by Ali Sethi
“A good man,” said Naseem, who had visualized him.
Her husband said, “There are good men still in this world.” He was sitting on his haunches, enjoying the warmth from the fire on his palms, showing a ludicrous grin on his face. Naseem had learned after many years to ignore his moods, which went with the moods of those around him.
But her son said, “I have thought about it. I will ask him to eat with us. When a good man comes along, it is good to be good to him.”
And Naseem said, “It is a good thing you are thinking, son. I will cook for him with my own hands.”
Dr. Shafeek agreed to the meal. Yakub escorted him from the mosque, where he was setting up a new program, and brought him to the house in the early afternoon. It was a dry day, and the sun blazed above them; they went through the parched courtyard, the brick walls shining, past the kitchen (where Naseem, assisted by Majida, was cooking rotis on the fire) and into the cool room where they kept their belongings: the tin trunk was in the center, visible below the table; the plastic plates and glasses were on a shelf hacked into the wall; the black-and-white TV (which hadn’t worked for some months now) was kept on a high shelf in a corner, and was covered with cloth to guard it against the dust. And all around there were posters that showed the imagined features of dead saints, of Hazrat Ali with his black beard and green headdress and sword, and of the eccentric Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in a trance, and of the docile-looking Bhulleh Shah, whose shrine in Kasur they had visited in the spring.
Dr. Shafeek was looking around the room and had a ready smile on his lips, which were oddly visible in the absence of a mustache and seemed to give his beard an added lift.
“Your wife’s decorations?” he asked. He had used the formal word for wife.
Yakub grinned frankly and said, “Not yet. No wife.”
Dr. Shafeek’s smile was the same as before.
He said, “It is a tenet of our religion.”
Yakub nodded.
“You must do it young. And you may have more than one.”
It was said with seriousness.
Yakub said, “Well, yes; please, eat.” And he raised the lids from all the pots that were arranged in a line on the table and which they had brought out for the occasion. “Please take.”
Dr. Shafeek expressed a desire to wash his hands.
Yakub led him outside, into the heated courtyard. Dr. Shafeek crouched before the tap and washed his hands, his wrists, his elbows, then his mouth and his face. “It is my habit,” he said afterward, when they had gone back inside to eat their meal. “When I was in Saudia, at every meal we washed in this way.” He said he had gone there first to study, and then, later, to obtain donations for the mosque and training center he was setting up here in the village. “Over there,” he said, “it is all desert, all dry and hot.” His mouth was sour with severity, but his eyes were bright. “It is scorching, scorching. The people are Bedouins.” He smiled wistfully. “They are used to the heat. Oh yes. Thousands of years they have spent there. They are not like us, not used to this and that. Their lives are spare and simple.”
Yakub was smiling too, as if sharing in the recollection of the Bedouins, seeing the huts and camels and the customs that Dr. Shafeek had not yet described.
“Bismillah,” said Dr. Shafeek.
They ate.
The room was dank and decorated.
Majida came in with fresh rotis, dropped them into a plate and went away.
After she had gone, Dr. Shafeek said, “In Saudia women are separate. They have separate quarters, separate schools. Islam allows. But there are limits.”
Yakub took the hot roti from the plate, broke it in half and placed the other half in Dr. Shafeek’s plate.
“Your car,” said Dr. Shafeek. “It is new?”
“Very new,” said Yakub, who was assuming that Dr. Shafeek had allowed for the maneuverings of a previous owner.
“It is a gift from Allah,” said Dr. Shafeek.
And Yakub said, “There is no doubt in it. We were saying only yesterday how it was good to get it blessed. Otherwise there are many accidents, and many are fatal, destroying not just the car, which is made of metal after all, but also the flesh and blood inside, the men and women and the children.” He was talking like a schoolteacher now, which was another of the things he could have been.
Dr. Shafeek said, “Blessed?” His eyes were narrowed and his smile was incredulous and small.
