by Omair Ahmad
‘Bolo Allah ek hai, Jamaal,’ the Maulana said playfully. Say that God is one. With the finger in his hand, Jamaal did not know what to say. He liked the genial face of the Maulana and his soft voice, but he was not used to this.
He looked around, searching for his mother, but Shaista was in the kitchen making tea. Instead it was Rafiq who said, ‘Bolo, beta.’
With only the questionable authority of his father to guide him, Jamaal dropped his eyes to the floor and mumbled, ‘Allah ek hai,’ while slowly letting go of the Maulana’s hand.
But the imam grabbed the young boy’s finger again, holding it softly and asking, ‘What did you say?’
It could have been a threat, but spoken so softly, and with a gentle smile, it became a game. And Jamaal knew all about games.
‘Allah ek hai,’ he said, in a stronger voice, and when Rafiq laughed softly, appreciatively, Jamaal started saying it repeatedly, excitedly, exclaiming ‘Allah ek hai! Allah ek hai!’ as he danced around the room, his hand free now, but his right index finger held up triumphantly, pointing to the roof, and the unseen heavens beyond.
Shaista looked in from the doorway and, noticing an odd confederacy between the men, caught Rafiq’s eye and gestured him to come to the kitchen. He would serve tea to the Maulana, as she excused herself from their company.
After that Rafiq became more regular with his pre-dawn prayers. Not that the Maulana came home every time afterwards, but once every few weeks Rafiq would invite him over, winning some time with his son.
It was odd, but it appeared to him—he allowed himself to believe—that after this Shaista began to address him differently. As if by playing, and winning, a difficult hand in the game between them, he had finally gained some respect. It was not deference, but his existence seemed to have taken some shape, and she had made a little space for it in her life.
In the pleasure of this contentment Rafiq lost sight of the things he needed to speak to Shaista about, or maybe it had become even more impossible.
It was natural, through this, for Rafiq to think that prayer would give him resolve. But at the morning prayers he found none within himself. Till one day, under the gathering storm of the politics afflicting the country, he thought he found some answers, but also other reasons to do nothing.
There was a group of young men speaking to the imam before the prayers began, and afterwards, they moved to intercept some of the faithful as they made to leave. Rafiq easily recognized some of the men who, like him, stopped to join the group: Rahmatullah sahib, Javed Habib, Mohsin Ahmed, Waris Abidi. They were all teachers. It was Maulana Qayoom who began the discussion.
‘You are all familiar with the Emergency?’ the imam asked in his soft voice.
It was a ridiculous question, and Javed almost laughed. ‘Maulana sahib, we do live in the world, how could we be unaware of the Emergency? The whole of the country is under the rule of Mrs Gandhi’s Congress and the leaders of all the rest of the political parties are being put in jail.’
‘A good thing, too,’ Mohsin said. ‘What this country needs is development and not demonstrations.’
One of the serious young men flanking the Maulana cut in: ‘You have no idea of what you are talking about.’
‘What do you mean?’ Mohsin bridled. The man was at least a decade younger than Mohsin, and sounded like he was from out of town. ‘Who are these people, Maulana sahib?’
Maulana Qayoom had also been ruffled by the sharp intervention, but he only said, ‘These are some friends from Delhi. Do listen.’ But he still gave the young man a severe look.
‘The woman has gone insane,’ the young man said. He had moderated his tone, but anger burned in his eyes.
‘Softly, Ahmed,’ one of the other men cautioned, the only one with a beard among them, although it was clearly a recent addition to his face. He put a hand on the angry young man’s shoulder, and turned to address Rafiq and the rest of the people from the mohalla. ‘You’ll have to forgive his anger. Ahmed believes strongly, but it is a difficult subject.’
Taking a deep breath, he asked, ‘You have heard of the nasbandi programme?’
And this time nobody answered, although one or two of them shifted uneasily. The government’s vasectomy initiative was not a comfortable topic of discussion.
‘I presume you have,’ the man continued. ‘Well, under the Emergency the government is pushing it through by all means. Since there is strict censorship and because all the opposition politicians are in jail, there is little news of it, and nobody to raise the issue.’
