Chor

Monsoon week in that city was always slower than the rest of the year. The rain quieted the bazaar. The water-women lingered at the wells. The merchants closed earlier. And in monsoon week of that particular year, the watchman walked his alleys at dusk and found a scrap of cloth no bigger than a pomegranate seed.

He had been a watchman for thirty years. He picked the scrap up. He looked at it under the brass lantern in his hand. The cloth was dark, the dark of cloth that had been dyed to disappear. He looked up at the rooftops above the alley, where there was nothing to see.

He did not report it. Watchmen are paid to know what is worth reporting.

By the next morning the women at the well in the small square behind the spice-sellers' bazaar had begun saying things to each other. Two at first, then three, then five — the way water-talk multiplies when something has happened. They said: did you hear. They said: he came again. They said: who. Nobody knew who. Nobody had seen him. But by the end of the third night of the rains the women at the well had agreed it was a man, and a young one, and possibly from somewhere else, because the city's own thieves did not work this way.

The city's own thieves stole brass. They stole grain from the stores at the edge of the bazaar where the merchants slept thin. They stole the small change a child carried home from buying lentils. They were known to the watchman and known to the women at the well, and they were dealt with in the ways such things were dealt with. A beating in an alley. A chain across an ankle. A banishment to the desert side of the city walls.

This was something else.

The cloth-sellers' lane was not where one stole brass. It was where one stole the cloth that wrapped manuscripts. And on the fourth night of the rains, the lock on the library at the head of the cloth-sellers' lane yielded to a hand that knew its mechanism.

The library had been there for a hundred and forty years. It belonged to one of the wealthy families who had given the city much of its present shape, a family that had grown rich in the spice trade two generations ago and turned that wealth toward patronage in the way that wealthy families in the city had been doing since the founding. The library held manuscripts in eleven scripts. It was open on Tuesdays and Thursdays to scholars with credentials. The lock on its lower jali was a brass mechanism brought from Lahore in the early years of the family's wealth, and it was the kind of lock that did not yield to anyone who did not know it.

On the fourth night of the rains, it yielded.

The library's keeper was an old man who slept in a small room off the manuscript chamber. He had been a sound sleeper for forty years and a lighter one for the last ten. He woke that night to the sound of water dripping somewhere in the chamber, which was not unusual in monsoon. He listened for it. He fell back asleep.

In the morning he walked through the chamber as he always did, checking the lamps and the stands and the cloths that wrapped each manuscript, and he found everything in its place. He checked again. He checked a third time. He counted the manuscripts on the stands. He counted them again. He counted them a fourth time. The count was correct. He did not understand why he was counting them four times. He went to make himself tea.

That afternoon he opened the manuscript of Raag Sohni-e-Pinjra to dust the pages and found that there were thirty-seven leaves where the day before there had been thirty-eight.

He sat down on the stone floor with the manuscript in his lap and did not move for a long time.

He did not speak of it to the family who owned the library. He waited a day. Then another. Then a third. He told himself he was waiting to be sure. He was not waiting to be sure. He had been the keeper of the library for forty years and he had been sure within the first minute. He was waiting because he did not yet know how to say it.

By the time he went to the family, the city had a word for what was happening, though it did not yet know what had been stolen. The word was chor. It was in every alley by the fifth day of the rains. It was at the well, at the spice-sellers', at the chai stall by the southern gate, in the courtyards where the women cleaned brass in the mornings. Chor, chor, chor. The city had a thief.

The city did not know what had been stolen. The keeper did not tell. By the time the family knew, four more nights had passed and the keeper of the library was a smaller man than he had been the week before.

But this is what really happened.

She was twenty-five years old, and she had been waiting for the storm.

The mehndi cone moved across the back of her hand. The cold of the paste, the heat of her own skin under it. Her hand was held palm-down on a small cushion. Another woman's hands held the cone — her father's older sister, Phupphi, who had done this for every daughter in the family for thirty years and would do it for every daughter who came after.

Don't move, Phupphi said.

She had not been moving. She had not moved in an hour.

