by Ali Sethi
Suri handed out the remaining bowls of sawaiyya. “Eat quickly,” she said. Her tone was sharp and aimed at Isa, who was the eldest and her son, and therefore the most susceptible to blame. “Up so late at night,” she said admonishingly. She may have known nothing of what had transpired in the room upstairs at night. She may have known everything.
“Late for prayers,” said Uncle Saaji.
“We’ve missed it,” insisted Uncle Shafto.
Hukmi said it was our fault for waking up so late.
They all had sex.
We ate the sawaiyya in silence. Suri said, “Buss ab chalo,” and plates were abandoned, outfits spanked for crumbs and tugged and straightened on the way out to the porch. We took Uncle Saaji’s jeep from the neighboring house. He drove it himself, Uncle Shafto sitting beside him in the front, Suri and Hukmi in the seats behind with Aasia and Maheen in their laps. We sat all the way at the back, next to a disused golfing kit and an old, veined map of the Margalla Hills. The drive was short since the park was inside the colony; it would have been easier to walk. But outings in cars were required here, and the long, wavering lines of stagnant vehicles led up to the mud-and-grass compound of the park. It was covered in two separate tents: the men and boys were going into one, the women and girls into the other.
“We’ll meet here,” said Suri.
The girls followed their mothers into the tent, looking over their shoulders at the other arriving families to ensure they were doing the same.
The men’s tent was vast: sheets had been put out to cover the grass inside, sheets that were also serving today as prayer mats; men left their shoes at the various slitted entrances and settled on the sheets barefoot. Some sat cross-legged, others with their knees drawn up and their arms enclosing the posture, still others with their legs folded beneath them in the posture of prayer. I sat beside Moosa, who sat beside Isa, who was sitting next to Uncles Saaji and Shafto in a line that continued to grow on either side.
Two boys in skullcaps were going around with a sack of cloth held between them like a hammock. There was money inside.
Isa said they were collecting chanda.
“Good cause,” said Uncle Saaji, and took out his wallet. He held it for a moment without counting the bills.
Uncle Shafto didn’t take out his wallet.
The boys came to Uncle Saaji, received his money, came to Uncle Shafto, waited for his money, waited another moment, and moved on without shedding or acquiring an expression. They seemed to know the ways of men, the things they held in their minds and hid in their hearts, the good as well as the bad, and the rewards and punishments that came their way as a consequence. The boys knew this to be true because it was written; it had been true and would stay true. They were only going around like this because they had death to think of, and their chances of success in the afterlife, which was where it all began.
“Dad,” said Moosa after they had gone. He was embarrassed.
“Frauds,” said Uncle Shafto.
“Good cause,” suggested Uncle Saaji.
“Goes into their pockets.”
Uncle Saaji smiled in a kind of torment of faith. “Who knows,” he said, opening one by one the bunched-up fingers of his hand and revealing a deeply lined palm. “Only Allah knows. It is so—it is written. We must do our bit and leave the rest to Him.”
“Thieves,” said Uncle Shafto.
Uncle Saaji had done his bit.
Isa looked at Moosa, who continued to look at the backs of the men in the row ahead. His embarrassment had increased.
He said, “You know how to say your prayers?”
I knew. Daadi had taught me and tested me in her room.
“Then where’s your mosque?”
I didn’t have a mosque.
“You say your prayers at home?”
“At home.”
“How many times a day you say them?”
I thought about it.
“Liar,” said Moosa. “Lies about prayers.”
Isa intervened, indicating a podium that had now appeared on the ramp ahead. A boy was bent beside it and attaching the wires to a microphone; he tapped it twice and went away.
The maulvi emerged from a slit in the tent and walked up to the podium, his beard small and sharp, raised with his chin at an intelligent angle. He stopped at the podium, gripped the sides, looked up, down, up again.
The murmur of voices in the tent grew quick and loud before it was stilled.
