by Bapsi Sidhwa
Nikka studied the white scars crisscrossing the man’s black, closely cropped head. He bided his time.
“A paan,” the man next ordered, “with crushed tobacco.”
Nikka withdrew a glossy leaf from a sheaf of betel-leaves wrapped in wet cloth and began coating it with a red and white paste.
The man was fingering a careful arrangement of biri bundles and cigarettes with clumsy irreverence. A tower of cigarette packets fell over.
Nikka swore, “. . . lay your leathery hands off my merchandise.”
The man folded his arms with an offensive smirk that appeared to suggest, “Just you wait, you innocent.”
Nikka handed him the paan saying, “Six paisa.”
The man popped the paan into his mouth, chewed, slurped and declared, “Also stale! Not enough tobacco either!” As he turned to go, he said, “Better learn your trade first. I don’t see how I can allow a sloppy cheat like you to settle in my locality.”
“My money!” shouted Nikka, half rising and gathering his lungi up above his knees.
Ignoring the demand, chewing on his paan, the man stepped away.
Nikka leapt down to the pavement and his hand pounced on his huge customer’s back.
The man swung round. “What do you want, shopkeeper?” he sneered.
“My money!” said Nikka, holding out his palm.
“Are you deaf? I told you, the betel-leaf is stale.”
He knocked Nikka’s hand aside.
Nikka slapped him full in the face. “Spit out my paan first,” he said, striking him on the back of his neck so that the red, syrupy mixture shot out of the man’s startled mouth.
The man clawed back in humiliated anger, and the two pehelwans grappled.
The crowd cheered the taller pehelwan, the acknowledged leader among the local roughs. Two policemen stood by watching the fight with professional detachment.
Keeping a wary eye on the shop, stretching on tiptoe, Qasim looked over the heads of the spectators. The stranger was a good wrestler, and the crowd fell silent when they saw Nikka get the better of him. He pinioned him to the pavement with his knees, and he twisted his face, crushing it into the gravel. The man cried out in pain.
Nikka stood up slowly. He looked around cool-eyed and arrogant. Dusting his torn clothes, and wiping blood from his palms, he jumped calmly on to his platform and settled down to business. He sat all evening as he was, victorious and blood-plastered.
News of the fight, of the strength of the new biri-walla in their midst and of the ignominious defeat of the extortionist, spread like a fire in dry leaves. Qasim felt a new admiration for his friend. Nikka, born with the instincts and destiny of a leader, knew just how to entrench himself. Three days later, the stall prominently displayed two intimidating photographs of his person. Clad only in his wrestling briefs, exhibiting the might of his muscle-bound body, Nikka posed before two stiff rows of diminishing cypresses, behind which hung a lavender Taj Mahal. In the other photograph, Nikka’s image scowled handsomely at customers from between a pair of snarling stuffed tigers. Beneath them, inscribed in Urdu, were the captions, nikka pehelwan and tiger nikka.
Qasim, with nothing to do, wandered along the crowded bazaars of Lahore. Perched on his shoulders, captivated by the intriguing odors of fish frying in the Shalmi, of barbecuing liver and kebab, smiling at the colorful pageant thronging the streets and pouring out of cinemas, Zaitoon relished all his interests. They were blissful, absorbed by the shop windows, their noses glued to sweetmeat and fancy-goods casements.
Often they sat on the spidery mud-caked grass of the parks, watching boys at a kabbadi match. The boys would crouch in rows facing each other. One of them, brown, his limbs shining with oil, would dart into the clearing slapping his naked thigh, calling “kabbadi kabbadi kabbadi kabbadi,” until holding his breath, he would touch a boy of the opposing team and swerve and dodge back to his line. If caught, the two would wrestle, trying to pin each other down on their backs.
They visited Shahdara, Emperor Jehangir’s tomb, its marble minarets rising in delicate towers set like a jewel in the jade of the gardens. They lay in the cool, fountain-hazed Shalimar Gardens, the summer sanctuary of Emperor Shahjehan, and strolled down Anarkali, the crowded bazaar named after the beautiful dancing girl who was bricked in alive by the Emperor Akbar because Prince Salim was determined to marry her.
