by Omair Ahmad
BOOK TWO
8
Jamaal grew up between a maulana and a mullah. While his father searched for a job, he stayed for much of the day and studied with the imam, Maulana Qayoom. The first few years after Shaista’s death were the most difficult for Rafiq. The jobs available were few and far between, and even Maulana Qayoom’s reference didn’t get him very far. The Islamic schools that had vacancies looked on him with some suspicion. He had no religious training or background, and was often caught flat-footed when asked about a point of religious doctrine.
After three failed interviews, the imam counselled him to spend two months on tabligh, travelling with a band of Muslims across the country to preach. Except it wasn’t really preaching, it was dawah, invitation, proselytization. The odd thing was that the dawah was largely to Muslims who never had the time to attend the prayers even if the mosque was a few minutes’ walk from their front door. He travelled with a group that went first to a mosque in Ghaziabad and from there to a series of other mosques in the little towns around Lucknow, even passing through Tufailganj where Ismat Sharif lived.
Rafiq found some comfort when he heard that Shaista’s brother rarely attended prayers, and that the local imam blamed the misfortunes of the Sharif household on the fact that they had forgotten they were Muslim. Wasn’t it the same with Shabbir Manzil? Hadn’t they too, in their arrogance, denied their faith and identity and addressed their petitions to the government, to the powers that were made by men and were, therefore, fallible?
In the group with which he travelled Rafiq found a number of people like him, who had only recently realized that they were bound by something deeper. One of them had lost a brother in a riot in Meerut; others claimed that their Muslim names made potential employers wince and look away. It was a bad time for the economy and stupid to be a visible minority of any sort.
After a few unsuccessful attempts to land a middle-level job at a local factory, one of the men, Haris, had recently forged papers which misspelled his name as ‘Harish’. Since his last name was Chaudhary, carrying no religious significance, a little smudge on his birth certificate would make him safely employable. Haris told Rafiq this in confidence, adding that he was sure his application would go through this time. He had paid the requisite bribes to the right people; only his name had been standing in the way. ‘One of the clerks handling my paperwork helped me out. He told me that it didn’t matter if I padded the folder with hundred-rupee bills, his supervisor wouldn’t hire a Muslim. He also told me where documents and certificates could be “manufactured”!’ Haris laughed.
‘Isn’t that wrong?’ Rafiq asked, feeling a little uneasy, as if by listening to this, and being expected to keep it confidential, he was somehow complicit in the forgery.
‘Wrong?’ Haris’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll tell you what is wrong. Having to run from door to door begging, that’s wrong. Destroying your pride is wrong. Having to hang your head before your wife and children is wrong. This is nothing.’
Then, shaking his head Haris said, ‘You know what your problem is, Rafiq? You care too much about what people will say.’
Rafiq looked away, but Haris’s guess was painfully close to the truth.
‘Are you married?’ Haris asked.
‘My wife died a few months ago.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that … And children?’
‘I have a son, Jamaal.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s staying at the madrassah in Moazzamabad.’
‘Don’t you want to take care of him?’ Haris asked.
And at that Rafiq looked up, suddenly angry.
Haris laughed lightly. ‘You do, don’t you? Well then all this doesn’t matter too much, does it?’
‘I don’t want to lie,’ Rafiq said lamely.
Haris made an exasperated noise. ‘Listen, you can’t expect the world to comply with your wishes.’
When Rafiq didn’t reply Haris added, ‘There’s a simple trick that will help you get a job at an Islamic school.’
Rafiq didn’t like the word ‘trick’, but he listened.
‘Just be angry,’ Haris said. ‘Rant and rave. Talk about the grand tragedies, about oppression, zulm, riots and murder. Grow your beard a little longer and miss no opportunity to raise your voice against the suffering of Muslims. It’s what the mullahs do all the time.’
Rafiq nodded reluctantly.
