Author Bio 

KAMILA SHAMSIE

CHURAIL

My father migrated to England with me weeks after I was born to protect us from my mother, who had died giving birth to me. My cousin, Zainab, informed me of my starring role in this turn of events when I was six years old and my father was preparing to move us to London from Manchester, where we’d been living with Zainab’s parents. It’s important to hear the truth, Zainab told me, with the solemnity of an eleven-year-old who doesn’t know when she might ever again see her young cousin. There were four miscarriages before I came along, and after the second the doctors advised against further pregnancies. My mother talked of adoption, but my father was insistent that he must have a son of his own blood, and the universe responded as it does when men refuse to understand what nature is trying to tell them: it gave him the wrong kind of child, and it took away his wife.
       It was summer. We were sitting on the floor of Zainab’s bedroom, which she’d consented to share with me since I was old enough to be moved out of the crib next to my aunt’s bedside. Serena Williams and One Direction looked down at us as the July rain blurred the world outside in its predictable way. Zainab took my hand in hers. The next bit was the most important, she said. I was only days old when my father heard a woman’s voice calling his name from the peepul tree that grew across the street from our home. He looked up at the first call, strode to the door at the second, and was bloodless with terror, immobilised, when no third call came. My wet-nurse saw it all, and she was the one to spread it through our village that my mother had become a churail.
       Women who died in childbirth often became churail, and were known for their fondness for living in peepul trees and calling out to their victims in the sweetest of voices. A misty dark night was the most dangerous time to be enticed by a churail because you might see only the beauty of her face and miss the telltale sign of feet turned backwards at the ankle. The other clue to the churail was that she would always call her victim’s name twice ‒ never once, never three times. She would lure men to her hiding place and keep them there, draining them of their life force, until they were old and spent. When she released them back into the world they’d find decades had gone by and everyone they knew was dead, so they would end their lives alone and unloved.
       Basically, Rip van Winkle is the story of a man spirited away by a churail but with the sex censored, Zainab said, briefly her usual self, trying to throw the word ‘sex’ in my direction at any opportunity just to see me squirm. Then she turned serious again: When your father says he’ll never go back to Pakistan because it’s a terrible place, don’t believe him. He won’t go back because he’s afraid the churail is waiting for him.

We moved from Manchester to London when I was six, from Wembley to Queen’s Park when I was eight, and from Queen’s Park to Kensington when I was nine. With the move from one Kensington property to the next, my father’s life finally caught up with his ambitions when I was twelve. He bought a house with a garden ‒ the seventh largest in London, six places down from Buckingham Palace ‒ and said we would never move again. You can make friends now, he said, as though it were the change in addresses rather than the awkwardness and insecurity of my character that had impeded my social life. He sent me to the most expensive school he could find and told me not to mix with the wrong kind of girl, by which I knew he meant other Pakistanis. He had huge disdain for his brother who had moved to England without any interest in becoming English ‒ if you enter someone’s home as a guest you must find ways of being pleasing to them, he liked to say. His way of being pleasing to the English was to take up squash, hire an accent coach, become a donor to the arts and a member of a venerable men-only club. But his attempts to showcase me as the perfect immigrant daughter resulted in disappointment: the piano teacher, the tennis coach, the French au pairs left only the faintest impression, quickly smudged.
       One day he came home to find me in the kitchen, and although I wasn’t doing anything other than bending down to the vegetable drawer in our fridge on my way to assembling a sandwich the sight of me made him cry out in rage.
       No matter what I do you’ll always look like a peasant working in the fields, he said.