The paisley grew across the back of her hand the way paisleys grow. From a single point on the wrist, curving and folding into itself, the small leaves and tendrils filling the space between the larger shapes. She watched it grow. She thought about what the back of her hand would look like in the dark. She thought about whether the henna would stain her fingers the way it always stained Phupphi's, dark at the cuticles even months after.

In the next room a woman was washing brass. The sound of brass being washed had a particular shape. A low ring as the lota struck the stone, a smaller ring as it lifted, the wet slide of the cloth across the curved metal, then the ring again. She had been hearing the sound of brass being washed in the next room since she was a child. Whichever woman was assigned to do it on any given morning, the sound was the same.

Outside it was raining. It had been raining since the previous evening. The courtyard was bright and grey at once, the way courtyards are in the second hour of a storm. Bright because the storm's first hardness had passed. Grey because the cloud was still low.

Hold your fingers still, Phupphi said. I am almost done with this one.

She held her fingers still. The cone moved into the last curl of the paisley near her thumb. Phupphi sat back, looked at the design, leaned forward, added a single small leaf at the base of the largest fold. The leaf was the kind of thing only Phupphi did. Every paisley Phupphi drew ended with a small leaf no other woman in the family knew to add, and the women in the family had long ago given up trying to figure out where Phupphi had learned it.

Now the other hand.

She gave Phupphi her other hand. She watched Phupphi's hands begin the new paisley. She thought about whether she would be able to climb in the dark with both her hands fresh-mehndied. She thought she could. The henna would dry in two hours. By midnight it would be set enough. By the time she needed to climb, the patterns would be dry against her skin and the dark cloth she would wrap around her hands would not smudge them.

The match had been agreed to three months ago. The boy's family lived in the southern part of the city, near the second river. They had grown rich in the same generation her family had, in a different trade. His name was Ishaaq. He was twenty-eight. Her father had told her, once, that he had a particular interest in horses and had ridden to the Bolan Pass twice with his uncles. He had been to the haveli twice. He had sat in the courtyard once with her father and once with her father and her father's brothers and her older brothers. She had not been in the courtyard either time. She had watched from a jharokha on the upper floor, the way an unmarried daughter watched. She had seen the back of his head and the shoulders of his coat. She had not seen his face. She was not supposed to see his face.

The wedding was set for the dry month after the monsoon ended. Forty-three more days.

For a moment Sahar held her hands very still and let herself feel what was actually happening. In forty-three days she would leave the haveli where she had slept since she was nine. She would not come back. The room she had walked through that morning, the small jharokha she had watched the world from for sixteen years, the corner of the courtyard where she had learned to recognize each woman of the household by her footsteps, the well in the back lane, the smell of the kitchen at dawn — all of it she would leave, and she would go into another haveli on the other side of the city to live among women she had not yet met, to be the wife of a man whose face she had not seen. She would do this because there had never been any question that she would do it. She would do it well, because she had been raised to do it well. She let herself feel this for a moment. Then she let it go.

This one is finer than the last, Phupphi said, not looking up. You sit so still. You always did.

Sahar said nothing. She thought about Phupphi's leaf. It had occurred to her once, a year ago, that the leaf was Phupphi's signature, the way some painters signed their work in a corner with a single small mark. The thought had stayed with her. She wondered now if every mehndi pattern in the household, going back the thirty years Phupphi had been doing them, was signed in this way. Phupphi had drawn paisleys for every woman in the family for thirty years. Every wedding. Every festival. Every birth. The household had worn Phupphi's signature on its hands across thirty years of celebrations.

She did not ask Phupphi about it.

There, Phupphi said. She sat back. She added the small leaf. Done. Don't touch anything for two hours.

Sahar held both hands palm-up in her lap. The henna paste was cool against her skin. Phupphi gathered the cone and the small bowl and the cloth she had been wiping her fingers with, and she stood up. At the doorway she paused.

Sahar, she said, the rain will keep up tonight.

Sahar looked at her.

Yes, Phupphi.

Phupphi watched her for a moment. Then she went out of the room.

