No God in Sight

by Altaf Tyrewala

  It is I who opens Medina Chicken Mart in the morning. On arriving, I step out of my shirt-pant and hang them on a nail high above the bloodiness below. I put on my uniform, then—a blue-checkered lungi and netted vest. My friend Mushtaq had said that in these clothes, with the cleaver in hand and black amulets around my right arm and neck, I look like an asli kasai, absolute butcher-man. Jamal Seth had admired his wit.

  Now Mushtaq doesn’t even know when to shit. He has been circling the city yelling mother-sister abuses for eight years, ever since his laundry-cum-clothes-rental shop at Anjeerwadi was gutted by neighboring slumdwellers. It was the night after the masjid was broken. The night people stopped being neighbors, cobblers, tailors, bakers, vendors, or drivers, and everyone turned Hindu or Muslim, Hindu against Muslim. It was the night some Hindus wished they weren’t Hindu and most Muslims wished they weren’t Muslim. When the curfew lifted three days later, Mushtaq rushed out like other anxious businessmen. He searched Anjeerwadi for his shop, not finding it where it should have been, as if shops could be mislaid. He ran in and out of the slum’s gullies, refusing to believe that that fifteen square feet of ashen heap was his shop. He has been searching ever since, refusing to believe. On spotting Mushtaq running by, I catch him by his grimy collar and drag him to a food stand where I feed him enough to last a day. Who knows when I’ll see his crazed face again?

  I used to give my lungi and vest to Mushtaq for washing; no one ever asked to rent them, of course. Now a dhobi, a bhaiya from UP, launders my clothes and demands five rupees extra to ignore the gore, the stink.

  It drives my wife Laila up the wall and over the roof. ‘Why pay that dhobi extra? What am I here for? I’ll wash your clothes!’ she says. But I refuse to let her. ‘Then tell your Jamal Seth to pay the dhobi. Why should we?’ she asks. At twenty, Laila understands nothing. How can I be petty over ten rupees for laundry when, in addition to my monthly salary of two thousand, Jamal Seth allows one free chicken every week? I take it home for the family. No thanks, no chicken for me. Since I began working here, I cannot stand aromas in my food. So no chicken, no onions, and no garlic. My meals consist of boiled vegetables. If my food asserts itself at all, I vomit. If Laila applies perfume, I thrash her. Like bakers who reek of biscuits, and chemists who stink like alcoholics, the stench of chicken guts and feathers has possessed me. I avoid all other smells. To be comfortable with discomfort, one must banish all contact with ease. She is a great woman, my Laila, my queen. Only once has she repelled me: on our wedding night, when I sprung up and hugged her, she breathed in and vomited the rich wedding food on our flower-strewn bed. Now the same girl offers to clean my foul, feather-flecked lungi and vest!

  Yet, there is something even my Laila seems to have an everlasting aversion to: cockroaches. She screams at them as if they are mosque-wreckers. Like on sighting a rat in the shop, Jamal Seth lifts his feet off the floor and yells, ‘Amjad! Choohaa! Maar usko!’ They expect me to kill them. Cockroaches—okay, they are like brown smelly wisps of air. But Bombay’s rats are big as cats; killing them is like killing a person. People think butchers can kill anything. It’s one thing to kill for money like I do at Medina Chicken, like executioners and assassins do; killing for money shows a desire for good things, a better life. But to kill out of hatred or fear hardens the heart. I have done my share of such killing and want no more. With the wooden handle of my cleaver I rap the rats on their furry little skulls and kick them to the walkway outside.

  Medina Chicken Mart is part of a market. There is an open gutter at the market’s entrance (this is where rats breed whole generations). Our great muncipaltee, instead of fixing the gutter, put planks over the four-feet-deep sewer so people can cross over.

  One evening some months ago, a drunk slipped into this gutter. No one dared to help. He languished for twenty minutes amid dead fish from the pet shop, phlegm from the grocer’s chest, curdled white slush from the milkwallah, blood from Medina Chicken, and liter upon liter of piss from all of us. When the fire brigade came for him, there was a huge audience.

  The man, as it turned out, was headed for Medina Chicken Mart. And he was not drunk, just short-sighted. After being dragged out of the muck, he proceeded to weave through random passageways of the market and halted outside MCM to read the board above our entrance.

