The Year of Rice and Salt

Now, in the dregs of the night in this Nsarene cafe, Budur pressed back slightly against Kirana's knee, in a knowing manner, friendly but neutral. For now, she kept arranging always to leave with some of the other students, not meeting Kirana's eye when it counted stringing her along, perhaps, because she was not sure what it would mean to her studies or to her life more generally, if she were to respond more positively and fall into it, whatever it might be, beyond the kissing and fondling. Sex she knew about, that would be the straightforward part, but what about the rest of it? She was not sure she wanted to get involved with this intense older woman, her teacher, still in some senses a stranger. But until you took the plunge, did not everyone remain a stranger for ever?

THIRTEEN

They stood together, Budur and Kirana, at a garden party on a crowded patio overlooking the Liwaya River before it opened into its estuary, their upper arms just barely touching, as if by accident, as if the crush around the wealthy patron of the arts and philosopher, Tahar Labid, was so great that they had to do it to catch the beautiful pearls dropping from his lips; although in truth he was a terrible and obvious blowhard, a man who said your name over and over in conversation, almost every time he addressed you, so that it became very off putting, as if he were trying to take you over, or simply to remember in his solipsism who he was talking to, never noticing that it made people want to escape him at all costs.

After a bit of this Kirana shuddered, at his self absorption perhaps, too like hers to make her at all comfortable, and she led Budur away. She lifted Budur's hand, all bleached and cracked from her constant cleaning, and said, 'You should wear rubber gloves. I should think they would make you at the lab.'

'Wearing gloves make it hard to hold onto things.'

'Nevertheless.'

This gruff concern for the health of her hands, from the great intellectual, the teacher – suddenly surrounded by an audience of her own, asking her what she thought of certain Chinese feminists… Budur watched her reply immediately and at length about their origins among Muslim Chinese, particularly Kang Tongbi, who, with the encouragement of her husband the Sino Muslim scholar Ibrahim al Lanzhou, set out the theoretical groundwork for a feminism later elaborated in the Chinese heartland by generations of late Qing women – much of their progress contested by the imperial bureaucracy, of course – until the Long War dissolved all previous codes of conduct in the pure rationality of total war, and women's brigades and factory crews established a position in the world that could never be retracted, no matter how hard the Chinese bureaucrats tried. Kirana could recite by memory the wartime list of demands made by the Chinese Women's Industrial Workers' Council, and now she did just that: 'Equal rights for men and women, spread of women's education and facilities for it, improvement in position of women in the home, monogamy, freedom of marriage, encouragement of careers, a ban on concubines and the buying and selling of women, and on physical mutilation, improved political position, reform of prostitution.' It was a most strange sounding song, or chant, or prayer.

'But you see, the Chinese feminists claimed women had it better in Yingzhou and Travancore, and in Travancore the feminists claimed to have learned it from the Sikhs, who learned it from the Quran. And here we focus on the Chinese. So that you see it has been a matter of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, each imagining that it is better in a different country, and that we should fight to equal the others…' On she talked, weaving the last three centuries together most brilliantly, and all the while Budur clenched her cracked white hands, thinking, She wants you, she wants your hands healthy because if she has her way, they will be touching her.

Budur wandered away on her own, disturbed, saw Hasan on another terrace and went up to join the group around him, which included Naser Shah and the ancient grandmother from Kirana's class, looking at a loose end without her knitting kit in hand. It turned out they were brother and sister, and she the hostess of this party: Zainab Shah, very curt when Budur was finally introduced; and Hasan a long time family friend of theirs. They had. all known Kirana for years, and had taken her classes before, Budur learned from Naser as the conversations swirled around them.

'What bothers me is to see how repetitive and small minded he could be, what a lawyer '

'That's why it works in application 'Works for who? He was the lawyer of the clerics.'

'No writer, anyway.'

'The Quran is meant to be spoken and heard, in Arabic it is like music, he is such a poet. You must hear it in the mosque.'

'I will not go there. That's for people who want to be able to say, I am better than you, simply because I assert a belief in Allah." I reject that. The world is my mosque.'