by Anees Salim
After the bomb episode, which gave birth to the term ‘aloo bomb’ in the lexicon of Mangobagh’s detonation experts, the Hathims grew insanely alert and had a Black Box fixed on their front door. There are three steps to use this simple device.
Step 1: Put your face near the Black Box which has an eye at the centre and a hell of a lot of holes beneath the eye.
Step 2: Press the blue button. There is only one button on the device anyway.
Step 3: Soon after you hear a beep, tell the box what is your problem in life. If the Black Box is convinced, one of Abu Hathim sahib’s sons or servants will open the door and let you in.
In ones and twos the mohalla-wallahs strolled down the alley to have a look at the Black Box, though they were too frightened to strike up a conversation with it. Only Zulfikar, who had always made us believe that his mother and Abu Hathim sahib were first cousins, had the temerity to have a few words with it. The rest of us stood on either side of the door so that the box could only see him and have a one-toone chat. He pressed the button, and when it beeped after a minute he said salaam and asked for Salma.
‘Which Salma?’ the Black Box asked back in an unpleasant voice. ‘The one who sews or the one who works in the kitchen?’
Zulfikar blushed. ‘The kitchen one.’ ‘Reason?’ the Black Box asked. ‘Sorry?’ ‘Why do you want to see Salma?’
‘She is my mother, sir,’ he said meekly.
There was a moment of complete silence in the Black Box, followed by the sound of two people talking and goats bleating in the background.
‘Zulfi?’ a voice breathless with excitement asked.
‘Ammi!’ exclaimed Zulfikar. He was no longer the man who had wanted to be the leader of our gang a year ago. ‘How are you, Ammi?’
Pressed against the wall, we started to titter.
‘What do you want?’ she snapped. ‘What is it that can’t wait till I come home in the evening?’
Zulfikar gulped. He had thought the doors would open the moment he asked for Salma Auntie; he had not anticipated questions. He could not even snap back because only God knew who else was listening. ‘Abba is sick,’ he said finally.
Covering our mouths, we roared with laughter.
‘What happened?’ the Black Box asked in a concerned voice, which made it even harder for Zulfikar to answer.
‘Wheezing?’ Salma Auntie asked, much less concernedly than the box.
‘Yes, wheezing,’ Zulfikar said, shaking his head like a small child.
There was another little period of near silence on the box. All we heard were whispers and the cute laughter of a baby, who Salma Auntie was probably carrying on her hip.
‘Zulfi,’ she said after a while. ‘Take him to Shanti Clinic. The chit is under his pillow. Sohail sahib will give you some money.’
‘Wait there,’ the Black Box said.
‘Sure, Sohail sahib,’ Zulfikar said.
The door opened after what could easily have been a quarter of an hour, and that too only wide enough to tightly frame a face. A look of suspicion spread on Sohail sahib’s face when he found Zulfikar was not alone in the alley. Quickly shoving two hundred-rupee notes into Zulfikar’s waiting hands, he closed the door; we heard latches busily slipping into loops. I counted up to four.
That very week they fixed a camera above the door, which turned its neck like a dinosaur at regular intervals to inspect both ends of the alley. Now even if you stood beside the door and pressed yourself against the wall the Hathims would see you. They might call the police or even unleash on you a pack of Dobermans which they had acquired, much to the imam’s displeasure, a fortnight after Noor Jahan sahiba had been bestowed with an aloo bomb.
IX
Can’t Hindus make and plant bombs?
Prosecutor sahib, are you accusing Islam of inventing RDX?
~ Corporator Liaquat Ali (1970- )
In theatrical abilities, Ammi and the imam are strange bedfellows. The imam cannot act to save his life while Ammi can make even Tabu and Humera emotional with her dramatics. If she were born in another part of the city, to another set of parents, in another religion, she would easily have made it into soap operas. She would have played lots of mummy roles which don’t demand much intelligence, just a lot of tears.
