by Anees Salim
‘Where the hell is that flag?’ the imam shouted from the bedroom, and Ammi made as if to go inside to help a husband who couldn’t track a single thing in the house on his own. But the imam was already in the front room, his face red with anger. ‘Where is the flag?’
‘Delhi is the national capital of India,’ Wasim spoke in his sleep.
‘That is news to me, brother,’ Javed Miandad said to the sleeping boy.
‘Where is my flag?’ the imam asked, slapping the armrest of the sofa, sounding like a child.
‘I haven’t eaten it, Imran’s Abba,’Ammi said.
‘Where is it then?’
‘It was all dirty,’ she said.
‘So?’ he barked.
‘I have washed it and hung it on the line.’ Her finger pointed to the well, beyond which was the alley’s dhobi-yard: three monolithic washing stones and a complex network of clotheslines. The flag lay between two of Wasim’s industrial dungarees, still dripping from the late-night laundering. I have no knowledge of what happened next, for Javed Miandad and I fled the scene, offering each other tea from Hussein Chacha’s stall.
Jerome Pinto’s grandpa saved the day for Ammi by dying in the mid-morning. Ammi insisted we all go as a family and put some nice flowers on Jerome Pinto’s grandpa’s chest.
‘No flowers,’ the imam said. ‘It’s not Islamic.’
‘But Pinto sahib was never a Muslim,’Ammi grimaced.
‘If you people are going to fight all the way I am not coming with you,’ Wasim announced. ‘Sorry. You three can go as a family.’
Everyone turned quiet after that. A heart with a hole is the best ever tool invented for emotional blackmailing.
Jerome Pinto’s grandpa was all dressed up and ready to go by the time we reached Bethlehem. A nun in white uniform stood in front of a mike and read from a book in a singsong voice; three nuns in coffee brown uniform stood in a line behind her, moving their lips but not really singing with her. There was a big picture of Jesus in the room, as if about to shrug, his hands open. There were four candles in front of the picture. Two were very tall, the third one only half the size of the other two, the fourth a mere stub, on the brink of dissolving into a pool of wax. When the wind from an oscillating fan passed the candles, the flames leaned forward like a family bending its head in prayer. A family of four, just like ours. For a moment I saw Wasim as the tiny candle ready to die out, and I felt sorry for the other three candles that would have to live on in the painful memory of the snuffed-out one.
Javed Miandad took pictures of the important people as they passed Jerome Pinto’s grandpa. He refrained from using flash as a mark of respect to the dead man. I tried not to smile when Javed Miandad, standing across the coffin from us, frowned at us through the viewfinder. The imam managed to look devastated as a series of crisp clicks escaped the camera, Wasim looked over his shoulder so as not to feature prominently in the funeral album and Ammi put a finger on a big rose in a wreath as if to take ownership of the red roses the nuns from St Xavier’s Cathedral had brought. Just as we were filing past the troupe of one singing nun and three mimicking ones I noticed the Wasim candle go out, wax spreading around its base like tears. Nobody else noticed this little tragedy. I remembered the song everyone except Diana’s husband sang when she died in a car crash.
Candle in the wind. Oh, candle in the wind.
– Queen & Family ( - )
Daylight had considerably dimmed since we had gone in to pay our last respects. Just outside Bethlehem, Jerome Pinto was leaning against an old Ambassador with a seriously dented backdoor, smoking and talking to his girlfriend Clara D’Costa on the phone at the same time. When he spotted the imam and Ammi he hid his cigarette and swallowed the smoke but didn’t stop talking to Clara D’Costa. I thought his eyes were moist; while smoking and talking to his girlfriend, he must have been crying for his grandpa as well: they were more like friends than grandson and grandpa, knocking down pints after pints of rum when the postman brought the old man his monthly pension. I hugged him tightly and whispered in his ear, ‘Sorry about your grandpa, Jerome Pinto.’
Fuck you man, Imran. You are a bloody joker.
– Jerome Pinto (1986- )
I ranked that as the worst behaviour of 2009.
