by Anees Salim
In this room of red walls and coffee brown furniture, conversation is always difficult. It was more difficult between two brothers with equally uncertain futures. He mumbled something and I mumbled something back as the man with the red bucket daubed at the freedom fighters’ sepia faces. Then, to my great relief, the warden signalled the time was up. Only in movies does a warden use unkind words to snap the tie between the cruel real world and the unreal prison world.
‘See you,’ I said as Wasim rose slowly from the bench.
He walked unhurriedly away from my sight, without promising to see me again.
XI
On the day of the blast, Imran Jabbari
was with me the whole day.
Where? Wherever he claimed to be.
~ Haji Masood (1929- )
The sandy mud from the garden stuck to my fingers like hardened glue. It would not go away no matter how hard I rubbed my hands. Equally gluey was the image of Wasim trudging along the flowering bushes and disappearing around the Record Room. I kept seeing him walking past the conical portion of the Record Room that jutted out of a neat alignment of nondescript prison architecture. After Wasim had slid out of view and there was only an empty, steaming road running to a copper-coloured wall to watch, I picked my weary way back to the garden, the sound of the warden’s boots trailing behind me like the reminders of Wasim’s fake Nike. I kept seeing dust gathering on his shoes, cockroaches slipping in and out of them as they pleased, even a little mouse nosing one of its curled toes. Details so stark that I could not even pretend to weed.
The sun set behind the barbed wires, the moon rose above D-Block and I felt like penning a poem, taking after the most talented and yet the most criticized poet of the mohalla.
If there is a heaven on earth,
it is Vanity Bagh, it is Vanity Bagh, it is Vanity Bagh.
– Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)
Don’t copy somebody else’s poem
and recite it as your own. At least not when I’m on the dais.
– Professor Suleiman Ilahi (1949- )
Calm down and sit down, please. Else I will disperse the meeting.
Okay, meeting dispersed.
– Rustom sahib (1951-)
Poetry eluded me, as did sleep. I still saw Wasim on his way out of the jail, composing in his head careful descriptions of a place the imam had never cared to visit. I saw him disappear around the red building again and again as in a short video footage looped to run forever. It was an effort to see anything else, but I managed to see myself perched on the branch of the banyan tree, on the brink of descending into a world without walls and wardens. But something held me back, something that made jumping a prison such a bad move even in imagination. I lingered on the branch, hands wrapped around a knotty root, ready to go down and camouflage myself amongst people, until I realized what held me back:Wasim. He should not have paid me a visit. Just by standing there in the deserted Visitors’ Room, a hand placed on his heart, he had become an abettor, a wily ally at least in the eyes of the superintendent and the wardens. He would be credited with bringing me the Big Babols and the idea of a jailbreak. They would drag him out of Vanity Bagh, round him up the way I had imagined they rounded up Zia; they would beat him up with the same indulgence and cudgels with which I had imagined them beat the daylights out of Zia.
Ahhhhhhhhhhh …
– Wasim Jabbari (1990- )
I remembered Chuck Norris in one of those dust-coloured movies, he and his men on the verge of swooping down on a Vietnamese village and spraying bullets with the same glee with which Mehendi sprayed colours on every passer-by during Holi. I remembered Chuck Norris noticing something suspicious at the last moment. He and Sylvester Stallone are always faced with some eleventh-hour complexity, especially when they fight Vietnamese or Muslims.
Operation aborted.
– Chuck Norris (1940- )
Copy that.
– Imran Jabbari (1985- )
I decided not to jump jail. At least till time erased the possibility of Wasim being a suspect. Why the hurry? I would have my chances in October, when there would be another celebration in the courtyard to mark Gandhi’s birthday; there would be posters on walls, streamers strung between pillars, speakers tethered to gooseberry trees, inmates singing through microphones – celebrations on a big scale, though not in the same measure as what was planned for Independence Day. As if to seal the deal, I started to chew Big Babol. One after the other until all six were finished and my breath smelled more strawberry than a bottle of strawberry pudding concentrate.
