The Scatter Here Is Too Great

by Bilal Tanweer

  You felt angry.

  You wanted to remind her who was in error. You wanted to tell her that nothing you had done to her could ever match up to what she did by forgiving your father after how he punished both of you for years. That there was no graver offense than what happened last week when you found your father in this apartment—and you had turned around and slammed the door shut on his face and shot down the stairs. That just because you had not spoken to your mother since then did not mean that you were not enraged. Yes, you wanted to tell her how angry you’d felt at seeing your father in this apartment. Not only that. You wanted to remind her of all her mistakes: that accepting and supporting your father in his work was a mistake; and sticking with him was even worse. That while he went out and got drunk and recited poetry to a bunch of runaway charsis, she never stopped him—in fact, said, “He cares for the world more than you or I or everybody who criticizes him”—that was a mistake. And now, after years of disappearance from your lives, now that his poetry and his fucking communism and his revolution were dead and he was a raving old lunatic, to accept him back into her house now, to comfort him—precisely when it was right to leave him to himself for the way he had punished both of you for years, YEARS—was her worst mistake of all.

  You did not say this.

  You just gave her an angry glance in return. It was the kind of glance that children give their parents when they know exactly the kind of total power they have over them and when the temptation to shatter them with one word, one phrase, is overwhelming, but something—just the vague knowledge perhaps that the mess they create would be too great to gather—holds them back.

  (Did your son ever give you this look? He didn’t. He battered you with indifference instead.)

  You got up to get water and that’s when you caught sight of the skin of your mother’s head through her hair. Her hair was now very thin; and oiled, they stuck on her head. All of a sudden you realized how old she was. You felt sorry for what you were thinking and for your hard, angry glance. Maybe she did not mean to accuse you with her look. Maybe she simply pitied Noor Begum and cared to share how she felt with you.

  You brought her the glass of water and took your place against the window—a safe distance away from the workings of the two women. Your mother was sponging the orange juice coursing down the sides of her mouth. Your initial feelings of pity and disgust for Noor Begum had now subsided and you found yourself in some other, more liminal space between your childhood and the present. Now you felt sorrow for her. Deep sorrow. It reminded you of things.

  Noor Begum lived in a house of dirty-pink walls toward the end of your lane. It was your neighborhood before your father decided he had to be closer to the railway workers and you all moved to this apartment near Cantt Station, where now your mother lived alone.

  You were eight then. In those hot, sticky afternoons, you walked through the front door of Noor Begum’s house into the room where you and seven other kids assembled in a loose semicircle to read the Qur’an. You all sat on a small worn-out green carpet at the center of the room. It’s fuzzy to think of it now: those afternoons next to the large window through which the sunlight sent in shadows with perfect edges now seemed suffused with a dull sense of mystery. You recited Arabic for an hour, and after reading for a while, descended into a lull, a dizzy drone. Your bottoms hurt from sitting on the ground.

  You daydream about those slow afternoons in your chilly air-conditioned office in a shopping mall overlooking the sea. You even had a chapter about Noor Begum in the book you are writing about yourself, about your successful career, all about your humble beginnings and how you faced those challenges and rose to where you were now. Yes, you were a success. You owned the largest video game playland in the city. You had started small, in a rented shop under an apartment building. Now you owned an entire floor in the most upscale shopping mall in the city. You had a passion for games too. Even the title of your book, Run, was inspired from the video game Pac-Man. The game embodied your ideals of living a successful life: get the dots, avoid the ghosts, move up one level at a time. No shortcuts, no exits, and absolutely no pauses whatsoever. You believed in a relentless cutting down of the unnecessary—thoughts, imagination, ideas—which had been the reason of your success.

