by Ali Eteraz
We lived among hefty Dominicans, suave Lebanese émigrés, vacationing Castilians, and a small contingent of sweaty Pakistani students who were following the same path to America—the state of salvation. With his feet in many jobs and a bottle in my newborn brother’s mouth, Pops graduated and started looking into moving to New York. But when he filed his papers, he learned that due to immigration quotas we couldn’t get in. Ammi also filed for immigration—this time through her brother, who already had American citizenship—but she was told that it would be seven to ten years before her name would be called if she followed that channel.
Out of ideas and in search of a job, Pops sent the three of us back to Pakistan. Then, with our last eight hundred dollars in his pocket, he went to Italy, hoping to gain admission in a medical fellowship. Less than forty-eight hours later he was conned of all his money by a Muslim. He had to call back to relatives in Pakistan to have money wired to him so he could buy a return ticket.
He joined us a week later.
We stayed with Beyji at her fine bungalow for a little while and then moved to a tiny apartment on a noisy lower-income street choked by smog and trash, with a thick carpet of dust lapping against our door. Every day Pops would get on his bike and ride around the towns encircling Lahore, seeking a place to launch a medical practice. After a while, a small-time feudal landlord who lived in a red haveli, a mansion left over from colonial days, invited him to open up a clinic in one of his buildings.
It was a tepid practice: the patients came rarely, and when they did it was only to compare medical prescriptions with what the pir, the homeopath, and various quacks were peddling. Day after day Pops came home on his bedraggled Suzuki motorcycle, his face darkened by smog, and vented the frustration of another profitless day. Never the stereotypically bulky Punjabi, he had cheeks that were sunken in, the skin leathery and dark, and his hair was both in a balding recession and a state of disarray. His arms were thin. His head was an enormous bobbing egg on a skeleton that was all clavicle, elbows, and knees. His clothes, a mishmash of checkered shirts and gray pants, bore the dusty residue of the streets.
When it became clear that the medical practice was not going to do well, Ammi and Pops had fights and Ammi retreated to the bedroom to cry. As she sat and sobbed, I touched the tears on her face and flicked them away. Then, when she forced a smile between her tears, it was my turn to cry and she wiped my face with her wrist.
“Don’t cry,” she said reassuringly. “We will pray and all will be well.”
“Inshallah,” I said.
Then Ammi became devout. The jai namaz, her prayer rug, was flung open and pointed toward Mecca. A little red copy of the punj surah, which contained the five most important chapters of the Quran, kept perpetual presence in her hand. She went repeatedly to a neighbor’s to make calls to Beyji to find out what type of zikr, or chants with Allah’s various names, the saints recommended to improve one’s fortune. She told me to turn off the cricket matches and sat me down regularly to teach me the Quran. She appealed to Pops to establish all five prayers at the prescribed times of day. She calculated whether we had paid out adequate amounts of zakat to care for the poor. She fasted with great earnestness during the daylight hours of Ramadan, waking up to make food well before the pre-dawn meal, suhoor, and preparing food for the post-sunset iftar way before evening.
Seeing Ammi’s devotion, Pops was impelled to emulate it, albeit in his own way: his religiosity was communal and intellectual. He took me to Friday prayers at all the great mosques of Lahore, and we showed up early so we could listen to the entire sermon. We went to the house of one of the old Jamaat-e-Islami organizers at the university, and his daughter served us sherbet while he talked about how Islam was slowly changing the world. Pops found various religious scholars who held evening study circles at their mosques, and we tried them all out. He was particularly fond of one shaykh of the Deobandi movement—a revivalist branch of traditional Islam—who taught in a well-off residential area of Lahore. The lectures were long. The shaykh sat on the floor with a Quran supported on a rehal before him at the end of a long row of men. (The women listened from behind a partition.) Occasionally touching the skin of the Quran, the shaykh spoke evocatively about the importance of family life, the virtues of hard work, and how patience in the face of adversity was a form of worship, and then he tied all of these things together with events from the life of the Prophet and his Companions. He said that one had to put prayer and worship before everything else, and when that happened, success followed. As proof he’d point out that he used to be just a simple villager, but—Allah be praised—because he followed this method, Allah put him in a place where he was able to teach Islam in such a beautiful mosque to such wonderful people. Pops and I rode back home on the motorcycle after such evenings, and he often quizzed me to see if I had been paying attention.
