by HM Naqvi
The young man gravely pinches his moustache in response. The growth still recalls the bristles of a frayed toothbrush but it will flourish in time. We, on the other hand, have run out of it. I want to tell Bosco that I love him, that he is the only son I have ever known, the only son I will ever know, but my tongue feels thick and I fear he will not reciprocate the sentiment; I want to stop him from immigrating, save him, do something, anything, but what to do? I produce his yo-yo. “I believe this is yours.”
“I’m too old for this,” he says with a flick of the wrist. “You keep it.”
Just then Badbakht, Barbarossa, and the Childoos join in, following the music.171 Guddu promptly hops into my lap, legs swinging, but Toto, a man of action, immediately starts mincing like a matador. Jugnu jumps in the ring and the dame can dance: Change-the-Lightbulb, Change-the-Lightbulb, Butcher’s Cut, Butcher’s Cut. Pulling Felix aside, I whisper, “What do you think?”
“That child’s a natural, man.”
“No! About her!”
“A bird in hand is worth two bushes.”
“What?”
“A bush in hand is worth two birds?”
“Are you drunk?”
“She don’t have no Adam’s Apple so you could be in the clear, but she could be hermaphrodite—”
Before the Caliph can expound other specious theories, the Major appears in spite of his spondylosis, thak-a-thak-a-thak-a-thak, ruddy-faced and raging, “What’s all this band baja?”
We all stop what we are doing—the hardened Soorkhas halt the Hopak Dance—anticipating drama, discord. Although I can wager that the Major put his brother up to the chicanery that ultimately led to his demise, I raise a glass and declare, “We’re holding a wake for our fallen comrade. Join us, sir.” Instead of bellowing Nothing doing, or I’ll sort you out, as he is wont, the Major settles into a vacant chair and rests his cane. “To Bakaullah,” I proclaim.
“To Bakaullah,” everybody cheers. “Euoi, euoi!“
We are all together and it’s all festal, but even after my last drink, I am acutely aware that I will be alone soon.
164. The body was actually stowed at the Imambargah Khorasan. The procedure, all procedures really, is wonderfully efficient amongst our community. You don’t have to think twice about any aspect.
165. For the record, I do not, cannot descend into the grave—if I were to manage somehow, I would probably not make it out again—so Tony and Babu dutifully attend to the placement of the corpse.
166. The only one I recognize amongst them is the towering Sobo G.—ancient but unbent. Said Comrade once avowed, “I am a three-headed monster: Communist, Hindoo, and Scindee.”
167. Although known as such, he is not the last; those who remain exercise the Shia practice of dissimulation, viz., pose as Parsees, Christians. There were eight hundred registered Jews in the country when I checked last.
168. I prefer the more elegant credo: “There is no virtue greater than the Truth.”
169. It occurs to me that when one runs into somebody in Our Swath of the World after a casual if not causal mention, one says, “You have a long life,” but abroad, one says, “Speak of the devil.” In Chambu’s case, obviously, the latter axiom applies, but one wonders why this disparity in discourse. And what about Rambo?
170. In spite of our historic relationship with China—“As high as the mountains, as deep as the sea”—Trotskyites for some reason, have always outnumbered Maoists.
171. I swear I can feel the djinn presence as well, a distant baritone humming, but perhaps it’s Sobo or somebody else.
ON NOTIONS OF HONOUR
(or THE BEGINNING OF THE END)
Before my boon companion and his wife depart for points north by northwest, before grand promises and red-eyed goodbyes, the dispatching of tiffins replete with our famous alloo bharay parathay and house pickles, before I am left to contemplate the world and my place in it, I ask Tony for Rambo’s calling card for I have hatched a Promethean plan in my head overnight. As my brother pats himself on the way out—keys, wallet, Snubnose Special—he slips the gangster’s card to me which reads, “MASTER FIXIT AC Sales & Maintenance.”
“The hell you up to, Abdu?”
“Getting things fixed,” I reply, escorting him down.
“Yeah well I got bigger eggs to fry.”
“Have some faith in your brother, brother.”
