Vanity Bagh

by Anees Salim

  poem. Each mohalla-wallah is a tourist ...

  – Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)

  Running errands for you doesn’t make anybody a poet.

  – Professor Suleiman Ilahi (1949- )

  Imran, keep writing. Thank you.

  Shoukath, show some respect for poetry.

  – Rustom sahib (1951- )

  A few months after the trial began, Mehendi Hind Sabha started a campaign to press capital punishment for all the accused. In retaliation, Vanity Bagh set up Mothers against Noose, a movement that was born in one of the innumerable bylanes of the mohalla and, after a month of frenzied campaigning, buried not far from it. It was a young college girl who thought up the counterstroke, called it ‘Mothers against Noose’ and later unwittingly gave it the acronym ‘MAN’ which drained it of all its maternal sensitivities.

  Motherhood is the most beautiful thing.

  When a mother loses her child she stops being one.

  – Mehreen Malik (1993- )

  Noor Jahan sahiba, who had been drawn to the window by a richly modulated and almost unbearably shrill voice, peeked cautiously down to see if a new villain had arrived in the alley to deliver to her family another instalment of their periodic misfortune. Finding that it was just a scrawny girl who could pose no threat to her family – not that girls could not be human bombs, but this one looked incapable of even passing wind unaided – she leaned over the window with a new apprehension: could this girl, especially since she was talking about the beauty of motherhood, have mothered one of her dead or living sons’ offspring? If DNA tests, like the home pregnancy checks advertised on TV as a modern miracle, were as simple and could yield as instant results, she would have summoned the girl upstairs and had the necessary contraption pushed up wherever the manual said it should be pushed.

  But this girl was not talking about her sons. The topic was mothers. Two hapless mothers whose sons were wrongly accused of blowing up Mangobagh’s softest targets and thrown into the Indian version of Guantanamo. She had a particular interest in this case; her husband had been the prime suspect for as little as a week, and then, as in many cases in which he had been the prime suspect or the co-accused, the truth prevailed yet again and his name was cleared. His distant cousin Qadir was still a suspect and absconding, though nobody outside of the family circle knew they were cousins.

  For a sixteen-year-old, the girl spoke impressively well of motherhood. The smiling face of a strangled Rasool Hathim still poking needles into her heart every night, Noor Jahan sahiba could relate to this sense of loss the way probably even the speaker herself could not. She decided to honour the sweating girl with a glass of cold sherbet and a slice of dilkush.

  Send the Jhansi Rani up.

  – Noor Jahan sahiba (1951- )

  Three sweating glasses of sherbet and one full orb of dilkush later, it was agreed that Noor Jahan sahiba would be honorary president of Mothers against Noose and Mehreen Malik the custodian. All the mothers and would-be mothers in the mohalla would sign a petition to the President of India, who herself was a mother. In retaliation to which, all the mothers and would-be mothers in Mehendi would sign another petition, interpreting even the slightest intention to glance through the petition from Vanity Bagh as a mark of disrespect to the 11/11 victims, and send it to the President of India, who didn’t read petitions anyway.

  Neither petition ever transpired. Mehreen Malik, though only for a fleeting month or so, became the talk of the mohalla, and remained the apple of hundreds of mothers’ collective eye, including that of Salma Auntie’s, who had famously told the NIA, though she had mistaken me for the investigator, to hang Zulfikar and bury him without letting her have a final look at him. Some even ranked Mehreen Malik as the top talent of 2010. Others wrote her off as a mere show-off.

  The defence lawyer, either in a bid to project himself as a picture of confidence or to show his contempt for public campaigns and petitions, said he would be pleased to have us slapped with the death sentence. Zia’s father wanted to set the lawyer’s rundown office on fire but, having recently developed a sizeable respect for the law, limited his outburst to a line of expletives administered to the lawyer’s junior. Then the lawyer, with an air of indifference that could have come only from too powerful a foresight, explained. A death sentence would garner support for us. We would be discussed in the national media. Human rights activists living in places we didn’t even know existed would come out gagged in black clothes and carry placards showing our faces. Then we would move an appeal in the high court.

