When She Was Queen Read Free Page A

sounding regretful.
    John Chacha beamed at him. “You have! If I have a palace, you have the Queen of Kisumu! You can do better than the Pandavas, surely.”
    The reference was to the five Pandava brothers of mythology, who gambled away their wife in a game of dice.
    “Arré what is he saying, this man,” Khanoo Chachi said in despair. “Have some shame, for God’s sake.” She started crying. She was an emotional, uncomplicated and kind woman, admired and pitied for enduring the trial that was her marriage.
    “Bid her,” said the undeterred John Chacha to my father, “and if you win, this alishaan mansion, this Taj Mahal of Lake Province”—he made a gesture to indicate all its grandeur—”is yours for you and your Mumtaz to move into. If not….”
    “If not?”
    “If not, she’s mine for a night.”
    There was laughter from the spectators.
    “So you think,” Father replied, with pluck. “I’ll beat you this time, Johnny-boy. All right, my wife on the table.” He threw a quick look at my mother, who stood behind him smiling.
    “Can they do this?” the African intern asked Dr. Singh.
    “It’s only a joke,” someone said beside them and chortled with nervous excitement. It was Dr. Patel’s wife. The haughty Dr. Singh threw her a look of scorn.
    The intern turned away with a look of disgust, then turned back again to watch the hand played out.
    Father lost. He got up, his face flushed.
    Dr. Singh and his friend were the first to leave, then all the others started packing up their children and heading for the door. It was a typical leave-taking, with many best wishes and reminders to meet again. Khanoo Chachi had been subdued by the women telling her it was all a joke, and men will be men, John especially. John Chacha stood beside her next to the door, equally subdued and polite in a drunken way. They shook hands with my father, did pranams to my mother. Ambalal and his wife Moti and their three children came out with Mother and Father, and as they separated in the driveway, Ambalal said to Father, “Well, you lost your wife. You have to watch this Johnny, he pulls the pants off you if you give him the chance.”
    When they reached home, my mother and father fought.
    “So you simply gambled me away. Like this,” she snapped her fingers. “What did you think of me?”
    “I was a fool, darling, but it was for you that I was tempted!”
    “And so you sold away my dignity.”
    “You could have stopped me! You could have objected! You
allowed it!”
    “We were all watching
you
to see what you would do! You accepted an insult to your wife! You
sold
me away! Well, if my husband thinks me dispensable enough a commodity—”
    “We were all a bit tipsy,” Father said desperately.“John especially. I’ll call him tomorrow, tell him it was all a joke. He should apologize. Come on, I am sorry …”
    The next morning he called up John. “I say, my wife’s a bit upset—that joke went a bit too far and I think—”
    “You know I don’t joke when I gamble and when I do business.”
    “But this time you joked, and I think—”
    “I didn’t joke. I bid my house fair and square, with all my honour at stake, and I take it that you too bid fairly. I could have lost, and you would have won my house. As it stands, I won.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I won your wife for a night, Rashid. Tonight I’ll send a car for her.”
    The car came, and she strode out to it, dignified as ever, dressed in her finest.
    “So, did they?” I ask my two sisters.
    On one side of the large deck at Habibeh’s Scarborough home, her husband and son barbecue meat and vegetables in an instance of father-son bonding I find quite touching. Teenagers shoot hoops in the distance, at the far end of the backyard, among them the other children of the family. Mother sits out on the lawn, protected by an umbrella, in the company of a new friend she’s brought with her today and her other son-in-law. And Habibeh, Razia, and I sit