Vanity Bagh

by Anees Salim

  We called ourselves ‘5½ Men’, though there were a whole six of us. But everything in the mohalla has a strange name, and a strange story. The imam of the Masjid-e-Mosavi once said our area had been named after the wife of the British engineer who built the bridge across the Moosa River a century ago. But did a lady named Vanity ever exist on planet earth? I seriously doubt the authenticity of this story, even though the imam in question happens to be my own father.

  The mohalla-wallahs are so obsessed with spinning yarns and naming things that they haven’t even spared a tree that stands bang opposite the mosque. They call it Franklin, as if it were born to Christian parents and even goes to St Thomas Basilica on Sundays along with the Pintos who run a garage a few blocks from the tree. In spite of its appearance, which borders on an antique variety of grandeur, the tree has not much significance in the history of the street. To be more precise, it is nothing but a criminal waste of nature’s time. Franklin bears neither flowers nor fruit, and starts shedding leaves only in late autumn, sprouting new ones when spring is almost out of sight; by the time its branches sport the first load of tender leaves other trees along the street will already have pupae under their foliage.

  The only person who had any memory of the tree as a sapling died a couple of years ago at the age of 105. He, as a small boy, had witnessed Father Franklin plant it in the sepiacoloured mud of Vanity Bagh nearly a century ago.

  Pather Praklin frayed and frayed and

  balked and balked around the free.

  – Ghulam Chacha (1902-2007)

  In Ghulam Chacha’s ragged memory, Father Franklin eternally circled the sapling, spraying holy water on its leaves before launching himself on a preaching trip through Mangobagh. For the first few years, the sapling stood sulking across the street from the mosque, nameless, guarded from the preying tongues of cattle with a tubular fence made of mesh. Then somebody, probably Ghulam Chacha, gave it the name of the priest who was nutty enough to walk around a little sapling while reading from the Bible.

  The day the City Chronicle renewed the legend of Franklin in its Sunday edition – sometimes these newspapers have so much free space they write about any crap, even about garbage disposal and eunuchs – we started hating the tree. What was a tree that reeked of Christianity doing in a Muslim neighbourhood? People started talking about felling it; they were furious that it had been planted by a Christian who must have bribed a few dozen Muslims into kafirs. Probably the Pintos had been practising Muslims a century ago; the mohalla-wallahs were almost sure that Moses, the senior-most member of the Pinto clan, had been called Moosa before his conversion. His wife was still called Fatima, whom the mohalla-wallahs now suspected of secretly fasting during Ramzan.

  I saw Fatima Auntie buying dates from

  Mogul Bakery during last Ramzan. Also haleem.

  – Aasia Jamal (1992- )

  No one normally believed Aasia Jamal: she once said she had won, through a draw of lots as part of an advertising campaign, the chance to dine with Irfan Pathan, but declined to go as cricket didn’t interest her much. She said no to Irfan? Yusuf would have been an easier-to-believe lie. But this time around, Aasia Jamal seemed to be speaking the truth. The Pintos were suddenly frowned upon and discussed as the sort of people who would trade anything for money, even the religion they were born into.

  Leave the Pintos alone, the imam said. And let Franklin be.

  The Pintos were left alone; all of a sudden the mohallawallahs could not care less about Franklin, except for Jinnah, who was the devoutest Muslim among us. He said he would drive mercury-coated nails into the tree. He even produced a handful of nails as proof of his indignation, but he had no clue where to find mercury. ‘But I’ll somehow finish this fucking tree,’ he said. But something, probably a quick mental picture of the street without its trademark tree, deterred him from working out a new plan for vengeance. One day he whipped out his penknife with a flourish, as if he were going to fell Franklin with it, and started carving the name of our gang on its rock-like skin, working dedicatedly a whole afternoon until the bark blunted the blade. Then he used a screwdriver. But the older name appeared to have been etched deeper into the mind of the mohalla, and the tree continued to be known by its Christian name. ‘5½ Men’, engraved like a declaration of calf love, remained only physically, catching the eye of people as they stared out of vehicles bumping through the choked street. They probably didn’t even wonder what that odd number stood for. As a gang we aspired to be nothing less than a nightmare, dreaded for a whole set of beastly qualities, but all we naturally had was a turtle’s instinct to shrink up and stay in our shell at the faint wail of a police siren.