  To be honest, you’ve been writing your book for an audience of one. You wanted your son to read the book because you knew he was a reader, or at least he was until two years ago. It’d been about two years since you last had a real conversation with your boy. He had refused to see you after your wife left you over your affair with the woman in the office. (To this day you do not know how your wife discovered. She had such precise details there was no point in arguing. You suspect that that bitch sleeping with you told your wife herself.) You had tried to explain to her that it did not mean anything to you. It was . . . just . . . something . . . without emotion or thought. It was nothing really. Nothing. But it was all over very quickly. She stepped out of your large luxurious house in Defense with her son and moved to a small apartment with an exorbitant rent on Tariq Road you were not allowed to visit. Your son, seventeen then, refused to see you afterward. She worked a job plus she had her savings of years with you—she had been smart that way—she kept her money separate from you. Your son was nineteen now. He drove his mother’s battered little FX. You saw him last week outside the new McDonald’s. He was visibly upset when you approached him. But your heart raced. He did not move when you put your arms around him. He had grown up radically in a few months. Broader shoulders, sharper eyes, more confident and aloof the way he stood. You felt his warmth, smelled the odor of his sweat. You wanted him to sit with you but he said he had to go. You were a little pushy but then you noticed the girl who was with him. You realized this probably wasn’t the best time. So you said good-bye. You asked him to call you. Call you tonight. You will be waiting. Will you call? Yes. Good.

  Needless to say, he didn’t call. You waited, trying your best to explain to yourself his point of view; that he was hurt; that anybody who had gone through the same would do the same.

  That was your life now that you did not understand. And you started to write out of a desperation because you felt this might help you make sense of your life. Also, because evenings had become unbearable. And you wanted your son to know. You wanted him to know you. Learn from your experience—there was so much you wanted to share. Ask you questions. Say, Wow, Baba. You are the best.

  So you wrote about your life and Noor Begum and things and their reasons.

  You suffered a bout of nostalgia while writing the chapter on Noor Begum. You wanted to write about the awkward squats as you sat loudly reciting the Qur’an, say how your foot felt grinded from bearing all your weight while sitting on the floor, the rapid tak-tak of the ceiling fan as it spun the air with its dusty blades, the dizziness . . . But you wrote: “Noor Begum’s house provided the comfortable environment for Qur’an lessons and my early lessons in disciplining myself into working through boredom.” Yes, instead of writing what you felt, you wrote about lessons about disciplining yourself—but really, you knew that lessons are derived only afterward. Discipline was something you admired only in theory. Your life and success were not a result of discipline, rather a series of smart choices and knowing what to do when opportunities present themselves. You were a big believer that every person, no matter how poor or unfortunate, gets at least one shot at a breakthrough in life. But you wrote about discipline regardless because, well, you did not want your son to get the wrong idea. You didn’t want him to misinterpret your words and see you as an opportunist, which he probably did already.

  That was the strange problem with writing, you had discovered. Meaning never matched the words, and words always evaded the thought. Before you had started writing, you could picture the clean arcs of your life. You had clear ideas. But what finally made it onto paper was circular and loopy and joined at the wrong ends with everything else. It messed up the whole picture. So you abstained from
saying too much. You described Noor Begum as the “perfect teacher who never fell ill” and moved on. You didn’t say anything about her small, healthy, luminous face, her extraordinary almond eyes filled with dark pupils, her glowing skin, wheaty complexion, her thin lips, her calmness as she sat with a vegetable bowl on her lap and heard you all read aloud.

  You wanted the whole thing matter-of-fact; you despised the poetic. Poetry, all of it, reeked of the kind of idealism your father embodied. You were everything because of your father: he was your model of what not to be. You’d learned your contempt of idealism, of poetry, of philosophizing from him. You believed in the two-dimensional simplicity of Pac-Man. The clarity of where to go and what to avoid available at all times.

  You’ve expressed your views on poetry and poets in your book in no uncertain terms. “Poets,” you’ve written, “are hungry and curious creatures—but only about what’s inside them. And the only way they usually know to get there is by tearing themselves up at the seams. They are always scattered inside. They only know how to tear themselves up.” These were the most poetic lines in your book, and needless to say, they were inflicted at your father.

  Your Qur’an classes were a conspiracy between you and your mother. Your father would not have tolerated it. He considered religion mixing up with everything was the cause of all problems in this godforsaken country.

