by Anees Salim
Soon after the 2.30 Charminar Express rumbled through the snoring mohalla, we set out for Mehendi. The moon was out and, for some strange reason, I thought of Benazir with a longing as we tiptoed past Mogul Bakery. Except for the winking reflection of a neon signage, her window was dark – she had been married and gone from Vanity Bagh for nearly a year now.
Imran, we will have as many children
as the other Benazir. No?
– Benazir (1985- )
Other than a small kit containing screwdrivers, spanners, a pen torch and a foldable knife, we carried six Hindu names just in case we got caught. Our real names would have made us more than gangsters; in a place like Mehendi, at such an unearthly hour, a gang hailing from Vanity Bagh could be dubbed not only as the enemy of the neighbourhood but of the entire nation.
My name was C. Ganesh (C for circumcised) and I remember smuggling Wasim’s Easy Ways of Refrigeration out of home, and a ridiculous story to go with it (I was somehow certain we were going to get caught): I, Ganesh from 2nd Street Raja Mata Nagar, missed the suburban train from Parade Circle after my crash course on refrigeration. Sorry for passing through your area so late at night. Good night. I kept the textbook tucked under my shirt, and the story of missing the train inside my head.
At intersections orange lights blinked at us, as if warning us not to venture beyond the Air India building. They appeared to tell us not to follow Abu Hathim sahib’s footsteps simply because we were not cut out for a life of blockbuster description.
In our schooldays, the Air India building used to be the tallest structure in Mangobagh, visible from as far away as Fouji Bagh which lies across the Moosa River and has of late shrunk to the status of a flea market as business moved from this old garrison to the newer city. When our cousins visited from villages and mid-sized towns, we sat them on the crossbars of our bicycles and rode them down a warren of alleys until we were at the back of Loyola Park, over which the white structure loomed like a single block of ice twinkling in the sun. ‘See,’ we would shout proudly, proprietarily, ‘the tallest building in the world.’
The white tiles on the building had long gone grey and ceased to gleam, and the cyclone of 2001 had left the huge neon sign atop the fourteenth floor seriously lopsided, so that the archer in the Air India logo now aimed his arrow at pedestrians. To dwarf it further in altitude and arrogance, three taller buildings had come up in a radius of two kilometres in just four years: two were malls, the third the headquarters of a software firm. Lured by the various attractions Mangobagh offered, the cousins continued to show up, but they were too grown-up now for crossbars and too informed to be fooled with superlatives; they went to the malls on their own and got themselves photographed against the Blackberry, Blueberry and Burberry roll-ups.
On foot it took us about twenty minutes to gain the first view of the Air India building: a glimpse of its red, blinking signage through treetops. In another five minutes we were directly under it. Though it looked anything but magnificent, the building in grandeur was still the most imposing architecture among a sea of waiting-to-collapsein-a-drizzle structures that stretched from Ashraf Bagh to Mehendi. A lone light shone at a ninth-floor window; a few floors above it, perched on the roof at an angle, the much depleted neon sign trembled like a dying butterfly. Along the railing we tiptoed like a group meditating over hijacking the Air India office and flying it to a friendly destination.
Then we stopped. Mehendi stretched in front of us, washed in the moonlight, waiting to prey.
‘Walk close to the buildings,’ Zia whispered. ‘And walk singly. Imran, you go first.’
As I crossed the intersection to the forbidden neighbourhood, my stomach started churning behind Wasim’s refrigeration manual. The rest of the gang had stayed back on the safer side of the intersection, waiting to see if dogs leaped at me or torches were shone on my face. When nothing happened, they slipped into Mehendi one by one. I walked quieter than a cat. For me, such craftiness was chiselled to perfection at home where you had to be extra careful to sneak past the imam, who slept light and groped under the cot for the machete even if a curtain stirred louder than it was supposed to, and I had not woken him even once from his dreams, which he claimed to be always about hajj pilgrimages. On the pavement of Mehendi, dead leaves flattened under my heels without so much as a crackle, but those who followed me didn’t have such a discreet way with their feet. Their footsteps sounded like a pack of children crunching away on a carton of Cadbury Perk. The other audible sound was the faint jingle of tools Jinnah carried in his kit.
Look for a black Toyota Corolla.
Number is MD-02-2997.
