“This is my alma mater. Hundreds of acres. Large grounds, lots of football and hockey fields,” Junaid announced. “We’ll stop here on the way back if you like.”
They left the town with its streets bustling with cloth merchants, laborers, and food vendors. Noor watched the last of the driver-hotels disappear in the distance and, as always when leaving a town, was filled with loneliness, an incomprehensible nostalgia she couldn’t displace no matter how hard she tried.
The feeling lasted until they stopped ten minutes later to fuel up at a small, peeling gas station, and the boys poured out to use the restroom and grab snacks from the mart. While Junaid and the bus driver chatted up the pump attendant, Noor slipped away. She stood behind a row of ghost cypresses and poplars along the riverbank and watched the smoke from her Marlboro Light spiral its way through the spider cocoon swaying above her. Dozens of insects hung dead or twitching in it. Hundreds of eyes glinted. If she reached out with her cigarette, could she set the whole thing ablaze?
“Quite a sight, isn’t it,” said a familiar voice.
Noor snuffed out the smoke on the bark of the nearest tree before turning. Tabinda leaned against a poplar, gazing thoughtfully at the water shining through gaps in the verdure.
“Cigarette?” Noor said. She’d never seen the professor smoke.
Tabinda smiled. She was a plump woman in her sixties with a bovine face and horn-rimmed glasses. Her teeth were rotten but her smile reached her eyes. “That shit you smoke? Nah.” She thrust a chubby hand at Noor as if offering to shake. “Look at my hand. Near the wrist. See where the two tendons join? It used to be easier to find when I was thinner, but can you see the dip in the skin?”
Noor looked at the concavity at the base of the woman’s thumb where it met the wrist. The skin was tinged orange, and paler compared to the dark brown surrounding it.
“That’s called the anatomical snuffbox.” Tabinda lowered her hand. “I used to snort real homegrown tobacco in my younger days, see? Place a pinch in there and snuff it right up. Quit about ten years ago when my doctor found a spot in my mouth. He took it out, biopsied it. Turned out it was pre-cancerous. And that was the end of that.” She nodded to herself and turned back to the river.
Noor watched the sun paint the woman’s cheek golden. They’d talked a few times before. Shared a few superficialities about families. Noor told her about her mother back in the U.S. and how long it had been since she had seen her; how difficult it was to live a translocated life. Tabinda told her about her marriage to a wife beater in Lahore and how she escaped by moving a thousand miles away to teach Pakistan Studies to this unruly military lot in Petaro. Commiserated about Noor’s transfer from Karachi to this “shit-hole town,” as she put it. She had a Punjabi accent and a nasal voice. Noor found it easy to like her; she was so jaded and sassy.
“Looking forward to exploring the ruins, Miss Hamadani?” said Tabinda.
“Noor, please.”
“Noor. Sorry. At my age it’s difficult to discard old habits. I’m used to calling all these men by last name.”
“Creates that distance, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Distance can be quite useful in this place,” Tabinda said, her eyes invisible from sun glare in her spectacles.
“When did you start working here?”
“Oh, about fifteen years ago.”
“The faculty didn’t … make you feel unwelcome?”
“Of course they did. That’s what men do. But I also try not to get in their way.”
The rebuke was subtle but unmistakable. Noor stared between the moss-covered trunks at the bus across the road. “What they were doing—it was wrong.”
“Bloodshed and sacrifice is a way of life here. Has been for centuries.”
“They don’t know any better,” Noor said. “I can’t stand the sight of blood, but that wasn’t why I stepped in. Teach kids to enjoy violence and they’ll carry that lesson to the grave.”
Tabinda laughed. The sound was deep-throated and made her jowls jiggle. “Half these cadets will be dead before they hit thirty. That’s the nature of their game. In their hearts they know it and it makes them arrogant.” She turned and walked toward the bus. She was agile for her age. Her voice carried back: “This has always been a land of heroes and monsters, Miss Hamdani. Here you pick your battles.”