Zia would have company. At least till Gandhi celebrated another of his birthdays in absentia.
You won’t be alone, my child.
I’m with you. And I’m in love.
– Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)
We ranked Zia’s love affair as both the worst tragedy and the best comedy of 2008. In the annals of 5½ Men, it was the only incident that made tears well up in some eyes from too much laughing and some other eyes because of too much pain.
Zia had hidden his love story from us for what could be a few months or many years. But in the end, as in every tale of romance, the cat was out.
Aasia Jamal?
Aasia Jamal of all people?
– Navaz Sharif (1985-2009)
We looked at Zia in disbelief, wordlessly demanding to share his feelings for this plump girl with funny spectacles with us, or at least to confirm the news. Zia said nothing, he didn’t even say yes or no. Leaning against the dark stairway, he stared into the distance.
Do nothing, lover.
Just stand there and stare into the distance.
– Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)
The meeting is dispersed. No more reciting, please.
And don’t use the mike.
– Rustom sahib (1951- )
Ask them to cut the mike, Rustom.
Because he will never cut the crap.
– Professor Suleiman Ilahi (1949- )
The stairway still smelled of the rain that had fallen a couple of days ago, the stairs were still clammy and the coldness of the stone seeped in through the seat of my jeans and worked its way down my thighs like a slow wetness, as if I had wet my pants at the news of Zia’s tryst with Aasia Jamal. Across the road a tiny, pellet-shaped green light jumped from bulb to bulb along the rim of Akbar Electricals signage. I always think this would be how amoeba would look if it were visible to the naked eye: green, luminous and eternally darting.
‘You know what kind of person Jamal sahib is,’ Zulfikar said in a lowered voice.
Jamal sahib was the kind of person the mohalla could not accurately brand as anything: he could be a philanthropist or plain eccentric. In the evenings he carried a scoop of peanuts to the roof of the mosque and shared it with the pigeons; in the mornings he handed a 100-rupee note to the beggar under Franklin who, as if by a previously arrived at agreement, handed back ninety-five rupees from his cashbox. He always wore – even to the Water Authority office where he worked as an overseer – T-shirts printed with the logos of foreign soccer clubs at the front and the names of international players at the back. One day this bald, stocky man would be Nistelrooy, another day Messi, yet another day someone else whose name sounded like the sound of a supressed fart. The most contradictory shirt he ever wore was a red one with the name of Cristiano Ronaldo, the most befitting piece from his wardrobe was a canary one with the name of the other Ronaldo. He watched TV with the volume turned up to maximum, beat up his wife every second Saturday and took his family to watch movies every second Sunday.
‘Why do you want to marry into a family of madcaps?’ Jinnah whispered.
We had been talking in whispers, though there was absolutely no need to. After the evening prayers the imam had padlocked the mosque and hauled himself home after glaring at the glowing cigarette tips on the stairway.
‘Anybody else knows about the affair?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Zia. ‘Aasia Jamal does.�
� When nobody laughed at his joke, he stopped staring into the distance and started mumbling the finer details of his private little Titanic in the making. ‘Nobody else knows. Nobody will know until we are ready to start a life together. She can make her parents put her marriage on hold for two years.’
With a few curled fingers, Yahya asked how she would make her parents wait.
‘Higher studies,’ Zia said feebly.
‘Attending embroidery class is no higher studies,’ said Navaz Sharif.
‘She will wait,’ announced Zia determinedly.
Our Aasia is getting married.
The boy deals in dry fruits. Wholesale.
– Rukhia Jamal (1967- )
She had come to buy eggs from Ammi and was still hanging around after a dozen eggs had been closely scrutinized and put away in her wire basket. Even after Ammi opened her eyes wide in fake excitement and showered sham congratulations on her and Aasia in absentia, she showed no sign of leaving. So Ammi asked reluctantly after the boy, and Rukhia Jamal readily furnished her with the specifics of Aasia’s suitor, her sleepy eyes never leaving me as she divulged all vital information barring the name and the address of the groom.
