Bats

Hasan Manzar


It was the month of May. That night in Naples was not supposed to be cold. Both of us and our children were exhausted after the day’s outing, therefore we returned to our hotel before it went dark. The children instantly slumped onto their beds without taking off their warm clothes, socks or shoes. We also intended to sleep early but somehow were not all that sleepy.

After having tea, my wife sat down to write a letter. I was going through the tourists’ albums and photographs which I had bought from various scenic spots in the city. Besides, I had my own photographs too. I was labelling them with names, dates and places.

While writing the letter, the wife (since she was the only woman there, so instead of saying “my wife” over and over it will be sufficient to say “the wife”) stood up for a while and went to the window. She started looking across the road where a yellow and white board of Meusitieri stood on an iron pipe near the building of Credito Italiano. I glanced at her and started placing my photographs in sequence.

The wife had started writing another letter after finishing the first one. Again she stopped writing, stretched her fingers and went to the window. This time she stood there longer and returned gloomily.

When the third time she acted in the same manner and came back distracted I asked her, ‘Why do you keep going to the window? I smell a rat.’

‘Yes,’ she laughed,’ there is one’.

‘If you continue doing this, some Italian dandy might climb up the vines into our room.’

Our marriage was still young enough to suspect one another superficially. After a year of our marriage, when once she had gone somewhere, I started skimming through the book that she was reading, as even a short period of awaiting was annoying for me. On her arrival, I started turning the pages of the book and then with a surprise I said, ‘Oh, what is this paper?’

‘Must be a bookmark,’she said disinterestedly.
‘It is a letter for you,’ I replied. She was taken by surprise; I started reading it aloud, ‘Dear…. Hope you are fine. I think of you every minute, do you also think of me?’

She suddenly tensed up and tried to take the paper from my hand. The letter was for her but without an envelope. At the end there was a name which I had heard from her along with many other names just after we got married. ‘Our neighbour Nabila sang well, Tony played the mouth organ, Saeeda Ashraf was a position holder, Yousaf the sissy used to be amongst girls all the time and Naveen used to call him ‘uncle’ of our children and Margaret was always flirting around.’ This name was also one of them, yours J. KH.

She relaxed and in a split of a second snatched the letter from my hand. Then she sat on a chair and asked innocently, ‘Who J.KH?’

I said, ‘So soon you have forgotten the poor soul!’

‘Aren’t you ashamed to be saying such things?’ she glared.

‘Why should I be ashamed?’ I said. ‘It gives me pleasure to be married to a girl who was admired by others as well. I haven’t married an ordinary girl.’

Such an ‘after marriage’ period had not yet waned away.

Once again she went and stood by the window. I asked her in a louder voice this time, ‘Who’s there, who are you watching?’

She turned and looked at me and with a finger on her lips signalled me to come to the window.

The road was quiet. On either side there were small yellow trees. ‘Credito Italiano’ was on the ground floor of this three-storey building. A dim light sifted through the curtained windows. One side of this building faced our hotel and the other one was on the wide road with a zebra crossing and a traffic light. Right by the Meusitieri board stood a woman. She was wearing a grey coat and thin stockings which could hardly be protecting her from the cold. In a way, her feet and legs under her knees were almost bare. Her shoes were white. She was smoking, perhaps to keep herself warm.

We left the window. The wife said, ‘I have been watching her for two hours now. The poor soul! Keeps going to and coming back from the pasta coffee shop.’

Settling down on the couch we started talking about her. I said, ‘She is probably a spinster; it wouldn’t be right to call her a girl. She could be a night-walker.’

The wife said woefully, ‘Maybe the one for whom she is waiting has not turned up; some sailor or boyfriend perhaps.’

‘Lovers are never so late; neither the awaited nor the ones who wait,’ I said.

The woman looked tired. The wife said, ‘If she had money on her, she would have gone to the coffee shop. Then all of a sudden she said, ‘Go and bring her up here.’

I was shocked. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Just like that. I feel like talking to her. It is so cold, I’ll offer her coffee.’ When I did not agree to her demand, she said, ‘If you are not going, then I will. After all she is a woman like me.’

I did not stop her. She had put on her coat and was covering her head with her scarf when I made for the door and said, ‘You’ll be responsible for it if she has me trapped. I have all the weaknesses of other men in me.’