A soft wind soughed through the spider cloud, making the dead shudder. Insect dust pattered down on Noor’s shoulders. She brushed it away. You’re wrong, she wanted to say. This is exactly how it begins. Hand them a weapon and tell them to man up and that’s the way to the mother lode of horror.
But of course she said nothing.
*
She had come upon them by accident the day before during her morning walk. The boy’s name was Abar and he was holding the trussed goat down with his knees digging into its well-fed side. Two other boys Noor didn’t know joined him, each squatting to hold the goat’s legs firmly. The animal—one of the beautiful tall Rajanpur breed with spotted ears and a milky body—bleated and thwacked its head on the bleached summer grass under the Kikar acacia. The sight made Noor’s blood pound and she found herself stomping toward the trio.
“Hey,” she called across the football field. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The two newcomers flinched as boys will on hearing a teacher’s voice and looked up. Abar just smiled and jerked the goat’s head back by the ears.
“Sir Junaid’s orders,” he yelled and positioned the slaughter knife across the animal’s throat. The blade glinted silver. It threw a dancing shadow across the green and Noor’s vision rippled. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, and anger swept over her.
“Put that goddamn knife down. Now!” She was only ten feet away and her voice boomed in the narrow grove of trees dividing the football and hockey grounds. The newcomers dropped the goat’s legs and sprinted away, but Abar didn’t move. He pressed the animal’s head down, an ugly grimace of anger and effort on his face.
“What’s the matter, Miss Hamdani?” Junaid had materialized from behind the grove of trees. In his hands he held half a dozen steel skewers, a chopping knife, and a cutting block. Without taking his eyes off Noor, he set these next to the acacia and mopped his brow dramatically. “How can we help you on this fine Eid day?”
“Did you ask the boys to do this?”
“Do what?”
“Slaughter animals on their own?”
He lifted his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Yes.”
“Why? Where’s the butcher?”
“Sick. Off duty. Does it matter? It’s sunnah to slaughter your own animals, isn’t it?” He grinned at her. He had what her dad used to call a copstash mustache: a thick wad of hair that bristled at either end. With his crew cut hair it made him look like a thug.
“Tell me again what the Prophet said about teaching mercy.”
He pointed at the bleating goat. “That is mutton. You eat it every day—”
“I’m vegan!”
“—and today’s Eid. Someone has to slaughter the animal to commemorate Ibraham’s gratitude to God for sparing his son’s life. It could’ve been Ismael under that knife. Then we’d all be in a boatload of trouble sacrificing our sons and all, wouldn’t we? All I’m doing is teaching our glorious cadets to do it themselves. Very important, learning to steel your heart.”
She wanted to punch him. “They’re kids! They need to learn kindness before cruelty.”
His eyes were chips of hot mica. “Not my cadets. Not in these times. And this is not cruelty.” He placed the skewers crisscross on the wooden block. “It’s necessity.”
Helpless, Noor glanced at Abar. The boy was smiling, a cold twisting sneer that was frighteningly familiar. The feeling of unreality, of red-hot memory, resurged. Noor turned and strode away, blinking away the warmth in her eyes. Behind her rose the chant “In the name of God … ” and the animal was screaming, a loud gargling sound. If she kept walking, Noor thought, she could o
utpace the sound. Walk away before steam rises from the animal’s throat in the winter air, before the red curtain drops in front of her eyes and the strange staring faces emerge … one of which will be Muneer’s. Always his.
As she fled, the sound was cut off suddenly.
Then there was chopping.
*
Through a thicket of trees they trundled into the low-lying areas of Mohenjo-Daro. The Sind River curled a blue finger around the plateau in the distance. Tabinda pointed out dull squat structures that formed the mounds on the ruins’ outskirts.
“Pariahs lived in some of these,” she said.
The museum at Mohenjo-Daro was a solid red brick building with life-sized bronze replicas of ancient relics flanking its entrance. Two hundred meters away in the desolate sprawl of the ruins the Buddhist stupa rose from the giant mound like a skin-colored tumor. Junaid and Tabinda disembarked to set up a picnic lunch, leaving Noor and the cadets to hurry into the museum.