One day Pops learned that my grandfather, Dada Abu, and my older uncle, Tau, who both lived in a town in the desert, were coming to Lahore to attend the Tablighi Jamaat convention at nearby Raiwand. They called ahead and asked Pops to meet them there.
Tablighi Jamaat, Pops told me, was a worldwide order numbering in the millions that had become disenchanted with the world. Its members—Tablighis—said that at some point in history Allah had become upset with Muslims and had taken away their glory, and now no material or worldly gain was possible for a Muslim unless the broken bridge between believer and Creator was first repaired. Tablighis were of the opinion that Muslims—each and every true Muslim—were facing failure in the world, and that indeed those in the world who happened to be successful were successful only because they had left Islam behind. The organization’s specific goal was to go to these people and bring them back to true Islam, which belonged to the unsuccessful. To this end they organized themselves into cells, and every few evenings they went door to door to the homes of Muslims, encouraging them to give up their work and wives and take a chilla, a devotional trip that lasted forty days. Pops had never been on a chilla, but Dada Abu and Tau had been many times. During a chilla the Tablighi leaders forbade discussion of worldly things like jobs, politics, and education and focused on things that made one a good Muslim—things like what supplication to recite before washing one’s posterior, whether Allah Azzawajal was the Lord of all the worlds (or if there was only one world which He owned in its entirety), and whether eternal damnation literally meant forever or whether eternity could be cut in half. Talking about these things, they asserted, would turn every failed Muslim into a success, would give Muslims financial prosperity, and would raise their status in society. The organization wasn’t against money; it was just against non-Tablighis having it.
Every year the Tablighi Jamaat met in a virtual tent city on the marshy salt plain in Raiwand. After Mecca, it was the largest single gathering of Muslims in the world. It was called Ijtema.
“Get on the bike, shabash,” Pops said one morning. “We’re going to Raiwand.”
I sat on the motorcycle and wrapped a checkered scarf around my mouth to protect against the dust. On the Suzuki we sped past the slums that surrounded Lahore. Soon we were on a flat highway cutting through fields of barley. A multicolored bus with mirror-work and murals on its exterior passed by. Outside of a small town we stopped to help an old peasant with a donkey cart. His lord had heaped too much weight on the cart before sending the peasant off, and the donkey kept getting tipped into the air.
Nothing could have prepared me for Raiwand’s immensity. There were thousands of tents on a burning-hot white plain. Countless men in shalwar kameez and beards, most carrying backpacks, walked around greeting one another. Vials of musk, tasbih beads, and tapes of religious instruction were on sale. I saw Mongolian men and Caucasian men and African men. There was considerable discussion among them about the possibility that Nawaz Sharif, General Zia ul Haq’s favorite politician (and a future prime minister of Pakistan), would be coming in by helicopter.
I was marched endlessly around t
he plain as Pops searched for Dada Abu and Tau. He eventually found them standing around in a large circle of men who had also come up from Dada Abu’s village, and there were loud introductions all around.
Dada Abu pinched my cheeks. Tau went to his stuff and pulled out one of the backpacks he had sewn at his workshop; he threw it around my shoulders.
Dada Abu and Pops stepped away from the group, me tagging at their heels, and discussed Pops’s practice. Dada Abu was trying to convince Pops to forget Lahore and move back to the desert where he had grown up (and where Dada Abu still lived) and start afresh. They talked in hushed whispers for a little while; then Pops grabbed my wrist angrily and we rode back home. Pops was upset about something and drove so fast that we flew into a ditch. After that we had to limp home, pushing the motorcycle along.