“At the shrine,” said Yakub confidently. “Hazrat Karman Aley Sharif.”
Dr. Shafeek lifted his glass from the table and drank all the water in it. Then he brought it down on the table and gasped. “My friend,” he said, and burped, “it is all a fraud. These shrines”—he waved his hand about generally, and it very nearly missed the pictures on the walls—“they are places of burial. Who is buried inside? A man is buried inside. You think that man is listening to your prayer? How can he listen when he is no more than bones? Who is listening to the wish that you make from your heart?” He was tapping Yakub’s heart with his finger. “Is it your fellow man, whose own heart is full of wishes, good and bad wishes, or is it God, who knows the things you keep in your soul?”
Yakub had the sense to say, “God.”
“So why,” said Dr. Shafeek, “are you praying to a man?”
Yakub was nodding.
“Tell me,” said Dr. Shafeek, and placed a morsel in his mouth. “Who bashed up your car that day?”
Yakub said, “A man.”
“And who saved your car? Who saved you that day?”
Yakub was nodding, and said, “You did, you did.”
“No,” said Dr. Shafeek. “Allah saved you.”
“Allah,” said Yakub.
“Allah,” said Dr. Shafeek.
They continued to eat. They were men. It revealed the act of sitting together in a new light, made it mundane, and made them audacious and unafraid.
Dr. Shafeek explained about the concept of shirk. It was when people ascribed godlike powers to entities other than God, to mere men (though in some parts of the world they were still worshiping stones and animals, and it was hard to say if that was better or worse), and thereby denied the oneness of God. “There is only one place to go,” said Dr. Shafeek, “to receive a blessing. And that place is the House of God. You must go. It is your duty as a Muslim. And it is your duty to send your parents, to send your mother, who has no doubt made many sacrifices, and your father, whose blood is in your veins. Send them, and then go yourself, and see the blessings Allah will bestow.”
Dr. Shafeek ate the rest of his meal, washed his hands once again in the courtyard and went away. And afterward it was agreed that his visit to their house had been a visitation. They didn’t immediately abandon the notion of shrines (though they saw now that it was a notion) and none of them dared at first to take down the posters from the walls. But on the matter of making the pilgrimage they were decided. Yakub said that he would start saving from the next day and promised to provide two airplane tickets for his parents to Saudi Arabia.
“But it is not enough,” said Naseem. “We will need more than that. We will need for the time that we are there, for the things we will eat and the things we will buy.”
And she said, “Allah gives. Allah will give. I will find.”
16
Daadi switched off the lights in her room and went to lie down on the bed. She allowed the descent into her thoughts. The day had passed; a government had ended, a new one had begun and things were at rest. She thought of the soldiers climbing the walls. They were brave. But then she thought: it is duty, nothing more, and they all follow commands delivered by someone else, and their lives are for nothing, and their deaths are for nothing.
She thought it was a dream. And she thought she had forgotten it already, something she did often now, not like in childhood, when she remembered every single dream and what it was made of.
She sat up and swung her legs off the bed, put on her slippers and went into
the bathroom.
But when she returned she was filled with dread. If she slept now she would dream again, and she knew that it would lead to mutations of the things she had seen in the day, which were mutations of the things she had seen in her life.
For some minutes she paced the room in the dark.
She went into the dressing room, found the small brass key under the carpet and opened her cupboard. It gave its customary creak, a sound of submission. She opened a drawer, took out an oval tin box and returned with it to the sofa in her room. She switched on a lamp. The pictures inside the box were the same. She saw now, in this half-slumber, that she had stopped collecting photographs at a particular point in time. She could name the year. And she could name the day. It was when her son died.
The crying had been a release until it became a habit, and she recalled the swollen eyes, the throbbing head and the squeezed ribs. She was glad it had stopped. But she wanted to know that she could do it still, and without having to revive a grieving self.