Qasim perched a frightened Zaitoon on the tall, proud snout of the Zam-Zam cannon, known because of Kipling as “Kim’s gun.” They sat on the sands of the shallow Ravi, gazing at its gentle brown eddies . . . Lahore—the ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings, the courtesan of Moghul emperors—bedecked and bejewelled, savaged by marauding Sikh hordes—healed by the caressing hands of her British lovers. A little shoddy, as Qasim saw her; like an attractive but aging concubine, ready to bestow surprising delights on those who cared to court her—proudly displaying Royal gifts . . .
“Don’t you want to find some work?” Nikka inquired once, but Qasim, with typical tribal disdain, saw no need for it. “I get my keep from you for so little. And don’t forget, at the end of six months, I’ll be receiving four hundred rupees from you. We shall see later.”
Nikka didn’t mind, especially since Qasim was often at hand for odd jobs. Besides, a burly tribal—a bandolier across his chest—added to the shop’s prestige. Once he borrowed Qasim’s pistol and holster and garlanded them round his photographs.
When Qasim accompanied Nikka to a fair he was surprised how easily the wrestler picked off an array of balloons strung up to test marksmanship, and with a gun that Qasim suspected had been doctored to miss.
At the end of six months Nikka returned Qasim his two hundred rupees with an additional two hundred in interest. The new terms they arrived at compelled Qasim to find work. He was to give Nikka forty rupees a month for his and Zaitoon’s keep. Zaitoon would be looked after by Miriam while he was at work. Good jobs were hard to find. Qasim sheepishly asked Nikka to take him on as a partner in his business. Nikka brushed him off with a casual, “Too late, friend. Too bad you missed the bird when it sang at your window.”
Qasim worked at odd jobs as a construction laborer and coolie.
Chapter 6
Lahore was getting cooler. A soft breeze from the foothills of the Himalayas gently nudged the merciless summer away. Disturbances subsided. October, November and then December, with its icy cold, checked the tempers. Hordes of refugees still poured in, seeking jobs. The nation was new. The recently born bureaucracy and government struggled towards a semblance of order. Bogged down by puritanical fetish, in the clutches of unscrupulous opportunists—the newly rich and the power drunk—the nation fought for its balance. Ideologies vied with reason, and everyone had his own concept of independence. When a tongawalla, reprimanded by a policeman, shouted, “We are independent now—I’ll drive where I please!” bystanders sympathized. Fifty million people relaxed, breathing freedom. Slackening their self-discipline, they left their litter about, creating terrible problems of public health and safety. Many felt cheated because some of the same old laws, customs, taboos, and social distinctions still prevailed.
Unused muscle, tentatively flexed, grew strong, and then stronger. Dictatorial tyrants sprang up—feudal lords over huge areas of Pakistan.
Memory of the British Raj receded—shrinking into the dim past inhabited by ghosts of mighty Moghul Emperors, of Hindu, Sikh and Rajput kings.
The marble canopy that had delicately domed Queen Victoria’s majesty for decades looked naked and bereft without her enormous, dour statue. Prince Albert, astride his yellowing marble horse, was whisked away one night from the Mall; as were the busts of Viceroys and Lords from various parks. No one minded. Portraits of British gentlemen bristling with self-esteem and dark with age vanished from club halls and official buildings, to surface years later on junk stalls.
Jinnah’s austere face decorated office walls and the Jinnah-cap replaced the sola-topee. Chevrolets
and Cadillacs gradually edged out Bentleys and Morrises and, the seductively swaggering American Agency for International Development (A.I.D.), the last sedate vestiges of the British East India Company.
Jinnah died within a year of creating the new State. He was an old man but his death was untimely. The Father of the Nation was replaced by stepfathers. The constitution was tampered with, changed and narrowed. Iqbal’s dynamic vision of Muslim brotherhood reaching beyond the confines of nationality—a mystic-poet’s vision—became the property of petty bureaucrats and even more petty religious fanatics.
Despite the unsettled times Nikka’s business prospered. He and Miriam shifted to three rooms on the ground floor of a tenement. He acquired for his home a cheap sofa set and a radio for the shop. The new living quarters were painted parrot-green, gratifying the tastes of his friends and acquaintances.
Miriam, reflecting her husband’s rising status and respectability, took to observing strict purdah. She seldom ventured out without her veil.
Qasim and Zaitoon remained in their solitary room on the second floor.
