The Scatter Here Is Too Great

by Bilal Tanweer

  My hand was hurting. I looked around to see Sadeq. He had dozed off on his seat. “No,” I said, trying to pull away my hand. It struck me how large his hands actually were.

  “Guess?”

  “Eighty-three!” I blurted out of sheer pain.

  “Yes! Eighty-three! I turned eighty-three yesterday! See I told you people who run away are friends!” He released my hand. I felt the crushing pain in my hand but I didn’t look at it. “I will write your story now,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  “To the sea?” I said reluctantly.

  “Ha-ha! That’s where they all go when they run away at first! But then they all come back. The sea, you see, feels good for only a few days, but then it starts suffocating you. You first escape to the sea to escape yourself, but after a while that’s all you find there. City is better that way. There are too many lanes and alleys. You never run into yourself there.” Then he leaned closer and said again in a whisper, “I spend my day in a café at Cantt Station. It has delicious fruitcake: cheap. Chai, so strong. Omelet, very reasonable rate. That’s where you should come as well after you’re tired of the sea. Okay? Look for me. I am there. Writer.”

  “And yes, don’t let them confuse you—” he said, still smiling, as if reassuring me of something he thought I was afraid of. “They will tell you all kinds of things, philosophies—huee huee—like I am doing now—huee huee! But that is all bogus stuff. All this philosophy business is bogus—even mine, huee huee huee. . . . It’s all meant to trap. Don’t listen to anyone. Just keep running away. . . .”

  He went on for some time, but I stopped paying attention to what he was saying. Something about him disturbed me, something about the way he spoke about the city. He got off with us at the Cantt Station and pointed me to the café he was talking about. He made the handshaking joke with Sadeq too; he was unable to guess his age.

  While we were waiting for the next bus to the sea, we watched the old man hobble along the sidewalk. He was cripplingly old and permanently bent. He waved to a select few faces as he went along the sidewalk—the cobbler, the paan seller, the little boy carrying tea, all of them stopped their work to exchange a word with him. He balanced himself by holding their shoulders. A little boy jumped when he pressed his hand. I heard his “Huee huee huee!” in my head.

  “What a jerk! The bugger has totally lost it with age, eh?” Sadeq said, smiling. I didn’t like that but I kept quiet.

  We got on the bus. I felt my father’s presence once again. It seemed to me he was there even when the old man was around, listening to him talk about his city.

  “What was the bugger saying to you?” Sadeq asked as we seated ourselves in the bus again.

  “Nothing, he was just proving to me how retarded he was. Telling me his adventures with whores.”

  “What! Whores! Are you serious?” He jumped.

  “Yeah. He even told me about a whorehouse near here, just behind some café. He said he was going there. He offered to fix us with some for cheap rates if we wanted. He said he was a pimp.”

  “Oh yeah? Then why didn’t he tell me that? Old bastard! But we should go! We should be careful. That’s how they lure boys and then fuck them, ya? He looked like a bastard to me. I could tell by the way he pressed my hand. Bhen ka. It still hurts.”

  “Yeah, but we should visit him sometime. He said he hangs out in that café.”

  “Ha-ha, yes, yes. But I didn’t know you were into this stuff.”

  “I’m not. But I think it’s about time I should start getting into this stuff, no?”

  “Ha-ha, yes yes. Why not. We could start together. I have a couple of reliable links. You know, whores are shady people. You have to be careful. They have contacts with the police and ministers. They cut your dick if you mess with them. Be careful. That’s what I’ve heard from friends.”

  There was a pause. “Oh, so I was thinking”—he smiled—“about that joke you told me a few days back—the lion one, what was it? Tell it to me again. It was really funny, that one. I want to memorize it for my friends.”

  “Ha-ha, not now,” I said.

  “What do you mean not now?”

  “I mean I don’t feel like it?”

  “Abay you fucked-up? Why not?”