‘But isn’t Aasia too young for marriage?’ asked the cynic in Ammi. She never liked the cynic in Rukhia Jamal, who once wondered – not completely without reason – if Fatima’s husband bore a close resemblance to Johnny Lever.
‘She is eighteen-and-a-half,’ Rukhia Jamal said brusquely. ‘Right age for marriage. Anyway, this mohalla is not the right place for young girls to grow up in.’
‘She is only sixteen,’ I cut in. ‘She was born in 1992, no?’
Two ladies with almost identical bloated frames were staring at me: the egg-seller livid with shame, the egg-buyer red with anger. Two ladies, two points of view, neither in favour of me. I tried to read their minds. From Ammi’s point of view, I was merely trying to reconfirm a nutty girl’s date of birth when I should have looked offended by her rival’s statement about the mohalla being a bad place for young girls. From her rival’s point of view, I was the one who had corrupted her sixteenyear-old with chits scribbled with statements of love and roses stolen from Mary Pinto’s flower shop. How would I tell them I was obsessed with dates, that I had a photographic memory of the imam’s rexine-bound ledger, that I loved memorizing digits that, when fenced by brackets and partitioned by a hyphen, became studies in longevity.
When Rukhia Jamal stormed out of the alley with eggs, Ammi declared that the boy who was going to have Aasia Jamal’s hand in marriage existed only in her mother’s head.
‘How do you know?’ I asked sheepishly.
‘Rukhia bought fifteen eggs from me only two days ago.’
‘So?’ I was confused. What do eggs have to do with Aasia Jamal’s matrimony?
‘She just used eggs as an excuse to come here and dream aloud about her daughter’s wedding. They can never afford a dry fruits wholesaler. A street vendor would have been an easier to believe lie.’
‘You are a genius, Ammi.’
‘Yes, I am. And I will throw you out if you continue to romance Aasia Jamal.’
When I made the mistake of telling the gang about Rukhia Jamal’s visit, Zia refused to buy Ammi’s eggs-as-excuse theory. He threw away his cigarette and sprang to his feet. ‘They are having people over,’ he said desperately, not bothering to lower his voice. ‘They are marrying that poor girl off in a hurry.’
The windows of the mosque were closed, even the louvres, except for a few which were open, and I caught a glimpse of the imam standing by the window nearest the stairway, his head cocked at a difficult angle to eavesdrop on us.
‘Look, Zia, you should let Aasia’s father decide about her wedding,’ I said so loudly that not just the imam but even the pigeons, whom Jamal sahib fed peanuts in the evenings, heard me. ‘Parents know what is best for their children.’
Zia called me the son of a rotten, pus-infected prick and the imam, taking the invective too personally, strode angrily out of sight. But he returned a short while later to throw the windows open and, standing under a sooty fanlight with his back turned to an ochre wall, started fiddling with his mobile phone.
‘Hello, police station? Inspector speaking? I was complaining to you ...’ He talked loud enough for us to hear, he was almost shouting, so we knew he was faking the call – no one in the right frame of mind would dare shout at a policeman who enjoyed the luxury of a caller-ID phone. Almost at the same instant, there appeared a glow in Zia’s shirt pocket and his phone started to rattle like a box of broken bangles. Making a face at the blinking green dial, he turned his back to us and took the call. He was now facing the imam who, looking somewhat like an award-winning photograph with light in the background and darkness in the foreground, was still on the phone, pretending to demand immediate intervention of the law-and-order machinery. For a brief moment it looked like the imam and Zia, standing a few metres apart, were talking to each other over the phone.
Zia shook his head and let out angry grunts at regular intervals while the imam briefed an imaginary policeman about the chaos on the stairwell. And then, almost at the same instant, they hung up.
‘They are coming for you with handcuffs,’ the imam yelled into the darkness. ‘Please don’t go away.’
‘The poor girl is under house arrest,’ Zia said. ‘I’m going to have a word with her father. Come with me.’