  We smelled him—Jamal Seth and I—before we saw him. A heady, lukewarm odor of the sludge that drains unseen below the city. This smell, I thought as I rinsed the cleaver, I could get used to even a smell like this. Jamal Seth tightened the handkerchief over his nose. ‘Are they cleaning the gutter this time of the evening?’ It was one of the few evenings Jamal Seth hadn’t already left.

  Then we saw him—a short sodden figure outside the shop. He was bleeding black filth from the waist down. Passers-by took difficult detours to avoid being near the man, keeping the space around him magically empty. Entranced, I did not notice that he had begun moving toward the shop.

  ‘Abbey hutt! Amjad, tell that thing to stay away! Shhoo! Hutt!’ Jamal Seth stamped his feet and motioned as if at a crazed animal. The man stopped some feet from the entrance and grinned at my boss’s histrionics. My heart warmed to the stranger—he stank worse than me and found my boss amusing.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean what do you want? Just drive him away!’ Jamal Seth shouted again. He rolled a newspaper and threatened to strike the stranger with it.

  The man raised his hand. ‘I don’t want to enter your shop, okay,’ he said. ‘Just, which one of you is Amjad Farsi?’

  Jamal Seth looked at me.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked the man.

  ‘I fell in the gutter.’

  We crumpled our noses.

  ‘Don’t laugh. Allah has made me short-sighted. Are you mocking Allah’s actions?’ the man said. ‘Who is Amjad Farsi?’

  ‘I am. Who are you?’ I was smirking.

  ‘Wasim Sheikh’s brother,’ the man said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You don’t know my brother?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  The man patted his head as if to calm himself. ‘You kill a man and don’t even remember him?’

  ‘What did you say?’ Jamal Seth squinted.

  The man pointed at me, ‘He! He killed my brother! He also killed my brother’s friend!’

  Jamal Seth turned to me. ‘What? What’s he saying, Amjad?’

  I tightened my grip on the wooden handle of the cleaver. ‘You’ve gone mad,’ I said.

  ‘Have I?’ the stranger said. The sludge had formed a puddle around his feet.

  ‘When did this happen?’ Jamal Seth asked. Above the handkerchief, his eyes were probing like roach antennae.

  ‘Ask him yourself, why don’t you?’ the man said, crossing his hands over his filthy torso. They both fixed their gazes on me—twin beams of vengeance and disbelief. I stared at an uneven tile protruding from the pavement outside the shop.

  ‘Amjad? What is this man saying? You killed his brother?’ Jamal Seth asked.

  A slight shake of my head was enough for my boss. He turned to the stranger. ‘Don’t waste our time with this nonsense. Get lost. You’re mistaken.’

  ‘I know he remembers! Unless he kills men every day, he can never forget taking those lives. Ask him! Force him to speak. Why he is standing like a dummy? It was in March, at Tupalgam village. He killed my brother and one other man,’ the stranger said.

  Jamal Seth looked at the stranger, then at me. ‘If it’s true, why isn’t he in jail?’

  The man fanned out a black hand. ‘Who will arrest him? They themselves kill Muslims. What, they’ll arrest a Muslim for killing Muslims? My brother’s death isn’t even recorded. But I know. I found out. Birth and death are too big to remain hidden. This man killed my seventeen-year-old brother! Had he been a Hindu I would have hacked his neck by now. But when one of us is at fault, what to do? What to do?’

  What? I gaped at the muck-drenched man standin
g outside Medina Chicken Mart. What was he talking about? Why did everything have to be about religion?

  Which one was Wasim Sheikh anyway? The one kissing the girl or the one kneading her bare buttocks? To think would have been a sin. There was my hand lifting a nearby brick.

  There was the brick in my hand. There was the brick coming down with two sure strokes. There were the two men, now dead, their skulls split open by the brick. There was the girl lying on the grass. A dumbfounded eight-year-old. I picked her up. She was trembling like a chicken. She led me to her hut. I handed her to her parents who knew nothing of where their child had just been, or how close she had come to becoming a woman. There had been thanks given and tears sobbed. The girl’s clan members followed me to where the two men lay. There had been assurances given of silence. It was the night I had gone visiting Laila’s parents at their village. The night I had gone strolling after dinner and heard the girl’s sobs coming from a dark, wooded spot. For once it had nothing to do with who I was, what I did, or whom I revered. It was simply about two perverts, a low-caste girl, and a butcher who did what he had to do.

