Jimmy

by Omair Ahmad

  ‘Beparda kal jo nazar aaieen chand beebian,

  Akbar zamin mein ghairate Qaumi se garh gaya;

  Poochha jo unse aap ka parda woh kya hua

  Kahne lagin ke aql pe mardon ki parh gaya.’

  (Yesterday, when I saw some unveiled ladies,

  Akbar was swallowed up by the earth in shame for his community;

  When I asked them where their veil had gone,

  They replied that it had covered the minds of men.)

  ‘A lovely one to remember, Lal Sahib,’ Shaukat Mian said in appreciation.

  Even Ahmed Saeed nodded. ‘Not the one I was searching for, but a beautiful one. These silly religious types talk in terms of veils and shame when it is their own minds that are blinded.’ He paused, then said, ‘And it is always the women that suffer.’

  This time the silence that settled on the group was both deep and embarrassed. This was a gathering of men; where did women figure in their conversation? And as if to change the subject, Khan Jamali, noticing the shadow of a stubble on Rafiq’s chin, growled, ‘Arre Rafiq, are you trying to grow a beard? You’re not becoming a mullah, are you?’

  ‘Yes, watch out for them,’ Shaukat Mian chimed in, ‘you know what Faiz Ahmed Faiz said: Shaikh sahib se rasm o raah na ki/ Shukr hai zindagi kharaab na ki (I didn’t spend time discussing tradition with the Sheikh/ Thank goodness I didn’t ruin my life).’

  Ahmed Saeed snorted with laughter at that, and it caught on, with the rest joining in. All except Rafiq. He felt the blood rise in his face, but there was nothing he could say. Till the azaan saved him. Or trapped him. As the loudspeaker crackled into life in the mosque only a few dozen yards away, Rafiq sprang to attention.

  ‘I’ll be going,’ he said. ‘It’s time for the maghrib prayers.’

  That silenced them. For all their mockery of the mullahs and sheikhs, and whatever they might have said about religion, none of them could say a word that would stop a man from going to the mosque. And then, foolishly, Rafiq went one step too far. As he exited the patio, he bowed exaggeratedly to Lal Sahib and said with unnecessary emphasis, ‘As salaam aleikum.’

  At another time it might have meant nothing. After all, what do the words mean except a wish for peace upon the receiver. It was merely a greeting. But it was also a Muslim greeting, spoken too deliberately by a Muslim to a Hindu, the only Hindu among them who made his way every day to this neighbourhood dominated by Muslims because of his love of poetry, to this house of high culture and refinement where he had always been treated only as another poet.

  As Lal Sahib fumbled to respond, Ahmed Saeed leapt up in his defence. ‘You forget your place, Rafiq!’

  ‘I can’t even wish peace to one of your guests, Ahmed Saeed sahib?’ Rafiq asked in false surprise.

  That response sent Ahmed Saeed into a fury, his face turning purple. ‘Out!’ he yelled, one quivering finger pointed to the gate.

  ‘From your house to God’s,’ Rafiq answered, and bowed.

  His behaviour was amazing, more amazing to himself than to anybody else. His head spun with what he had just said and done, the sarcasm in his voice with which he had addressed Ahmed Saeed. What was the matter with him? Had he gone insane?

  And then the fear hit him.

  He was nothing without the favour of Shabbir Manzil, his job, his marriage, even his house, were in the hands of the person he had so gratuitously insulted. And for what? He could not tell.

  At the mosque the ritual of ablution brought him some calm as he splashed the water on his face, over his arms and his feet. The prayers were soothing as well, and he stood, then bowed, and straightened only to genuflect again in the company of the fifty or so faithful gathered in the courtyard.

  But maghrib prayers are short, and soon he had nothing left to do. Usually he would sit at the gathering of poets till quite late, getting up just in time to make his way home for dinner. Now he had nowhere to go.

  So he went home.

  Shaista was surprised to see him back so early. She had a knife in her hands, with a potato half cut. Jamaal clung to her shalwar and looked up at his father’s unfamiliar face, contorted with some fierce emotion.

