Vanity Bagh

by Anees Salim

  Nobody noticed him till he had climbed the tree and crawled halfway down the branch that had overgrown the jail premises. On the other side of the wall was a clutter of old buildings where the archaeology department used to function before it had been shifted to a new complex near the collectorate (I had imagined trees stood in tight clusters on the other side of the wall and a tiny house sat in a corner of the estate). A sweeper dressed in khaki was watching Zia from the shade of the branch he perched on. I would have panicked. But Zia whipped out the make-up man’s mobile phone and pretended to dial a number. A phone rang in a fictitious pocket for a long time without being answered. Then Zia struck a pose of humility and briefed an imaginary superior that he did not detect any suspicious activity on the east side of the prison. Halfway through the call, Zia pretended to have noticed the sweeper for the first time and knitted his eyebrows in serious apprehension. He ended the call after informing the imaginary boss that he had spotted a man who might have some information on the fugitive.

  Straddling the dangling roots, loosening and tightening his grip alternatively, Zia reached the ground to interrogate the sweeper. The officer asked stern questions, the gentleman fumbled for answers, probably dreading that he would be mistaken for the runaway prisoner and manhandled before he had a chance to produce his voter’s ID. The officer asked if he owned a motorcycle, the gentleman said no, only a bicycle, which he was more than happy to lend.

  So Zia collected clothes, a mobile phone, a pair of sunglasses and a bicycle en route to the highway of freedom. But a man dressed in clothes two sizes smaller for his frame, sporting sunglasses, wielding a mobile phone, riding a bicycle never entered Vanity Bagh on Independence Day or the days that followed.

  We’re always fascinated when we

  find leg irons with no legs in them.

  – Tommy Lee Jones (1945- )

  His absence was first noticed at sunset when the sweeper came to the prison to reclaim his bicycle. At first the sentry refused to let him in, then he was taken to the deputy superintendent and a few minutes later the siren began to wail like a song of praise for Zia, whom the sweeper had described as an Akshay Kumar lookalike. The sweeper either suffered from diminished eyesight or mistook someone long-faced and droopy-eyed for Akshay Kumar. Or Zia probably wore the kind of sunglasses Akshay Kumar always did. None of the things he had decamped with were ever recovered, except the mobile phone, which was handed back to the make-up man after the Cyber Cell investigated the call register. Only two calls were made since the phone had been thieved; the first to the central railway station, to warn about a bomb that had been planted in a moving train. I know where he got the idea of a bomb scare to distract the police – we had watched Speed together in Sharif Khan’s hair salon. The second call was traced to a cripple living in an alley behind Vanity Bagh’s lone Irani Café. The call lasted precisely six minutes.

  What I earned from Zia’s escape was enlightenment: that you need something more than Big Babols to jump a prison – you need brains and balls; that I will continue to attempt jailbreak, though only in my fantasies.

  In spite of thunder rolling in the distance every evening, August passed without rains, without Ammi visiting. I didn’t even expect her to, what with Wasim’s surgery and the possibility of men in civvies roaming around the mohalla eating peanuts. I looked forward to the rains, inhaling the smell of earth that drifted into the Book Room from the garden. Between binding books, I continued to read from their blank pages and think of the smell of raked earth that always pervaded the alleys of Vanity Bagh before the rains. I saw the rain falling through the branches of Franklin with a patter, drumming on the tin awnings of roadside stalls.

  One day I looked up from a book and saw it had started to rain quietly. On the floor of the quadrangle the silent rain had collected into tiny pools, and fingers of water rolled lazily down as the rain thickened, bridging Lilliputian islands. It was September. In September, Mangobagh skies invariably poured.

  Bearing the imam’s ancient umbrella, Ammi called on me on a rainy Wednesday, bringing two medical bulletins from Shahbaz Memorial Hospital. The first she delivered with a smile framed in a sigh:Wasim was making good progress after the surgery; the second with a heavy scowl bordered with tears:Abu Hathim sahib was dying.

  Cowards die many times before their death.

