by Sabyn Javeri
I turned around to realize that none of the others were behind me.
They stood a little way off, distracted by a vendor selling mud toys on a cart.
‘Matti kay khiloney! Unbreakable mud toys, try it, buy it, try it, buy it, mud toys!’
Even in the distance, I could see the child’s small face light up at the sound of the man’s lonesome, weary call. He reminded me of myself.
‘Mummy,’ he called out to me, ‘Mummy, can I have some?’
Just for a second, I felt my heart thawing.
But then Halima’s shrill voice rose up, cutting into me like a saw. ‘Hai! You can have the entire cart, my little Baba,’ I heard her say. ‘Just you wait here and I’ll get them for you.’
‘No! I want to choose myself,’ the child argued.
‘Come, then. But don’t show any excitement. You don’t know these rascals. The minute you like something, they double the price. Now listen, whichever one you like, say, “Ugh, that one is the worst,” understand?’
The child nodded, though I could see he didn’t.
The vendor approached, his nasal voice creating a melancholic atmosphere as he pitched his wares with the sadness of two lovers forced apart. ‘Ah, look at this kettle, once a beautiful kettle, still a beautiful kettle, look at its cup, unbreakable mud cup…’
The child squealed as he saw the mud animals. ‘That one! I want that one!’
The vendor allowed himself the slightest of smiles and promptly said, ‘Oh little Baba, you have the taste of a prince. That one is the most exquisite.’ He quickly placed the toy in the child’s hands, ‘Just one red note it costs.’
‘Oho,’ Hailma jumped in, ‘do you think I was born yesterday?’
Gul Khan didn’t help when he muttered, ‘I don’t even think you were born in this century.’
Halima ignored his remark and addressed the vendor: ‘Don’t try to fool us with exquisite craftsmanship, partnership, whatever. Quote the right price or take your sweaty face and roam the streets of Karachi for the rest of the afternoon. Arrey, who plays with mud toys nowadays anyway? As it is our little Baba has toys that can fly, talk, walk – even a little dog that does backflips. Have you even seen such a thing in your dreams, you miserable mud-toy–seller? One red rupee my foot!’
The vendor who wore a dark brown shalwar kameez stained with huge patches of sweat, shifted his yellow turban and I felt a surge of anger at Halima for bargaining him down.
The man frowned and said, ‘Look at the workmanship, Bibi. It takes my wife six hours to make a single toy.’
‘Take it or leave it,’ Halima replied, ‘we’ll give you ten rupees.’
The man scowled at her. He reached out to take the toy away and the child shrank back. Halima, offended by the man’s behaviour, smacked his hand with her Chinese fan.
‘Acha, tell us a reasonable price.’
‘The price is reasonable,’ the man sulked.
My patience was wearing thin and if I’d had any money on me at all, I would have ended their little drama right there. For once, Ami Jan and I were in agreement. She managed to pull out a few notes without lifting her burkha and handed them to the toy seller. I wondered how Ami Jan saw through the gauze mesh that covered her eyes.
‘Enough,’ she held up her hand before Halima could argue. ‘Now let’s go inside,’ she said firmly, marching towards the hakim’s clinic.
Inside, a wall portioned the room in two neat halves.
Halima, Ami Jan and I were led towards one side of the waiting hall while Gul Khan and the child were told to wait outside.
‘Oh, but he’s not a man, he’s a child,’ Halima exclaimed. ‘He is just four years old. Why can’t we bring him into the women’s quarters?’
‘You can’t,’ proclaimed the receptionist, a fat woman whose flesh spilled off the steel stool she sat on. She smoothed the silky hijab through which her henna-stained hair peeped out; then, spitting a thin red arc of chewed betel nut juice into the spittoon, said, ‘Even a pregnant woman is not allowed here in the zenana half, lest she be carrying a male and he may stain the purity of their purdah. This is a strict hijab-observing zone. Doctor Sahib’s faith is very pure and, who knows, perhaps it’s this strictness of observances that has bestowed upon him such powers of healing.’
