Shazi appeared to be a woman who could produce able children. She was young, full of vim and vigor, and only distantly related to the Mustis. The symmetry of her face and body guaranteed her fertility, or so said the matchmaker, over tea and poundcake one afternoon when they visited Shazi’s stone house in an alleyway of Pindi. The Dr and Mrs Musti of Lahore, who both introduced themselves as Naseem, nodded, interested in the outward scientific indicators of genetic capability and Shazi’s looks, which seemed complementary to the Musti’s own – golden curls, a face wider than it was long.

Mrs Naseem Musti, not entirely convinced that a woman who was good enough for her son existed, said, “Ha! A guarantee is only as good as the proof.” She’d only agreed to come to the alley because Dr Musti insisted on visiting his twice removed fourth cousin’s daughter. But when she leaned in and stroked Shazi’s cheeks she found them remarkably soft and spongy.

They’d chosen not to bring their son with them, the proposed groom, Shan Musti, who at times had difficulty accomplishing basic tasks, like tying his shoes or paying attention to traffic or having sex, but that could be because he’d lived a life cared for by a valet, a driver, and several other servants and on top of that, coddled by his mother, despite being a grown man. They’d even hired a courtesan from Heeramandi to help him out when he’d turned twenty-two, but Shan had gone and fallen in love with the whore, insisting that he wanted to marry her, and because he was child-like and stubborn, it took them years of great trickery as well as several rounds of homeopathic therapy to make him forget about her. At thirty-three, when he looked at Shazi’s photo, he didn’t shake his head or spit on it and run away crying, but instead walked into the garden cradling the image in his palms and held it up to the sun, whispering, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.”

Shan used his own full lips to speak in a stilted Urdu, a kind of accent developed by the family over generations, a nasal inflection, the vowels elongated, slightly slurred Rs. It sounded quite genteel and drug-laced, a fact no one admitted out loud even though the whole family was on a plant based therapy to alleviate one symptom or another. The Mustis had been homeopaths for generations, prided themselves on being able to cure anything.

On their wedding night, Mrs Naseem had dosed both bride and groom with an aphrodisiac elixir mixed  by the Dr himself, an elixir never given to anyone outside of the immediate family, the Dr being mindful of the detrimentally uncontrolled birth rate in Pakistan, his constant concern being that the Malthusian theory would be proven in the land of the pure. 

Shan’s eyes rolled back as he lay on the rose petal strewn bed in his cream silk pajamas with gold piping, pajamas his valet had dressed him in. Shazi thought it was quite unmasculine to have someone else dress you and told her sisters so, describing her wedding night to them as they giggled weeks later. Her mother reprimanded her for gossiping about her own husband as Shazi blinked rapidly crying out: “You’ve no idea where you’ve married me!”

“All rich families have their eccentricities,” her mother said patting Shazi’s beaded dress, her bejeweled fingers and wrists. “What’s a few discomforts when you have everything?”

Laying in heat of their wedding night, Shan, startled as if by a sudden dream, began speaking in tongues, reciting Rudyard Kipling, horrified that Shazi had never read him. She was more into science and maths, she said. As he stuttered, a fine spittle sprayed Shazi in the face, his full lips partially hidden by a thin curved mustache that his valet had carved for him earlier that day. Shan recited: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!” He looked up at her, wanting her to know how much he wanted to be her man, but also needing her permission. Did she realize how dangerous his mother was? He was afraid for her, for her life. He didn’t want Shazi to meet the same fate as his first love, Maya.  

Shazi tried to be interested in his antics, but felt disgust at how silly he was, reciting rhymes like a child. She was tired, having sat for almost three days in one long never-ending wedding ceremony celebration, full of band baja and even photographers from the Society pages. Her neck and upper back were sore from holding the traditional bride’s pose: head bent under the veil so that no one could see her face, just the fount of her head. She hadn’t questioned why a bride’s head should be bent and she didn’t know that in that very year, 1969, in Lahore there was a bride who’d already lifted her head, brazenly showing her face to the whole room, her expressions of joy and sorrow and then a moment of plain old panic.

“A wedding signifies a kind of death,” Mrs Naseem had said to her, as they stood outside the bridal suite while down below in the courtyard where the party continued and  the live band played the shehnai. The melancholy wail held a new meaning for Shazi.