  The valiant never taste of death but once.

  – Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)

  Now you are stealing from Shakespeare.

  That’s improvement.

  – Professor Suleiman Ilahi (1949- )

  That’s Shakespeare? Sure?

  I thought Majrooh Sultanpuri wrote that.

  – Rustom sahib (1951- )

  After the bad news was lamented over for a few minutes Ammi told me what befell the mohalla on the day Zia escaped from the prison. Like on the last two Independence Days, the imam had made plans to hoist the tricolour in front of the mosque in the morning, and for the third year in a row Ammi deprived him of that proud moment by hiding the flag in her cupboard. The imam, unlike on the previous occasions, refrained from raising his voice; Wasim’s surgery was due in a few days. Late in the evening, the mohalla overflowed with khaki. Policemen wandered down alleys, shone torches into cowsheds, stopped strangers, had free refreshment from roadside stalls, demanded identification proof even from beggars and tugged at beards that looked unreal.

  My beard is my personal property.

  Please ask my permission before touching it.

  – Inzamam-ul-Haq (1990- )

  Of all four brothers, only Inzamam looked somewhat like Zia, and for some time there was talk of Inzamam being taken into custody.

  If looking alike is a crime,

  half of China would have been in prison.

  – Adv. Fakir Ansari (1957- )

  If being related to a criminal is a crime,

  show me the arrest warrant for your commissioner’s wife.

  – Mrs Fakir Ansari (1954- )

  (A word to those who share my penchant for dates: Adv. Fakir Ansari’s year of birth is not a mistake from my side. He actually married someone elder to him.)

  The police threatened to arrest the Ansaris for abuse and disruption of duty, and the couple readily offered their hands to be cuffed, as if they were playing the lead roles in a Maoist street play. But in the end the police went away without even arresting Inzamam, leaving the Ansaris triumphantly shaking each other’s hands. The police left Zia’s tiny, overcrowded house that overlooked a construction site, but they did not leave the mohalla altogether. A group of them operated incognito, waiting for buses, selling lottery tickets, doing land surveys, hunting for jobs or being plainly pious. In the simple disguise provided by an Islamic cap, one of them sat in a corner of the mosque and spied on the imam, who, under the guise of a fool, repeatedly requested the newcomer to contribute to the Tabligh Conference by his presence and through donations.

  Abu Hathim sahib denied having received any call from any runaway prisoner. He no longer had access to the number Zia was said to have dialled from the make-up man’s phone; he had misplaced the phone on one of his rare trips to Hyderabad – a good riddance as he longer enjoyed talking, on the phone or one to one.

  As the police, impervious to Sohail Hathim’s pleas to spare his father on health grounds, continued to ask him the same difficult questions over and over again, Abu Hathim sahib’s kidneys abruptly collapsed.

  Abba’s kidneys collapsed, Abba’s kidneys collapsed.

  Call the police. I mean, call an ambulance.

  – Sohail Hathim (1973- )

  An ambulance, which had been spotted in a different part of the mohalla for the past three days, finally switched on its beacon light and siren and rushed Abu Hathim sahib to Shahbaz Memorial Hospital where he has been progressively dying ever since.

  Then came the NIA. But they came quietly this time, in fewer numbers and in smaller vehicles than when they had come for us. They discreetly led a man in a blue tie
around the mosque, along the ablution tank, past the madrasa to the patch of grass under the willow tree.

  ‘A fair guy with lots of gel in his hair?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’Ammi looked surprised. ‘How do you know?’

  So the Workshop man had finally spoken up; he must have opened up fearing that Zia had jumped prison just to disinter the crates of detonators from beneath the pot of green dahlias and build a spoor of bombs across the city, one too close to his house or office. It still confused and saddened me that I was not a part of the entourage.

