by A. A. Jafri
‘Amma, you should have seen Mansoor Babu’s face,’ she said.
‘You should not play with him. I have told you hundreds of times not to. He has the shadow of a djinn on him,’ Kaneez reprimanded her, stirring the curry.
‘Shadow of a djinn? But you told me he was a djinn.’
Mehrun was disappointed that her mother’s memory, which had remained consistent up until then, had suddenly become faulty. But it didn’t really matter. She wanted to hear the original account again from someone who had actually been there at the scene.
‘Amma. Please, will you tell me what you saw when he was born?’
‘How many times do you want to hear it?’
‘One more time! Please, Amma! What did you see?’
In Kaneez’s mind, the retelling of what she had seen at Mansoor’s birth to as many people as possible was vital to make her hallucination seem believable. So, despite her apparent resistance, she was actually more than willing to recap the story for her daughter. As far as she was concerned, it was an irrefutable fact to which she, Kaneez, was an eyewitness.
‘Long before his birth, I had seen him in my dreams, and I kept hearing a voice that told me a djinn lived inside Farhat Begum’s kokh, her womb, and that one day he would come out of there. I also went to Malang Baba, who said the same thing. That day, when Mansoor Babu came out of Farhat Begum’s kokh, Dr Minwalla handed him to me to clean him. I held him in my arms, and I swear by God, he was hotter than this stove! He was there one minute and then he disappeared the next!’ As Kaneez paused to lick the ladle for a taste of the curry, she was hit by Jumman’s slipper.
‘Oye, churail! Stop your babbling! You will have me kicked out of the Kashana. Don’t talk bad about the Babu Sahib this way. He is not a djinn. He is a good boy and I like him!’ Jumman hollered from his cot.
But Mehrun persisted. ‘What happened to her other babies, Amma?’
‘She had eleven before him. All died in her kokh. He ate all of them.’
‘Who?’
‘Your friend, the djinn you play with. He is the one who ate them alive in her disgusting kokh. That’s why you shouldn’t play with him. He will eat you up, too.’
Suddenly, with savage ferocity, Jumman picked up his other slipper and struck Kaneez hard. She howled in pain.
‘Shut up, kutiya! One more word from your gutter mouth and I will strangle you!’
Jumman’s violent reaction had a silencing effect on both mother and daughter. After making the chapatis, Mehrun spread a food-stained white tablecloth on the floor and put the food on it. Jumman joined them, and they all ate dinner quietly. Outside, it became dark as thick patches of threatening clouds covered the full moon.
*
At dinner time that night, Noor was, once again, absent. Farhat and Mansoor quietly munched on their food. Sarwat, a frequent and unbidden guest at the Kashana, was also there. She mostly escaped to her sister’s house to be away from her miserable husband and wayward children.
It was Budhoo’s day off, so Sikander was doubling up as a driver and an attendant-in-waiting. Farhat had dispatched him to buy chicken tikka and some greasy parathas from the famous Bundoo Khan’s restaurant on Bunder Road. A sudden gust of strong wind slammed the gate outside, as if to protest Noor’s absence. Farhat gazed at his empty chair and checked the time on her wristwatch, yearning for his presence at the dinner table. Why couldn’t she have a regular relationship with her husband like everyone else? Why couldn’t they have a normal conversation without blaming the government, without uttering blasphemies? Why couldn’t they do normal family things?
She looked at her watch again. Where was Noor? Probably at the Sindh Club, binging on imported liquor either with his Parsi clients or his good-for-nothing Shaitan friends. He never disclosed his plans to Farhat, and it was generally understood that if he did not come back home by eight at night, he could be found hanging out at the Sindh Club. Both Mansoor and Farhat dreaded those nights when he came home drunk, unable to walk without someone supporting him, mumbling incoherent sentences. But that night, Mansoor’s mind was not on his father’s whereabouts. Instead, it was the picture of that immolated lizard, the burnt smell afterwards, Joseph and Mehrun’s victory song, and Mehrun calling him a djinn, that kept playing in his mind. As he slowly chewed on the chicken tikka, he asked his mother, ‘Amma, what are djinns made of?’