“You’re no longer  Shazi from the Pind alleyway, that girl is dead. You’re now a Musti from Lahore and to be a Musti is no easy lifestyle. We have responsibilities around here, villagers from miles around come to us with their problems, and we have the solution to everything from piles to dysentery to melancholia and colic. Look outside,” Mrs Naseem said. “What would they do without us?” She pushed Shazi towards the white stone railing on the veranda with a wide view of the city, the Minar e Pakistan, the red light district. And just below them on the street level, a long line of people snaked around the building and the street corner, men and women in simple clothing from the agricultural corners of the country leaning against the stone wall or sitting on the sidewalk, waiting to be cured at the Musti Clinic located on the historic Musti Compound, a very old building commissioned by Shah Jahan in the 1600s for one of his concubines who loved archways and towering nooks where mourning doves could gather to coo and gurgle and build love nests among the chalky marks of their pure white droppings.. 

Before leaving, Mrs Naseem gave Shazi a drink in a cut glass tumbler, tasting of roses and bitter gourd. The potion quickly traveled through her channels and went straight to her loins and she was listless with a biological desire, a feeling of uneasiness as her groom droned on and on about poetry. He was reciting something again, but Shazi had turned up the rumble of the city, the cars, the ding of bicycle bells, the horns of rickshaws and the cloppity clop of the draught horses-pulling carriages so loved by tourists. There were  the sighs and shifting movements of  people still waiting on the street, who’d probably wait there all night to keep their place in line, too poor to spend money on a hotel, saving it instead to pay Dr Musti in the morning for the cure.

The acoustics of the Musti compound were capable of making a person delusional. Shah Jahan wanted ears in all parts of his house, so the walls were designed to have him hear everything, especially from the top floor, five stories high. 

Shazi rose to close the doors, shut the city out, perhaps the night air was keeping them up and out of their marital bed. She was there to comply with Allah’s will. Shan was still hunched over his book of poems, turning the pages noisily.

On the night before her wedding, her aunts had made obscene jokes, debating how big it would be and whether he’d plunge straight up into her or know how to soften her first, not all men did they said, before they giggled and hid behind their scarves and began to gyrate and dance, singing about the wind taking over their red muslin scarves.

In sciences last year she’d gotten hold of a text that detailed a male human body and she’d studied the penis carefully, its tributaries running into the testicles hung like bags of marbles. She wondered what Shan’s erection would feel like against her. She wanted to touch him but she was ashamed and tried to push down her desire by reciting the Quranic verse before intercourse. Shan kept reading his book, occasionally peeping at her through his spectacles, almost as if he was afraid of her. She smiled weakly, wondering whether she should move closer to him. It wasn’t a woman’s place to initiate contact. Yet Shan seemed to be waiting for her to begin the dance of the wedding night. She despised his indecision. Her father had always been so firm and resolute, a manly man. He’d said no to most of her desires. No romance novels, no movies, and no she wouldn’t be going to medical school, even if she’d gotten a scholarship. She cried, protested, went on a hunger strike. 

She leaned back on the headboard and waited for her wedding night to start, watching Shan read, peep, read, until she fell into a light doze. It was only then that Shan crouched towards her, and planted a light kiss on her lips.

She was startled awake by a knock. The valet carried a tray of more drinks: two cups of warm milk with ground almonds, pistachios, and honey. “Sir can’t sleep without this,” the servant said. Shan, recovering from almost being caught in the act, tossed his cup back in one gulp and fell asleep almost immediately, leaving Shazi still fully dressed, alone to enjoy the dull ache of her warm loins.

The next few weeks were a blur of breakfasts in bed, Shan’s constant stream of literature and other useless things he’d learned from books without which he could not live, designed, Shazi felt, to avoid life itself.  Dressed in ornate outfits–intricate and heavy with gold and silver thread embroidery – with jewelry, hair, and makeup all appropriate for a new bride of the Musti family, Shazi walked slowly down the dark lattice-windowed corridors to attend to the formal drawing room, larger than the entirety of the house she had grown up in, decorated with chintz and chinoiserie and other London imported fine furnishings, where politicians, businessmen, famous actors, and renowned Qawwali musicians had arrived to give their exclusive blessings to the newlyweds as Shan, being the only son, was the heir of the Musti dynasty. The musicians sang a hypnotic song and everyone swayed and vah vahed, passing around a tin container of small pink opium pills. Shazi popped one and the music seemed to shift something in her, wake her up to a new kind of desire, and when she looked across the room at Shan, he was staring at the corner of the wall, where a lizard swayed in the shadow.