  The covertness with which the NIA arrived bore little fruit in the end. A crowd thronged the mosque, slogans rent the air, the police drove up in riot gear, at the sight of which shops downed their shutters. The imam neither pacified the crowd nor provoked it. He just spoke his heart out in a high-pitched voice. In the capacity of the highest official of Masjid-e-Mosavi, he warned the NIA that digging beneath the willows would yield only a heap of bones. A little boy’s bones. Bones are fossilized memories. Don’t let spades and hoes cut through memories. Don’t make minds bleed. The crowd cheered the imam’s rhetoric.

  Bones are fossilized memories.

  – Kareem Jabbari (1953- )

  Listening to Ammi’s account, I can’t accurately say if it was the imam’s oratory that influenced the NIA’s decision to not dig. Putting the spades and hoes and pickaxes away, they spoke to the people who claimed to have attended Sinbad’s funeral, verified the mosque’s records and, after waving a couple of bomb-detecting devices around the willow tree, deduced that the pit under the pot of dahlias contained nothing but fossilized memories.

  As the police escorted the NIA out to the street, the imam clambered onto the parapet of the madrasa and did a tailpiece to his short yet spectacular speech about bones. Shaking a finger, he said his heart beat for hundreds of thousands of innocent people who were languishing in dark cells without a trial. Wiping a tear, he reminded the dissipating crowd that his own innocent son had been snatched away from him and flung into a sunless chamber.

  The last part was the least convincing; I seriously doubted that Ammi had made it up, though she vehemently ranked it as the imam’s best speech of 2011.

  XIV

  Justice delayed is justice denied.

  I request you to expedite the proceedings, My Lord.

  ~ Public Prosecutor ( - )

  The drawers of my worktable have been opened and ransacked. The yellow feather, the bookmark that fell from the sky, is conspicuous by its absence. I look around in search of it and finally spot it in the hands of a warden, most of its quill already inside his ear. His one eye is closed, and half his face is all wrinkled up and set with the indescribable pleasure of being tickled on the eardrum.

  I feel utterly lonely, but the loss of my bookmark has nothing to do with it. I am grieved by bigger losses which are actually too big to be evaluated without help. I remember the lone survivor of the jungle combat team, the glassy-eyed, lantern-jawed soldier who hauls himself towards the last reel of the movie. I feel like him. I don’t know what remains of 5½ Men, I don’t even know how many of us have survived 11/11. All I know is: I am alive, and I am alone, and I can read from blank pages.

  The warden finishes cleaning his ear with the feather, looks up and sees me staring at him. He stares back, jerks his chin questioningly, enquiring with a finger pointed at the feather if I need it to clean my ears. He then sends the feather out of the window by launching it into the air like a paper plane. Had this happened in a jailbreak movie, this would have been reason enough to start a prison revolt.

  This is hell, and I’m going to

  give you the guided tour.

  – Donald Sutherland (1931- )

  Your body has to be here.

  Your mind can be anywhere.

  – Sylvester Stallone (1946– )

  I open a book and stare at its pages. I see it raining in the mohalla.

  When it rained, the roof of Khan Hair Salon sounded like the audio tracks of Rambo I, II and III played back to back. It was just raindrops tapping on tin sheets, but it sounded just like Stallone slaying Vietnamese revolutionaries in the next street. When it rained the best thing to watch after business hours was porn. Navaz Sharif had the run of the salon from the evening, when his father, tired from standing all day behind salon chairs and eyeing his own reflection in the mirror like a strip teaser, retired to nurse a bottle of cheap liquor.

  Never shave a customer’s armpits,

  even if he offers to pay double. Or even triple.

  – Sharif Khan (1950- )

  Ironically, Navaz Sharif’s work-related fantasy involved shaving a famous Pakistani lady’s armpits, that too for free. After bundling off the last customer into the rain-washed street, we reclined on salon chairs and reflected on the crisis pornography was faced with on a global scale, the crisis of cliché, while muted couples made out on a fairly big flat screen. The desi ones were the worst; they would not even look properly at each other, let alone kiss passionately.

  .................................

  – Over-conscious lady ( - )

  .................................

