The Scatter Here Is Too Great

by Bilal Tanweer

  Perhaps your son feels the same way about you.

  And now you look at Noor Begum and realize you have no language to describe what you feel. No way to say how it wounds you to see her this way. Now, standing here, it is clear as day: more than anything else, you want to find words for what you feel and think and everything that is dark. And then this terrifying thought hits you: Yes: your father wrote poetry to find a language for his wounds. Yes: you in your own way have become your father.

  People are still pouring in toward cars and buses that stand blasted out of shape. Should you go downstairs and try to help? You see a car toppled over, as if it had stepped on the bomb and was flung up in the air. A man tears away from another burning car with a large scrap of metal sunk into the back of his shoulder. He’s screaming but his screams barely reach you. There is noise. People are shouting pointing to roasted bodies, skulls pierced with bits of shrapnel—soft and musty with blood. You pull away from the window with the image of a man squatting on the ground, holding his head.

  You recall your car was parked close to the building. You must go down to examine the damage.

  You ask your mother if she’s okay. If Noor Begum’s okay? She’s still moaning, “Hai, hai Allah, hai Allah . . .” Your eyes pause over the gentle throb of the jugular of Noor Begum’s neck, the raisin skin of her neck. She’s still alive. But is she well?

  You ask her to move to the other room with Noor Begum, which would cordon you from the worst, if it comes to it. You lift Noor Begum’s papery body in your arms. Her face still doesn’t seem to register anything. She stays numb and your mother gently lifts her dangling arm and wraps it around your neck. All of you move to the other room behind this one.

  Noor Begum’s clothes (white shalwar kameez, tiny roses) stink. You think of the security guard at the airport who was pushing her. You had recognized her voice as she hit the security guard’s chest with her fists telling him, “Let me go to Mecca, son, let me go to Mecca. I have been summoned, my son, let me go there. I have no one here, let me go.” The guard was speaking over the walkie-talkie, “Yes, there’s another one. Come get her. I am on duty.” You approached the woman and realized it was Noor Begum. “Is this your mother?” the guard asked rudely. You shook your head and told him you knew her, to which he said, “You know where she lives? Then take her away if you can. Otherwise these airport people will leave her somewhere on the highway and she might get hurt. Take her if you can.” What did he mean by leaving her on the highway? you had asked. “O Sir-ji, these old senile people show up at the airports asking to be sent to Mecca for Hajj, or to their children or relatives who have moved to other countries. They don’t know their addresses or anything else, so we put them in our car and leave them far away. They are a nuisance. Amma, get away from me . . .” He pushed her again. There was no point in taking Noor Begum to your own house. There was nobody there.

  You think about how you’re going to write about this incident in your book. Your father should be here any minute—wait, where was he . . .

  That moment you hear an almighty crash. You dash into the room and see the glass panes in a huge mess on the floor. The netting ripped and tattered.

  Your book needs to be rewritten.

  The door is still open.

  YOUR WOUNDS ARE YOUR EYES

  Ever seen a bullet-smashed windscreen?

  The hole at the center becomes an eye. You see less through it but you gain focus, sharpness. That’s how it is—our wounds become our eyes. Seeing outside becomes seeing inside.

  Listen.

  A Writer in the City

  The Truants

  The colorful tassels hanging from the ceiling bobbed above the bus driver’s head, the floral patterns flowing along the window panels turned into spirals and whorls and peacock feathers and feminine eyes, and the feisty colors of the ceiling—orange, blue, red and turquoise. . . . It had been four years since I had been on a bus and it was a sudden raging blaze of memory.

  I had not been on a bus since my father’s death four years ago, and it all came back in a rush: the noise and the clatter, the staring men and vexed faces. The fear and frenzy I was ridden with a minute ago—of having run away from school, of the possibility of having been spotted while scaling the wall, of not even knowing the bus routes to the sea—were replaced with a sudden, strange feeling, and I looked around the bus like a near-blind man straining to see in dim light. Just then, a hand prodded me, “What are you doing? Move!” Sadeq was trying to get in the bus and I was blocking the doorway. I took the seat on the right, next to the window. He came and sat next to me.

