Vanity Bagh

by Anees Salim

  No, professor, he was slow-poisoned.

  And Shoukath miyan, limit your imagination to poetry.

  – Rustom sahib (1951- )

  While the papers were read and theories were formulated, debated and discarded, Jameela Auntie put her head around our door and asked if we had seen Jinnah. He had not come home last night, his mobile phone was dead. She had looked up every place he could possibly be. Even, she said with tears welling up in her eyes, the police station.

  ‘The biggest favour some people can do their families is vanish,’ the imam said from the armchair. Jameela Auntie looked helplessly at Ammi, who glared at the imam, flaring her nostrils, and for a moment I didn’t put it past her to take down a porcelain bowl from the cupboard and break it into two unequal parts on the imam’s head.

  ‘Take Imran with you,’ she instructed Jameela Auntie. ‘He sure knows more of Jinnah’s hangouts than you and I do.’

  We were clomping down the alley to the main street when Jameela Auntie remembered something and signalled me to stop. ‘Where does that dumb idiot live?’ she asked. ‘Jinnah said yesterday he was going somewhere with him.’

  ‘You mean Yahya, Auntie?’

  ‘Yes, the same idiot.’

  Yahya lived in a house of pockmarked wood and dimpled tin in a slum-like settlement leaning against the back wall of Bukhari Mills. Jameela Auntie looked unpleasantly at the narrow, miry path, curtained with the day’s laundry, which rolled endlessly away in twists and turns. As we pushed our way down the path that was too narrow to let two people walk side by side, I heard the sound of the television filtering out through walls that were nearly as flimsy as packing boards. (The only household in the mohalla that took the imam’s preaching against television seriously was his own, ours.)

  ‘Stop,’ Jameela Auntie said. ‘Is that the place?’ She was pointing at the house that looked like the remains of a catastrophe waiting to be rebuilt.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why is there a crowd?’ she asked. ‘And why is the Quran being recited so early in the morning?’

  What struck me as strange was not the sound of verses rendered in a forced nasal tone, but the abundance of electric bulbs that shone in every room, as if the house was getting ready for a photo session.

  Lights are a building’s make-up.

  Especially if you are going for an exterior shot.

  – Javed Miandad (1980- )

  An elderly couple came out of the house and walked quietly past us, the man holding my gaze for a second, the woman nodding sympathetically at Jameela Auntie. ‘Someone is dead, Imran,’ Jameela Auntie whispered. ‘Go and find out who.’

  I took a few strides and stopped; I was dressed in a fake Armani T-shirt and a pair of jeans with one knee threadbare, the other riotously torn. It would be rude to enter a house of death thus dressed. Just inside the rusted, permanently open gate was a willow tree; I blended into a small band of old men beneath it and spied on the house of no particular shape. Yahya’s father, who looked exactly like KofiAnnan from certain angles, sat in the veranda with his head propped up in his hands; he looked up every time a mourner passed him, and tried to get up but was discouraged by a man, perhaps his brother, who looked like Morgan Freeman.

  Under the willow tree, the old men chatted away in mild accusatory whispers, though they were not even remotely critical of anybody. Eavesdropping on them convinced me that Yahya had not left a suicide note behind. The oldest of the lot said the boy was depressed over his speech impairment. The youngest suspected him of falling out with his father and taking his life on an impulse which could have been easily tackled if the victim had practised yoga. A third one asked if he had a drug problem. A fourth one asked if anyone had a cigarette. But none suspected Yahya of being an indirect victim of a bomb blast.

  Then, like everywhere else, the conversation under the willow tree steered itself towards 11/11.

  If you spot any suspicious object, please call the control room.

  Our number is 111. Sorry, I mean 101.

