by A. A. Jafri
Noor was still thinking about Farhat. How badly they both wanted a child, and how ruthlessly nature had denied them. Eleven failed pregnancies. Why? All his friends had heirs, all except him. He had always wanted a family, sons and daughters. Twenty-three years ago, when he was only twenty, he had been notified by his parents that his marriage had been arranged with the daughter of Javed Sultan. No one even bothered to tell him the girl’s name for a long time. But none of that had mattered on his wedding day. When Noor had lifted Farhat’s veil, he was dazzled by her beauty, and when she raised her green almond-shaped eyes to look up at him, it was as if the whole room had lit up. Only seventeen then, she had retained her elegance and beauty throughout their married life, despite being pregnant almost always and now middle-aged.
The ringing of the doorbell broke his reverie. He stood up and drew the curtains that separated the men’s quarters from the rest of the house. A few seconds later, Budhoo brought in Haider Rizvi and Sadiq Mirza, his closest friends from college. The loud-mouthed political editor of the Morning Gazette, Haider Rizvi was better known for his thick, black round glasses and his penchant for using tiresome cricket terms in his editorials than for his journalistic prowess. Sadiq Mirza, on the other hand, was his outright antithesis. A professor of comparative literature at the University of Karachi, he was soft-spoken, thoughtful and good at putting things into perspective. His trademark pipe mostly remained glued to the right corner of his mouth. Noor admired his erudition.
Haider sniffed the air, almost salivating as he savoured the delicious smell of the venison, ‘Scotch and venison! Now that’s what I call cricket!’
‘My friends, that’s what you get in my raj,’ Noor replied.
‘It would have been perfect, except for this bloody heat,’ Sadiq remarked, lighting his pipe.
After they had settled down, Noor gave them their plaques and opened the bottle of Johnnie Walker. It was only during such meetings of the literati that he took out his Scotch; for his everyday needs, he quaffed the local whisky, which he called his shahi tharra, his royal hooch.
‘I am going to hang this in my office,’ Sadiq said, admiring the plaque.
‘Me too, but before I forget, I have a message for you, Noor, from our publisher, Mr Azeem Shan. He would like you to represent the Morning Gazette.’
‘Why? Did he forget to pay his protection money to the government?’ Noor asked, pouring the whisky into the glasses.
‘Very funny, but no. He paid his protection money. This has to do with something else.’
‘Thanks, but no thanks. Tell Azeem Shan that I can’t take any more cases. My workload has increased since Burmah-Shell retained me.’ Noor handed one glass to Haider and the other to Sadiq.
‘Well, at least speak to him.’
‘Why should I? The thirsty go to the drinking well; the well doesn’t go to the thirsty.’
‘But what is this case about?’ Sadiq asked, puffing out smoke from his pipe.
‘Remember the corruption story we ran against that bloody-fool minister? He retaliated by slapping us with a lawsuit accusing us of libel,’ Haider said.
Sadiq swigged down the Scotch and said, ‘So that’s why your editor wants the most sought-after attorney in Pakistan to represent them.’
‘Frankly speaking, I don’t want to get involved in these bloody political dramas. I have had enough of them in India,’ Noor said. ‘The English went away, but they left their poodles behind just to piss us off.’
‘Come on, Noor, you’ll become famous,’ Haider said, and guzzled down the whisky.
‘Fame doesn’t inspire me, my friend,’ Noor replied.
‘So, what’s this speech that the Leader of the Nation is going to deliver today?’ Sadiq asked, as if Haider had an advance copy of the speech. ‘I have heard that it’s probably about a possible rapprochement with India,’ he continued.
‘Or it could be just another speech giving honorific titles to vacuous sycophants,’ Noor replied.
‘Everyone in this country has titles stuffed right up their asses!’ Haider laughed as he stood up and began refilling his whisky glass.
‘Titles in this country, my friends, are like haemorrhoids; sooner or later, every asshole politician gets them,’ Noor interjected. The three friends burst into laughter.
‘Okay, here is a deep mathematical question for you, Professor: What are the odds that we will have a Constitution ready in time to entertain us?’ Haider asked Sadiq.
Before Sadiq could reply, Noor laughed and said, ‘Between zero and naught! The Assembly has been on it since 1947; how much progress has it made in these last four years, huh?’
