Vanity Bagh

by Anees Salim

  In our mohalla it’s quite normal, you can even call it inevitable, to be named after someone rich and famous from Pakistan. But everyone in the area doesn’t have politicians’ names like our gang-members do. Some have the names of singers, some of actors, some others of cricketers. I, for instance, am named after Imran the cricketer, and not Imran the politician. (The mohalla-wallahs always name their children after people with successful professions. It was Imran’s own fault that he joined politics and lost his wife and everything nice to more successful people.)

  Though the imam was a big fan of cricket, he had no knowledge of the rules and tactics involved; he didn’t know what a night watchman was supposed to do, nor could he tell Dicky Bird from Billy Bowden. Like people with marginal knowledge of cricket, he attributed the fall of each and every wicket to perfect aim alone, and occasionally poked fun at Ashish Nehra for handling the ball more awkwardly than the girls in the mohalla handled catapults. He named my younger brother Wasim – he, incidentally, is a lefty.

  The street had a Benazir too. She was the youngest daughter of Mir sahib, the chubby little man who owned Mogul Bakery and a string of less successful enterprises across the city, who was the richest guy in Vanity Bagh if you counted white money alone. If black money and encroached properties were allowed to be counted, nobody in the area could beat Abu Hathim sahib in wealth and in wile. Even kids in the area would vouch for that.

  I had a short fling with Mir sahib’s last-born. Imran and Benazir! Doesn’t it remind you of the stories that surfaced shortly after a human bomb killed Benazir? Imran and Benazir! Benazir and Imran! The mohalla-wallahs have no qualms when it comes to gossiping even about the dead and the retired. They know bitching about the deceased and the fallen is not a nice thing to do, but they don’t believe in doing just nice things alone. The Benazir from our mohalla was very nearly sexy. I gave her eight out of ten. Our gang-members grudged her just five on the night we were grading the girls in the mohalla – girls from our own families didn’t get any grade, they simply did not exist in this rushed census. Benazir was tall, even without her high heels – with which I was equally in love – she was almost my height. Her curls were very curly and always stuck out of the shawl she wore over her head, which gave her the permanent air of a refugee fleeing from the Afghan border. What spoiled her looks were her lips, each the size of my thumb, which she kept painted in light pink or shocking copper. In Jinnah’s opinion, hers were the kind of lips that looked good only in a blue film.

  They lived directly above the bakery, and her windows, doing utmost justice to the name of the family establishment, were in Mogul style and overlooked the street. During the first season of our romance I used to hang around the bakery even after the other guys had gone home, feeling a pang of anxiety when passing buses and overburdened trucks blocked my view of her room. I feared her windows would be erased from the masonry by the time the building came back to view. The things people think up in love! But the windows were always there, and she would be behind one of them as long as I was on the street, combing her hair. Sometimes I stayed out so late that I saw bats returning to Franklin after their long haul over the city. I never went home of my own accord; sometimes the imam sent Wasim out in search of me, at other times Mir sahib came out of the building for a smoke and stood on the sidewalk, looking lovingly at the building, as if he were serenading his own home.

  Her wedding was the grandest affair Vanity Bagh had witnessed since her elder brother’s. Even Abu Hathim sahib, who rarely came out of his home after a crude bomb had driven him indoors, came to bless the couple, surrounded by a band of frowning men whose bulging pockets outlined the shape of country-made pistols. Why Abu Hathim sahib? Even I went, and made a discovery: contrary to what is widely believed and poetically expressed in couplets, there is no lump hardening in your throat as you watch your ex marry. The feast was on the rooftop, under a canopy of red-andochre concentric designs, and I helped myself liberally to the lamb biryani a famed cook from Hyderabad had been roped in for. I even freaked out with Jinnah and Zia, who wanted to swap their frayed footwear with the district collector’s expensive leather shoes when the stairs were deserted. They took turns to slip their feet into the black, spotless pair like in the ‘Cinderella’ story. Jinnah’s feet were a size ten while Zia and the collector had smaller, daintier feet. And that settled it. Crouching on the steps, Zia tied the shoelaces as slowly as if the shoes were his own and went home whistling, leaving behind his rubber slippers with Hulk Hogan’s face on the insole for the collector. The bride’s father was hugely embarrassed and apologetic, offering to get a replacement from Dey’s Mart, but the collector laughed the offer off and, singing praises of the Hyderabadi biryani, leaped over the puddles to his car. For the rest of the night, Mir sahib hired Jinnah to keep an eye on the guests’ footwear. We ranked it as the top joke of 2006.