  And a word to you, Zia’s father. Every word you tell

  my junior reaches me. Sometimes with his own additions.

  – Defence Lawyer (1965- )

  In 2006, shortly after Benazir had been betrothed to the television dealer from Begum Bazaar, a fire raged in the kitchen of Mogul Bakery resolutely enough to bring two fire engines to the mohalla. In Ammi’s memory, that was the first major fire in Vanity Bagh which had nothing to do with arson. Sharif Khan, who had waited in vain for something resembling a fire engine to arrive and had to watch fire lick his hair salon clean as a direct outcome of Pakistan’s 1992 world cup victory, fumed at the sight of not one but two of them arriving, tolling their pompous bells.

  They will come and pump water into his arse

  when Mir can’t stop farting. Chooths.

  – Sharif Khan (1950- )

  Sparing the façade, the fire engines squeezed their way into a side road and sprayed the back of the bakery and three nearby buildings with iridescent sheets of water. The traffic on the main road had come to a standstill; inside the stalled buses there were near-stampedes for box seats to the spectacle of someone’s hard-earned money going up in thick curls of smoke. At a window above the bakery signage, Benazir appeared with her recently hennaed hands and freshly plucked eyebrows, fiddling with her swanky mobile phone while her daddy’s Rome was burning. She started to talk on the phone, breaking immediately into a flirtatious smile, so I deduced the Samsung super stockist was at the other end – I could even imagine his fingers dancing on the keys of a calculator as they exchanged the sound of kisses. It was a while before she spotted me amongst the crowd, looking blankly at her while everyone else had their heads cocked towards the burning chimney. She stopped talking and, holding the phone away from her face, froze at the centre of the arched window frame, staring back, her face set with the saddest smile of 2006. A diaphanous puff of smoke floated across the street, a steady hiss of water drifted up the side road; it was a moment so beautiful and painful at once that I ranked it next to the tragedy of Jack and Rose. ‘Every night in my dreams, I see you …’ would have been the perfect accompaniment. To break the trance, a fireman appeared behind Benazir and asked her to evacuate the building immediately.

  The crowd went home much after the fire engines did. Mir sahib put a notice on the shutters to say the shop was closed for renovation, as if no one had seen the fire engines come and go. He had a table placed in front of the shutters and heaped it with buns and bread neither fire nor firemen had thought of consuming, and stuck a second notice on the shutter which, in what I easily recognized as Benazir’s hand, read: FREE FOR ALL.

  As if we are living in Somalia.

  – Sharif Khan (1950- )

  With a serious sneer on her face, Ammi went home; I realized she had been sneering at Sharif Khan and not at Mir sahib only when she returned a few minutes later, carrying two plastic bags into which she stuffed Mir sahib’s unexpected charity. Her action mobilized the crowd, and the buns and bread were gone in no time.

  Somalis are a less hungry lot.

  – Mrs Sharif Khan (1957-2011)

  Wasim announced a fast unto death while Ammi made all kinds of burgers and sandwiches. The imam looked pleased with the big spread on the table and rubbed his palms together like hungry husbands in English movies, but when he learned the real reason for the radical departure from Ammi’s usual meagre menu, he pushed the plate away and the chai
r back and stood up, saying eating leftovers from somebody else’s kitchen gave him gas. Ammi’s big eyes turned to little pools and, before they could brim over, I grabbed what I could be sued for calling a burger and took a bite from it.

  ‘Can I have a word with you, bhai?’ Wasim asked with forced civility.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Come out.’

  He led me to the door that overlooked Abbas Chacha’s backyard and, leaning against the door frame with his hands crossed behind his back, asked through gritted teeth, ‘Do you really want to eat leftovers from your ex-girlfriend’s house, future gangster?’

  How fast these kids grow up! How good they get at hitting you below the belt!