  “Are you sure no one saw you when you climbed up the wall after me?” I asked him. He was rolling up his sleeves in even folds.

  He dropped his sleeve abruptly and grabbed my face with both hands. “Nothing has happened! No one has seen us! Understand? No one!” He dropped my face and resumed folding his sleeves. A silence fell between us and I felt my ears heat up.

  The last kid who was caught bunking was caned in the school ground and then was left kneeling in the sun for the rest of the day. When he fainted from dehydration, his parents were called in and were humiliated in a parent-teacher conference, after which the boy was packed off with a one-month suspension certificate. I was sick with worry. My mother and I lived with my sister at her husband’s house, who also paid my school fee. He was a cloth wholesaler, a charitable man who staunchly believed in helping his relatives. He believed their well-being was a reflection on his person, and he never failed to have a low opinion of those who were well-off but did not help their extended families. He had taken my mother and me into his house when my father died. But he was also a violently unpleasant man. He did not mind cursing his wife when angry. That very morning I had heard him yell through his bedroom, “I will cut your throat, you hear! Don’t you ever take money from the cupboard without telling me. I’ll leave you out on the road! That’s not your property. They are savings SAVINGS! Bitch!” My sister emerged from the bedroom and went straight into the storeroom where she cried. My mother had left early for her job at the hospital and I was leaving for school.

  Now that I had run away, I was trying to suppress the fear of what would happen if he found out that I have been bunking school that he paid for with his money. I would be lifted from the school and made to roll cloth at one of his shops, and my mother and sister would bear his wrath for being ungrateful.

  Sadeq was annoyed at my questioning. He wasn’t used to such company. I was trying hard to be as tough as him. Just before getting on the bus I had asked him what if we got suspended from school? He replied without even thinking, “I don’t know, why are you even thinking all this? We are not going to be caught. And oh, so what if someone has even seen us? What are you going to do about it now?” He tapped my cheek and said, “Think positively, my dear.”

  To be honest, I did not even know why I was running away. I thought of it as a natural progression of the recent changes in my person. I was never a shy or timid boy, but recently I had turned a swashbuckler. I’d learned how to bludgeon boys’ egos, how to cut through their fathers, mothers, and sisters, and wipe walls with their blood. The eager audience of my classmates, I found, were ever ready, ever present to cheer and jeer at my victims. And frankly, there were very few who could withstand my blitzkrieg of abuses, cuss words, and filthy anecdotes about their mothers and sisters and bloody pimping fathers that I conjured and launched in just a few half-seconds.

  My improvised witticisms were in Urdu, most of them very dirty, usually ending in and around the anus (it was an all-boys school). I had mastered the art to such a degree that I could reduce even the most unsuspecting, sheepish boys to a violent desperation. I did not stand down until I gained complete submission—annihilation, if you may—that usually ended in my prey’s attempts to hit me (clumsy slaps, punch in the belly; but I usually got them before they could; grabbed them by their neck, most of them froze; if they didn’t, then I’d bring them down�
�boys immediately realize their place if they look up at you from down below; if someone threw a hapless hand or foot my way, a kick in the gut set him right); but in most cases they’d simply let out despairing expletives that fell on laughing boys’ ears. I was caught a few times: a punch on my ear and it bled; I was slapped this other time, again on my right ear, and it whistled all night, the guy who hit me was a lefty. Bastard. The fucker even scratched my face. I think he was going for the eye, but Sadeq belted his arms from the waist and yanked him out just in time.

  I was saved almost always by Sadeq’s interventions.

