Punjabi moon

The 2002 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize winner.
There were more than 100 entries from a total of eight countries. The runners-up were Clementine Cecil, Gregory Lascelles, Jonathan Ledgard, Rory Stewart and Ben Yarde-Buller.

Just below us we could hear the chowkidar tut-tut-tutting his disapproval on the ground with his stick, pacing up and down, tut, tut, tut, while we two sat together on the flat-topped roof above, our backs to the Lahore skyline. Behind us the plains of the Punjab had been swallowed whole by a syrupy blackness, the villages, the wheat fields and beyond that the border with India. We were sitting in darkness.

Tut. Tut. Tut. The chowkidar continued his agitated walk. He was distressed at the scandal unfolding on the roof of ‘Aunty’s’ house. We were in Pakistan, and here unmarried men and women do not mix alone.

‘What’s this bloody bastard doing?’ snapped my lover, irritated that we were being spied on. So he moved across the roof, leant against a wall of unfinished brickwork and spread his coat on the ground so I wouldn’t get dust on my purple silk skirt. He told me of the river on his land. His father used to take him there at night when he was a boy and tell him and his older brother Rashid to swim across it. ‘Toughening us up,’ he said, clenching his shoulder muscles, then laughing.

He told me of his earliest ancestors from Kashmir, two brothers, thieves and horse-rustlers, who fled the Kashmiri valley to the Punjab plains below. And he told me of a great Muslim grandfather of his in pre-partition India who fell in love with a Hindu girl. She ran away from her family to marry him. He took her to his village and the next day he sent her into the fields where everyone could see her.