The next day they were to set off for a honeymoon to Shangri-La, nestled in the steppes of the mountains, adequately chaperoned by Mrs Naseem and her three daughters. Dr Musti would stay home to attend to the Musti Clinic, and the never-ending line of patients, their tales of sorrow, strife and ill-health, the long sojourn they’d undertaken from Lucknow, or Baluchistan or Ahmadpur. The small kerchief they untied to show Dr Musti the bundle of rupees and coins they’d brought, much of their savings, if they could only have the cure. They were all the same, the ills of the world. Losses and griefs and not enough tissues around the clinic rooms.

Behind the patient rooms lay a vast pharmaceutical factory taking up the entire back section of the compound and inner courtyard, where the homeopathic medicines were ground by hand in mortar and pestle and then calibrated piecemeal into bottles as a powder or pressed into pills, or sometimes mixed into rubber-capped eye dropper bottles as a tonic. Shazi looked into the courtyard and saw Mrs. Naseem, her long scarf swishing along the factory floor, where on covered palazzos lay huge piles of multicolored powders: reds, oranges, pinks. She longed to go down and stick a wet finger in the piles of powder and taste it – what was it that people came from miles away to have? How did the cure work, she wondered?

Mrs Naseem peeked into Dr Musti’s office. “We’re off, do you want anything from Shangri-la?”

Dr. Musti, in the middle of listening to one of his patients’ stories, held his pen to his lips. “I’m in the middle of an appointment,” he said to Mrs Naseem. 

“I’ll bring you a fairy, then,” she said, sarcastically.

Dr Musti turned to his patient, “Go on,” he said gruffly to the man sitting before him, a patient with thirteen children whose names he could not remember, which was only the beginning of his constrained circumstances. Dr Musti was renowned for having deep regard and patience for all manner of stories, from troubles with landlords, spouses, farming or the weather, however unrelated they may have appeared to a more conventional doctor. He would take out his white pad with the Musti insignia, the Caduceus, a long thin staff with two intertwined snakes and angel wings at the top, and of course his name, Dr Naseem Musti, Bhatti Chowk, Lahore. He’d stop to think for a minute, resting his pen on his lips and then write the name of a flower: Papaver Sonmiferum. “Take twice a day with meals.”

The patient knelt and bowed to offer prostration and kissed Dr Naseem’s hand, but Dr Naseem waved him away grumpily, not believing in idolatry, being a modern sort of Muslim. The security guard led the patient down the hall to the dispensary counter, to fill his prescription for pink pills.

The month in Shangri-La did wonders for Shan’s disposition. He loved the idea of  exploring the magical little mountain town’s hidden bookstores ever since he’d read that’s what Rudyard Kipling himself had done as a young man. He dragged his entourage of bride, mother, three sisters, and valet over the steep steps of Shangri-La in search of the bookstores. By evening, Shan was ready to drink a warm cup of milk and turn in early to scour for a few minutes the Kipling diaries he’d acquired for a dear price before falling asleep with his spectacles askew on his nose.

Finding Shazi alone in the sitting room at Shangri-La, Mrs Naseem gently inquired as to whether Shazi, being a vessel for progeny, was feeling any nausea yet, or any other symptoms or pre-indications of successful brideship. Shazi, faced with this alarming line of questioning and exhausted from the long walks in ornate clothing, broke down, despite the general prohibition on excess feelings for women of her new social status, and tearfully, in a few disguised words confessed to her mother-in-law that no, there was nothing happening down there. There had been no marital relations at all, except for a few furtive kisses on the cheek, which was as far as Shan had managed to proceed. Fear passed through Mrs Naseem, though only the most practiced person would have guessed it, so composed was she on the outside, her inner world impenetrable sometimes even to herself.  

“Aren’t the drops working?” Mrs Musti inquired. As instructed Shazi had been putting five dropperfuls of aphrodisiac into Shan’s milk before bed and then into her own, and she’d made herself available, dressed in a sheer silk nightie, lips quivering, eyes glowing green. Shazi knew she had a duty to perform, but how. She shook her head again, no. 

Shan would fall asleep soon after taking the milk. Shazi didn’t quite know how to explain this next part to her mother-in-law without appearing obscene. The covers tented over his erection and he made huffing noises as he masturbated in his sleep, turning over and rubbing himself on the sheets until a yelp and a shudder later, a milky white string of semen sprouted between them. Once, Shazi accidentally got some on her fingers, rubbed and sniffed it. That was as close as she’d gotten to making a child. The shame of her predicament and the suspicion that perhaps her husband didn’t like her made her burst into tears.

Mrs Naseem drew a steadying breath. “We’ll take care of it when we get back,” she said, patting Shazi’s hand, bejeweled with five rings in emeralds, rubies, and diamonds with little chains attached to a gold bracelet at the wrist. It had belonged to Shan’s great great grandmother and was usually given to a Musti bride on her honeymoon as a congratulatory gift for the generous act of love-making. 