She cried a great deal today, so much so that the young warden, despite his best efforts to appear unruffl ed, averted his face, wriggling his nose. He is perhaps as young as me but looks much younger than Wasim, and was probably moved by the memory of his own mother, maybe long dead, crying. He now stared demurely at the inmates whose visitors kept their cool and looked fit to discuss a jailbreak. This was the moment Ammi had employed her false tears for. Taking my hands in hers, still weeping, she slipped Big Babols into my hands so deftly that even I didn’t realize she had committed a violation of prison rules until she said, ‘Don’t let them see you chew it.’
I am not planning to chew bubblegum. Why should I? I am not going to kiss a girl outside a dream for the next fourteen years. Nor am I going to appear for an interview in an over-air-conditioned room where bad breath could cost you the job even before you landed it. I am not even going to open my mouth to a lady dentist in the near future. My teeth are fine, thank you. In short, Big Babols are not for me, they are for the cameras. I would just wet them and stick them on the lens when everyone, including the cameras, is looking the other way. At least that is the plan. That’s my Freedom Plan for Independence Day, as the telecom advertisements go. Prison has made me a plotter. Prison makes everyone a plotter.
If you walk along the corridors too close to the pillars, the cameras will not see you approaching. Stand behind a pillar pretending to look for something you have dropped and, just when the camera finishes a rotation, reach out and stick the Big Babol on its face. Phut! Repeat this simple manoeuvre six times over and you will have left the surveillance system in the courtyard stone-blind. It is easier to blind cameras with Big Babols than to put dogs to sleep with dried fish dipped in chloroform. I have planned everything in detail. What else are sleepless nights for? In my heart of hearts I want to get Zia out as well. He is a good friend. But it is too dicey; passing on messages is a risk that outweighs even the greatest of friendships. Though I see him playing a part in this daylight jailbreak, he doesn’t play an essential part. If I find him on my way out, which is unlikely even on a day when the whole prison gathers in the courtyard, I will drag him along. Otherwise forget it, sir.
Talking of escape, something really funny happened last month. We were in the TV Room, watching the television which is fixed too close to the ceiling that you get a pain in the neck by the time the Sunday movie is over. We should have been watching a movie or a reality show that evening, but it was a news channel that had been forced on us because the wardens wanted to watch an exit poll. The poll findings were being heatedly debated among the wardens when the bulletin turned its focus on an attempted jailbreak in some godforsaken corner of the world. It was as if the lady who read the news could read my mind as well and wanted to furnish me with some good case studies. But this one was of much bigger proportions than I could ever think up or execute. This was a thousand Imran Jabbaris plotting together, not just plotting but acting together. Hell had broken loose in a North American prison. The prison, to begin with, looked like a township, with wide roads, watchtowers, basketball courts, garages and a water fountain. This could be the same prison where they shot Lock Up, but definitely not the same cameraman who shot the movie. At first I mistook the inmates, dressed in blue dungarees, for factory workers, and the wardens, in their greyish outfit, for supervisors. After the introductory shots of neat premises and peaceful surroundings, as if it wanted to impact us with a before-after formula, the bulletin treated us with unambiguous scenes of lawlessness.
An inmate was trotting away to a small building with a gas cylinder balanced on his shoulder as if he were an Indane delivery boy. There was an explosion from the building almost the next instant and the roof was
on fire. Up what looked like a running track another man in blue was walking a warden at gunpoint; he punched his hostage on the face every time the latter tried to look over his shoulder at the burning roof.
I hope they have already shot
the superintendent through the arse.
– Inmate No. 861 ( - )
A gun held to his head, the warden appeared to be working out a deal in whispers; maybe he was volunteering to barter information about secret doors and escape routes for his life. But all his captor was interested in was punching him and punching him like he wanted to set the world record for bashing up a prison official. We all clapped in encouragement though it was not even a live telecast. The superintendent burst into the TV Room from nowhere and quickly changed the channel, and then angrily switched off the television. As if you need a scene from an American prison to start plotting. All you need is six Big Babols, and a little bit of imagination.