And then a miracle occurred. When I was sixteen, Zainab moved to London for an investment banking job after a glittering turn at university. She was everything my father wanted me to be: stylish, skilled in small-talk, ambitious, opening bat for the City Ladies Cricket Club. He encouraged her to treat our home as though it were hers, seemed pleased whenever he saw her walk through the front door, laughed at her jokes, asked about her life. I couldn’t hate her for it, and she quickly took up her old position as the shining centre of my life. In return, she appeared to find genuine pleasure in my company, which made me relax and talk openly with her in a way I never did with anyone else.
       Her reappearance brought back an old memory, and one afternoon I asked her about the churail.
       She typed something into her phone as we reclined on adjoining garden chairs under the umbrella on an unnaturally hot autumn day.
       Listen! These are all the circumstances under which a woman can become a churail.
       Dying in childbirth, that was the first. Also, dying during pregnancy.
       Dying during the period of lying-in (we had to look up ‘lying-in’, which didn’t mean a lazy Sunday morning). Dying in bed.
       Dying while on your period. Dying in any unnatural or tragic way. Dying after a life during which the woman has experienced abuse at the hands of a man. Dying after a life during which the woman has experienced abuse at the hands of her in-laws. Dying after a life of little or no sexual fulfilment.
       Well! Zainab said.
       Soon we were shouting out names of dead women who were clearly now churail: Marilyn Monroe (died in bed); Zainab’s one-time neighbour Aunty Rubina (no sexual fulfilment, obviously); Amy Winehouse (unnatural death); Carrie Fisher (tragic death, because no matter how Princess Leia dies it’s tragic); Princess Diana (in-laws).
       Later that day, my father asked what Zainab and I had been laughing about so hysterically he had to close the windows to his study. He was on his way out when he said that, front-door keys in his hand, and I knew the remark was a rebuke phrased as a question but even so I chose to answer it:
       Churail.
       He slipped the keys into his pocket, but not before I heard them jangle in his usually steady hand.
       Superstitious nonsense, he said, and departed, leaving me alone. We had dispensed with au pairs when I turned thirteen, and instead he had cameras all over the house, presumably so he could replay the footage of any disaster that might kill or maim or assault me while he was out. This was the sort of thing I thought often and never said out loud, except to Zainab.

The next day Zainab texted to say my father had banned her from seeing me any more. When I went weeping to my father, he said, Exactly the kind of bad influence I’ve tried my whole life to keep you away from.
       A tiny part of me was relieved that I wouldn’t have to watch him around Zainab and know he wasn’t incapable of love, just that he was incapable of loving me.

My father’s version of our migration story was this: when my mother died, my uncle called from Manchester and said his business was expanding, he could do with my father’s help and my aunt would raise me with Zainab as my older sister. And so my father came to England, mostly for my sake. It was only once he’d arrived that he saw two things: (a) the country he had left was a dump to which he intended never to return, and (b) he could become a rich man here, but not while attached to his brother’s mini-cab company. There were several failed ventures before he made his first million from a marriage app targeting a Muslim clientele (‘Discounts on venue hire, catering, car service and outfit tailoring for all our satisfied customers!’).

Why didn’t you ever marry again? I asked when I could speak to him once more. Didn’t you want a son? Sometimes there were short-term girlfriends in his life, but I was certain that most of his relations with women were uncomplicatedly transactional.
       Not once I understood there are other ways to leave a legacy, he said. He was a man who liked to stamp his name on things ‒ university scholarships, renovated theatre foyers, museum wings.
       And what am I? I said.
       He switched on the TV and turned his attention to Dancing with the Stars.

I continued to see Zainab, but furtively. She didn’t set foot in our house again until the following summer when she entered no further than the hallway, front door open behind her, and asked me to let my father know she would like to talk to him.
       It was the summer of floods in Pakistan, devastation without precedent. Zainab had quit her investment banking job, and was on her way to Pakistan to help with flood relief. She told my father she had come to see him, hat in hand (she was wearing a fedora, which she doffed in his direction as she spoke), to ask for a donation to the aid organisation she would be working with. His village was underwater, she said.
       My village is Kensington and Chelsea, he said, and turned on his heels, still nimble in his movements despite his increased girth.
       Your family has lost everything, she called out. Your uncles, your cousins.
       He didn’t falter as he continued down the hall to his study, and I remembered the only time I had seen his body betray the tiniest disruption to his psyche.

