by Anees Salim
‘Fair enough,’ I said. He could be anything but a policeman in disguise. He held my gaze in the mirror for a moment. Then he nodded at my reflection.
‘We want to discuss this amongst ourselves,’ Zulfikar said.
‘I want you to discuss this amongst yourselves and say yes or no next Sunday.’ He turned to leave, eyeing the rain distastefully for a moment.
‘How do we contact you?’ Zulfikar held a hand out. ‘Mobile number?’
‘Don’t worry. I will contact you. We will meet here on Sunday night?’
‘Perfect,’ Zia said.
‘You have three days. I think there is enough time for you to make up your mind.’
‘Perfect,’ Zia said.
Then Qadir went out of the shop and walked into the rain, beginning to half-trot towards Franklin, when a flash of lightning lit up the sky above the outline of minarets.
If you are a practising Muslim living
in Vanity Bagh, you are a page in my ledger.
– Kareem Jabbari (1953- )
According to the imam’s ledger, which had grown to the size of a busy tailor’s book of measurements, five practising Muslims by the name of Qadir lived in Vanity Bagh. Two had already kicked the bucket. One was too old to be our man, the other had been born only last Christmas. The remaining Qadir lived on the fringe of Vanity Bagh, where the cemetery of St Francis Basilica began, but had his business running from the mohalla’s private little Nariman Point. If the ledger was anything to go by, he was a florist, a job that was a bed of roses when compared to the uncertainties and adventures that marked the career of loan recovery agents.
Looking up some girl’s address?
When can I expect her mother here?
– Bushra Jabbari (1962- )
There was something fishy about this man. You could be a scrap dealer and a hooligan at the same time. Or a civil contractor and a contract killer. Or a restaurateur and a pimp. Or even a policeman and a pirate. But a florist doubling as a debt recovery agent was as unimaginable as orchid plants springing water lilies.
‘He looks like a perfect crook,’ I, based on my little research and analysis of the imam’s ledger, observed.
‘So do the six of us,’ was Zulfikar’s reply to this.
We decided to spy on the florist and they picked me for the job, mistaking my access to the imam’s ledger for immense talent for sleuthing. I took Jinnah’s bicycle and stopped by Fatima’s house to borrow her husband’s helmet that had a grinning skull painted on the back.
The best fights are the ones we avoid.
– Jackie Chan (1954- )
Riding a bicycle down a bustling, narrow market street wearing a motorcycle helmet, I epitomized bad espionage. People studied me with confused interest, even the suspect looked up from a heap of flowers when I pedalled past his shop.
The best way to describe the market is to compare it to an anaconda that has just had dinner. It has a modest mouth beginning from the side of Akbar Electricals, snaking narrowly through the mohalla to a point where it suddenly becomes a spacious oval patch, then narrowing as abruptly as it has widened and petering out to a mere tail which ends on Purana Masjid Road.
Qadir’s shop was just beyond this belly-of-the-anaconda, it sat at a bend after which there were only fish stalls. The florist appeared to be there not to make money, but on a selfless mission to give the market-goers a whiff of fragrance before the stench of fish invaded their nostrils. His little shop, so vivid with colours, made you realize how monochromatic underwater life was. After the pleasing shades of Mangobagh’s flora, all the seas had to offer was either steely grey or greyish black. In two days I did several helmeted rounds of the market, and Qadir looked briefly up every time my bicycle rattled past him, his profile framed either in the loop of a wreath or in the near oval of a garland, both meant for the day’s commerce.
Then Sunday dawned, then Sunday brightened, then it dimmed and finally darkened. Khan Hair Salon remained open well past its closing time, Yahya posted on the steps to ward off drunks or perfectly sober human beings who, spotting the salon still open, might wander in for a haircut.
TheTitanic, which had long sunk to the bottom of television ratings, had just hit the iceberg when Qadir finally rode up on a rickety Lambretta the colour of kadak tea. He left it on the pavement, where it stood with its headlight angled towards the salon as if it were keeping an eye on its master. Yahya came in and closed the door. Navaz Sharif switched off the television.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ Qadir said, as if he owned the shop, its three barbers’ chairs, four visitors’ chairs and one bench that had served three generations of clients. ‘Have you made up your mind?’