Having accomplished her mission with enviable exactitude, Ammi was now drying her face. You could tell from her smile she was very proud of what she had done; she expected a word of appreciation from me. I still pretended to be too grief-stricken to be smiling while my fingers were deftly tucking Big Babols under my waistline. Once done, I asked Ammi not to boast around in the mohalla about how she smuggled in Big Babols. Unlike the imam, she is a very boastful person. I warned her it would mean trouble for me; what I refrained from telling her was it would be trouble for her as well when I jumped the jail using six Big Babols.
When it was time for her to depart, Ammi was in tears again. But this time she cried for real; her eyes had turned as red as when she chopped a mountain of onions for the Eid feast. The thought of our dark little kitchen with its many smells and silhouettes of urns threatened to plunge me into the depths of despair. I watched her until she reached the spinach beds. Then I walked dreamily across the courtyard where there would be the Independence Day celebrations in a week’s time. I put myself in flashback mode.
A week before Independence Day of 2009, the imam brought home something nobody in the mohalla had ever dared to: the national flag. I heard him tell Wasim what he had read in newspapers about the tricolour: the government has relaxed the rules. Now everyone could hoist the national flag wherever they wanted unlike in the old times when only the president, ministers, army people and headmasters were allowed to do that. One rule the government has not changed pertains to the handling of the national flag. You have to be very careful with it: putting it upside down or dropping it to the ground, even by mistake, could land you in jail.
‘It’s not a new rule,’ Wasim said. He was lying on his stomach on the floor between the settee and the chairs, a hand under his chin, hair falling onto his forehead like a little girl’s. Directly under his chin was a sheet of pink chart paper, which was eager to roll back to its favourite cylindrical shape but prevented from coiling by four different objects placed on its four corners: a pencil box, a saucer, a clay figurine, an elbow. Wasim was drawing the block diagram of a fridge on the chart paper, which he would roll up and take to the institute in the first week of September. The diagram did not even look like it belonged to a fridge; it looked more like a tiny township seen from a tower crane. You could imagine neat black roads leading to housing estates, arrows pointing to car parks, children’s play area, swimming pools and security cabins. I don’t know how well Wasim’s diagram was appreciated in the September evaluation, but it changed the way I looked at fridges forever. Now when I see a fridge I imagine a housing colony of tiny snowmen beneath its walls; I see the ice tray as a community bathtub, egg racks as pre-historic sites freshly excavated. ‘The rule has been there for years, Abba.’
‘In my childhood it was a crime to touch the national flag,’ the imam said. ‘Now you can buy it from every supermarket.’
‘You bought this?’Ammi asked, almost incredulously.
‘Yes, I bought this,’ the imam said. ‘And on August 15th I am going to hoist it.’
Wasim looked up from the chart paper, and smiled at the imam as if he wanted to yell, like the cute little girl in the advertisement for cooking oil:My daddy strongest. I don’t know why, but on that day so many things about him were girlish, school-girlish. Maybe anyone lying on his stomach with chart paper tends to look sissy.
‘And where are you planning to hoist it, Imran’s Abba?’ Ammi asked. ‘Inside your room or outside the house?’
‘Outside the mosque, Wasim’s Ammi.’
Wasim looked up from the chart paper again; he looked prouder of his father than the little girl in the advertisement was of hers, though he was not even ten per cent as cute as her. Ammi pulled a face – she has the kind of face that makes pulling a face the easiest thing on earth. ‘Imran’s Abba, have you ever seen any flag other than a green one hanging outside a mosque?’
‘No,’ the imam said defiantly. ‘This will be the first time.’
‘And the last time,’ she said. ‘Abu Hathim sahib is only crippled, not dead.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Wasim muttered under his breath, ‘he will soon be.’
Ammi wanted to hit him. She at least wanted to tear up the chart paper so his weeklong hard work would be undone in a matter of seconds. But she just gave him a hard stare and went to the kitchen because nobody hits a young man with a hole in his heart or crumbles up his half-yearly project. But there is a limit to the sympathy you can enjoy – even if the hole in your heart is getting bigger in the x-ray sheets – as Wasim was to discover soon.