  I looked at him in the eye; I knew he’d be sore if I refused—but I really didn’t want to talk about it, especially because I wasn’t feeling good. The old man was nice to me—I shouldn’t have said all that about him.

  I wanted to refuse, but then I just decided to get it over with quickly. The joke went something like this:

  Once upon a time a fox goes outside a lion’s lair and starts swearing at the lion who is sleeping inside: “Oh fuck you, you cur! If you have any shame, come out and get me! Who’s made you the king, you whore! Hey bastard, come now!” The lion glances at the fox with one eye still closed and turns over and continues sleeping. The fox continues to swear at the lion, and then even goes on to challenge his manhood. The lioness, who is witnessing all this, is outraged: “What kind of a lion are you? Go get this half-breed of a fox, otherwise I’ll have to do something!” When the lion ignores her as well, the lioness roars and runs after the fox. The fox dodges her and leads her into a hole in a tree trunk, through which the fox slips but the lioness gets stuck because of her bigger behind. The fox comes around and does a job on her backside—and disappears happily. When she finally returns to the den, she finds her husband angrily pacing up and down. He bursts out the moment he sees her, “Are you happy now? Why do you think I was so sleepy? I was fucked five times last night!”

  Sadeq laughed hard (“Ha-ha-ha! Five times! Fox! Ha-ha-ha!”). I turned away to look outside the window.

  We are sitting on a footpath, facing the Empress Market-bustle and sharing a glass of lemonade from the pushcart. Before us, the perennial Empress Market traffic jam: cars, rickshaws locked behind buses on the narrow strip of road, and the buses, gurring their engines as they wait for their seats to fill up before taking off.

  My head feels hot and my tears are drying on my face. The slipper on my foot seems a dead, dust-ridden animal with a broken strap and mauled face.

  It happened very quickly: I tripped and fell while trying to keep up with his pace. My slipper got lost under hundreds of feet. He had turned immediately and lifted me up. “Are you okay?” he asked in a worried tone. I told him to find my slipper, which he did. But without realizing, I was crying—my palms and elbows were scratched with blood and dust, the skin grazed and burning.

  Soft drinks are a luxury my father cannot afford, but I am a crying child, so he takes me to the lemonade pushcart. He watches me with a smile while I slurp it up. I ask him, “Baba, aren’t you thirsty?” He shakes his head. I forcefully give him a sip. He takes a sip and returns it to me. He’s a storyteller and he’s looking at the buildings, as if daydreaming what it’s like to be inside. He has receded into his recollection mood. He points me to the blue Konica 1-hour photo board in front of us. “When I was in college, instead of that, there was a horse-riding cap store. This place was the heart of the city, cleanest in all of the city. The most chic crowd came here. That building you see there was a billiard room. Expensive stuff. We couldn’t go there on our student budget. That corner store, which is selling cheap socks, was a cabaret and a bar. But come.” He gets up and we walk.

  He walks the streets with his arms spread wide, his chin cocked up. He walks as if he owns the city. We dodge a few pushcarts and he pauses to let a man complete spitting his phlegm in front of him. He stares at the man, who does not pay any attention to him. I pull him on and we then run to cross the road to reach the sidewalk of a park where the air turns into an incredible stench of piss. He points me to the building in front of us, which is a crumbling colonial facade on top and a camera store below. “That was the India Coffee House,” he says. “All the intellectuals, poets, and artists came there. You remember the sketches I have at home? All of them were made by my friend Salahuddin over a cup of tea. Ev
eryone I met, everything I know about life and politics, I learned from there. I came here with my friends after college, which was near the old Karachi University campus.” He takes a pause to laugh. “The owner of that place used to shout when he looked at me: Ho ho! Here he comes, our young intell-kachool!”

  I look at his smiling face and then turn to look at the decrepit old building and try to reconcile the emotion. It is then, perhaps, for the first time I am confronted with the fact that places and people are like things: both made of memories and meaningful to us in the same way: we construct ourselves in our conversations with them.

  I am perhaps too young to realize all this, but my relationship with the city has already been established. It is one of perpetual loss.

