Mrs Ali’s Road to Happiness

by Farahad Zama

  “Do I look as if I am worried about him? Beat him and throw him off the roof for all I care.”

  There were squeaks from Mrs Ali and Pari as the guru and his men stalked out.

  Eleven

  The grey concrete slab of the terrace was still warm from absorbing the sun’s rays all day. It was bordered by a waist-high wall and punctuated at regular intervals by half-raised pillars. Between two of them, somebody had strung a line on which a yellow sari had dried to a crisp. The only other structure was a water tank on short stilts at the far end. There was no place to hide here and…Rehman had a sudden thought and went back to the doorway. He grimaced when he saw that the bolt was on the other side of the door, which made sense. Why would anybody want to lock themselves out on the terrace?

  The building faced east and he didn’t dare to go that way in case the men gathered on the road below saw him. Along the length of the left-hand edge was the roof of his own house, but it was two storeys below and inaccessible. To his right was another building of equal height, but because the land sloped that way, it was at least seven or eight feet higher than where they were standing – not to mention the fact that there was at least a ten-foot gap between the two buildings.

  He rushed to the far end, or the backside, as the watchman would call it, squeezed past the water tank and looked out. The land behind belonged to a widow who lived there with her daughter-in-law. Despite the land being worth millions of rupees, she survived on the money she made by grinding batter for dosas and the coconuts she sold from her own trees. The canopy of one of them leaned close to the wall.

  Rehman studied the coconut tree carefully and turned to Vasu. “What do you think?”

  Vasu shook his head. “If you are thinking what I think you are thinking, you are mad. We’ll both break our necks.”

  “Did you get that dialogue from a movie?”

  Vasu nodded.

  Rehman said, “If…no, when we get out of here, I need to have a word with your mother about how many movies you are watching.”

  If only it was any other tree, thought Rehman, they could have tried to climb down its branches. A coconut tree, however, is just a single cylindrical trunk with a crown of leaves on top. It was impossible to either ascend or descend it unless you were a monkey or a trained coconut picker – and even they used a special sling made of hemp rope and rubber to move up and down. Vasu was right: the coconut tree would lead to a broken neck faster than it led to freedom.

  He and Vasu went back to the stairs. They could hear the heavy feet of the activists coming up the stairwell. Rehman became desperate. He was under no illusions what would happen. Once they recognised him, they would think that he was some sort of agent sent to infiltrate their ranks and, if he wasn’t actually beaten to death, he would be left fairly close to it. What could he do?

  With a sudden thought, he made for the dried sari. Before he reached it, Vasu shouted, “Don’t touch it.”

  Rehman jerked his hand away in surprise. “Shh!” he said. “Don’t talk so loudly.” He cocked his head to check whether the men below had heard Vasu, but luckily, they were making so much noise with their slogans that Vasu’s voice had been drowned out. “Why can’t I touch it?”

  “It is madi-battalu,” said Vasu.

  “Oh!” said Rehman, laughing. “I don’t care. I thought you were worried about something important like stealing or something.”

  There must be a Brahmin family in the flats. Only they were strict about madi. In Brahmin households, a woman was considered unclean while she was menstruating and was not allowed to enter the kitchen. After her period ended, she would take a ritual bath to purify herself. The clothes she wore before that bath were unclean too, and nobody was allowed to touch them.

  “If we don’t use it, it is our blood that will be spilled,” said Rehman.

  Vasu looked blank. Rehman realised that while Vasu might have known about madi and avoiding such clothes, he didn’t really understand what lay behind the prohibitions.

  “Take the other end of the sari and twist,” said Rehman.

  Once the cotton sari resembled a rope, he knotted the two ends together, so that it formed a loop. Rehman unhooked the clothes line from the pillars, his fingers clumsy and stiff with fear. He could not believe that such an obvious hiding place as the terrace would remain unsearched for long.

  “Come on,” he said. “We don’t have time to waste.”

  Vasu eyed the flimsy cotton loop and the thin nylon rope with misgivings. “I don’t think – ”

  “Didn’t your mother tell you to listen to me?”