Over dinner Pops told Ammi what Dada Abu had suggested, and she also dismissed the idea. Schools were better in Lahore, she pointed out, and there was more opportunity there even if expenses were greater. However, a few days later, Lahore made the decision for us. A local businessman who was friendly with Nawaz Sharif sent his thugs to our apartment building and informed the landlord that they were going to come back in a week’s time and knock the building down. It would behoove the tenants to go quietly, they warned. By the time a gang of university students, Nawaz Sharif’s supporters, came to the neighborhood and rocked the buildings until the structures collapsed with a groan, we had wrapped up our things in knotted bedsheets and were at the train station.
6
The Prophet Sulayman, son of Daud, King of the Jews, controlled the elements, spoke to animals, and commanded the jinn. He traveled across the world on a throne made from a diamond so flawless that before the Queen of Sheba stepped upon it, she hiked up her dress, thinking she was about to step in a pool of water. One day Sulayman’s aerial adventures took him to a great mountain at the easternmost edge of the Iranian plateau. He looked across South Asia but found it covered in darkness; then he turned toward Jerusalem. That mountain where he stopped, later known as Takht-e-Sulayman, sits in what is now the arid desert of central Pakistan, west of the mighty Indus. In that desert, my father’s family lived in Sehra Kush, a tired town surrounded by sand dunes.*
We had no throne. We took third-class rail to get there.
On the multi-day trip we occupied a window seat and a sleeping berth. We rode with migrant workers smelling of soil who slept with their turbans pulled over their eyes. Those who couldn’t snare a seat were comfortable sleeping in front of the train’s pungent latrine and in the aisles, apparently unconcerned about being stepped upon by barefoot passengers coming in from the muddy fields. Men brought aboard everything from bicycles, to a line of women in veils, to lambs and goats—along with a wide range of similar life essentials—minding them with a dismissive nonchalance. The atmosphere in the train was jovial. Chai flowed freely; roasted nuts, poured out into paper cups, were omnipresent. The predominantly good-natured conversation was punctuated by laughter, and there were many jokes about politicians and their corrupt char so beesi. There was occasional yelling as well, especially whenever a shepherd led his bearded goats onto the train track ahead of us and caused a delay. A delay was usually considered deplorable only if it was overnight, however; even then, if it was a precautionary stop in order to avoid an ambush by dakooz, it was shrugged off with a casual reference to Allah’s ownership of the universe (followed by a stream of profanities about the incestuous anal activities of the armed degenerates). When there was a woman discovered to be traveling all by herself, she was shuttled off to some other part of the train, where a coterie of hefty matriarchs who had heard about “the poor creature” yelled at their men for not showing more initiative in bringing the vigorous jawan girl under their protective umbrella.
A few nights after leaving Lahore we came upon a deserted train station and switched to a midnight lorry that would take us over unpaved roads the rest of the way. Because we had a woman with us, Flim and I were put in the front, while numerous men—Pops among them—jammed themselves into the back.
I looked out the window at the station we’d left behind and in a cloud of dust saw a pair of men running at the moving lorry, holding their sacks with one hand and their falling lungis—a traditional Punjabi sarong—with the other, cursing at the driver in a language I didn’t understand.
They shone with a blue luminescence that made me wonder if they were angels.
Unlike Lahore, where the immensity of history forced hierarchy to become subtle in manifesting itself, Sehra Kush felt no qualms about segregation. The town was bisected by a highway that did the job.
The lower portion of the town, in the shape of a polygon, was for the administrators, judges, civil servants, and military men, all of whom lived in bungalows inside compounds marked by streets of the blackest asphalt, manicured lawns complete with imported trees, and an order epitomized by security guards and regular trash pickup (with refuse sometimes dumped onto empty plots on the other side of the city). The central institution of this section: the clubhouse; the popular mode of transport: unmarked car; the favored type of violence: against servants.
