by Anees Salim
When you made a reference to Sharif Khan’s father, who had gone to Mumbai to act in the movies when Sharif Khan had been just a toddler and never come back, two things were certain to happen. First, a globule of spittle would land on your face. Then a tightly clenched fist would leave the bridge of your nose numb and bleeding.
Black Cap nursed his broken nose with a hanky, which suddenly developed red floral patterns on its folds. ‘Brothers, come back,’ he screamed to the disappearing bunch of scooters. In the roar of traffic, only his assailants heard him.
When you irked Sharif Khan, you irked his friends too, and they kicked Black Cap around the pavement like a football until the barber struck the pose of a referee ending the play, holding an authoritative hand up. Back in those days Khan Hair Salon was not a well-lit place, and the brawl happened in the dim light of the salon signboard. Later that night, though, Khan Hair Salon became the brightest spot in the whole of Vanity Bagh as it went up in flames, blazing with a determination even water and sand could not douse. By the time a fire engine could reach the street all that remained of the salon was a charred barber’s chair, which was swivelling of its own accord as if a spirit were sitting on it and admiring its new haircut in the blackened mirror. Barely an hour had passed when the legendary riot manager of Vanity Bagh parked his vintage car under Franklin and scaled its roof, and called for collective action.
Time for jihad has come, bhaion.
Pledge to kill every kafir you see. Bolo Takbir …
– Jalal ‘Jihadi’Ahmed (1935-1992)
Allahu Akbar …
– Jamsheer ‘Jihadi’Ahmed (1973-1992)
The mohalla-wallahs took a two-hour break from rioting to bury Jalal Ahmed sahib and his youngest son Jamsheer side by side in the kabristan behind Purana Masjid. After throwing dust into the twin graves they rushed back to the street and resumed the campaign with renewed vengeance, wielding freshly stropped weaponry.
Raids succeeded the riots, and the imam was worried sick about the machete that he always kept under his bed, which he thought would compensate for our flimsy front door. He had brought the machete home the day Fatima had formally become a woman and Ammi had banned her from leaving home without purdah. The imam considered hiding it behind a rafter and was mounting a stool when the police thumped on our door.
‘You can come in,’ the imam told the inspector in a priestly voice as he stood blocking the way. ‘But one of my boys is down with chickenpox.’
At the mention of chickenpox, though I had only measles, the inspector froze at the doorway and bit his lip in serious indecision, while Fatima whispered to me to groan as if the boils on my body were plopping off like the units in bubble wrap.
‘Not a problem,’ we heard the inspector say after a while. ‘We have had chickenpox at some stage of our lives. So, no worries.’
‘I’m the chief imam of Masjid-e-Mosavi.’ He sounded as if he had developed a sore throat all of a sudden.
‘All the more reason to search this place,’the inspector said, treading into the house with a small regiment of policemen who smelt of quelled fire. Frightened by the sound of boots, Wasim climbed onto Fatima’s hips and sat there whimpering till the house was free of intruders again.
‘Were you among the people celebrating on the street last night?’ the inspector asked, lifting a table cover with the end of his baton.
‘No,’ the imam said in a hurt voice. ‘No way.’
‘Any idea who all were celebrating Pakistan’s victory? I want some prominent names.’
‘I don’t know,’ the imam replied readily, defiantly. ‘And I don’t know why you interpret it as a celebration of Pakistan’s victory. Couldn’t they have been celebrating the defeat of England who ruled us for so many years?’
An unexpected peal of laughter erupted from the inspector, and when it stopped as abruptly as it had started, he wiped tears from the corners of his eyes and gestured at the policemen to start the search. The way the policemen moved about the house suggested that they had been instructed not to ill-treat the imam until the raid unearthed something that linked him to the riots: a can of petrol, a nip of gunpowder, a bunch of sticks, a machete …
Machete! If the imam was not already in a soup he was treading the rim of the bowl, tumbling over any time now. Never a good actor, he made a disastrous attempt to look unruffled, but his eyes kept returning to the spot where he had thought of hiding the machete but didn’t have the time to. The inspector stood with his back turned to a window, watching the imam from the corner of his eye while turning the pages of Fatima’s science reader. After a long scrutiny he put the reader back on the windowsill and climbed a chair without even taking off his shoes. He groped behind the rafter from which the imam could not peel his eyes off, but all his search yielded were stringy pieces of cobweb that fell on his face.
