by Ali Sethi
Uncle Shafto said, “Fazl-e-Haq was my class fellow. His brother was a Wilsonian.” He had made the connection. He looked around now and nodded clinchingly.
“It is difficult to get in,” said Uncle Saaji. He knew because he had tried for Isa many years ago.
“But you should try,” said Suri, for she trusted in the likelihood and was unafraid. “There’s no harm in trying. You might even get in. You never know with these things.”
The Wilson Academy campus occupied almost seventy acres in an otherwise congested part of the city. There was a logic to its seclusion: the school had been founded at a time of aridity, when the irrigation systems built by the British were still spreading and much of the present city was still barren, an emptiness recorded amply in watercolors and drawings and later even in photographs, some of the first of their kind, developed to an attractively high contrast of blacks and whites. From the start the school had drawn the sons of the very best families, who had seen to the improvement of its surroundings: the road outside and the avenues of old, high, spreading trees—these had come up around the school, because of the school, and were tied to its legacy of public service; many of the city’s famous philanthropists had been Wilsonians, and had served on the school board, as well as on the boards of state schools and hospitals and public libraries. And so for more than a century the campus had resided in uncontested isolation, its noiseless acreage secure behind high brick walls and the tops of trees, only the crowning domes of its buildings visible to the outside world, the same domes that formed the school insignia, which was disseminated across a wide range of objects, including cutlery and wall hangings and a line of stationery that was recommended annually to alumni and made mandatory for enrolled students, who had to make their purchases at the school gift shop.
We waited in my mother’s van outside the gate. It was the rear gate and faced a narrow two-way street behind the campus. The high iron bars were painted black and sharpened into spearlike tips at the top and separated below by thin spaces, providing a view that was more obstructed than revealing.
“Why is it taking so long?” said my mother. She pressed the heel of her palm into the horn and held it.
A security guard appeared. He wore a beige uniform and a black cap, and walked up unhurriedly to the van.
“Admissions test,” said my mother.
The guard looked at her blankly, his hands on the exposed felt of the rolled-down window. He was a young man steeled to procedural silences; without a word he stepped back and brought out a notepad, wrote down the car number, then went back inside and opened the gate, and saluted as the van went in.
We followed a trail of sign boards, blue-and-white reproductions of THIS WAY TO PARKING that led along a winding path, broad enough to be a road. The evenly contoured hedges gapped abruptly and showed a ditch running on the other side. And the trees along the path were chalked up to the waist, with square tin signs nailed to the bark for identification: the names of the species were given in both Latin and Urdu, the scripts juxtaposed in showy equivalence.
We left the van among bicycles in the parking lot—there was no other car and still no sign of people; we went down a rutted old path and past the canteen, closed now, the stone benches outside unoccupied, then alongside a field that was smooth and vast, a hockey field or a football field—the rounds of competitive sporting activity were difficult to imagine on a day like this, with no cloud or breeze. We passed brick buildings that had gone over the years from what was still in places a soft pink to a hard, hot gray, the color of the granite path, which shimmered falsely in the distance with hints of wetness, the very thing that was missing.
A bearer in white clothes stopped us at the entrance to a hallway for questioning. He checked the name on a printed list, then led us through the hallway and showed us into a room with upholstered chairs.
A woman was sitting in a chair with her hands on her knees. Her head was covered and her eyes were closed. She was swaying and muttering. My mother sat on a tattered red chair, folded her hands in her lap and looked around with feigned interest. The room had a high ceiling and no windows, and was lit faintly by the blaze from outside; the ceiling fan groaned lethargically and gave no relief. The walls carried paintings of flowers and fruits and vegetables, and were made by the students, signed and dated in the bottom-right-hand corners; in some the paint had come off, had chipped or had started to peel, or had formed bulging pustules that sat within the glass malevolently, like sores, constrained by slim black frames all of the same size, so that some of the pictures had been decapitated in order to make them fit.
“Amma.”
A plump and sullen-looking boy stood in the doorway with a folded paper in his hands.
“Did you fail?” said the woman, and rose from her chair.
The boy stared at his mother, stared at the paper in his hands.
“Did you fail? Tell me now: did you fail?” She was shaking him by the shoulders.
The boy was crying.
The woman snatched the paper from his hands, looked at it, scowled at the boy and took his hand and hurried out. Their voices receded down the hallway, the mother shouting and the boy bawling like a much younger child.
I looked at my mother.
She was looking at the pictures on the walls.
My name was called. The bearer reappeared in the doorway and was brisk now and energized; he went making musical sounds in the hallway, glancing importantly at the brick walls, at the pillars and the notices up on the boards. He knew we were following. At a door near the end of the hallway he stopped and gestured emphatically with his palms—we were to stop here and wait. He opened the door and parted the curtains, went inside and drew the curtains again. A man’s voice was talking inside on a telephone, laughing and describing a hockey match the boys had won at a rival school. He mentioned the trophies, the team’s impressions, the undeniably good reception given by the host school, and then said nothing for a while, only “yes, yes” and “God’s grace” as he brought the conversation to an end.