Sahar sat with her hands palm-up in her lap for a long time. She listened to the brass being washed in the next room. She listened to the rain in the courtyard. She listened to a child somewhere in the haveli calling for someone whose name she could not hear clearly. She thought about Phupphi's leaf. She thought about the forty-three days. She thought about Ishaaq, who rode to Bolan Pass and whose face she would see for the first time on the night of her wedding.

At the eighth hour she stood up. The henna on her hands was dry. The household had gone to its evening prayers. The household women were in the courtyard, the household men were in the front rooms with the day's last visitors, the household children were being put to bed. The rain was still coming down.

She climbed the narrow stair to the upper floor of the haveli. She went to the small room she had been sleeping in since she was nine. She took down from the wooden chest at the foot of her bed a folded square of dark cloth she had been making for three weeks. She wrapped her hands in dark linen. She drew her odhni up around her head until her face was a shadow inside it. She opened the small window that looked out over the back lane.

It was the fourth night of the rains.

The rooftops of the cloth-sellers' lane ran for six havelis without a gap. She knew this because she had been walking them in her mind for two years, and three weeks ago she had walked them in fact, on a dry night, to be sure her mind had been right.

The rooftops of the cloth-sellers' lane were lower than the rooftops of her own family's quarter. To reach them from her window she had to climb down two stories along the back face of her haveli, cross the back lane on the roof of a stable that had been built into the lane forty years ago and never taken down, climb up the back of a house that belonged to a brass merchant, and then she was on a rooftop two havelis from the library.

She had done it dry, three weeks before, in twenty-eight minutes.

Tonight she did it wet, in monsoon, in thirty-four.

The rain was steady on her shoulders. Her hands were wrapped. Her feet were bare. She had taken off her slippers in her own room and left them at the foot of her bed. Bare feet held the wet stone better than any slipper could.

On the rooftop of the brass merchant's house she stopped and listened. She could hear the city below her, the alleys mumbling to themselves the way alleys did at the ninth hour of a wet night. She could hear, very faintly, the watchman's lantern moving down a side alley two streets away. She did not need to see him to know which alley. He had walked that alley at that hour every night of the rains for thirty years.

She moved.

The library was on the third rooftop along. The library's lower jali, the one that opened from the chamber onto a tiny inner court at the base of the building, was the way in. Two months ago she had gotten the inner-court key from a junior scribe at the family who owned the library. The scribe did not know what she had taken from him. She had returned it to his pocket the same afternoon. He was a young man who would never look back on that afternoon and understand what had happened.

She dropped from the third rooftop into the inner court of the library.

The jali screen was carved sandstone. The mechanism on its lower edge was the brass lock from Lahore. She had been studying its mechanism in her mind for two years. She had never touched it. She touched it now.

It did not yield.

She held the lock and breathed. She had practiced for this. The teacher had told her: the locks of Lahore do not yield in monsoon the way they yield in dry weather. The brass swells. The mechanism catches. You will turn it once and nothing will happen. Then you will breathe. Then you will turn it again, slower, with less force, feeling for the catch. The teacher had said this six weeks ago and Sahar had remembered every word. She remembered them now. She breathed. The pulse in her throat was very high. She put it where she had been taught to put it. She turned the lock again.

It gave.

She lifted the panel and slipped through.

The chamber was lit by a single oil lamp on a low writing table at the center of the room. The lamp burned because the keeper kept it burning. He had told a guest, once, that he liked the chamber to feel inhabited even when no one was in it. The light made the manuscripts feel less alone, he had said. She had heard this story from her father, who had heard it from a member of the family who owned the library. The chamber felt less alone now. The chamber felt watched.

She knew which stand the manuscript was on. She had known for two years.

The manuscript was bound in cotton cloth and tied with a silk cord. She untied the cord. She folded back the cloth. She opened the manuscript on the stand.

The page she wanted was the eighth from the front. The composition began with a long opening invocation in Persian and moved into the raag's body at the eighth page. She had known this for two years from the descriptions her father had read aloud to her older brothers when he thought she was not listening, and from the things her father's friend the music teacher had said in the courtyard when he thought no women were paying attention.