  ‘I decided to come home after the namaaz,’ Rafiq explained, his words hurried and slightly ashamed, and Shaista understood something of what had happened. It could only have been some insult at the hands of Ahmed Saeed, and she burned with his humiliation. Turning away quickly so that he would not see the anger in her eyes, she said, ‘I have been teaching Jamaal the numbers. Will you do that so that he doesn’t bother me in the kitchen?’

  And so it was that father and son sat down together for the first time in the drawing room and Rafiq addressed the boy solemnly, ‘As salaam aleikum, Jamaal.’

  Jamaal only watched him, solemn-faced, until Shaista who could hear everything through the open door to the kitchen, said, ‘Answer your father, Jamaal.’

  ‘As salaam aleikum, Baba.’

  Sweat broke out on Rafiq’s scalp, and he found he could not speak to his son. So he called out to Shaista, ‘How much does he know?’

  ‘I can count up to ten,’ Jamaal said, and Rafiq’s heart felt as if it would pound its way out of his chest for sheer pride.

  ‘Mamujaan,’ Jamaal said, meaning Ahmed Saeed, ‘gave me a Cadbury’s éclair the first time I counted up to ten.’

  ‘Your father will give you two éclairs,’ Shaista said promptly.

  ‘Sach?’ Jamaal asked in excitement.

  ‘Sach,’ Rafiq promised.

  Of course poor Jamaal got it wrong, remembering only up to six and then jumping straight to nine, and Rafiq, who had so desperately wanted to buy his son one toffee more than Ahmad Saeed, could not hide his disappointment. Jamaal stood up and ran to his mother for shelter.

  ‘Ammi, Ammi!’ he demanded. ‘Second chance. Please ask Baba to give me a second chance.’

  Rafiq followed his son to the kitchen, but did not step in. This was Shaista’s domain and although Jamaal could barge in, Rafiq could not.

  ‘Uffo,’ Shaista exclaimed, ‘you’ll make me cut my fingers, Jamaal,’ but she was laughing.

  ‘Of course you can have a second chance,’ Rafiq said, and looking up at his wife, her eyes alive with joy, he added, ‘everyone deserves a second chance.’

  It was a lie. He knew that, as foolish, as vain and as small as he was, there were things he could never return to. His reputation at the gatherings in Shabbir Manzil had been decimated, partially out of his own pettiness. He felt ashamed now for putting Lal Sahib in such a spot and realized that he would rather have his forgiveness than Ahmed Saeed’s. But that chance too was gone. Still, he could ignore all that for the present, could laugh with his wife, take pleasure in their son. They could eat together at the dinner table, and when Shaista started to clear up the table she said to him, ‘Why don’t you take Munna to the mosque? He’s old enough to keep quiet even if he’s too young to pray.’

  That was their first excursion together, as father and son, Rafiq holding his son’s hand far more tentatively than Jamaal clutched his. Along the way Rafiq stopped at a corner shop and bought his son not two but three Cadbury éclairs, making the excited child promise to eat them only when the prayers were done.

  The night prayers are the longest, reflecting the old desert habits when the Arabs had time, and finally the cool, to remember God. Jamaal was not the only child present at the mosque, a few others had accompanied their parents, but they started to play and scuffle in the back rows. Occasionally, between breaks, one of the elders would turn around and glare, silencing the children for a few moments. But they knew that the adults would have to go back to the prayers and they could resume their games. And anyway, they were safe from the wrath of their parents. Men feared the wrath of God enough here not to raise their hands in anger.

  Jamaal sat through all this quietly in the corner, clutching the éclairs in his fist. After the last set of prayers, Rafiq turned and saw his son sprawled asleep. As the others of
the congregation left, Rafiq rose to say one final short prayer, of thanksgiving.

  6

  Something happened after that, a miracle perhaps, or maybe Fate just forgot about Shaista and Rafiq for some time.