  He did not, in fact, tolerate it when he found out.

  It happened one day when he came home early and caught you on the stairway with the Holy Book in its crimson silk envelope edged with golden embroidery and the rehl, its wooden stand, in your hand. He was puzzled at first. He asked you, Where are you coming from, what is this—but then he saw the white cap on your head and squinted his eyes. He calmly took the cloth envelope from under your arm and opened it. “This? Where—? For how long?” You were about to say something but you stopped. His face had started to tremble. He climbed up the stairs ahead of you and banged the door of your apartment. He was yelling out your mother’s name telling her to open the door. The door did not open and he finally had to fumble the key out from his own pocket. When he entered, your mother was rushing out of the bathroom, water splashed around the neck of her kameez.

  “Is THIS what you have been teaching my son? This?” he hissed. “You want to fill his brain with this? What do you want him to become?”—and then exploded: “I ALWAYS KNEW YOU. I KNOW YOUR KIND. YOU WITCH. YOU WANT TO TAKE MY SON AWAY FROM ME. I WILL KILL YOU. THINGS YOU HAVE BEEN TEACHING MY CHILD. YOU WANT TO STEAL HIM. I KNOW IT. I ALWAYS KNEW IT. I WILL KILL YOU.”

  It was the one time in her life that your mother did not back down. She raised her voice to match his—“I will teach him what I think is best for him. He is my son first. Look at yourself—you want him to be like you? You think you are a role model for my son? Haan?” He grabbed plates and glasses with both his hands from the table and hurled them at her feet. Shaken, terrified, she stood with her back against the kitchen door, guarding her other things she had collected out of her savings, and kept answering back. You felt your father might hit her or throw her out of the house—as he was threatening her. You quietly moved to grab your mother’s wallet and dupatta in case it happened.

  Then the doorbell rang. And both of them fell silent.

  There’s an echo of that mortifying silence thirty years ago in this room now rocked by the bomb blast. How you had hated your father afterward as you watched your mother sweep the broken glass off the floor intermittently stopping to control her tears. Now with one-half of your face sweating against the floor, you feel a surge of sympathy for your mother. And the same deep hate for your father.

  Oh he was about to visit you! You had forgotten! Your mother had told you when you came into the apartment with Noor Begum. She didn’t try to hide her bitterness. “I am telling you so I won’t have to hear anything later. It’s up to you if you want to stay.”

  There was no need for her to say that. She said it precisely to ask you to stay. She wanted you to reconcile with your father. You had yelled at her countless times, but she persisted. “My son, you need to be good to your father. He’s your father after all. He’s made mistakes but he’s an old man. He’s so weak even . . . mentally . . . My son, even God forgives. Who are we to hold grudges?”

  “Then let God forgive him,” you gave her a curt reply.

  But there’s no escaping this now: if he comes into the apartment now, right now, and finds you like this, and says, Hello, son, what would you say?

  You don’t want to think of your father. You don’t ever think about him—you have trained your mind to think away from him, to other things big, small, meaningful, meaningless. In your book you talked about his life in more general terms. His life is used as a symbol for irresponsible living. As a person, you do not discuss him in any detail: you’ve given him a nondescript life, “someone with Communist leanings” and you never mention him again.

  Your father was a Communist poet, for whom family was largely an inconvenience. When you were twelve, he’d decided to separate himself from his family to commit himself to the revolutionary cause. So he disappeared. Later, he went into hiding for being a left-wing political activist; he quit journalism and took up carpentry. But he remained active in organizing workers and protests and wrote poetry.

  All these years, you resented your father for his selfishness and for the suffering he inflicted on you and your mother for his idealism. Practical men, contrary to the idealists’ bias, are the least selfish: they even use selfishness to benefit their families and country. Artists, poets, writers—idealists, all sorts—hide their selfishness in the garb of philanthropy, and they end up doing more harm than good—to everyone, most of all their own selves and families. They are weak men who destroy others. Your father was a weak man.