  Sadeq was someone I would have never befriended in ordinary circumstances: he hung out with the senior crowd of the school who smoked cigarettes and bunked classes—but he was the only one who had an answer to the darkness that had taken root in me after Baba’s death. With him around, I felt a crack of light in my darkness. I can’t say I felt happy around him, just more secure. He regularly thumped my back and said things like, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine, just don’t think about it” without even asking what bothered me. He didn’t wish to know. It was like that with him—he was not interested in emotional conversations. He was interested in people who could kick ass. And we were friends because I could: not with my fists but with my words. When it was just the two of us, he was interested in jokes. In fact, that’s what our friendship was founded on—I told him jokes, the general rule being the dirtier the joke, the better. We had started bunking classes about a month ago, and when he evolved the bunk into an escape from the school, I took the plunge to prove I could do it—and here we were.

  I looked around the bus and inspected the two kids with garbage sacks full of plastic bottles. They were stinking up the whole bus. My father would have struck up a conversation with them, asked their ages and places of residence, switched to their ethnic language and made them smile, and instructed them that they should go to the evening school his friend ran for children who were working. . . .

  It wasn’t nostalgia I felt, it wasn’t even longing, it was something more immediate, a kind of stumbling encounter with someone too important to be forgotten but who had been forgotten nonetheless and was now leaning his weight at the door I had closed.

  I felt a hurtling through my chest, a sudden rush of blood in my fingers—I was feeling weak and ambivalent. I put my head on my suitcaselike schoolbag and imagined him. He seemed far away, like a man in some story and I was with him, the character who was now breaking away from the narrative to dream his own dream.

  I am holding his finger and we are wading through the rush of the Empress Market. My hand is sweaty and I fear that it might slip. We are dressed in identical clothes; I am his microcopy, both of us are in white kurta-shalwar, straddling the mass of men. I am continually falling behind him—and holding his finger is only a tenuous connection: as if his finger would break in my hand and he’d walk off without even noticing. He walks oblivious of his own body; his hands look like lifeless lumps hanging from the beam of his shoulders. After walking for a while, I have only a vague sense of him; it is just his sweat-streaked white kurta that assures me of his presence as I follow him.

  We break into a less crowded area. He’s trailing a chant: “Po-etry, hist-ery, pheel-aasaphy, diee-gest, fayy-shion, booooks, all kinds, booooks, booooks!” It’s cloudy and pleasant but very humid and we are both sweating. He pauses abruptly, the finger I am holding feels stiffer: his eyes are set on something in the distance and his lower lip trembles. It means he is angry. I realize what he’s glaring at, but before I get a chance to distract him, he says, “Look, just look at the filthy bastard.” He is pointing to the man who is squatting and pissing on a wall in a corner.

  He loves the city and fully exercises his right to hate the transgressors who don’t love it as much as he does: I watch him as he lets his anger burn through him. It short-circuits him into one of his spiels about the Islamization of this country during the Zia regime and how they removed public toilets and urinals, believing them to be an un-Islamic way of pissing. “Now you have bastards like these who piss all over the city. . . .” He pauses and keeps staring. “So much for Islam improving us.” I tug at his finger to bump his mind again into the chant “Po-etry, hist-ery, pheel-aasaphy . . .”

  We make our way to the pushcart selling books. The bookseller’s face lights up upon seeing him. He shakes off my grip from his finger and embraces the bookseller’s hand. He then sifts through the stacks of books presented to him. I stand there bored while he has a chat with the bookseller about books, asking what-happened-to-that-one-I-asked-for type of questions. I’m not interested in books. I am still watching the filthy bastard who is now inserting a stone in his shalwar to dry the splattered piss-drops on his thighs and whereabouts. I feel a similar kind of hatred that my father channeled earlier—although I don’t really understand my reasons for feeling angry.

  Finally, my father’s done. He hands me a white plastic bag with a few books and we enter the crowd once again. “Baba, where are we going?” I ask.

  He smiles. “I’ll teach you how to love the city, my son.”