– Navaz Sharif (1982-2009)
Tracking the car down was simpler than spotting an elephant from a cavalry. A neighbourhood marginally richer than ours, Mehendi gets about in small cars while Vanity Bagh is predominantly a two-wheeler community. After retrieving important papers for safekeeping, Mehendi leaves its cars on the street for the night, the entrances to old apartments lining the road being too narrow to let even a rickshaw through.
‘There she is,’ Navaz Sharif said. He classified anything without a dick as a woman. The black Corolla stood out arrogantly from a long line of smaller cars parked under a salt tree, the moon glinting on its roof.
‘Let’s get started, boys,’ Zulfikar murmured, suddenly assuming the role of a leader.
It was under the salt tree that I realized the skills our parents had made us acquire had amply prepared us for a profession they wouldn’t have approved of. After dropping out of school, Jinnah had spent a year at his uncle’s one-room factory, where he had been supposed to learn making keys. But he learned more about picking locks than moulding keys. And here, on the main street of Mehendi, he stood on his knees by the moonlit Corolla, as if praying for world peace, and tampered with its door.
The lock put up a brave front for a few minutes, then succumbed to his advances with a crisp snap. The door fell open, and a heady stench of damp carpet and old leather wafted out. Jinnah started sneezing.
‘Shut up,’ snapped Zulfikar, easing himself into the car. He was the only one among us who could drive a car and mend it too; he had apprenticed at Pintos’ Garage until the day he lost his temper and George Pinto a client. On getting sacked he hurled a spanner at George Pinto and walked out, his chest puffed out with fake pride.
I’m cursing you. Your hands will tremble
at the sight of a spanner. God bless you.
– George Pinto (1951- )
‘Get in, boys,’ Zulfikar whispered. ‘Let’s go.’ Settling into the driver’s seat, he flipped the sun visor, expecting a bunch of keys to tumble into his hands like they do in English movies. No keys; that gave him a chance to imitate a keyless Tom Cruise. Yanking two wires from under the steering wheel, he flicked their ends against each other like a caveman trying to work up a fire with stones. Much to everyone’s surprise, the car roared into life and throbbed impatiently. ‘Get in, all of you.’
Out of habit we slammed the doors shut, then looked apologetically at each other. But Mehendi seemed to be in a deeper slumber than the bang of car doors could wake it from. An adventure can’t be this simple, I thought. How can an operation be complete without hiccups, hiding and hearts skipping a few beats? This was only a slightly upgraded version of stealing money from the imam’s jubbahs.
The very next moment my conclusions were to be proved premature, and the operation was to go through all the phases I had envisaged essential for giving it a sense of completion.
The hiccup phase, to start with. We were about to roll away when the hollow boom of a motorbike floated down the street. For a minute it seemed that the motorbike was riding away from Mehendi, headed for Broadway or Ashraf Bagh, but soon we saw a circle of light appear near the Air India building. Zulfikar switched off the engine and signalled us to be quiet while the circle grew bigger and the motorbike came to a halt under a lamppost across the road from the Corolla. It was the kind of bike th
at looked good and muscular in magazines, but exactly like a trodden-over grasshopper on the road, with long, curving handlebars and an oval headlight. The light went off, and the pillion rider got off the bike.
The hiding phase, next. ‘Quiet,’ Zulfikar hissed. His face had gone pale, his voice shaky. I made sure Wasim’s textbook was under my shirt, as if it were my bulletproof vest. Knowing that a fit of sneezing would change our lives forever, Jinnah caged his nose in his cupped hands and sat staring at a doll dangling from the rearview mirror.
The heart-missing-a-beat phase, to wind up. We sat still, staring into the distance, like a bereaved family, while the man on the bike lit a cigarette and exhaled blue smoke. His companion, a younger man in a tight T-shirt with very short sleeves, was leaning on a lamppost, his hands held behind the post like he was tethered to it and awaiting lashes. We would not have been surprised if they turned out to be Mehendi’s night guards, men who had volunteered to save their street from Muslims, and were to spend the night chatting until the moon paled out and the sun rose at the end of an alleyway. But having finished his cigarette the man got off the bike and stood by the lamppost, hands on his hips, and surveyed the row of cars parked neatly along the road. His gaze froze on the Corolla for a moment, and I saw Zulfikar’s hands reach out for the wires, ready to spark off a quick escape if he took a step towards us. What I saw next I have never seen again in my life. The man peeled his companion off the lamppost and, wrapping his hands around the young man’s waist, kissed him on the mouth. A long, tender kiss.
