The Scatter Here Is Too Great

by Bilal Tanweer

  “Where are you going?” she asked in her sleep.

  “To the other room,” I said.

  “Watch your step,” she said.

  Aapa was awake. She opened the door when I knocked on it. When I told her that Nani asked about her afternoon visits, her eyes grew big and she covered her face and said, “What did you tell her?”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  She became quiet and said, “Go to sleep.”

  I could not see her face because it was very dark.

  After that Aapa stopped going out in the afternoons and Nani sometimes came to check what we were doing. She asked Aapa about things she had given her to do and checked how she did them. But Aapa did not look happy and she became quiet as well. She would not even talk to me while she was washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen.

  I saw Nani watching and standing near the chicks’ home a few times. She asked me about them and I told her what they did and what they talked to each other about all the time. I also told her they missed Za very much because he was the nicest one of them all.

  Kha (the red one) also died. I don’t know why. I think because he ate dirty ants and dust. Even though I told him so many times to only eat what I gave him (I gave him bread crumbs and rice and other clean and nice things) and not to go around eating everything he found on the ground, but he ate all those dirty things and one day when I woke up I saw he was limping and could not stand. He did not eat or start running when I took him out of the house. He just sat there with his eyes closed.

  I was sad when he died. And for two or three or four nights, Aapa did not tell me any new story as well. “I don’t know any stories about chicks.” She also said she did not know any more stories. One or two times she read them from the magazines. They were happy stories but I did not like them. She could not even tell me why the evil sorcerer did not marry the princess and why he was waiting for the prince to arrive, wasting so much time. Aapa did not like that story either. She seemed angry.

  Only Ta was left to play with me. In the afternoon, Aapa quietly took out the phone from Nani’s room for a few minutes and took it inside her own room. (It had a long wire, not like the phone in our house, which cannot be taken anywhere because it has such a short wire.) I played with Ta when Aapa was talking quietly on the phone, but Ta did not like to play with me. He liked to be alone. He ate what I gave him and sometimes jumped as well, but he did not run like Za and Kha. So I sat in the corner and watched him walk around the kitchen.

  Then one night Aapa said she will tell me a new story. The Speaking Bird and the Singing Tree.

  Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl who was always sad for no reason. She had three princes who loved her and wanted to marry her. She liked one of them but she could not express her love to him, because if she declared her love for him the other two might kill him. So one day, that sad girl was sitting outside her house waiting for the vegetable hawker to buy vegetables when this very, very old woman suddenly appeared and said, “My lovely girl, the reason you are unhappy is because you don’t have the speaking bird and the singing tree.” The girl was surprised when she heard this. She asked immediately, “Where can I find this, my dear old woman?”

  The old woman told her where she should go to find it. It was in the Dark Mountains (they were Dark Mountains because all their rocks were dark gray). But the old lady warned her: “Remember: when you are climbing the mountain, don’t turn around and look at what’s behind you. Remember that, just don’t turn around.”

  The girl agreed to go. But when she told her plans to the princes who loved her, they persuaded her not to go and said they would go instead and get the speaking bird and a branch of the singing tree for her. In return, she promised to marry whoever brought her the singing tree and the speaking bird.

  Because she loved one of the princes and wanted him to win, she only told him about the warning of the old woman. “Remember, don’t turn when you are climbing the mountain,” she whispered in his ear as she saw him off.

  The first prince climbed in haste and his foot slipped, and to save himself from falling, he looked back and immediately turned to stone. The second prince when climbing thought that someone was throwing stones at him. He turned to see who it was and as soon as he turned, he turned to stone. The third prince, the one the girl loved and wanted to marry, was also the most cautious and intelligent of the three. When he was climbing the mountain, he saw many stone sculptures of young men. He paused to examine them. Suddenly he heard some noise. He remembered the warning so he did not turn and continued his journey onward. As he went farther, he started hearing even stranger noises—like witches coming after him. But still he did not turn. Finally everything became calm and peaceful. He was very tired and thought he had reached the end of his journey. His heart was full of joy. He looked up to the sky full of stars and felt the cool breeze. He wanted to talk to someone about it. Suddenly, he heard the voice of the beautiful girl he loved. As soon as he turned to look, he too turned to stone.