  I keep pausing and stretching out my other hand to keep people and their knees from bumping into me.

  Sadeq tapped me on the shoulder, “Oye, want to have a coconut?” I nodded and looked through the window on the road where a coconut hawker stood between two cars on the traffic signal. He was refreshing his sliced crescents,

  decorated in a flower arrangement, by splashing them with water using a steel glass.

  “How much?” I asked sliding my hand in my pocket to draw out the money.

  “Don’t worry about the money,” he said going to the window seat across from his. I didn’t understand and watched him assume a position like a jaguar waiting for prey: his hands on the window bar, his eyes fixed on the coconut seller scurrying nearer to our bus in search of potential customers. He waited, waited, and just as the coconut seller went past him from under the window, his hand snapped downward and pinched a slice that was lying loose in the puddle of water on the tray. He immediately leapt back across the aisle onto his seat.

  He looked at me with lit-up eyes, lifting the coconut slice caught in between his thumb and finger. “Yes!” He lifted his other hand for a high five. He broke the slice in two and I took the half he offered me. The taste of the scrubby-sweet-watery texture filled my mouth.

  “It’s just two rupees,” I said, trying to make my point casually. “Why take the risk?”

  “Abay, it is not about two rupees or five rupees,” he said looking at me, his face still red with the triumph. “It’s about practicing.” He smiled.

  “Practice?” I was puzzled.

  “Yes, if you’re going to get anywhere in this place, you must protect yourself from getting fucked, and the moment you get a chance, you must fuck the other person. You understand? That takes practice. Learn the lesson early,” he said exultantly, chucking the last bite of coconut in his mouth.

  The bus started moving. I looked out the window and caught a glimpse of the coconut seller rearranging the slices on the tray. I felt a sting: he seemed to be counting for the missing.

  Right then, I realized Sadeq was conversing with an odd-shaped head wiggling in front of him. “My knee, you know, I cannot sit in that seat,” it was saying to him. “Can I sit here, please hunh? You can take my seat, it’s right here, just behind this one, hunh?”

  Sadeq made a face and moved to the seat behind ours. A short, crooked man in a light crumpled red-checked shirt appeared beside me. His head was sparsely haired and defined like an overgrown lightbulb which was screwed with a tiny mouth. He had no teeth on the upper level, and the ones below, which he used for smiling continuously, jutted out in a constant display. I noticed the top buttons of his shirt were loose and revealed the crinkly skin of his chest.

  He smiled looking at me as I ate the last bit of my coconut. I nodded and turned to look out of the window. He tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the red ch
ecks on my bag. “Your bag matches my shirt—huee huee!” he said, looking amused.

  I smiled and looked away again.

  He paused and then leaned closer to whisper in my ear, “Run from school, eh?”

  Before I could reply, I heard his sniggering laughter. “Huee huee huee! I used to do the same . . . run from school. In fact, I ran away from college then from work. And now I am retired, I run away from my home!”

  I was unsure about how to react to this information. He continued, “You know, I don’t go home for days because I like it here in the city—around all the noise and people.”

  “Hmm . . .” I nodded.

  “You know what I do around here?” he said somewhat triumphantly, after a thoughtful pause. “Guess?”

  I looked at him completely puzzled. “I don’t know?”

  “Huee huee . . . I look for others who have run away and I write their stories. I am a writer,” he said with emphasis and looked at me with a delighted expression. His abundant glee disturbed me and I think he detected my discomfort. He immediately added, “All of it completely imaginary, of course.”

  “Hmm . . .” I said.

  “Here, shake my hand,” he said. “You are my friend now.” He pushed his hand forward. I looked at it, and reluctantly gave him mine. He snapped it. His jaw jutted out, and from his open mouth, I saw the broken architecture of his teeth. He had a surprisingly powerful grip. “You see the power in this hand?” he said, his face glowing. “You know how old I am?”