‘Lesbos,’ Navaz Sharif whispered.
‘Gays,’ Zia panted. ‘Gays.’
‘Ass bumpers,’ Jinnah said. ‘And they have 101 jokes about Muslims doing that.’
The kisser and the kissed freed themselves from the tangle of hands at the blare of a train in the distance (probably the same train I had thought of cooking up a story about missing if caught by the men of Mehendi). A short while later they bid each other a silent goodbye: straddling the bike, the kisser launched a flying kiss; leaning against the lamppost, the kissed held his hand stiffly by his side, palm facing the ground, and waved curtly at his own feet. When the throbs of the bike faded down the street to the other end of Mehendi, the kissed started walking towards an alley, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
‘Sir Yahya has got an erection,’ Jinnah started to titter.
‘Shhhh …’ Zulfikar hissed, flicking the ends of two wires against each other till the engine roared to life. With nothing more to witness, we steered out of Mehendi and cruised through Mangobagh, which didn’t look like a city but an unending backyard lit by a huge yet pale night lamp.
VII
That is not my brother’s blueprint for the 11/11 blast.
That is my half-yearly college project.
~ Wasim Jabbari (1988- )
Zia is very talented. He can shell up to six coconuts inside a minute. And he does not need a machete or an axe for that. His teeth would do a neater job in lesser time. Crazy stuff. I can’t shell even a single one; even watching Zia do it sets my teeth on edge. I hope someone will have the guts to walk up to the superintendent and enlighten him on this wonderful skill Zia has. On second thought, I hope not. The superintendent might force the wardens to believe that Zia can gnaw away iron bars as well and disappear.
I met Zia yesterday after what seemed to be a couple of decades, though we both have been here for just about eighteen months. He lives only two blocks away, but he might as well have been living in Guantanamo. Rules are strict. Inter-block contact is not permitted, except on days of national importance when the prison is a borderless gathering in the courtyard; even then you cannot escape the cameras staring at you from pillars. (But you can blind a camera with a Big Babol. If you have six Big Babols and enough guts, you can leave the cameras useless and sneak out of the courtyard. Once out of the courtyard, getting as far as the wall behind the Death Room is child’s play; beyond that it is an altogether different game, and everything depends on individual skills – climbing, jumping, sprinting, vanishing into thin air, everything.)
Yesterday I met Zia thanks to a little mishap. A fire broke out in the kitchen that serves E-Block and spread to the kitchen that serves F-Block, and both had to be shut down; so our kitchen was burdened with the task of feeding the entire prison. My suspicion is that the inmates in charge of the kitchens had wanted to start a fire big enough to make the wardens throw open the prison gates and order the entire jail out of the premises. But all it took to thwart a possible jailbreak plot were two fire extinguishers which had been hanging on the Record Room wall like something waiting to explode.
Queues stretched through trees like anacondas, and there were long delays and much caterwauling; some inmates were even clanking tumblers against plates as if they were revolting in a movie in which bad guys ruled the prison. When the superintendent came to have a sample morsel (yes, he tastes everything before we do, just like Ammi used to do when we were children, though he doesn’t blow at piping-hot stuff like Ammi used to), a hush descended on the premises. He was, understandably, livid. With fake admiration for the ones who had whistled and yowled, he stood under a tree, wordlessly challenging the whistlers for an encore. No one whistled. No one so much as breathed audibly.
They had put the serving counters in opposite directions, so the queues passed each other like slow trains. Some stared at you, some smiled in a small way, just like people do when one train passes another. I did neither at Zia. I just winked. He, after a slight hesitation, winked back. There was enough time for a few words, but there were two wardens watching us.
Later in the Book Room, by the mere act of opening a book, I saw Zia on the night of our trip to Mehendi to impound the Corolla.
Zia speaking, sir. Operation success.
– Zia-ul-Haq (1984-2012)
Okay, okay. Don’t say anything more on the phone.
Meet me in my office tomorrow.
– Pawnbroker ( - )
After parking the car behind an abandoned fire station, we cut through gullies that smelled of sheep until we reached a part of the expressway that skirted the backside of Jumbo Cements Complex. In the distance, swathed in the moist light of sodium vapours, stood plants that made cement which, when converted into a commercial and aired on television, promised to bond life, not bricks or flint. Just as we passed the arched gateway of the factory the two o’clock siren blared, and workers poured out of the tall gates like impatient schoolchildren. The imam’s younger brother worked in one of those plants; he worked in the fly ash unit and always wore a yolk yellow helmet, even when he went to the market or the ration shop on his off days, as if he dreaded the impact of an explosion would reach him even if he was miles away from the plant. But he did not work in the shift that ended at two o’clock, so I had no worries of confronting him.