For the rest of the week, the imam and Ammi argued about the national flag while Wasim, crouched over the pink sheet, added new alleys, parking bays and sewage pipes to the township inside the fridge. There were tiny booths here and there and I told myself these were ATMs, where frosted little men coldly did their banking.
‘Mosavi-e-Masjid is not owned by Abu Hathim,’ the imam said in the middle of an argument. ‘So I don’t have to tell him what I do with it.’
‘And why should that old man mind if Abba hoists the national flag outside the masjid?’ Wasim asked. ‘It’s none of his business.’
‘If you don’t shut up now,’ Ammi said, ‘that funny little drawing of yours will go straight into the stove.’
That shut Wasim up, but the sudden loss of his lone ally made the imam harden his stand against the hero of Ammi, I and the rest of the mohalla. ‘Abu Hathim is just a criminal who has somehow managed to keep himself off police records.’
‘And when Hindus wanted to burn all of us alive it was this criminal who saved the mohalla,’Ammi said passionately. ‘Where were the mullahs then? Where was your masjid committee hiding?’
I felt a strong urge to rise up and applaud her. But I kept quiet; left alone, Ammi fought her wars admirably well.
‘He was not guarding the mohalla,’ the imam said. ‘He was just trying to save his own family.’
That was the most thankless thing to say. In my childhood I had heard the imam himself narrate how Abu Hathim sahib and his men had patrolled the mohalla like the Border Security Force so no stranger would infiltrate into the republic of Vanity Bagh.
‘The entire mohalla is his family,’ Ammi said, shaking with anger. And I wanted to say ‘Wah’ to this, but I held my tongue.
‘Maybe,’ the imam replied. ‘But that should not stop me from hoisting the national flag outside my workplace.’ This was the first time the imam had referred to the masjid as his workplace, as if he were a clerk of some sort and Allah was his grumpy, fat boss who rarely looked up from his work.
Wasim opened his mouth to say something encouraging to the imam but then, in the best interests of his drawing, he gulped down his words and started chewing the end of a pencil.
‘Kareem Jabbari sahib, you are inviting trouble for you and your family,’Ammi warned, hauling herself up to her feet.
‘I’m just trying to make the entire mohalla proud of itself,’ the imam said. ‘Newspapers might even write about it.’
‘Ah,’ Ammi excla
imed, sounding almost like Tabu and Humera. ‘You just want your picture printed in newspapers again. That’s what happens to people once they get mentioned in media.’
The argument, like in the old Coffy Bite commercial, continued over the weekend, in different durations and tempers. Wasim finished the half-yearly project on the eve of Independence Day, staying up late to give ornamental borders to the drawing. The next morning, someone firmly rang the doorbell even before the light under the door could harden to anything significant. Ammi opened the door to Javed Miandad from Minerva Studio. A camera was dangling from his long neck. The sunlight behind him portended premature baldness for him.
‘Yes, Javed Miandad,’ Ammi asked sleepily. ‘You want to meet Imran or Wasim?’
‘Neither, auntie,’ he said. ‘Imam sahib is ready?’
Wasim was asleep on the sofa, his hands tucked between his legs. But I heard his can of deodorant hissing like a pressure cooker in the bedroom. A moment later the imam stepped out into the front room in clothes he usually reserved for days as special as Eid or Muharram. The black fur cap sat on his head like a wig; he had dyed his whiskers to match the fur.
‘Are you ready, imam sahib?
‘Oh yes. Let’s get started.’
‘Auntie is also in the frame?’ Javed Miandad asked.
‘It is not a family photograph,’ the imam said slowly, as if the news would break Ammi’s heart. ‘And you are photographing me in front of the mosque. Not here.’
‘Cool,’ Javed Miandad said as the imam, suddenly remembering the indispensable accessory for the photo session, rushed in to fetch the national flag. Javed Miandad let me look through the viewfinder at the tender leaves on the neem tree and the hens that pecked around the alley well. ‘Don’t click, brother,’ he kept reminding me. ‘It costs money.’