Jimmy

by Omair Ahmad

  There was a moment when Jamaal felt something odd. Rahul had been praising him to the skies, and said, ‘You could be part of our study group. You could lead us.’

  A sudden silence descended on the group. Although Rahul had proposed the idea, it had lost steam even before he finished saying it, the last words coming out less as a statement than as a question already gone wrong.

  Amit added, reluctantly, ‘We meet on Saturday mornings at Ruby’s.’

  Jamaal knew the name of the restaurant. It was the most fashionable restaurant in Moazzamabad. Actually, it was the only one; all the rest were glorified dhabas or other greasy eateries. Jamaal had never been there, of course. But he had stared curiously at the rich people of the city walking within its portals. He had no idea what it cost to eat there. He had never thought about it. What was the use, when he knew that he could never afford it? And how did one behave inside a place like Ruby’s? How did one sit, what did one ask for and how? There were, Jamaal knew, a hundred different ways to fail in a place like that.

  ‘Saturday morning?’ he asked falteringly.

  The others nodded slowly, unsure, and that gave Jamaal time to think up an excuse. ‘My Urdu lessons—I go to the mosque for my Urdu lessons on Saturday,’ he blurted.

  And at that they all smiled, suddenly liberated. For no reason Jamaal started laughing, and the others joined in. He was so relieved that his classmates had turned out so much more welcoming than the children in Rasoolpur.

  Even when he got back to his class Jamaal didn’t notice anything odd, except that Amit, Saurav and Rahul immediately left his side and made their way to where Arun was sitting, smiling contentedly to himself. And then school was over, gym class being the last session for the day.

  It was only when he reached home and took out his books to do his homework that Jamaal found out what had happened. When he opened the fountain pen, ink splashed out of the cap all over his shirt and trousers. He leapt to his feet, trying to save his notebook. His clothes could be washed, but not the paper. Luckily he had sat on the floor instead of his bed, and he ran to get a cloth to mop up the ink. He filled a bucket of water, and soaking the cloth, he carefully cleaned the mess, and then, sprinkling some washing powder on the floor, he scrubbed the tiles until the stains were almost gone, leaving only a slight darkness in the cracks.

  When he turned his attention to the pen, he found that there was no nib. It had been snapped off, as if somebody had taken the pen and smashed it, nib first, into the ground with as much force as he could muster. It was destroyed beyond any hope of recovery, and when he realized that Jamaal started to cry.

  He couldn’t tell his father—what could his father do? He himself owned only one fountain pen, an old one. He couldn’t afford to buy Jamaal another one, especially if even that one would be broken by the boys in school. And if Jamaal complained, what would he say? What proof did he have? Just that Amit and Saurav and Rahul had praised him, that they had talked to him like a friend, an equal? And even if the teachers believed him, would that make him safer, could he ever afford to bring the fruit of his achievements, the proof of his father’s pride, to school, knowing that someone would find a way to destroy it? A gift was no use if you lived forever in fear of what might happen to it.

  So Jamaal learned that there was a price to success, and the price wasn’t simply hard work. He also realized that he wasn’t a fighter, that he didn’t have the courage to confront his tormentors. He could only bend before them, not challenge them in any way. He understood then why his father never protested about being called a mullah behind his back. He understood who his father was, and also that he was his father’s son, a mullah’s son, and a coward. He lay down on the cool ground, curled his body around the broken pen and wept.

  10

  Jamaal found not just truth at St Jude’s, but also a friend: Khalid the bastard.

  It’s hard to say exactly what their relationship was, or indeed what friendship meant to either of them. Part of it was just that neither of them had any other friends, and perhaps that explains the nature of their relationship: the soft, almost secret greeting exchanged in the morning, a lunch shared when Khalid hadn’t brought anything, or a cup of tea that Khalid paid for though he didn’t look like he came from a home of any considerable means. This was how it was; there were hardly any words exchanged, and there were no shared interests. What there was, though nobody knew this and neither of them quite acknowledged it either, was the complicity of a criminal and his accomplice.

