The Scatter Here Is Too Great

by Bilal Tanweer

  In my memory, I looked hard at them, but I couldn’t understand what they meant. Along the street level, I was reading signs outside old establishments offering cheap and dirty stays to travelers and residents—I paused to look at one that offered haircuts, steam baths, and massage. A few meters up, a crowd was gathered around the intracity bus terminal; people were piling on top of the roofs of the buses because all seats were taken. In the apartment building just above the bus terminal, a man’s thick arms hung out of the railings of his third-floor balcony. He wore a vest and shalwar and he was yelling to a man below who was waving something in his hand. Beside the man in the vest, a woman was hanging clothes on the clothesline.

  The other name I had read on the register of the dead at the hospital was Comrade Sukhansaz. He was one of my father’s dearest friends and a man I had known since I was a child. It occurred to me that his family also lived in one of the apartments adjacent to Cantt Station. Was he on his way to meet his family when the blast happened? Was he leaving? Did he come and decide it was not a good idea to meet them? He used to say to my father that marriage was his biggest comfort and his biggest mistake. After his son was born, he said, he had started feeling alienated from his work that he had dedicated his life to. He cared only about his son. Nothing else was important to him anymore. “That scared me,” he said. “I realized it had to be one thing: family or revolution. But a man is allowed only one irreparable mistake in his life—then at least he can work his life out so as to justify the mistake. But I made two. Having a child was a mistake because of my work. And when my son was born I realized committing to my work was a mistake. You know what Gautama said? There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to Truth: not going all the way, and not starting. I think I made both. Two mistakes make a man blind. You lose your ability to see and understand things. You go mad. Mad.”

  I was standing somewhere near where the curve of the bridge peaked. The sky from the bridge looked a white metal sheet. This bridge was one of the few places I visited often. On this bridge, the world made sense, even if momentarily. I had spent many hot afternoons standing here, feeling the feral breeze of this city, and staring at the railway tracks forking below—abandoned and alone for miles, and watching the kites scout the skies overhead, and pigeons, crows, and sparrows beneath them, all pursuing their always scramble. On the bridge you could stand aside, and simply observe the enormous angry mad busy world rushing past you.

  I began dreaming of Sadeq with whom I had spent most evenings during the last three years, listening to his daily digest of car recovery stories, his musings on love, his weird descriptions of people and places in his angry, funny, doped-up voice. We were friends in school who lost each other afterward but then we rediscovered our friendship again after college.

  Back in the school, we hunted as a pair. I had a sharp tongue and he was a bully, full of untamed flair. But during the years of his absence he had turned into a hard, angry, vengeful spirit who reveled in the fear and intimidation he caused. He said he cared very little for the world. But the truth was different. He was running away from things he loved. (In that sense we were alike.) In his crooked messy way he did love people. And in his ways, he found that love reciprocated too. But he carried guilt for not being able to give himself up to what he loved; he hated himself for being a criminal. He once told me about an old man he helped outside a hospital and how holding his frail body sickened him. How he tried not to think of that man because it made him sick of what he was doing every day of his life and how he lived. Those were rare moments though when he lowered his guard. I remember once while playing hooky from school, we ran into some policemen who harassed him and he broke down. We never spoke about that incident, but I believed that was the moment we had become friends.

  My mind drifts. I was dreaming of that café at Cantt Station where I went looking for an old man we had met on the bus on that trip—the old writer, the truant, who roved the city and wrote stories about all the truants of this city. The café he told me about was adjacent to the intersection. It was a Persian café that served cheap delicious food and tea and fruitcakes; its dark hall was packed with booths that had wooden furniture and tables with marble tops. The incubated air inside smelled fuzzy—frying things mixing with car fumes wafting in from the street; its darkness diffused with white tube lights. For a while, in my mind, I was there again, listening to the din and tumble of life inside the café.

  Out at the street, I saw a boy in a car with a girl stuck in the traffic jam. It reminded me of a story a friend once told me of a botched date where he got stuck in the Cantt Station traffic, and by the time he managed to extricate from it, it was time for the girl to return home.

  All these stories, I realized, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city as anything but a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city. That’s how we lose the city—that’s how our knowledge of what the world is and how it functions is taken away from us—when what we know is blasted into rubble and what is created in its place bears no resemblance to what there was and we are left strangers in a place we knew, that we ought to have known. Suddenly, it struck me that that’s how my father experienced this city. How, when he walked this city, he was tracing paths from his memory to the present—from what this place had been to what it had become.

  My mind now was a hard knotted skein of voices of the two men I had lost. I could hear their voices in my head: both of them raucous, loud, foul-mouthed. But gleaning beneath their cacophony of noises I could sense the menacing silence of their deaths. I felt as if my heart had been violently torn out of its cage and all its pieces flung into the world. My forehead was cold with sweat.