His mother, still worried about her husband, snapped, ‘Why for Allah’s sake are you thinking about djinns at this godforsaken hour, and who told you about them? It was that churail Mehrun, wasn’t it?’
‘No, it wasn’t Mehrun. I heard about them at school,’ Mansoor lied.
‘How many times have I told you to not play with those two?’
‘You shouldn’t talk about djinn mamoo, especially at night,’ Sarwat interjected.
‘Mamoo? Why did you call a djinn your mamoo? Djinns are not our uncles, are they?’ Mansoor asked.
‘No, silly. We call djinns our uncles out of respect, so that they don’t harm us. Not all djinns are evil, son. Muslim djinns are good, but the kafir djinns who still haven’t converted to Islam, they are evil.’
‘But why can’t we see them?’
‘Because they are invisible, and that is why you can’t even see their smoke!’
‘But why are they invisible?’
‘Okay, that’s enough about djinns!’ Sarwat became irritated. ‘And one more thing, Khaleel told me that you call him names and take his money.’
‘No, I don’t. He—’
‘Why would he take Khaleel’s money? He is not poor,’ Farhat interrupted, coming to her son’s rescue.
That only poor people steal was something Mansoor was not going to think about at that moment. His mind was still on the mysteries surrounding djinns, their make-up, their invisibility.
After a long, distended pause, Farhat said, ‘I don’t know when he will return tonight.’ Lowering her head, she gently massaged her temples to relieve the tension headache that was building up.
‘Maybe he is still at work?’ The elder sister tried to calm her fear.
Sarwat herself was no stranger to fear, having been physically abused by her husband repeatedly.
‘Farhat, you are fortunate. At least he doesn’t beat you up.’
But lately, the beatings had actually stopped. It was not that Nawab Khan had suddenly realized his errors and was making amends. It was just that he had found a new fascination. As Karachi’s brothels began to be raided with increasing frequency, all on the orders of the newly installed military government, he switched to raising pigeons. They became his latest obsession. His days were now spent visiting his elaborate pigeon coop on the rooftop of his flat and flying them in flocks while he controlled their flight with high-pitched whistles and calls. His evenings were devoted to meeting with people who bred pigeons, and his nights to planning how to make a fortune selling them.
Nawab Khan had frittered away his modest inheritance, buying land and shops in the commercial area, only to eventually lose them to gambling and whoring. Now with no property or shops to his name, and with little money left, he often forced Sarwat to borrow from Farhat. Sarwat was a good seamstress and she made decent money from sewing children’s clothes; that, however, was not enough to feed her five recalcitrant children and a demanding husband.
‘It seems to me that your husband’s you-know-what has increased,’ Sarwat said, avoiding the word ‘drinking’.
‘I have tried to stop him, but what can I do? He . . .’
Realizing that Mansoor was listening, Farhat stopped and quickly changed the subject to their brother, Zahid; but Mansoor was no fool. He knew they had been talking about his father’s drinking habit. He had heard Farhat’s wailing supplications to Allah to bring Noor to the righteous path. He was aware of her frequent calls to his father’s office to find out where he was, and he was familiar with her face that could not hide the shame when people inquired about him.
Dinner ended without
Noor showing up. Sarwat went home, and Farhat took Mansoor to her bedroom. She felt guilty for snapping at him at the dinner table.
‘Amma, why do you forbid me from playing with Mehrun and Joseph?’ Mansoor asked matter-of-factly.
‘It’s complicated. It’s like . . . you should play with children like you.’
‘What do you mean?’
Farhat paused for a while and began explaining the complexities of class differences and the convolutions of social ranks, but when she saw Mansoor beginning to look increasingly confused, she changed her strategy.
‘You should play with the boys.’
‘Joseph is a boy.’
Exasperated by Mansoor’s relentless questions, she thundered, ‘Both Joseph and Mehrun are kamzaat. Should I say more?’
‘What is kamzaat?’
‘Low caste!’
‘But Maulvi Sahib told me there is no caste in Islam, only Hindus have caste.’