“Bismillah Arrahman Irrahim,” said the maulvi. He paused to survey his audience. His breathing in the microphone was like a wind approaching.
He raised his chin and began to recite in Arabic.
The men stood up.
The prayer had begun.
I did what the others were doing.
When the prayer was finished the maulvi wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, recited another fragment in Arabic and said, “Means what?”
The congregation was waiting.
“Means what?” The maulvi shifted from one side of the podium to the other, allowing his question to loom. “Means,” he said at last, and stopped in the center of the podium, “that permission to fight is granted. Permission. To fight. Is granted. To those. Who are being attacked.”
There were nods.
“For they have been wronged.”
More nods.
“Is this true of today?”
The audience was thinking.
The maulvi smiled, nodding, his smile growing into a scowl. Our brothers and sisters in Bosnia, he said, were dying. They were being slaughtered in their homes, dragged out into the streets and shot, fathers forced to swallow the innards of their children and mothers raped and left to hang from ropes tied to trees. And what were we doing to stop it? We, the well-fed, well-clothed Muslims of Lahore, were coming from breakfasts of halwa and sawaiyya, and thinking ahead already to the lunches that awaited us at home: kebabs and chicken boti and matar pulao and biryani, and naan, and kheer for dessert, and glasses of sherbet to help us fall asleep in the afternoon.
The congregation listened in silence to the growing descriptions of blood-shed, which was prevalent in so much of the world. No land in the maulvi’s telling was exempt; places that seemed far away from here, far too from one another, were revealed to have suffered similar fates. And still the Muslims hadn’t learned. A logic of recurrence had emerged and was attributed to the Creator’s design, the Creator who had given men the power to think for themselves, to reason and choose, a power not granted to beasts or angels. Time and again we had squandered that power, allowed our minds to go astray, choosing not to learn from the stories of our forefathers and repeatedly drawing His wrath upon us. Now, again, the signs of calamity were among us: usury and drinking were common, and gambling too, for what was the stock market but a gambling den? Men had become womanly and women had turned into men, wearing men’s clothing and using men’s language and leaving their homes at night to drive cars in the streets. A woman was now running the country, a Muslim country, and making the kind of mess she ought to have made inside her kitchen.
The Day of Judgment was approaching. The scrolls of the past were going to be unrolled, and every man was going to have to speak for himself. There would be no intercession, no appeal for forgiveness or another chance. The future was decided, closed.
The maulvi continued with his sermon. He was unable to end it, more involved now that he had disclosed an impending calamity and begun to describe the heraldic fires that were blazing in announcement. The murmur in the crowd returned, the roving restlessness that comes when things have stalled. At last the maulvi stopped, ending his speech on the prospect of redemption, a concept he had not had the time to develop; he twitched, swallowed, then stood back from the podium and cleared his throat. The congregation rose.
“Allah-o-Akbar,” intoned the maulvi, his hands clasped at his waist, his eyes closed.
Outside the tent, the crowd of colony residents was dividing and subdividing. T
he men hugged three times each, said “Eid Mubarak,” and moved on to other acquaintances, a fractured dance of greeting in which groups formed and dissolved and formed without sequence or direction, so that some were finding themselves in the same places and finding that they were trapped. Away from the warmth and confusion, by a pair of benches, Uncle Saaji was conversing with two men, both bald and mustached and dressed in black sherwanis, with triangular red napkins tucked into their breast pockets. One of the men was slimmer than the other, and was listening to the shorter man, who was talking and making elaborate blooming gestures with his hands.
“Kureishi brothers,” said Isa. “Family friends. Go back long way.”
Moosa said, “Very long way.”
Uncle Shafto was standing with us near the tent. He was not conversing with anyone. “Useless,” he said. “Whole bloody place.”
Suri and Hukmi emerged from the women’s tent, Aasia and Maheen behind them. They saw us and approached.
“Oho, Dad,” said Moosa. He was pointing across the grass to a group of men who had gathered in a circle under a tree.
