by Omair Ahmad
14
Should Jamaal have spoken then? If people knew exactly what kind of person Khalid was, would the fires have burnt that bright, or for so long? Who can tell?
And maybe in all that I am telling you there is nothing to help us make sense of this town, our mohalla, that boy. We understand so little, after all …
But let me finish my story nevertheless.
So Jamaal told no one. He watched, he listened. Most of all to his father.
Rafiq was at the forefront of things, but in an odd way. He was not involved in violence, God forbid the thought, nor did he make speeches or lead demonstrations. No, what he did instead was to present facts. Perhaps because he was a teacher, he had a way of saying things, of recalling an incident, so that a fact was no longer just a fact but a lesson, the wisdom of history. As Khalid’s story whirled through the mohalla, Rafiq recalled for people the recent incident of two Muslim boys going missing from the railway station in Lucknow, and their bodies turning up mysteriously in the Gomti river three days later. He recalled, too, that a journalist—a Sikh—had started digging around for details of the boys’ disappearance, and one day his car was hit by a police truck whose brakes had failed. The journalist had survived, but his investigations had not.
Rafiq knew dozens of such facts, collected from newspapers and committed to memory so that he could tell them as stories of their time to those of his neighbourhood who cared to listen. People congregated to hear him now, as tension gripped the mohalla. They arrived at his house as they had once turned up at Shabbir Manzil. The only difference was that no one was turned away from Rafiq’s.
Initially Jamaal stayed, making tea and listening, adding nothing of his own. To say what he knew of Khalid would be inappropriate in these gatherings; it might even be seen as treacherous. He couldn’t risk that. But there were times when he wanted to stop them and say, ‘Look, this isn’t an innocent you are talking about. This is Khalid the thief.’
But he had never spoken before, and how could he speak now? He had never trained for it, he had no experience, nor even any great desire to speak his mind. How could he correct his father when he had never told him the truth about the broken pen, or about the reason why his stomach had reacted badly to the things Khalid fed him?
Rafiq, on the other hand, had spent a lifetime waiting to hold forth. He had practiced silently to himself all those long years in near obscurity. Stories flowed out of him now. Jamaal had never seen his father like this. Rafiq had always been the man who said odd things, briefly, abruptly—dark words that everybody thought of but would not speak. The fact that he would say these unspeakable things had found him a place, but that place was on the sidelines. Now, though, the end of the world was approaching. They had ignored it for so long, and they had been wrong. Rafiq, it seemed, had been the only one willing to look truth in the face. People clustered around him, as they had never done before, for whatever it was that he could offer.
Alone with his story, the wrong story that was locked inside his head like an urgent secret, Jamaal could think of little else. And every day he thought about it, it became more wrong, not less. After all, what did it matter if Khalid was a thief? There were other thieves, and were they beaten as he had been? Nobody had tried to kidnap or kill them in broad daylight. If they were looking to kill Khalid, then, was it because he was a thief or because he was a Muslim? All Jamaal had to do was listen to his father, to see the peace on his father’s face when he recalled another violent or hushed-up incident, from another time, and showed how it all fit. This was how it was all connected, and even if the end of the world was coming, he seemed to be saying, at least they were not sheep that they would go to their deaths without knowledge, without recognizing the true face of their executioners. The crime they had committed was to be Muslim, nothing more, nothing less.
It wasn’t because he was a thief that Khalid had been tortured and kidnapped. And it wasn’t the reason why dozens, hundreds, thousands, might now die.
There was only one person that Jamaal could turn to, for solace and clarity, but he struggled with the decision, did not know whether he should speak. The mosque, in any case, was no longer a place where people would gather as they did before. There were always policemen there. And what would he tell Maulana Qayoom, what would the imam hear? And anyway, were his questions so important? So he hesitated, and he hesitated too long.