‘What does it matter?’ Mohsin asked. He was still angry at the way he had been addressed. ‘If people want to get their tubes tied, what does it matter to us? It isn’t as if India suffers from a lack of children.’
‘It is forbidden, that is why it matters,’ Ahmed cut in heatedly. ‘It is haraam. Haraam. It is God, and God alone, who determines who is to be born and who is to die.’
Mohsin made to rise. ‘I think it’s time for me to go.’
Again it was Maulana Qayoom who intervened. ‘Please, Mohsin sahib, please stay. This is important.’
Nobody had heard the imam ask for anything before, and maybe it was just the surprise that made them pay attention.
The bearded man sighed and said, ‘I’m sorry, this is a matter of strong emotion. My name is Qamruddin, and I used to be an anaesthesiologist at a hospital in Ghaziabad, just outside Delhi. A month ago I was told that we were to perform a heavy load of operations over the next few days. We performed twenty vasectomies the first day, and it was only afterwards, when I was going through the paperwork, that I realized all the men were Muslim. When I went to the recovery ward to talk to them, not one of them knew about the operation that had been performed on them. They had just been picked up by the District Magistrate and carted over for a “check up”. When I confronted the doctor, he told me that the order had come from the government. All officials are being assigned a quota—they have to ensure a fixed number of nasbandis are performed in the areas under their supervision.’
Qamruddin added, ‘It is the poor that are being targeted, the poor and Muslims. Who will speak up for them? When I complained to the doctor he said we had a surplus of poor people and Muslims in India. This would take care of poverty and Muslims in one go. That was before he remembered that I was a Muslim as well.’
There was a fraught silence, until one of the men from the mohalla said, ‘Maybe it will all blow over. We haven’t received any reports here.’
‘You will,’ Qamruddin answered heavily, ‘you will. And then you’ll have to decide what to do.’
Maulana Qayoom spoke now. ‘Many of you are government employed. If it comes to a choice between your salary and standing by the people of your faith, I hope God will show you a way.’
The discussion continued for a while, but one by one everybody left, suitably serious. Qamruddin, Ahmed and the two other men with them left as well to catch the faithful at another mosque. It was then that Rafiq asked Maulana Qayoom, ‘Is contraception haraam, Maulana sahib?’
The maulana cocked his head and thought before he replied. ‘In this case, definitely. Not just because it is being done by deceit and force, but also because the idea behind it is false. It is God that provides for people. The richest often destroy their wealth, or a calamity takes it away from them; only God can give to the poorest, and guide them to salvation. It isn’t our right to halt a life for that. We must trust in God, submit to His Will, that is Islam.’
‘So it is haraam?’ Rafiq persisted.
‘Not in all cases,’ the Maulana replied. ‘Not if it endangers the mother’s life, or something like that.’
And Rafiq wanted to say something then, something about Shaista, he wanted to ask for help, but Maulana Qayoom was now asking him a question: ‘And you, what will you do? The Alvi College receives government funding.’
‘I will act as a Muslim,’ Rafiq mumbled, and rose to flee, knowing that he wouldn’t. That he wouldn�
�t have the strength to tell Shaista what the Maulana had said. Even religion did not give him the courage to face her and tell her that nothing justified her insistence on having another child, not at the risk of her own death. Islam disapproved.
As for that other thing, the nasbandi programme, Rafiq became principled through no fault of his own. When the government announced that teachers’ salaries would only be given when they had met their ‘quota’, when they had ensured that the required number of men submitted to the scalpel, there was genuine outrage, and there was a standoff. The government cut off funding to the Alvi College, and the teachers’ union decided to take a voluntary pay cut proportional to the amount of funding. Some donors pooled in a little more money, and the college managed to limp along. Other measures of the Emergency too moved forward, but haltingly, and by the time they touched Moazzamabad most of their force had been spent.
In either case Mrs Gandhi and her travails were of no real concern to Rafiq; he had troubles of his own. Three months before Jamaal was to turn five, Shaista became pregnant once again.
Dr Srivastava took a moment to remember them, and then immediately lost his temper. ‘Are you mad?’ he said to Rafiq. ‘Do you know that she almost died last time?’
Rafiq had to swallow his anger before he could speak. ‘It has been five years.’