  Sadeq and I sat on the ledge facing the sea, our shirts filled with the gusty breeze. Our frenzied excitement upon first seeing the sea had subsided, and now we were flicking roasted chickpeas into our mouths. We were calm and without the need to speak with each other.

  The sea at 11:00 A.M. was one Karachi dream that came true each day. It was one part of the city that remained as it ever was: a vast desert of water meeting a uniform spread of gray sand that shimmered with litter in sunlight: plastic bags lolled their heads in the constant wind, half-buried glass bottles stuck their radiant necks out of the sand, varieties of seaweed lay wasted like old mop cloths, and the sea breeze was forever at work scrubbing sand on everything that interrupted its movement. And then, the crows—everywhere. The sea was full of them. We watched them as they scampered, all at the same instant, lunging and snatching after a piece of bread or any desirable or shiny object—they made one-legged, lopsided landings, flipping and flailing in the sea breeze and colliding into one another without caring a damn about anything. And then after eating the piece of bread or whatever they scavenged, they played among themselves with the wild abandon of children still learning the rules of the game. In some sense, the crows embodied the spirit of the city itself. To me, they looked like litter with wings.

  A couple had veered too close to us. The boy was wearing tight jeans and in one of his hands he was turning a key chain. They had their backs toward us and were walking toward the sea with their bodies rubbing each other’s. The boy put his arm around her. He snuggled his face in the girl’s hair and kissed her on the neck.

  “Ha-ha! Did you see that?” I exclaimed to Sadeq.

  I realized he had been looking at them for some time.

  “Yes,” he said, not taking his eyes away from them.

  “Just look at the guy! He’s got the face of a shaved chicken. Even he’s got a girl.”

  They took off their sandals where the wet sands began and then began walking barefoot toward the water. At one point, the girl stopped and pulled the boy back with his sleeve. She pointed him toward the footprint he’d just made on the sand. The boy bent down to look at the footprint closely and clutched the girl’s bare ankle. Both of them laughed as she tried to release her leg from his grip.

  “You don’t need a face to get a girl, my dear,” Sadeq said, still holding his stare. “You need balls that weigh two grams more than the rest of them. That’s all.”

  I am sitting with Baba on the roof of a tall building and we are both looking down. It is like flying, really—so little noise, full of air and happiness. You look below and think the world is a lovely thing playing many games. Cars are small, buildings have shapes, and everything moves in regular clumps within the straight lines of the roads.

  “You see, my son, a city is all about how you look at it,” he says, looking at me. “We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.”

  I sit with him and imagine myself going up even higher, on some even taller building, as high as the sky itself. I imagine everything becoming so small that the world becomes a dot. A dot full of games. I see that little dot in my head and feel elated because it has all the cars, roads, buildings, Baba, I and Amma, and my school. Everything.

  That is how I first desire the city.

  “So should we go and eat something? Do you see a bun-kebab stall here?” he said, flicking the last chickpea in his mouth. But it missed its mark as he abruptly turned around. Two policemen stood behind us, open collars; the one with the baton had tapped Sadeq’s shoulder.

  “What are you two doing here oye?” one of them asked, who looked like the senior officer.

  “Nothing. Talking. What’s wrong?” Sadeq replied.

  “Talking? Ha!” He turned to the other and winked. “We know what that means. What are you two really doing?”

  “O why don’t you speak oye?” He paused to examine us, and then his belligerent tone turned malicious. “Have we caught you doing something, eh?”

  I felt my tongue disappear.

  “What do you mean, sir?” Sadeq replied firmly, his face flushed.

  “What do I mean? Hmm.” His baton began tracing Sadeq’s arm. It jumped to his waist and curved around his pelvis and hovered there for a few seconds and then started touching up his testicles. Sadeq twitched.

  “Skipping school to have some one-to-one fun, eh?” he sneered. “Let’s take them to the station. We can teach them about some real one-to-one fun there,” he indicated to the other fellow.