  “The rest of the story I will tell you tomorrow,” Aapa said. I said all right. I knew what was going to happen anyway. The girl would go to the Dark Mountain herself and get the bird and singing tree. But what would happen to the princes who had turned to stone?

  The next afternoon Aapa and Nani had to go visit the neighbors for Qur’an khwani. So in the afternoon, Nani and Aapa wore nice clothes and went next door where lots of women with colorful clothes were also coming and taking off their slippers outside the house.

  After a while, I got very bored. Ta was not playing. He just went and stood in a corner, and I missed Za and Kha. I took him onto the balcony, which he liked. I had to stop him always from going near the edge where he could fall off. I wanted to show him something in the big ground in front of us, but instead we talked about the moon. I told Ta that the moon is not supposed to be there in the morning because it is the sun’s time, but Ta had gone back inside the house. I put him in his house again and went out to look for Aapa.

  I could not find her slippers in all the slippers lying outside the door of our neighbor where the Qur’an khwani was happening. Then I climbed the stairs and smelled the perfume she put on herself in the afternoons. I ran up the stairs, two flights, and there I saw Aapa and the boy who had been looking into our house from his window without a shirt. He was wearing a shirt now and had his hand behind Aapa’s back and his mouth was on her neck. I shouted, “Oye! What are you doing?”

  Aapa pushed him away and came toward me. “Why, why have you come here?” When she came near me, she stopped and covered her face with her hand. I turned and I saw what Aapa saw: Nani was standing halfway up the stairs looking at Aapa and the boy.

  What happened after that was just noise and shouting. Nani started shouting and all the women from the Qur’an khwani came out. And then Nani started crying, saying that oh our honor is destroyed our honor is destroyed. This girl has destroyed our honor. All we had was our honor and this girl destroyed it all.

  Someone told me to go inside, you are a child, and then locked me in from outside.

  I stood near the door and heard lots of cries and shouts. When Aapa came back with Nani both of them were crying and Nani was angry and shouting at her. Aapa’s hair was over her face. She went straight into the room and closed the door and locked the door. Nani was cooking food and kept on saying I told your parents I told them that they should get this girl married. The world is already so corrupt. I told them. Now see what has happened. Our honor is lost. Now who is going to marry this girl? The whole world knows. This girl has destroyed our honor. We’re faceless. We can’t show our face to anyone. It is all gone, our honor, our respect, all gone. . . .

  When Nani went into her room that night, I took some water for Aapa and knocked at her door. She opened after a long time. She was crying.

  After that Aapa did not speak with anyone for a long time and just cried. Nani also kept on saying things to her as if she was saying them to hersel
f but really she was saying them to Aapa.

  I really wanted Aapa to finish that story of the singing tree and speaking bird.

  We went back to our house when Amma and Baba returned. Nani told them what Aapa had done. She made it look so bad. Baba was very angry and Amma started crying. But then we went home and things became all right, but Aapa was not allowed to go out of the house without permission. And Baba stopped talking with her properly.

  The end of the story was this. Aapa told it to me one night in our home some time afterward.

  The girl waited for the princes to come back for a long time, but when they did not return she sets out to get the speaking bird and singing tree herself. When she was scaling the Dark Mountain she saw the prince she loved as a stone sculpture. She also heard all kinds of sounds and screams but she didn’t turn and reached the top of the mountain. There she found the speaking bird, which greeted her and told her where she could find the singing tree. The girl then went to the singing tree and broke a branch for herself. The girl then tapped the branch on all the people who had turned to stone and they became human again. They thanked the girl and went home.

  “So, does she marry the prince she loved?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Aapa said. She got off the bed and straightened the blanket over my feet. “When she tapped the branch of the speaking tree on them and they all turned into humans again, they were all the same to her. The one she loved and those she didn’t had turned all the same.”