‘Yes,’ Zulfikar said.
‘Okay, you are saying yes?’ Qadir asked.
‘No,’ Zulfikar said.
‘No is what you have decided?’
‘Listen,’ Jinnah said. ‘We can say yes or no only after you tell us what the job is.’
And he told us.
If our maiden operation had us taking possession of a car, this one would have us getting rid of scooters. We would not have to steal anything. We would just ride the scooters to the addresses Qadir would furnish us with. We would park them at specified places and just walk away. We would be carriers. That meant Qadir was not a loan recovery agent.
‘This is drug business?’ Zia asked, already expressing his unwillingness for the job with a shake of his head.
‘This is gold business,’ Qadir replied. ‘There will be gold bars hidden in each scooter you ride to where we want them to be ridden. But the gold is not your responsibility. If you are followed or intercepted, you can ditch the scooter and escape. That’s the standard norm we follow.’
We did not know gold smuggling had standard norms, that the rules had been formulated by such golden-hearted
dons.
‘But we will not tolerate cheating,’ Qadir said darkly.
‘Neither will we,’ replied Jinnah.
Qadir burst out laughing and seemed to want to thump Jinnah on the back but then settled for a few slaps on the countertop. ‘I like you people,’ he said. ‘And I like the fact that you kept an eye on me for the last three days. In this business, if you walk with an open eye you go far. Now, yes or no?’
We looked at each other, and Qadir looked from face to face, expecting us to shout yes like schoolchildren. Our reluctance appeared to worry him beyond reason, and when we remained silent for longer than he had expected, he said, in a tone that suggested he had already given up, ‘I am just asking you to do some valet parking for me. Only that you don’t have to wear any funny uniform and bow at people when they grudge you paltry tips. No, Zulfikar?’
Zulfikar gave him a shy smile and a nod of agreement – his stint in valet parking at Residency Plaza had proved to be a sour experience for him and a sourer one for the hotel. A luxury sedan had suffered a mangled radiator grille and powdered headlamps in his hands, but this qualified him to speak with some amount of authority on the accuracy and infallibility of airbag deployment.
I have no idols. I admire work,
dedication and competence.
– Ayrton Senna (1960-1994)
‘I don’t know what stops you from saying yes. We have options. We can always hire gangs from Begum Bazaar area to do this. But they are professionals, hence easy suspects for the police. You are not on police records. And you are all jobless. Now, yes or no?’
I thought what Qadir had said was the least persuasive thing I had ever heard in my life so I was immensely surprised, even a bit disappointed, when Zulfikar, after having glanced around the room, said, ‘Deal.’
Close to an hour later, when Navaz Sharif switched on the TV after seeing off Qadir, the Titanic had completely sunk. Little did we know then that our own boat had started to roll, that we would soon run into an iceberg and get flung into a cold sea. And sink.
Navaz Sharif went around the shop snapping off lights, and finally he pressed th
e button on the remote and killed the TV. In the dark, someone heaved a sigh. It could have been anyone but Yahya. Yahya never sighed, you know?
XV
My son, whom you’ve called a bomb expert,
is scared of even those tiny, ten-per-rupee crackers.
~ Salma Auntie (1968- )
No news from home. No sign of Ammi. It is already late October and it has been over a month since I last saw her cry. I have a list of probable reasons that keeps her away. A list that keeps growing day by day.
Probable reason 1: Wasim. Has he had a relapse? And is he back in the CCU of Shahbaz Memorial Hospital?
Probable reason 2: Abu Hathim sahib. Have his kidneys finally failed him completely? Did the ambulance that rushed him to the hospital with a rotating beacon and a shrieking siren finally drive back to the mohalla, sluggish and silent? Ammi, devastated by the news, knows it will leave me even more devastated.
