Vanity Bagh

by Anees Salim

  The red light turned to orange, then to green. And the scooter began to clamour threateningly again. Barely a quarter kilometre later the light was red at the Rajamata Colony intersection too. I kept the scooter growling, impatient to be out of the last busy junction before our destination. An auto rickshaw came to a halt beside us, crammed with kindergarten children, its roof loaded with colourful satchels secured with what looked like fishing nets. They eyed us suspiciously, then broke into wide grins as Yahya pretended to be a monkey and picked fictitious lice from my hair. It was like my memories moved with the traffic lights, and I remembered how my first day at school had ended. I had cried until I started to retch, and my eyes were bloodshot and body weak by the time school dispersed. The imam took me home on his shoulders, stopping by Mogul Bakery to bribe me in advance for the next day.

  When the light changed, the auto rickshaw competed with us for a while, the children waving and howling at us. Then I slowed down, and let it trundle away. The Air India building was already in view, the sun glowing faintly on its weathered white tiles.

  Mehendi was as sleepy as ever. The parking lot of Vinayak Super Shop was only half-full and, thankfully, unmanned. It was too early for shoppers to come, and the man at the snack stall under the cloth awning was just knotting the threads of his red apron behind his back, an act that reminded you of a woman struggling to fasten the hook of her brassiere, but the ice-cream counter was already open and had two young boys running their tongues over individual pink scoops.

  Yahya slid off the scooter and wandered to the side wall of the next building, where he stood hugging himself, studying the fluorescent green posters of Matrix II. His interest appeared to be so complete that I could not help marvelling at his talent to be indifferent. I dragged the Lambretta onto its stand and strolled out of the parking lot, a hand fiddling with my zipper as if I were looking for a place to piddle. I was walking away fromYahya, towards the bus stop a few blocks down, where he would join me a few minutes later. Only when I crossed the street and was a few feet from the bus shelter did I realize that I had disobeyed Qadir’s orders and committed a mistake. In my efforts to look casual, I had detached the key from the scooter and put it in my trouser pocket. Yahya, who was beginning to walk, paused to watch me retrace my steps to the parking lot and fiddle with the scooter. A shop assistant stared blankly out of a window as I pushed the key back into the ignition and walked unhurriedly away, past the bus stop, past a tiny petrol station, across a faded zebra crossing, around the Air India building and into an angular network of pocket roads which, if you walked into without looking back to see if you were being followed, brought you to the backyard of Vanity Bagh in twenty-five minutes.

  About half an hour later, the birds of Mehendi flew off from their perches as a scooter went off with a bang that was soon to be codenamed 11/11.

  XVI

  Imran Jabbari suffers from a chronic mental illness.

  I treated him once.

  ~ Dr Faud Niyazi (1966- )

  It is already December on the wall calendar, and it has been easily two-and-a-half months since Ammi has stopped visiting. Why, I ask myself every Wednesday as inmates get summoned to the Visitors’ Room, and the list of probable reasons for her absence grows in length and complexity.

  Probable reason 9: Ammi herself. Is she finally sick of jail visits?

  Probable reason 10: Mehendi Hind Sabha. Have they warned her against the visits through an anonymous letter?

  Probable reason 11: Jail-o-phobia. Which is a horrible fear of going to jail even for a short period of time, though I am not sure if jail-o-phobia is the term it is referred to as in the dictionary.

  Probable reason 12: Amnesia. She once claimed to have a huge memory loss, and we thought she was just acting up until Wasim asked her her name and she did not even remember that. The imam was seriously thinking about taking her to an ENT specialist when her memory was unexpectedly restored and she told Wasim her name was Bushra Jabbari. This happened many years ago, and cured itself before the imam had a chance to change his clothes. Has Ammi had a relapse?

  Amnesia said hello to me.

  I said I don’t remember you. So off it went.

  – Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)

  Why don’t you just cut me into little pieces

  and feed me to the street dogs?

  – Professor Suleiman Ilahi (1949- )

  Me too, please.

