Vanity Bagh

by Anees Salim

  Here goes the boy again,

  carrying the burden of life in his tender hands.

  – The madwoman outside the masjid ( -2007)

  Hands laden with things nobody wanted to take immediate possession of, I requested the shopkeeper to dig into my trousers for the receipts, and his hand went so deep into my pocket that it nearly brushed my balls.

  Bhenchod, what am I supposed to do

  with your electricity bills?

  – Shahul Haja Khan (1934-99)

  Blind with rage, Ammi had given me the wrong bills. At the thought of having to brave Zia and the madwoman for the third time that afternoon, it was I who wanted to blow myself up into tiny pieces neither the imam nor Ammi could fix back even if they tried with Fevi Kwik or Araldite. All of a sudden I found the imam standing beside me and talking to Shahul Haja, who had swiftly loosened up and was offering to take the purchases back without proper receipts. The imam, on the other hand, was apologizing for the confusion and saying his wife had changed her mind again: she would now like to keep every piece of her afternoon shopping with her. ‘These women,’ he said, laughing. ‘These women,’ said Shahul Haja, laughing with the imam.

  The Workshop man was rapping the end of his pen against the clipboard, the way animal trainers in the circus do while their dogs do sums on a blackboard, as if he could control my thoughts with codes thus relayed. Abruptly he stopped and, just as I was expecting him to heave a sigh and let go of me, he asked, ‘What do they teach you at the madrasa?’

  Since 11/11, I had been asked this question more often than I had been asked my name. During the interrogation and the trial and even during my first weeks here I heard this question asked, sometimes with serious interest, sometimes as a way of mocking, and I had only one answer no matter what tone of voice my interrogators chose to employ: Madrasas teach you what they are supposed to: the Holy Quran. And they all smiled in a bad way like I had told them a joke they had already heard.

  ‘I am just being curious, Imran bhai,’ the Workshop man said. The sun was glinting on the long strands of his hair plastered together by too much gel. I was getting a headache just by looking at it. ‘How do you remember the madrasa you studied at?’

  The only madrasa in Vanity Bagh is a long, shady verandah at the back of the mosque. The sun streams in through an expanse of reed curtains and falls softly on the cracked olive floor like a faded Persian carpet. There are benches but no desks, so the children spread their books on their laps and chant what they are instructed to. Behind the verandah is a square grassy patch where mullahs occasionally congregate under the willow tree and chat late into the night. Whenever Abu Hathim sahib pays a visit to the mosque, he never goes home without a laborious trip to the backyard, where he stands under the willow tree the same way a visiting dignitary does in front of a national memorial, chin dropped to the chest, eyes closed. Under the tree a potted dahlia sits on an almost unobtrusive mound of earth, over which he runs his fingers warily and then presses them against his lips.

  Beneath the potted dahlia lies little Sinbad, Abu Hathim sahib’s youngest and the most favourite grandchild. Four years ago Sinbad died at the age of seven in a car accident. There were rumours that the truck that hit the car was driven by a professional killer who had been hired to bump off Abu Hathim sahib’s son. But on that fateful day it was the chauffeur who drove Sinbad to school; the truck killed the boy on the spot and the chauffeur died in a wailing ambulance. We were all shaken, especially the ladies. Sinbad was to be buried in Purana Masjid kabristan where Vanity Bagh buries its dead, but Abu Hathim sahib just couldn’t let the boy leave his bungalow, let alone the mohalla. Some sentiments are so senseless that they make you angry. This one made the imam fume; he would have even shouted if it was anybody other than Abu Hathim sahib. No one shouts at Abu Hathim sahib. No one even dares hold his gaze for longer than a few seconds. After clearing his throat several times, the imam found his voice and tried to make Abu Hathim sahib see the point: it is utterly un-Islamic to bury the dead in private premises unless you are a Mogul ruler or your killer wants to hide your body. But Abu Hathim sahib never sees a point other than the ones he himself makes. Sinbad’s father was willing to bury him anywhere. He even appealed to Abu Hathim sahib to comply with the Islamic rules. Impervious to such entreaties, which now came from everyone bold enough to speak up, the old man wouldn’t let the body go. The imam sat stiffly next to Abu Hathim sahib with a finger pressed to the side of his head, apparently thinking about the next best option to facilitate an Islamic burial. Mourners started sniffing, glancing around; it was the same familiar sulphuric smell that pervaded our home when the imam broke wind. Abu Hathim sahib momentarily recovered from the delirium to sniff the air and look accusingly around, as if asking, ‘Who dared do this in my house?’ I ranked that as the top joke of 2006.

