by Ali Sethi
One day he went upstairs and found that the murals had been defaced: someone had drawn a mustache on each of the women, the same black line in marker.
“Whores,” he said.
This was a habit: whenever he was called upon to give an account of something, to describe an event or explain a happening, he resorted to a language of types in which everyone was assigned a motive and a mission, and was made, in the end, a female. And so the principal and the coordinator were witches, with hidden lives in their offices, and had brooms and cats at home; the English teacher was Alto, named after a stout, economical car, while Dr. Qazi with his henna-dyed beard was Ginger Spice. “She’s bursting,” said Kazim conspiratorially after enduring one of the beatings, which had reddened his ears and left a cut on his lip, a beating again observed in silence in the classroom. “She’s going to go home and suck on a carrot.”
We were walking toward the canteen, and passed the senior benches on the way. A monitor watched with surprised amusement as one of his friends stood up, placed a hand on his heart and began to sing a song about a girl with a tantalizing gait. The boys around him hooted and clapped.
I said, “Don’t you feel ashamed?”
And Kazim sighed, as if the only thing to feel here was exasperation, and said that they were dried-up women who went home to hidden lives, to armchairs and fridges and radios, and he carried on with this imagery all the way to the canteen, developing scenarios and laughing at comeuppances that hadn’t been suffered and wouldn’t be suffered, and kept it alive until we had entered the crowded area inside, where the real noise ate it up.
I was alone when Kazim withdrew to the art room. On those days I had to walk myself to the canteen, where I was not without options: Saif, my first friend, was still approachable. He had by now established his place at a bench behind the cypress trees, where he sat with two unchanging companions, friends from before, a boy called Mooji and another called EQ. They were joined sometimes by others, who always brought their own food and left before the bell had rung, which was required of itinerants. Saif still offered to share his food with them but didn’t insist when it was declined; restraint was a part of his personality.
“Shirazi!” he cried. He was sitting on the stone bench with his arms spread out and his feet lodged on the table.
I sat across from him on the adjacent bench, shook his hand, then shook the hands of his friends.
“Thirst,” said Mooji, a dark, muscular boy with a long face. He stood up and yawned.
“Coke?” said Saif.
Mooji thought about it and said, “Coke.”
Saif took out the money from his wallet. The third boy, who sat slouching into himself with his elbows in his palms, was called EQ, which was short for something. He made no contribution to the funds, and didn’t seem to think it was required.
“Shirazi?” said Saif—he was handing out the money. “What do you want? CokeFantaSprite?”
“Fanta for him,” said Mooji.
EQ laughed.
Saif was looking at me and waiting for an answer.
“Coke,” I said.
“Coke,” said Saif. He passed the money to Mooji, who took it with him into the canteen.
“Where’s your friend?” said EQ. He was looking at the tops of his fingernails. They were gnawed down and lined with filth.
“Oi,” said Saif.
EQ grunted and bit into his thumbnail. He tore it off and spat it out; the undernail was pink.
“Fucking animal,” said Saif, and his disgust was encouraging, a compliment EQ had earned. “Fucking rhino.”
EQ was biting his other thumb.
Mooji returned with the Coke bottles held between the fingers of one hand. He placed them on the cracked stone table, and lowered himself slowly onto the bench, looking around and frowning as if alerted to an ever-expanding threat in his surroundings.
“Cheers, mate,” he said in a jolly Australian accent; he laughed briefly and determinedly to fill the ensuing silence; he took quick, scowling gulps of the Coke and gasped rewardedly. “So,” he said, bouncing a knee in anticipation, and wanting to hear some jokes now, since his own hadn’t led to amusement, “Shirazi’s got a girlfriend?” He looked from me to Saif in puzzlement.
Saif shook his head disappointedly. “Mooji, man,” he groaned, and then in a confidential whisper to me: “Mooji’s a homo. There’s no cure for him.”
EQ was ecstatic.
“Oi!” cried Mooji, feigning offense, exactly the kind that hasn’t been felt: he made as if to strike Saif, then withdrew the hand and brought it down on EQ’s back.
“Bastard!” cried EQ, whose hide was human after all.
Mooji chuckled, and EQ rubbed his own back to soothe the sting.
“Amazing,” said Saif, shaking his head from side to side and laughing in undisguised enjoyment. “Aren’t they amazing? I tell you, Shirazi: stay with them and you’ll never run out of entertainment.”
But Mooji said, “He has entertainment,” and plugged the bottle firmly and frankly into his mouth.
“It’s getting late,” I said.