  – Rustom sahib (1951-)

  Probable reason 13: Pregnancy. Fatima is pregnant again and needs twenty-four-hour looking after like last time?

  On certain Wednesdays, the pilgrimage from the scot-free world comes in a long unbroken trail and inmate after inmate gets summoned to the Visitors’ Room until the Book Room is empty except for a warden and me, and we sit like the orphans in the movie that left the king of sound engineering’s family yelling and beating their chests in joy.

  The warden usually walks away to a window and stands there with his back turned to me. I invariably open a book and catch up on my reading.

  Last Wednesday, I opened a book at random and found myself staring at a page oddly numbered 11/11. Ah, that is a custom-made coincidence.

  A couple of years ago on 11/11, most of Mangobagh had clambered onto their roofs and looked southwards to see what had happened. But from a height it was impossible to distinguish between turmoil and tranquility. As they say, you need to come down to earth to comprehend life better, but when there are rumours about serial bombs collectively ticking away across the city, would anyone care to tread the streets without bomb suits?

  The first news of the blast reached me at a quarter past one. I was lying on the bed, with a view of the long, murky passage that culminated in a doorway filled with brilliant sunlight and the occasional bleating of Ammi’s two goats. I saw Wasim enter the house and stride down the passage; he dragged a chair from the table which served as the dining table, ironing board, study table and sewing machine stand at different times of the day, and started opening the lunch packet Ammi had packed for him in the morning. From the kitchen, Ammi asked why he was home early. Mouth already stuffed, he said something neither Ammi nor I could comprehend.

  Then I heard Noora Auntie excitedly tell Ammi about a bomb blast. She had heard it on television and invited Ammi to watch the news as one of the channels was repeatedly airing her brother’s eyewitness account of the blast.

  ‘Where did this happen, Auntie?’Wasim asked, hurriedly washing his hands.

  ‘Near Central Theatre, beta,’ Noora Auntie said. ‘Aurangzeb runs a paan shop next to it.’

  ‘Ammi, I am going to Central Theatre,’Wasim yelled to the kitchen, drying his hands on a towel. ‘Don’t tell Abba.’

  Ammi materialized in the passage with a ladle in her hand. ‘Go and come back with a blown-off leg. And we can get two doctors to treat you. You are not going anywhere.’

  ‘Let him come and watch our TV, Bushra,’ Noora Auntie said.

  Bickering, Wasim left for Noora Auntie’s. A few minutes later, I hopped across the alley to a room full of people staring at a fourteen-inch television. Noora Auntie waved me in, though the man of the house was not particularly happy to see me. He always kept an eye on me when I paid them a visit.

  It is strange, Imran. But whenever

  you leave our home, so does something from our shelf.

  – Abbas Chacha (1959- )

  There was as much pandemonium in the room as on the television. The channel kept repeating what they labelled the first and exclusive visuals, and Aurangzeb’s excited eyewitness account was a part of the exclusive package. Abbas Chacha wanted to flip the channel, but Noora Auntie wouldn’t let him.

  Finally, Abbas Chacha grabbed the remote from her and changed the channel. The new channel showed the same angle of devastation as the one in which Noora Auntie’s brother had starred: a few burgundy benches, blood-splattered tiles, heaps of glass shards around an ice cream counter that had twisted window frames. Except for their logo
s, there was nothing to tell one channel from the other, as if the two cameramen had stood shoulder to shoulder and captured what the bomb and its capacity to change lives had left for them to capture.

  Abbas Chacha kept flipping through the news channels. Same visuals, same tickertape, same excitement that left reporters fumbling for words at times. Then he stopped squeezing and shaking the remote and lingered on a channel which seemed to be more informed than other channels, though the visuals were much the same. There was a red circle on the screen, the kind that is liberally used to highlight things or people that suddenly deserve more attention than at the time they were caught on camera. The red circle that, when superimposed on a television image, instantly turns the subject into a culprit or an accomplice or a suspect or a victim. The ominous red circle started to flicker, as if to underline the importance of being a red circle, as the camera zoomed in on a scooter the colour of kadak tea.