After the day that Manoj Tripathi’s men had come for Khalid and failed, curfew days finally reached Moazzamabad. But not immediately. That evening, that week, was odd. Very few things changed in reality, but it was as if there was a difference in the humidity and temperature, in the air they breathed. The mohalla was both energized and curiously reluctant to do anything. All things seemed to be possible, but nobody really did much except talk. It was what revolutions must feel like. The police had disappeared, and one after another people looked up and around. There was a sense, a suspicion, that everything that they took for granted, the rules and orders of everyday life, were unnecessary. Or—no, that was not strictly true. What they realized was that the only people keeping them in their cage were themselves, and this thought both freed and paralysed them. Freedom of course is the great temptation—the great, fatal temptation, wouldn’t you agree?—and it was tempting here too, then as it is now. But there was also fear—of being free, of what would happen the day after freedom.
It should have been the ideal time for the people who hated the state to rise up, except that they needed a state to hate. The police weren’t around for them to revolt against, and for a while Rafiq found himself with a diminished audience. If there was freedom to be had, why should he be listened to, why should anyone be listened to?
And then the police were back, in force. No one had seen so many, nor of the kind who arrived.
Curfew was declared. Pickets were set up at the major crossroads in town, but this was a mohalla so there were only minor crossroads. A large truck painted in camouflage trundled up close to Shabbir Manzil and disgorged its contents. These were no ordinary police, even their khaki was different, and they were armed with submachine guns. The street shook a little when they jumped out, a stream of young and middle-aged men with surprisingly clean boots.
The people of the mohalla, like stunned cattle, found themselves herded into their homes, the peace enforced by the threat of gunfire. That was when the resistance rose, and speeches were made. But they were only made in the safety of the home, and sometimes in the mosque. This was Rasoolpur after all, resistance did not mean picking up a gun. The greatest violence we knew was that of a cutting remark.
But the world was bigger than Rasoolpur; Moazzamabad was bigger than Rasoolpur, and the world was so much bigger even than Moazzamabad. The world crept in, almost by stealth. Slowly things that we had only heard about—things that were happening in the rest of the country—began to happen in our town. In small ways. The muezzins set their loudspeakers in the mosques a little louder, or maybe they just sounded that way in the new situation. The chants and bhajans from the temples sounded louder as well. At some point of time, it was difficult to tell exactly when, there were more insistent calls to prayer being sent out from our mosque early in the morning, and the chants from the temples around our neighbourhood began to reach us earlier and earlier in the morning.
To those cooped up in their homes the war to be the loudest began like this, until there was only the noise of aggression, no call to God at all left in the way that people were summoned to state their loyalties.
In that compressed and wound-up space rumours spread, first like stains and then like small fires. Somebody had been killed by the police, a priest had been caught with guns in his Maruti van, a young woman had been raped—always such women were beautiful, and then ritually slashed and scarred. Always the mob was coming to kill.
All of this had happened before, but it took on an added edge now. Jamaal was a teenager when the curfew days began. He learned that curfew fear was of a diff
erent quality and texture than any other he had encountered. Sitting in his house, he saw the fear not only in his own face when he looked in the mirror, but caught it on his father’s face as well. He could see the mark it left, a yellowing and tautness of the skin that was unmistakable. And he could see it in the twitching of the eyes that would always look away after brief contract.
It was a virus in the gut, spreading silently in the blood, infecting the heart and the mind. Maybe it really was a sickness that had been identified and recorded in medical books long ago, and a good doctor could detect it as infallibly as malaria. Jamaal wasn’t sure, he didn’t know, and after a while he wondered if it was only he who was looking for signs of curfew sickness.
Or maybe it was just that everyone was sick in those days, and who wanted to be reminded of their own failing health? In the constricted hours, curfew fear sat crouched in Rafiq and Jamaal’s living room, feeding on slips of the tongue and growing more massive by the hour.