  I thought about that but I did not understand it so I asked her if she knew any more happy stories. She said, “Yes, I do. It’s a very short story though.”

  She told me this story about a little prince who kept crying because he wanted the moon. He wanted to play with it like a toy. Each night he would look at the moon and start crying. Then suddenly his mother, the queen, thought of an idea. She brought out a large bowl of water in which the moon was reflected. When the little prince saw the moon in the water, he started playing with it.

  After that story I gave Ta a little tub of water so that he could look at himself and not miss Kha and Za. But when I came back to play with him, I saw he had drowned in it. His beak was open and he was just lying there dead and his pink feathers were filled with water.

  I buried him like that, soggy and cold, with Za and Kha in the flower pot. I also understood why Aapa stopped telling me happy stories.

  GOOD DAYS

  It’s one thing when you’re cruising on a steady honk, going wham wham past everything, and one thing else when you go slow and easy, reading number plates, matching them with a number inside your head.

  “2219, na?!” Pannoo shouts. “2219! I found it!” His hand flies off the steering wheel and flaps in the air.

  Chuchu’s on the passenger seat. He leans into Pannoo’s side of the windscreen. “Where?” he asks.

  “Ha! That’s 22-7-9!” I say, laughing. “You so chutiya, Pannoo!”

  Pannoo realizes he’s misread. Chuchu sees it too. For two seconds it’s like their brains are parked in darkness.

  “Ugh,” Chuchu grunts.

  “Can’t you READ?” I laugh louder. “Oye Pannoo, you smoked UP? Chuchu, you should get somebody who can READ.” I feel a surge of happiness for saying this to Pannoo, to his face, to his fucking chicken chutiya face I love to loathe.

  It gets him all right. He turns around and I see my face—a blue twisted oval—in his big bad shades.

  “What happened, mister chut?” I smile. “Are you trying to scare me? Hoohoohoo, I’m scared.”

  He keeps looking at me—for three seconds straight. The car is moving at a good thirty or forty or something. It’s scary. This chutiya is capable of all things. And like that: ALL things. Days back, he bit off somebody’s earlobe in a friendly scuffle and then spit the piece of the guy’s ear into his palm. I don’t want him to keep looking at my face, so I point to the windscreen and shout, “Watch it!” And that does it—he hits the brakes without even turning around. The car screech-stops in the middle of the road and for half a second we are eating the air from the shock. Then we are banged in by something. My face hits the seat and I get a rash knock in my jawbone.

  I turn around and see the traffic curving around our car. But there’s nothing behind us.

  “Nothing happened, right?” I ask.

  Pannoo’s hands are clamped on the steering wheel. “Shut him up, Chuchu,” he says. Clearly, he doesn’t care what we’ve hit.

  “Shut up you both—” says little Chuchu, acting like our big brother. He gets out of the car; I follow.

  We find a motorcycle half-buried beneath the rear of our car. Chuchu’s helping a middle-aged man stand up. The man’s short and fat and looks like a tree stump, clumps of hair climbing out of his open shirt collar, and a lush beard cropped close to his face. It’s a nice beard, actually; I’d like to have one like it one day. I pull out the motorcycle from under the car and walk it to him on the footpath. It’s all scratched up from the side.

  I pat the man on his shoulder in a friendly way. “Just watch how you drive, boss.”

  “Did I say anything to you, HAAN!” he starts yelling. “Did I say it was YOUR mistake!” He’s angry at us for something else I feel. Some anger already inside him boils its way into his voice. He looks funny, like a fuming truck. I look at him for two seconds and then I start laughing. He twists his mouth a little and stares at me.

  “You have a nice beard,” I say, laughing.

  That’s when people start gathering. What happened? What happened?

  We return to the car, leaving the guy holding his arm.

  I am still laughing.

  “What? Any trouble?” Pannoo asks.

  No answer.