  But when you were writing about your father in your book, you found yourself veering from this idea of your father’s life. Your memory hemorrhaged into images and incidents that you thought never happened. You found yourself sleepwalking through secret doors, segueing into things that didn’t fit the two dimensions of your life, falling through holes that led into vast halls of greater darkness.

  When writing the story of your life, you, for instance, remembered that your father did not abandon you entirely. He used to come pick you up from the house—even during his days of hiding. He’d take you to his new place outside the city, where he worked as a carpenter. You started remembering, and then, without realizing, started writing about those afternoons: your father camped on his knees, vigorously planing a block of wood. Bent over, one hand clamped on the wooden block and the other firmly pushing the planer over its surface. The pedestal fan behind his sweat-drenched back lying dead. The recursive sound of planer scraping the wood echoing through the room with his hard, cavernous breathing. The room feeling like a grimy pool of heat.

  He worked in that hard, resolute manner till his bushy brows were completely soaked up with sweat; he then paused, put aside the planer, took off his large square spectacles, tilted his head sideways, and wiped his brows with his finger. Sweat poured down his temples in a sudden stream and rapped the straw mat that he was squatting upon. He then walked up to the dirty orange watercooler, which had a dripping ice block piled on top of it and filled a big steel cup with water, and drank it in slow gulps.

  You wrote this and remembered more. You remembered the nights too.

  You were pressing his legs, with your little hands. You realized how his legs had grown thin, and he heaved loud and sibilant sighs when your fingers pressed into his calf muscles, which were stiff and knotty. After a while, your wrists began to ache and you asked, “Baba, should I stop?” He did not reply, so you covered his feet with the bedsheet and were about to get up when he said in his wispy, shredded voice, “You must say to yourself, ‘What a father. What a fucking father.’”

  For a minute, it was as if a flash exploded in your face. You did not move. It was too dark to see his face, but you were c
ertain that a tear was shuffling down his cheek. You took his cold, sweaty hand in yours and held it awkwardly. And obviously, it brought no relief to either of you. You were trying to console him, but even then you knew he was right. You did hate him for loving his revolution more than you and your mother. It was impossible to give him any consolation, so you just sat there quietly on his bed, listening to the bleached silence between both of you, collecting the frothy sounds of the passing cars. A few seconds later, he lapsed into mumbling angrily to himself. His eyes were aflutter, his head moved as if trying to encircle his escaping thoughts. Every few seconds he sucked in the air with a loud sibilance. “Yes, yes,” he’d say in his scratchy voice, and then lapse back into, “Hmm, hmm,” as if agreeing with somebody absent. When you drew out your hand from his, you realized that he was not holding it at all.

  These were pages that didn’t make it into your book but they all return to you jostling and clambering for space in the story of your life now as you’re lying chest down, shoulders down watching a cloud of dust billowing into the room through the empty window socket.

  This suddenly feels much worse than the terror you’ve felt.

  Or is it another face of the same fear?

  Listen: you look ridiculous, lying on your belly holding your breath like a lizard stuck on the ground darting its eyes both ways.

  You cautiously rise to your knees and walk up to the windows that are poking at the netting. Without touching anything, you peep through the side of the windows and see a lot of fire and dispersing men. From five stories above, you can discern a clear circumference of explosion. You quickly run your eyes, looking for guns, for somebody sitting in a sniper’s position—and find nothing. Everything is scratched and seared. Buildings like live charcoals. Smoke in hot black clouds. Tar and scrapes of fire.

  But now, so close to death, your mind is suddenly thinking about what you had written and discarded. You realize that you have suddenly become conscious of wounds you carried but could not see. Now looking out this broken window at people rushing toward sources of smoke, throwing water over burning cars and buses, you realize that what you had felt for your father was much worse than hate: it was a kind of love where it’s impossible to know what you want, and where every act of reaching out lacerates you more deeply, and expression is impossible because no matter how hard you try you’ll inevitably fall at odd angles to each other’s needs.