Nikka’s prowess in wrestling and his enormous strength became legendary. Qila Gujjar Singh pitted its pehelwan against wrestlers of other localities and gloated over Nikka’s unfailing victories. Nikka’s generosity and his capacity for arbitration also were widely acclaimed.
One of the political factions sniffed him out—embraced and flattered him—and he became a miniscule part of a huge political package.
Policemen became courteous. All appreciated his ability to intercede for friends, and some shady characters from the political underworld aired their grievances to him.
Qasim was wafted upward on the swell of Nikka’s success. Nikka procured him a job as night-watchman at a steel-ware warehouse. His leisure hours he spent loitering around Nikka’s shop.
As for Zaitoon, Qasim laughed at her prattle. He was continually touched by the affection she lavished on him.
Zaitoon had the short memory of a happy child. Recollections of the horrendous night, of her parents, of tilled earth and lazily dipping wheat fields soon dimmed into oblivion. She played with the little urchins of her street, and came to look on Miriam and Nikka as part of her family. Though Qasim rarely saw Miriam, Zaitoon was constantly in and out of her rooms.
Their own room was dingy, and except for a single misshapen door, it had no ventilation. Qasim and Zaitoon slept on straw mats spread on the bare, brick floor. The chief piece of furnishing was a shiny new tin trunk in one corner which Qasim hoped to fill with clothes. Later, when he could afford it, he bought two charpoys and they carried these to the roof and slept beneath the stars during the summer.
He saw to it that Zaitoon attended school for a full five years. Awed by her recital of the mysterious Urdu alphabet and by her struggle on the takhti, a wooden slate coated daily with mud-paste, he tried to learn from her. When she began writing in a book he gave up. Miriam, scandalized by such a foolish waste of the girl’s time, at last told Nikka, “Now that she’s learned to read the Holy Quran, what will she do with more reading and writing—boil and drink it? She’s not going to become a baboo or an officer! No, Allah willing, she’ll get married and have children.” Another time she sighed, “Poor child . . . had she a mother she’d be learning to cook and sew . . . does Bhai Qasim think he’s rearing a boy? He ought to give some thought to her marriage . . . who’d want an educated . . .”
“But she’s only a baby,” protested Nikka.
“A baby? She’s ten! I can already see her body shaping. The Pathan doesn’t realize she is in the hot plains of the Punjab: everything ripens early here . . . she’ll be safe only at her mother-in-law’s . . . A girl is never too young to marry . . .”
Qasim glimpsed Zaitoon walk past the store. It was too early for school to be over.
“I’m here, Zaitoon,” he called.
He stepped out and noticed her drawn face. “What is it?”
“I have such a bellyache.”
Zaitoon doubled over and Qasim carefully picked her up.
“Did you eat raw mango?” He knew she loved the sour mangoes smothered in salt and red pepper sold outside the school.
“No.”
Her forehead felt damp and cold and he buttoned up her cardigan. “I’d better take you to Aunt Miriam’s.”
He knocked on a curtained window. Miriam opened the door and saw them through the bamboo blind screening the entrance.
“Zaitoon has a bad stomachache,” he explained.
“Come in, brother.”
Miriam held the screen apart and, stooping, Qasim edged past. He laid Zaitoon on the sofa. Miriam darted into another room and hastily having covered herself with a shawl, sat by Zaitoon.
“I’ll take care of her, Bhai: she’ll be all right.”
“Let me know if you think I should take her to the hakeem for some herbal medicine—or if you need anything.”
“Don’t worry: it’s probably something she ate.” Qasim nodded his silent thanks. Miriam turned away, and with respectfully averted eyes he left.
Miriam rubbed Zaitoon’s stomach with mustard oil and gave her an aspirin. She heated a brick and, wrapping it in a towel, coaxed the child to lie on it. Stroking her hair, she recited a verse from the Holy Quran known to ease pain. Exhausted, Zaitoon fell asleep. When she awoke it was evening and her pain had gone.
Next day she went to school.
The pain recurred; low in her belly and sometimes in her back. Qasim took her to the hakeem on his street and when that did not help, to the Parsi doctor near the station.
Miriam told Nikka, “Tell Bhai Qasim not to bother with hakeems and doctors; they won’t do her any good . . . She’ll probably start menstruating in a few months!”