He hung up the phone and said, “Yes, please?”
The bearer parted the curtains and we went into a museum-like room, with framed English poems and sayings on one wall, and a collection of shields and trophies on two sagging shelves, one below the other. Another wall was devoted to the framed portraits of men, first a set of faded white men, made distinct by the sharp jutting darks of hairlines and beards and mustaches—they were the early administrators. The Irish missionaries, who were harsh-looking and wore black cloaks with small white squares in their collars, followed; then came the men who had served since Independence, locals more at ease in these surroundings, gazing calmly and smiling occasionally. Their names and tenures were given on slim silver plaques below the frames. Only the last picture was undated, and showed a thin, balding man with lively eyes and lips sealed up in a smile, his expression one of childlike mischief or wonderment: he had the look of someone who has made a discovery and possesses it in the form of an unmade revelation. His name and title were given on the plaque as Tabassum Ali Hassan, First Chief Coordinator, Wilson Academy.
The man sitting at the desk beneath the picture was frail and completely bald, his shoulders hunched behind him and his hands settled before him on the desk. But his eyes were still bright, and the smile, though twitching unconsciously at the corners, was still the presiding aspect of his expression, and promised both durability and resilience.
“Please,” he said, and waited for us to settle in the chairs.
My mother smiled and said, “Slaamaleikum.”
“Tabassum Ali Hassan,” he said, and touched his heart. The gesture was perfunctory; it did nothing to the mask. He lifted a pair of spectacles from the desk and settled them on his face, and his eyes became magnified. “Yes,” he said, and picked up a pen. “Your name, please?”
“Zaki Shirazi,” said my mother.
“I asked him,” said the man.
“Zaki Shirazi,” I sa
id.
“Zaki Shirazi, sir.”
“Sir.”
He waited as if for a retraction. Then his gaze relented and shifted to a notebook, and he located a page and took his finger to the bottom of it. “Yes,” he said. “And your age, please?”
My mother looked at me.
“Twelve,” I said.
“Are you lying?” It was asked in a disconcertingly tender tone.
“No, actually,” said my mother, and then remembered that she wasn’t supposed to speak. “Sorry,” she said, and covered her mouth with a hand. “May I?”
He was nodding.
“Yes, well: he’s actually still twelve, he’ll be thirteen in August.” She smiled and nodded.
“That means,” said the coordinator, writing it down in his notebook, “that he is thirteen. For our purposes. We select on the basis of age, you see. He will have to sit for the year-nine test.” He turned the page and continued to write.
“But he’s only twelve,” said my mother.
“My sister,” said the coordinator, and put away the notebook; his eyes were frank and uncomforting. “There is always a complication. But we cannot always make an exception.” He looked at me, and his smile returned. “He is a smart boy. That much I can see. In the end it is simple: if he is intelligent enough, he will pass the test. And if he passes the test, we will consider him intelligent enough to be in this school. It is the best philosophy.” And he laughed at the philosophy, a surprisingly robust laugh for a man of his proportions.
“Please wait,” said my mother. “I have brought the documents with me.” She was looking for them in her handbag.
“But, my sister,” said the coordinator, and brought his palms together. “Why search for a way when you have the destination? Please, I have told you. I cannot help you: my hands are tied.”
The test took place that afternoon in an upstairs room, in the presence of an elderly invigilator: he wore a beige safari suit and walked slowly up and down the room, his hands behind his back, and glanced repeatedly at the clock as though he had somewhere to go. I was unable to finish the math section and was unfamiliar with the Urdu expressions, which had to be converted into sentences. At last I turned to the English test. I read the comprehension passage and answered the questions, then considered the last part, the composition, which asked for a story about human nature. I wrote about a pair, a boy and a girl, younger boy and older girl, who live happily in a house on a hill but are separated by fate and spend years trying to find each other. The boy becomes a forlorn judge; the girl becomes a mother of four in a village and lives a life of smothered respectability. But they are denied a reunion and eventually die tragic, unrelated deaths. “The mourners gathered at their graves,” went the last sentence, “and prayed for their departed souls, but who knows what lies ahead, beyond the ashes and the dust?”
The papers were tied with string and submitted. Two weeks later the package containing the results was delivered to the house: I had failed in math, failed in Urdu and done badly on the comprehension passage, but the story had earned full marks. “Superb,” was the comment, and beside it a mad swirl of a signature, attributed in typing to the principal of Wilson Academy, who had read the essay and approved my admission into the school.
Daadi said it was Allah’s doing.
My mother said it was talent.
And Suri and Hukmi said it was all very well but stories alone couldn’t get you through your life.
It was the first day of school and I was late.
“Naseem!” cried my mother. She went through the veranda to the kitchen, then hurried back in her nightgown, looking around in delayed distress. We emerged from the dressing room after having fussed over the tie and the shirt, which had not been ironed to Daadi’s satisfaction.