  Shaista’s second pregnancy was as trouble-free as the first had been difficult. And though she glowed once again, there were no shadows under her eyes. Even in the seventh month of her pregnancy, when the child had ballooned her belly and his kicks could be felt even by curious little Jamaal, Shaista moved with a grace that wasn’t of this base and broken world. She was sure it would be a boy again, and she had decided to name the child Mahfooz, the one who is safe, because she knew that both her husband and her eldest son would take care of the new child. She knew how much that meant, knew how necessary it was, hadn’t she seen it in her own life? And now she was seeing it again as Shabbir Manzil closed its heart to her husband.

  Rafiq spent more time at home now. He had so few places to go to. The college was his only outlet, but after teaching he could not spend his time there: besides, the taint of his fall in social status meant that the other teachers didn’t want to be associated with him. The principal had become more obnoxious and Rafiq found that after his bout with Ahmed Saeed he had little courage to take on another fight.

  Instead he began spending more time at home with his son, whom he suddenly had so much access to. And if he had lost one audience for his poetry, he gained another with Shaista who, after the fourth month of her pregnancy, had taken leave from teaching and spent time at home, reading and sleeping. He had started tentatively, quoting a few verses to her from the book she was reading, and when she replied with a few by another poet, Rafiq had slyly inserted a verse of his own.

  She was delighted, and surprised. In all their time together she had had no idea of what actually happened at the afternoon gatherings at Shabbir Manzil. She had been dismissive of it, considering it little more than the useless gossip of idle, middle-aged men, and she had been partially repulsed because Rafiq had so desired those gatherings. But now as he recited to her the verses he had composed, she felt a thrill of unexpected intimacy. She tried to match him, quoting the poets she remembered, and clumsily trying to shape poetry of her own. In truth what she was doing was remembering bits and pieces she had written many years ago, when she wanted to capture the feel of poverty, but with dignity. She had not succeeded, and she had put those thoughts away, but now she tried to recall them, speaking them for the first time ever to another human being.

  Her verses were not as polished as his, but at times there would be a line of such striking insight that he would exclaim in delight. It was at such moments that he missed acutely the company of other poets, even the stern Khan Jamali and the owlish Lal Sahib.

  Unused to her approval, and in his gratitude for what she now gave him—something approaching love—he responded with devotion, which would have appeared clumsy had it not been so reckless. If only she were a man! It was her place, not his, to have sat there in that gathering, and she would have acquitted herself better than he had.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Shaista replied when he spoke his thoughts. She put her hand on his mouth to emphasize the point. ‘Don’t say that. You stood up for me, you spoke for me. What man could acquit himself better?’

  And then he longed to tell her the truth, but it was so complicated and he was so scared that all he could say was, ‘You don’t understand.’

  His misery made her all the more committed to stand by him in his hour of need; so when the women of Shabbir Manzil came to call on her now and invite her into the inner courtyards of that grand house, she always refused. She would not enter the inner sanctum of a family that had insulted her husband. And even when Rafiq stepped out of the house, Shaista insisted that he take little Jamaal along.

  There was, in any case, only one real place that the father and son could go to, and that was the mosque. It was Rafiq’s time alone with his son, so the visits became frequent. And somehow, because these things follow their own secret logic, Rafiq started to grow a beard, making true the mockery that Khan Jamali had flung his way. It gave his thin face a look of strength that had been missing, and he found that the students paid greater attention to him in class, especially if he also frowned once in a while.

  Meanwhile, Fate, or whoever had been on duty, remembered Shaista in her eighth month, and she collapsed into a faint in the middle of a sentence. Luckily she had been leaning against Rafiq when it happened so he could catch her as her body lurched suddenly forward.

  ‘Mumma!’ Jamaal yelled, but for once Rafiq had no time for his son. As the child scrambled around the scene, scared as much by his father’s uncharacteristic silence as by Shaista’s, Rafiq lifted his wife in his arms, amazed by how light she was even with child, and carried her to the bedroom. When he had set her down, he sat next to her and held her wrist and felt her pulse running at a rate that terrified him. She had been radiating heat when he carried her, but he was still surprised by how her forehead burned with fever under the palm of his hand.

  ‘Jamaal,’ he said, finally turning to his bewildered son, ‘watch your mother for a few minutes. I’m going to fetch a rickshaw.’