  – Commissioner ( - )

  If anybody harboured any suspicion about Vanity Bagh’s involvement in the serial two-wheeler bomb blasts, it was only the mohalla-wallahs. But the mohalla suspected itself only in murmurs. Even Mehendi thought it was beyond Vanity Bagh to design and plant scooter bombs. For them, we were nothing more than a poor neighbourhood that was home to petty criminals, infamous conmen and an extortionist who successfully repackaged himself as Robin Hood. Terrorists we could never be. We could build roadblocks and run riots at the drop of a hat, turn the public transport system into mobile billboards carrying inflammatory headlines and taglines and transform peace rallies into a scene from Karate Kid 2, but handling serial blasts was something else. It needed planning and precision, virtues Mehendi would hate to credit our mohalla with.

  On the second day after the blast, the police released my composite sketch. If you wonder how accurate a police drawing could be, I would give it three on ten for accuracy;Yahya would have given the sketch the kind of rating that could have either made the artist tender his resignation or initiate legal action against him for defamation. The only person the sketch bore any resemblance to was Mohammed Atta of 9/11 fame. But how did a funny moustache, which neither Atta nor I had thought of cultivating, find its way into the picture? They had done my portrait after intently listening to the shop assistant who had seen me sitting on the scooter. Four Atta lookalikes were picked up, interrogated and let off – they were either Hindus or had strong alibis.

  On the third morning, Jameela Auntie, accompanied by a corporator, walked into Begum Bazaar police station to lodge a complaint for man-missing. She carried a cabinet-sized picture of Jinnah posing against somebody’s Audi A8, beckoning the world with a finger to get into what he pretended was the latest addition to his already impressive fleet. It took the police just two hours to half-crack the case and one day to trace the roots of the serial blast to Vanity Bagh. The fourth morning the NIA came, hunting for unusual suspects.

  The passive fourth morning was preceded by an eventful third night. Late into the night, just as Navaz Sharif was snapping switches off in preparation for shutting the salon, three hefty men trooped in and asked for crew cuts. Grabbing his mobile phone, Navaz Sharif made for the dark street, but they caught him at the swing doors and dragged him back to the wall of mirrors, where he was forced into a chair and asked to apologize. He readily said sorry, which was construed not just as an act of expressing regret, but a confirmation of his role in the blast. The heftiest of the three opened a drawer and took out a tube of shaving cream and a brush. He opened another drawer and fished out a shaving razor as well. As he whipped up lather on a plastic bowl, he said he was going to give the barber a shave. Navaz Sharif could do well without his mullah beard; Mangobagh could do very well without another mullah. Then he pressed Navaz Sharif’s head against the headrest of the chair and slit his throat.

  On the fourth morning, the NIA drove up in a blue van with wire mesh windows, and picked up us one by one in strict alphabetical order. They didn’t say ‘Freeze, NIA’ or anything more tempting; I noticed they even sacrificed the chance to flourish their ID cards in order to avoid hurting family sentiments. Two men casually strolled into the house and one of them took me by the wrist. ‘Come with us,’ the other one said. Had they been dressed up like ordinary constables, Ammi would have whined the roof down or even fainted. Reassured by the quiet ways of these full-sleeved, teacher-faced men, she remained composed and tight-lipped as they herded me out of her sight. One of them even wrapped a hand around my shoulder as we stepped out of the house; Ammi must have been greatly comforted by that unexpected gesture of camaraderie.

  Next we stopped by Zulfikar’s, where the plainclothesmen on duty walked up to the van to inform that the boy was still at large. The van was being reversed when the door of the house was flung open and Salma Auntie tumbled out with a yelp, palms glued together, hair all messed up. Fighting her way through a smal
l crowd, she rushed to the van to stand between the plainclothesmen and lament through the wire mesh. She must have been sitting in the dark for long and was blinded by the sudden burst of harsh sunlight, for she mistook me for an NIA officer, and her words to me were so unexpected and bereft of uncertainty that they turned into a quote many a newspaper cared to print the very next day.

  If my son is the enemy of the nation,

  hang him. And don’t even show me his corpse.

  – Salma Auntie (1959- )

  She is just playing Mother India.

  The drama queen! Abu Hathim’s keep.