Haris threw up his hands. ‘You’re an intelligent man, and you’ll do a good job teaching, what does it matter if you have to scare the people interviewing you a little to get the job. If they ask about some vague point of law, tell them—“The police shoot Muslims every other day, and this is what you are worried about?”’
‘It’s not as if it is untrue,’ Rafiq mumbled.
Haris laughed softly. ‘As long as they haven’t shot us.’
At the next interview, in a little school newly established at Hamirpur, fifteen kilometres from Moazzamabad, Rafiq kept his face stern. His beard had grown, filling the hollows of his face. He knew snatches of Islamic doctrine now, and when they quizzed him about it, he answered the questions readily enough at first, and then, taking a deep breath, he said, ‘You know my credentials. I have taught at a much better place than this. I even sacrificed part of my salary when they were conducting vasectomies during the Emergency on poor Muslims. I have proved myself as both a teacher and a Muslim, what exactly is it that you are trying to determine?’
It caught them up short, the blunt words maybe, or the fierceness of the tone. There was a mumbled conversation among the three men who were sitting across the table. After a while the eldest of them said, ‘My apologies, Ansari sahib, but we are leaving you in charge of our children, after all. We shall let you know by the end of the week.’
‘Thank you,’ Rafiq said. He kept his face stiff, unwilling to betray the tension he felt inside. There was still some money left in his savings, but not for much longer, and he cursed Haris for the bad advice. There was no need to pretend to be so hard, but now that he’d spoken as he had, there was nothing to be done about it. ‘As salaam aleikum,’ he said as he left.
Two days later he was informed that he had got the job. Rafiq knew better than to celebrate. He went to the mosque, and after thanking the imam for his help, immediately, and very publicly, offered prayers in thanks.
He was in the hands of God now.
It was a disguise that grew on him. Very much like the time when he had confronted Ahmad Saeed, Rafiq realized that the anger he expressed, even if he believed none of it, gave him a sort of power. Now that he had lost access to Shabbir Manzil, he found that he liked to sit among the serious people at the mosque after the prayers and discuss the trials and tribulations of Muslims. And just as a memory for Urdu poetry had carved out a place for him at Shabbir Manzil, his ear for a finely turned phrase made him a voice to listen to when people talked of riots and revolution. It was funny, though, how much he had to thank Haris for, because it wasn’t just in job interviews that well-articulated anger gave you some space. He spoke rarely, but just once in a while he would trail out some pithy argument, said in controlled rage, about the state of Muslims, in India, in all the world. It gained him the kind of respect that none of his social climbing had.
As for young Jamaal, even after his father found employment, he spent much of his free time at the mosque, either being taught his Arabic and Urdu by the imam or playing with the other children, and it was there that he first heard the name his father had earned. Rafiq was completing the non-obligatory prayers one day and Jamaal was waiting for him, watching a group of prosperous-looking gentlemen, as they stood chatting. One of them turned his head and noticed the child staring at them.
‘Hello, young man,’ he said, his long mane bobbing. Although Jamaal found the person vaguely familiar, he was too shy to speak. He was only eight years old, and the three years after his mother’s death had taught him only the value of silence.
‘Hello,’ the
person repeated. His mane reminded Jamaal of the picture of a lion he had stuck on his pencil box, and imagining this strange man as a scrawny, undersized lion, standing on two legs and with no tail to speak of, Jamaal had to hide a smile.
‘Ah, so the little one laughs,’ the strange man said, and Jamaal was about to ask him about the vastness of his hair, and where his tail had gone, when one of the other men turned to see what was happening. And maybe he was the real lion, because the long-maned man’s smile narrowed until it was hardly even there. But Jamaal wasn’t afraid. There was something very familiar about the larger man; Jamaal could not see this new man’s hands, but he felt he knew what they looked like and how they felt.
‘So, Khan sahib, you’ve spotted one of the next generation of poets?’ the larger man said, and he might have had a hint of a smile on his face because now the long-haired man let his smile reappear. Then the larger man looked beyond Jamaal and his features, relaxed and generous till now, tightened swiftly with revulsion. ‘Here comes that mullah, Rafiq.’