  So, perhaps it wasn’t friendship. But then, how do you define friendship? Is it good fortune or only a privilege, a gift for those blessed with good sense and an even temper? Either way, what can it really mean to two young boys in Moazzamabad, each carrying the mark of his father’s sins and mother’s death?

  Khalid was, of course, the son of Shakeel Shabbir, the second son of that grand house, the son in whose company no respectable woman would be seen. And if disrespectable women found themselves in his vicinity, well, everybody knew how he would act. Wasn’t Khalid living proof of that? The boy had his father’s features, had had them since birth, and became more like him as the years went by, acquiring the same fleshy lips, the floppy hair, even the odd mannerism of pulling at his earlobe when he was lost in thought. Everybody could see that he was Shakeel’s son—they just didn’t know who his mother was.

  Shabbir Manzil always maintained that it had been a secret marriage, that Shakeel’s mother had come from an orthodox, even an ultra-orthodox, Shia family in Lucknow who disapproved violently of all Sunni Muslims such as the Shabbirs. And the poor woman had died in childbirth, which was the great, disorienting tragedy of Shakeel’s life.

  But the story hardly silenced the doubters and the merely curious. Why would a Shia woman fall in love with Shakeel? And if her family was ultra-orthodox, how did she meet him in the first place? And why did this only become known after her death? And now that she was dead, couldn’t at least her family be named, so that others, genuinely sympathetic maybe, could offer their condolences?

  No. The story raised far more questions than it answered. The only reason nobody dared ask Shakeel was that he was as quick with his fists as he was rumoured to be oily in his ways. And Shabbir Manzil said nothing else. So the mystery persisted, as did the rumours and insinuations, and the occasional insult. There was no real need to please the man; everybody knew that the wealth and power was vested in the person of Ahmad Saeed, who shared none of it with his wayward younger brother. The people of the mohalla called Khalid exactly what they thought the son of a philanderer should be called: a bastard. It was a constant whisper in Khalid’s world, barely heard but always there: haraamzaada, bastard. But nobody was willing to explain to him what it meant, no matter how much he asked.

  Ignorance is always a matter of choice. You can choose to see, and you can choose to listen. But isn’t it a miracle of God that it is always easier to hear and bear what people are saying than it is to see the truth? We may shut our eyes, but we can never close our ears; and even if people can choose to close their mouths and silence their tongues, they seldom do.

  Khalid became familiar with the title of bastard long before he was told anything about it by his father. And whatever he was told, he kept strictly to himself. He had been laughed at enough in his life to want to invite more mockery by opening his mouth and protesting his mother’s innocence. Or maybe Khalid understood the peculiarity of the title. A bastard is not so much a sinner himself as a product of sin. Or the product, many would say, of wayward love, or rebel love, or even the legitimate, virile passion of a man who will obey no rules. And in that case the title can also be a form of praise, an abusive sort of praise, but praise nonetheless.

  Khalid, never quite respectable, yet never entirely rejected, was always on the edge of things, breaking rules in a lackadaisical manner that displayed not so much a wish to cause mischief as an inability to follow any convention at all. For someone born outside the law, outside
of society, what did it mean that the teacher wanted homework done? What sense did it make, the demand that students should be presentably turned out, with their shirts ironed, nails clipped and hair neatly cut? Khalid could never follow any of these instructions. He would try; at the beginning of each year, he would try, but within a couple of months his notebooks would become scarred and leprous with abuse, a seam would open up in his shirt, and his shoelaces would habitually come undone.

  The teachers tried to do their bit, some out of concern for the boy, others because it hurt their ego the way he flouted all the norms. It had little impact. Khalid would suffer the punishments with mulish indifference. He would present his hand to be hit with the teacher’s slim disciplining rod. He would stand in the corner, silently, when ordered to do so. He would spend the recess time shut up in the classroom completing the homework that he had forgotten to do. Khalid simply didn’t care. He had no friends whose shame could affect him, and he cared nothing for the teachers’ encouragement. There was no pain that they could subject him to that would make him wince and resolve to change.

