by Omair Ahmad
It was an odd question, and Jamaal could feel everybody’s eyes on him, especially Rafiq’s. So many years had gone by since they had spoken of things other than routine matters, but Rafiq was still Jamaal’s father, he knew that his son was speaking of a matter other than what he asked. Maybe that was why he kept uncharacteristically quiet, letting the Maulana speak uninterrupted.
‘In his collection of Hadith, Imam Bukhari records that Anas stated that the Prophet, peace be upon Him, said, “Help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or is oppressed.” When people asked, “O Allah’s apostle, it is all right to help him if he is oppressed, but how should we help him if he is an oppressor?” The Prophet, peace be upon Him, said, “By preventing him from oppressing others.”’
‘But what if the people he is oppressing are oppressors themselves?’ Jamaal asked.
‘Yes, Maulana sahib, what if a criminal is acting against greater criminals?’ one of the older men there repeated Jamaal’s question. ‘Look at Dawood Ibrahim. He’s a criminal, and he killed many innocents by those blasts in Bombay, but he stopped the riots there, didn’t he?’
Suddenly everybody was talking, and the question that Jamaal had mustered the courage to ask after so long was lost in a deluge of other queries.
‘To kill innocents is a crime,’ the imam said. ‘Islam forbids any attack on non-combatants.’
‘But what if the whole of society is against you?’ somebody wanted to know.
‘All of Mecca was against God’s apostle, peace be upon Him,’ the imam answered, ‘but he did not resort to attacks on the entire city.’
‘Maulana sahib,’ Jamaal tried again, ‘but if you can only bring the smaller criminal to justice, and it means that the bigger oppressors get away with oppression, aren’t you aiding them in oppression?’
Maulana Qayoom was patient with him; he had seen the boy grow up before him, always a little quieter and more serious than the others. ‘It is forbidden to wage war except within the rules that God has set for us, beta. Justice will be done by God alone. We must do what we can according to His law.’
‘So we should suffer, and even hand our own people over to the police?’ one of the men said. ‘That makes no sense.’
Rafiq spoke then, unable to keep silent any longer. ‘Our religion forbids us aiding oppression, even by voluntarily submitting to it.’
It was an odd phrase. He didn’t contradict the imam, but the way he said it, the bitter undertone, meant something very different from what the imam was saying. Jamaal looked at his father, at the taut expression on his face, and realized that he could never tell anybody the truth about Khalid. Least of all his father.
13
Jamaal’s testimony turned out to be unnecessary in the end. They caught Khalid red-handed by the railway station, trying to sell a stolen motorcycle. They would have caught his partner as well, but he disappeared. Or maybe he knew not to turn up. Or maybe, as some rumours had it, the police did catch Khalid’s partner but money and influence oiled the hands of the law and he managed to slip free, leaving only Khalid behind, Khalid the bastard, whose father had neither the wealth nor the influence to keep his son from jail.
The arrest sent shockwaves through the town. However poor or despicable his father might be, Khalid was also the nephew of Ahmad Saeed Shabbir who, after his father passed away three years ago, had become president of the Waqf Board, managing all the properties kept in trust by the Muslims, and their unofficial leader. The shame was immense, and somewhere beneath it all was the fear that if the police could put Ahmad Saeed’s nephew in jail, then no Muslim was safe.
It wasn’t a matter of criminality. Didn’t everybody know that Dilip Aggarwal, the son of the owner of the fertilizer plant, had shot and killed his wife, even if the police would never file a case? Hadn’t other deaths too been hushed up, rapes as well, and all manner of crimes committed by people of all religions and all kinds, whether politician or policeman, businessman or judge, as long as the criminal was of a certain class, with a family that had deep pockets? Why was Khalid in jail now? And could it be only a coincidence that the mosque had been torn down only a few years ago, and that the Bombay bomb blasts were still talked about as if they had happened not some years but a few days ago?
For reasons known only to himself, Ahmad Saeed hesitated. Perhaps despite his position he was never fully comfortable being the leader of the town’s Muslims alone. Maybe he had reason to believe that Khalid really was a criminal and there was no use petitioning the government on his behalf. Or maybe he was just scared.