‘It has nothing to do with caste, Mansoor. You will understand when you’re older. Now shut up and go to sleep.’
To Farhat, Mehrun was a bastard child born to a harlot—a stinking mishmash of harami and churail—the dirty whore who stole Jumman’s seed and spawned this evil. The story that had endured all these years was that Kaneez and Jumman had never married. Nobody had witnessed it, and they couldn’t provide any solid proof of their matrimony. Certificates never existed in their world, whether it was birth, marriage, or death.
Mansoor had heard the word ‘harami’ attached to Mehrun’s name often enough, but he did not understand its exact meaning.
‘Can we get a dog, Amma?’ he asked as his mind wandered.
‘No . . . angels don’t come into houses with dogs.’
‘Why? Are angels scared of dogs?’
‘No, it’s because dogs are unclean animals. The Prophet, peace be upon him, liked cats. Maybe you should get a cat.’
‘No, I don’t like cats; they make me sick. My friend Najeeb has one at his house, and whenever I go there, I start to cough.’
His mind digressed, and he started to think about djinns again. What if that lizard was a djinn? A twinge of fear leavened in his heart as he imagined hearing the rustling of approaching djinns. His face whitened and his forehead crinkled. Farhat, noticing his changed features, asked, ‘Are you okay, Mansoor?’
‘I am scared.’
‘What are you scared of?’
‘Djinns!’
‘Beta, why are you still thinking about djinns? That vile Mehrun! Just recite the kalimah.’
‘There is no God but God, and Mohammad is His prophet,’ Mansoor recited the Qur’anic verse in Arabic, squeezed his eyes shut and buried his head in his mother’s bosom. Farhat began to stroke the back of his hair. Mansoor felt better, but soon he started thinking about Mehrun again until sleep conquered him. Farhat called Sikander to put Mansoor in his bedroom. Noor came home quite late, but he was not drunk that night, much to Farhat’s relief.
Six
That night, rain pounded the salt-rich earth of Karachi with all its anger. The sky rumbled endlessly and lightning zigzagged across it with a ferocity never seen before in this city of immigrants. All night long, it felt as if someone was pelting stones at the windows, while explosions rocked the rooftops. Rising water that had nowhere to go flooded the streets, the shops and the houses. The low-lying areas were the worst-hit, but even the elevated expanses of the metropolis couldn’t escape its wrath. Less than ten inches of rain in a year was the norm for Karachi, but that night, fifteen inches fell in one go. Upheaval always accompanied the city even with modest rainfall, but fifteen inches choked up its sanitation system, and the primitive drains running all across the city vomited raw sewage non-stop. Every year the government set aside funds to build sewers, and every year, without fail, corruption sucked up the honest taxpayers’ money. There was no one to question; there was no one to answer.
Mansoor slept restlessly. He twisted and turned; he moaned and cried and dreamt strange dreams, all of which had something to do with djinns—both Muslim djinns and kafir djinns, their hands clasped together, doing the Jahanammi nautch, the danse macabre, with Joseph and Mehrun flitting in and out of these nightmarish visions. All throughout, Mehrun’s Urdu doggerel echoed in Mansoor’s nocturnal brain:
Aadhi roti, aadha kebab
Girgit ko marna bara sawab
Hearing him moan, Farhat came to Mansoor’s room and cradled his head in her arms. He woke up, a bit startled to see his mother.
‘Is Abba back home?’
‘Yes, he is. Recite the kalimah, beta, and try to sleep,’ she kissed him on his forehead and left.’
But for the longest time after his mother left his room, Mansoor couldn’t go back to sleep, and when he eventually did, the nightmares returned.
In his dream, he found himself in a room full of strangers. He saw his mother crying, and Sarwat comforting her. Strangers whispered in a bizarre language. He saw his father staggering along in a drunken stupor and ask no one in particular, ‘Why is everyone after me?’ Suddenly, he saw himself punching his father on the back and weeping uncontrollably.
And still dreaming, Mansoor felt an uncontrollable pressure on his bladder. He ran towards the bathroom, but there was none in the vicinity. Unable to control his urge, he began to urinate where he was, in the middle of an open field.