Mrs Naseem could tell that Shan liked his wife. At dinner, he asked Shazi to cut up his chops, instead of asking his mother. And the way he’d sneak glances at Shazi shyly was the stuff of romances. But Shazi was oblivious to his admiration, mired in her own sort of stiff blithe misery. Mrs Naseem chewed her own lamb. “Tough!” she accused the server and glared at the virgin bride. 

It wasn’t her son’s fault, obviously. Mrs Naseem had raised him very particularly. He was a sensitive, special boy. It only made sense to seclude him from other boys, uncultured rough housers. She had protected and pampered him thus because after all, he’d been a miracle. His birth came after thirteen pregnancies, three of them his sisters, the rest, incompletes. Was it her fault that the bloodline was so thick that it trembled at the sight of itself?

Mrs Naseem remembered her own newlywed days. Dr Naseem was an insatiable beast in the bedroom, their lovemaking driving them almost mad. They’d grown up in the same house as cousins; she even had the same name, the female version of it. They looked very much alike, the same short round sturdy bodies of clay gods, golden curls haloing their heads, and faces wider than they were long, giving them a cherubic look. Making love to each other had almost been like making love to oneself. They’d been in heaven. Until the deformed babies issued forth, a whole line of miscarriages, one after the other, and none of the remedies worked though she tried them all, including eating the placentas of the last two stillbirths, causing gossip around the compound that she ate her own babies, but what could you do with the common masses who did not understand nuance or paradoxical treatment. Shan had been born as one last desperate attempt on her part. Dr Naseem had started sleeping with the help, a longstanding unspoken family tradition, observed without fail. Mrs Naseem had slipped him a potent cocktail, then slipped into his room disguised as a servant girl. She’d followed all the other instructions of the moon blood healer: recited the Ayat-ul-Kursi one hundred times, placed the alms on the graves of various ascended Sufi masters and now rode her husband in one last ecstatic shot at the ripe old age of thirty six. Shan was conceived that night.

Some said he’d never been allowed to mature into a man because of his mother’s jealous rages abasing Dr Naseem, who’d wanted to take a second wife. That was the kind of gossip which eventually reached Shazi’s ears, along with glances that came her way from Lahore society, from the workers at the dispensary, and the servants of the house. She was the object of love and pity, dressed in the finest of gossamer chiffons in summer and gleaming jacquards in winter with matching jewels, no longer having any chores to occupy her except for the impossible one – to conceive a child. Shazi started haunting Dr Naseem’s library soon after returning from Shangri La. She’d gathered the technical details, yes of course, sperm enters egg, but how did one make a husband perform?  She needed to figure out how and fatafat. Mrs. Naseem felt the urgency too, and booked an appointment and pinched her cheek.  

“Where are we going, Ammi jaan?” Shazi asked. 

“I’m getting you the best treatment,” said Mrs Naseem. “Nothing is too good for my daughter in law.”

The driver took the bride and mother in law to the other side of town, where on the east wing of a modern building a small silver plaque announced, “European based Gynecological Solutions.” What happened in that office was a slight blur for Shazi. She was heavily dosed with laudanum for the procedure, which  she described, to her sisters and mother later that week, as pelvic thunder, an “electric shock therapy and lightning in my nether regions”, after she’d decided to leave the Mustis for good.  They slapped her thigh, exclaiming, “Stop it!” and accusing her of exaggeration, typical of the dramatic, eldest sister.

The doctor’s request that she remove her shalwar had made Shazi blush. As she lay on her back with one leg askew on the table, the doctor inserted a long narrow metal wand inside her. A clicking sound and the wand began to buzz. “No!” Shazi screamed, as Mrs Naseem stroked her hair and hushed her. A smell of singed pubic hair filled the room. Her mother-in-law said, “She’s having trouble getting pregnant.”

“It’s not my fault,” Shazi mumbled, but the doctor didn’t hear her, confident that the experimental procedure was very effective in stubborn cases, and in use all over Albania. At the sight of her blood, he said, “There we are, all fixed.”

Shazi limped back to the car, avoiding Mrs Naseem outstretched hand. You know it’s not my fault! Shazi wanted to tell off her mother-in-law very badly. How was she all fixed when it wasn’t her that was broken, but Shan. Mrs Naseem looked out the window at the streets full of buses and mopeds, and ordinary people spitting paan from pursed lips, people just trying to survive.