  “Sir, sir, we are just students, sir,” I blurted. “We are not skipping school, sir. It’s the last day of our exams and we got off early and thought we should come here. . . .”

  He wasn’t listening. He asked for our IDs and told the other policeman, who was the junior officer, to take down our names and school names. Then he walked ahead and we followed behind him with the junior officer. After we had walked a little, the senior policeman stopped outside a paan stall to get a pack of cigarettes. When he was gone, Sadeq said to the junior guy, who was standing with us, “Can something be done? You know with some fees we can pay here?”

  The second fellow looked at us sympathetically. “Hmmm . . . I can try. Do you have something?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, and started pulling out the money from my pocket. Seeing the one-rupee bills, he was irritated and said, “Are you kids messing with me? See the sir’s shoulder—he has two stars!” He turned to Sadeq. “What do you have?”

  Sadeq turned his pockets and took out one ten-rupee note. He grabbed it. “Okay, go. I will speak to Sir. No, no keep those.” He pointed to my handful of one-rupee notes I was pushing toward him.

  Both of us walked in the other direction as fast as we could, almost running. It was strange, because we were next to the open sea, always in sight, no place to hide, and they were right behind us. For all I knew, they could arrest us again for running away while in custody.

  “Should we throw a rock at him? Smash the bastard’s head?” Sadeq said in a vengeful tone.

  “What?! At who?”

  “It’s easy, they won’t be able to catch us. Look at the bellies of those fuckers. They won’t come after us. We can just run away. What do you say?”

  “No!” I said incredulously.

  “It’s easy. We’ll just hit them and get out, get on a bus or something.”

  “No! It will get us into trouble! You don’t fight with crazy men on the streets.”

  “But the bastards . . . they . . .” His hardened face suddenly broke into tears. I stood there watching him as he tried to push his tears back into his tough exterior.

  I did not know what to do. He covered his face with his elbow and sobbed. Finally, I put my hand around him. “Let’s sit.” I glanced backward; the policemen were walking away from us in the other direction.

  Sadeq sat with me on the ledge, sniffling, rubbing his eyes. I felt calm myself. The air was punctuated with his sniffles. We did not speak.

  I was looking toward the sea: the waves arriving calmly then scattering on the shore. One reared its head above the body of the water far away, gained shape nearing the shore and along its path, gulped many tiny wav
elets, and then it hit the shore and simply dissipated and shimmered back into the sea.

  Amazingly, I was not thinking of Sadeq or the policeman. I thought of the old man. He seemed a man who existed only in stories. I began remembering things he’d said that I thought I had ignored. He said some really strange things. “The only thing you have is what’s inside of you. Be hungry for your heart. Find it. Run away with it. Marry it. People just forget their hearts and do philosophies. Huee huee! When I run away I begin to feel my heart. I am usually in that café, eating fruitcake—but don’t tell anybody—it’s our secret, okay? Huee huee huee! And no, you can never run away from fruitcake and chai. Huee hueeee!”

  I realized the old man had given a voice to something in me that had been buried under a different voice that had imperiously ruled my life. I imagined sitting with this old man in the café, listening to his stories, surrounded by the shouting bus drivers and paan sellers, and the hotel waiters. I imagined shaking his hand again, traveling on a bus with him. And even though I was only a reluctant truant, I had no doubt that we were friends. The thought made me happy.

  Sadeq and I finally got on the bus to return. He had gone completely quiet, and I did not wish to speak to him anyway.

  I wanted to stop at the Cantt Station and look for the café but the bus conductor said no bus was going there and instead would go straight to Shahrah-e Faisal from Teen Talwar. It was closed for some official function. “Where do you want to go? Take out the money.”

  I paid him the fare and looked at the sea in my window that we were rapidly passing by. I dreamed of being surrounded by it. I wanted to lose all land. I wanted to suspend myself in the vast blue, where the same sea reenacts itself all around me. It was another way to look at the city. That was how I desired the city the second time.