X
My life is my message.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
It was funny how I interpreted the poster above when I first noticed it on the wall. I took it for an advertisement for some mobile phone service that sold SMS packages to inmates who secretly use mobile phones with secret permission from wardens. Swindlers, politicians, tax evaders, high-class pimps and other well-connected bums live in the network coverage area even when they live in a jail. We, the lesser ones, are the ones who have to depend either on imagination or on telepathy to connect to the world outside the walls. The second time I read the poster I knew it actually was a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, though the last word of the quote still evoked in me the same image as the first time, that of the back of a digital envelope.
I was back to working outdoors, but only for a couple of days. The Book Room, like many other workplaces, was closed till the Independence Day celebrations were over. They
needed all available hands to deck up the prison like a big showpiece. In our mohalla, the Pintos resorted to such showoffs to let their church know their Christian identity was intact in a neighbourhood nicknamed Little Pakistan. Everything in Pintos’ Garage would have strings of blinking serial bulbs around it, even empty lubricant drums. There would be drummers and buglers, and free red wine and plum cake which they usually ran out of in the first half hour. The main attraction was the life-size stable they built in a corner of the garage on the eve of Christmas. Jerome Pinto’s younger sister Mary Pinto always played the Virgin Mary, and the same doll was dusted up every December and handed the role of infant Jesus. Wasim, wearing a wet strip of cotton for a beard and a wise look, once played one of the elderly men from Jerusalem until he abruptly vanished from the tableau. Blue turban, brown staff, white beard, wise look … all gone between two winks.
Where is imam sahib’s son
Antonio Rosario Pintonio Gonorrhea gone?
– Sheikh Zardari (1945-2003)
With a light frown and a half-smile the imam had arrived on the scene a while ago and was sizing up what he would later describe to Ammi as Christmas-time comedy when the tall elderly man towering over the Virgin Mary caught his attention. His frown deepened, smile waned, but Wasim pretended to be a Jerusalem citizen well past seventy, and continued to simper at the flowing traffic. The instant the imam turned his head to shout a question into George Pinto’s ear the tableau lost its baby-faced old man.
We later found him sitting on the washing stone near the alley well, the marshmallow-beard in his hands, his left toe doodling tree shapes on the wet earth. ‘Please come and bless our home, uncle,’ I said passing by. The imam put him on a two-week probation for wearing a white beard, holding a staff and standing by Virgin Mary Pinto while the mohalla-wallahs either strolled by without sparing a second look or stopped by for plum cake and wine. Wasim did not speak to the imam for weeks after the sanctions were lifted, and Ammi ranked them as the worst father and son of the year.
That was in 2004, five whole years before I would be peeled off the mohalla and thrown into jail.
As Independence Day approached, the jail became the same frenzied whirlpool my school had habitually turned into in the second week of August. The superintendent was as unhappy about the preparations as the headmaster. The wardens turned as busy as teachers, and they lorded over the prisoners the same way teachers did over students. Results were much the same in both the places: posters on the walls, streamers strung between trees and secret plans to slip away to the accompaniment of amateurish music on microphones.
I stood in front of the Gandhi poster and watched the inmates wash the courtyard. A thin, broody man strolled around with a bucket of paint, the brush in his hand drippin
g white, watery lime onto the stones. He paused whenever he spotted a boot mark on the wall and, squatting on the cobbled floor, daubed lime on the blot until there was nothing left of it. Two wardens were walking around with rolls of paper balanced in the crooks of their arms, putting up posters to hide blotches too deep for the paintbrush to mend.
Ignorance is always afraid of change.
– Jawaharlal Nehru (1899-1964)
I liked this poster better than the first one, though I never expected Nehru to be alive as late as 1964. I had always been under the impression that all big leaders died one by one soon after the British had snatched their flags off every single flag post and rushed off to catch the first available plane. But then my understanding of Indian history was pretty bad. Of world history, I had even lesser clue. In short, history was never my cup of tea.
The Independence Day is on August 15.