“You see all these people? We are not like them, beta. We have a higher responsibility, a calling to heal the world, to keep the line going. Like bearing a son. It’s up to us, beta, it’s up to you.” She gave Shazi a weary look. Underneath the makeup, Shazi saw the shadow of bags under her eyes.

Shazi started packing as soon as she got to the Musti house. 

The road back to her childhood home was lined on either side with open sewers.

“Is everything all right?” her mother asked, opening the door to Shazi’s drained face. Shazi said nothing and went to her room, except that she didn’t have her own room but shared one big communal room with her sisters. Throwing herself on the bed, all the women of the house rushed in on top of her, to dry her tears and admire her clothes and jewelry. Her sisters, yet unmarried, opened her suitcase and tried on everything in it, pretending to be Shazi while she watched them from the bed. The sisters wanted to know about the joys of marriage.

“Can I have this one?” they asked about a scarf, or a bangle, or an earring.

“Why are you rifling through my stuff?!”

Her mother patted her back. “Because they want what you have. You’ll see, it will be fine. You just have to blend in a bit. Every family has its own ways.”

“There is no way!” Shazi sobbed for a long time.

“What did they do? Do they beat you? Do they force you to do all the chores? No? Then stop it now, you’ll make yourself ugly,” her mother said matter of factly. “Lightning crotch happens to all women, eventually, with or without a doctor.”

Shan came to pick her up a few days later, when she telephoned him, after her parents said she couldn’t stay. They said it out of kindness, to save her from the life of a divorcee who, in the 1960s, was the lowest member of society, perhaps even worse than a prostitute who at least had purpose and value in life.

Smiling, they waved goodbye to Shan’s black sedan. Shazi turned to look at the shirtless boys running behind the car, waving sticks they used for gilli-danda.

She began an earnest study of Dr Naseem’s books but none of them held the answer to her question, and when she heard that Mrs Naseem had booked another appointment at the European doctor, she became hysterical and was found sobbing in the library by Dr Naseem with whom she could not discuss her problems because of the shamefulness of it, the sheer indecency.

Dr Naseem understood the pain of her silence; he knew Shan was a boy in a man’s body. He went to the back of the library where out of a hidden closet he produced a full-length black burqa that he draped around Shazi, and then led her towards the back of the house, interrupting the driver’s lunch and giving him specific instructions.

“Say hello to our friend Maya from me,” he said to Shazi as he opened the car door and waved her off.  

The driver hurried recklessly through back alleys towards the Red Light District, knocking Shazi about in the back. As they crossed the boundary into Heera Mandi, bright lights made her blink and Bollywood songs streamed into the car. A place for love and poetry she’d heard about but never dreamed she’d ever visit.

The driver stopped at a curved wooden door. An orange haired older woman escorted her inside, where Maya, long face and slanted eyes, liquid black-blue curtains of hair falling to her waist, a tiny fleur de lis tattoo high on her left cheek, was reclining on a settee, teasing out a new melody with her accompanist on the harmonium, whom she soon whisked away with one motion of her hand when she saw Shazi, giving her a broad smile with red betel stained teeth. “Did you bring any pink pills with you?”

Shazi nodded no, and seeing Maya’s disappointment, promised to send her some as soon as she could. Maya patted the space on the settee next to her. She ran her fingers through Shazi’s hair for what seemed an eternity, and then nimble fingers in her other places, a seduction practiced like a structured poem, even the taste of Maya’s mouth, smoke and pepper like a portal into Shazi’s body. Maya reached for a phallus shaped statue on the side table. She used the cold black polished stone, etched with grooves and a curved tip to trace the lines of Shazi’s mound, pushing into Shazi, in and out, in and out until a crescendo was reached, a pinnacle established, a deflowering complete and there was nothing else the quivering Shazi could do, but surrender, fall back onto the velvet pillows, her eyes blurry.

Later that week, emboldened by sudden desire when confronted with the unconscious Shan, Shazi carefully lowered herself onto his erection, having already given him an extra dose to prevent him from waking. What a marvel he was from that angle, looking down on his golden curls and the hesitations of his face completely fallen away. He was a beauty, her mind’s vision expanded a thousand times and she came to see her husband’s true form, unfettered by the posturing of his waking hours, pre-constructed by the Musti Compound. He grunted, half smiled, ejaculated into her and through this new ritual of sleepy sex, Shazi birthed two healthy daughters, ten fingers, ten toes, one after the other, sweet girls with golden curls and faces wider than they were long. Mrs Naseem poked at her granddaughters approvingly and then at Shazi for her inability to create sons.

Shazi was determined to make a son. 