‘The hard part is drawing a fine line between the secular and the religious,’ Sadiq retorted.
‘Well, I think the fault lies with the Great Leader. If he had not died so soon after the Partition, we would not only have a Constitution but a secular one at that,’ said Haider.
‘Instead, theocracy is now entering Pakistan through the back door,’ Sadiq added.
‘My friends, theocracy, in this country, is going to make a grand entrance, garlanded with flowers and wearing a turban. Just wait and watch,’ Noor replied.
The bell rang again, and after a moment, Zakir Hassan made his entry, liberally doused in the most expensive cologne and looking his usual dapper self. A connoisseur of the bon vivant, he had recently joined the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Based in Rome, he was back in Karachi on official business. After embracing all his friends, he accepted a glass of Scotch from Noor, and settling down, asked, ‘What is this talk about theocracy in this great land of our geniuses?’
‘Nietzsche once remarked that genius is the will to be stupid,’ Noor quipped as he handed him the remaining plaque.
Zakir looked at the plaque and laughed. ‘May we remain an unholy quartet forever!’ he said, raising his glass in a toast.
Everyone raised their glasses and said, ‘Cheers!’ Sadiq raised his glass again and said, ‘May God bless your whisky cabinet, Noor!’ The revelry had begun.
The comrades discussed politics, poetry and philosophy; they ate venison and biryani; they laughed and glugged down their liquor. Sophisticated turned into silly, and silly became sordid. The partying went on until late in the evening when it was interrupted by an excited Budhoo.
‘Sahib, Sahib! Farhat Bibi is going to be a mother,’ he informed Noor, panting. ‘She is screaming, Sahib. Sikander has gone to fetch Dr Minwalla.’
Budhoo couldn’t have said that Farhat was going to have a baby; that was not the proper way to discuss childbirth, especially when it pertained to the mistress of the house. Saying that she was going to become a mother somehow made the whole affair more sacred, adding a veneer of respectability to it. After relaying this message to his sozzled master, he left in a hurry. The air in the mardana, already filled with tobacco smoke, now thickened with a surreal silence as Noor gathered his intoxicated thoughts. He saw Haider holding his glass of whisky on his head and starting to do a slow dance. His eyes dopey, his voice heavy, he broke the stillness in the room with a silly cricket rhyme: ‘Twelfth Man . . . on the pitch . . . in he comes to serve; Zero gifts and zero knack; has a lot of . . . nerve!’
In the game of cricket, the twelfth man is a reserve player whose duty is to serve drinks to the other players and to be a substitute fielder for an injured player. Haider, in trying to be funny, had really infuriated the drunken Noor.
‘What . . . do you mean . . . twelfth man?’ Noor demanded. ‘Are you saying . . . my firstborn is a . . . a twelfth man? The server of drinks and . . . lunches? Do you think . . . my wife . . . is giving birth to a . . . bloody servant?’
The veins on Noor’s neck swelled menacingly as he staggered towards Haider, and had it not been for Sadiq and Zakir’s intervention, Noor would have definitely punched him.
‘I was just . . . joking, Noor. You know me. I am a cricket idiot,’ Haider said apologetically as the other two sat Noor down.
‘My child is never going to be a twelfth man!’ Noor shot back.
The air in the room became suffocating as the stony silence grew loud. It was late evening, and the time for serious, thoughtful discussion was long over.
Two
Farhat had been feeling rotten since the night before. Earlier that morning, she was irritable not just because Noor was having his stupid party and had taken to continually nagging her, but also because of the intermittent contractions she was having. By the time her husband’s party was in full swing, the contractions had started coming closer together. When she felt that the time had come, she told her elder sister, Sarwat Khan, to order Sikander to fetch Dr Zarina Minwalla, the only female doctor in the city at that time. Dr Minwalla, a Parsi doctor—a general practitioner to be exact—made house calls and delivered babies at home, but only for the affluent purdahnashin women of Karachi. She was not a trained obstetrician, but, by default, she became the doctor of choice for most of these women. While they waited for Dr Minwalla, Sarwat sat next to Farhat, wiping the sweat glistening on her forehead. The news of Farhat going into labour had spread like a contagion across the neighbourhood.
