Sikander came back in a few weeks and picked Soraya up to take her back to Lahore. On the road, the first time they had been together without Asma, he gave her the back story.
Asma, he said, had, as the wife of his close political associate, been given open access to him like brother and sister, despite his partner being of a traditional bent. There was an understanding of trust - that to breach that covenant would be unthinkable. Thus, over the years, she had become for Sikander a supportive friend, sharing his confidences about Blanche and Soraya and that whole other holiday-life in England that he was otherwise obliged to conceal.
Asma, however, to all appearances a meek and quiet soul who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, had conceived an ardent and enduring passion for Sikander. This translated, in due course, into her arriving at his offices late at night and taking her clothes off. She did this a couple of times, apparently, and then Sikander’s never robust defences crumbled and he proceeded to get her pregnant. Asma, rather than brushing this under the carpet and mixing this baby in with the four other children she had with her husband, had decided to go public. Scandal at the perceived immorality competed throughout Lahore with scandal at Sikander’s betrayal of his brother-friend. Sikander had had to leave that political party. Asma had left her husband (a gentle soul who had wanted to keep and forgive her) and children and shacked up in this apartment in Lahore. Asma divorced her compliant husband and remarried Sikander. Some fancy footwork followed with the paperwork via Sikander’s connections to post-date the little girl’s birth and make it all tickety-boo and thus it had proceeded to the point of Soraya’s intervention.
Soraya enjoyed this conversation. It was good to hear her father’s confidences. Good to be close to him in a way that didn’t threaten her. A way that made her feel like a daughter. When they arrived in Lahore she asked him if he would take her to the Lahore Hilton for Tutti Frutti ice cream as they had done in the former age of innocence. After a bit of prevarication about the delay, Sikander agreed, and they ate ice cream and fruit and shared information.
When, in early evening, they arrived in the apartment, they met with retribution. Asma was red-eyed, weeping, the baby was crying unconsoled in her arms; when Sikander came through the door she hurled herself at him, screaming in Urdu. Soraya went to the other of the two rooms and listened. Asma was ranting in a harsh, high-pitched, stream, and Sikander was responding in low, measured tones. She couldn’t understand it all, but she got enough to understand that at least some of it was about her. Eventually she went to sleep, with this duet ongoing through the wall.
The next day they all behaved as if nothing had happened. They went out to the market, to Anarkali. On the way out Soraya saw a paper, on which Sikander had written “I love only, only, Asma Lodhi”.
In the market they drank pomegranate juice, Soraya’s favourite, and wandered around. On the way back they stopped at a big, plain house in a residential area and Asma got out of the car. She went through a gate and disappeared, and Soraya turned to Sikander.
“So what was all that about?”
Sikander paused - one of his long pauses that made Soraya wonder if an answer was ever coming.
“She was jealous. We got back later than we should have done if I’d just driven straight back. She wanted to know what we were doing. I told her where we were, but she wasn’t satisfied.”
Sikander paused again and frowned, and did not look at Soraya when he continued;
“She made me swear on the Qur’an that we weren’t having sex”.
There was an awkward silence. Soraya didn’t know what to say. Then she responded,
“I don’t know how she could think I could do that”.
Sikander shrugged and they both fell silent. When Asma returned she was angry again. Soraya was able to discern that this, too, related to suspicions of what they had been doing in the car in her absence. It had grown dark and Lahore was beautiful with lights and fountains. Kalimullah drove them along canal-lined boulevards where the white lights lit hanging baskets of white flowers on lamp posts and the air was thick with the scent of chambele. The row continued unabated, Soraya trapped in its midst knowing she was the subject, and at a certain point Soraya asked Kalimullah to stop the car, to let her get out. Sikander and Asma watched her go. She walked along the road, a wide intersection with a pedestrian part near the colonial library, and became, immediately, the object of universal attention. Of universal desire, from the throngs of young men moving around the streets. Fair, tall, Western girl walking alone among the sex-starved roaming youth of Lahore. It was a sick feeling. They started to ask her questions, to talk to her, they developed a long coda behind her. She got scared. She looked around and, some way ahead, her father’s Toyota Corolla was marking her path. She walked towards it, humiliated, her proud statement of exit defeated by her fear and got back in. Silently, they went back to the flat.
The next day they were distracted. There was an important vote taking place in the senate. The party had been planning to make Sikander a senator to replace one who had died - when he left his old opposition party he returned to the party in government and brought huge numbers of his loyal followers with him. They were moving his inauguration as a senator forward so they could have his vote.
Sikander had charisma, that was for sure. A sharp, logical mind, and the fine art of persuasion. He was also brave - he had shrugged off Bhutto’s assassination attempts. Zia Ul Haq, the military dictator who hanged and followed Bhutto, had repeatedly imprisoned Sikander for making pro-democracy speeches. The last time had been in solitary confinement, in heat, underground, for six months. Amnesty has deemed the conditions of his imprisonment to be inhuman and degrading treatment and had campaigned for him. He had weathered it all, improving his liberal, lawyerly expertise in Islamic scripture and doing what he described as “callisthenics” - broadly the video-less equivalent of the Jane Fonda workout. Whenever he put on weight, he would joke that it was high time he made another speech.
He had political clout, and many people believed in him. Getting him back into the government, under Nawaz Sharif, the man who filled Lahore with chambele, was quite a coup. So he was to be a senator.
Asma packed up her baby girl and they all set out for the airport, where they were ushered through VIP. They flew into Islamabad and Sikander voted in the senate. The newspapers carried the photo - Sikander Lodhi, newly elected senator of the Muslim League, with his family in Islamabad for his inaugural vote. The photo was of Soraya, Asma, the baby girl and Sikander. This photograph in the newspapers, and the friends who rang them to talk about it, was how his his two stricken elder sons learned of Soraya’s existence, and how their mother learned that there was now a third wife.
Asma was now completely public, fully recognised, in fact she was now the official wife for political purposes. She had got everything she wanted. That love-assault on Soraya in the early days, the wreaths of chambele, the heart-wrenching stories, the giving of gifts like her old wedding harara dress, the motherly adoration, had paid off in Soraya getting Sikander to introduce Asma to his mother and brother as his wife. Once she had that, she had no need of Soraya any more. She could unleash upon her the serpent hid beneath the flow’ring face. And Soraya understood at last that, silly girl so keen for affection, so disposed to advocate for recognition of a woman who had seemed to be reliving her mother’s past, so childishly disposed to meddling and do-gooding, she had been well and truly played.