  For a moment I thought I had had a long siesta and was being treated to a tightly edited, nicely shot and amazingly sound-engineered dream. The moment passed, but nothing else did.

  The scooter lay on its side, charred by the explosion and dripping with water from fire engines, its fake number plate still in place, disturbingly white amidst things singed and blackened. The reporter, with a finger pressed against her ear, was saying something, almost shouting, into the camera. I strained my ears to hear through the various sounds of the alley – sounds of hungry animals, of playing children and of clanking pots – and I heard the voice of the reporter, which bordered almost on childish excitement, say the bomb had been planted on this scooter that had mysteriously appeared in the locality around noon.

  Abbas Chacha had started squeezing and shaking the remote again, and finally settled on the channel that had earlier featured his brother-in-law and now featured a newsreader who had the hairstyle of electrocuted people. The ‘first and exclusive visual’ label had disappeared; now it was ‘Breaking News’ galore on this channel. Big red stripes had taken over the lower half of the screen, and the newsreader kept repeating the word ‘terror’. In the last fifteen minutes, two more bombs had gone off, one next to Holy Cross Hospital, the other in the parking lot of a supermarket in Mehendi. All were scooter bombs.

  Give me a call at the first sign of trouble.

  Don’t waste even a second.

  – Zulfikar Faizudin (1984-?)

  I dialled his number. His phone rang thrice. Then the call was rejected. I dialled again. This time it was switched off. I tried Jinnah’s number, and a recorded voice said all lines on that route were busy at the moment. The voice seemed to suggest that no matter how insistently I tried, I was not going to reach anyone that afternoon.

  A bomb not only kills people directly,

  but it kills them indirectly too.

  – Public Prosecutor ( - )

  The scooter bombs killed eleven people directly. One of them was Jinnah. He had parked the Lambretta at the bus bay next to Central Theatre Complex and, instead of rushing back home, hung around a tea stall to spy on the cartel that dealt in gold bars. With such an insatiable urge to know what was forbidden, he must have been willing to wait for any stretch of time to have a glimpse of the next carrier in the network. He didn’t have to wait for long; two cups of tea, one-and-a-half cigarettes and a loud bang later he was seen moving on all fours, blood gushing out of his mouth and falling between his hands as he crawled along the pavement to a roadside water tap, his tongue hanging out. An old clerk, who later tearfully recounted the last moments of a young man before Jinnah’s involvement was suspected and investigated into, kneeled by him and made him drink from his water bottle. Jinnah gulped down every drop the bottle had to offer, then sat against a tree with a look of immense relief and died.

  Neither the public prosecutor nor the police can tell you about the number of deaths the bombs caused indirectly. I think it is just a symbolic way of putting things, but the trouble with a symbolic way of putting things is it can impress people, including a judge. The more they impress a judge, the longer you spend in jail.

  I often think about the call I made to Jinnah after coming out of Abbas Chacha’s house. A recorded voice had said all the lines on that particular route were busy at the moment. If the lines were not busy and Jinnah’s phone had rung, who would have picked it up? What would have been the words the stranger, possibly a policeman, said? You called a bit too late. Sorry.

  I tried calling Zulfikar a third time, but it yielded the same result as the second time. Then I dialled Navaz Sharif’s number. To my surprise, he answered the phone as soon as it started ringing. There was the sound of the TV in the background, the faint hum of traffic and the snip of scissors. He said it was a busy day at the salon, that he would return the call when the shop closed. I asked him about Zia, and he said he had not met any of our friends for a couple of days. It was then that I remembered that call register had become the sniffer dog of the modern world; it would scurry invisibly along roads, leap from one mobile phone tower to the next, sneak down unsuspecting lanes and alleys and lead the police to a suspect. Could they already have begun tapping phones in Vanity Bagh since the bombs had been planted in predominantly Hindu areas? I thought it was too early to record telephonic conversations; they would get down to phone tapping only after rummaging through everything, including garbage, around the city with bomb detectors. Or would they have a software which would automatically tap all phones the moment bombs went off like chain crackers? Was Navaz Sharif talking just for the recording software, building up an alibi? If he was, so would I. I told him I had been ill all of last week and was still being treated by Dr Faud Niyazi.