  We dreamed the dream of the poor – to be rich and, circumstances permitting, famous – and we had an unlikely role model, who didn’t come from film posters or sports pages but lived right amidst us, in the alley beside the Irani Café, in a rambling, well-guarded building that was Abu Hathim sahib’s home and refuge rolled into one. By the time we were tall enough to reach up to his waist, he had ceased to be a hero for most of the mohalla-wallahs. He had lost a leg, and the ability to make people salaam with great humility. But childhood heroes die a slow death, and Abu Hathim sahib continued to live in our memories as the man who had drafted Mangobagh’s riot charts, who had settled feuds between gangsters, guarded nightclubs in Begum Bazaar and Broadway and, most of all, stood in the middle of the street with his hands behind his back and chest puffed up as bulldozers rolled in to knock down a new illegal housing colony. In our mind’s eye, the legend of Abu Hathim still strode on two sturdy legs, though we could clearly hear the thump of his crutches as he picked his way to the windows to spray the alley with paan juice.

  Zulfikar, who had the temerity to claim Abu Hathim sahib as his Ammi’s first cousin, looked up from the splatter of paan juice on the alley stones one evening and snapped his fingers for attention. ‘Can’t we be somebody like Abu Hathim sahib?’

  The stains on the stones looked so much like blood that I wondered if Abu Hathim sahib had become terminally ill.

  ‘One-legged like him?’ asked Jinnah, laughing.

  ‘I mean, can’t we form a gang?’ Zulfikar said. ‘Like he did when he was our age?’

  Abu Hathim sahib had made his mark very early in life, having been booked for murder at the age of nineteen, acquitted several times before he reached twenty and ranked as one of the top terrors of Mangobagh when he was hardly twenty-one. And look at us – we were already twenty-two or

  more, and nonentities.

  ‘Can’t we?’ Zulfikar asked.

  The idea touched me like a cold, invisible thing, like the hand of a ghost, and I remember shivering slightly. Maybe a cold wind blew through the mohalla when I first heard about it but, looking back, I want to believe that it was a foreboding that touched me like a hand – a firm, clammy hand. When the momentary chill passed, I could see beyond the end of the alley, I could see the future and our place in it.

  ‘Can’t we?’ Zulfikar asked again.

  If the six of us could roll ourselves into one big Abu Hathim sahib, we could probably rule the mohalla, we could even recreate history in a small way. As on a huge video wall I could see the gang doing many things, the same things Abu Hathim sahib had probably done when we had been children: guarding the mohalla, being salaamed by the mohalla-wallahs; collecting hafta, being salaamed by the mohalla-wallahs; making a fortune, being salaamed more by the mohalla-wallahs; beating up the mohalla-wallahs, being salaamed still more by them; and finally losing a leg.

  The year was 2007 and the season late summer, when twilight came early and made Vanity Bagh look like the gloomiest place on earth. As darkness spread in the alley we heard Abu Hathim sahib cough and clear his throat, followed by the thumps his crutches made on the floor. A fresh shower of paan juice landed on the alley floor, and I found myself wondering again if Abu Hathim sahib was living out his last days. When the thuds of the crutches, as precise as clockwork, faded away, Zulfik
ar said it was time someone stepped into the shoes that had been lying vacant since Abu Hathim sahib had his right leg amputated. ‘If we don’t, someone else will,’ he said.

  Police are in the mohalla, looking for two young men

  who beat up the Bata manager.

  – Passer-by ( - )

  Jinnah and Zia looked at each other, almost lovingly, then walked hurriedly towards the end of the alley where there was the railway line, beyond which, hidden behind big trees and draped with dusty vines, stood a dilapidated flint structure.