When Dr Minwalla entered the room a little while later, an entire retinue of anxious servants—Budhoo, Sikander, Changez and the gardener, Jumman, accompanied by his partner-slash-lover, Kaneez—tried to follow her in. The story around the neighbourhood was that Kaneez, the churail, had seduced Jumman, the faithful dowered servant of Farhat, and had given birth to a daughter, Mehrun, out of wedlock.
Sarwat immediately ordered all of them out, but Kaneez stayed put.
‘I said everybody out. Are you deaf?’
‘Kaneez can stay. I have asked her to assist me,’ Dr Minwalla said in a brisk tone.
A part-time servant at Farhat’s house, Kaneez also moonlighted at Dr Minwalla’s clinic as a midwife. She had this enormous gift of cultivating neurosis in the hearts of those around her, and so, at Dr Minwalla’s response, Sarwat’s mouth fell open and her eyebrows wrinkled with horror and anxiety. For Sarwat, Kaneez’s presence in this makeshift birthing room was a bad omen. Annoyed and scared, she stammered, ‘Sh-sh-she shouldn’t be h-h-here, Doctor Sahiba.’
‘Listen to me carefully, Sarwat Begum, she is my assistant; she will help me deliver the baby and you will keep quiet. Do you understand? If you don’t want to see her face, you should leave the room,’ Dr Minwalla minced no words. The threat silenced Sarwat.
With victory scribbled all over her dark, pockmarked face, Kaneez grinned and squinted her only good eye, while Sarwat scornfully catalogued her every churail-like feature. She blamed Kaneez for Farhat’s eleven failed pregnancies, but the midwife, in turn, remained convinced that a djinn residing inside Farhat’s womb was responsible for her misfortunes. Kaneez fully expected another disappointment for her mistress this time as well.
For both the sisters, Kaneez fitted the description of a churail perfectly. A severe bout of smallpox in her childhood had scarred her face, robbing her of one eye, and a congenital condition had given her a club foot. And as ultimate proof, someone somewhere swore that Kaneez had been either near or around Farhat every time she had a miscarriage: quod erat demonstrandum; she was a certified churail.
Sarwat prayed softly to Allah to protect her younger sister from this churail. She saw Kaneez in front of Farhat’s open legs, simpering inanely, gloating over her victory, an authentic necromancer, their worst nightmare come true at that hour, but there was no time to challenge her presence, for Farhat was howling in pain.
‘The baby is ready to come out. Now when I say push, you give a big push. Okay . . . PUSH!’ the doctor instructed.
Farhat pushed, and her scream ripped through the muggy air in the room.
‘Push again.’
Farhat pushed with all her strength and then lay back against the pillows behind her, moaning.
‘Come on, Farhat Begum, push harder!’ the doctor ordered.
‘I can’t. I’m going to die!’
‘Doesn’t matter, just push,’ Dr Minwalla laughed at her own joke.
After half a dozen more pushes, Farhat finally delivered a healthy baby boy. Dr Minwalla, instead of putting the baby in Farhat’s arms first, handed him to a shell-shocked Kaneez to clean him up. As she held the baby, Kaneez’s face changed colour. Turning pale, she let out a loud piercing scream, ‘Djinn, djinn! Oh Allah, he’s a djinn! Take him away from me. Take him away from me; he will get inside me!’ she blurted hysterically and almost threw the baby back at Dr Minwalla.
She must have been high on ganja, for she saw the baby boy vanish into thin air, out of her hands, only to then reappear in the arms of the doctor a split second later. But how could that happen? To Kaneez, it was unmistakable, no question about it. Instead of a boy, her mistress had given birth to a spirit—one of Allah’s creatures made of smokeless fire and mentioned in the Qur’an, the ones she had heard about countless times from her mother, one that had once invaded her neighbour’s body. Disguised as a baby boy, this djinn had now come out of Farhat’s body to torment her after devouring the hearts of all her other eleven children.
In Kaneez’s opinion, therefore, it was humanly impossible for Farhat to have a child. Then how could she have been proven wrong after all this time? A live birth! A crying and kicking baby! Well, there was only one explanation for this live birth: the djinn had come out of Farhat’s womb in the form of an infant, in the guise of a boy! Ganja or no ganja, that fateful October in 1951, Kaneez stood in the birthing room in the Kashana, utterly convinced that this baby boy was a djinn.