And with those words the little knot of men wound down their conversation and moved towards the exit of the mosque. Jamaal turned to see who they were referring to and saw his father coming their way. He wanted to call the men back to say that they had it wrong. Yes, the man approaching them was called Rafiq, but he was not a mullah, he was a teacher at the small school in Hamirpur. But they fled so quickly that he had no time to say anything, and when his father came and rested a hand on his shoulder, there was no need to say anything. Father and son, neither was much for words.
Afterwards, when he was at home, Jamaal took out his blue plastic pencil box and looked again at the lion stuck on it, and realized that none of the men had actually looked like lions. In the picture, little as it was, the great cat stood upright and unafraid, its head raised in challenge. It seemed like the master of all it surveyed, not one who would scuttle away from any man, mullah or not.
Only later did Jamaal find out that the large man was his uncle, Ahmad Saeed Shabbir, the cousin of his dead mother. But that was all he found out. The only time he saw the older man was at Friday prayers, standing far in front among the rows of prestige just behind the imam. Jamaal stood with the children, far to the back so their whispering, pinching and other games wouldn’t disturb the elders in their prayer. His father stood somewhere in between, ahead of the unmarried men, but far behind the prestigious first few rows, and it seemed that Rafiq was glad, and would have stood even further back, among the children, so that he could be close to his son. But such display of affection was considered unseemly in men, and Rafiq would only come to Jamaal after the prayers, rest his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and they would make the trip to the cemetery to pray at Jamaal’s mother’s grave.
9
There is more to being a mullah than prayer. It took a while for Jamaal to understand the difference, although he had always known instinctively that there was one. People called the imam ‘Maulana sahib’ in deference to the obvious markers of his faith, but they would never have referred to him as a mullah. It would have been an insult of sorts. Maulana Jalali Qayoom was the imam of one of the oldest mosques in the city; he had social standing, prestige. He was no mere mullah.
When Jamaal understood that, he understood much, or as much as the mind of a boy who spent most of his time listening and little talking, and who was approaching his teenage years, could understand. This was about power, about honour, and ultimately about wealth.
Later, he would learn more. That it wasn’t money that distinguished the imam and made him more than a mullah. No, he had little enough, but still he had enough, and if he needed more it would have been provided. It isn’t necessary to add that it would have been the wealthy families that would have provided, because who else had the means? They would have provided because the imam was necessary, the mosque was necessary, an order was necessary on top of which the rich and powerful could find their place.
In the end what is the point of power if people don’t admire you for it? What is the use of wealth if others don’t envy you for it? You can’t eat gold, but you can live off your pride. For that you need a community composed of both the rich and those who desire to be rich. You need a guardian of morality who whispers the requests of the needy into the ears of the wealthy so that they can be generous, all in the name of God’s grace.
Mullahs, though, were a different breed. They had no mosque, just a message. Their piety had a smell, like the sweat of those who can afford soap but not perfume. It was an offence to the well-cultivated sensibilities of the rich, making their nostrils curl in disgust. Worst of all, the mullahs didn’t listen, and they certainly didn’t whisper. A mullah had the Word of God, and didn’t care to murmur it gently, nor did he care to have its nuances explained to him, especially the parts that excused the important folk from the petty obligations of prayer and other such minor details.
Still, what did it matter? Without a mosque, without the favour of the wealthy, a mullah was a mere man, even if his voice was more insistent than that of most.
That Jamaal understood all this instinctively was not only because he had spent all his life listening. The more important reason was that he was powerless, a cipher in the system that cared little for mullahs, or their sons. Nothing teaches a person the rules of power better than being excluded from it, and Jamaal knew all about that. And he learned about it at the same place as his father had: St Jude’s.