With a signal of her hand she told me to go out. There were hardly any steps down the third floor so I did not take the elevator. When after crossing the road I reached the bus stop, I looked up to see that the wife was standing at the window. I had always wondered about the interest of domesticated women in these unmarried, unchaste women involved in the sex trade. There used to be times when our domestic women stayed away from this other kind but were still curious about them.

I think that if in all those places where women fought battles and ploughed the fields and men fed the children and cooked food, there were such men who lived in isolated areas and walked the streets at night, the domestic males would be as interested in the life and ways of those men, wanting to probe their souls and find out how they talked, what they ate and drank, what kind of clothes they wore and how they fared with their wives.

It was the first time I was talking to such a woman. She saw me coming towards her and stopped to say, ‘Good evening Signore.’

I also said, ‘Good evening Signora.’

Then taking out my cigarette box from my pocket I said, ‘The sea wind is blowing, it is quite cold.’
‘Is it?’ she said, ‘Not that cold; you seem to be from a hot country.’ Like all others who live near seaports and sailors, her language was a combination of various languages. She could explain herself to anyone in the world. After a few moments I was also speaking the same universal language.

I gave her a cigarette, took one myself between my lips, lighted up both and turned to look up at the window. For some time I also walked with her from the pasta coffee shop to the Meusitieri board and back. I will not say that I was horrified. Deep down I was enjoying walking with a young, white Italian woman. There were some cars parked beside the road which were mostly Italian; some big, some small but all from the same stock.

I asked her, ‘Would you like to come with me to the hotel for an hour?’

She said, ‘Si’ and without calculating continued, ‘charges are the same for an hour or a whole night……. and the advance.’

‘How much?’ I asked. She stated a nominal amount and once again said, ‘An hour or one night, it’s all up to you.’

I took out the purse from my pocket. The notes were filthy and almost coming apart but for the cellophane that kept them intact. The amount was hardly enough for a dinner at a mediocre restaurant for the wife and me.

‘This way please,’ I said.

‘Signore,’ she said and started walking beside me. I looked up triumphantly at the wife. When we reached the hotel restaurant, she unwittingly turned towards the elevator. Some people who were seated around on different tables looked at us casually and kept on drinking and talking. I felt completely at peace and when the elevator started to move, I told her that my wife was present upstairs.

‘Is she?’ she lifted her eyebrows and said, ‘does not matter as long as you are paying.’

The wife came forward and shook hands with her and asked her to sit down. For some time the wife and I both did not know what to say. The woman was sitting quietly on the sofa. She had kept her hands folded in front of her and appeared to be tired. I will call her ‘the woman’ and not ‘that woman’ as there was no other woman without a name present in the room. The wife, the woman, the sleeping kids and I were the only ones there.

The wife asked me to call the room service and when the waiter came in, she said, ‘Coffee for three,’ and asked the woman, ‘will chicken sandwiches be all right?’

‘Gracious Signora,’ said the woman and the wife said to the waiter, ‘a big plate of sandwiches.’

‘Signora,’ he said and went away.

It seemed that the woman’s mind had gone numb. May be because of such an unusual situation or perhaps because of watching out alone in the cold night for two hours at the same spot, like a soldier who keeps vigil at some important place by moving like a pendulum, challenging any passerby who comes along with, ‘Halt, who comes there?’

One night in Rome, when I had gone out alone as the wife was too tired, a woman had called after me in Arabic saying, ‘Hello darling,’ and soon after, ‘hello love.’

This woman must be calling out in the same manner after every passerby and then watching out for the next one, if he should walk way.

I said she looked numb, not upset or disturbed. Wherever she was taken, she must be going without contemplating what she would see there; what sort of place or what kind of person her companion would be. Cleanliness, body hygiene, politeness or behaviour do not matter in this profession. She had started walking beside me without saying a word, just like a porter hired to carry luggage would have done. She had summarized all in her one sentence saying, ‘As long as you are paying, it doesn’t matter.’

The wife made a cup of coffee and offered her first. She said something which meant, ‘you first’ and the wife said in English, ‘no you take first, you are the guest.’

‘Guest? What is that?’