  As I walked down the bridge, I saw a car windscreen lying on the footpath. It was battered with bullet holes. I stopped and examined it. It was an absurd thing to be lying on a footpath. I stood looking at the sharp, clean webs around the bullet holes. A stunningly violent, shockingly beautiful object—a crass memento of this city to mark this moment.

  I walked down the bridge to climb the first bus I could get—to be somewhere else.

  Things go on.

  I do not remember when was the last time I strayed from the path I had followed from my apartment to work and back. But I do remember very well how and why it was established.

  There came a point in my life when I started looking for a job with a hard, inflexible routine. I started searching for work that would help me get away from writing; work that would not leave me with a craving to reach for words because here’s the thing: writing was an inescapable torture for me. I could not do it, yet it was the only thing I desperately wanted to do.

  I had tried many things to effect my escape—worked as a salesperson for car tires; a receptionist; a signboard painter; plumber; cotton-filler in pillows and quilt covers; an overseer in a garment factory—but when I came home at the end of each day, I reached for pen and paper—and wrote down the little fragments that filled my head. I wandered the city for hours—I hung about the old markets, sat at the rickshaw and taxi stands, observed alleged criminals around the city courts, ogled at customers buying condoms and electronic gadgets and spices and haggling over meat and used books and parrots—and each day, I came home brimming with the manic psychic energy of the city, with countless nameless voices in my head, and tried to write it all. But nothing I wrote was up to the task of capturing this ruinously mad city. Each day was another exercise in despair.

  But that wandering the streets, to be honest, was also just another search for how to look away. I wanted to forget—because like everyone, I had a lot to forget: I wanted to forget my father and his stories that were of no use to me but that nonetheless haunted me and interrupted my life and imagination and my writing. I wanted to purge myself of his imagination. I wanted to write against his idea of stories. I wanted to write stories that were completely unlike his stories—ones that had no element of fabrication. I wanted voices on
the page to be as true as the ones I heard. Because I had realized that there was nothing called true stories. Only fragments were true.

  So I wrote in fragments. My fragments were things as I saw them. Things as they were—I wrote as intensely as I saw and heard and felt but all the fragments I wrote had a hole in the center where life was supposed to be. All of them were meaningless. I wrote reams but the more I wrote the more I felt I was sinking deeper, each time ever more hopelessly, into the quicksand of my own little islands while the universe moved past me at its own indifferent pace.

  That’s when I found this job as the subeditor in a newspaper office, and it salvaged me from this despair. I spent my six hours in the news office, subediting the files of raw reported stories that were placed in my computer folder. The work itself was insipid, and most days left me with a stiff headache. But what made it tolerable—even pleasant, occasionally—was the continual relief of completing small tasks that punctuated the day. At the end of the day, my cup of tea waited for me. After that I headed home, where I’d spend a couple of hours drinking quality whiskey with Sadeq, and around seven, we’d go down to the dhaba to dine on tea and parathas.

  That had been my schedule for the last three years and my release from the oppressiveness of writing. (Although it left me with a disgusting sense of loneliness, but that’s a different matter.) This job had suitably shrunk my universe to myself—and the city had been reduced into a few roads that I traversed to and from work without paying any attention to my surroundings. I stopped roving the city too.

  So when I received the phone call asking me to get to the hospital, I worried about Sadeq, but to be honest my first reaction was resentment that this bit of news threw me off my daily routine. I had to walk again on roads I had not walked on in years now. It made me nervous.

  The bus beat rambunctiously with the Jhankar versions of old Bollywood numbers as it moved slowly and aggressively through the viscous traffic. It pressed down upon smaller vehicles like a big-chested bully who knew precisely how to execute its mass and noise into movement: it froze the traffic with a sudden burst of a honk and then—with a growl of the engine and the spit of the exhaust—thrust its snout into the gap that opened up between the slow-moving traffic. It pushed forward until the rear fitted snugly one spot ahead.

  Across the aisle, a little boy was sitting with his father. He wore a red Coca-Cola cap (too large for his head). His father was explaining to him the dangers of the bus driver’s irresponsible aggression. “One wrong move, the bus is going to scratch the side of some car, and these people will break into a fight, and we’ll be stuck here. We are already late. Everybody is waiting for us at your phuppo’s place.” I watched the little boy as he clasped the seat in front of him with his little hands and absorbed his father’s anxieties. His father poked his head out of the window and looked ahead, and then shook his head. “Okay, what was that game you taught me? Rock-paper-what? Let’s play that.”

  When I was a kid, I played a game with my father called Blackboards. We closed our eyes and suggested to each other various things that we drew on the blackboards we imagined in our heads. It was a game I used to learn spellings. My first lessons as a writer. I closed my eyes and saw the blackboard again—only for it to vanish and my mind to be flooded with images of the hospital: the man with the guttural voice held down by the medics; that ambulance boy, Akbar.

  Living in this city, you developed a certain relationship with violence and news of violence: you expected it, dreaded it, and then when it happened, you worked hard to look away from it, because there was nothing you could do about it—not even grieve, because you knew that it will happen again and maybe in a way that was worse than before. Grieving is possible only when you know you have come to an end, when there is nothing more to follow. This city was full of bottled-up grief.