“It doesn’t matter,” my mother had said.
But Daadi had insisted, condemning the characteristic inattentiveness, and sent the shirt back to the kitchen.
“He is a growing boy,” she had said. “And this is not that kind of school. It is not for your amusement.”
My mother said, “Why don’t you iron it, then? Why don’t you pay the fees? Why don’t you take over everything?”
And Daadi had said there was no need to have a fight in the morning.
Barkat drove me to the school. It took a while: the school-related traffic began on the canal and lasted all the way to the campus gates, two of which had already closed; it was late now, past the time for the first bell, and the few cars on the road were rushed. Barkat had to make an effort to reach the last gate before it was shut, and I ran after the other boys, who were marching far ahead in lines to the clanging of the bell.
The lines led through the hallway and out into a large circular field behind the main building. And here was the noise of so many voices speaking at once and the sight of hundreds of boys all dressed in the same clothes, the same blue shirts and green ties and pale khaki trousers. They were assembled in separate squares, each made up of five rows, the shorter boys ahead and the taller ones at the back. Beside every square stood a teacher: they were mostly men but there were some women too, and they were looking around and nodding and smiling at one another in acknowledgment.
I joined the first square and stood at the end of the last row. It was a hot, damp morning, the sky low and overcast; I tried to loosen the knot of the tie but desisted when this began to draw attention. The other boys had starched shirts and neatly knotted ties, their hair combed and wet—they had showered in the morning, and some had even deodorized their armpits and now gave off the smell.
An older boy was going around with a register and a pen. He wore a blue and yellow badge on his breast pocket, a mark of his separateness. There was an importance in the way he lingered and tapped the open register with his pen.
“Shoes,” he said.
“Sorry?”
He looked up from under a frown. “Your shoes,” he said, and pointed the pen.
I looked at my shoes. They were black, like the ones shown in the brochure. “What’s wrong with these shoes?”
He began to blink. “You have no respect?” He was suddenly close, his jaw jutting forward. “What’s your name?” His breath was sour and heated. “What’s your name?”
“Zaki Shirazi.”
He wrote it down. “You come see me after this.” And he resumed his rounds with an attempt at preserving the initial pace.
“He’s the monitor,” said the boy to my right.
I said, “What’s he going to do?”
“Nothing. He’s new. He has to try.” This was a charitable assessment, not lacking in potential for humor or depth. I looked at the boy: he was narrow and of medium height, his hair falling forward in thick slants and into his eyes, which were small and appeared to squint out as if at something bright.
I said, “You’re new too?”
But he wasn’t. He had been at the school for a year, but had developed an illness in the second term that had forced him to take leave and repeat the grade. “Same class,” he said. “Same teachers. Just different kids.” He smirked at this twist in his fate.
“I’m new,” I said.
“I could tell.”
We stood in the line and watched. A monitor was assigned to every gathering, which the boy, whose name was Saif, said were houses: first the monitors all walked out of their assigned houses and into the center of the field, where they stood in a line, their backs arched and their chests out and their palms stiff by their sides. They were waiting for a sign, which came now from a podium on the semicircular balcony that jutted out of the brick building like a lip: Coordinator Hassan was dressed in a dull gray suit with the buttons closed and the shoulders puffed out; he surveyed the assembly below and gave a single nod. And together the monitors cried:
“Attention!”
The silence was abrupt. The movement of a bird in a tree was painfully distinct: it flapped and tore inside the leaves and then fell away with a patter of its wings.<
br />
Coordinator Hassan leaned into the microphone and said, “There will now be a recitation from the Holy Quran.” His voice echoed in the microphone; he held both sides of the podium, and his small body appeared to lift behind it.
A boy went up to the podium from behind the coordinator, took his place at the microphone and began to recite. His eyes were shut, and his body swayed to the drawn-out sounds, which were in Arabic. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Translation! In the name of Allah! The most Beneficent, the most Merciful! Praise be to Him! The Lord of the worlds! The Beneficent, the Merciful, the Master of the Day of Judgment! Thee alone we worship! And Thee alone we ask for help! Show us the straight path! The path of those whom Thou hast favored! And not of those! Who earn Thine anger! And nor of those! Who go astray!”
The boy gave no bow or word of ending, and withdrew abruptly into the shadows behind Coordinator Hassan, who stepped up again to the podium and began a speech about the importance of fairness. Throughout the speech his head was bowed, so that he seemed to read it out from his notes, and when it was done he looked up brightly and said, “And now for the principal, please.”
The applause was like a waterfall crashing; the principal stood at the podium on the balcony and presided over the sound until, at a wave of his hand, it stopped.
He was a tall, regal-looking man with full white hair and a lush mustache, and with the slow, considered movements of tested authority. “It was Eliot,” he said, his voice booming across the field, “who asked the question ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ It is you, my sons, who must remove that final question mark”—he caught it in the air in his fist—“and make of it a motto for yourselves. Disturb the universe. Disturb it by all means. Things will fall into place.”