I could see that Ami Jan was suitably impressed as she lifted the flap of her burkha and relaxed on the hard wooden bench as if it were a velvet love seat. But Halima continued arguing, ‘What hijab zone? Never in my life have I heard…’
Seeing the woman’s mounting irritation, Ami Jan decided to send the child home.
‘Take him home,’ she instructed the driver. ‘Stay with him till we get back.’
‘But he’s only a child. Will it be safe to send him alone?’ My concerns went unheard as I was ushered into the waiting room with just one sentence: ‘Don’t worry, he’s a boy.’
And so we sat, till finally we got an audience with the healer. The fixer-upper of Muslim women gone awry, the sign should have read, in my opinion. But then my opinion didn’t matter. It never had.
Hakim Dilbar was a delicate man. There is no other word to describe his fragility. Nearing ninety, he sat cross-legged on a divan, mystically serene, untouched by the stifling Karachi heat. He wore a snow-white kurta pyjama that seemed to have been woven from the softest of threads. His white beard, white hair and unusually pallid eyes contrasted with the darkness of his pupils, giving him an ethereal appearance. If it weren’t for the red rose in his buttonhole and the strong smell of ittar, I would have dismissed him as an apparition.
Ami Jan pushed me down on the silver metal stool while she sat on the chair nearby. Halima squatted on the floor beside the hakim sahib’s throne and began her lamentations: ‘Ay, Hakim Sahib, five years ago, Zara Bibi got married and went to Lon-don. Ever since she returned, she is not the same. Doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep … Arrey, she hardly even talks.’
‘Halima, please,’ Ami Jan shouted.
Just then, a rumbling voice sounded as someone cleared their throat. It was then that we noticed the other man. While the elder hakim sat on the throne-like divan, looking like a king observing his court, his son – a younger version of the hakim except for the lab coat and spectacles – sat hunched in a corner on a small white desk, behind a large open register and a row of glass bottles filled with tiny pills and forbidding-looking herbs.
‘Name?’ he asked without looking up at us.
We were too taken aback by the second man’s presence to answer right away. Now the elder hakim spoke, in a voice that seemed to have been dipped in a mixture of sugar and honey and woven like a basket of banana leaves: ‘He means which one of you is the patient?’
For some reason, the question made me smile. The smile spread further, erupting into laughter. Where had I heard that mad people always thought it was the world around them that had become insane? Looking at Ami Jan’s alarmed face as I laughed, I could see that she thought I was the one who needed help.
‘Nafas,’ said the elder hakim, asking for my wrist.?While the younger version pottered about with stethoscopes and charts, the elder calmly leaned back and, taking my pulse with his thumb and forefinger, closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, I stared at him and asked, ‘What can you tell by checking my pulse that he can’t with all his instruments?’
Ami Jan hushed me at my impertinence, but the elder man just smiled. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, scanning my face, ‘the stream of our pulse carries the illness into those dark forgotten corners of our bodies where the doctor’s tool cannot reach.’
I shifted in my stool.?
‘Come here, beti,’ he leaned forward.?
‘Ijaazat hai?’ he turned to my mother for permission.?
‘Proceed,’ she replied.?
I had heard tales of how some of these spiritual healers beat out spirits from the body, how the patient’s skin was burnt to release a trapped ghost, and how they tore out your nails to remove the l
urking evil inside your fingers. I shivered at the thought of what they would do to someone like me, someone so far removed from the realities of everyday life.
He held my face close to his. So close that I was breathing his breath. Before I could open my mouth to protest, he flicked my eyelid inside out.
‘No!’ I screamed, not so much from the pain but from the unexpectedness of it all.
‘Hmm,’ he mumbled. ‘The secret thrives … it hides … in the dark.’?
‘What is it, Hakim Sahib?’ Ami asked, clasping her chest.?
‘What do you mean? They haven’t even asked us why we are here,’ I said.?
‘It is,’ he said, looking directly into my eyes, ‘a malady of the heart.’
‘A malady of the heart?’ repeated Ami Jan.?
‘A malady of the heart!’ echoed Halima.?
‘A malady of the heart,’ said the son firmly, closing the register as if admitting failure and putting away his charts and vials.?When we recovered from the echoes, Ami Jan asked, ‘Surely, Hakim Sahib, with your powers, there must be a cure?’?