‘Fatima,’ the imam said. ‘Get some ice water from the fridge for inspector sir. He needs to wash his face.’
We never had a fridge. The imam was just poking fun at the inspector, knowing which Fatima neither went to the kitchen nor asked the inspector if he would settle for plain pipe water. The policemen who had charged into the kitchen found a tall woman squatting on the floor, doubled up over a long knife which she kept pressed to the ground by her toes. She was so involvedly slicing vegetables against its glistening blade that the policemen thought it rude to interrupt her. They quietly poked their lathis at the mounds of ash in the hearth while she ran chunks of snake gourd through the long blade of the kitchen knife. They opened old tins of Cerelac and sniffed at the condiments stored inside while she started to chop green mangoes. After a while they came out of the kitchen on the verge of a sneeze, and shook their heads solemnly at the inspector.
‘Bathe the boy in turmeric water. It is good for chickenpox marks,’ the inspector told Fatima before leading his men out into the alley. Once the sound of boots faded away to the street, interspersed with the squeals of chickens that flew off the alley to escape being kicked, Ammi brought the machete back to the front room, wiping its blade with her dupatta. ‘Here is the sword of Tipu Sultan.’
‘My missus is a little genie,’ the imam said proudly.
‘It’s not genie, Abba,’ Fatima cried through her titters. ‘What you mean is genius.’ She ranked it as the top joke of 1992.
The riots fizzled out in two days, the raids took one more day to die down, but it would be another three months before Khan Hair Salon would bear a resemblance to what it had been prior to Pakistan’s world cup victory. It had irrevocably lost its cowboy-salon look – the new swing doors and fanlights failed to reconstruct the old charm – but the salon had found a new glory, for the simple reason that it had found Vanity Bagh a new name: Little Pakistan.
The elderly of the Khan clan found it hard to stop exaggerating their agony on the days of the riots and raids; the younger ones, on the other hand, simply chose to brag.
In the madrasa, where we yelled verses from the Quran like slogans during weekends, where the imam had once flogged me with forced anger for addressing him as ‘Abba’ (he later took me to Mogul Bakery and said he just wanted to convey to the class that I enjoyed no special privileges as his son), in the madrasa Sharif Khan’s youngest son Navaz told us many hard-to-believe stories. The worst one was about a Pakistani leader writing to his father to congratulate him on his valour and to invite him to Karachi in case he should ever flee Vanity Bagh. We all knew there was no postal service between India and Pakistan, and nobody big would stoop so low as to write to a barber like Sharif Khan. But we never laughed at his stories, for we wanted to hear more of them. Then one day someone borrowed his copy of the Quran and discovered that he had made small yet significant modifications to his name, had turned it into a worldlier one. Striking out the name he had so pompously uttered on our first day at the madrasa, he had more pompously etched the new one; and the change from Navas Khan to Navaz Sharif was borne in silence. Just like his stories. Years later, when we formed th
e gang and he became one of the six members, we realized that none among us had a more Pakistani name than his.
A warden who has been watching me hold the same book for some time is finally coming over to probe. Let me quickly put the feather between the pages and close the book. I promise more reading on another day. Till then.
VI
Send me home, Judge sahib,
send me home. Or hang me.
~ Zia-ul-Haq (1984-2012)
Everyone dreams of jailbreak. Even people who have never been jailed do. The only exception is Frank Leone in Lock Up, which happens entirely in a jail except when Frank Leone and his love stroll hand in hand as snow falls on them like marshmallow puffs. But that is just flashback, and flashback is the most inevitable and important thing to happen to prisoners, in movies and in real life. The jail Frank Leone is in has a huge, ugly door but the rest of it is tastefully done. It is so beautiful in wide angle that you think the prisoners get there through a raffl e.