  “Yes, of course, but still…”

  They reached the far end of the terrace again. As Rehman looked at the gap between the wall, the coconut leaves near them and the long, slim trunk of the tree, he could understand Vasu’s reluctance. Trying to descend the tree was a quick way to commit suicide.

  “Give me your chappal,” he said.

  Vasu took off his flip-flops.

  “Just one, keep the other one on,” said Rehman.

  He flung the rope around one of the coconut branches. It took three goes before he was able to snag it and tie the ends to the nearest pillar. A thin nylon bridge now closed the gap to the tree.

  Rehman took careful aim with Vasu’s flip-flop – he would get only one chance to do this – and threw the slipper onto the widow’s land. He twirled the looped sari like a lasso in his right hand and pointed with his left. “You first. I’ll follow.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The noise from the crowd, which had died down a bit, now rose again. It also seemed to be coming closer.

  “Quick,” said Rehman, unable to keep the worry out of his voice or his eyes from flicking towards the stairs. “I think they are coming up.”

  His last view of the terrace before it dropped out of his sight was the door swinging open.

  ♦

  The men stumbled out of the doorway and spilled out on the terrace, like water from a broken pipe. “They are not here,” shouted one of them.

  “The neighbour said he had seen them go up on to the terrace. They must be here. Look everywhere.”

  They spread out, peering over the edges and behind the pillars. “Guys, come here…”

  The men rushed to the far end by the water tank. A blue rope, most of its colour leached from long exposure to the sun, trailed from an iron rod sticking out of a pillar to one of the branches of the coconut tree.

  “It looks so thin…”

  “It’s nylon, very strong. Look, down there.”

  It was already getting dark and they had to squint. A boy’s lone rubber flip-flop lay halfway across the neighbour’s land. “But how can anybody get down a coconut tree?”

  “That’s how,” said a third man, pointing.

  A yellow cotton sari, faded from repeated washing, twisted to form a rope and knotted into a loop, lay like a three-day-old marigold garland at the base of the tree.

  “Go. Run down. That way – round the block. Ask if anybody’s seen a man and a boy leaving. Come on, come on, move it.”

  The men rushed away and then stopped as their guru came out onto the terrace. The man who had given the earlier orders tugged the nylon rope away from the tree and took it to the older man. “They’ve managed to escape, sir.”

  “They can run but they can’t hide. Keep the men looking for the boy, but once they find him, just keep an eye on him. Don’t bring him back.”

  “Why, sir, won’t the boy be in greater danger then? We might lose track of him again.”

  The guru stroked his beard. “The elections are still several weeks away. This will give the story wings. Call your tame reporters and tell them that a Hindu boy has been kidnapped by Muslims. After all, if they didn’t have anything to hide, why would they spirit him away?”

  “You are a genius, sir. It’ll be in all the newspapers tomorrow.”

  “I don’t care about the English papers – the people who read them don’t
vote anyway. It’s the regional papers that are important. Let’s go.”

  The men had their mobile phones out before they reached the stairs. Silence again descended on the terrace and it grew steadily darker. Several minutes passed before the galvanised iron sheet covering the water tank slowly rose on its hinges. The only witness was a bat flying past. Just at that moment it dropped a half-eaten fruit of a wild almond, the shell making a loud metal ping. The lid fell back with a jerk.

  It was another five minutes before the lid rose again and two wet figures climbed out of the tank, resembling waterlogged kittens. “Are they g-gone?” said Vasu, his teeth chattering in the evening breeze.

  They were lucky that the water had absorbed the heat of the sun all day, but the soaking still left them shivering.

  “Let’s go down,” said Rehman. “But be careful. We don’t want anybody to see us – not even the neighbours.”

  ♦

  When Mrs Ali was a girl, everybody would meet up in her grandparents’ house at lunchtime for Eid. ‘Everybody’ meant her parents and siblings, four of her five uncles and aunts, several cousins and her grandparents. Her eldest uncle, who had spent half his life in a faraway mining town, leaving his wife and kids behind in his parents’ house, had come home after retirement, by which time Mrs Ali was ten or eleven. He always had a huge smile on his face and was beloved by all the children because he was generous with his ‘eidi’, the money the men gave the women and children after returning from the festival prayers at the mosque.