  As the day wore on, Abu Hathim sahib showed signs of thawing. He said he would allow the boy to be buried behind the madrasa. But behind the madrasa there was only a small patch of land. ‘There is enough room for my little Sinbad,’ he groaned. ’And enough space for me beside him when I die.’ It was very moving to watch a don cry.

  There was nearly a stampede to carry the body. When the rich and the famous die everyone wants their share of involvement in the funeral. Even the boy’s father and uncles got elbowed out, but I managed to hang on to a pole of the green casket. It was one of the biggest surprises of my life. The casket, though it was riding on how many hands only God knew, weighed like it had a little bull inside. Sinbad was a tiny boy even a one-legged person like Abu Hathim sahib used to carry with ease. I remember believing for a moment that in death the boy had amassed the weight of the sixty or so years he would have lived had the truck not rammed into the car. I had a glimpse of his face when the winding sheet was opened just before they placed six planks on his grave. He was smiling with the corner of his mouth: a mocking, frozen smile that is the official emoticon of the mohalla-wallahs when they wish to wordlessly disapprove of something. I could not sleep for the next two days. On the third day, Abu Hathim sahib stepped through the madrasa and placed a pot of green dahlias on the grave. Before that I had not known that dahlias could bear green flowers.

  ‘You have been staring at that tree for the last ten minutes, Imran bhai,’ the Workshop man said. ‘And you haven’t answered my question about the madrasa and the one before that.’

  I closed my eyes and heard it rain, a rain that fell thirteen miles away behind the madrasa; I heard the clink of raindrops as the awning tiles of the mosque dripped onto the ablution tank. Through the sound of rain I heard a papery voice, which said in a tone of indifference I never knew I was capable of producing, ‘There is a willow tree behind the madrasa.’

  ‘Willow tree? Really?’ the Workshop man asked, and I opened my eyes. The sun in the prison yard was many shades fiercer than the mellow light that graced the alleys of Vanity Bagh. There was surprise on the face of the Workshop man as if a willow tree had been in one of his recent dreams. ‘And I guess you miss that tree. Right?’

  ‘There is a pot of dahlias under the tree.’ My voice was less papery this time, and more involved. ‘The pot is placed there as a mark. There is a big secret buried under it.’

  ‘What secret is buried under the pot?’ he asked, beginning to frown.

  Since I had been made to sit in front of this man whose gelled hair now reminded me of Mandrake, I had been plotting against him, whom I had met for the first time that morning, and his world, which I did not even have a faint mental picture of. Then, all of a sudden, I knew why I wanted to set this stranger up: I could not wait for fourteen odd years to be in Vanity Bagh again. I wanted to see the mohalla now, just once at least, just for a few hours, even for a few minutes. I considered it a mission accomplished if this man could be sent back to the real world with a false story. A story he would share with the magazine that had hired his group. A tiny speck of a story the magazine could blow into a big molten bubble. A story that wou
ld switch on a big spotlight over Vanity Bagh like in award shows and the circus. Look at the irony: a convict’s story carries a lot of weight whereas an under trial’s tale would always be met with a smirk. The world is a silly place. It can’t help pettiness. So I decided to mislead him, the same way you mislead wailing police cars in computer games so that they would tip over riverbanks lined with fake ‘Bridge Ahead’ signs. I could already see the imam turn the leaves of the magazine without taking it off the newsstand.

  ‘Tell me your little secret, Imran bhai,’ the Workshop man pleaded, adding a smile to his words as an afterthought.

  ‘There is a big crate of bombs buried under the pot.’

  He looked across the yard where the superintendent stood admiring the tip of his shoes. Then he looked back at me, his Adam’s apple moving slowly as he gulped. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I saw them bury the crate under the tree.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Abu Hathim and his sons.’