‘Please,’ Dr Srivastava snapped. ‘I know how long it has been. This is in my own handwriting,’ he said, pointing at the file he had open on his desk.
After a moment the doctor spoke again, wearily this time, in defeat. ‘You’ll have to think of aborting the baby.’
‘No,’ Shaista said.
‘Ma’am,’ Dr Srivastava began, trying to reason with her, but Shaista wouldn’t let him.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No one is going to kill my baby.’ And she rose to leave, pulling Rafiq along in her wake.
Two days later Ahmed Saeed dropped in to their wing of Shabbir Manzil. Jamaal answered the door, and immediately hugged one of Ahmed Saeed’s legs. ‘Toffee, toffee,’ he cried.
‘What do we have here?’ Ahmed Saeed asked gravely. ‘Am I being held for ransom, and that too by Jimmy the pirate, the companion of Brave Sindbad of the wild seas?’
Jamaal, who didn’t know the word ransom, but did know Sindbad and, more importantly, knew that Ahmed Saeed never went anywhere without a sweet on his person, nodded vigorously.
Ahmed Saeed fumbled in one pocket, and then another, until one hand emerged holding the distinct orange, brown and gold wrapping of Jamaal’s favourite chocolate toffee. Patting the delighted child on his head, Ahmed Saeed said, ‘Now go tell your parents that your Bade-abbu is here.’
Rafiq was already there, extending his hand. ‘As salaam aleikum, Ahmed Saeed sahib,’ he said. ‘You’ll have tea?’
‘Wa aliekum as salaam, Rafiq,’ Ahmed Saeed replied, and nodded.
Shaista got the tea ready, and brought out a box of biscuits that Ahmed Saeed refused to touch at first, but he took one after much coaxing. Satisfied, Shaista left to run after her son.
‘Rafiq,’ Ahmed Saeed said when they were alone, ‘Anil tells me that Shaista is expecting again?’
And when Rafiq didn’t reply, Ahmed Saeed explained that he meant Anil Srivastava, the doctor. ‘I’ve known Anil since my schooldays; he was a year senior to me. Bright chap. We always knew he’d do well.’ Then, interrupting the hearty confidence, he added, ‘I met him last night at the club and he mentioned that he was worried.’
‘Contraception is forbidden in Islam. It is forbidden, haraam,’ Rafiq said, the words coming out hard and angry, in the tone that the young man from Delhi, Ahmed, had used a year ago. He hadn’t expected to say it, but now in his agitation, this was what came out. Mumbling, he added, ‘It is our responsibility to multiply according to God’s command.’
Ahmed Saeed was so nonplussed that he nearly dropped his half-eaten biscuit. He had never imagined hearing something like this from Rafiq.
As Ahmed Saeed floundered for a response, Rafiq rose from his chair and picked up the newspaper. Bringing it back to the table, he opened it to the second page and pointed to the top right-hand corner of the page. ‘Riot in Fatehgarh,’ he read out. ‘Three dead.’ Pointing to an article on the facing page he read, ‘Meerut, 14 injured.’
Unwilling to stop lest the trembling of his lips became apparent to Ahmed Saeed, he said, ‘Nobody seems to care when a Muslim dies, but one more Muslim child and the world will come to an end! That is what happened with the nasbandi programme, that’s what it was all about although everyone pretends it was about something else. A plot to make sure that there are no more Muslims, no more children among us, that’s what it was.’
Ahmed Saeed struggled to respond. ‘The nasbandi programme wasn’t aimed at Muslims,’ he said, ‘and however stupid it was, it has been brought to a halt.’
Rafiq took a moment to respond, gathering courage from a weird place, from the conversation after those predawn prayers, the ones that Ahmed Saeed never attended, and so had never heard the men from Delhi and their stories. ‘The nasbandi programme might not have been aimed at Muslims, but it hit them, all right,’ Rafiq said quietly and surely now. It wasn’t a tone he had used before, certainly not with Ahmed Saeed. He looked up and asked, ‘Ahmed Saeed sahib, aren’t you the one who told us about Jabalpur?’
‘What on earth does that have to do with all this?’ Ahmed Saeed said, half in irritation, half in panic at a conversation he had lost all control of. ‘Anil is a doctor. This is a doctor’s duty.’