She placed her hand on the page before she took it.

She had not planned to do this. The plan was to take the page quickly, retie the knot, leave. But her hand was on the page now and she did not move it for a long moment. The parchment was thinner than she had expected. It was warmer than she had expected. A hundred and twenty years of someone else's silence was under her palm.

She took the page.

She closed the manuscript. She refolded the cloth. She retied the silk cord in the same knot the keeper had tied that morning. She had practiced this knot for two years, on a square of cloth she kept in the chest at the foot of her bed. Her hands worked on the knot without her thinking about them, which was good, because she was thinking about the missing page now folded against her ribs.

The manuscript on its stand looked exactly as it had looked when she came in. It had thirty-seven leaves now where it had thirty-eight before. Nothing else had changed.

She folded the page she had taken into a small square of waxed cloth she had brought for this purpose. She slid the cloth into a fold at her waist. She crossed the chamber to the jali. She lifted the panel. She slipped through. She lowered the panel behind her. She turned the brass lock back into its closed position.

On the rooftop of the brass merchant's house, climbing back across, she allowed herself one breath of acknowledgment. Two years of preparation. The page was at her ribs. She had not been caught. The watchman was somewhere two streets away walking his alley. The household was asleep. The city did not know.

She crossed the stable roof. She climbed the back face of her own haveli. She slipped through the window into her own room.

It was the tenth hour of the night. The rain was still coming down. The household had been asleep for an hour.

She unwrapped the dark cloth from her hands. She unwound the odhni from her head. She took the page from the waxed cloth and laid it flat on the small wooden chest at the foot of her bed.

The page lay in the oil-lamp light from her own room's small brass lamp. The script on it was in Shahmukhi, written by a hand that had been dead for a hundred and twenty years. The composition was the eighth page of Raag Sohni-e-Pinjra. It was the page where the opening invocation ended and the body of the raag began.

She did not yet know how to read it.

Phupphi's signature was on the back of her hand. The leaf at the base of the largest fold. She looked at it. She did not yet know what it meant.

She would learn both. She had a teacher.

The teacher lived in a back room of a house in the spice quarter, three lanes from the well.

Sahar had found her by accident, the way these things happen. Eighteen months before, on an errand for her mother to a particular fabric merchant in the spice quarter, she had paused at a doorway to fasten the strap of her slipper. From the doorway she had heard a woman singing very softly, alone, behind a closed jali. The woman was singing a sargam phrase Sahar had never heard before. The phrase was not from any of the raags Sahar's father's music teacher taught in their courtyard. It was older. It was something else.

Sahar had stood at the doorway long enough to memorize the phrase.

That night she had hummed it in her room. The next afternoon she had hummed it again, to make sure she had it. The afternoon after that she had walked back to the doorway in the spice quarter and stood there for an hour, hearing nothing, and gone home.

The fourth time she went, she went at the eighth hour of a moonless night and she knocked on the door.

A young man opened it. He was the woman's grandson. He looked at Sahar in her plain street odhni, drawn close against her face. He asked her what she wanted. She sang the phrase.

He stood for a moment in the doorway. Then he stepped aside and let her in.

The teacher was sixty-eight years old. She had been a thief for forty-six years. She had her own page from the same library Sahar would later steal from, taken on a different night of a different monsoon week, in 1779. Her teacher had been a thief in turn. Her teacher's teacher had been a thief. The line went back at least four generations, and the teacher said it probably went further than that but the four generations were the ones she knew the names of.

The teacher had not taken a student in twenty-two years.

She took Sahar.

Tonight Sahar sat across from the teacher with the page on a low wooden table between them. The teacher's room was lit by a single oil lamp on the same table. The teacher wore a heavy chadar of undyed wool pulled close around her shoulders, the way she always wore it. Her face was suggested in the shadow under the shawl. Her hands were the hands of a woman who had washed brass for sixty years and held manuscripts for forty-six.