Qasim stopped taking Zaitoon to doctors and she went to Miriam instead. Miriam ministered to her and soothed her with tales about the valor of Hazrat Ali, the wisdom of Hazrat Omer, and the brutal tragedy of Hazrats Imam Hasan and Husain at Karbala.
She also told her that any day now she might find blood on her shalwar. She was to tell no one and come straight to her. “We all bleed. It’s to do with having babies and being a woman . . . of course you won’t have babies—not till you’re married—but you’re growing up . . .” Zaitoon was too distracted by her garbled talk to understand anything.
Zaitoon was eleven. They were playing during the morning break when a classmate excitedly pointing, said, “Your shalwar is red. Are you hurt?”
Zaitoon raised her shirt and looked down. She sat in the dirt, wondering.
“Are you hurt?” her friend asked again.
Zaitoon shook her head, mystified. “You’d better see Nurse.”
A clutch of sympathetic girls accompanied her to the sick room.
Nurse took her aside. She placed a wad of cotton between her legs and tied it in place with a strip of cloth. She told Zaitoon to wash her shalwar and go home. Zaitoon walked to Qila Gujjar Singh holding her legs apart, a little astonished that she felt no pain.
She went straight to Miriam.
“I told you it would happen, didn’t I?”
Zaitoon gaped blankly. She wondered, considering the blood, if she should cry. Taking her cue from Miriam’s calm face she decided not to. Miriam looked happy, almost triumphant—as if Zaitoon had accomplished a feat.
Slowly it dawned on Zaitoon that Miriam had told her something about bleeding and not to tell anyone. She looked bewildered and crestfallen. Miriam held her close and kissed her.
She asked questions and to some of them Miriam gave evasive answers. “You’ll bleed every month,” she said, and, “Don’t be silly child, boys don’t menstruate; only women!” and, “How do I know how babies come—do I have a baby? Allah alone knows! But enough; you’ll understand everything when the time comes . . .”
She gave her strips of cloth, frayed with washing, and taught her the discipline of washing them for reuse.
“You are now a woman. Don’t play with boys—and don�
�t allow any man to touch you. This is why I wear a burkha . . .”
She decided it was time she had a chat with Qasim. She insisted Zaitoon stop going to school and he agreed.
From her Zaitoon learned to cook, sew, shop, and keep her room tidy: and Miriam, who spent half her day visiting neighbors, took Zaitoon with her. Entering their dwellings was like stepping into gigantic wombs; the fecund, fetid world of mothers and babies.
The untidy row of buildings that crowded together along their street contained a claustrophobic warren of screened quarters. Rooms with windows open to the street were allotted to the men: the dim maze of inner rooms to the women—a domain given over to procreation, female odors and the interminable care of children. Smells of urine, stale food, and cooking hung in the unventilated air, churning slowly, room to room, permeating wood, brick, and mortar. Generations of babies had wet mattresses, sofas and rugs, spilled milk sherbets and food, and wiped hands on ragged curtains; and, just in case the smells should fade, armies of newborn infants went on arriving to ensure the odors were perpetuated.
Redolent of an easygoing hospitality, the benign squalor in the women’s quarters inexorably drew Zaitoon, as it did all its inmates, into the mindless, velvet vortex of the womb.
Zaitoon loved best going to the Mullah’s. His tall, malodorous hive, adjacent to the mosque, sheltered a large joint family and his two wives. His second wife was his elder brother’s widow. Rather than leave them to the hazards of widowed and orphaned destitution, he had married her and adopted her three girls. The two wives got along no worse than the other brothers’ and cousin-brothers’ wives. The female sphere was enlivened by an undercurrent of intrigue and one-upmanship and the effort expended in the struggle was no less there than it was in the corridors of power and politics. Men, although favored, were not specially welcome. Proud husbands, fathers and brothers, they were the providers. Zealous guardians of family honor and virtue, they sat, when in their homes, like pampered patriarchs, slightly aloof and ill at ease, withdrawing discreetly whenever the household was visited by unrelated women, which was often. As soon as Miriam, in her burkha, appeared before a screened door a signal passed and the few men who had strayed in left. If in going they happened to see her, they saluted, “Salaam-alaikum, sister” and continued their unobtrusive passage. Once in a while Miriam might, to show her trust in and friendship for the family, address a few remarks, and the men invariably returned the courtesy by inquiring after Zaitoon’s and her health.