‘And no doubt all those vasectomies were the work of dutiful doctors,’ Rafiq countered, completely addled now in the force of his words. Unable to contain himself, he rose and started to pace across the room, a dark energy animating his gestures. ‘I will tell you what will happen, Ahmed Saeed sahib, I’ll tell you what one more child will mean,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘If it’s a girl, Jamaal will have a sister to guard and protect, and if it’s a boy, he will have a brother to watch his back, at least one person to trust in this world.’
What he didn’t say was that if there was another child, he might have the chance to spend time with his own son—his exile and humiliation might end. Instead he spoke of God, and said, ‘What is forbidden is forbidden for a purpose, Ahmed Saeed sahib.’
‘If that’s what you want,’ Ahmed Saeed said, rising in irritation.
‘It isn’t what we want that matters,’ Rafiq said. ‘It is God’s command, and we must obey. We must submit to His Will. That is Islam.’
5
Shaista had never heard Rafiq’s anger. She did not think he had it in him, this thin cipher that her brother had handed her over to, this man whose life revolved around the nonexistent praise of neighbourhood poets and a job that had come to him as a dowry.
She had stopped to take a breath while Jamaal scampered around the courtyard, laughing in that carefree way that caught in her throat, when she heard Rafiq’s raised voice. It had taken her a moment to reach close enough to hear him say, ‘If it’s a girl, Jamaal will have a sister to guard and protect, and if it’s a boy, he will have a brother to watch his back, at least one person to trust in this world.’
Such simple words, and spoken with no great flair for oratory, just a tight anger, and yet they meant so much to her, bringing sudden tears to her eyes. And with those tears something eased in her and she looked again at Rafiq, at the husband she had never seen.
It was a strange love, one that came so late and in a woman who had long ago lost any thought or hope of any, and had never expected to love this man, of all people. But maybe all love is a misunderstanding of a kind.
Shaista held him that night, after Jamaal had slipped off to sleep, held his face before the lovemaking, kissing him gently, and held him afterwards, wrapping herself around him, keeping him safe, treasuring him. Perhaps Rafiq should have asked her why, perhaps he could have spoken to her about the danger of her pregnancy and saved her. With her newfound love for him maybe she w
ouldn’t have been so desperate for another child. But he had never had the courage to speak to her before, when she had not loved him. Now, when he was loved, how could he be suddenly brave with all this to lose? He took the coward’s way out, and was merely grateful, not questioning at all. And who among us can blame him for that? How many men have been brave in the face of love, especially when they suspect that they are undeserving of it? And if there really are such men, certainly there were few of them in the town of Moazzamabad, in the mohalla of Rasoolpur. Here courage was conspicuous by its absence. Nobody ever spoke openly about anything; all the accusations were by insinuation; every blow was a stab in the back.
The day after that confrontation with Ahmed Saeed, Rafiq found himself again at the gathering of poets. Of course Ahmed Saeed was there and Rafiq wanted to apologize. He meant to, and he truly was sorry, but there was more to him now, a happiness that he could not hide. Ahmed Saeed was quick to notice that Rafiq’s distraction was not that of a penitent, but that of a self-absorbed lover. He had no need for the favours of Shabbir Manzil at that moment. Shaista had given him a sense of entitlement.
With an effort, Ahmed Saeed controlled the anger that flared up at this realization. Instead, he turned to poetry to mock Rafiq. ‘What was that sher of Akbar Allahabadi’s?’ he asked the gathering. ‘Something about the mullah declaring that the train was passé, hadn’t Islam given us the camel?’
There was a shifting of seats as people tried to recall the verse, but despite two or three attempts nobody could.
Rafiq asked, stupidly, ‘Are you sure it was Akbar’s?’
And to that Ahmed Saeed released the full pent-up force of his anger. ‘Of course I’m sure!’ he all but shouted. ‘Who else could put the religious fools in their place better than Akbar?’
Everyone sat still, and noted the anger on Ahmed Saeed’s face, the bafflement and guilt on Rafiq’s, and they understood that things had changed.
Lal Sahib started polishing his scratched glasses, and said in a quiet, measured voice, ‘Yes, Akbar had a lovely touch. I don’t recall the sher you mean, Ahmed Saeed sahib, but there was that other one of his: