Vanity Bagh

by Anees Salim

  In memory of my father

  M. Salim

  (1927-2006)

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  I

  I plead not guilty, Judge sahib. I bloody do.

  ~ Imran Jabbari (1985- )

  Long, long ago – about eighteen months ago, to be precise – my world shrank to the size of a mousetrap at the tap of a gavel on a very dark desk. It was a sunny day, so sunny that fair-skinned ladies decided to open their umbrellas, but the people crowding at the windows blocked the stream of light into the courtroom so completely that it might as well have been a rainy day.

  There was a clock in the vicinity, out of sight. It let out the sound of a spoon hitting a metal plate every half hour, sending in premonitions of the long, empty years that would be handed to me by a judge who bore a close resemblance to a famous stand-up comedian.

  The court split shortly after noon, people cleared from the windows, and there began the journey to the prison, which lasted a little under an hour, during the course of which I kept picturing my destination like I had done on my first trip to school.

  It was a Friday and, just like on every Friday afternoon, there were long queues crawling into cinemas and big crowds pouring out of mosques – the two places I was going to miss ever so greatly.

  At ten past two on the clock above the blue gates, the van reached its destination. From the outside, the prison looked like a school (the school, at first sight, had looked like a prison). There was a faint film of moss on the wall as if it were made of bronze and the rain had spread the first coat of patina over it. The gates opened with a dark enthusiasm, the van rolled morosely in.

  Since that moment of driving through the tall gates I keep wondering if eighteen months have turned the outer wall a deep green, or if the prison authorities have had the inmates scrub it down to a light copper. In eighteen months I haven’t had a chance to check on the outer wall; it might as well have been in outer space.

  Exactly as in a school, there was a room where the shelves were crammed with ledgers and the walls hung with farewell pictures showing row after row of demure-faced men, the retiring ones highlighted with oversized garlands, the elaborate ends of which descended onto their laps and sat there like an origami garden sprouted from the crotch.

  A warden in plain clothes sat by a window, the curtains of which were plaited like a girl’s hair and secured with wooden rings, and wrote unhurriedly in a register as I told him the precise directions to a locality I might never see again.

  ‘Vanity Bag?’ he asked without looking up from the register. ‘You mean “bag”?’ He had never heard of our mohalla, maybe he had but didn’t want to admit it, or he did not belong to the city.

  ‘No, not “bag”. Bagh.’ I doodled the letters in the air as I uttered them, suddenly concerned about having wrong spellings on a page which would probably not be referred to for the next sixteen years. ‘B-A-G-H. As in Mangobagh.’

  ‘We have a spelling bee champion here?’ The prison superintendent, a rather thin man with the face of a baboon, put his head round the half-door and looked unpleasantly at me. For a moment the wardens did not know whether to salute him or laugh. In the end, they decided to laugh. Clapping their hands, shaking their bellies, they laughed. I did not get the joke then, I still don’t get it. Maybe there is not much of a joke; it could be a rule of the prison that wardens laugh at the superintendent’s jokes even if they are sick jokes. They don’t have the licence to kill you but they have the liberty to torture you with their weird sense of humour. Maybe that is how they compensate for their inability to get physical with you. They sure want to hit you once in a while, when they have had a bad day at work or a fight at home but, remembering the consequences in the nick of time, they pocket their clenched fists and go away. New government rules have made prisons a better place. You cannot beat up an inmate. Verbal abuse is out of the question. So is spitting on the face. No usage of mother-fucker, sister-fucker and brother-fucker (the last one is for gays). All those have now become a gross violation of human rights.

  There is even a human rights officer who comes every month and sits under one of the gooseberry trees with a ledger open on his lap. If you have a grievance he is all ears. He will write down your complaint and make you sign under it, then sign it himself before passing it on to the concerned department. But people rarely tell him anything. When it is four on the double-faced clock above the blue gates, he brushes off the yellow leaves the tree has shed onto the complaint book and leaves the prison. Once two inmates marched up confidently to him as the wardens watched tensely; the braver of the two said the weekly meat curry was too watered down and tasted like something meant for cattle. But the officer firmly shook his head and dismissed the complaint as something that could not be treated as a human rights issue. The losers walked slowly back with fake smiles. The wardens smiled for real.

  I wonder if the plain-clothes warden asks ‘Bag?’ every time he has a new inmate from our mohalla. Much to my nostalgic pleasure, I bump into people from Vanity Bagh every now and then, and the first thing I do is sniff. I sniff so hard that they think I have either caught a cold or, overcome with homesickness, I am struggling to keep my nose from running. But in reality I am just trying to be a dog, to take in the smell of the mohalla, of its alleys and backyards, food stalls and florists, guile and innocence, innumerable drains and the lone attar shop that sits next to Suleiman’s Homeopathic Clinic. Sniffing yields nothing, though, for once you have slipped into the prison uniform everyone smells pretty much the same. Everyone smells of despair and, sometimes, bleaching powder.

  Last summer a stubby little man with restless eyes and busy fingers came over from D-Block to meet me. He said we used to be near neighbours in the other world; his family lived directly above the Bata outlet, though I didn’t remember spotting him near the Bata store or anywhere else in Vanity Bagh. He wanted tips from me, tips on surviving the three months that had been slapped on him. He was typical Sub Jail material: small crime, brief term. He had been charged with the kind of swindling most kids do in their schooldays, but the poor chap did it with a big company that has half an English name, a proper logo and trademark, and ended up here because the Sub Jail was running beyond capacity. I told him there were no particular tips to surviving a prison. Just be yourself. That is the trick. And he said that was exactly what his boss wanted everyone in the office to do. Just be yourself. And that was what he had done with the office money. Leaning against a pillar, we laughed until we remembered we were convicts.

  I asked him about Vanity Bagh the way people ask after old friends, and he talked about it as if it were a friend-turnedfoe. He didn’t care much about it and, still worse, he would be moving his family to another neighbourhood once his three-month term expired. I asked how the mohalla was doing. He shrugged. I asked after the well-known people and the popular establishments of the area. He shrugged again. It was as if he had made up his mind to shrug the mohalla off his back.

  The three months went like two weeks; when he came to the garden one afternoon to say a quick goodbye I shook his hand longer than a handshake normally lasts. The longer the handshake, I thought, the deeper I would rub my fingerprints onto his. And no matter how brief his stopover would be, he was certain to leave my fingerprints unknowingly on several things in the mohalla: trees, lampposts, walls, doors, ATMs, railings.

&nb
sp; It was one of those months when people were released in large numbers. Some left after elaborate goodbyes that made you painfully jealous of their freedom; others vanished as quietly as in a jailbreak, their absence noticed later by the vacant seats in the TV Room and the workplaces that needed new hands.

  The Carpentry Room was suddenly short of three men, the Handicraft Room four, Kitchen seven, but it was the Book Room that was worst hit. It had sent thirteen bookmakers out to the free world. One morning we were getting a patch of land behind the water tanks ready for growing spinach when a head warden strolled up with a clipboard and pencil. His shadow paced the freshly raked earth, fat and funny. At regular intervals he pointed the pencil at an inmate and said ‘You’, and the chosen one stared solemnly down as if he had been picked by a firing squad. Once used to roaming free among the ancient trees, soaking up the sun and occasionally slipping behind a tree to smoke a contraband cigarette, once used to all this luxury, nobody wanted an indoors job. The outdoors fill you with sounds and sights, a long list of them: the best sound is that of trucks, as small in your mind’s eye as toys, tearing down the distant expressway; the best sight from a prison is a silent aeroplane disappearing into an Everest of clouds. It makes you want to get out of prison one day and do well in life. The most disturbing sight always awaits me beneath the loose stones near the bamboo clumps. I lift them occasionally in the course of weeding the garden steps, and an acute sadness creeps up on me at the sight of snails lurking under the lichened stones. They are reminders of the slow years I have to live through. Apart from that, I have no issues with the outdoors.

  Even the sun doesn’t like to linger around a prison interior for long, where sometimes it is hard to tell solid things from shadows. It beats me as to why there are still people who would give anything to land an indoors job; when you are destined to live in a prison, why would you want to spend your days in another prison inside it?

  I was grateful that I was not deemed fit for one of the rooms. Not yet.

  ‘You,’ the head warden said exactly a minute after I had heaved a sigh of relief at being spared. I didn’t look up from the shallow pit I was digging with a stick.

  ‘You, 111,’ he said again, rubbing the sole of his boot against the gravel. ‘I am putting you in the Book Room.’

  That sounded like news of the death of someone who owed you a lot of money.

  ‘Come join this group,’ he said, pointing his pencil at three old men, all of whom were big book haters, to judge from the heavy frowns on their faces. I equally hated books. But in a prison you can’t pick and choose a career.

  The Book Room is the quietest of all workplaces in the Central Prison. It is many blocks from the nearest sign of human inhabitation. The silence that surrounds it makes you think of a library. It even looks like a library, for that matter, with same-size books, darkly stained shelves and ceiling fans suspended from long poles. But the books here have only blank pages, which makes it a library of unwritten books and unforced silence. The blade of a paper-cutting machine occasionally swishes through the uneven edges of freshly made books and makes a light thud.

  Books are born in near silence. No wonder libraries are such quiet places. Edges trimmed, they are passed onto my table. I bind them. At twenty-four, that is my calling.

  Even my ammi, who had sat in the third row of the packed courtroom with her lower lip pushed out in anticipation of bad news, would not have imagined me ending up among books eighteen months after my fate had been officially sealed. She had been praying silently through the morning of the verdict, a tasbih moving through her fingers like a brown baby snake. The beads froze between her fingers when the judge cleared his throat and opened his mouth to pronounce the verdict.

  Imran Jabbari has been found guilty of all the charges

  and is sentenced to sixteen years of imprisonment.

  – Justice P. R. Nariman ( -2012)

  The tasbih tumbled onto the court floor without so much as a tiny tinkle. Ammi followed suit, shrieking.

  II

  11/11 is Mangobagh’s private little 9/11.

  ~ City Chronicle (1959- )

  The first days in the Book Room were the hardest, and the bleakest. Every place I had forcibly turned into a comfort zone appeared to have been condemned overnight and knocked down without an eviction notice. I missed the vegetable patch we had been working on, and the shade under the bamboos, where the grass was greener and park-like. I craved the sun, cigarettes and the right frame of mind to play that solo mental game in which I jumped the jail when everyone was lost in thoughts about the other world or merely looking the other way.

  The Book Room, a long hall with a blue door set at either end, had a depressing smell of, what else, books. More depressing if you had hated books in the other life; in my life before the prison, I had been allergic to books, even to newspapers and magazines. So I was as big a misfit in the Book Room as a temple would have been in our mohalla. I found myself looking forward to someone getting tired of my clumsiness and reporting me to the superintendent: Inmate No. 111 has no knack for bookmaking nor any interest. Gardening is his vocation. Transfer him to the greens. Let him grow vegetables.

  Then one day, one Friday afternoon, the miracle happened.

  Miracles happen on Fridays. On Fridays alone.

  – The madwoman outside the masjid ( -2007)

  Happening without omens, it lasted less than a minute. I had just finished binding a book and was sizing up my lack of talent for the job when it happened. It all began with an impulse and ended with a revelation: something is seriously wrong with me or the world.