Hakim Sahib ran his fingers through his long white beard and began fingering his beads. When he spoke, his voice was low and measured. ‘The heart is the main connector of the body. It is through the heart that our body pumps blood, our spirit becomes purified. And it is through the heart that our desires become tainted.’ He looked sharply at me: ‘The heart is vital, but not supreme. We must remember we control it and not the other way around. The heart that does not listen becomes a danger to the self.’
As if in protest, my heart began to beat loudly against my chest. Thump, thump, thump. I felt as if I were standing naked – breasts exposed, nipples ripped out, only an unsightly, unruly bloodstained organ thumping itself into a slow, hollow, relentless beat.
How much does he know? I found myself thinking for the second time that day.
The sun seemed harsh and unforgiving after the soft haze of the clinic. I blinked and rolled my eyes, wanting to ensure that my lids still worked, despite being turned inside-out. Through the corner of my eyes, I saw the alarmed look on Ami Jan’s face and felt a softening of my sickly heart. I was all she had. Me and her God. And Halima, perhaps.
We stood side by side, the three of us – silent, stoic and sad. Three comically sad women with ill-behaved hearts that refused to listen. Ami Jan, Halima and I – failures at the game of love. What must we look like to passers-by, I wondered. Lost wanderers searching for an address, newly discharged patients, possessed women hoping to be cured by the healer, the evil witches of Macbeth, or perhaps just three ordinary women waiting for a rickshaw. The thought was amusing and I began to laugh. But perhaps combining the laughter with an eye roll was not such a good idea, for Ami Jan began to sniffle into her burkha. She blew her nose with the flap of her burkha, and any sympathy I had felt for her disappeared instantly.
I rested my forehead against the cool trunk of a thick, leafless tree littered with advertisements. Wrapping my arms around it, I began to read the posters plastered on its trunk.
‘Do you think you are going mad?’ I read out. ‘Think you are going to die? Get rid of the evil eye, come to Baba Ji, come today, don’t be shy.’ ‘Has your manhood let you down? Contact Hakim Hikmat, sole distributor of the German Mr Lover Bombastic syrup.’ I read slowly, my tongue feeling foreign around the Urdu script I hadn’t read for eleven years. ‘Are you no longer in control? Contact Sayana Buddhu, expert in Bangal Ka Jaadu.’ And then, beneath the drawing of a heart split in two, there was a number and an address: ‘For the Broken-hearted. You break it, we mend it,’ read the slogan that ran all around the trunk in three tiers of tattered white paper.
A sniffling Ami Jan trailed after me as I circled the tree, reading the series of advertisements as if unwinding a string.
‘Halima,’ Ami said, ‘stop a taxi. No use waiting around at an unsafe time like this.’ I was unsure if she meant the city or me.
‘Alright, Begum Sahiba. But taxi drivers are all thieves.’
‘Oof!’ Ami Jan replied, pressing her temples with her forefinger and thumb.
Just then, a yellow cab rounded the corner and I flagged it down, wanting to be of some use to them but Halima barged ahead of me. ‘How much to Society?’
The man rolled up his window and left.
‘Halima,’ Ami Jan screeched, raising her voice to the loudest I had heard in a long time, ‘have you gone completely mad? How can you bargain at a time like this? Do you know how dangerous it is for women to be out alone at a time like this?’
Halima bowed her head sheepishly.
Ami Jan turned away from her and bumped smack into me. Instinctively, we moved away from each other. But then Ami Jan suddenly looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Twenty-five years.’
She cupped my face and, though I could not make out her expression behind the veil, I could feel the grip of her fingers as she pressed them firmly around my face.
‘Twenty-five years have I been married to your father. Never thought of leaving. Not even the times when he left me.’
I struggled to look away, but she held firm. ‘He always came back. Men always do.’?
Finally, I yanked her hands away. ‘And what if it’s the woman who wants to leave?’ I asked.
Now it was Ami Jan’s turn to look away. With the veil blocking her face, even if I tried, I could not see what she was seeing.
So I walked away. Standing a few feet away from the two old women, I surveyed my surroundings.
