Haveli by Suzanne Fisher Staples Read Free Book Online

speculatively.
    “Uma, why is she so small?” she asked. “Her ears get bigger, and she eats a lot. I want her to grow as big as Guluband so I can ride her!”
    “Guluband was a camel,” said Shabanu. She thought of herself at Mumtaz’s age riding the majestic Guluband among the dunes, his feet lifting in rhythm to her songs. Shabanu turned to look at the fawn, and both she and Mumtaz watched as the animal gazed back at them with her long, graceful ears pitched forward.
    Mumtaz is right, Shabanu thought. The fawn had not grown at all in the month since she’d come to Okurabad. Perhaps losing her mother at such a young age had shocked her, or her confinement within the courtyard had stunted her growth.
    “This little one will never be big enough for you to ride,” said Shabanu. “Shall we name her Choti, and she’ll always be your little one?”
    Mumtaz nodded solemnly and took her mother’s hand. They walked on without speaking.
    A little farther on they met Tahira, Rahim’s third wife, a slim woman with fair skin and a deprecating air. Tahira had deep-set eyes and a gentle sense of humor. When Shabanu had first come to Okurabad, the women would summon her to tea each afternoon.They would assemble formally in the parlor and catch up on the household gossip. They’d watched her carefully, and after she’d left them they’d talk about her, inventing things they claimed she’d said to them.
    In those days Shabanu had wanted to befriend Tahira. But Tahira would have no part of her. If Shabanu spoke to her, she would look at the floor and pretend not to hear. Never in her life had Shabanu felt so alone.
    Tahira adjusted her shawl studiously, not looking at Mumtaz and Shabanu as they passed on the canal path. Her daughter, a few years older than Mumtaz, turned and ran back to pet the fawn. Tahira came after her quickly and grabbed her by the wrist, shaking and scolding her as she dragged the girl away.
    It didn’t matter whether Rahim decided Ibne was innocent or guilty, Shabanu thought. It was
her
guilt that Leyla and Amina hoped to prove, as surely as crows are drawn to a corpse.
    Ibne and Zenat were the only exceptions within the household at Okurabad, where the attitudes toward Shabanu ranged from indifference to viciousness. The longer Shabanu lived in Rahim’s house, the more clearly she saw how cancerous the relations between the family and the servants had grown.
    At first they had seemed rather normal to her, if intricate and fragile, shaped by traditional codes of behavior of which she was thoroughly ignorant. She decided not to even try to understand. She wouldnever fit in with the family women, and even the servants regarded her as beneath their station. Instead, she approached each person on his or her own terms.
    These were some of the things Shabanu observed:
    While the family rooms were kept in good repair, the mud interior walls plastered and repainted in their original Mogul designs, the walls of the rooms where the servants worked were cracked and bulging. The furniture in the front rooms had been repaired, the springs retied, the horsehair fluffed, and new covers sewn. In the house’s interior, derelict chairs and tables slumped in corners.
    During rest periods, the male servants dragged their
charpois
from their rooms into a circle in the courtyard, where they sat gossiping and drawing on their tall brass
hookah
pipes. The servant women spread basketfuls of neem leaves over the grime on the floor so they could sit and talk behind the kitchen. If anyone not included in the conversation approached, the group fell silent until the intruder had passed.
    In the family’s quarters the windows were opened during the day to air out the rooms. They smelled of sunshine, jasmine, lime trees and roses from the gardens, and sometimes of burning sticks of incense. The interior stank of years of rancid
ghee
, animal blood, the droppings of rodents, and more than two centuries of dust. To Shabanu it smelled