  “Isn’t this the happiest day ever?” he would say. Mrs Ali could still remember his red paan-stained teeth. “I am sure that on this day everybody in the world is joyous.”

  Even as a child, Mrs Ali knew that it wasn’t true. Her uncle had only to look at his own house to see it. His wife invariably looked frazzled, cooking a festive lunch for so many people. And her grandparents were always melancholy despite their smiles. One Ramzaan her grandmother had let slip the reason: one of their sons had migrated to Pakistan after the Partition and on this day of the year they missed him the most.

  If Mrs Ali didn’t believe in a day of universal happiness, she did think of Eid as a day when the whole family got together. The festival this year would be horrible: Rehman and Vasu had fled to Vasu’s grandfather’s village to escape the vigilantes who were still hunting for the boy. Azhar would probably not come to their house. Her eldest sister was no more. Mrs Ali felt heartsick at the thought of Eid.

  She was standing at the gate, barely noticing the world go past, when Mr Ali came back from the butcher’s. “I managed to get the meat,” he said. “But are you sure the festival is tomorrow? Hasn’t it been only twenty-nine days since you started fasting?”

  “It’s possible. Not all months have thirty days; some have only twenty-nine.”

  Mr Ali handed the thin polythene bag of mutton to his wife. “I’ll go to the mosque and check,” he said.

  “Are you sure? After all, the imam – ”

  “We are still members of the mosque. Why shouldn’t I go there?”

  “I suppose so…”

  The traffic had picked up and Mr Ali had to walk along the dusty edge of the road. He thought about what his wife had said: that some months just had twenty-nine days. The Muslim calendar is a purely lunar one – and, depending on the exact time of day that the new moon is born, some months end up shorter than others. But beyond that astronomical fact, there was another reason for twenty-nine-day months.

  Once upon a time, the Prophet, peace be upon him, had been dismayed by the squabbling of his wives and declared that he would stay away from them for a month. He moved to his daughter’s house and returned after twenty-nine days. The Prophet’s youngest wife, Ayesha, had teased him that it wasn’t yet a month and he is said to have replied, “Some months have only twenty-nine days.”

  Mr Ali usually took the same route to the fish market and, by habit, he almost walked past the mosque before doubling back. A large number of men were crowded near the entrance, each with just one question on their lips. “Has the moon been sighted?” and “Is it Eid tomorrow?” Actually, that was two questions, but they both meant the same thing.

  Mr Ali noticed among them Razaaq, his friend with the seat-cover business. Razaaq had been in the crowd led by the imam, demanding that Vasu be converted to Islam. But Mr Ali wasn’t one to hold grudges. If you were a member of a committee, you had to go along with it – collective cabinet responsibility and all that. After all, even his own brother-in-law had accompanied the visitors. It’s funny, he thought, that the mosque committee and that Hindu organisation had come up with pretty much the same demand.

  He made his way through the crowd and said, “Salaam A’laikum, Razaaq mian.”

  Razaaq made a face as if he had just bitten into a peanut and found it foul-tasting. His eyes slid away and he moved off with a cough.

  Mr Ali showed no reaction, but he was deeply hurt. He and Razaaq had known each other for a long time. Almost thirty years ago, Mr Ali had been posted to Pithapuram, Razaaq’s native town. While he was there, Razaaq’s parents had needed a residence certificate because their ration card had been accidentally put in the wash and they had to apply for a replacement. It had been a trivial matter for somebody like Mr Ali, working in a government office, to cut through the bureaucracy and get the certificate issued, but it had saved Razaaq’s parents a lot of hassle. Later, when Mr and Mrs Ali moved to Vizag, they had asked them to look up their son. Razaaq’s parents were no more but the men’s friendship had remained strong since then – until now.

  As he moved towards the edge of the throng, somebody tapped him on his shoulder. He turned around to see Razaaq. His friend didn’t meet his eye, but whispered, “Go back home. There’ll be trouble.”