You took the eighth page, the teacher said.

Yes.

Good. I took the twelfth. We have to know which pages we are missing. Anyone who reads from this raag will find the eighth page gone. They will replace it from another manuscript or they will write around it. But the missing twelfth page is mine and the missing eighth page is yours.

Yes, Bibi-ji.

The teacher placed her wrinkled hand on top of Sahar's. The silver ring on her smallest finger caught the lamp. Sahar's mehndi was still dark on the back of her hand. The teacher's hand sat on top of Sahar's hand for a long time.

You did not panic at the lock.

The lock took longer than I had expected.

Yes. The brass swells in monsoon.

Yes.

The teacher lifted her hand. She placed her fingertip on a line of the sargam notation on Sahar's stolen page.

Read this line.

Sahar read it. She read it the way the teacher had been teaching her to read it. The teacher listened. The teacher's eyes were closed under the shawl.

Again.

Sahar read it again.

Again. Slower.

Sahar read it again, slower.

The teacher opened her eyes. The shawl shifted slightly. The lamp caught the edge of her face. She looked at Sahar for a long time.

When the eighth page is sung the way the dead hand meant it to be sung, the teacher said, the room knows. The lamp does not gutter. The walls listen.

Sahar did not speak.

That is what they took from us. Not the music. Music is everywhere. What they took was the room that listens when a woman sings.

Yes, Bibi-ji.

The men who wrote down this raag a hundred and twenty years ago, the teacher said, did not believe a woman's voice could carry it. They believed the divine would not bend down toward a woman's mouth. They wrote the raag down so it could be taught, and they taught it only to their sons, and their sons taught it only to their sons, and on a moonless night a hundred and twenty years ago a woman walked into a library and took a page of it, because the only way to learn what they would not teach us was to read it ourselves.

Sahar listened.

The boy whose face you have not seen.

Yes, Bibi-ji.

You will marry him.

Sahar drew a breath. She did not speak immediately. She let the teacher's words sit. The teacher was telling her her life now — not the wedding, but the forty-six years after. She let herself feel it. The room with the door closed. The candle she would light when the household was asleep. The voice she would carry alone through every season of a marriage to a man whose face she had not yet seen. The teacher was offering her a life that would look from the outside like every other life and would be, inside, something else entirely.

Yes, she said.

And you will sing this raag in your husband's house, in a back room, in the deep night, for the rest of your life. You will teach it to your daughter. You will teach it to your daughter's daughter. You will be a wife and you will be a thief and the household will never know.

Yes.

The household never knows, the teacher said. That is how this lineage has lasted four generations. The third woman in our lineage was caught. Her husband found her with her teacher's page. He did not turn her in to the kotwal. He drowned her himself, in the small tank in his own courtyard, before the morning prayers. Her teacher had to take her next student before the body had been carried out. There are houses in this city that drown their women quietly, so the lineage runs in the deepest part of the night.

Yes.

The teacher looked at Sahar's hands. She looked at the mehndi on the back of Sahar's right hand.

Who did this for you?

My Phupphi.

The teacher looked at the leaf at the base of the largest fold.

She did not say anything. She looked at the leaf for a long moment. She looked at Sahar.

Then she said, Read the line again.

Sahar read the line again.

On the fifth night of the rains, the household had been asleep for an hour.

Sahar sat in her own room, on the small Persian rug at the foot of her bed, with the page from the manuscript on the low chest in front of her. The single brass lamp in the corner of the room was burning. The rain had stopped. The night was very still.

She had been studying the page with the teacher for four weeks. She had been studying it alone in her own room for four nights. She had read every line of it under her breath, mouthing the notes, until she could read it the way the teacher said it should be read, the way the dead hand that had written it a hundred and twenty years ago had meant it to be read.

She had not yet sung it aloud.

She had not sung anything aloud in her life that was not what the women of the household sang together on festival mornings.

She placed her hands flat on the page. The mehndi paisley was still dark on the back of her right hand. Phupphi's leaf was at the base of the largest fold.

She closed her eyes.

She opened her eyes.