One night, when Shazi was on top of Shan,  a tiny green gecko fell from the ceiling onto Shan’s head, and he woke up screaming. The lizard flicked off his forehead in a flash, and he was surprised to find himself inside Shazi and very much objected to the proceedings, claiming that Shazi had been raping him and though he loved her it was a pure sort of love that couldn’t be sullied by sex of an animal nature. Shazi propped her head on one elbow.

“How do you think the girls were born?” she asked.

“Oh God, no.” Shan’s face contorted into sudden awareness, then disgust. “That explains it. I wasn’t sure.” He had been sure. He’d had it all figured out. The purity of his love for her mobilized his sperm, allowing them to squeeze out of him in the night and march across the bed, two by two, towards her, white tear dropped soldiers crossing the white sheets, entering her in sleep, then giving them children. He whispered his theory into her ear.

Shazi was stunned. “Is that what happens?” she said, reaching for his arm.   

He began to cry, in heaving sobs. He held onto Shazi, shivering, and she stroked his back, shushing him. “It’s her,” he whimpered.

“Who?” Shazi asked.

“Maya,” he whispered, then shook his head. “She’s the one who told me that a love bond doesn’t need physical love. But we must never speak of her again.”

“Why?”

“They said she had to go away because she wasn’t a Musti…” he continued to blubber. “No, we must never speak her name.” 

Shazi was rocking him back and forth now, he was sobbing bitterly.          

“Mother killed her and she’ll kill you too if you’re not careful. Mother can’t stand it if I love anyone more than her,” he said, then stuffing his fist into his mouth, “no no we must never speak about mother like that!”

“There there, shhhh.” Shazi stroked the length of his body, considering whether to tell him that Maya was very much alive, if dead to him, a memory of his past, because he belonged to Shazi now. He was her man-boy, sweet, easily aroused and she had to confess she liked him, almost. She’d developed a motherly concern for him, which only sometimes turned to motherly contempt.

“I would never ever let that happen,” she said, taking his chin in her fingers, explaining to him that according to the esoteric sciences, the falling of a lizard on the head only meant good fortune. “And you know, I’m almost convinced that Maya’s wandering soul is somewhere here.”

Shan’s face was stricken. “Here?”

“No, I don’t mean here, I mean here.” Shazi touched her bosom. She drew Shan closer. Outside their room a pigeon cooed. A gardenia night bloomed on the patio.

Afterwards, his dried tears tasted sweet when he licked the side of his face. He hadn’t known that a physical act could contain that much love. He was hopeless. And for this betrayal he was convinced his mother would kill him.

*

The red powder piles in the back of house were pressed into pink pills and meted out for conditions of nervosa and Shazi, soon began to take one or two or three after each meal, the opium putting her in a bit of a dream state, floating around the house and the dispensary to oversee the workers, and then come in for tea and cake with some visiting dignitary and discuss, especially if Dr Naseem was there, whether in fact life was a dream, in accordance with the philosophical message of Row Row Row Your Boat.

At tea there were the children to attend, to place them on their feet and lift them up on airplane legs. Shazi always chose the younger daughter, Fiza, while Shan preferred first born Mahvish, who looked and acted exactly like Shan, soon wanting to read instead while Fiza screamed, “higher! higher!” until her mother’s quads were strained.

Once a month, Shazi put on the black burqa and ventured out into the world alone, to bring Maya her pink pills and spend a delicious hazy afternoon whispering and pinching each other, a development that did not escape Mrs Naseem’s notice but which she supported, at first. Shazi came home to find Shan sitting with his mother, spooning halwa into his mouth. Shazi raised an eyebrow, and Shan jumped up, bowing to his mother before following Shazi into their room for a nap.

Shan admitted to his terror of sex, fearing he’d be poisoned by his mother should she catch them in the act.

“But darling, why would she do that?” Shazi said, laying next to him with her forearm over her eyes.

“Because,” he stuttered, “I am her son!” He turned to Shazi and said, “I’m going to pretend to sleep now: you can do as you please.” He started snoring softly. A lizard ran diagonally across the ceiling.

Downstairs, Mrs Naseem worried her beads. How well Shazi had been looking lately. She called for her. “Perhaps it’s best you stop going to the Red Light District,” she said. “You need to focus on having a son.”

Shazi’s eyes blazed at her mother-in-law. “Yes Ammi,” she said meekly, pushing her anger inward and down. But the next month, she put on the burqa again, slipping a few extra rupees into the drivers’ hands in exchange for confidentiality. What she didn’t know was that Mrs Naseem had also slipped a few rupees into a servant’s hands, to switch the pink pills that Shazi always took for Maya with a pack dosed extra strong for another patient’s horse.