  Bring me people who have fitness

  or sickness to prove. They get a certificate.

  You get a commission, Imran.

  – Dr Faud Niyazi (1966- )

  Halfway through my sickbed story, Navaz Sharif heaved a sigh and hung up. And now I felt I was as ill as I pretended to be. All of a sudden I had a blocked nose, a sore throat and a heart that did not beat any longer. I walked up the street looking for … I didn’t know who I was looking for. I would have been happy to see anybody from our gang, happier if it was Yahya. But I dreaded running into people who would tell me there had been a serial blast, that hundreds of people were blown to death, thousands injured. In the quickly failing light of Mangobagh winter, I bumped into no one I knew. At sunset I found myself sitting on the stairwell by the mosque, suddenly calm, waiting for them to shuffle up the stairs to repent.

  It was here, sitting alone on the cold steps, that I regained enough composure to align the events of the day carefully like fossils. A slow reconstruction which left me more confused, more clueless. It all appeared to have happened a long time ago; in a matter of a few hours everything had turned as vague as an old memory. I felt I had long lost touch with my accomplices, who had become untraceable owing to the years that had passed since the bombs had gone off. The chimes of a clock, as if to hand me a better sense of time, seeped out through the windows of the mosque. It was seven; just about as many hours since the first bomb had tested the tenacity of Mangobagh’s shock absorbers.

  I lit a cigarette and replayed the rattling ride I had taken through the heart of the old city. I had stopped at an intersection and studied my face in the tinted glass of a car; I had stopped at the next intersection as well and children had waved and howled at us; I had ridden parallel to a family of four travelling on a motorcycle – that afternoon, I could have been the messenger of death for many.

  The prayer hall began to fill up, the speakers on the minarets started to hum with the imam’s singsong prayers. Then the prayer hall emptied, the pious went out to the street and the priest started latching the windows. It was a long time after the mosque’s last light had been switched off that I spotted a figure plodding down the path that led to the foot of the stairs. I didn’t recognize Jinnah until he had climbed the stairs and stood leaning over me with his hands on my knees.

&
nbsp; ‘Where are the other chooths?’ he asked.

  ‘You are the first chooth to turn up today,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, let’s go to the rooftop,’ Jinnah said. ‘I heard the police have switched on searchlights. As if the next bomb would come from the sky.’

  Not knowing that Jinnah had died that afternoon, I followed him up the stairs. A long bar of light swept across the sky, illuminating nothing besides itself. Standing shoulder to shoulder, we peered down at Vanity Bagh.

  ‘Look, there is your old heartthrob.’ Jinnah was pointing towards the row of stalls behind Franklin.

  ‘Where,’ I asked. ‘Who?’

  ‘At the chaat shop,’ he said. ‘Aasia Jamal.’

  ‘I will kill you.’

  XVII

  Imran Jabbari pleads insanity.

  ~ Defence Lawyer (1965- )

  Wasim was the first to notice the coincidence. I think he made the discovery even before the press did. Technically speaking, all newspapers quoted my brother the next morning, word for word, though no journalist was around when he returned from Noora Auntie’s house and exclaimed aloud, ‘It’s 11/11.’

  Was 11/11 just a coincidence or a well-hatched plot, nobody knows till date. But the mohalla-wallahs discussed theories by the dozen in their free time, and they had all the free time in the world.

  Hilal Hathim, grandson of Abu Hathim sahib and first-born of the slain Rasool Hathim, celebrated his eleventh birthday on that very November 11. But would Abu Hathim sahib, though he had sworn revenge on the spur of the moment, celebrate a fatherless child’s birthday with a bloodbath? The mohalla flung that stupid theory out of the window and drew the curtain.

  Someone revenging for Yasser Arafat’s assassination?

  He died on November 11.

  – Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)

  Don’t be silly. Arafat died a natural death.

  – Professor Suleiman Ilahi (1949- )