During the hours when the curfew was lifted there was a strange feeling of carnival, as if everyone wanted to talk at once. Funnily enough, they would congregate at Rafiq’s house, and listen to him talk about fear instead, about being hunted, about the end of the world. It seemed to relax Rafiq somehow, as if their greater fear mitigated his own illness and made him healthy. Or perhaps what helped him was the simple fact that people listened to him. Now, after all those years of obscurity and frustration.
For Jamaal it was unbearable, to be freed from fear for some hours, only to be subjected to even greater fears. He would run away from the house, with the excuse of groceries to be bought, little household errands to be done. But on his return there was nothing else to do, except to share the enclosed space with Rafiq who had the shiny-eyed look, those days, of a doomsday prophet.
Where could Jamaal run from that—when he was jailed within his own house, where could he escape? When his own father seemed to thrive off the dangers of the time, Jamaal’s cowardice overwhelmed him. The fear became an invisible, obsequious, unshakeable pet, like a mangy street dog that had adopted him, whose sweat grew rancid and soaked into every small part of his life. The stink of it was in every piece of clothing he wore. Even when the curfew was finally lifted and he walked out of the house without thought of where he shouldn’t go and when he should scuttle back indoors, he carried the stench in his clothes.
The worst of it was that the fear was not unreasonable. All that Rafiq said made perfect sense.
When the whole country was burning it seemed impossible that any town or city, any person, should remain untouched. More than once the news had come, whispered or spoken out loud in anger or alarm, telling them the mob was already on its way to gut and burn their mohalla and slaughter everyone who lived there. Always it had turned out to be a mere rumour, but they could never be sure when it would be the real thing. Did they not already know, wasn’t Rafiq there to remind them, that the khaki of the police was the uniform of callous disregard, if not hate? Didn’t they know well that the law could be a cliff that they could batter their hands to pulp against, and still it would give them no shelter?
It did something to Jamaal, that knowledge, the reasonableness with which Rafiq explained it all. Jamaal understood. He was sure he understood. When he heard the news now, he knew exactly which mohalla the mob had set out from—he knew because his schoolmates lived there. He knew that they would be part of the maddened hundred-armed creature carrying axes, iron rods, tridents and kerosene cans that would break down the door looking for him and his father. One night, he woke with a start, shivering with dread and cowered under his bed, till shame forced him to crawl out. That marked him—the shame. And the absolute loneliness, for nothing isolates you as completely as the thought of dying.
There is something obscene in being eighteen years old and knowing the face of your death so well that you can draw in the details. You see that face when your classmate refuses to meet your eye and you wonder if he’s thinking about your murder.
Jamaal learnt a lot in those days, through his last year at St Jude’s.
He bloated up with the knowledge. And this knowledge had the smell and taste and feel of fear. Although outwardly he was thin to the point of being skeletal, he felt obese with his fear as it grew a little every hour, till it was straining the insides of his skin. Had his father not been there, Jamaal would have flung himself out onto those eerily empty roads, towards the guns of the policemen keeping the peace. He would have died there, and it would have been the end of it all.
One night he almost did it; the whole mohalla almost did. It was after a week when the curfew had been enforced rigorously, only a couple of hours allowed in the morning and the evening for people to scurry to the stores for supplies and return, panting, to their prisons. That evening had been no different from the others, unnaturally silent, people recovering from the quickened pulse and tension of the two-hour reprieve. And then the chanting started. It was so loud that it would have needed countless hundreds to make such a sound, a veritable army.
It began as a slow rumble just before midnight, and grew into a roar within minutes. You could hear the hate, the religious frenzy of the mob that was coming, and everybody in Rasoolpur knew that they were going to be killed. The police and paramilitary would stand aside to let the terrifying mob in this time, and nobody would escape.
There was no point in staying inside, and people sneaked out slowly to their balconies to look out into the darkness, to see the shape of their death. But there was nothing to see. The sound was coming from across the wide sewer line and there were no lights there. The only movement was that of the policemen and soldiers stationed in their trucks, and they seemed to be cowering at the unexpected attack.