Elections for the mayor of the city were only a few weeks away, and as always there were only two serious contestants ringed by a crowd of non-entities. By tradition the seat of the mayor passed between the head of the Talwalkar family and Manoj Tripathi, the second son of the Tripathi household, who was also the head priest at the Hanuman mandir. There would be very little campaigning, the candidates simply coming to meet the head of every major neighbourhood to canvass for their support.
There were no direct elections, of course. It was the corporators, chosen from each area by the people, who in turn elected the mayor. Fully a third of the twenty-six corporators in Moazzamabad were elected from Muslim localities, and for this reason the support of the Shabbirs, the most important Muslim family in the city, was invaluable. Everyone who aspired to be mayor of Moazzamabad knew and accepted this. Except Manoj Tripathi.
Even the first time he stood for mayor, Tripathi had already decided to break with tradition. He hadn’t come to meet Ahmad Saeed, nor had he visited any Muslim locality for support. The omission hadn’t harmed him in any way; he had won the election. The mosque in Ayodhya was demolished during his first term as mayor, and he had distributed sweets at the Hanuman temple in celebration. It was also whispered that he had promised that every mosque, even the one in Rasoolpur, would soon be destroyed to make way for a temple.
Now, it was Tripathi’s fourth attempt to become mayor, and though by tradition a Talwalkar should have occupied the office, everyone knew that times had changed. It was said that Rajiv Talwalkar was rethinking his decision to contest. He had come to Rasoolpur, and Ahmad Saeed had assured him of the vote from the corporators he could influence, but Talwalkar appeared to have conceded defeat already. Everyone in Rasoolpur was talking about a secret pact between Tripathi and Talwalkar, some even suggesting that what lay behind the pact was more threat than inducement.
Perhaps this uncertainty, this sign of times changing and Shabbir Manzil losing its position of influence, was why Ahmad Saeed hesitated. He didn’t go to the jail until two days after Khalid’s arrest, by which time, in any case, the pressure of public curiosity had become unbearable and he couldn’t show his face in the mohalla for shame. When he finally got into the jeep, the only person to accompany him was the tall, cadaverous figure of Waris Ahmed, a man who had served as the clerk of the elder Shabbir sahib, Ahmad Saeed’s father, and was credited with knowing more points of law than the combined bar association of Moazzamabad. In his hands was a sheaf of papers, held together in the typical brown folder with a ribbon, proclaiming that they were legal notices.
Bail, it was whispered, and then everybody realized how foolish they had been. Ahmad Saeed had to arrange the bail—what would have been the point of going to see the boy if he couldn’t free him?
If only Ahmad Saeed had known that there was a point in visiting the jail immediately, if he had just cared more, or been less nervous about going to the police station without legal cover—maybe then it could all have been averted. But how was Ahmad Saeed to know that they would start beating the boy so soon, and so savagely? He could not possibly have imagined that the police would bring out a man stinking of urine, shuffling along on the bruised soles of his feet, with a cut lip and torn clothes, and tell him that this was his, Ahmad Saeed Shabbir’s, nephew.
‘Khalid?’ Ahmad Saeed said in surprise, and the battered boy raised his head, and looked at him with eyes that still he
ld something of their mulish stubbornness. Then he opened his mouth to speak, and Ahmad Saeed was appalled to see the space left behind by a broken tooth. Khalid simply whispered, ‘Badeabba …’
‘What have you done to him?’ Ahmad Saeed exclaimed.
The Station House Officer, an inspector nattily dressed in a crisply ironed uniform said, ‘He attacked my men. What do you expect?’
Khalid no longer had to struggle to find his voice. ‘Liar,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you just admit that you beat me because I’m a Muslim?’
Inspector Rawat pointed the shiny end of his baton at him and said, ‘Why you lying little thief …’
‘What thief?’ Khalid asked. ‘What proof do you have except a confession that you beat out of me?’