“Had you come in spring,” said the curator, “it would’ve taken you eight hours to get here from the college. You chose wisely. But, still, this late?”
Noor fingered the seated Priest-King statuette the curator had been showing the class, a tiny resin replica with pressed lips, closed eyes, and a gouged nose. A crack ran down its forehead to the left cheek. “Why? What happens in spring?”
The curator glanced at the wall clock. It was quarter past eleven. He scratched the crab-shaped mole on his cheek. “The Sarwar Fair. Hundreds of pilgrims from villages all over the Indus Valley converge on the saint’s tomb in the Baluchistan hills. They travel by foot and donkey carts and often clog up the roads all the way from Dadu to Sukkar. The soil of Sind is filled with miracles and magic.” His voice was monotonal as if he were reciting from a textbook. His eyes didn’t leave the clock.
Noor placed the resin figure back on the counter. “What time does the museum close?”
The man sighed. He was short and swarthy, dressed in a checkered ajrak shirt, white shalwar, and an embroidered Sindi cap. His nametag said Farooq. As he looked at the mass of teenage boys loitering about the lobby, distaste crept into his face. “Now.”
“It’s not even noon.”
“It’s Eid. We’re usually closed for the holidays. I made an exception for the cadet college because I was told we’d be done by ten.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say. They had been delayed at a military checkpoint in Dadu. Apparently a suicide blast had occurred at a small mosque in the outskirts of Khairpur, killing an elderly women and her two grandchildren. The area was flooded by police and army personnel; checkpoints had been established at various junctures from Larkana all the way to their college at Petaro. The military was worried about a follow-up attack. Junaid said he wasn’t surprised. Most terrorist attacks happened in double strikes, a well-known MO used by the Taliban as well as the CIA.
“Sorry,” she said to Farooq who was fingering his mole, “but we traveled a long way for this. Most cadets go home during holidays, but they,” she pointed at the boys peering at a representation of the famous bronze Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro and rows of clay urns lining the glass cases, “had no one to take them. Either their families are away or they have no families. So a few of us volunteered—”
“Yes, yes.” Farooq waved his hand impatiently. “Spare me heartbreaking accounts of army orphans. I’ll give you a quick tour. Is this your entire party? Where’s Ms. Tabinda? She’s the one who called me.”
Noor glanced to the exit. Junaid and Tabinda were setting up lunch. She felt guilty that she couldn’t help with such chores; her inability to speak Sindi prevented communication with the bus driver whose Urdu was rudimentary. She wished the older professor could at least take the tour. The Mohenjo-Daro trip was her idea.
“Seems like we’re the only ones for now.”
Farooq nodded glumly. “This way then. We’ll start with the Memories of the Ancients display.”
She nudged the cadets and they followed him up the northern corridor.
His voice echoed as they passed through an arched doorway into a long hall flanked by glass cabinets on either side. “Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Indus Valley are the three earliest civilizations of the Old World—China came later—and all, of course, developed along water bodies. We used to believe they evolved and thrived in isolation, but now we know that Indus Valley and Mesopotamia traded with each other for centuries.” He pointed left and right at carnelian necklaces, sculptures, gemstone beads, ivory combs, and brass containers with traces of herbal collyrium.
Noor’s belly cramped suddenly. Period pains? But she wasn’t due for another week. It would explain the headache she had earlier that morning. Wincing, she rubbed her abdomen.
“Discovered in 1922 by an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India, Mohenjo-Daro is thought to have been the most important city of the Indus Valley Civilization. Spread out over two hundred and fifty acres on a series of mounds, its heyday was from 2500 to 1900 BC. It was suddenly abandoned then. No one knows why.”
Noor glanced over her shoulder. The kids looked suicidally bored. They drifted behind her, listless, eyes glazed. The Pashtun boy, Dara, had his nose pressed against a cabinet, palms splayed against the glass, but she thought his reflected green stare was fixed on her. His biceps bulged on either side of his head.
“A Buddhist monastery was discovered atop the city’s main citadel. You can still see the stupa. We don’t know why the builders decided to erect it there hundreds of years after the city was abandoned, but most of Mohenjo-Daro still lies underground. The mounds grew organically over centuries as people built platforms and walls for their houses. The name Mohenjo-Daro means ‘Mounds of the Dead’ in Sindi.”