(A good cinematographer can make anything look inviting; that is why all the young people who grow up watching noon shows at Kemps, Zeenat’s and Central Plaza want to dump their parents and go to America. In his heart of hearts Wasim wants to do that too, though he knows his chances are grim.
First, refrigeration is not a much-in-demand-profession in a cold place like America. Second, after 9/11 Muslims are not welcome in America even if you are the best computer expert or physiotherapist in town. If they could strip people like Abdul Kalam and Shah Rukh Khan at airports, what chances does Wasim stand? They would happily send a spear up his rectum and plant him inside a police museum. A suspect from India. Stuffed for you.)
We ranked Lock Up as the top movie of 2005, though it was already an old movie. If there were Oscars for jailbreak scenes alone, it would have won every single one of them. And the dialogues – they made me stare at the mirror and imitate the man who uttered them on screen.
I don’t have to prove nothing.
I came here for an execution.
– Sylvester Stallone (1946– )
We watched it for the first time in the summer of 2005. Those days we used to watch one English movie per night on the DVD player in Khan Hair Salon (and a barber’s chair gives you a much better recline than the seats these multiplexes charge you a bomb for). When I watched Lock Up for the first time or the second time or the twentieth time, little did I know that I would ever see the interior of a prison, let alone languish behind its copper-coloured walls. The DVD had been sitting on the half-price rack of Abid Videos for years before Jinnah took a serious interest in the title and shoplifted it. In the movie, according to Urdu subtitles, Stallone is not a compulsive jail-jumper; he handles hardships with a level of composure he exhibited neither in First Blood nor in Rambo. But the superintendent, for reasons even subtitles cannot adequately convey, is hellbent on making Stallone break the law so that he could lock him up for the rest of the movie. We have a much more straightforward superintendent in comparison. Ours doesn’t plot even for timepass. I do.
I always plan my jailbreak around a day of national importance – Republic Day or Independence Day – when everyone is busy wrapping silver foil around tree trunks or hanging streamers in the courtyard or leaning over tables arranged in a long line behind the kitchen, chopping vegetables for the special midday meal. In my plans I am armed with a steely resolve and the necessary accessories: a knife, a coil of rope and a can of deodorant. The knife is for self-defence, rope for scaling the mossy wall behind the disused Death Room. Deodorant kills the odour of sweat and leaves sniffer dogs all fucked up – if it doesn’t I can accuse Rexona of misleading prisoners with their commercial.
At the back of the prison stand trees that are tall enough to have their tops sticking above the high walls. I don’t know what else awaits me beyond the back wall. I picture a tiny house nestling among coconut palms and chikoo trees, a house whose sole purpose is to help me shed the prison clothes and acquire a civilian outfit. I can even see shades of clothes waiting to be stolen on a flagging laundry line. Blue denims and an olive tank top. Even a white cap with ‘Green Mangobagh Clean Mangobagh’ sewed onto its pea-green visor. Thus dressed in clothes smelling of sunshine and starch, I would tear through the woods, not looking back, not going to stop for the rest of my term if footfalls follow me down the carpet of sepia leaves.
Since my appointment in the Book Room, which has equipped me with this rare ability to read from blank pages, I make fewer plans for a jailbreak.
A good book is a great escape.
– Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)
A blank book is as good as a jailbreak.
– Imran Jabbari (1985- )
The moment I open a book, its covers still spongy from clumsy gumming, the whole mohalla springs up from the pages like the pop-up stable in a Christmas card. I look around. In a patch of the summer sun a warden with a horseshoe moustache sinks deeper into his chair and closes his eyes slowly, like dying people in movies do. I open my eyes wide and start reading from pages that have never been written on.
If Vanity Bagh is a pocket-sized Pakistan, it is only natural to have the Line of Control, however tenuous, running through some part of Mangobagh. The invisible LoC cuts through the old city, diagonally north of the mohalla, just three miles from the Char Bazaar intersection. Our territory ends abruptly on the brink of Broadway. Beyond that, a couple of blocks after the Air India building, the road becomes narrow, lined with apartment blocks that have the same weathered faces on which half-open ventilators sit like sleepy eyes. This neighbourhood is called Mehendi, a rambling Hindu colony which celebrates every festival with saffron flags and yolkcoloured laddoos. The mohalla-wallahs rarely venture beyond the Air India building, and on the rare occasions they have to, they do so after discreetly hiding their Muslim identities and idiosyncrasies.