  Though, in fact, he was a bright child, even a talented one. His geography and biology teachers raved about the fine detail with which he drew his diagrams and maps. His maths teachers had also come to realize that although Khalid may be dozing off, or playing with an insect in the back row, his understanding of numbers was far better than students two years his senior. But these came instinctively to Khalid, he did not have to work at them. He understood them at a gut level and simply produced what he considered natural. It was the rest of the stuff, the social science classes and the English lessons, that he couldn’t quite grasp.

  After a while the school just gave up. It wasn’t as if he was disruptive; there wasn’t any real damage that he could do—for all his spunk and devil-may-care attitude, he was a loner, not part of any gang. The other students, in any case, had realized that there were things that he could get away with that they shouldn’t even attempt. Even if they survived the harsh scolding, or punishment, that would come their way, they had parents at home who would pick up where the teachers had left off. Khalid had no such fear. His father would come to the school if the teachers called. He would even cuff Khalid, and yell at him, but it was all an act, a performance by father and son for a society that cared nothing for either.

  Jamaal should have been the exact opposite. He was a quiet child, one of those who never raised his hand in any class, with the possible exception of English literature, and never made a performance or a fuss. His homework was always done on time, and if the teacher asked him a question, he would always have the answer. On the surface, at least, Jamaal was an ideal student—a child who came to be taught, who listened and learned. Except that no teacher really liked him. In fact, they hardly noticed him. For most of them he was only a name in the attendance register or on top of an exam paper; he made no further impact on them. Maybe they understood that just as Khalid cared nothing for social norms and knew at some deep level that he would remain just a poor bastard, Jamaal was always going to be a mullah’s son, no matter what he did.

  The two boys met just before the English class. Jamaal’s English class.

  After the incident of the pen, Jamaal had retreated into himself, but he had watched and learned that no one particularly cared about the English class, no one except the girls, and they were not the sort to bully Jamaal physically. Of course, they had their own system of humiliation and exclusion. A snide remark and a snigger could stay with some unfortunate for weeks. It would be whispered behind a back, but if the victim turned to look there would only be a few girls, all prim and proper in their uniforms, not one of them showing any emotion at all. But Jamaal was too low on the social scale for this to have much effect on him. He could afford to ignore their dislike most of the time, and be invisible. This was necessary.

  It was true that Rafiq had expected much from his son, and just once in a while Jamaal needed to make his father proud, and the English class was good enough for that. The subject may not have mattered to the other boys, who were too busy trying to prove themselves in the sciences, but to him it was a safe way of ensuring he had something with which to occasionally make his father happy. It wasn’t quite so simple, of course. He had to be careful, too. The girls were related to some of the boys by blood, community or social standing. This was Moazzamabad, after all, and there were only a handful of families that mattered, and most of them had some children studying at St Jude’s. The boys didn’t care if Jamaal did all right in a girlie subject, but he had to make sure it was never interpreted as humiliating their sisters. That would be going too far.

  This was how Jamaal felt and measured the walls of his prison, day by day, and figured out to the last half-span of a hand what kind of freedom he was allowed. And during that voyage of discovery, he also discovered Khalid.

  He shouldn’t have, not really. Even if Khalid was from the same mohalla, he was still a year senior to Jamaal, and at such an age a year is a boundary more real than the borders of many states. But they met through a criminal conspiracy—and if you are already breaking laws, what do social conventions matter?

  Jamaal was sitting in the classroom during lunch break, working on his English lesson. There was no point in going outside to play, when all he could do was play alone. Khalid sauntered into the room. He saw Jamaal, but it didn’t give him pause; instead he quickly went through pencil box after pencil box on the desks in the front row. Jamaal could only watch from his seat near the back of the class and admire the smooth, silent efficiency of Khalid’s fingerwork.