  “Why should I – ” began Mr Ali, but Razaaq slipped away.

  What did Razaaq mean by trouble? Before Mr Ali could think further about it, he was face to face with a group of young men, ostentatiously religious, with beards, skullcaps and long-flowing Arab robes. “You are not welcome here, old man. Go away,” said one of them.

  Mr Ali peered at the speaker and said, “Saajid! What do you mean by being so rude? Don’t you know who I am?”

  “You are the man who defies our imam and goes against our Prophet’s sunna, his teaching. You are not welcome here.”

  “Does your father know you are here?”

  “Of course he does. He is happy to see me on the true path.”

  Mr Ali remembered the rumours about Saajid spending time with girls and drinking. If religion put a stop to that, any father would be glad. But if it made a young man talk rudely to his elders, that wasn’t so good, was it?

  Mr Ali tried to pass him, but found himself blocked by Saajid and his friends. Mr Ali said, “Since when have you become the watchman of the mosque, Saajid?”

  The youth flushed and one of his friends shoved Mr Ali. Mr Ali stumbled back, rubbing his chest where he had been struck. “Hey!” he said. “This is a religious place, not a dance hall to keep people out.” Mr Ali suddenly realised that a circle had opened in the crowd and he was in the centre of it.

  “Men who side with the infidels, the kafir, are not welcome here.”

  “Then you should go to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia where there are only Muslims,” said Mr Ali. “We live in Hindustan, in case you’ve forgotten. And anyway, what’s it to do with you? I’ve been a member of this mosque for years. And regardless of that, I’ve never heard of a Muslim being denied entry to any mosque anywhere. What kind of sunna is that?” Mr Ali’s voice rose and his face turned red. “I don’t believe what the world is coming to.”

  Since when did young men care so much about religion anyway? Youth was a time that people spent carelessly, in the way that a farmer with a riverside field used water, knowing that more would flow his way the following day. As the years passed and there was less time left to them, people started facing up to what came after and turned more religious. He himself ha
d never had the urge, but that’s how his brother-in-law, Azhar, had changed – from a fun-loving man who enjoyed a joke and laughed heartily with a wide circle of friends, to a bearded, serious individual who spent an awful lot of time in the mosque. But that, at least, was the natural order of things. That’s how people had always behaved. This new trend for young men to be more religious than their fathers was odd – and dangerous, Mr Ali couldn’t help feeling. He thought again of Azhar, who, in his twenties, had flirted with communism. Mr Ali remembered a dinner at his inlaws’ house soon after he had got married at which Azhar had argued that religion was a tool to subdue the poor – a drug to keep them compliant. Mr Ali wondered whether Azhar remembered those days any more.

  Somebody shoved Mr Ali again and he snapped out of his reverie. The crowd around him had grown and he suddenly felt alone and vulnerable. The young men nearest to him suddenly parted and the imam, Azhar and a few other older men were standing in front of him.

  “I’ve come to find out if Eid is tomorrow,” said Mr Ali.

  “I don’t know which mosque you belong to, so I can’t say what your imam has decided.”

  Mr Ali’s eyes slid from the imam’s face to Azhar’s. Azhar turned red and looked away Mr Ali’s attention flicked back to the imam’s youthful face.

  “I belong to this mosque.”

  “You are not welcome here. You will not be allowed entry on the day of Eid. When you die, nobody from this mosque will come to your house for the burial. Maybe your family can use the government crematorium.”

  Mr Ali flushed. Hindus burned their dead. Muslims buried theirs.

  “Hasn’t your study of the Qur’an taught you that tomorrow is guaranteed to nobody? I am older than you, but I might still be alive twenty years from now while tomorrow night your family might be wailing over your body.”

  The imam inclined his head. Saajid roared, thrusting his face close to Mr Ali’s, “Hey oldie! Are you threatening the imam in front of his own mosque?”

  Mr Ali was glad to see Saajid’s father, Razaaq, pull his son back and was then shocked when Saajid brushed his father’s hand away brusquely.