had been the way of it for Idelba in her youth; and now she sat in her brother's little middle class harem, 'protected' by him in a way that gave her frequent attacks of hem, that in truth made her a fairly volatile person, like a Yasmina with a bent towards secrecy rather than garrulousness. Alone with Budur, pinning up laundry on the terrace, she would look at the treetops sticking over the walls and sigh. 'If only I could walk again at dawn through the empty streets of the city! Blue, then pink – to deny one that is absurd. To deny one the world, on one's own terms – it's archaic! It's unacceptable.'

But she did not run away. Budur did not fully understand why. Surely Aunt Idelba was capable of tramming down the hill to the railway station, and taking a train to Nsara, and finding lodgings there somewhere – and getting a job that would support her somehow? And if not her, then whom? What woman could do it? None of good repute; not if Idelba couldn't. The only time Budur dared to ask her about it, she only shook her head brusquely and said, 'There are other reasons too. I can't talk about it.'

So there was something quite frightening to Budur about Idelba's presence in their home, a daily reminder that a woman's life could crash like an aeroplane out of the sky. The longer it went on the more disturbing Budur found it, and she noticed that Idelba too grew more agitated, wandering from room to room reading and muttering, or working over her papers with a big mathematical calculator, a net of strings holding beads of different colours. She wrote for hours on her blackboard, and the chalk squeaked and clicked and sometimes snapped off in her fingers. She talked on the phone down in the courtyard, sounding upset sometimes, pleased at others; doubting, or excited – and all about numbers, letters, the value of this and that, strengths and weaknesses, forces of microscopic things that no one would ever see. She said to Budur once, staring at her equations, 'You know Budur, there is a very great deal of energy locked into things. The Travancori Chandaala was the deepest thinker we ever have had on this Earth; you could say the Long War was a catastrophe just because of his death alone. But he left us a lot, and the energy mass equivalence – look – a mass, that's just a measure for a certain weight, say – you multiply it by the speed o ig t, and square the result – multiply it by half a million li per second, think of that! then take the square of that, so – see enormous numbers result, for even a little pinch of matter. That's the qi energy locked up in it. A strand of your hair has more energy in it than a locomotive.'

'No wonder it's so hard to get a brush through it,' Budur said uneasily, and Idelba laughed.

'But there's something wrong?' Budur asked.

At first Idelba did not answer. She was thinking, and lost to all around her. Then she stared at Budur.

'Something is wrong if we make it wrong. As always. Nothing in nature is wrong in itself.'

Budur wasn't so sure of that. Nature made men and women, nature made flesh and blood, hearts, periods, bitter feelings… sometimes it all seemed wrong to Budur, as if happiness were a stale scrap of bread, and all the swans of her heart were fighting for it, starving for it.