Zulfikar counted himself out of the delegation; he said Jamal sahib and his father were first cousins, which made him and Aasia Jamal second cousins. Blood relation was his stock excuse to get out of situations. Zia looked expectantly at Navaz Sharif, who had a genuine reason not to come along: Jamal sahib and his father were not first cousins, they were worst enemies. Zia discouraged an enthusiastic Jinnah from being anywhere near his future wife’s house, the windows of which Jinnah had threatened to smash when Jamal sahib refused to contribute to Saddam Hussein Peace Foundation, a charity organization Jinnah solely managed and was the sole beneficiary of.
Zia’s mobile phone rang a second time as he lit a new cigarette with the stub of the one he had smoked almost to the company logo. But this time it was a shorter call, which ended without Zia mouthing a single word, not even grunting a single grunt. He climbed down the stairs hurriedly and walked towards Jamal sahib’s, forlorn and all alone. Out of sympathy for him, I decided to accompany him. Out of sympathy for me, Yahya decided to accompany the two of us.
Aasia Jamal lived in a poky lane which was accessed through an arched entrance sandwiched between two meat shops – Buhari’s and Karachi Meat. The shops were closed for the day, and harpoons hung from awnings on nylon ropes like inverted question marks. For a moment I saw our bodies dangling from the hooks like what befell people who dared the Taliban.
At the entrance, Zia paused to take a long drag from his cigarette. He threw away the butt and fished out a couple of bubblegum from his pocket. One he chewed himself, the other I shared with Yahya.
‘Have you watched a movie called Daryl?’ Zia asked, completely out of context, and I sensed he, in spite of putting up a brave front, was as tense about entering Jamal sahib’s den as I. He probably now saw what I had seen a while ago – bodies dangling from metal hooks, dripping with blood and urine. The movie talk was his tactic to distract himself, to dispel the fear of being denied entry into Aasia’s home, or being kicked out of it as soon as he asked her hand in marriage.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Good movie?’
‘Excellent movie,’ he said. ‘It is about a boy with double brains. He flies a plane and finally sticks bubblegum on a surveillance camera so that nobody can see what he does.’ He spat out the bubblegum into the gutter and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Come, let’s meet Jamal sahib.’
(Later that year I watched Daryl on DVD. It was first released in 1985, the year I was born. It ran at Kemps in 1992, years before I saw my first English movie. And finally, when I had a chance to watch it, I ranked it as the mos
t difficult-tounderstand English movie I watched in 2008.)
At the top of Jamal sahib’s door was a gold-plated panel etched with a surah. At the centre of the door was a big peephole that looked like an eyeball. Yahya pressed the doorbell, and the girl under house arrest answered it with a ruddy nose and bleary eyes. A sudden urge to take her in my arms and plant a comforting kiss in her hair parting was swelling inside me when her mother arrived on the scene and glared murderously at her until Aasia Jamal disappeared behind a curtain.
A live soccer match was in progress on a flat television which looked gummed onto the wall. Jamal sahib was watching it from a tattered sofa, dressed in a red football jersey and white bermuda shorts. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I was waiting for you.’ That was a very positive sign; Aasia must have melted her father’s heart with litres of tears. The stadium was humming with an anthem while snow fell like popcorn onto the field. Whenever there was a close-up shot of the spectators, these decent-looking people wrapped in warm clothes behaved just like street urchins in rags, waving at the camera and turning hysterical with joy.
‘You all love football?’ Jamal sahib asked, motioning at us to be seated.
We all shook our heads meekly, sitting down on a sofa more tattered than the one Jamal sahib was occupying.
‘Which of you loves football plus my daughter?’ he asked without malice, but he was not smiling either. By sliding to the edge of the sofa, Zia identified himself as Aasia’s Romeo. Jamal sahib nodded appreciatively at him.
When the singing was replaced by the resonant blare of some strange wind instrument, the stadium sounded like a sawmill, filling the room with the constant whiz of iron teeth cutting through soft wood; Jamal sahib made a face at the television and got up to get the remote from a windowsill, and we saw he was Rooney today. He muted the match and sat down on the sofa, his left heel placed on his right knee.