  ‘Amjad, this has gone too far. What is this man saying? And don’t just shake your head, you hear me? Speak!’ Jamal Seth huffed. ‘I won’t have a man working…I mean, I want the truth!’

  I curled my lips. ‘It’s time to close. I have to go pray.’

  I placed the cleaver on the bloody tabletop. Under the gaze of the two men, I washed my limbs, changed into my shirt-pant, and combed my hair in the tiny mirror on the wall.

  Jamal Seth barred my way, ‘Come on, Amjad. Answer this man.’

  I guided my boss aside by his soft shoulder, ‘You must not stop me. It’s time for namaaz.’

  The stranger stretched out his arm. ‘No, you cannot go without saying. Why you killed my brother, you butcher?

  Why? Why you killed him? What he did to you?’

  As I neared the man on my way out, his stench made my legs wobble. But I pressed onward, against and past his outstretched arm. The muck on his sleeve rubbed off on my shirt. There was now a black blot on my chest smelling like hell itself. I was wrong: I could never get used to a smell like this. Would Laila offer to clean this as well? How much more would the dhobi charge to ignore this new filth? For the first time in three years I stumbled through the passageways of the market looking to douse myself with attar or spices or turpentine—anything to mask the stench of me.

  Jamal Seth, the Desperado

  There is a limit to how much ugliness a man can bear. I am afraid I have reached my breaking point for today. Medina Chicken Mart closes at eight p.m. It is five right now. I am already restless. I have been here since twelve noon. With a handkerchief pressed over my nose like a gora sahib, I have been going through the motions of business. A customer once asked me whether my handkerchiefs are perfumed. I ignored the insinuation. If I get used to the smell of chickens, what next? How many more of my senses will I have to deaden for the sake of practicality? So although this checkered square of cotton does little to bar the stench from my nostrils, and although I am losing the respect of customers, the handkerchief will remain—like a last vestige of my humanity, or whatever little of it is left.

  I sit at a counter at the front of the shop, facing the walkway outside. To my left is the cage of chickens. Beside it sits Amjad, my employee butcher. Surrounding us is the soupy, vibrating stinkstenchsmell of the birds. We have had an especially good afternoon today. Eleven units. Chickens sometimes aged and died in the cage itself—but that was in my father’s time. Now non-vegetarianism is epidemic. As are lies, treachery, murder, promiscuity and heartlessness. No one knows what is right or wrong. Is it wrong to be the owner of a chicken shop? Wrong to oversee the butchering of twenty to thirty birds every day? And then to make money out of this? Is all this wrong? Really, I really want to know. But who’s going to tell me? Five youths in Save Earth T-shirts had picketed the shop once. Non-vegetarianism, they said, is wrong. Must I close my shop, I asked. They didn’t know. ‘We’re here to sensitize, not propagate,’ one of them said, and round and round they went in circles outside my shop, chanting jingles that extolled the virtues of vegetarianism. I almost joined them, enthused as I was by the spirit of those teenagers, till I remembered I was the enemy.

  My attention strays to the wall above the cage where an old clock smoulders with time. Seventeen minutes past five. I would like to walk out this very instant. But sometimes I like torturing myself. At least this much I know is wrong. To torture oneself is wrong. Anything that makes a man happy is right. Anything that makes a man unhappy is wrong. But what is a man to do when something makes him neither happy nor sad? Most of the time I feel nothing. The propriety of my actions remains unknowable, and my attempts to ascertain right from wrong resemble a blind man opining on color. I wonder: Is it like this with everyone? Does Amjad feel anything as he slaughters away to glory from morning to night? Did he feel anything when he killed those two men? I don’t know for sure whether he did, I don’t want to know, but assuming he did, did Amjad feel anything while taking human lives? I do not think so. The feelings are missing. They have vanished. What’s left are instincts, sensations, drives, and passions. Inside, everything is dead.

  The evening’s first customer enters; I know him—a freelance chef who caters to parties in the neighborhood. Things will get busier as night approaches. I am glad I will not be around then. The man ignores me and approaches Amjad because—because it is the kink of modern commerce: the doer owns nothing, the owner does nothing. Amjad comes to the counter and whispers, ‘Jamal Seth, customer wants a discount. He wants thirty kilos.’ I declare a five-rupee holiday per kilo. The caterer agrees. The genocide begins.