  I had casually opened the book and glanced inside, expecting to see nothing. There was, of course, nothing on the page I had opened the book to, but my eye caught something grey and grainy underneath, like bits of lead stuck between the pages. I turned the leaf but found nothing on the new page either, except the promise of something grainy and grey on the page below. If one impulse had led me to open the book another insisted I stay on the page and stare at it, until I saw an alphabet, then a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a story. This could be another game my mind played, like the game of a daylight jailbreak, where I get three lives as in computer games and the guards get bonus points if they shoot me between the eyes. I closed the book, and opened it after a while. Blank pages. But if I stared long enough I knew the words would be right back, ready to tell a story. My story.

  Every third Saturday, a makeshift tent is erected near the front garden and four doctors sit behind different tables set outside hearing distance of each other, as if one is not sure of his diagnosis and doesn’t want the other to overhear. Three of them are armed with stethoscopes; the one without a stethoscope, whom I first took for a priest minus the cassock, is a psychiatrist and to the best of my knowledge he is the only psychiatrist in the world who has decided against sporting a French beard. If you have a mental issue come talk to me, his smile seems to say. Inmates frequently go to him and complain about sleeplessness or hypertension, hoping to get some sleeping pills or even a recommendation for parole. All they get is counselling, though. In the week after I first spotted words appear on blank pages as on a magic slate, I considered consulting him and getting myself counselled, consoled and cured. Then I thought: why? What harm can it cause me? Maybe this is a rare skill, like mirror writing, which one in a million is blessed with. Maybe God has sent me this facility because He willed me to read my own story as if I haven’t lived it myself.

  The next time I opened a book, a ray of sunlight angled in through a cracked roof tile and fell on a page, illuminating no words. There were, in fact, thousands of words, maybe more, only that the naked eye couldn’t see them straightaway.

  Every night thousands of stars appear in the sky.

  Blame it on your eyes if you see only a few.

  – Professor Suleiman Ilahi (1949- )

  I scrunched up my eyes for a couple of minutes and there appeared words, and words formed people, peo
ple formed places. The first place this nearly invisible opening chapter sketched was Vanity Bagh. That meant the chapters in this book were in perfect order.

  Barely a mile long, Vanity Bagh is a long queue of old buildings waiting at the Char Bazaar intersection for the light to change so that they can trot down the zebra crossing and join the architectural revolution that has been sweeping across Mangobagh since the turn of the millennium. But the green light never comes on for them, and they remain standing on either side of a reasonably wide and unreasonably busy road. That is one thing I have always noticed about Vanity Bagh. It is always busy, unreasonably so because it houses no important places – no government office where you get important licences or certificates for a bribe, no famous shop which runs discount sales all year round, no eminent fakir who can cure even Hepatitis B by merely blowing into your ears, nothing of the crowd-pulling sort. All it has is a row of dusty green colonnaded structures with balconies made of wood and the railings of wrought iron. All the buildings are treated with the same measure of negligence, and not a single one of them has seen a lick of paint since Bushra Jabbari, my Ammi, set foot in the mohalla as a young bride.

  In my memory these buildings haven’t

  changed a bit in thirty years.

  – Bushra Jabbari (1962- )

  Amidst this horrid stretch of masonry stands Masjid-e-Mosavi, a tiny, green-domed mosque where the whole neighbourhood comes to pray on Fridays. Next to its arched entrance is a narrow external stairway that leads to the terrace from which pigeons fly out five times a day at the sound of the azan.

  Don’t sit on the steps. And don’t smoke here.

  This is a place of worship. No place for idlers.

  – Kareem Jabbari (1953- )

  Though we were not highway robbers or rippers or something even half-acclaimed as Abu Hathim sahib, the mohalla always thought there was something utterly fishy about our gang. The mohalla-wallahs knew where to bump into us, and they tried their best not to. We hung around Mogul Bakery, which produces probably the best kebabs in the whole of Mangobagh, or sat on the wall that had been built by the Railways to stop encroachments into their territory. When a police patrol crept through the mohalla we vanished into the alley near the Irani Café, where we lounged in the shade of Abu Hathim sahib’s two-storeyed house, ducking when he walked up to an upstairs window to spray paan juice into the alley.