  Skirting the house, I went out to the street and, strolling under the yellow light of sodium vapours, I headed to Surf XL, where I sat in a corner cubicle with a view of the main street through the tinted glass. I didn’t latch the cubicle door as I did most evenings, nor did I unzip my jeans. No need for all that. I wouldn’t visit the ‘Frog Sex’ main page today and then jump to two of my most beloved categories under the sun:‘Mature’ and ‘Interracial’. I went to Google Earth instead.

  From the heavens, Mangobagh looked like a rambling mango orchard dotted with dwellings built for watchmen. Vanity Bagh, when zeroed in, appeared to be nothing more than a pixellated puddle, then the image cleared up and the back-to-back hoardings mounted on the roof of Imperial Hotel stood like toast glued together by blackberry jam. To the left was Franklin, looking tinier probably than it had a century ago; to the right was the light green three-storeyed block that was Mir sahib’s establishment on the ground floor and residence on the upper one, topped with a water tank the size of an ice cream tub. I almost expected to find Benazir seated by the water tank, as diminutive as Barbie, as dainty and weightless as well.

  Wasim knew what I was aspiring to be. He knew I had a broken heart too.

  The transparent mouse had some loose components inside, and it rattled like dice every time I changed my glider’s view of the city. Now I was hovering over the chequered fields beyond the Moosa River; the mausoleum where Maharaja Muneer Shah was laid to rest three years ago and his juvenile son three decades back looked like an abandoned garden. Further north were the new residential estates, down south a thin river. I was circling over the western side when a cluster of buildings enveloped in high walls caught my attention. I swooped down and down until I saw barbed wire on the walls and tall blue gates under an arched gateway. It was some kind of an institution, though the angle did not let me read what was written above the gates. There were whitewashed buildings around a large playfield and, for a moment, I wondered if it was a residential school, whether the two blocks of brick structures had been built to accommodate the boarders. There was a long line of what could be lavatories; there was something that looked like a watch tower; and three squat buildings with their own individual fences. Without caring to find out what they were, I floated away to the familiar landscape of the mohalla, looking for the alley I had left a while ago, and the little house with lots of sandwiches and burgers no one wanted to eat.

  Years later, as a van with mesh wire on the windows drove me through the blue gates under an arched gateway, I had a feeling that I had been here before, but it was months before I realized where I had had a peek at this place from.

  XX

  The court adjourned till November 11.

  ~ Justice P. R. Nariman ( -2012)

  I had long stopped waking up on Wednesdays with an air of expectancy. I had stopped adding new entries to the list of probable reasons.

  Probable reason 15: Out of sight, out of mind.

  That was the last of them all. It didn’t actually deserve to be on the list, for it was not a probable reason but the remotest possibility, but you need some conclusion to end a case and close the file. I would never be out of Ammi’s mind no matter how long I would be out of her sight.

  As Wednesdays passed without visitors, the only things that connected me to my past were the notebooks I bound. There were new covers, showing little stadiums with strategic formations or field settings, but inside were old stories, tales from Vanity Bagh. I hoped parents would attribute their wards’ poor performance to the little game ideas that their notebooks came with and complain to the school, and the prison would lose orders in such huge quantities that the friendly-looking warden would have his double increment revoked, the certificate of merit snatched back and thrown away. I stopped even looking at him.

  ‘Have you gone deaf?’ he asked, knocking on my worktable with a clenched fist. ‘Or have you gone mad?’

  I looked up, but didn’t tell him if it was my ears or my mind that had failed me. Why should I?

  ‘I was talking to you,’ he said with the hint of a smile. ‘And you were talking to yourself.’

  I tried to return his smile, but in my eyes he had long stopped looking friendly.

  ‘Go,’ he said, waving a hand towards the door. ‘You have a visitor.’

  Surprised, almost shocked, I looked around the Book Room; yes, it was Wednesday again – several inmates were missing from behind their worktables.

  ‘But don’t climb the tree and vanish like your friend did,’ he said as I reached the door. ‘We are already short of hands here.’