  It took a moment for me to realize I was the same in some sense. I had not yet grieved for my father.

  My father was a writer of stories for children who gave up writing to become a street performer. He was haunted by nightmares. During the Zia-ul-Haq years, he had spent a fortnight in jail where he watched his friends get tortured. (For writers and members of the intelligentsia they favored torture methods that did not leave body marks. They force-fed them and did not allow them to either sleep or relieve themselves. By the end of the second day, most were ready to renounce their causes along with their kids and wives and all else that lies in between.) He had dreams about that time in jail and they kept getting worse as he grew older. During the long period after he had lost his job and the city was racked with violence, his nightmares turned worse too. He began fearing sleep. He wanted an escape, so he gave up writing and took up apprenticeship with a street magician, and soon he was popping live chicks from tennis balls while performing for children across poorer neighborhoods in the city for petty change that people spared.

  My father met Comrade Sukhansaz in jail, and they remained friends till my father’s death. They spent long hours together speaking of days past, and I sat by them overhearing their conversations. I never got the references and names they exchanged, but they shared a deep love for this city and I always sensed their conversations had a set pattern: an initial animation winding down into an abiding sadness.

  I got off the bus at the Empress Market stop. It had been years since I had last been here, but no matter the time of the day, this junction was a full throat: a two-lane road with one lane encroached by street hawkers. This was also the patch of road where bus drivers left their buses in the middle of the road and went searching for some corner to piss.

  I almost lost my balance as I squeezed myself out of the rear door crammed with men. If getting on the bus was a struggle, getting off a running bus was a downright challenge to survival. You risked your limbs at the least and falling flat on your face at the most. Only years of riding experience prepared you in the abrasive art of negotiating them. (To get on the bus you must be visible to the bus driver speeding at you. Wave at him. He will slow down if you’re a man, slow down very much if you are a lucky man, but he will halt completely only for women, especially older ones. So if you’re a man, which you were, run and try to be in front of others running with you. Catch hold of the side bars first, keep running, put one foot on the pedestal, and pull yourself up. There—you’re off the ground and on the bus. To get off the bus, get to the rear door at least fifteen seconds before you want to get off and bang the steel door. Hit it hard. Make sure the driver hears the bang. If not, bang again. At all events, make sure the conductor hears the bang. He will be around somewhere, collecting fares, trying to adjust people to make room for one more person in there. If he hears you banging wildly, he will whistle the special whistle and the bus driver will slow down. This is also called stopping. Also remember: the bus driver doesn’t care how you get off—or if you get off. The banging on the steel door—that must stop. Get off now.)

  I disentangled from the mass of people and leaped out from the rear door, and stumbled as I landed on the road.

  “Look out, bhayya!”—a hand grabbed my arm and helped me gain my balance. I thanked the man, who replied, smiling, “I usually charge a fee for such help, you know . . .”

  A crowd was building up next to a small cart selling fried innards of assorted animals, releasing a putrid smell.

  I went closer to the crowd and tried to glance over the huddle.

  “Look at that dagger!” was the whisper going around. “Look at that thing in his neck!” Ah, the dagger: a full foot long—at least. Half of it on either side of his neck. “Look, the damn thing even looks real!” someone exclaimed again in a whisper.

  He was a stick of a man with a dagger going through his neck. Dressed in a pink tattered cloak, he was singing at the top of his voice:

  I am the bird of death

  I have come back from the Land of the Dead

  To tell you . . .

  He had a round face, a thin neck, and his facial expressions were dee
ply crumpled, as though he was in great pain. His eyes were looking straight ahead at no one in particular and he held a large cardboard sign to his chest and was singing at the top of his voice:

  I am the bird of death

  I have come back from the Land of the Dead

  To tell you . . .

  I looked around to see the people watching this—half-believing, half-amused.

  Friends: my brother was a soldier. Once he was passing by a graveyard while returning from his duty when he heard terrifying cries that would burst open your head. When he went inside, what he saw was nothing short of hell on earth: a little, rat-like animal, red eyes, white-fur was sitting on a pile of bones. When that animal with his venomous teeth struck at the bones, they let out excruciating screams. They were screams the likes of which my brother had heard neither in war nor in torture. He wanted to save the dead man’s soul from this torture of the grave.

  So he took out his gun and shot at the little-ratlike-animal. Next thing he knew the creature was running after him. He ran as fast as he could and finally, when he came across a pond of water, jumped in to save himself. Now listen to this and find lessons for your salvation: that creature stopped just short of the pond. My brother thought he was saved. The animal took a mouthful of water in his mouth and spit it back into the pond. My friends, the water of the pond turned into acid. I swear.

  The body of my brother became witness to it. He lost his body from his chest down. It was burnt with an acid which has no cure. The government of Pakistan has shown him to all kinds of doctors, but no one understands the burns or the cure. This is his picture . . .