Jamaal gained admission in the sixth standard at St Jude’s, the excitement of it making his eleven-year-old body tremble with joy. But it was short-lived, for it was here that he learned soon enough what it meant to be poor. The school had originally been set up by German missionaries in 1904 as Wolfsson School, but was taken over by the government during the First World War. It had finally ended up in the hands of the Gill family, of fine old Sikh ancestry, who were gifted a large plot of land in the region for their loyalty to the British Empire. No better fate could have befallen the school. The Gills were rich enough to ignore the profits from it, little as they were, and old Harinder Gill, the patriarch of the family, had himself been one of the first students of St Jude’s. A committed Anglophile, he made sure that St Jude’s had all that it needed for a thorough, if Spartan, education emphasizing the values of an English public school.
Whether out of his anglicized sense of fair play—and his anglicized ways had found their first expression in the change of the school’s name—or just because he didn’t need to favour the children of the rich, Harinder Gill instituted entrance exams for the school, and based the fee structure on the income of the parents of the students who made it through the exams. This meant that middle-class parents who dreamed of sending their children to St Jude’s could now actually afford to. This legacy was what Rafiq had benefitted from, and now Jamaal.
But privilege, or the lack of it, will show. Although the entrance exam was open to all and even a mullah could send his son to St Jude’s, the hurdles of wealth were not just in the income of the rich, but in the attitude of their children as well. Within the confines of the school the politics of wealth was indulged in as viciously by the children as their parents played it outside. But maybe that is how things were meant to be. The children were training for their adult lives and if they didn’t learn how to recognize who mattered and who didn’t, what good would their education be?
But it was a stiff-upper-lip school, and the teachers ever vigilant, and the rules of the game needed to be as subtle. The first rule was to do with wealth, of course, and how to flaunt it. Since everybody was forced to wear the school uniform, it was the accessories that counted: the shoes and the stationery. To own a cheap plastic pencil box, as Jamaal did, marked one out as somebody to be avoided. The stickers that Jamaal had covered the plastic with made it worse for him. You could easily see that the stickers were of the cheapest quality, and even those were old, their condition as threadbare as Jamaal’s chances of social acceptability.
The ga
me of exclusion and mockery was usually played out most successfully in the gym class. The well-fed children of the rich glowed healthily next to their scrawny, pigeon-chested rivals. Even if physique was a gift of genetics rather than of wealth, the quality of running shoes clearly divided those who walked on air from those whose heels barely rose above the dirt of their existence.
Jamaal wore canvas sneakers of the cheap variety that lasted barely one season, with rubber soles so thin that pebbles would punch their way through them if Jamaal ran too hard. But why would he run swiftly anyway? There was no prize awaiting him at the finish line. Being a winner requires more than just being first in a race: a victory is never quite that unless there are people who will acknowledge your triumph. It was the reason Jamaal never stood first in any of his exams. He had never excelled at anything enough to attract attention.
Except once. It had happened right at the beginning, before he learned how to behave.
Jamaal had been taught by Rafiq to do well, and Rafiq was a good teacher at least, a man who valued his students’ achievements. Jamaal’s early education had been studded with gifts and encouragement. Nothing too expensive, just a sticker here, a candy there, and often enough only a dazzling smile from a silent but proud father. At school it was different. In his first social sciences test Jamaal had answered every question correctly, even getting an extra point for a bonus question, earning a score of 21 out of 20 points. His father had been delighted and just before the maghrib prayers he had taken Jamaal to the local stationery shop and bought him his first fountain pen. The boy had spent all evening playing with the pen, filling it with ink, squirting it out, practising his signature endlessly, even attempting the temerity to write his father’s name.
The pen didn’t go unnoticed at school. Every little change was noticed, and anyway it wasn’t as if Jamaal hid it. He wrote with a flourish, each move of his hand making the gold of the pen glitter. The next day was gym class, and three of the boys stayed afterwards to talk to Jamaal. They were openly admiring of his skills in social sciences, and Jamaal was happy to brag. He didn’t notice that Arun was not there. He should have. Arun was the one who usually came first in class, and these three, Amit, Saurav and Rahul, were his closest friends.