![]() ![]() Chaudrey Zawar Hussein always seemed comically unsuited to the vehicle, a tall man with steel-gray hair, never smiling. Despite the alarming state of the farm’s finances-brought home to him over many afternoons spent sweating through deviously knotted accounts, woven by Munshi Zawar Hussein as a screen to hide his thefts-Sohel had bought himself a used jeep, not a sleek vehicle that would impress the locals, but a boy’s toy, a jacked-up four-by-four with a ragtop. Sohel drove in to Cawnapur with the farm manager, Chaudrey Zawar Hussein, to see the superintendent of police about the matter. Testing Mian Abdalah’s grandson, Sohel, who had returned from college in America six months earlier and moved onto the estate, they had been amusing themselves and bearding him by cutting out lengths of the wire that passed near their village and selling them for copper somewhere across the Indus. The Chandio village sat far from the road at the back end of the estate, buried in an expanse of reeds and derelict land, dunes that had never been cleared. Now, for the second time in a month, the Chandios had stolen a section of the telephone wire, which served for all the area as a symbol of the Dunyapur estate’s preëminence. A single wire ran many forlorn miles from Cawnapur city through the flat tan landscape of South Punjab, there on the edge of the Great Indian Desert, then alongside the packed-dirt farm tracks laid out in geometric lines, and finally entered the grounds of a small, handsome residence built in the style of a British colonial dak bungalow. Even now, thirty years later, there was no other line nearby. They also pushed out a telephone line to his farmhouse, the first phone on any farm in the district. Back in the nineteen-fifties, when old Mian Abdullah Abdalah rose to serve as Pakistan’s Federal Secretary Establishment, a knee-bending district administration metalled the road leading from the Cawnapur railway station to his Dunyapur estate.
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