“I know,” he said, with a knowingness he didn’t have. “It’s time for the bats to fly.” He looked up at the sky, where the early dark was still a clear blue, undisturbed by bats or other beings in powered flight.
We were sitting on the pavement by the basketball courts and waiting for collection. I was waiting for my car, Kazim for the bus. We had just finished with a cross-country run, or I had, since Kazim had refused to participate on the pretext of an ailment; he got excused by showing a doctor’s letter he had drafted himself at home but typed out and signed, the amount of fabrication on display outdone in the end by the amount of will. After the first few questions the coach had stopped arguing, then stopped staring and noticing as well.
“Why don’t you play?” I said.
He said, “My, my.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“You’re not.” I snatched the notebook from his hand and held it away.
“It’s mine,” he said.
I flung it across the court. It flew a good distance and then swiveled and fanned out and succumbed. The weakness, the failure, they were mine.
He got up archly and went across the court to fetch the fallen notebook. And I went to shoot hoops into the basket. But the ball wouldn’t go in. I tried with patience and then in a blind fury of repetitions, and now and then it went in but that wasn’t enough.
“Zaki!” he cried.
I ignored it.
“Hel-lo!”
The ball struck the rim, dithered, dropped.
“Miss Moodswing!”
“What!”
And I heard him say, “Your car’s here,” and then the sound of an abandoned ball continuing to bounce on its own doomed course behind me.
I was going to Kazim’s house and my mother wanted to know for how long.
“A few hours,” I said.
“When should I send the car?”
“In the evening.”
“It’s already evening, Zaki.”
Daadi said, “Who is this Kazim?”
“A friend of his from school,” said my mother, and then, prompted by the question into another: “What do his parents do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we should know where you’re going, shouldn’t we?” She stood with one hand on her hip and the other held out in a challenge of maternal concern.
But Daadi was glad to know that friends were being made. “Don’t worry about the car,” she said. “It can stay with you. We don’t need it here. Take Barkat. You can come back whenever you want.”
Barkat drove me to the house, which was located beyond the bridge in a place called Township; the road here was cracked and undivided and appeared to function as one large thoroughfare. On the way we passed the site of an accident, the smaller car crushed into the mouth of a wagon. There were no lights on the road, which was litter
ed with glass, and the vehicles continued to come and go at tilting speeds. We found the house behind an arching sign for the Law College, in a lane that had led directly from the main road but was surprisingly quiet, saved by its interiority from the unceasing noise outside.
Kazim appeared from behind the low gate. He was wearing socks and no shoes.
“You’re here,” he said.
I went in through the gate.
He closed the gate and went on tiptoe into the house.
It was dim. The sofas were covered in plastic, the TV covered in cloth. A small crystal vase on a table had bright plastic flowers. On the way to his room we passed the kitchen, and it had a rich, meaty smell; the hiss of frying oil now confirmed that someone was cooking. Kazim went ahead into his room: there was a bed and a wardrobe, and three small cushions on the carpet.
“Sit,” he said, indicating a cushion. He went over to the bed and brought back his pen, his textbooks, his notebook, all dropped now on the carpet. We were going to study for the physics exam, which was scheduled for the following week, the start of the half-yearly examination period.
We spent the first hour attempting the multiple-choice questions in the physics topic book: it was made up of past exams, and provided the range of questions from which the examiner could choose.
“What do you think they did when they had no topic books?” he asked, closing the book.
“They must’ve studied from their notes.”
“How did they come up with the questions? If they didn’t have any to repeat . . .”
“They probably made their own.”
He thought about it, crossed his legs and said, “I can’t imagine Cobra coming up with her own.” Cobra was the physics teacher, fidgety and only slightly sibilant, a man.
I said, “What question are you on?”
But he didn’t want to study anymore.
“No,” I said. “I’m here to study, not to play with you.” And I reached for the larger book, the assigned textbook, and turned through its diagrams.
We studied for more than an hour. Then the door opened, and a woman entered with a tray: she smiled and nodded shyly and looked around anxiously for a place to put it.
Kazim tried to take it from her.
“Let me . . .” she said.
“It’s fine,” he said.
She surrendered the tray and stood there another moment, wringing her hands. She said she had put the sandwiches in the lower compartment.
Kazim said, “It’s fine,” and stared into his lap until she had left the room.
“I’m sorry,” he said after she had gone. “She’s just”—he mimed an indescribable frustration—“she’s just like that.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t explain it. You can’t understand.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t.”
“Why?”
It had led into a precarious excitement.
“Why?” I said, touching his arm, his foot. “Why?”