  So Benazir did not marry Imran; she married a paunchy television dealer called Shooja and left the mohalla, promptly returning every year to labour in Bismi Maternity Centre.

  The street even had a man named Pervez, a tiny creature primly dressed in clothes that were in vogue when Amitabh Bachchan was the official angry young man of the nation. It was hard to spot him without a smile on his close-shaven baby face. He was always at the bus shelter, awaiting a bus that never came. A tattered copy of Good Housekeeping tucked under an arm, an imitation leather attaché case dangling from a hand, he would stare pensively past the intersection and pick pockets with long, nifty fingers. I had once seen him at work, and what a smooth operator he was. Once a pocket had been picked, which he did with lightning speed, he would carefully place the attaché case on the floor and pore over Good Housekeeping until his victim boarded a bus and was gone. Then he would disappear into a neighbouring alley, probably to stow away the loot, and resurface in a short while, all smiles as ever. He was a nice little gentleman living quietly out of commuters until he went into bad company, joining a gang of young drug peddlers from another area who rode their remodelled motorbikes through Vanity Bagh like snowmobiles, swaying through traffic as the wind played in their long hair. They were all picked up from a mall the day Mangobagh’s narcotic cell had a new, ruthless chief, and we heard nothing more of Pervez and his new friends.

  Our own gang found its name one early evening during the listless monsoon of 2007, precisely a day after Jinnah had made a reference to the imam’s pubic hair while we had been sitting on the stairway. The name, like the very idea of the gang, came from Zulfikar.

  5 ½ Men.

  – Zulfikar Faizudin (1984-?)

  No one spoke for a while; you simply didn’t want to say something to an odd name like that and be mocked for your judgement for the rest of your life. As in every situation that leaves you indecisive, each waited for the first response to come from somebody else.

  ‘Anyone in disagreement, please raise your hand,’ Zulfikar said.

  Zia readily held up a hand.

  ‘You don’t like the name?’ Zulfikar asked calmly. ‘Reason?’

  ‘I like the name very much. That’s why I raised my hand.’

  No one even cared to laugh at Zia. We were too busy deciding if the name was awesome or awful, because we didn’t know any adjective that existed in between.

  ‘All for it then?’ Zulfikar asked, a matchstick quivering in a corner of his mouth. ‘Can we freeze on it?’

  There was a voice of dissent, though, which ironically came from a person who had never spoken a proper word in his whole life. Yahya, another one of us with a popular Pakistani name, as you can see, was born dumb. But he was not dumb dumb, he was smart dumb. When the Almighty pressed the mute button on him at the assembly line, He gave Yahya something exceptional in damages, and rolled him out into the noisy world with a set of remarkably big ears that heard things no one else did: ants marching across asbestos roofs, beetles sneezing, goats imitating radio jingles, rain-clouds preparing to dissolve into a shower over the city and even the squeal of the
public lavatory door as the ghost of Iskander, a young man who died from having too much fake cocaine, went in to pee.

  Yahya read lips as well, and he read them more fluently than we read the Quran. And on that day of christening our gang his eyes never left Zulfikar’s nicotine-stained lips as the latter explained how he had arrived at that peculiarly odd name. It was a simple trick, Zulfikar said: he had counted Yahya only as half a member because of his handicap. I secretly thought he should be whipped for saying that in Yahya’s presence.

  When you make fun of someone’s handicap,

  Allah reserves a bigger one for you.