Unless you are a Pakistani. Then you are right.
It’s on August 14.
– Devaki Hegde (1932-1998)
I cried a great deal that evening, copying ‘August 15’ 250 times on ruled sheets of paper as penance. The night had fallen by the time I had finished, and in the shed at the front of the house a black-and-white goat with a particularly fierce frown had just given birth to Tabu and Humera. The imam was required to sign the document of atonement as if to apologize for the historical blunder his son had committed. But he refused to, and went for a walk in the market; by the time he returned Ammi had forged his signature and even put the seal of the mosque committee on the top sheet to make it look legitimate.
Put him in another school, Bushra.
The same teacher made fun of my son
because his name is Jinnah.
– Jameela Auntie (1949- )
The third poster was bigger than the first two simply because it was trying to hide a bigger patch of naked brickwork than the first two. The man quoted was Abul Kalam Azad, but before I could read what he had to say everyone was looking at me, pausing in their work to smile. I didn’t know what was happening until I noticed a spindly shadow beside me on the cobbled floor. I turned to see who was standing behind me, imitating my posture.
Sir, I hope you are happy
with the arrangements.
– Superintendent (10 BC- )
They started laughing, both inmates and wardens. Let them, I thought, I am going to have the last laugh on Independence Day. Then everyone else would be too shocked to laugh, the superintendent would be even too shocked to close his mouth that was certain to fall open at the news of my escape. Once they had recovered enough they would round up Zia and beat the daylights out of him.
Ahhhhhhhhhhh …
– Zia-ul-Haq (1984-2012)
He was a good friend, but he turning into a punching bag for no fault of his made me only smile. Hiding the smile in a forced scowl, I put up a show of sweeping the yard as long as the superintendent’s shadow was on the cobbled floor. Then I sat down for a quiet dress rehearsal for the August 15 escapade.
I was armed with the simplest of jailbreak kits: six Big Babols and a plot worth patenting. My plan was not to take the beaten path, which led straight to the back wall. The back wall of a jail would always be the first priority of a freedom seeker, especially on an occasion like Independence Day, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the jail had a rule which put the back wall under special surveillance on days as special as this. The back wall would not figure even in my wildest dreams. I would use the banyan tree instead. The Book Room affords a view of this sprawling tree which stands a long way off the wall and is thus not plot-friendly. But a branch, probably growing sick of the jail environment, had grown resolutely away from the trunk until it was out of the jail premises by a good half metre. This portion of the twisted bough still looked innocent enough as it was too high to facilitate a safe jump down to the free world, but there were roots descending from it like ropes made of bed-sheets. They did not go all the way down, but they came down reasonably low. You could slide down a dangling root and let yourself go from the end of it and fall on all fours, without even grazing the skin on your knees. I was positive.
A day before Independence Day, as the sun rose gloomily over the Record Room, I woke up feeling like a rocket getting ready for launch – a silent countdown had already begun inside me. I was assigned to tidy up the garden that morning, and I worked as diligently as my acting capabilities allowed, working with hoes and spades and pickaxes so no one would suspect I was mentally rehearsing the jailbreak scheduled for the next afternoon. Zia, unsuspecting and uninterested, went past me pushing a wheelbarrow piled with brick and mortar and broken glass, the strain of singlehandedly navigating the loaded cart lending him the gait of a chimpanzee as he disappeared around the banyan tree to the temporary garbage hill.
Masterji, I want to be
a doctor when I grow up.
– Zia-ul-Haq (1984-2012)
Sure, Zia. Your handwriting is already
like a doctor’s. I can’t read a thing.
– Shivram Narain (1947- )
Rubbish dumped, the cart empty, Zia came around the tree a while later, wheeling the barrow like a toy but still maintaining the burdened monkey stride. They chose the area behind the banyan tree as the site for garbage because the tree would hide the rubbish from the visiting dignitaries. The tree would hide more than waste tomorrow. I managed a smile when Zia passed me, but he hobbled away without even sparing a glance in my direction. In thirty-six hours he would be the only member of 5½ Men in confinement, but I couldn’t help it.