“Oho!” said Uncle Shafto. He held his hips in preparation and smiled, recalling a prank or a joke, then cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Anjum Mian! You bastard!”
A man turned.
“Look here, bastard!”
The man saw. He gave a small smile of acknowledgment, said something to his friends and began to walk across the grass.
Uncle Shafto brought his hands together in a slap. “Caught the bastard,” he said.
Moosa sniggered.
“My friend,” said Anjum Mian, approaching.
“Pardner,” said Uncle Shafto, and tugged at his hand. The man stumbled. “Where are you, pardner?”
Anjum Mian said he was right here and looked around him with an air of bafflement.
“When’s our promo pardy, pardner?”
“You know how it is,” said Anjum Mian. “One day is planned for something, and some one thing or other will come up, right up to the last minute, and the plan is canceled.” He enacted the cancellation with a dropping movement of his hands, one that was more suited to abandonment. “So now we have postponed. Wife has said it, what to do. Her niece is getting married on the same day, chief minister’s nephew, so to their house we are going.” He brought his hands together in a clasp of resolution. “Sorry, pardner. Next time.”
“Ah,” said Uncle Shafto, “I see. I see I see. Well”—he offered his arms in an embrace—“we will do it next time, pardner. Man must tend to wife—on that there can be no dispute. Give my best, hanh? Wife and kiddos.”
They embraced and shook hands. Uncle Shafto watched as Anjum Mian returned across the grass to his friends.
“Anjum Mian,” he said after a while. “My colleague.”
“His wife,” said Hukmi, “she’s a real—”
“Such a—” said Suri.
“Total.”
“Complete.”
“So then?” said Suri in the car, in a tone prepared for amusement. “What had the Kureishi brothers to say?” She spoke from behind Aasia, who was sitting in her lap with a reassured hand on the windowpane, watching the world go past. Her neck turned with the sights.
Uncle Saaji was driving with both hands on the steering wheel. He said, “Oh, nothing,” and gave a sheepish little laugh.
“Still,” persisted Suri. “Must’ve said something.” She removed Aasia from her lap and settled her in the seat.
Aasia didn’t seem to mind.
Uncle Saaji said, “They are setting up a mill. Were saying how difficult it has become to get loans. Have to go through ministries, you know. Not easy.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.
Suri said nothing.
Hukmi said, “Politics. It is all politics.” She had stopped bouncing Maheen on her knee.
Maheen screamed.
“Shut up,” said Hukmi.
Maheen was quiet.
“I am sure,” said Suri, “that it is easier than they say it is. Every minister is their buddy. It is their government, their country. Why should they be worried?” She spoke in a singsong parody of innocence.
From his seat in the front Uncle Shafto said, “Actually they are all the same. All of them. Take Anjum Mian, my colleague. Man is a nincompoop. Nincom-poop. But what is he getting? Promotions. Why? Connections. This is the game. He will be GM in a year or two, just wait and see. And mark my words: he will take this company down the drain.”
Hukmi reiterated her initial stance, maintaining that it was all politics, and Suri shook her head.
I asked if it was always like this.
“Always,” said Suri. “From the very start. Democracy this and democracy that. Very well. But will you tell me, please, is it democracy to steal people’s lands? To take away the things they have lawfully earned? Land reform, they said. Land reform, my foot. First the father came to steal, and now the daughter is stealing, and nobody can say a thing, because we are in democracy. Your Uncle Saaji used to have so much. Ask him, ask how much he used to have: he will tell you. The Kureishi brothers used to be his tagalongs. But it goes—always it goes in the end—and like this the Kureishi brothers were gone, like this.” She snapped her fingers in the air. “Now they go around in their cars like they have always owned the world. And why not? They are providing the commissions and getting the benefits. They have dinners and receptions.” Her tone of exaggerated innocence had returned. “They are the businessmen. And she is the businesswoman.”