  Fifteen minutes later father and son were at the hospital, accompanying the still unconscious Shaista. It was another half hour before Dr Srivastava finally sat down and spoke to Rafiq. He was too tired for anger, but some of it still seeped through. ‘There’s something wrong with the baby. The blood supply is choked, and we’ll have to perform a Caesarean immediately. I doubt we can save the child. We may just be able to save your wife.’

  What he didn’t say was that it was all Rafiq’s fault, but he was so disgusted with the man sitting across the table that he didn’t even look him in the face.

  The baby was dead long before they managed to cut it out of its mother’s womb. It had been a girl.

  It took Shaista eighteen hours to recover consciousness. With nobody to turn to, Rafiq had deposited Jamaal at his own parents’ home, the first time they had their grandson to themselves. When Rafiq had turned to leave, having ended his exile from his parents’ life as abruptly as he had chosen it, his father stopped him at the door.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  Out of pride, Rafiq had shaken his head, though he had waited a little at the door, taking a while to pull on his shoes. But his father hadn’t repeated the offer.

  Rafiq was asleep on the hard metal bench next to Shaista’s bed when she woke up in the middle of the night. Feeling the pain in her stomach, she reached out to feel her suddenly flattened belly, and running her hands over the stitches she started weeping. She didn’t need anybody to tell her what had happened. Her sobs were too soft to wake Rafiq, but then, as she tried to sit up, the intravenous cord caught on one of the bottles by her bedside and it exploded on the floor in a spray of shattered glass and pills.

  Rafiq jumped awake, and put a foot down on the floor before he realized what had happened. But he was lucky, and only one small shard cut into his heel before the stab of pain stopped him. He reached down with his right hand and felt across the sole of his foot until he felt the edge of the shard, and pulled it out as he said softly, ‘Gently, Shaista, gently, you’re all right now.’ But that made her weep all the harder.

  In the dim glow of the night lamp Rafiq located his sandals, and then made his way to her bedside. He had just put his hand around her head, cradling her, when the nurse arrived. Rafiq said nothing, nor looked up at her. The nurse didn’t need directions; she had seen the aftermath of many tragedies, and a broken bottle of pills was a small matter. It took her only moments to clean up, then she left the grieving couple to each other’s ministrations.

  ‘Where is Jamaal?’ Shaista asked finally.

  ‘With my family,’ Rafiq answered.

  ‘I so wanted him to have a brother …’

  ‘There will be other chances,’ he said, although he knew there wouldn’t, not for Shaista. The damage that the dead
child had done to her was immense, the doctor had told him. She would be lucky to survive.

  ‘I wanted this one,’ she said, and there was no answer to that. He could only hold her as she wept herself to exhaustion.

  As she slipped into sleep she said to him, commanded him, ‘Stay with me.’

  ‘Always.’

  But he wasn’t there when she awoke. There was only her brother, and Ahmad Saeed.

  ‘Where is Rafiq?’ she asked.

  ‘Outside,’ Ahmad Saeed said. As tired as she was, his tone enraged her. She knew that her husband would have been here if not for these two, knew that he would have been true to his word if not for them and their undue power. They had already humiliated him because he had spoken for her, and now they had made him break his promise to her. How much more would they do to break him?

  Maybe that was why her look was so withering when she turned to the man who had been her caretaker all her life, and asked, ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Bitiya,’ he said, flabbergasted, ‘how could I not come?’

  ‘I have somebody to take care of me,’ she said. ‘You married me off to him.’

  ‘And I am so sorry, Bitiya,’ Ismat Sharif cried. ‘Forgive me. Had I known that this is what he would do to you, I would never have approved of the marriage!’

  ‘Anil, the doctor, he warned that rascal Rafiq. And even I tried,’ Ahmad Saeed said. ‘We are sorry.’

  ‘It was my son,’ Shaista said fiercely.

  They went blank for a moment, and then Ismat said, ‘It was a girl.’

  She would have hit them for that, if not for all the other things they had done. She would have struck them for not understanding that the baby had been her choice, her desire, and that the man they were maligning had been her partner in it, a willing one. If there had been a crime, it was she who was the criminal. He had become an accomplice only out of loyalty. Out of love.