Shazi lay in bed for a week recovering from the overdose. Maya didn’t make it, her body weakened from prolonged use, sinking all the way under. Shazi slunk around the halls of Musti Compound, thickening prematurely, blaming herself for Maya’s death. Even as the servants gossiped loudly about Mrs Naseem’s win, it was Shazi who had brought the pills to Maya, for years. To avoid her guilt Shazi turned to the business of protecting the Musti legacy from nosy journalists who began to suspect that the Musti cure wasn’t a cure at all, but a coverup.

Shazi didn’t have time to think about a son. She kept the dispensary intact, pumping out as many satisfied customers as possible and even becoming a spokesperson for the Musti Clinic, giving interviews, assuring the public that their mission was solely to relieve the pain of the ill, the anxious, the troubled, the poor suffering masses while Dr Musti telephoned in his political favors to call off the journalists.

Shan followed Shazi around, asked her permission for everything and even began to see patients with her at his side, and with Dr Naseem’s blessing. Shazi now knew the routine and the cure for everything that was wrong with everybody. Mrs Naseem slanted her eyes at all this, growing weaker with age and opium usage, but rearing her head to put a stop to Shazi’s boldest move yet, trying to move Shan and the kids away from Musti Clinic to the suburb of Gulberg. She’d already showed her sisters the floorplan when Mrs Naseem had the lawyers prepare an estoppel.

They all remained in downtown Lahore, the urban noise growing louder and the patient line dwindling as Dr Naseem turned sixty-five and Shan took over the practice. Shan wasn’t very good at listening to the patients. He quoted them a story he’d just read, about a mother eating her children. They cocked their heads and looked confused. This was Dr Naseem’s son?

To fund her youngest daughter’s dream of an American college education and to hold onto the valet and driver, without whom Shan could not do, Shazi began selling off parcels of the Musti compound.

All the hope of Shazi’s life was now vested in helping her younger daughter, Fiza, escape. She was so brilliant, unlike the eldest, Mavish, who rarely left the compound and spent hours making intricate drawings of lattice work. Fiza, beautiful and headstrong, rejected all pharmacology and spiked breast milk, and still grew up mimicking her mother’s drug-laced speech patterns. When she turned eighteen in 1994 she wanted to go to New York University to study art history, countering her mother’s suggestion that she should become a doctor and revive the Musti business. Fiza agreed to study pre-med but changed her major the moment she arrived in New York.

David Saccler – on a muffin break from a med school all nighter – first lay eyes on Fiza at a cafe near NYU, her golden curls, wide mouth, and green eyes, giving her the look of  a priestess. He was rapt, though unable to place her accent. “Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked.

She laughed showing her teeth with her head thrown back. “I’ve lived my entire life between the Musti Compound and the Convent of Mary and Jesus school,” she said. 

Fiza Musti and David Saccler, within weeks of long talks, sacred silent kisses, and after being particularly moved by a revival screening of the 1970 movie Love Story, fell in love. They were determined to join their unlikely families. She spent a fortune telephoning her parents in Lahore, explaining that she was getting married, that they must come.

Dr Naseem, raising his hand slowly from where it lay next to him in a daybed like a separate creature, said, throatily, “What was the name?”

“See this is what comes of letting your daughter go off to America alone!” Mrs Naseem cried. “You’ve upset your father.”

“Please shut up, mother,” said Shazi, pacing the room, going through her mental list of instructing the staff for overseeing the business in her absence, thinking through the strategy for disentangling her daughter from the Sacclers, who although were a famous pharma family like her own, were inexcusably not Muslim. Shan burst into laughter, pretending the joke was in his book. Shazi packed their suitcases half full of clothes, and half with Shan’s essentials, his books. Reading Walt Whitman in preparation for the America trip, he’d secretly become a Transcendentalist, though he didn’t say it out loud to Shazi who seemed vexed and unhappy like his mother, shrieking about honor and other things he couldn’t quite latch onto.

The NYC taxi driver who drove them to the engagement party happened to be Pakistani and spoke insufferably the entire way as Shazi sat frozen faced while Shan kept his head out the window to swallow American air until they arrived at Trump Tower, where David’s mother was currently residing on the 37th floor. Fiza greeted her mother with a hug, whispering into her ear about David’s mother, who had just returned from rehab after receiving several rounds of electric shock therapy at his father’s direction and so could be expected to behave a little unpredictably. Shazi smiled and made a few pleasantries in English, while Shan stood in a corner of the room with the Saccler men discussing the finer points of their great responsibility in the community as healers. David winked at Fiza from across the room, clear headed and clear eyed. “The secret,” he’d whispered to Fiza on one of their earlier dates, “is never to take what your family is peddling.” 