  “Why is he laughing? What’s so funny?” Pannoo asks again.

  “Nothing. The man’s hurt his arm,” replies Chuchu.

  “What was he saying? Did he ask for money?”

  Chuchu doesn’t reply.

  “Are you going to tell me—what was the man SAYING?” Pannoo asks again.

  “He was saying NOTHING!” Chuchu bursts out. “Let’s find the fucking car, shall we?”

  He gets like this, Chuchu; hurts and smarts like a fucking human being. Still too soft for our kind of work.

  The plan is simple: to make it impossible to locate 2219. That’s my ticket to watch Chief getting kicked in the balls and, who knows, to put an end to this company.

  This company has a name: Chief Security Services, but when Chief and I started out, we simply used to call it Uchakkas—very loosely, The Lifters. Our task is to locate and recover cars that are on the List.

  The List comes from the bank, of cars whose installments have not come in for three months or more. We have the bank’s license and court’s permit to do this, but at the end of the day, it’s a private business. That is, nobody’s going to step in and save us if somebody sends a bamboo ripping up through our ass and beyond. Get this: nobody. The good thing is we have guns and can shoot in self-defense. We have court protection for that.

  How I joined this business is a story. I was out of college and doing nothing when Chief asked me to become a partner in his company. That was two years back. It would be just the two of us, he said. We’ll keep it low-key; share the profits—forty, sixty.

  Forty percent looked good to me, especially because I was not doing any of the accounts or anything in the office. He explained how it worked. He got me a gun, the permits, and for transport we were going to ride his bike. We were set.

  Our first case, we were looking for a maroon Nissan Sunny that had vanished; no traces. We tried the standard methods: called the guy up, said words to the women in the house, sent a few drunken boys to smash a few things outside his house, but the bastard knew somebody who knew somebody-lawyer who sent legal notice to the bank for harassment who sent bamboos up our chutes and we had to stop the indirect methods. Then one day early in the morning, too early, Chief called and said he had picked up the trail of the c
ar.

  When we got there we found the car outside the man’s house; his wife was in the driver’s seat, brushing her cheek with a blush-on when Chief walked up from the side and pulled out the gun at her. She howled and flashed her nail-polished hands at his face. He backed up a couple of steps and kicked the side of the door, and yelled at her out of his gut, his sticky early morning spit flying out of his mouth. When she stepped out of the car, Chief caught her arm and yanked her aside and got into the car. He was about to turn the ignition when a stinking meat-heap of a man walked out the door with a pistol hanging in his hand. He pointed it at Chief’s car but before he could fire, I fired two shots in the air. He sneaked back in and fired at my bike. I didn’t get hit but the fucker tried. We drove off to the police station to get the FIR registered and report the car as Recovered. That was the first case, and it taught me my most important lesson: even when it gets messy, get out as cleanly as possible.

  But I knew nothing about the insides of the business, did not know how much money we were making. I just kept what the Chief gave. But then I noticed him getting rich: in three months he got a new bike and in nine months he got his new car. On my side, in nine months I had just enough to get comfortable on a new bike; sure, I had other expenses, but I could not afford a new car, no way. So I told Chief, It doesn’t look to me to be adding up. He got angry without even asking what I meant and shot back, saying that I was accusing him of stealing the money. I said I said no such thing but in all that shouting he let on that he had been keeping a percentage for the office and extra for his wages as an accountant and manager and other things. Then he started pulling out the account books and tried explaining everything. But by that point I just didn’t care. I knew he was a cheat. Then I got loud and he lost it and then we fought properly without any holding back.

  That same day I fought with Sehr.

  Sehr was this girl I had lost my head for. I was blinded by her, but I did not know what I wanted from her except that I wanted her completely. She told me to quit this job and find something else. I tried to explain to her that this work, yes, it looked dirty, but it was totally legal. I even showed her the license and court permits for everything. She did not agree. Came a point when she said she was going to marry somebody else. It was her age to get married and I wasn’t looking like a good idea to her. I was in pieces.