I told her that a person coming to see someone is a guest. She took the cup and said, ‘Oh I see, thank you Signora.’ Then the wife offered her the sandwiches. She did not hesitate this time, though her manner was decent as she picked up the sandwich and started eating.

As a courtesy, we both took one sandwich each and asked her to have more. The wife said to her, ‘It is a cold night and you must want to have wine; we both don’t drink so shall we get some for you?’

Her complexion had turned pink now and she looked younger. She said, ‘No…No.’

After wiping her mouth with a tissue paper she sat against the sofa back, relaxed. Now she was not tense anymore and not concerned about being with a man and a woman. No one deserved more sympathy than a prostitute in this world. I had said this many a time to my wife and in my own country when female beggars attacked our car, I used to get furious, saying that if they wanted to fend for themselves, they could but had become habitual beggars, wanting to eat without earning. If there was no one else in the car I would say, rather the wife would complete my words by saying that prostitutes were better than those beggar women.

After a while, in order to breed familiarity, we started talking about her country. ‘How beautiful a country it is; how pleasant the weather is; such fruits are not found anywhere in the world.’ I said that Rome was not built in a day. She raised her eyebrows, and looking at her I came to the conclusion that if the phrase were changed to ‘not built in a century’, it would not matter. She kept on listening to our flowery, flattering conversation without any reaction. We talked about Rome, Napoli…. Once she said with surprise, ‘Have you seen the whole country?’

The wife said, ‘A little, and you?’

She answered in the same language saying, ‘A little.’

We were not asking her personal questions, as we knew it would hurt her. Otherwise I thought that everyone visiting her kind must be enjoying the personal stories of these women in the amount that he paid for his pleasure. There is something melodramatic about such a thing, as if a client would pick her up from the market and offer her a home after listening to the story.

She got up and went to the bed where the children were sleeping. She kept looking at them for some time. Then she put her finger on their lips and kissed them one after the other. The wife went and stood beside her. ‘This is a boy.’

‘I know figlio.’

‘This is a girl.’

‘I know, figlia’, she said with a nod.

Then she picked up the poncho, which the wife was knitting and was almost done. ‘Yours?’ said the woman.
The wife pointed towards our daughter saying, ‘It’s hers.’

At once her face lit up. I kept myself away from their conversation, as I usually do, when women indulge in womanish talk. To this the wife always reacts with, ‘So are we supposed to talk like men?’

Then she asked the names of both the children. The wife asked her, ‘Your name?’

‘Salvana.’ She came back to her seat. Now some personal conversation had begun and I was expecting to be able to delve deeper into her heart to find out about her love for Italy and The Vatican. Was she also proud of her country’s past? But the language constraint prolonged the pauses in our conversation. Obviously, her profession had not invented a language for such talk. Ultimately she begged to leave. She extended her hand to pick up her long coat.

The wife said, ‘What is the hurry about? We sleep late; where will you go?’ The last query was spontaneous.

She said, ‘Home.’

We did not have the courage to ask what she meant by home. The wife asked if she cared for another cup of coffee.

‘No, thank you,’ she said.

Then the wife said as if mumbling to herself, ‘You must be scared standing alone on the road in the dark, at night.’

‘Paura?’she said.

‘Fear of the dark,’ said the wife.

She laughed and said, ‘Bats are not frightened of the dark. I am a bat, we are all bats.’

The wife moved back a step. She is always afraid of bats as if they were all vampires.

I helped her put on her coat. The wife went to see her off at the landing. She was sending her back into the sea of darkness. I went with her up to the place where we had seen her walking. I gave her a last cigarette. After taking a puff she said, ‘Thank you.’
When I came back to our room, the wife, as I had expected was standing at the window. She had been watching us all this time. I asked, ‘Were you keeping watch over me? But remember, there was no one doing this for years before you came into my life. What will you do about those years?’ She gave a last look at the road and said, ‘Gone.’

Her repressed emotion had left her exhausted. Tired, she sat down infront of me. I was thinking that a tourist who did not see the prostitutes and the down trodden of this resort had not seen anything of that country. The wife went to the children’s bed with dead feet. She started as she picked up the poncho. She held out the money peeping through it saying, ‘This……..’

Instinctively we rushed to the window to look for her in the thickening darkness but she was gone, vanished in the state of Rome.



Translated from Urdu by Mahjabeen Zaheer