But when Rambo growls over the telephone, I feel pigeon-hearted. “You know who I am?” he asks.
“Do you remember who I am?”
“You know what I can do to you?”
“Do you know what I can do for you?” I reply, girding my loins.
I hear him chewing on a toothpick. “Meet me at Aat Chowk at eight.”
“How will I find you?”
“I will know when you are there.”
They say All Roads Lead to Rome but in Lyari all roads lead to Aat Chowk.172 Statistically, only one in four rickshaw-wallahs venture into the warren of dim lanes after sundown. I sweat though the ride—the only establishment open for business is a hairdresser called New Balouch New Fashion—then sweat in a plastic orange chair on the pavement at a one-room roadside “hotel” that only seems to serve clear tea with cardamom in miniature teacups. I scrutinize the five-story ramshackle flats facing me, the clothes hanging on the balconies, the full moon above, in order to avoid the gazes of men with dangerous eyes. “You lost, boss?” a voice inquires. Although a mere lad, stringy and not much older than Bosco, he sounds like a man to me.
“Just having a cup of tea.”
“He’s here for the tea,” he laughs, addressing nobody in particular.
Whether he is bored, a born joker, a stool pigeon, I feel like I am at the schoolyard. Sometimes I suspect the problem is not the city; it’s me. “I’m meeting Rambo,” I ejaculate. “Know him?”
Nobody accosts me after that—nobody, save Rambo. Pulling up an hour later in a charcoal Civic with tinted windows and a chassis that glows neon blue, he is accompanied by two Johnnies who do not appear to be air-conditioner technicians. One walks like a robot and sports wraparound sunglasses even though the sun has set, whilst the other wears a manicured beard and a shirt that reads, “Peace,” across the chest, “In the Middle East,” on the back. They sit down on either side of Rambo without exchanging pleasantries. “So?” he gnarrs.
“I need a favour, Rambo Sahab.”
Leaning in, he says, “Why would I grant you a favour?”
“I helped your boss, Langra—”
“I am running things now, and running out of patience. Do you want me to run out of patience?”
“Patience is a virtue,” I blurt.
“Stubborn, this one,” says Peace in the Middle East.
“He’s like a balloon,” the other avers, “and balloons pop.”
“I know you are a busy man but I just would like to make you an offer of help before you pop me.” Rambo almost smiles. “I have some friends who are being threatened by a bootlegger.”
“So?”
“I want you to put the fear of God in him.”
“You think I am a common thug for hire?”
“I think you can put the fear of God in people.”
“Have I put the fear of God in you?”
“I am an old man, Rambo Sahab—I am only scared of my conscience.”
“Stubborn one, this one,” repeats Peace in the Middle East.
“Why should I help you?”
“After you met my brother at the Lodge he wouldn’t stop talking about you and about the indifference we show to our athletes. Who remembers Bholu Pahalavan today?173 You have raised the profile of this nation on the international stage but we are a nation that forgets: we lionize the dead but shrug at the living. My friend is the publisher of a very important newspaper, an English newspaper, and I am a writer, as you might know, of some renown. I am offering to write a fitting tribute to you: a full-page spread, an interview, with pictures. Do you have pictures?”<
br />
Rambo massages his nape. “I have pictures.”
“So you will help me?”
“I want to see the article first.”
“Done.”
When I turn up at my editor friend Zed’s office on Deepchand Road in the morning, he surveys me with owl eyes and says, “You’re crazy.” It is as if everybody has finally caught on. “I run a business newspaper,” he adds. “There is no sports section.”
I tell him that our families go back—they may not be amongst the original settlers but have become established Gardeners since—that we always allocated a portion of our advertising budget to their newspaper even though we had no need. All relationships have become fundamentally transactional, this for that, tit for tat. “Moreover,” I continue, “in these times, people like you and I need allies. Like this Rambo fellow. You understand? I don’t know how you do it—publish a supplement, a tribute to our athletes, sponsored by tennis shoes—but do it.”
After a deep, soulful breath, he says, “Affirmative.”