Fiza Saccler was to be her new name, even though her mother jostled her elbow, unsettled that she hadn’t yet spoken to Fiza privately, whispering  in Urdu, that times were well beyond women’s lib, and women no longer had to take a man’s name, or religion for that matter. Uncomfortable silences ensued, especially after someone announced that David’s father, the Saccler patriarch would not be attending after all, as he was detained either on some urgent business matter or an emergency which required escorting his third wife to rehab, it was unclear which.

“Figures!” David’s mother said, rolling her eyes.

The doorbell rang and into the small party ran David’s ten-year-old step brother, carrying a small plastic cage, housing his pet crested gecko. Fiza ran to hug him, already a foreigner, thought Shazi, as she reached into her purse for the small inlaid box with the pink pills. Mrs Saccler wanted to know what it was that she was taking. “Oh, it’s just for my nerves,” said Shazi, then offered her the box, like a mint. The effects of the pills produced great entertainment for everyone as Mrs Saccler slow-danced around the room while the pet crested gecko leapt out of its cage and onto Shan’s left shoulder causing him to have a fit, and Shazi, in the hullabaloo, took her daughter aside by the bare shoulders, asked her to come home with them, declaring that a lizard on the left shoulder was a bad omen and the marriage should not take place after all. “I love him, mama,” Fiza said.

 “A man can never satisfy or rescue you,” she said.

“No,” said Fiza, and no more. A simple word. What was that feeling, the murderous feeling towards another woman, a younger woman, who’d not do as her mother commanded, who dared impose her own will, the devil’s will and doing, the shir and shirk, signs of the end of times. It was perfect, thought Shazi. Why had she herself never imagined, much less executed, an escape?

In the morning she was on the hotel phone changing their return flights to the very next day, when Shan, pacing and reciting under his breath a line he’d caught and repeated every morning in their tiny room, “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. And this is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy,” and here he paused, considering deeply whether he himself was stupid and crazy or the one who stood up for them.

“What about Fiza?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“She’s not a Musti anymore,” Shazi said, all the sadness and fury she’d ever felt towards her mother and Mrs Naseem rising into her throat.

Back in Lahore, Shazi choked down more pills and fell into bed, heartsick. The loss of her daughter to kafireen was quite a blow to her, though under higher doses of the pink pills she rolled her eyes up to the skies, ecstatic that her daughter had been freed. Mahvish, the elder daughter, held her mother’s hand and read her King Lear.

When the pills wore off, the past and the present came crashing on her: Mrs Naseem’s verbal flagellations, her elder daughter’s dullness, the shame of an uncontrolled runaway daughter, people whispering in the streets about her brazenness, and the recent news about the Musti cure. A young reporter who’d passed by the Musti compound late one Sunday afternoon and seeing the line up had disguised himself as a patient, and had the pills tested under a microscope. He blew up the Musti business with one headline: “Drug Lords of Lahore Parading as Healers.” His article explained in his caustic and plain Urdu that Dr Musti was nothing but a drug dealer handing out an opiate for the masses, and this time, no political favors could save them.

Business at the Musti compound slowed down to a trickle, the staunch believers still showing up at first, until heroin production and distribution ramped up in both urban and remote parts of the country, making the supply chain available without a trip to Dr Musti. 

In an unusual moment of clarity, Dr Musti defended himself by inviting the reporter for a metaphysical talk on the nature of life and health. “It’s all in the dosage. Minute amounts of opium work in paradox, reviving the human channels and awakening one from a false dream, straight into the real dream. They do not destroy like greater quantities of heroin do.”

The reporter nodded, respectful, resolute. His career was beginning to take off; his mother was so proud of him, wanting him to bring back some pink pills in a little box stamped with the Musti insignia.

The last few weeks of Shazi’s life passed in a hallucination. A servant was put on guard after she tried to fly off the balcony. One shabby room remained of the dispensary, one of three rooms that Shan could only afford to rent in the compound, whose new owners turned the remaining space into an auto-repair shop.

At her funeral, Fiza sent apologies that she could not travel. Mrs Naseem wailed into a tissue and clung to a frozen Shan. The elder daughter wore all white and denied that Shazi had a difficult life. To the contrary, she insisted, her mother was always at peace with her station in life, being a Musti, wearing it gracefully.