The minute Sarwat heard Kaneez utter all this nonsense, she screamed in rage. ‘I will kill you, churail! I will kill you!’
Dr Minwalla ordered both of them to be quiet.
‘You clean the baby, now,’ she told Sarwat.
Usually, that task fell to Kaneez, but the doctor couldn’t take any more chances.
Cleaning the soft baby skin had a calming effect on Sarwat. When she was done, Sarwat reminded Farhat about the need for the azan, the religious custom of whispering the call for prayer in the baby’s ear.
‘Is Noor Bhai going to offer the azan in the baby’s ear?’ she asked her sister.
‘No, he is not well enough.’
Sarwat knew what these coded words ‘not well enough’ meant: Noor was too drunk to perform this solemn ceremony.
‘Why don’t you do it?’ Dr Minwalla suggested.
‘No, Allah forbid . . . women are not allowed to do so.’
‘What about Budhoo? He is a man,’ Kaneez ventured hesitatingly.
‘If you keep spitting filth, I’ll hit you with my shoes,’ said Sarwat.
The sisters began panicking, for nothing else was permissible without the azan being recited to the baby. Farhat wished her brother Zahid were there to perform the ceremony, but he was in Lahore, studying engineering. As for their father, Javed Sultan, he was out visiting friends.
‘What’s wrong with Budhoo doing the azan?’ Kaneez persisted.
Sarwat turned and threw her shoe at the woman, but it missed her and hit the framed photograph of Noor and Farhat’s wedding, kept on the side table. The picture frame fell and broke.
‘Look, what you made me do!’
But there was no time to have another go at Kaneez; the azan had to be performed soon because the baby needed to be fed. Budhoo, a servant, was not the ideal solution to the crisis, but he was perfectly acceptable from the theological point of view. Farhat’s head began spinning at the thought of Budhoo performing the azan for her child instead of her husband. She was furious. What would people say? Her only son and the first voice he hears is the voice of a servant!
Reluctantly, however, she agreed and told Kaneez to summon Budhoo, who completed this first rite of religion in his accented and garbled Arabic; and Sarwat Khan thought, this is not auspicious. May Allah have mercy on this child.
All this while, a radio had been playing somewhere in the house. Now,
a mere second after Budhoo finished the azan, the song stopped abruptly and in a solemn voice, the broadcaster announced:
We interrupt this programme to bring you news of a supreme tragedy. Our beloved prime minister, the Leader of the Nation, Liaquat Ali Khan, was mercilessly assassinated by a cowardly deranged man while he was speaking to a crowd in Rawalpindi’s Company Bagh. We are God’s creation, and unto Him, we return.
The evening darkened; the sky heaved as the sun plunged into the Arabian Sea. From a nearby mosque, the muezzin called the faithful for the evening prayers.
And Sarwat Khan muttered to herself, ‘This is not auspicious. May Allah have mercy on this child!’
Three
Farhat did not forgive her husband for not performing the azan, but the joy of giving birth to a son made her forget his transgression. Noor named the baby Mansoor ul Haq.
‘What does this name mean?’ Farhat asked.
‘It means the protector of truth. I have named him after Manṣūr al-Hallaj.’
‘Who?’
‘The great Sufi mystic who spent his life in search of the Truth,’ he said.
Noor did not tell her the whole story, that when Manṣūr al-Hallaj thought he had found God, the Ultimate Truth, he concluded that since He was everywhere and in everything, he, Manṣūr al-Hallaj, had become a part of God. In his ecstasy, he said, ‘Anā-al-Haq, I am the Truth,’ and was executed for this heresy.
Farhat knew nothing about Sufism, but she liked the name. To her, giving the right name to a child was the most important thing. Two weeks before her delivery, she had heard an oft-repeated lecture from her father, Javed Sultan, on this very topic.
‘It is important to give the most suitable name to a child, because a name affects the character, blesses the household, and protects the future generations. My daughter, the name of a Muslim child should be distinctively Islamic and should have a good meaning,’ he had said.