‘Is this true?’ Waris Ahmed asked before the inspector could refute him.
‘Of course it isn’t,’ the inspector replied in frustration. ‘We caught him red-handed just about to sell the motorcycle.’
‘To whom?’ Waris Ahmed asked. ‘I don’t see another prisoner. Where is the buyer?’
Inspector Rawat had an answer, but he couldn’t give it. So he decided to say nothing.
‘You had better have a good case,’ Waris Ahmed said. ‘And some very good witnesses to say that your men acted in self-defence when they beat up this boy.’
This was too much for the inspector. ‘Or what?’ he asked. ‘What will you do? The boy is a thief. We caught him, and he confessed. We have the details of a dozen robberies that he committed in the last six months, and he squealed like a pig the last two days in prison, told us everything.’
‘You had better have a good case,’ Waris Ahmed repeated, unfazed, and then turned to follow Ahmad Saeed as the older man helped his nephew out of jail.
At the Suleiman Medical Centre, as the doctor washed the cuts, applied balm, and put Khalid through a battery of tests, Waris Ahmed told Ahmad Saeed that the case was weak. Unless the police presented the buyer, a confession was just not enough, even if they did recover the stolen goods. There was little chance that they could successfully prosecute such a case, especially in the light of the beating the boy had endured.
When the doctor brought Khalid out, telling Ahmad Saeed that they would have to wait for the results but it seemed that there was no permanent damage except a badly chipped tooth, Ahmad Saeed told Khalid that the police had no case, even with the stolen goods.
‘What stolen goods?’ Khalid asked, his eyes flat and malevolent. ‘I’m no thief. They just stopped me on the street and asked me my name. When I told them, they asked me if I would come along with them to identify my friend Raghav’s motorcycle that had been stolen two days ago, and took me in their jeep to the forest. The motorcycle was lying flat on the ground, and its licence plate had been removed. When I pushed it upright, I recognized the sticker that Raghav had stuck on the side of the fuel tank. “So you can tell it’s stolen,” the inspector said to me. “I bet you know a lot about stolen goods.” When I asked him what he meant, he said he had a lot to discuss with me, and they took me to jail.’
He paused before continuing. ‘And then they started beating me, and abusing me, telling me that I was a bastard, a thief, a motherfucking Muslim, and on and on, for hours. When I passed out, they threw water on me, and then started beating me again. They tied me down to a table and beat the soles of my feet. They wouldn’t even let me go to the toilet, just made me piss on myself, and then they continued to beat me until I said I’d say whatever they wanted me to say, do whatever they wanted me to do, just so that they’d stop. They made me write out a confession. And then you came.’
Ahmad Saeed was stunned. He had never heard something like this before. It was like in a movie. Even the doctor standing next to Khalid was moved by the power of the story. Only Waris Ahmad thought that it sounded too good, almost rehearsed, without a word out of place, and that the police inspector would have dictated a confession only if he had collected the stolen goods beforehand. But all he said was, ‘I’ve told the inspector he should have a very good case.’
‘He won’t,’ Khalid replied. He had a small grin on his face and Waris Ahmed thought to himself that sometimes it wasn’t enough to be a thief. The best of thieves needed to be liars as well, and such good liars that even the most experienced of men, even hardened policemen, would think that they had managed to get their hands on the truth, only to come away empty-handed.
The story of Khalid’s torture at the hands of the police reached everybody in Rasoolpur mohalla by that afternoon. There were many who could recite, word for word, what Khalid had said about his experience, and there were many more who retold the story using their own imagination, adding electric shocks, acid and sodomy to the mix. Half a day more, and the spine-chilling news was being told and heard all over Moazzamabad, even beyond.
By that time Inspector Rawat too had understood that a thief could be a liar as well, and a good one, good enough to fool Rawat, maybe good enough to destroy his career. He called Manoj Tripathi’s office, and was told that the priest and two-time mayor would see him at half past five, and that Rawat should come and say his prayers at the temple.
‘Give me Haria,’ Rawat said, as he sat before the priest that evening. But Tripathi didn’t reply.