  – P. Mudassar (1960- )

  Zia, who had emulated an ostrich by switching off his mobile phone and keeping indoors, was stepping out of his home when we pulled up by the construction site that overlooked the little republic that his joint family was. He was dressed in an Islamic cap and somebody else’s clothes – a long white kurta and matching pajamas, and matching sandals. The kind of clothes the rich and the famous put on when they go for the funerals of the other rich and famous, though neither Zia nor Navaz Sharif was either rich or famous. The news of the murder in the salon had spread through the mohalla by sunset, though it would get its share of newsprint only the next morning, along with the news of our arrest.

  Zia produced a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, puffed at their petal-shaped glasses, rubbed them against a sleeve and put them on. He instantly looked like a Page 3 item, and the NIA men agreed that the suspect could have been in the movies if he had not been in deep shit. ‘Does your friend act?’ asked one of them. When I nodded my head in the negative, he pulled a face and moaned.

  Zia rolled up the sleeves of his borrowed kurta and sized up the lane. For a moment his eyes rested on the half-built structure and an idling carpenter, who had embraced carpentry only that morning to spy on Zia. He then looked at the duo of constables dressed up as masons, and strolled towards a bicycle shed. A man who had been daubing lime on a wall in the most amateurish way imaginable threw his brush away and trailed Zia. As Zia leaned over a bicycle to unlock it, the painter-inspector put a hand on his shoulder.

  I think I missed something in between by blinking; the next thing I saw was Zia sprinting barefoot to a wall and a whole bunch of the construction crew chasing him. Beyond the wall was an incline dotted with thorny bushes sloping down to the old canal, an area Zia knew like the back of his hand. It gladdened me that he didn’t make it.

  He was carried to the van with a look of utter shock and a nosebleed; his sunglasses now had one empty frame, so that he appeared to be wearing an eyepatch. A little girl who had witnessed the chase and its conclusion had run to the joint family and brought all of them out onto the street.

  When the back door of the van opened, Zia was surprised to see me inside.

  ‘Come on, son,’ one of the NIA men said. ‘Have a seat.’

  ‘And cheer up,’ chipped in the other. ‘Your entire family is here to see you off.’

  Zia started to sob like a child who had been denied a ride down a slide.

  As if to force poetic justice into the case, the trial was completed in eleven months. Qadir and Zulfikar were tried in absentia. Post-mortem reports of Jinnah, Yahya and Navaz Sharif were tabled to assure the judge that they were not going to come back and blow raspberries at him. The final verdict, to the delight of the bereaved and the press, was decided to be delivered on November 11. My only hope was the judge getting carried away with the overdose of 11 and slapping on me eleven months of rigorous imprisonment and 11K as penalty. I got fourteen years, Zia got six months more; he probably earned the extra retribution for making the police run around in their fancy dress costume. The imam, as anticipated, did not turn up. Ammi, as expected, fainted. She had attended every single session the fast-track court had held over the eleven months, sharing an auto rickshaw with Zia’s parents and going Dutch. The defence lawyer, who had always looked like he was going to win the battle, walked up to us with a pout and mumbled regret.

  Sorry. It’s all over.

  – Defence Lawyer (1965- )

  Nothing is over. Nothing.

  You just don’t turn it off. It wasn’t my war.

  – Sylvester Stallone (1946- )

  XVIII

  My parents are old and ill. My brother is

  young and invalid. And I am their only hope.

  ~ Imran Jabbari (1985- )

  You can tell the heroes of an era by its notebook covers, unless you are looking at the ones made in this prison. The books we make here have the same cover design – yellow-and-purple concentric patterns that remind you of disco lights in old Hindi movies. I was not only bored by this design, I even had a few nice alternatives to suggest. Like this superlative one: the cover will afford an aerial view of a football field complete with all the positions of the players marked, or a cricket ground with a classic field setting with short descriptions. So you know the difference between a stopper-back and a midfielder, and you can tell a leg slip from a forward short leg. In their free time, kids can use their fingers to play a little game on top of their notebooks, a screw of paper for a cricket ball or a Cadbury gem for a Jabulani. I insist the view has to be aerial, otherwise it doesn’t work. If they could put me through to the man in charge of designing, we could together bring more utility value to notebooks. They could even brand it. I can personally assure you it will sell like hot cakes. But procedures are silly and not simple in a prison.