  – Over-emoting man ( - )

  It was early November and raining. There was talk of truncating power-cut hours or even lifting them altogether as it had been raining steadily in the catchment areas. On the screen a South Indian girl was glaring at her potbellied Sindhi-looking partner for attempting to do something she had not been told about beforehand. It was obvious that she was going to create a scene once the camera was switched off. Her partner was squinting at the camera and restraining a burst of laughter as a shadow, probably that of the man who had funded this home video, darted across the wall behind the narrow bed. Then they were back to the business of frisking each other and perfunctorily kissing.

  Navaz Sharif, Zia and I gave the video a single-star rating, Jinnah and Yahya gave it two on ten and Zulfikar opined we should stop ranking and rating every damn thing under the sun, especially porn. We were wondering if we should rank Zulfikar as the top hypocrite of 2009 when someone rapped on the door.

  ‘It’s Abba,’ Navaz Sharif gasped, quickly wrapping a towel around my neck and starting to trim my hair. Jinnah ran to the rack on the wall and unplugged the DVD player and, to further obliterate signs of debauchery, veiled the TV in a satin cloth. Zia and Zulfikar straddled a bench and started playing chess with serious concentration. The door was knocked more insistently than the roof was thumped by the rain.

  ‘Don’t cut my hair,’ I told Navaz Sharif concernedly.

  ‘He will kill me if he finds out we watch porn in the shop,’ Navaz Sharif said even more concernedly as Yahya opened the door and let the sound of the rain in.

  ‘Checkmate,’ Zia said, slapping his thigh.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Zulfikar yelled in cooked-up anger. ‘You beat me again.’

  In the mirror I saw a thickset man standing by Yahya and sizing up the shop with a mild distaste; the air was suddenly redolent of jasmine attar.

  ‘We are closed,’ Navaz Sharif told the stranger with an apologetic smile. ‘This is my last client of the day.’ The pair of scissors snipped menacingly close to my ear.

  ‘Oh, I don’t want a haircut,’ laughed the stranger, running a hand over his bald head. ‘What is there to cut anyway?’

  All, except me, turned their heads to look at him. To do justice to my role of a client, I had to content myself with his mirror image. Of course I had seen him before, not once but many times, but whether it was here in the mohalla or elsewhere I could not recollect.

  ‘No, I don’t want the services of a barber,’ he said, much to the chagrin of Navaz Sharif, who thought ‘barber’ was the job title for a Hindu, while ‘hairstylist’ was the cosmopolitan term. ‘But I want to hire 5½ Men for something.’

  The snipping of the scissors stopped, glances were exchanged, pinups on the walls were admired but no one said a word. In the mirror the rain fell beyond the salon
door, luminous under a streetlight. I suspected this stranger to be a policeman in mufti and was extremely grateful to Navaz Sharif for introducing me as his client. Maybe a jeep waited in the street, though I didn’t have the faintest clue of the charges that were going to be framed.

  ‘Make the whiskers smaller,’ I instructed the hairstylist, just to underline my role as a client. ‘Not much smaller, just a bit smaller.’

  ‘You know us?’ Navaz Sharif asked him, ignoring my instructions. ‘How come?’

  ‘I know you,’ he said, with a nod which suggested he knew each of us. ‘Why shouldn’t I? I live right here in the mohalla. My name is Qadir.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ Navaz Sharif asked, putting away the pair of scissors and the pretence of cutting my hair.

  ‘What do you want us to do?’ demanded Zulfikar, trying to silence Navaz Sharif with a hand held up in the air, thus trying to brand himself as the leader of the gang.

  ‘Something you have done before,’ Qadir said. ‘Something that involves vehicles. But on a much larger scale.’

  Once again glances were exchanged, pinups were frowned upon, toenails were stared at but no one spoke for a while.

  ‘Car loan recovery?’ Jinnah asked finally. ‘For ICICI or HDFC?’

  ‘See,’ Qadir said. He now stood with his elbows on the back of a barber’s chair, making it squeal with the measured movements of his hands. ‘I can’t give you more information until you tell me if you want to do this.’