Suddenly Bashir Qasim appeared at the gate of his house. A middle-aged man, he was dressed in a white kurta-pyjama. In his hand was the sword that had been preserved in his family for centuries. Since all the guns in the neighbourhood had been confiscated at the beginning of the curfew, this was all he could find to defend himself. Always a bit portly, Bashir Qasim looked strangely thin and fragile in the yellow of the sodium lights. As the men in uniform hid, and the neighbourhood cowered, Bashir Qasim raised the sword and roared the old war cry back at the hidden mob: ‘Naar e takbeer, Allah u Akbar!’
His voice cracked at the first attempt, but then he roared again, challenging the killers advancing towards his home. And then, one by one, other people took up the cry and in minutes the residents of the neighbourhood were out in the streets, armed with kitchen knives and roaring, again and again, ‘Naar e takbeer, Allah u Akbar!’
It was then that the men in uniform sprang to attention. Jeeps and trucks with flashing lights and sirens drove into the streets of Rasoolpur, scattering people in pyjamas out of their way. Within fifteen minutes the mohalla was covered with men in khaki, and then abruptly the sound of the threatening mob vanished. It was only the next day that people found out that there had been no mob, just three tape recorders fixed to loudspeakers placed strategically across from Rasoolpur and turned on full at the dead of night.
Bashir Qasim’s sword was confiscated. Everybody knew that it was Manoj Tripathi who had arranged the trick with the loudspeakers, but nothing could be proved. What could easily be proved was that the police were not there to protect the residents of Rasoolpur, but to strip them of all their defences instead.
The next day, as Jamaal was slicing onions for salad to go with the dinner, an idea came to him.
No. It wasn’t quite like that. There was no thinking. He just washed the knife, dried it, and his right hand slipped it in the gap between the rolled up sleeve and the skin of his upper left arm. It took a second for the cold metal to warm next to his skin, and Jamaal rolled the sleeve a little tighter to hold the knife, but it fit almost naturally.
It is impossible to recall how many times the fear came and passed. You do not count the day of your death; it is only supposed to happen once. You remember the old cliché that
a brave man dies only the one death while a coward dies many, many times? Maybe Jamaal was a coward then, and he died many times. But not, as they say, in reality. The mob that was always coming for us never actually arrived, and the Police Armed Constabulary, the PAC, somehow never made it to our door collecting men and boys for target practice.
After the horror of those weeks, Jamaal found himself, strangely enough, still alive.
When a dog bites a man, the man learns to fear. When a dog slavers, barks and howls at the sight of a man, when it chases him down the street and corners him against a wall and is then unexpectedly called back by its owner, what does the man learn?
15
The curfew ended, but it stunted many lives. Like Jamaal’s. The fear and confusion extended well beyond those powder-keg days, and there came a time when Jamaal found that he had done little to secure his future. Maybe somewhere in the world you can find a job when all you have is a modicum of ambition, a bachelor’s degree in history and the ability to hide a kitchen knife on your person without letting it show. Not in Moazzamabad.
Jamaal even missed the tech revolution. He did not study computers, but he was taught typing on broken-down machines in the college, the only boy among a roomful of girls who hid their smiles behind their hands and giggled at him. And what was a computer in Moazzamabad anyway but a glorified typewriter? When the opportunity came, Jamaal was ready to be a typist.
As the memory of curfew and violence faded, few people came to listen to Rafiq. They had less time, less patience, too. They even had opinions of their own that Rafiq had to listen to, silent against his will. One evening when Jamaal returned from his college he found Rafiq sitting alone at home.
‘As salaam aleikum Abba,’ he said.
Rafiq looked up at him, but took a while to reply. ‘Wa aleikum as salaam.’
The pause had been just long enough for Jamaal to hesitate. He could not go into his room now; so he asked, ‘Would you like some tea?’