God helps those who help themselves.
– Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)
Mid-morning, a warden signalled at me to stop weeding the garden. I had a visitor. ‘My mother?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Unless your mother is a funny-looking man.’ I laughed, my penultimate laugh in this prison if my plan worked the only way it should; I would laugh my last laugh from the branch of the banyan tree, then I would take a leap to freedom. I followed the warden across the courtyard, down a series of sunless passages and up a narrow flight of stairs to the Visitors’ Room. We emerged into the longish room of red walls as a clock chimed like church bells. On the walls were pictures of local freedom fighters, many of whom, imprisoned for making bonfires out of things made in Britain, had languished in the cells lining the courtyard; a few had even died there. All of them were getting fair treatment today: an inmate with a red bucket and a sponge was moving from picture to picture, mopping dust off the faces of the patriots. In the far corner of the room was the coffee brown jail furniture: rows after rows of benches arranged for the visitors to sit and weep while the visited stared into the distance. The rows of benches, which always remind me of a waiting shed by a tiny boatyard, had no takers today. The lone visitor was standing, looking at his own hands.
Where I had expected the Workshop man or someone from the NIA, there was a lanky youth with a three-day stubble pretending to be a beard. It took me a few seconds to recognize him; I had never seen him sporting a beard before.
‘Wasim, what brings you here?’ I asked in an incredulous voice as if he had some other business to be in the Visitors’ Room than I, Imran Jabbari, his only brother.
He would not let our eyes meet; he could not even decide if it was appropriate to smile in a prison. In the end he merely put a hand to his chest as if to greet me the way one mohallawallah is supposed to greet another. Then, frowning faintly at my mud-stained hands, he mumbled, as if someone had forced him to utter those words, ‘My heart surgery is scheduled for Thursday.’
We had grown up without hugging each other, we never even fell into each other’s arms after the Eid prayers when you engaged every Muslim you bumped into in a bear hug; our acts of intimacy were restricted to handshakes which Ammi insisted we do after our school-day fights. As he stood there with a palm placed over his heart, which had a hole that seemed to grow at the same pace as he did, all I wanted to do was hug him tightly and give him a comfortin
g pat, and say the kind of reassuring words only people on television serials can bring themselves to say on the face of a life-risking surgery.
Wasim’s dream to become India’s next Milkha Singh was shattered in the year Con Air started playing in Kemps. (It played four shows a day for two months, one show at noon for three months.)
Nice work, Poe. Truly nice work.
– Cyrus the Virus ( - )
This boy has a future in athletics. All he needs is
rigorous training and lots of vitamins.
– Coach Williams (1964- )
Coach Williams gave Wasim rigorous training. Ammi filled him with lots of vitamins courtesy Tabu, Humera and a flock of nameless hens. But he collapsed in the classroom after a warm-up session around a tree, crushing the water bottle of another boy and the dreams of his coach and the imam. His nostrils turned red though no blood came out. The coach, the music teacher and I took him to Shahbaz Memorial Hospital in an auto rickshaw that crawled through mid-morning traffic. Everyone was tense, but only I cried. The imam soon joined us at the physician’s room where the curtains, bed-sheets and pillow slips were the same shade of green.
You can postpone and postpone the surgery
until you can’t postpone it anymore.
– Dr Ubaidulla (1937-2006)
So Wasim had reached the stage where the surgery could not be postponed anymore. I gave him a pat. He smiled weakly with the corners of his mouth. When he sat down on the edge of a bench and stared at the olive floor, where the sunlight turned it glass-like, I noticed his shoes – the Nike I had picked up for him from Fauji Bazaar long ago. My anguish deepened as I pictured the tick-marked pair sitting under his narrow bed awaiting his return from the hospital, slowly gathering dust, turning into a den for cockroaches, cobwebs covering them like faded and frayed shoelaces, until Fatima’s son would decide to dig them out, dust them and march on to puberty in duplicate Nike.