There was a larger upper portion of the city expanding like a heinous goiter. It belonged to bazaris with their stalls, traders, cart-walas, maulvis on their way to teach at the mosque, and mendicants. Most of these people lived in mud houses lined up haphazardly on streets of dust marked by trash, open sewage, and the furry green droppings of low-breed donkeys. The central institution of this section: the mosque; the popular mode of transportation: the horse-drawn tanga; the favorite type of violence: insult. This is where we were headed.
We arrived in Sehra Kush on a hazy morning and took two tangas to Dada Abu’s house. After clop-clopping on a highway for a while, we turned onto a badly paved road and passed an empty field full of trash where a pair of wide-horned black buffaloes—whose milk was sold to the neighboring families—swished their tails. We then took a turn into an unpaved alley, passing open gutters leaking witch blackness onto the street. Homes were on both sides of the alley, set off from the narrow street by a foot-wide gap for the nali, the open sewer, which flowed in a slow froth full of everything from stones, to phlegm, to animal dung, with light-brown dollops of human feces bobbing to the surface. Each house had a thick wooden plank that bridged the nali. The doors on the houses were all flung open, although there was a heavy curtain in each doorway that assured privacy for the women within.
When our tangas made their way into the alley, children ran toward us from each side. They yelled greetings and stuck sticks into the churning spokes, picking up another stick whenever a grinding wheel snapped a spear and nearly took a child’s hand along with it. Soon we came to a dilapidated Land Rover from the mid-1950s that was parked in the middle of the alley. (We later learned that it belonged to the Balochi neighbors.) The tanga drivers, clicking their tongues at their horses as they reversed, cursed at the ungainly car for blocking the thoroughfare. The horses took short, unsteady steps backward during this process, and the heads of the animals swayed from side to side as if they were intoxicated mystics.
Dada Abu’s house, constructed from a mixture of mud, hay, rope, and wooden beams, was airy but not big. He lived there with Dadi Ma and four of my uncles and their families. The house had a courtyard, a kitchen, a cemented area for the hand-operated nalka that supplied the water, a tiny latrine with an unpaved hole in the ground, a sitting room, two bedrooms with shuttered windows, and an open staircase going to the roof. On warm nights people slept on the roof; on cooler nights in the courtyard. In the desert it never got cold enough to require sleeping inside.
As this host of relatives greeted my brother and me with pats on the head and pinches to the cheeks, I took a look at the cramped quarters and realized that we had moved in as well.
7
Why bother? I’m just ugly and old!”
Dadi Ma was fond of saying this to people who told her to cover her face when she went f
or her great walks around town. She was a small woman with a gold tooth, thin hennaed hair, and a loud voice. Although the women of Sehra Kush, when they left their compound, always wore the niqab, a full veil that covered the face, when Dadi Ma went out she preferred the comfort of a loose garment called the chador, which draped over her head and shoulders but was open at the face; she typically tied it with a ribbon under her chin.
During the days, I spent a lot of time in Dadi Ma’s vicinity. She usually sat near the kitchen on a small charpai, or cot, giving instructions to Ammi and the aunts about what to cook for dinner, how many pinches of salt should go in the cookpot, and why the milkman needed to be thrashed for adding water and skimming the cream.
She also told tall tales. How sleeping under a tree caused you to die from asphyxiation because the jinns that lived in the branches sucked up all the oxygen; how the scary backward-footed churayls were actually fallen souls seeking forgiveness for some crime they had committed; how going to a particular saint’s grave and spreading a ceremonial chador over it would lead to the expiation of one’s sins. Most of the aunts and children had already heard the stories and never asked Dadi Ma any questions, but Ammi enjoyed talking to old people and often probed her, to my great delight.
One day they began talking about the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and Dadi Ma started telling really scary stories.
“Five of them,” she announced, making her hand into a claw. “Five girls. Count them. One, two, three, four, five. Five girls jumped into a well. Into the same well. Just to protect their honor. This was in 1947, back when we lived in Indian Punjab. All because that Mountbatten switched the borders on the founders of our country and put us in India when we would’ve been in Pakistan.”