Probable reason 3: Fatima’s husband. Latif had broken a tower of crockery in his kitchen at the news of my arrest.
He banned Fatima from calling on Ammi and the imam, and referred to us as a family of terrorists whenever it pleased him. Has he threatened to send Fatima home if Ammi doesn’t stop visiting me?
Probable reason 4: Zia. Could it be that Ammi does turn up on visitors’ days without fail but is denied permission as an act of revenge for the blow Zia has dealt the jail? Four wardens have been suspended. The deputy superintendent has been transferred. A lookout notice has been published. The branch of the banyan where Zia sat holding the make-up man’s phone has been sawn off. The October 2nd celebrations have been cancelled. My worktable got searched and I still get stared at.
Probable reason 5: Shoulder dislocation. Which Ammi is occasionally prone to.
Probable reason 6: October. The month that takes the imam out of Mangobagh. He joins a small band of mullahs on a six-city tour in the name of the Tabligh Conference while poor Ammi does double duty. Now, with Wasim indisposed, triple duty.
Probable reason 7: November. The month that once shook the city and has been in the news ever since, remembered with pictures of mangled metal, broken windows, blood-splattered walls and panel discussions on TV.
Probable reason 8: I have no clue. I am still thinking about reason 8.
For the books of empty leaves, I have found a new bookmark. It doesn’t look as good as the feather; it doesn’t look even halfgood. But my new bookmark has more value: it carries the autograph of the king of sound engineering, who actually shook hands with Will Smith and was even half-hugged by him.
I don’t watch movies.
But I’m happy that India has won three Oscars.
– Kareem Jabbari (1953- )
If truth be told, most of the inmates don’t know who Will Smith is, nor do they care a damn about the king of sound engineering. The scraps of paper they had stood with in the sweltering sun were thrown away almost as soon they were elaborately autographed. I don’t know if the king of sound engineering had a glimpse of his signature being balled up and tossed away. If he did he would have ranked it as the biggest insult of 2011.
So an autographed piece of paper is my new bookmark. I remove it from a 200-pager and look at the pages that are blank except for the blue rules on them. These days I imagine weird things about libraries. One of them is a library stocked only with books of blank pages. You borrow books on the merit of their binding, take them home and read from their blank pages the very stories you have always wanted to write but never knew how to begin. I am very impressed with this impossible idea of mine.
This ten-year-old Imran is very creative.
Boy, try poetry and do the mohalla proud. The way I did.
– Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)
Another weird imagery I have thought up recently has something to do with calendars. It is a calendar with only eleven months on it. October blends into December with ease, and there is nothing to suggest that there once used to be November in between. I dread November. Maybe that’s why I see November when I open the notebook to read from my own unwritten memoirs. It’s only natural for us mortals to keep seeing what we would give anything to erase the memory of. There is one more thing I am afraid of and obsessed with at the same time. It is the number 11. So when I open a book, there it is, the number 11, a whole chapter of it.
November is the coolest month.
Flowers are lilac and memories are green.
– Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)
Eliot would be turning over in his grave.
– Professor Suleiman Ilahi (1949- )
Let us dissolve the Poetry Club.
That would be our biggest contribution to poetry.
– Rustom sahib (1951- )
The month, as I already said, was November. The date, as fate would have it, was 11. That makes it 11/11. You get the drift of the story I am reading? The day was overcast. It had poured overnight and, as the combination of rain and tin imitated the sound of distant artillery over our heads, Zulfikar’s phone began to ring and vibrate.
He let it ring for a while, sniffing and swallowing, and when he took the call he listened with serious distaste, as if something he had always dreaded would happen had finally happened. Then he hung up, dropped his head and nipped his eyebrows where they were conjoined.
‘We will meet Qadir at 11 tomorrow.’
That, in hindsight, makes it 11/11/11.
But we reached the florist’s five minutes late, and Qadir was waiting impatiently for us outside the shop. Without pleasantries or handshakes, he led us to the belly-of-theanaconda area where three scooters were parked in front of a shop with its wooden shutters plastered over with several layers of film posters. One of them was the tea-coloured Lambretta, and all of them had new number plates, which meant they were fake numbers.