“Stop it,” he said.
“You want me to stop it?”
We appeared then to fight, and it was the opposite of what we were doing, but there is a release in occupying an estrangement that gives weight to wishes and ways of arriving satisfactorily at what we already know. Afterward it was possible to stay in that room without having to think about the smell of breath and the taste of spit, so like your own, and to see the linkless silence for what it was: a place waiting for words.
“Your house is nice,” I said. I was lying on the floor with my head on a pillow, gazing up at the ceiling now, appearing to think.
He was sitting across with his notebook and making something in it; he turned his head to one side, held up the pencil, closed one eye, then brought the pencil back to the page.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Show me.”
“Wait.”
I snatched it. And he tried to take it back but I had seen the drawing; and there were drawings on every page, profiles and frontal poses and drawings of the back of the head, still recognizable, and made with a knowledge that so exceeded my own.
I said, “When did you make these?” I was turning the pages just to see how many there were of me.
“Different times,” he said. “Mostly in class.”
There were drawings of the eyes alone, of other isolated features as well, of nose, mouth, hands.
“Can you make me from memory?”
“I can,” he said. “You’re simple.”
The next day there was no school, and I went with my mother to the office with my books. It was too late at night to get together for studying, and I called Kazim from the office and told him I wouldn’t make it. We had planned to meet after the weekend, but the weekend came and went, and then the exams had started; we saw each other at school in the morning and exchanged notes before and after the exam, but then he had to go, relying on the school bus, which waited for no one, and I stayed on the campus with the other boys and took my time getting home.
14
Fresh elections were held in spring. The previous government, ousted on charges of corruption, lost at the polls; and the largest opposition party tore into power with an astounding two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.
“Well, it is expected,” said Suri, who claimed to have stood in the queue for almost an hour to cast her vote, “the better party has won. And why not? The people are not fools all the time.” She sat looking sideways with the surviving indignation of a victor who has not forgotten the times of hardship.
“It is true,” said Daadi, who had also gone to cast her vote, and had later flaunted her inky thumb at home, “these elections are the fairest I have seen.” Her mood was influenced by the news she had heard in the morning: Chhoti had called from Barampur to say that Uncle Fazal’s favored candidate had won the local elections and was going to become a minister in the next government. And although she had sounded merry on the phone, Chhoti had not allowed a longer conversation to take place.
“At least,” said Daadi afterward, “we now know someone in the government.”
“Oh, yes,” said my mother, who had refused to vote, “everyone we know is a minister, or knows a minister. We are the minister class. Ask Zaki: his friend’s father is going to get a post.”
The implements of power were made available to Saif’s father the week before he was sworn in: four security guards arrived with weapons and uniforms, to confirm publicly the possibility of a threat; two of the men went with Saif’s father to Islamabad and the other two were given to Saif, along with a new jeep that displayed a small green flag on the bonnet and two green government number plates. The week after the jeep arrived Saif took me in it to Hall Road: he wanted new speakers. At the shop he sat in the driver’s seat and reclined it all the way back until he was almost supine, like someone on a beach. I stood outside, at the back of the jeep, and supervised the installation of the woofers, which we later tested in the car, playing the music at bursting volume. “This is good shit,” said Saif, nodding his approval. “Nice job, don.”
At school he applied for a house transfer and got it: I was to mark him present now at house events he no longer wanted to attend. (The only sport he enjoyed was tent-pegging, and his father encouraged it, and had bought him a thoroughbred from a stud farm in Jhang and kept it in the stables at the polo grounds behind the campus.) So I persuaded the coach on the sports field and spoke to the house monitor after assembly; I submitted his letters of absence to the coordinator’s office on days when Saif was missing, when he wanted to stay at home and sleep. His nights were busy, and Mooji and EQ were expected to join him.
Later in the term he applied for a transfer to my section. Mooji and EQ sent in their applications too, but theirs were denied. Saif moved in one morning without a schoolbag, without a book: he sat in the desk next to mine and didn’t acknowledge the invasion when the rightful occupant walked in.
&
nbsp; “What’s his name?” Saif asked in a prankish whisper.
“Kazim Naseer,” I said.
For exams we studied together at Saif’s house. Mooji, EQ and I virtually lived for those days of preparation in the new “portion,” or wing, built in the upstairs part of that house: it was one bedroom attached to a large, formless space that had a winding oak bar, with mirrors behind the empty bottles, and sunken leather sofas that went along the walls and faced a large, flat TV screen. I studied for myself, but didn’t refuse to share my work with the others.