  I am off. It is five-thirty. I stand up and push back my chair. Amjad is carrying the first four chickens, two in each hand, to the back of the shop. ‘I’m off,’ I say, ‘see you tomorrow.’ He waits for my exit. I remove a thousand rupees from the cashbox, blood money, and have to restrain myself from breaking into a run. This place augments the income of my family of two parents, sisters, and a freeloading cousin. I cannot sit through all its working hours. The least I can do is walk away. I walk away. And when the stench is no more to be seen (yes, sometimes it is so thick I can see it), I stuff my handkerchief in my trouser pocket and head straight for my bike in the market’s parking lot.

  Outside of Medina Chicken Mart, and because of it, my leisure hours are devoted to the tracking and hunting down of beauty in all its squirming, reluctant forms. Money and mobility are essential to the endeavor.

  Kickstart… and… vroom.

  I have been motorcycling since sixteen. I suffocate in other modes of transport. I am the man you see hanging out of train doors or being air-blasted on upper-level front seats of double-deckers. I walk; if being boxed in is the only way to get somewhere, I do not go. I see no merit in flexibility. Yield, and soon your whole world is gone.

  My buddies are wondering what we should do tonight: dinner in the ghetto or gate-crash a college jam session? I have joined them on the footpath outside a grocery store that has served as our meeting point for several years, sometimes to the chagrin of the owner, sometimes to his relief and delight. This evening, since we have all ordered colas and cigarettes, the grocer is gracious. I have three friends I shall not name. We are all the same: except for some details (one of my friends is an orphan, the other almost a dwarf, the third can speak fluent English) and varying livelihoods, I would be hard-pressed to assign unique personalities to any of us. We are a pack, a herd. Think of us as one. In these few hours of bonhomie, we regain the vigor sapped through the day. We sit on our bikes and gossip or talk business. Sometimes we play cricket with makeshift apparatus. When we’re bored, we brawl. For men in their late twenties, we are alarmingly incapable of stillness. When I sleep, even my dreams are action-packed.

  Two of my pals have had a windfall in their lines of work; they want to do something extraordinary this evening. This is just talk
, of course, because our itinerary varies as predictably as the days of the week. Still, something special must be done.

  We settle on a dance bar. In a suburb, along the National Highway, is a new place called Samudra Mahal. One of us had been there a few nights ago; he sings such paeans to the pleasures to be had there, we decide to set off at once. With the lives we live, it’s never too early or too far to watch half-naked women gyrate. The two cash-rich ones agree to shoulder most of the expenses. Samudra Mahal. Beautiful women shaking their goods for me. My crotch pulsates in anticipation. Thanks to AIDS and concomitant diseases, the dread of which public campaigns have successfully instilled in people like me (the middle class, ever ready to heed alarms), our eyes are now our cocks, and to ogle is to hug, kiss, fondle, undress, mount, and fuck, all rolled into one.

  The pack is on the move. Four motorcycles weaving in and out of lanes, racing, swerving, overtaking from the left. The promise of sleaze makes us reckless. We leave in our wake shaken motorists and a traffic flow made fragile by our passage. At least we have been noticed, even if for the disruption we have caused; for the chronically powerless, this is revenge enough.

  We ride past a girl in shorts and, because we have no words to compliment her sexiness, cannot help propagating a stereotype embraced unquestioningly, and are afraid to approach her, the four of us honk. The girl turns her head. I look back and wink. She widens her eyes. I accelerate to catch up with the others. ‘Uttha lein?’ one of us shouts over the roar of traffic. We laugh. But this is no joke for me. The abduction of a girl is a tempting course of action. Not to rape and discard the abductee, but to detain her long enough to win her affection. Half a chance to impress is all I ask for. I cannot remember the last time I spoke to a girl I was not related to, someone I could amuse with my Amitabh Bachchan imitation. We would talk, I would ask about her likes and dislikes, birth sign, and then I would propose. Why can’t my sisters hurry up and get married? Being the elder brother, I must wait till both have wedded. My sisters, however, seem in no hurry to say ‘yes’ to any one of the thousands of boys we have shown them. How did they grow so willful under their burkhas? Some of us do not want to wait for perfect loves and ringing bells. Some of us are tired of honking at girls and driving across town to watch sluts dance. Will someone please tell my sisters that some of us just want to get on with our bloody lives!