‘Scooter No. 2342 will go to the Holy Cross Hospital parking lot,’ Qadir said.
In Mangobagh, people are obsessed with the belief that the number plate of your vehicle can make or break your life; they have a simple way to decide if a vehicle is blessed with a lucky number, or cursed with an inauspicious one. They separate the digits of the registration number with an addition sign and add up all four digits to get a sum that could be even and lucky, or odd and ominous. That was what I did to the number of the scooter Qadir instructed to be ridden to a hospital. The sum of 2+3+4+2 was 11.
That makes it 11/11/11/11.
‘Scooter No. 1901 will go to the bus bay next to Central Theatre.’
The sum total was 11 again. That makes it 11/11/11/11/11.
‘And Scooter No. 2243 will go Vinayak Super Store.’
That makes it 11/11/11/11/11/11.
Then, in a lowered voice, Qadir instructed Zulfikar, who, as if picking a side for an evening match in the alley of Abu Hathim sahib’s bungalow, assigned us tasks.
Zia and Navaz Sharif would ride to Holy Cross.
Jinnah and Zulfikar would take the Lambretta to the bus bay.
Yahya and I would go to Vinayak Super Shop.
Then he changed his mind; Jinnah would go alone. He would stay with the florist and function as the control room. His mobile phone number would be our helpline number. Call for any clarification.
And we rode off.
Vinayak Super Shop is the kind of supermarket that boasts of selling you anything other than your blood relations. It is old and sprawls over two badly lit floors, but the shelves are always full and the aisles crowded. It stands on the main road, fourth block from the intersection after the Air India building, with a popcorn machine and a Coke fountain under its extended awning. We were to park the scooter just outside the store and get out of the street, leaving the key behind; twenty minutes later someone would take possession of it, and an hour later we would get paid at the florist’s.
The scooter clanked all the way to Mehendi, like someone had attached a tail of old tins to its rear number plate. I rode as fast as the rickety scooter would allow me, dreading that it would disintegrate in
to a pile of nuts and bolts and rusted coils in the middle of the road, leaving Yahya and I standing over the iron carcass as traffic roared and honked all around us.
Yahya sat stiffly behind me, his hands placed lightly on my hips as if he were to lift me up by the waist and start waltzing the moment music commenced. Strangely enough, the pathetic state of the scooter was the only thing that kept me worried on our three-mile journey to Mehendi. I was sure that we were not going to be caught; the only folly we were going to commit that afternoon was parking the scooter in front of Vinayak Super Shop with no intention of buying anything from them, besides the bigger folly of being Muslims and hailing from Vanity Bagh. But I had a Hindu name handy, and that would be my passport to any part of Mehendi. There was no question of being exposed as long as I refused to crack because Yahya’s sign language would be too much for a stranger to paraphrase.
The light was red at the Begum Bazaar intersection. I casually glanced at a car that had tinted glasses, and caught my slightly distorted reflection in one of the windows. And for the first time in a very long time I remembered my first day in school, and the preparations for it. Ammi had riotously powdered my face and run a pencil over my eyebrows before slinging a sand-coloured satchel over my shoulder. The imam took me down the alley with a full smile he wanted to reduce by a few watts but looked unable to. We crossed the street after Mogul Bakery and ambled along the road until we were in the next street. Puddles were full and plenty; the imam held up a hand to signal caution to the driver when a vehicle approached. The school looked exactly like the ones illustrated in R. K. Laxman’s cartoons: an arched gateway propped up on two lichened pillars, a spatter of rambling trees in the foreground and behind them a loose clutter of buildings the colour of my satchel. The imam daubed at my face with the end of his jubbah to reduce the effect of a mime artist the coat of talcum powder had given me and, with a smile of humility and a hand pressed to his heart, handed me over to a teacher. A moment later he slipped away without a formal wave of goodbye. But I caught him peeping through a window, checking to see if tears had smudged my face.