I interview Rambo on the telephone at home in the afternoon—he is pleasant and cogent like a radio broadcaster—and tell him to dispatch the photographs. Then I sit behind my typewriter and crack my stubby fingers, index, middle, ring, arrange and rearrange the papers on my desk—The Culinary Anthropology of the Subcontinent, The Abridged Timeline of Adjacent Metaphysical Epochs & Associated Environs, Notes on the Story of Man—devour a box of Blueberry Puffs, and smoke a wrinkled cigarette I find in the drawer. Although the formal journalistic mode of writing is not quite my cup of tea, Rambo’s story gushes out like an open tap when I get down to it:
Some men are born fighters. They fight to exit their mother’s womb. They fight to make a place for themselves in the world. They fight because that’s the only thing they know how to do.
Some men are forced to fight. They are teased, they are taunted by their peers. They are torn down and they build themselves again.
Rahim Balouch, a.k.a. Rambo, is one such man.174
I type through the evening, clack-clack, clackety clack-clack, ring—orchestral percussion!
When I’m done, I send Barbarossa to Zed with the copy and drain a bottle of feni, like a man who deserves every last foul drop, before passing out. When I wake I call Rambo who tells me to meet him at his court at Aat Chowk. “No,” I tell him. “This time you need to see me. You come to Boast Basin. And don’t keep me waiting.”
The street-side joint, adjacent to the Old Book Shop, is rudimentary—six carpeted charpoys arranged like boxcars—but offers barbequed udder, mint sheesha & cold beer in stainless steel jugs from the wine shop around the corner. Since it’s still early for dinner, the only customers present include a grandfather & granddaughter quietly spooning chicken corn soup and a couple of teenagers in jeans and T-shirts passing around a sheesha spout. Reclining on a tasseled pillow, I gaze at the sky, and the sky is like layer cake: pink on the horizon, violet in the middle, and velvet blue above. The breeze carries the tincture of dead fish from the murky lagoon below which the president once presumably planned to transform into a public dolphinarium.
When Rambo & the two Johnnies show up, the waiters stand to attention and other customers disappear—they must sense menace—but I parcel out copies of the published supplement like a monarch granting favours, farmans. The spread features a picture of Rambo as a gaunt nine-year-old in knickers, back against a brick wall; another of his dramatic reincarnation as a welterweight, leaning into the camera bare-chested, brandishing gloves; and a recent passport picture with a pale blue background. As Rambo scans the material like a child with a new storybook, I ask, “Do you want me to read it out?”
“You think we can’t read?” Rambo asks. “This one is matric-pass,” he says like a doting uncle.
On cue, Peace in the Middle East reads from the article out loud using his finger, translating as he goes along. Rambo leans in, head angled, brow furrowed, as if listening to a recitation from the Holy Book. They sit back after and nod to themselves. “You understand,” Rambo announces. It’s a grand compliment.
Snapping my fingers, I order four plates of kat-a-kat and a jug of local beer fut-a-fut. We pour ourselves tall tin glasses of the sharp amber brew and palaver like old friends about everything from the worsening municipal services to the imminent football World Cup: Langra, I learn, used to organize giant screens on the streets for the thousands of enthusiasts—one of his many magnanimous civic gestures—but now the responsibility falls on Rambo.
“You must come as our guest,” he says.
“You are too kind,” I reply. “Please try some more of the kat-a-kat.”
“Brains,” one Johnnie remarks. “Testicles,” says the other.
“Top notch,” Rambo chirps.
After wiping his tin plate clean with naan, Rambo dabs the sides of his mouth and passes around a thick hashish cigarette that tastes like bark and tickles my oesophagus. As my head swims in the fragrant smoke, he says, “Let’s go.”
“If there’s space in the heart,” I chunter, “there’s space in the car.”
We pile into the tinted Civic and pass quiet residential swaths, the police cooperative society, and a storefront advertising camel milk, before cutting from Belfast to Clarke Street. Disembarking outside the familiar, narrow, grey, four-storied edifice wedged between the surgical supplies store and abandoned lot I visited with Bosco, I raise my hand to beckon to an ice-cream-wallah, pushing his cart in slow motion—the tamarind flavour is divine—before remembering that this is not any Night Out with the Boys: Rambo & Co. retrieve weapons stashed in sideboards of the dickey and march in.