  Suddenly Khalid stopped. He had just opened Saurav’s pencil box. He reached in and pulled out a single currency note. Jamaal was too far away to see it clearly, and Khalid’s fingers too quick to give him much of a chance, but it looked like a large note, maybe fifty or even a hundred rupees. Khalid looked up and met Jamaal’s eyes. He didn’t smile, or show emotion of any kind, but there was an understanding of sorts reached between them. Then Jamaal went back to his work, and Khalid disappeared.

  11

  The noise of the children returning from the lunch break sounded unnaturally loud to Jamaal, but nothing happened. Saurav didn’t need his pencil box for the first class, nor the next.

  It was only at the beginning of the third class, the last one before the end of school, that Saurav opened his pencil box. Jamaal saw him pause, and start rummaging through the box. He had been watching Saurav so intently that it was a relief that the theft had been discovered, and he lowered his eyes so that Saurav wouldn’t turn around and catch him looking. But he heard the low hiss of conversation as Saurav turned and whispered urgently to Rahul.

  ‘Rahul, Saurav,’ the teacher asked sternly, ‘are you sharing secrets or is there something you’d like to discuss with the rest of the class?’

  Now Jamaal could look up. Everybody was staring at Saurav and Rahul. It was Rahul who answered, his voice stiff. ‘Ma’am, some money is missing from Saurav’s pencil box.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mrs Tripathi asked Saurav severely.

  This was too much for Saurav, and he turned, teary-eyed, and pointed his finger at Jamaal. ‘He stole it! That thief stole my money,’ and having made the accusation, he started weeping uncontrollably.

  Jamaal had been expecting it, but he hadn’t known how he would react. He felt the shock, the blood draining from his face, but he sat stock-still. He didn’t have any words to respond.

  ‘Saurav!’ Mrs Tripathi exclaimed in anger and then, as the class burst into excited chatter, she banged her ruler on her desk. ‘All of you, if you don’t start behaving yourselves in one minute, I will cancel your lunch break for the rest of the week.’

  It took some time but the classroom subsided into silence, with only Saurav hiccupping in anger. They knew from experience that Mrs Tripathi was not to be trifled with. ‘Saurav, do you have any idea what you are saying?’

  ‘He was right here, ma’am,’ Saurav burbled. ‘W
e all went out to play after having lunch, and he just stayed here, and he stole my money.’

  Mrs Tripathi looked up and met Jamaal’s eyes, but he still couldn’t find anything to say. It was Mrs Tripathi who said, ‘Jamaal always stays here during the lunch break.’ There was an odd note in her voice, something that Jamaal couldn’t identify. If he could have believed it possible coming from someone as stern as Mrs Tripathi, he would have said it was sympathy, or at least pity, that hid in her tone, making it flat but still full of questions.

  ‘My money was in the pencil box before I left,’ Saurav insisted, ‘and it was gone when I came back. It was him, I know it. It was that dirty little thief. He did it.’

  ‘Saurav!’ This time Mrs Tripathi’s tone was much stricter, cutting through even Saurav’s newfound sense of authority and shutting him up.

  After a pause she said, ‘I’m taking both of you to see the Principal. Arun, Ritika, take care of the classroom. If I hear even a whisper in the corridor, you will all regret it very much.’

  Jamaal stood up, but his legs were trembling. He forced himself to be steady, gripping hard the ruler in his hand, and made his way forward. He could feel the eyes on the back of his neck and, despite Mrs Tripathi’s threat, the insect buzz of whispering was clear in his ears.

  ‘Do you want to leave your ruler behind?’ Mrs Tripathi asked, but he shook his head, and she didn’t insist.

  It was only fifty yards across the playground to the Principal’s office, but it was the longest walk that Jamaal had ever taken. Next to him he could hear the quick breathing of Saurav, somewhere between rage and tears. Jamaal didn’t look at him. Even as they waited outside the office, Jamaal didn’t turn to look at the other boy.