“Who?” said Aasia, alerted to the prospect of a businesswoman.
“The madam herself,” said Suri. “The queen.”
Hukmi chuckled.
“Who’s the queen?” said Aasia, desperate now to know.
“Who!” cried Maheen, sensing a buildup and her own exclusion from the excitement. “Who! Who!”
“A bad woman!” cried Hukmi, and it established the parallel between reprehensible women and the screaming little girls who demanded to know their names.
Maheen struggled free of her mother’s lap and sank into the seat. She was frightened, and frightened of being frightened.
“Look,” said Suri, pointing, “there she goes . . .”
It was a banner stretched taut between two electricity poles on the street. It thanked the people for electing the mohtarma a second time, and gave a prayer of thanks to God for sending angels to assist the people at the polls. Next to this was a portrait of the prime minister herself, watched over by a silhouette of her late father, and beneath it all the large, colorful letters that spelled out the name of the local politician who had paid for the banner.
I wanted to know if Benazir was a bad woman.
“God judges,” said Suri. “God will judge.”
Hukmi said, “I don’t know why some people are hell-bent on supporting her. . . .”
My mother was hell-bent on supporting her.
“It is not their fault,” said Suri charitably. “They do not know. How can they, when they have not suffered?”
“Still,” said Hukmi. “There should be some sense . . .”
“That tau I don’t think there is,” said Suri.
“A sense of right and wrong . . .”
“No, no.”
“A sense of family . . .”
“None.”
The car was quiet.
Isa looked at me and looked away.
Moosa looked at me for a while.
Then, from the driver’s seat, Uncle Saaji said, “Leave it, ji. It is a blessed day, a noble day. A very noble day indeed.” He sighed extensively, releasing the anxious air he had carried with him all morning, and his mood was recovered. “Zaki Shirazi,” he said. “You may guess where we are going.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for suspense.
“Where?”
“You may guess it.”
“Yes,” said Aasia, “guess.”
“Guess!” cried Maheen.
We were goin
g home—not to theirs, but to mine. Daadi’s room was air-freshened and lamp-lit in anticipation, the bed made, the sofa plumped with new padding for the cushions. Daadi herself was waiting on the sofa and set about at once with instructions, presiding over the seating and admiring the outfits and departing in a hurry for the kitchen to see if lunch was ready. On her way out she said to tell my mother that we had come.
But it was better to stay in the room and enjoy the feeling of being in a family, which was, for once, complete, even if the family wasn’t mine and the feeling belonged in reality to someone else.
7
In all I spent three nights and three days with the cousins. And toward the end it was established that I was welcome in their homes, newly integral to their lives, as they were to mine; we parted informally, not required to say good-bye or offer thanks, it being understood that this was a beginning, and not the end, as is so often assumed of events that have concluded. I was sent home in Hukmi’s car with her driver, who had returned from his village after the Eid holiday and claimed in the car to have seen a jinn behind his neighbor’s bushes—he told the story as if he’d told it many times, recounting the unreality at the heart of it in the same flat tones with which he described the fit his wife had thrown the following night (she wanted more than her usual share of his salary). “Never marry,” he said, shaking his head dismally at his own faint reflection in the windshield. “You will forget the man you were, the man you wanted to be. Never marry.”
We drove past the houses of the colony, past the colony park, where the removal of the prayer tents had revealed patches of dug-up soil, demarcations for seed and fertilizer, for shrubs to snap from and bring forth flowers that in spring would bloom spectacularly.
At home there was excitement: Chhoti and Samar Api had returned from Barampur with stories of success. The lunch hosted for Uncle Fazal’s relations and acquaintances had been well attended, and Chhoti had received many compliments, mostly praise for her young daughter, who had grown noticeably since anyone could last recall. Chhoti named a relative of her husband, a man who owned a considerable amount of land in Bahawalpur and whose wife had now indicated to Chhoti that they were interested for their eldest son, a lawyer.