When Mogul Bakery started advertising its free home delivery service in Hello Evening, Mehendi developed an instant appetite for Vanity Bagh’s famed mutton patties, but every time it placed an order, small or big, Mir sahib apologized for the service being temporarily suspended for want of delivery boys and flung the order out of the window, swearing under his breath.
Since the Partition, Vanity Bagh has been at constant war with Mehendi, though the riots following Pakistan’s world cup victory (or England’s world cup defeat, as the imam would put it) had given the enmity a new dimension that even the upheavals of 1947 could not bring about. The Black Caps stopped passing through the mohalla after their evening drill at the Ramleela Grounds. Instead they took the roundabout way home, sticking to the highway and bearing with many bottlenecks. The overcautious White Caps ceased visiting Murgi Bazaar which lay too close to Mehendi to facilitate endless, shameless haggling sessions in its dingy lanes. So imagine our horror when the maiden operation for 5½ Men demanded us to be at the heart of this forbidden zone, that too in the dead of night when Mehendi seemed to lurk behind pillars to pounce on the very idea of Islam.
Our gang had been suffering from the same crisis that all clandestine businesses face at some stage of their evolution: obscurity. Even in our own mohalla we were completely unknown for obvious reasons; we couldn’t possibly put advertisements in Hello Evening like Mogul Bakery did for its home delivery service, nor could we stand at a street corner and distribute handbills like Sharif Khan did for his salon. The only promotion we could afford and rely on was word of mouth, but we simply didn’t know how to get people talking about a gang that dreamed of covert and mortal combats. Hamstrung by the lack of a sound promotional strategy, we were idling our time away by Franklin when we abruptly got hired. It still remains a mystery as to how our first client had come to know about us. He was a small-time pawnbroker who ran his business from a poky lane of Broadway, a venture we didn’t even know existed until he rang up Navaz Sharif on his mobile phone one evening and said an eve-teasing type of hello.
‘What can I do for you, sir?’ Navaz Sharif asked like a helpline voice, only more s
incerely. He was briefed sketchily over the phone about the job and the next evening, in the pawnbroker’s cubicle made of sand-coloured plywood and opaque glass, Navaz Sharif and I were spoken to in great detail about the operation.
It appeared to be a job too simple to require six enthusiastic minds and as many pairs of quick hands, but then the pawnbroker did not know the strength of our gang and the extent of our genius. He never cared; all that concerned him was a neat, foolproof operation. He insisted that it was a simple job. We were to track down a second-hand Toyota Corolla he had financed and his client had vanished with; we were to seize it by force or by deceit and bring it to the recovery yard behind the Purana Masjid kabristan. Khatam, he had said. You are done.
Everything looked perfect, even familiar, like a scene from a movie we had watched long ago and remembered only in patches, until he gave us the address. Navaz Sharif and I howled in unison, as if we had just seen what Yahya had claimed to have witnessed quite a few times – Iskander’s ghost moving behind the public lavatory window.
But we could not dismiss the opportunity the way Mir sahib chucked the orders from Mehendi out of his shop. The world gives novices lesser chances, and we were still on the periphery of a world we reckoned to be big but didn’t know the exact dimensions of. We stepped out of the sandcoloured office undecided, promising to be in touch by the next evening.
The imam tapped a bunch of keys on the window frame when the stairway got noisy with debates. There were many reasons we should not take the job. Then there were as many proverbs that suggested we grab it. Yahya kept on miming one, pointing a finger at the night sky, at the Almighty and then stabbing it on his chest thrice, indicating bravery of the highest order; maybe he wanted to shout in our faces ‘Fortune favours the brave’ or some equivalent he had silently picked up. The next evening Navaz Sharif called the pawnbroker to say yes, and Yahya attributed our decision to his immense powers of persuasion.