Farooq waved at a ceiling-high stucco wall covered with black-and-white and sepia photographs. A flicker of interest went through the cadets. They crowded around aerial and ground views of the ruins.
Noor had seen these in slideshows Tabinda put on before the trip. She went to Dara who hadn’t moved. He edged left to allow her to lean against the cabinet. This close, he was taller than her. He smelled of sweat and cologne.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” she said in a low voice. “I didn’t mean to barge in on you two like that.”
The tips of Dara’s brown ears darkened. She could see the tension in his bunched neck and shoulder muscles.
“And here,” boomed the curator’s voice, “is the most famous statue found in Mohenjo-Daro. You might have seen the Priest-King’s picture in textbooks on Indus Civilization. This is a detailed replica made from a mold of the real thing kept in the National Museum in Karachi.”
“It’s okay. Really,” Noor told Dara. The boy’s fingers had closed over the edge of the cabinet. “I won’t tell anyone. Some of my friends back in the U.S. were like you. One of them was bullied and ended up struggling with depression for years.” Her gaze went to the cadets gathered around the pictures. What would they do if they found out about this kid or his friend currently away during winter break? She didn’t want to imagine. Seized by instinct, she lifted the corner of her hijab and hissed at him, “We all have secrets. Look.”
He didn’t turn to face her, but his eyes flicked in her direction. They widened when he saw her left shoulder.
“Some think the Priest-King is neither a king nor a man. Some believe this is in fact a woman of considerable importance to the people of Mohenjo-Daro. A high priestess or maybe a eunuch who led their religious rituals.”
“We all have secrets,” Noor said again. Dara looked at her with wary eyes. He was a quiet backbencher, rarely said a word. His grades were average. She used to wonder if he was slow.
She dropped her hijab into place.
Dara rapped a knuckle against the glass, and his eyes were green fires. “You don’t know anything,” he whispered fiercely, turned, and fled down the hall.
She watched him go, then walked back to join the cadets peering at something in a glass case. Farooq
glanced up as she approached.
“So glad you could join us.” He adjusted the Sindi cap on his head. “I was just telling this young man about seal 34. Dr. Gregory Fossel of University of Pennsylvania believes it represents a sacrifice ritual. Care to listen in?”
She watched him unlock the case and withdraw two artifacts. In one hand he held a reproduction of the tan soapstone seal. The boys murmured and jostled to get closer. A tall angular deity with a horned headdress and bangles on both arms stood atop a fig tree. With a gleeful face it looked down on a kneeling worshipper.
Nearby was a small stool on which lay a human head.
“Seal 34 is taken as evidence by some that human sacrifice was practiced as a fertility rite in this region. Similar to such offerings to Kali in certain parts of India.”
Noor looked at the seal. Below the kneeling worshipper were a giant ram and seven figures in procession. They wore single-plumed headdresses, bangles, and long skirts. The sight chilled her; it was so brutal and somber. Her belly cramped again.
“Dr. Fossel, however, has argued that the presence of Pashupati’s seal,” Farooq held up the stone in his other hand. It showed a naked figure with three grim faces and ram horns seated on a stool surrounded by deer, rhinoceros, and elephants, “means that the people of Indus had the option to proffer animals as substitute for humans.”
“Pashupati?” Someone chortled. Noor glanced up. It was Abar, the boy who had slaughtered the goat on Junaid’s orders. He had a malicious grin on his face. “What kind of faggot name is that?” He elbowed a friend.
“One of Shiva’s names.” The curator glared at him. “His incarnation as the Lord of Beasts.”
Both boys burst out laughing. A few others smiled uneasily.
“That’s enough,” Noor told the boys. Giggling, they strolled down the hall. “Sorry about that,” she said to Farooq.
His face was pinched and red. “That’s the sort of kids we’re raising now. Forget it. It’s closing time anyway.” He muttered something inaudible and led them back to the lobby.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 Page 14