Wide awake now, he could hear his heart pounding and feel his pants clinging to his thighs. He had wet his bed. Feeling ashamed, he tried to focus. Where was he? Why was he sleeping in his pants and not in his pyjamas? The last thing he remembered was being in his mother’s room, talking about Mehrun and Joseph. Who had brought him back to his room? But he was glad he was in his space, relieved it had happened in his bed. He touched the bed. It was only slightly wet, but his pants were all soaked. It was still dark outside, and the rain continued pounding on the roof and the windows. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, Mansoor got up, slipped out of his pants and shirt, and put on his sleeping suit. Rolling up his wet clothes into a bundle, he tiptoed towards his bathroom, dumped the urine-drenched clothes into the wooden hamper and quietly came back to his bed. He hoped that Kaneez wouldn’t notice the smell and tell Mehrun when she washed the clothes.
*
That same night after dinner, under the dim light of the lantern, Mehrun opened her schoolbooks and started to memorize her English lesson, mumbling softly.
‘Is this the time to study?’ Kaneez asked with a frown.
‘Amma, I have to study. I have a test tomorrow,’ she lied.
‘A girl’s hands are made by God to make rotis, not to hold a book.’
Mehrun answered her with a ready-made Urdu doggerel:
Parho gey likho gey bano gey nawab
Khelo gey koodo gey bano gey kharab
(Reading and writing will make me a nawab
Playing and jumping will make me spoilt)
‘Stop your poetry and go to sleep; we don’t have kerosene to waste on a girl’s education.’
Reluctantly, Mehrun closed her books and went towards her corner of the room, where a cold and tattered bamboo mattress awaited her. The charpoy in the room was her father’s sole property. Her mother and she slept on thin bamboo mats. Mehrun felt so tired that she went to sleep right away, but the non-stop thundering and lightning woke her up in the middle of the night. She saw the flickering of a candle through the slightly opened drapes that hung from the clothesline. Without lifting her head, she looked at her mother’s mat. It was empty. Then she heard her father’s cot, shaking and squeaking. She saw the silhouetted naked body of her father crushing the equally naked body of her mother, both of them oblivious to the rampaging rain outside. Her mother’s faint moaning petrified Mehrun. Jumman regularly took to beating Kaneez, but she had never seen anything like this. Shivering, she pulled the blanket over her face and curled up into the foetal position. Suddenly, Mehrun remembered her teacher’s advice to recite the Ayat-ul-kursi, The Throne Verse, the most po
werful of all Qur’anic verses, the warder of all evils, whenever she felt scared. She tried to recall it. But her memory failed her and all she could remember was that silly ditty:
Aadhi roti, aadha kebab
Girgit ko marna bara sawab
As her memory went blank, her mother’s moaning grew louder and the charpoy rocked harder. Then, just as suddenly, it all ended, as if there was an unexpected power failure that shut everything down. All that Mehrun could hear now was the drumming of her own heart. She remained inert, trying not to breathe, suppressing her thoughts, restraining her movement. She wanted to melt away and disappear into the darkness. Then she heard her father mutter: ‘Get the hell out of my bed.’
She heard her mother getting up, then the rustle of a shalwar being pulled up, the crunch of a bamboo mat, a dry cough—denouements of a play poorly produced. Mehrun squeezed her eyes tightly, yearning to sleep promptly. Beside her, she heard her mother lie down and snore loudly the minute her body hit the bamboo mat.
*
Jumman’s hovel was mostly made of concrete, except for the tin roof. It escaped significant devastation from the flood, but Joseph was not that lucky. His rat trap jhuggi, a mixture of mud, cardboard and corrugated metal, crumbled swiftly, just like his collapsed desires. The torrential rain flooded the open gutters and disgorged rancid sewage. Granted, Joseph had lived all his life amidst the stench of human and animal waste, but that night, the odour became more revolting, the air more putrid. Pyaro had woken him up when she heard the commotion outside. People were shouting and running to safety as everything around them began to crash. And when their shack began to crumble, Joseph and Pyaro quickly gathered their meagre belongings and ran out.