‘I need Haria,’ Rawat repeated. ‘You said that he was your man, that you needed him, and that the boy would talk. I need Haria to make the case.’
‘What happened?’ Tripathi finally asked.
‘The boy talked all right, but he lied. He made fools out of us. We thought he was confessing, but he gave us nothing. All the locations are false. The goods are somewhere else.’
‘Haria can tell you where they are.’
‘No,’ Rawat said, shaking his head. ‘No. Haria told me that the boy never revealed where he stashed the material. And anyway, even if I can recover the goods, he’s chosen such locations in the confession that he could easily prove that we didn’t find them there. One of them is the house of a sitting high court judge! The minute we produce that confession the case will be thrown out of court. If the press get their hands on it nobody will be able to save me.’
‘He made a fool out of you, and you want my man?’
‘Look, if Haria confesses, in court, and identifies the boy, I’ll make sure he gets a milder sentence. With any luck he’ll be out of jail in six months.’
Tripathi said nothing for a moment, thinking, and then asked, ‘You think that Haria’s confession would prove anything?’
‘At least it would prove that I didn’t cook up the case,’ Rawat said desperately. ‘Otherwise, not only will I lose my job, I could even end up in jail.’
The policeman’s fear made the priest break into laughter. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You don’t know Moazzamabad. And you don’t know how to deal with these Mussalmans. It’s just the boy, isn’t it? Don’t you know that he’s a bastard? Haven’t you realized that not even his father spoke up for him? It took two days for them to come and fetch him from jail. Get rid of him and you’ll be doing them a favour. They’ll thank you soon enough, but only after you’ve done their dirty work for them. Useless sons of whores don’t even know how to get rid of their own criminals; we have to do it for them.’
Rawat shook his head. ‘I can’t do anything right now.’
The priest smiled. ‘Let me show you how it’s done.’
Two days later the men came for Khalid. It was at the medical centre. There were three of them having tea, and a driver in the jeep. They had been waiting all day, from ten in the morning—for their elderly aunt, they said, who was expected anytime. But it was at the sight of Khalid in the rickshaw that they sprang to attention. He was still walking with crutches, and as he descended from the rickshaw, slow and tentative, the men put away their teacups and started to walk purposefully towards him.
People casually made way for them, as they unthinkingly do when larger men move in a particular manner towards their goal. They would have probably gotten away wit
h it, except that at the last minute, just as one of them was about to reach out to grab Khalid’s arm, Khalid seemed to slip. The man stretched his arm farther to catch the falling boy, but Khalid was not falling, and at nineteen years of age he was no longer just a boy. His elbow came up hard, and made a sickening noise as it sank into the man’s exposed neck, into his Adam’s apple. As the first man fell, choking, Khalid whirled around, dropping one crutch, holding the other with both hands like a cricket bat, and drove it with all his strength into the side of the second man’s head.
And suddenly the third man was left all alone—one of his companions lay unconscious, with a bleeding scalp, and the other was gasping helplessly for breath on the ground.
‘Come on, motherfucker,’ Khalid yelled.
The man didn’t have such courage. He’d never hunted alone. He turned to flee, but now the people didn’t make way for him. They knew Khalid, and they knew his story. He might not have been a hero in Rasoolpur, but he was one of them, and close to being a martyr. They wouldn’t allow some thugs to kidnap him from under their noses, now that they understood who these men were, or at least what they had been attempting to do.
The driver saw the crowd start to beat the third man, and made a fatal mistake. He had been ready to go, but in his hurry he pressed too hard on the accelerator just as the jeep roared into life—and the engine choked into silence. He had been driving the jeep for years, and he should have remembered that the engine had a tendency to flood, but fear had overwhelmed him. Soon the crowd overwhelmed him as well, pulling him out, beating him down, and then, just as he lost consciousness, he saw that somebody had set fire to the jeep. His last emotion was terror. It was a petrol jeep, chosen for its quick acceleration so they could make a clean getaway, and unlike diesel petrol doesn’t merely burn, it explodes.