  The next afternoon we met on the stairway that stood next to the mosque like a wooden ladder left leaning against the building, and sat listening to Zulfikar as pigeons landed on and took off from the terrace with an angry flutter of their wings. What had sounded like a life-changing idea in a nutshell now turned out to be something grossly self-centred as he added one detail after another to his brainwave. When he said ‘gang’, Zulfikar meant his gang. Maybe he had spent the whole week imagining himself seated on the throne Abu Hathim sahib had vacated soon after a crude bomb had been hurled at him just outside Mogul Bakery; Zulfikar must have pictured the five of us standing behind his chair wearing dark goggles, hands cupped over our crotches like soccer players.

  ‘The best idea you have ever had, Zulfikar,’ Zia said, his small eyes wide open in mock wonder. We all faked admiration for our new chief, and Zulfikar was on the verge of self-coronation when we erupted into a round of synchronized laughter, which slowly grew in volume and emptiness until Zulfikar got up and climbed down the stairway. He disappeared from our sight just after Franklin, his black T-shirt blending into the darkness behind the row of public lavatories. The laughter brought the imam to the window, where he stood with his hands on the ledge and glared at me, just at me as if he didn’t see the rest of the gang, and they fell quiet, more out of respect for me than for him.

  You can laugh at a brilliant idea, but you can’t laugh it off altogether. Knowing this, Zulfikar came back the next evening with amendments to his idea and a big smile. The imam had closed the green, slatted windows soon after he finished the evening azan in a style that made the mohallawallahs wonder whether to laugh or complain to the Muslim Welfare Board. But he had not turned the louvres down; light from the prayer hall sieved through the slats and fell on the damp steps, glinting on the moss like dew.

  ‘I don’t want to be the leader,’ Zulfikar said with the air of someone who was making a sacrifice for mankind, ‘if you people don’t like it.’

  ‘We people certainly don’t like it,’ said Jinnah. He was the bluntest of the six, looks-wise and otherwise. ‘And nobody can be my leader.’

  ‘Yes, that was what I was about to tell you too,’ Zulfikar said. ‘Nobody is going to be anybody’s leader. It’s a gang without a leader.’

  (Jinnah, who had been brainwashed by his Ammi into joining Dey’s Mart the next week as a shop assistant, changed his mind. Who wants to fake smiles at customers when you could stare shop owners into paying the weekly hafta?)

  So the gang would have no leader, though time and again Zulfikar would try to strike the pose of one with a simple matchstick, which he placed in a corner of his mouth and pushed around with the tip of his tongue, an act that made him look like he was sneering at the listlessness of our mohalla and the oddity of its name.

  Since the gang was headless it couldn’t afford to be nameless. Long hours were spent on the steps, smoking and arguing, trying to sell one’s own choice, not willing to buy what others thought the most fitting name for the gang. When the debate got too loud the imam opened the window and glared out, not seeing anyone, but staring at a particular spot which he imagined to be the head of his own son. He tugged at his long, hennaed beard frequently, conveying to the vague outlines on the stairs that he was enraged to the point of dialling 101.

  ‘Don’t sit on the stairs,’ he yelled out. ‘And don’t smoke here.’

  We quickly wrapped our fingers around the cigarettes, hiding their glowing tips in our palms, and the imam stomped off to the far side of the prayer hall, only to reappear at the window at regular intervals. After the window had been thrown open and slammed shut the third time that night, Jinnah made an observation. ‘I think the imam sahib hennas his pubic hair too.’

  There was a long moment of silence in the stairwell.

  ‘I’m sorry, Imran,’ Jinnah said after a while. ‘I didn’t mean to make fun of your Abba.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I forced a laugh, swallowing hard.

  What remained of the evening was spent in hushed parleys, and the session was finally cut short by a drizzle, which made us look up in surprise, as if we expected Abu Hathim sahib to stand on the rooftop, squirting betel juice down on us through the V of his fingers placed against his lips.

  We found a name for the gang the next evening as we sat under Franklin, watching the slow traffic on the main road. But it would be another month or so before Mangobagh would find us out, and offer us opportunities, possibilities and a story we would want the children of Vanity Bagh to grow up listening to.

  III

  If this city had a WTC,

  they would have bombed it as well.