She took out a photograph and held it up like a shield. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them she found an old picture, one of her oldest, from the days when she was still a girl. The girl standing next to her with the hair parted in the middle was Amrita, her friend and neighbor, and they were standing behind the shrubs in Amrita’s garden. It was the summer Amrita had left.
The Hindu family next door, the Parsi gentleman who lived in the secretive double-story house and ran the laundry on Mall Road, and Amrita’s family, a Sikh family—all of them had locked their houses and gone away.
The year before, things were different. The word “Pakistan” had been on people’s tongues, a word they used mostly in slogans, and their lives in Lahore were unaffected by it. Daadi’s father came home in the evenings and spoke about Gandhi going to jail, Nehru going to jail, Jinnah appearing in the newspapers and asking for concessions for the Muslims, and it was a part of his personality, his way of talking in English and smoking cigarettes on his own in the darkened veranda.
“Cripps Mission,” said Daadi in the morning.
“Cabinet Mission,” said Amrita.
The taanga was taking them to school. The horse’s click-clock made them bump.
“My dear,” said Daadi, fifteen this summer and newly enamored of the English language, “it is all politics.” She said it and leaned back in her seat. The world around them was one of overhanging trees and dirt tracks paved recently for travelers.
“Politics,” said Amrita satisfactorily. Then she said, “I don’t think I look like her at all.” And she meant Noor Jehan, the young singer who had hijacked All-India Radio and was being praised for singing a difficult qawwali in the film Zeenat.
Daadi had told Amrita earlier that morning that she looked like Noor Jehan, who was marked by a cleft chin and sullen lips.
Daadi said, “You look just like her.”
“You keep on saying it,” said Amrita.
“Because it is the truth, my dear.”
“I know why you say it.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s because you don’t look like anyone.”
“I look like myself.”
“Only yourself.”
“Thank you, my dear.”
“Damn you.” And Amrita said it and blushed, her sullen lips hanging uncertainly, and looked around as if for witnesses.
They were neighbors. Daadi lived in the small house with the terrace, and Amrita lived in the house with the telephone. It sat on a stool in their veranda and rang loudly in the evenings. A Muslim bearer hurried in, stooped to pick up the handle and passed it on to Amrita’s father, a Sikh lawyer who wore his turban like a fabulous crown and reclined in his long veranda chair to discuss the amounts of money involved in his cases. People said Amrita’s father was a show-off, and Daadi’s mother had told her that people were jealous.
“In this neighborhood,” she said, standing one morning with her sleeves rolled up by the kitchen window, “everyone is one thing on top and another thing inside.”
She meant that they were unreliable, and she liked to give the example of her own husband, who spoke agitatedly of education and progress but had nothing to show for himself.
“If I didn’t send him to work every morning,” Daadi’s mother used to say, “we would be paupers, we would be begging on these streets.”
It was true that Daadi’s father was fond of sleeping. (He ran a pharmacy that doubled as a dispensary, and he claimed that nobody in Lahore required his services before noon.) She had to rouse him on her way to school. And she often had to go afterward to bring Amrita out of her house. On the way she passed Amrita’s mother, a round-faced, broad-boned lady with coal-black hair and a dark slit between her two front teeth. In the morning she sat on her burgundy rug and recited gravelly hymns from the Granth Sahib. She saw Daadi enter the house and nodded with her front-toothy smile. Then Daadi passed Amrita’s older brother, Ajit, who took morning classes at the Law College. Ajit was a large fellow, high and hefty, with massive, sloping shoulders and a childish sulk. People said he sulked because he was struggling with his father’s shadow; Daadi had heard their loud arguments, the ones that took place in the veranda and usually followed their legalistic discussions, culminating in the slamming of doors, which rang like gunshots. Amrita said her brother was like her father in every way.
“They should get along,” said Amrita.
“Not at all,” said Daadi.
“I think so,” said Amrita.