  He puckered his lips into a brown rosebud and shook his head slightly for a long time, like a rubber doll made to rock in the lightest of breezes.

  ‘But why are you telling me your little secret which is actually big?’ he asked at length.

  ‘Because I am a changed man now.’

  The sudden light in his eyes, which he tried to hide from me by blinking, said he got much more than he had come looking for. He exhaled noisily and then extended a hand. My first handshake in a long time. I looked at the superintendent. The superintendent looked away. I shook the Workshop man’s hand. A hand that would touch things that existed in the real world later in the day. ‘Nice meeting you, Imran. I can see you are beginning to be a new man. Good going.’

  I hurried to the Book Room, badly wanting to open an empty book and read from it. But the Book Room stood closed, padlocked. Then I remembered it was a Sunday. Sunday is a holiday. Even in prison.

  V

  I saw him in the parking lot, reading a movie poster.

  I got suspicious, because nobody reads movie posters for real.

  ~ Witness No. 7 ( - )

  The Workshop man seemed to have kept the story to himself, for when Ammi paid her monthly visit last week she did not mention anything about the National Investigative Agency marching through the mosque and digging up what four years had reduced little Sinbad’s body to. When the NIA first combed the mohalla soon after 11/11, hell had broken loose in Vanity Bagh, and the mohalla-wallahs had locked themselves in and decided to pretend they were not at home if the doorbell rang. The cleverer ones padlocked their doors from outside and sneaked back inside through the windows, as if a lock was enough to make the NIA turn on its heels and go home. Mogul Bakery stuck a hurriedly composed poster on its shutter announcing that the shop was closed for renovation. It reopened a few hours later upon news of our arrest, and the mohalla-wallahs threw their doors wide open and inhaled fresh air as word spread that the NIA had bundled Zia and me into a jeep and driven away, blazing headlights and blaring horns.

  Had the NIA revisited the mohalla, Ammi would have talked about it with a lot of zeal and drama, without even the faintest suspicion that I was the one who had made it happen from here. Had the NIA been to the mohalla, she did not even have to tell me: news of Vanity Bagh’s furious resistance or shameful submission would have penetrated even the barbed, brazen walls.

  Just like the unlicenced cable TV studio that Sarfraz used to run from a dingy room behind Pintos’ Garage, Ammi enlightens me on everything that happens in the mohalla in a fifteen-minute capsule that aligns deaths, divorces, pregnancies, childbirth, circumcisions, weddings and other little tragedies on a long straight line. She doesn’t miss out on a single episode, however inconsequential. On the other hand, I take only a few minutes to tell her what happens here – nothing much happens here. She stares past me at the walls as I talk, probably imagining life in a prison once visiting hours are over and the prison regains its monochrome shades and monotonous sounds. I doubt if she can imagine the depth of despair that always overwhelms you when twilight dawns and there are no streetlamps flickering to life anywhere in sight. I suppose every inmate misses streetlights, and the flies that buzz around in their sad yellow vignettes.

  Ammi’s eyes brightened up a little when I told her about my new job in the Book Room, though the smile she gave me was similar to the one Sinbad smiled from his grave.

  ‘Why did you smile?’ I asked, suddenly angry.

  ‘Because I am happy for you,’ she said.

  ‘But you didn’t give me a happy smile. You gave me a different kind of smile.’

  She shaped her lips in a bad attempt at a better smile. ‘When you were in school, you never touched your books. Now you have to do that every day.’

  How true! My love of books came rather late in life. In childhood my fascination for books was limited to the rexinebound ledger the imam brought home on Friday nights. It had a shiny green cover, at the centre of which was a crescent Fatima had cut out from a magazine at the behest of the imam. Inside was the inky scrawl that could only have been jointly produced by the imam’s ancient fountain pen and his shivering left hand. There was nothing interesting inside, just the unauthorized census of the mohalla, and the details of the quarterly donations Muslim households made to the masjid. If you looked at it closely, the way I did, you saw the rushed history of the street and the fluctuating fortunes of its people except the Pintos, half a dozen Sikh families and a few Jains. The imam brought the ledger home on Friday nights to update it from memory, to make amendments to its pages in accordance with the changes Allah had done in His ledger. In case of a death, he would record the year of demise against the name which would already have the year of birth next to it, and close the bracket. A case shut forever. In case of a birth, he would just scribble ‘+1’ on the margin of the page dedicated to the blessed family, ‘+2’ if it was twins.