  ~ Public Prosecutor ( - )

  On my way from the Food Hall to the Book Room I found it under one of the gooseberry trees. It lay on the cobbled path, face down, waiting to be trampled. The moment I picked it up I understood the real meaning of feather-light. It means lighter than air and ready to float away. The feather was a fluffy yellow, fairly big; it must have slipped off the plume of a pale yellow, innocent-looking bird as it flew over the prison. I have no clue which bird; I don’t even wonder which bird. Birds don’t interest me; rules do.

  Rule No. 7 (a varnished board outside the superintendent’s office lists out sixteen of them in white enamel) says inmates are not supposed to collect things. And, as if in a reaffirmation of Rule No. 7, our uniforms are completely bereft of pockets. The wardens’ uniforms have plenty of them; it’s an open declaration that they collect things, mostly money. The last time Ammi was here she bribed the sentry even if there was absolutely no need to: it was Visitors’ Day when purses usually remain shut and doors open. The sentry did not even mention a bribe in the usual roundabout way sentries do. She must have gone up to him and volunteered, ‘Please take this money. I have brought it for you all the way from Vanity Bagh.’ She has a talent for corrupting even the most honest warden in service.

  None of the rules enamelled on the board say an inmate should exercise restraint on following his impulses. So I quickly went down to my knees and whisked off the feather from the floor before boots or bare feet could trample it. It was as light as yourself in that recurring dream in which a beautiful, convent-educated girl insists you marry her (and in each version the dream bursts like a bubble just before you could comply).

  Noticing me crouching on the cobbled path, a warden raised his voice from the veranda, ‘Are you planning to pee there, son?’ Inside the prison walls, ‘son’ is the abbreviation of ‘son of a whore’ or worse.

  I sprang to my feet and continued to the Book Room, the feather secreted on my person. Though I trod carefully across the courtyard, like a woman whose movements are controlled by the fear of a miscarriage, I was somehow convinced that the feather had already been damaged. But it miraculously survived the trip – the tip was a bit crushed, that’s all.

  Why did I take the trouble of smuggling in something even a bird had considered good riddance? Only when I stood behind the worktable piled with stacks of paper did I find an answer. To give my books of magical pages more legitimacy, I had unknowingly been craving a bookmark. When you are in captivity, every act, no matter how unreal it is, needs all possible accessories to create an air of make-believe.

  There were five freshly bound books on the table, the fruit of my half a day’s labour. I opened the one on top, half-expecting to hear the squeal of hinges as if I were opening the door of a library. I placed the feather between the
pages – blank pages, of course – and closed the book. The tip of the feather stuck ungracefully out of the book as if a little bird had landed on the book I was reading and I had snapped it shut in a fit of rage, trapping the poor thing inside. But it looked a decent bookmark notwithstanding. To retrieve the feather and keep it in the tool box with rolls of twine and a little bunch of needles, I opened the book. And there you were – the miracle had happened again: in the few minutes I had kept the book closed its pages had been filled with words.

  ‘Work, son, work,’ a warden called out to me from the other end of the aisle as he did every afternoon after lunch. He would then pace down to the tower of books on the far side of the room and back to the barred door two times over, just to ease his post-lunch heartburn. After the routine walk, he would undo the top two buttons of his shirt and collapse onto a chair; his siesta lasted exactly twenty-five minutes. It is the time of the day when every official, with the exception of the sentries, sinks deeper into his chair and closes his eyes for just a minute; he is shaken awake half an hour or so later by the renewed call of duty. I have fixed this hour for jumping the jail. The date I haven’t made up my mind about yet.

  Once the warden had settled into his chair and started to snore – almost immediately – I opened the book at the page that now had the luxury of a bookmark. Words, words and all of them about the life I had lived until they handcuffed me and brought me here in a rattling van on a grey Friday.

  I read those words, fascinated.

  If I wrote down the names of our gang-members one below the other on a sheet of paper, the oddity would have struck you instantly. You should see them together to understand the absurdity of this coincidence. We ourselves never noticed it in the first place and eventually it was Zia, who had this bad habit of digging deep into things and coming up with laughable trivia of life, who said we all had the names of Pakistani politicians. We could not stop laughing for a whole afternoon.