All around us, the city lay dug up and little hills of sand stood like miniature pyramids. Dug-up roads, abandoned pipes, broken electricity poles, half-constructed buildings – some pockmarked by bullet holes – made the city resemble a bombed-out war zone; yet, people walked about or stood listlessly like cattle, chewing toothpicks, picking their nostrils or twirling their moustaches. A few women stood at the junction which seemed like an unofficial bus stop. A queue of donkey carts, cars and bikes formed behind a bus that skidded to a sudden stop, blocking the mouth of the roundabout and causing angry shouts. A man wearing a dark shalwar suit, stained darker by the sweat patches on his back and chest, descended and slammed the side of the bus, as men quickly clambered inside and, when there was no more room left to squeeze in, they climbed on to the roof, squatting like stubborn monkeys. The few women wrapped their headscarves closer to their skulls and, with downcast eyes, got in next to the driver. Now the man slammed the side of the bus and shouted, ‘Jannay dey, jannay dey, let’s go, let’s go!’ running along with the bus as it picked up speed. ‘Let’s go,’ he shouted one final time before clambering aboard just as the bus lurched forward, letting out a puff of smoke, its creaking body permanently tilted to the left and painted with colourful slogans and paintings of birds and planes.
I was so immersed in the whole rigmarole that I didn’t notice Halima hailing an autorickshaw. The man stopped a few feet away and when Halima stubbornly refused to walk over, tapping her feet impatiently, he reversed, puffing smoke right into our faces. ‘May your face be blackened if you lay an evil eye on me,’ read the slogan on its back.
As we walked around to its front, I noticed several more: ‘Look, but with love,’ being the most prominent one, painted in bold red lettering, a pair of winking eyes drawn underneath. Inside, on the red patent flaps, a poster of the Punjabi film actress Saima had been glued patchily, her heavy cleavage spilling out of the too-tight blouse nearly accosting us as we struggled to clamber into the small vehicle. ‘Once you come inside me, you’ll never want to leave!’ declared the sign placed right underneath the poster.
I could feel Ami Jan’s horror as her glance fell upon the words. Halima, who was the last one to get in, unable to read, remained blissfully ignorant and chatted happily, ‘Aren’t you glad, Begum Sahiba, we didn’t get into that looteray bank robber’s taxi? After all, why pay so much for such a short distance? Rickshaws are a far better option!’
After twenty minutes of jostling aga
inst the steel pipes of the rickshaw and the impertinent breasts of Saima, I could no longer stand the rickshaw driver’s smirk in the rear-view mirror. I turned to Ami Jan, but she sat so stiff and rigid that I wondered if she had turned to stone. ‘Ami Jan,’ I tried to speak over the roar of the rickshaw, but she remained stoically still. ‘Disgraceful,’ she muttered when we slowed down at a traffic jam. I thought she meant the rickshaw driver, but then she said, ‘In our days, a woman left her father’s house as a bride, and her husband’s as a corpse.’?
When I didn’t reply, she took my hand in hers and said, ‘Think of your child.’
‘You want me to stay in a loveless marriage just like you did?’
‘Oh, what is this love-shove? Living abroad has put all these ideas in your head. In the end, my child, love boils down to nothing. It is not love that holds a marriage together, but responsibility, property, children.’
All further conversation was drowned by the rickshaw driver turning on the badly tuned radio that blared out more static than music. Ami Jan and I stared at the back of the driver’s head as he suddenly broke into a song. He upped the volume, impervious to the argument behind him. I turned to Halima, but she seemed suddenly subdued, tolerating the rickshaw driver’s vulgar humming. I initially thought it was Ami Jan’s harshness that had silenced her, but later figured it was the picture of the political leader Altaf Hussein on the windshield that had got her tongue. Altaf Bhai and I had something in common: we had both been banished to London and now wished to live there in self-exile. But, while I had ended up there through an arranged marriage, he had escaped a jail sentence. While I was powerless and isolated back in my city, Altaf Bhai still managed to wield the power of his sword over Karachi with ruthless cynicism and a deadly following. His supporters feared no one and, in turn, everyone feared them. I had heard that even the powerful were helpless against them and averted their eyes to the lootings and killings carried out by his henchmen.