  – The madwoman outside the masjid ( -2007)

  Yahya mimed his resignation from the gang, tearing up an imaginary contract and throwing it into a bin that did not even exist (during that furious act of cutting up an indenture and throwing it to the wind, only the wind was real and pretty gusty). He kicked the wall, slapped Franklin, spat. But when no one paid any attention he stopped behaving like that and sat down on the stone bench, staring at a bottle crown partly buried in mud. His fingers, which were his lips, would not part and utter a word for the rest of the evening.

  ‘All of us will have our wrists tattooed “5½ Men”,’ Zulfikar proclaimed. ‘Agreed?’

  Yahya sprang to his feet and, swinging his hands almost comically, tore down the street. For the next two days there was no sign of him. He was the kind of person who was easily and greatly missed. I strolled down the smelly lane where he lived in a lopsided house that looked like a coop built for ostriches, whistling a radio-station anthem which was our code. He didn’t whistle back, though I knew he was watching me from behind a curtain. But on the third evening, just when Zulfikar was tinkering with the idea of renaming the gang, Yahya was back under Franklin, laughing and thumping us on the back, his fingers talkative once again, his wrist ready to be tattooed.

  Going home with a tattooed wrist equalled doing a striptease in front of the imam. So I asked the tattoo-wallah to do it on my upper arm instead of the wrist, and in a much smaller version than what was already on Zulfikar’s wrist. And, believe me, mine looked the best of the six. Or of fiveand-a-half, as Zulfikar would have put it.

  IV

  When the city was burning,

  Imran Jabbari, a devoted son,

  was attending to his very sick mother.

  ~ Defence Lawyer (1965- )

  Workshop, they said.

  And I thought it was just another place where they teach the inmates to earn a living when they cease to be inmates, like the Book Room or the Tailoring Room or even the Class Room, a high-ceilinged hall with broken furniture piled in one corner, where a few inmates, some of them well past their prime, prepare themselves to write high-school exams. But it turned out to be none of those places, but a bunch of smiling men who sat behind desks the wardens had us haul out to the courtyard and place under the gooseberry trees. They sat with their backs turned to a banner strung between two pillars. You talk. We listen.

  In spite of the promise on the banner, they did most of the talking and we did the listening because the superintendent was leaning against a pillar, frowning at the glare of sunlight on the Record Room windows. At first they talked through the microphone, poking fun at each other for their receding hairlines, expanding waistlines and insatiable appetite as a way of introduction. I imagined their voices climbing over the bronze-coloured walls and floating along the highways they would themselves travel later in the day. Then they split us up into small groups as if we were about to be hung in batches, and talked to us one by one in near murmurs, like whispering the last prayers to us.

  They already knew everything important about us: the nature of our crime, the length of our punishment, how long it would be before we walked free. They knew everything except the individual jailbreak plans we hid in the folds of our brains. The wardens must have let them peek into our records, into our past, into the blur of our future. What set them apart from the human rights officials and social activists, who visit prisons more frequently and earnestly than inmates’ kin do, was their curiosity. It was a while before I realized it was their profession to be curious. They belonged to a research organization, and had been hired by a magazine to do a study on how captivity changed convicts’ lives. Dumb topic. Does anyone speak the truth when their daily life is researched into? (Ammi once told a research lady we owned a Philips colour television when the truth was the imam had forbidden us from watching even the neighbours’ TV. Which size, the research lady had asked. Fairly big, Ammi replied.)

  Watching them talk, occasionally mocking each other over the public announcement system for their identical girth, I had a sudden brainwave, an intuition, which said there was something for me in these men in ties: a hidden possibility, a chance to dare, a flicker of hope. They would not allow me to be a stowaway in their van – of course not. Nor would they slip a packet of cigarettes into my hands when it was safe to do so – no way. But this band of smiling men did foreshadow an opportunity, the exact nature of which I had no clue about.