  The mentioned tree, the colossal banyan, was awash in fierce close-to-noon sunlight; light streamed through its branches and stamped the mould beneath with shimmering spots. Since Zia’s escape, the wardens considered the tree with a look of mild suspicion, and for the inmates it became a symbol of freedom, a ray of hope as bright as the beams that the April sun was filtering through the branches to create.

  The Visitors’ Room was more crowded than I remembered it from four months ago. The air was already heavy with whispers and cackling children. Having just emerged into the room of red walls I was the only one standing, except for the watchful wardens. Standing by the door I cast quick glances sideways, but there was no sign of Ammi. She would have been conspicuous in a crowd of this size: she was a large-boned woman and, as if her build was not enough to get her noticed, she borrowed Fatima’s garish headdress when she came calling.

  I looked from face to face, not recognizing any of them; only a lone old man with a grey beard and no moustache sitting with a long, rolled-up umbrella across his lap looked nervously at me and grudged me a smile. I recognized the umbrella before I recognized its owner. When he rose up slowly from the bench, a skullcap dangling from his fingers, I realized it was not the years of not seeing him that had made the imam look a perfect stranger; it was the absence of the skullcap on his head. Without its scalloped edge running parallel to the permanent lines of worry on his forehead, his face appeared to have grown long, his head balder than I remembered it on Eid mornings when he took off the white cap and combed his meagre hair with his long fingers before putting on a red Kabuli fez.

  The imam shuffled up the aisle like a man who had had cramps a short while ago; he reached me, wheezing lightly, and sat on an empty bench with the umbrella planted firmly between his knees. It would look odd if I remained standing so I sat opposite him, pressing myself against the backrest, so our knees would not touch. Having never been inside a prison and not knowing a thing about the visiting-hour etiquette, he spied on the neighbouring set of furniture for clues, where an inmate was feeding a little girl a finger of the chocolate she had brought with her. Ammi would not have wasted time looking around, she would have started her round-up by now – on one of her visits the first thing she told me was how the imam was falling victim to a peculiar case of stage fright; he dreaded the azan, something he used to love doing so dearly and with his own sense of rhythm that Wasim and I used to blush when the muezzin’s call drifted across the mohalla. He now feared his voice would be met with boos from the street. He had five three-minute ordeals to live through everyday.

  Silence welled up between the benches, and a lady with dark patches under
her eyes was watching us from the corner of her eye while the man fed the little girl the finger of sticky chocolate.

  ‘How is Wasim?’ I heard myself ask.

  ‘He is completely healthy,’ the imam said in a shaky voice. ‘He does all the cooking now.’

  ‘Where is Ammi?’ I asked warily, a sudden chill rising up my spine. ‘Why hasn’t she paid me a visit the last four months?’

  The imam tightened his grip around the chestnut handle of his trademark umbrella and began weeping. The lady, the little girl and her father were all looking at us now as if they had finished their family affairs and had all the time in the world to spare. The attention from across the aisle quietened the imam. Wiping his eyes, he readied himself to say something.

  Junior, I have to tell you something.

  – Sean Connery (1930- )

  I knew what was coming. I had suspected it all along, even when I kept adding entries to my list of probabilities.

  Don’t get sentimental now, Dad.

  Save it until we get out of here.

  – Harrison Ford (1942- )

  You left when you were becoming interesting.

  – Sean Connery (1930- )

  Rotating the handle of his umbrella, the imam recounted Ammi’s final day in weepy whispers. Another eyewitness account from the mohalla where you could be miles away from the scene and still call yourself an eyewitness. The account started with the imam coming home after the night prayers to the sound of Tabu and Humera baying for water. The house was unlit, the front door half-ajar. He wandered through the house until he came upon Ammi sleeping on Wasim’s bed. Only that she was not asleep, but twenty minutes away from the doors of Jannatul Firdaus. He went to the kitchen, made two glasses of tea and brought them on a tray to Wasim’s bed, and tried to wake her up.

  I never knew the imam had cherished such a strong filmi flourish.

  His shouts brought Abbas Chacha and Noora Auntie home, and they ferried her to a clinic near the intersection where, after ten minutes of being treated on, she had a second heart attack and died.