  On a Wednesday afternoon, when the inmates had left for the Visitors’ Room and the Book Room was empty except for a friendly-looking warden and me, I put forth a proposal to him. He instantly stopped looking friendly. Knitting his eyebrows, he gave me the is-that-the-only-thing-thatconcerns-you look. When I enlightened him on the branding part and made it more irresistible by saying he could claim to the superintendent that it was a combined brainwave of his and mine, his frown thawed to some degree of affability. But in the end he said all notebooks in the world now have the same design.

  What? Are we living in an age of no heroes? Or, according to some new rules, you need to share the proceeds with the celebrity whose picture is on the cover? Then concentric circles make sense, as do floral patterns and Tetris blocks.

  As inmates came in from the Visitors’ Room one by one with scowls and sad smiles and I turned to go back to my worktable, the warden asked me why I don’t get visitors anymore.

  Probable reason 14: Alzheimer’s. Ammi’s Abba died of Alzheimer’s disease, and until the day he died he mistook the imam for the man at the gas agency who took bribes from him but never honoured the promise of an additional cylinder. ‘Where is my gas?’ he kept asking, and the imam, the worst actor any two-legged creature could ever be, mimed complicated paperwork and signalled that the delivery truck had already left the warehouse and would be at his doorstep any time now. We ranked it as the top joke of the day every time we paid Grandpa a visit.

  Abba, you have double gas trouble.

  – Wasim Jabbari (1988- )

  One thing I notice about books these days is that they have become tall and handsome. When we were in school, books were almost half the size of what they are now. And back then notebooks had only pages and binds, not screens and keypads. Most of my primary-school notebooks had Imran Khan on their covers, Wasim’s had Wasim Akram. The imam used to source them from a stationery shop on SufiBaba Road and was under the everlasting impression that the notebooks with our namesakes on the covers made us immensely popular at school. When we were given the freedom and money to choose our own notebooks, Wasim came back from the school store with Hulk Hogan in orange underwear; I simply invested the money in a jackpot venture a crook with infectious optimism ran outside the school.

  Three weeks after I told the friendly-looking warden about the idea of notebook covers with sporting arenas as seen from the heavens, the superintendent, his new deputy (the old one had been transferred shortly after Zia had jumped the jail wearing his sunglasses), a head warden and the fri
endly-looking warden came into the Book Room. All were wearing their best smiles, or rather the superintendent was wearing his best smile, so the rest had no other option than to follow suit.

  The head warden held up a hand in the air and said the superintendent had an announcement to make. So all those who were working stopped doing so, and those who were pretending to be busy now pretended to be all ears. The Book Room attained the silence of a library as the superintendent put a sheaf of papers on a table and prepared himself for a little speech; anybody who had watched enough news bulletins would know the superintendent’s role model in oratory was the president of America. He touched the edges of the sheaf of papers he had in front of him, half-smiled to himself and waited for the right moment to begin. But when he opened his mouth to speak, all the practised poise quickly left him, and he ended up with the body language of one of those Arab dictators all American presidents equally want dead.

  The United States must get a taste of its own poison.

  – Saddam Hussein (1937-2006)

  He used his hands without restraint, spoke with aggression and thumped on the table for attention when one of the inmates looked absently out of the window.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, determined to make us laugh, and the men in khaki promptly acknowledged his sense of humour with a short burst of laughter. ‘I don’t know how many of you know the history of this room. The Book Room was the idea of Mr Iyengar from whom I took over the charge of this prison seven years ago. Seven years back the output of the Book Room was just 300 books a month. It climbed to 750 three years ago and has been steadily growing thanks to the concerted efforts of everyone concerned. And today I am proud to say that we produce an average of …’ He paused to smile at the inmates the American-president smile, to make the number he was going to reveal sound bigger than it actually would be. Someone had already started to clap, but realizing that the achievement of the Book Room was yet to be quantified he pretended to be dusting his palms.