  As specimens they preferred inmates who had got long terms to those whose time here was more or less up. That made me an easy candidate, and I found myself sitting in the spidery shade of a gooseberry tree with a man who looked intensely familiar from a distance but a complete stranger up close. His face lit up the moment he read out my name from a sheet of paper pinned to his clipboard, as if spending an afternoon with Imran Jabbari improved his prospects at the office.

  ‘Imran bhai,’ he said, tapping me lightly on the knee, as if he had known me from the other life, from happier days. There was so much gel in his hair that the sun seemed to slip off his head and fall onto his knees in tiny white circles. ‘I am sure the past eighteen months have changed you a lot.’

  The eighteen months had not changed me much, except for one thing: I had started seeing printed words where there were actually none. But that was not a change a research agency would accept as a significant change. So I shook my head, indicating a firm no.

  He placed his hands on his knees, and warmed his palms on them. The white circles were now on the back of his hands. ‘11/11,’ he sighed. ‘Such a coincidence that all tragic days have an 11 to it, isn’t?’

  I didn’t know about the other 11s. But 11/11 was no coincidence; it was how they wanted it, so that history would be easy to remember in numbers as simple as the multiplication table of one. No one goes wrong with the multiplication table of one. No one can.

  ‘You were more than an average student in school. Then you dropped out.’ He looked up from the file, absently turning a page. ‘Why?’

  I smiled with the corner of my mouth. So he knew I was not going to answer this question or any other question he might have up his sleeve. I, like many other inmates, was bearing with these Workshop men just because the superintendent was still watching us.

  ‘You even wrote a story for the school magazine and when it was rejected you sprayed ink on the teacher who laughed at it. Am I right?’

  Wrong. It was a poem, not a story, and I had copied it from my sister’s English text and jumbled the words so it would look fresh and original. But I held my tongue; it no longer mattered if it was verse or prose, rejected or published, if I was punished for squirting ink on the English teacher’s shirt or let off with a stern warning.

  ‘Your father is a priest,’ he read out from the file, as if I didn’t know yet.

  I nodded and he appeared relieved: I was finally responding to his research.

  ‘Was he the type …’ he stopped, hesitating over the next word, and then started drawing medium-sized breasts in the air with his forefinger. ‘Was he the type of person who … who … let me put it this way … a person who would appreciate what the Al-Qaeda, Taliban and people like that do?’

  One of the most respected personalities of Vanity Bagh, though a complete nonentity outside it, the imam had never been asked these kinds of uncivilized questions. If someone ever developed the nerve
to question his integrity in this manner, he would have given that person a piece of his mind, a big chunk of it, in fact. In public the imam loathed violence, and preached what every other Muslim clergyman does when a human bomb kills enough people to make headlines: that peace is the religion of Islam. Not that he sympathized with the fidayeen in private. The only time he wanted to be a human bomb was when Ammi came back from Haja Stores on the eve of an Eid with too many shopping bags and a Chinese umbrella. He frowned at the bags and announced it was time he took Khomeini sahib’s fatwa seriously and blew himself up when Rushdie was around so that Ammi and the rest of us could wallow in the same degree of luxury Mir sahib’s wife and children were spoilt with. Anger spread on Ammi’s face like a rash, and she ordered me to take the bags and the umbrella back to Haja Stores and get a refund. ‘Give the money to your Abba. And tell him no one dies if he blows himself up. I am the living example.’

  In Vanity Bagh, most shopkeepers treat young boys like beggars. Those who don’t are either genuinely good at heart or plain paedophiles. Shahul Haja was neither, and he bluntly refused the refund on the grounds that I had no receipts to show. Bags piled on my forearms and the Chinese umbrella hanging from my shirt collar like a counterweight, I waddled home past Zia and his friends who made farting sounds with every step I took. (We went to different schools; we were not friends yet.) Ammi scowled at the sight of the bags she no longer wanted and shoved a screw of pulpy pink bills into my pocket. Zia and his friends farted with their lips when I picked my burdened way back to Haja Stores.