  I found the entries fascinating, and wondered about the expiry date of each of the mohalla-wallahs. My name is there, as are Wasim’s, Ammi’s and the imam’s. Fatima’s was struck out soon after she was married off. I sometimes wonder if the imam crossed out my name after 11/11, just to please the NIA if not for anything else.

  When the visiting hours end with a long, rhythmic peal of an electric bell, Ammi promptly cries. Then she turns away without bidding goodbye and starts her journey home. I watch her pick her way along the beds of red spinach, around the Record Room, and disappear down the road that leads her into a world as crowded as cartoon strips. I too cry, but in an invisible way. I sit under one of the gooseberry trees and let unhappiness settle down to the bottom of my mind like silt. Only then do I return to what I have been interrupted from. But last time I skipped my usual stopover under the huddle of the gooseberry trees and headed straight back to the Book Room, where I grabbed a book from the worktable and stared at its empty pages with moist eyes. I saw the street Ammi was travelling to, I saw the light failing so rapidly over the mohalla that it would be dark by the time she got off the bus and walked past Franklin. I saw birds landing on the dark boughs, like the details from a nightmare the tree was going to have once the street went to bed.

  Vanity Bagh, like many people who live in its poky lanes and blind alleys, has a nickname, which the rest of Mangobagh slapped on it like a parking ticket soon after Pakistan won the cricket world cup in 1992. I was just about seven then, groaning at the top of my voice that I was going to die. Ammi asked me to be quiet; no one had ever died of measles.

  There are many versions of how the mohalla earned its nickname. But this is the most reliable and, in the light of our street’s reputation, the most likely one. On the night of Pakistan’s world cup victory a minor fight erupted outside Khan Hair Salon, but belligerence never stays minor or moderate in Vanity Bagh; the unease quickly spread through the mohalla and even spilled onto Ashraf Bagh and Mehendi, escalating into a big riot by the next sunrise. I didn’t sleep a wink that night; on the brink of falling asleep, I heard a wind
ow being smashed somewhere, and every half hour or so a gun fired, a bang that reassured us that the neighbourhood was still in safe hands, that Abu Hathim sahib was standing as tall as King Kong at the mouth of the street, holding fort. I even imagined a cavalcade of rioters trying to sneak past him through the space between his five-storey-high legs and he, the local guardian of all the mohalla-wallahs, squashing them under his feet to an unrecognizable mangle the way he crushed his country cheroots after a few puffs.

  The riot was not our doing. The mohalla-wallahs hardly start a riot, though once dragged into it you need water cannons and teargas shells, sometimes even a few rounds of firing, to coax them back home. A band of hardcore Hindus from the railway quarters had started the trouble. They were riding through Vanity Bagh after their evening drill at the Ramleela Grounds (what were they getting trained for, anyway?) when Sharif Khan, a good batsman in addition to being an excellent barber, was lighting a long hank of firecrackers in celebration of the world cup victory. His friends and a few of his clients were doing a kind of fire dance on the sidewalk with green ribbons tied to their wrists as chain crackers went off like artillery. The last scooter in the convoy took a U-turn near Mogul Bakery and came back, halting near the salon as the last of the crackers popped off and all that remained of the celebration was a drifting cloud of smoke and the smell of gunpowder.

  The alien wore a pair of khaki shorts and a white shirt; on his bony head sat a black cap which was not much different from what the imam wore for the Eid day speech, only that his was made of fur and the alien’s of some cheaper, stiffer material.

  ‘What are you celebrating?’ Black Cap asked Sharif Khan.

  Sharif Khan, who had no talent for answering unexpected questions, merely shrugged. And a shrug is always seen as a sign of weakness or indifference in every part of Mangobagh.

  Your father is fucking dead or something?

  – Black Cap ( -1992)