They had their opinions. Amrita wanted to have two children—a son and a daughter. “Older son, younger daughter. It’s always better.”
Daadi said she wanted two daughters and a son.
“Why not two sons and a daughter?” said Amrita.
“Because a girl needs company.”
Amrita said, “Girls fight much more than boys.”
And Daadi said, “What do you know? You’re just making it up. You always make things up on your own.”
The arrival of the refugees was unexpected. Daadi heard it described in the house and informed Amrita.
“It’s true,” Amrita said. “My father has said they’ll be coming to our house. My mother will make their beds.”
“How many are there?” said Daadi.
“I don’t know,” said Amrita. “It’s all politics.” Then she said, “Muslims are killing them for no good reason.” And she said the words like a lawyer, with her hands laying them out in the air.
Daadi said, “Muslims were killed first.” It was what her mother had said in the morning with the rolling pin in her hand.
“No, they weren’t.”
“The truth is the truth.”
“Muslims lie all the time.”
“You don’t wash your hair.”
“I do.”
“Your father doesn’t. Your brother doesn’t. They keep it all day in their turbans.”
And Amrita made a face and went home.
Earlier in the year there had been riots in Calcutta between Hindus and Muslims. Calcutta was very far away, a five-day journey on the train from Lahore. Rioting in Calcutta was as remote as the fighting (her father had called it a “fiasco”) that was happening between the countries of Europe. But the riots in Calcutta led to the killing of Muslims in Bihar, and then Hindus in East Bengal, and then, most recently, the killing of Sikhs and Hindus in the northern provinces. The northern provinces were not so far away, just a five-hour journey by train, and the attack on Hindus and Sikhs had sent them with their families to Lahore. Amrita’s own house, in keeping with her prediction, was currently full of relatives who had fled the fighting.
Daadi’s mother said, “We should shut our windows. Who knows what they have brought in their hearts?”
Daadi’s father was reclining on the divan in the veranda. He raised his head from the pillow and said, “Don’t be so narrow-minded, my dear.”
Daadi’s mother widened her eyes, opened the corner of her mouth and said,
“Yes, my dear,” and went away to shut the windows.
Later that night she said, “These British. They are evil geniuses.”
But Daadi’s father said not everything could be blamed on the British. He was lying still on his divan, listening now to the gramophone that sat next to him on a high table and was possessed by the spirit of Noor Jehan.
“Whose fault is it?” asked Daadi.
“Our own,” said her father. “Man is an animal. He must always curb his instincts. It is only under the influence of discipline and restraint that man is Man. Remember that.” The possessed gramophone sang a sad verse about moons and broken hearts.
By summer the madness was everywhere. The British were leaving and there would be two countries, India in the center and Pakistan on each side—a long strip to the left called West Pakistan, and then to the right, after one thousand miles of Indian territory, another Muslim land called East Pakistan. Hindus and Sikhs were going to India and Muslims were coming to Pakistan. The Parsis and Christians were unsure, and had been told to make up their minds.
Signs appeared on doors. THIS IS A PARSI HOUSE. THIS IS A CHRISTIAN HOUSE. Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs didn’t put up signs because they feared identification. There were riots on Mall Road. The mostly Hindu neighborhood of Shahalmi was torched. Thick clouds of smoke settled on the horizon and spread like the blackness that suggests a storm. The stories were fantastic: people had seen bodies piled up against walls, thrown into ditches, severed heads and hands and cut-off breasts. Refugee trains were arriving at their destinations with corpses inside. A woman who had made the journey across the new border said that she had climbed a pile of bodies in order to hop across a high wall. Daadi was trying to keep up with the stories, trying to picture Mall Road without the Parsi laundry, Shahalmi without Hindus, the River Ravi without its funeral pyres, a plain gray without its blaze of orange. Could there be Eid without Holi and Diwali, Noor Jehan without All-India Radio, Daadi without Amrita in the mornings?