“What are you planning to do to him?” I slur.
“Fear of God is what you asked for,” Rambo whispers, flanking the door with the other two, “Fear of God is what we will deliver.”
When I rap on the bolt-iron door of the third-floor flat, aware that I am participating in a crime, the hatch slides open and an eye materializes. “A dozen,” I say, “the usual.” As soon as the bottles slide out, Rambo shoves a pistol into the bootlegger’s face and orders him to open the door. When he emerges—a hairy, gangly young man in a vest and jeans—Rambo strikes him in the face with the buttstock of a pistol. I watch the bootlegger cup his mouth, fall to his knees; I watch blood ooze out, teeth scatter like Chiclets on the worn concrete floor. As I turn away, Rambo hisses, “You like throwing women, children out of their houses? What if I throw you down the stairs?” The man makes muffled, plaintive noises—no-no, no-no, no, no, no, no—and then there is a dull crack, a blood-curdling howl, and the door slams shut.
Clutching my watermelon head in a corner of the corridor, I tell myself, It has to be done, as mosquitoes drone relentlessly about, there is no other way. But I know I am no better than Langra, Rambo, the Johnnies: I do not have blood on my hands but I have a blood-smeared conscience. Banging on the door, I plead, “Don’t kill him, don’t kill him …”
When the door finally swings opens, Rambo stands in the frame, neck speckled with blood. “We are professional,” he declares in English. “We only broke his legs. He will never come back again.” As the Johnnies drag the limp body of the bootlegger by the arms, Rambo grabs a carton of feni. “Help yourself,” he says, slapping me on the back. “You look like you need a drink.”
As I shut my eyes like a child pretending to disappear, the only consolation in the penumbral darkness is the thought of facing Bosco and reminding him that he once said, “If I can’t put things right, if I can’t do what I should do or must do, I’m no longer a good man.” But when I rap on the door of his flat, there is no response. Perhaps they are out, I reckon, or have retired for the evening. I rap again. I rap till my knuckles are sore.
It might be obvious to everybody but me: Bosco has left for good.
172. Tannery Road, Denso, Sheedi, Haji Pir, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Italians might have called it Piazza Otto or Campo de Otto.
173. For those who do not rememb
er, the great wrestler Bholu held the World Heavyweight Title, defeating Harbans Singh and Goldstein in the fifties and Henry Perry in ’67.
174. It continues:
He has been forgotten by us, by discourse, but let us remember that he represented our nation at the Asia Cup as a flyweight in 1997. He has been forgotten like our wrestling greats such as Gama and Bholu, our musical giants from Afzal Hussain Nagina Wala to Hamid Ali Bela, our writers, poets.
We are a forgetful nation. But if we don’t understand our Past then we won’t be able to negotiate the Future.
Rambo’s future is not promising. He fixes air conditioners. Although more of a heavyweight now than a flyweight, he recalled his childhood to this scribe via telephonic interview. He was the slight sixth child born to a cobbler. “There was no running water,” he said, “and a drink of water was often dinner.” When harassed by bullies, he took refuge in a makeshift gymnasium near his home in the Ragiwara area of Lyari. “What are you doing here?” asked a man named Jan Mohammed. “I’m being hunted,” replied our hero. “I can teach you to hunt if you like,” said his mentor-to-be. The rest, ladies and gentlemen, is history …
ON THEORIES PERTAINING TO THEODICY, ANTHROPODICY AND SUCH
The headline in an evening standard the other day read: TREE KILLS BOY. Whilst the phrasing is maladroit, the incident tragic, it is an accident. Evil requires agency.
A man stranded on a desert island cannot do Evil. He can only be cruel to clams. Evil requires another.
The Capacity for Evil, like the Capacity for Good, is arguably innate: there are children who tear ladybird wings at age three175 and those who let the creatures go after marveling at them momentarily.
The most beastly of beasts—crocodiles, Komodo dragons, vampire bats, the great white—can be hungry, territorial, but not Evil. Only Man is. There was no Evil before him and won’t be any after.