She drew breath.

The first note of the sargam came out of her so quietly that it was barely a note at all. It was the shape of a note. It was a breath given a pitch.

The second note was a little louder.

The third note was a real note.

She sang the line.

Something in the room moved that she could not have named. The lamp in the corner held steady. It had been guttering very slightly before she began. It was not guttering now. The air in the small room had become a different air. Her chest had opened in a way her chest had never opened. The sound was leaving her body and the body was different for having let it leave.

She sang the next line.

She sang the next.

The page in front of her grew larger and smaller in the lamp-light. The room around her receded. The household around her receded. The city around her receded. There was only the raag and the sargam notation on the page and the dead hand that had written them and her own voice carrying them up into a chamber that had not held them in a hundred and twenty years. The walls listened. She felt the walls listen. The teacher had been right.

She sang for a long time.

When she stopped, she did not stop because she was tired or because she had reached the end of the page. She stopped because the lamp had begun to gutter. The oil was running low. She had been singing for an hour and a half.

She looked around the room. The room was very quiet. The household had not woken. The household had heard nothing.

She blew out the lamp.

She lay down on the small Persian rug at the foot of her bed and did not sleep until the first light came in through the window.

The watchman walked his alleys at dusk the way he always did, his brass lantern swinging at his side, his lathi held loose in his other hand. On the sixth night of the rains he walked the cloth-sellers' lane. He looked at the rooftops. He looked at the doorway of the library. He looked at the wet stone of the alley.

There was nothing to see.

He kept walking.

At the well in the small square behind the spice-sellers' bazaar, three women were filling their pots in the dawn light. They were talking. They were talking about the thief. The thief had not come for a night now. The thief had not come for two nights. The thief had come on the third night of the rains and the fourth night of the rains and possibly the fifth night, though the keeper of the library would not say. The thief was a man, the women agreed. A young one. Possibly from somewhere else.

The thief would come again, they said. Thieves always came again.

They did not know what had been taken. The keeper of the library had not yet told the family that owned the library, though by the sixth day the family knew something had happened because the keeper was a smaller man than he had been the week before. The family would learn what was missing within another week. The city would never learn.

In the haveli of one of the wealthy families of the cloth-sellers' quarter, on the morning of the sixth day, the women of the household were preparing the daughter for her wedding. The wedding was forty-one days away. The mehndi was being prepared. Phupphi was in the courtyard, mixing the henna paste in a small brass bowl. The daughter sat on a low takhat with her hands palm-up in her lap.

Phupphi sat down across from her. She took the daughter's right hand. She held it for a moment longer than usual.

Sahar, she said.

Yes, Phupphi.

Phupphi looked at her. Then her eyes went, briefly, to the leaf at the base of the largest fold on the back of Sahar's hand — the leaf she had drawn there four days before. She looked at it for a moment. Then she looked back at Sahar's face.

She did not say what she had thought of saying.

She lifted the cone. She began the new paisley. The cold of the paste, the heat of the daughter's skin under it.

In the next room a woman was washing brass. The rain had stopped during the night. The bazaar was waking. The water-women were at the well. The watchman was at home, asleep. The keeper of the library was sitting at his low writing table with the manuscript of Raag Sohni-e-Pinjra in his lap, counting its leaves for the seventh morning in a row. Thirty-seven, every morning. Always thirty-seven.

In a back room of a house in the spice quarter, three lanes from the well, a sixty-eight-year-old woman in a heavy chadar of undyed wool sat at a low table with a single oil lamp burning, even though it was morning. On the table in front of her was a page from the same manuscript. The page she had taken in 1779.

The two pages were a hundred and twenty years apart, and two streets apart, and they had both been written by the same dead hand, and the raag that ran from one to the other had begun, the night before, in a third room, in the voice of a third woman, for the first time in four generations.

The city did not know.

The city was at its wells, at its bazaars, at its watch-posts, at its workshops, at its courtyards, at its kitchens. The city was talking about the thief. The thief would come again, the city said. Thieves always came again.

The city had always been right about thieves.