I walked Zainab down the street to the nearest cash machine so I could withdraw the maximum amount my debit card allowed, and our conversation returned to the churail, who had led first to my exile from Pakistan, then Zainab’s expulsion from my home.
       She’s the victim of patriarchy who enacts revenge on men, I said. I guess that’s kind of feminist?
       Except she’s evil, Zainab said. And she’s evil because she’s attractive and without sexual restraint.
       She’s a manifestation of patriarchy’s guilt, I said.
       She allows guilty men to cast themselves as the victims, Zainab said.
       And even when they’re the victims they make themselves sex-gods with a fifty-year-long erection that a woman of unearthly beauty can’t get enough of.
       Zainab laughed and laughed.
       Be this version of yourself more, she said.
       Seriously, there are no queer churail?
       Yes, like that, like that.

I told Zainab that when I turned eighteen I would go to our family’s village and visit my mother’s grave. But when she returned from Pakistan it was with the news that the graveyard had been washed away in the flooding, along with every home in the village. Even the peepul tree, she said, even that had been destroyed. She placed a green-brown section of branch in my hand, six or seven inches long, with small heart-shaped leaves growing from it. This was the only thing I could bring back for you, she said. Think of it as a climate refugee.
       A climate refugee in a hostile environment, I said, knowing that peepul trees can’t grow in England. They want sun and humidity to thrive. Even so, I planted the cutting in the corner of our garden where there was the most sunlight. It was still summer in England, and hotter than any summer before. In the next weeks it grew a few centimetres, and then autumn came, and winter after, and though the peepul tree didn’t die it stagnated, a stubby sad thing that the gardener wanted to uproot until our cook from Sri Lanka told him it had religious significance. My father was unaware of this piece of his village growing in the English garden he treated as entirely ornamental for visitors to look at admiringly from the windows of the house.
       The following year, the summer heat came earlier, more ferociously. By June we already had hosepipe bans in London and the grass in the garden was burnt, the trees wilted. One weekend morning only a trickle of water came from the kitchen tap. We thought at first it was the drought, but every other tap gushed water. My father said he would call a plumber and I thought no more of it until I heard my father roaring my name from a corner of the garden I hadn’t walked to in months.
       The peepul was five or so feet high, its heart-shaped leaves thick and glossy. The plumber had his phone in his hand, one of those apps open that identifies plants. He called it ‘invasive’; he said it could send its roots deep and far in search of water. It had entered our pipes, might already be burrowing its way into the foundation of the house.
       How is this here? my father said.
       I told him Zainab had brought it, clipped from the peepul tree across the street from our house.
       His face! Like a man receiving news of a sickness so old and deep in him that there’s no way of cutting it out without excising his organs with it.
       The plumber, reading off the screen, said we would have to call in an expert to remove it. Cut down the plant and the roots would continue to grow. Hard to know what damage had already been done.
       That night my father stood in the rarely used drawing room, looking out at the seventh largest garden in London. We’d been leaving the windows open at night to let in the breeze but as I walked through the house in search of him I saw that each one was closed and locked. I went to stand beside him.
       Do you see her? he said.
       It was a spindly little thing, with nothing of the magnificence of the broad-trunked peepul I’d seen in pictures, with their aerial roots, their great height. We stood there a long time, the only sound his breath, strange and ragged. He didn’t seem aware of my presence, appeared not to notice that I hadn’t answered his question. The moon slid out from cloud; the breeze stirred the branches and leaves. I saw a slender-limbed figure hold out her arms towards the house. I heard a voice say a name, twice.
       My name.
       My father looked at me.
       Very calmly, as if I had been waiting for this all my life, I walked towards the French windows and unbolted them. My father’s hand clamped onto my wrist.
       She won’t like it if you do that, I said, and he moved his hand away as though my skin were poison.
       I stepped into the garden. Dead grass beneath my bare feet. Across the burnt expanse the tree waited. Perhaps I would find my cousin Zainab hiding in the darkness. Perhaps I would find the real truth of the churail, a creature much older than the myths men wove around her, desperate to be the centre of her story.
       One step and then another and another. I stopped, sat on the grass, and hugged my legs to my chest, my face turned up to the sky. There was no rush. I would sit there awhile, and my father would stand and watch me while the echo of the churail’s voice burrowed deep inside him, shaking every foundation.