Yahya mimed he was hungry, drawing an elaborate dinner in the air with his fingers. Along the factory wall were small but well-lit food stalls, and we ate from one of them, sitting amidst workers who had cement dust clinging to their bodies, which made them look like children who played all night in the hills of Horlicks. Although I had not had a proper mouthful since afternoon, I was not even remotely hungry. Maybe it was the refrigeration manual tucked under my shirt that made my tummy feel full. After eating we headed home down the expressway, throwing away our Hindu names like counterfoils we had no more use of.
Except for stray automobiles, the Iron Bridge was deserted. Halfway down the bridge we were stopped by the designs the moon had fashioned with the century-old girders. Across the asphalt porous shadows lay in pale lattice patterns. Down on the Moosa River the moon was a huge silver coin bleeding luminous ripples downstream. Navaz Sharif whipped out his two-megapixel mobile phone and started taking pictures. We posed against railings, hugged no-parking signs, leaned on stacks of traffic cones. We shaped Vs with our index and middle fingers, hung our tongues out, faked orgasms. While we struck poses of jamboree, Jinnah, the bor
n graffiti maker, fished out his penknife and started to carve the name of our gang on a girder. A car slowed down and its windows were rolled down just as Navaz Sharif was making Zia and Yahya imitate the gays from Mehendi. Disrupted, Yahya blew the driver a flying kiss while Zia offered to donate his private parts to two old men in the backseat. The windows went up, the car went reluctantly away and Zulfikar warned us that somebody might already be dialling the police. We decided to split, after ranking it as what it deserved to be: the most memorable night of 2007.
Sneaking back home was a tougher task than slinking out of Mehendi with the Corolla. The imam, who looked on the verge of falling asleep during the day, was always on the brink of waking up at night; he had developed the habit of sleeping late and light for two reasons. The first – Fatima’s formal initiation into womanhood – had long been rendered redundant by her marriage. The second was a hole in Wasim’s heart, of which the imam had many x-ray images, which he stared dolefully at when Wasim was away at the refrigeration training centre.
I rated Wasim as a disappointing young man. It was a personal rating. 5½ Men never rated the families of its members. It was our corporate policy, though an unspoken one.
On some nights Wasim, so tall and frail he looked like Iskander’s ghost passing through our house, paced the room which is only slightly more spacious than my cell. A hand on his chest, a light whistle on his breath, Wasim would appear seriously lovelorn, humming a tune for his sweetheart. And the imam, ever alert to signals of distress, would burst into the room no sooner than Wasim had started his restless trips between the narrow beds. Wasim had always been his pet, but a lesser pet in the days prior to him fainting in the class and being rushed to the hospital in an auto rickshaw, I wailing by his side.
In the middle of every month, except for the holy month of Ramzan, Wasim had a relapse. He would rouse from the bed at small hours and stay restless until the imam nursed him back to some degree of wellness with a tiny pill and a few verses from the Quran dispensed to his ear in a whispery hiss. On occasions when the pill and the prayers failed to have any palliative effect on him, I was sent to fetch a taxi. The taxi rank near Mogul Bakery went empty much before midnight. On lucky nights I flagged down an auto rickshaw bumping through the mohalla. Else I hired one of the cycle rickshaws parked under Franklin, the rickshaw-wallah sleeping on the backseat with his knees drawn to his chest to make himself fit into the narrow space. I remember a night when the street didn’t offer even this humblest means of transportation; I thought of calling one of my friends for help, but did not know how the imam would react to it as he strongly disapproved of all four-and-a-half of my friends. What else to do than wave frenziedly at approaching headlights as the imam struggled to keep Wasim on his feet on the sidewalk? Finally, a mini truck carrying fish to Begum Bazaar pulled up and carted us to the nearest hospital, the imam and Wasim travelling inside the driver’s cabin, I on the tray of the truck, my feet planted in a sea of dead salmon. For three days afterwards, people started sniffing when I was around, in spite of me working a solid bar of Lifebuoy on my feet until it turned to a spongy little blob.