by Nadeem Aslam
When he came in out of the drizzle his wife poured him a cup of tea – the second of many that Maulana Hafeez would drink during the course of the day. Maulana Hafeez dried his face and beard with the towel and took the cup.
‘You were in Raiwind during the month of that train crash, Maulana-ji,’ the woman said; she was thinking about the lost mail-bags. She was fair-skinned, frail, and her abundant hair was as white as the stole covering her head.
The cleric made an effort to remember. On his forehead there was a small bruise, the size of a teddy-paisa coin, proclaiming the zeal of his obeisance in prayer.
‘Nineteen years,’ the woman said and rose to her feet. From outside she brought into the kitchen two chairs and set them with their backs to the fire. Over the chairs she spread the clothes Maulana Hafeez was to wear to Judge Anwar’s funeral.
‘I heard a papiha singing somewhere,’ she said. ‘It must be monsoon.’
Maulana Hafeez nodded. ‘It’s been singing since dawn.’
Resin sizzled, hissing angrily on the surface of the blazing wood; the fire burned, the flames horizontal against the base of the pan in which something fragrant simmered. Maulana Hafeez looked up at his wife and said, ‘I do remember something about an infant surviving a train crash.’ He searched his wife’s face for confirmation. ‘Was that the same accident?’
‘You’re right, Maulana-ji,’ she said. ‘Strange that you should remember that. A little boy was found under the wreckage, five days later. There was a picture of him in the newspaper.’ Like everyone else in town Maulana Hafeez’s wife addressed him as ‘Maulana-ji’; she had never used the familiar ‘tu’.
‘God is merciful,’ Maulana Hafeez said quietly; other details of the disaster were coming back to him.
His wife came back to the stool and, removing the pan from the fire, got ready to bake chappatis. She tested the temperature of the baking-iron with a pinch of flour – it turned brown immediately, the smell of singed starch spreading through the small room. She pulled out the wood to moderate the heat and, with rapid clapping gestures, began to flatten a ball of dough between her palms. Blue veins were visible beneath the skin of her knuckles. Maulana Hafeez looked out at the silent mosque – it looked like a collection of glittering vases floating in the drizzle.
‘I still haven’t announced the death on the loudspeaker,’ he said.
His wife shook her head. ‘There’s no need, Maulana-ji,’ she said, carefully spreading the flat circle of dough on the baking-iron. ‘I’m sure the whole town has known about it since four o’clock.’
Behind the mosque, in that part of town which was once a Hindu neighbourhood, most of the doors on to the streets were open. Women stood on doorsteps, arranging their pale mourning shawls over their heads, hesitating before stepping into the drizzle. A crowd, mostly men, swarmed outside Judge Anwar’s house; and everyone, even those standing still, appeared purposeful. The only women were a few beggars, and there were some children, again mostly boys. A servant girl, carrying a bucket of water and a twig-broom, came out of the house. Judge Anwar had suffered from diabetes most of his adult life. Some hours before his death – before the break-in – he had got out of bed and squatted to urinate by the bedroom door that gave on to the portico. The urine had dried on the floor – a dark line on the grey cement – and tiny brown ants were chipping off the flaky crystals of sugar. The girl began to wash the floor, drowning and sweeping away the ants with her broom. Beyond the far end of the street was the empty plain where a Hindu temple had stood at other times. After the Partition, Hindus had emigrated to India and Muslims coming in the other direction to replace them – to settle in the new homeland – had torn down many of the sacred places of their predecessors. A large section of the temple had had to be dynamited. The conical tower was reduced to rubble in seconds, the large bronze bell tolling as it fell to jubilant applause from the onlookers.
Beyond the empty lot was the river, appearing like a silver thread except where obscured by the wild summer grasses that grew between the still-remaining parts of the temple floor. The smell of water – sluggish and uncomfortable – was in the air, eddying down the street. Azhar drew breath sharply as he entered the muddy street. A very fine drizzle was falling, its impact barely registering on the surface of the puddles; palls of dark cloud surrounded the sun. A small boy ran out of a house and headed, in front of Azhar, towards the judge’s house. From inside the boy’s home a woman’s coarse voice shouted reproaches and threatened punishments; but the boy was out of earshot.
Azhar arrived at Judge Anwar’s house. The talk became muffled and the crowd made way for him to reach the front door. Someone who was smoking a cigarette, and who exhaled smoke from his lungs fast as Azhar approached, reached out his hand and said, ‘They left without managing to take anything.’ Azhar nodded without shifting his gaze, nor did he alter his precise pace.
The house was full of people, and here, too, everyone seemed in the middle of performing some important task. Two men had been to the mosque and borrowed the low wooden platform on which corpses were washed. All the rooms opening on to the courtyard were being prepared to receive mourners. Most of the furniture had been removed from these rooms – only the heavy beds remained, standing on their sides against the walls – and the familiar rooms appeared, Azhar noted, at once spacious and alien. White sheets covered the floors. Photographs and portraits had either been removed to other rooms or turned face to the walls. However, the framed reminders of the dead man’s career had been left untouched: still crowding the shelves and mantelpieces were addresses, tributes and sapas-namas, each with the text printed elegantly between garlanded borders on shiny paper. Someone on his way out of a room stopped on seeing Azhar and said, ‘The shotgun was a Lee-Enfield.’
Azhar stood outside the room and softly cleared his throat before entering. The lowing of the heavy door caused many women inside to look up. They sat on sheets spread over the floor; it was possible to tell from the faces distorted by interrupted sleep which of them had been in the house since dawn. They covered their heads as Azhar entered.
The body was laid out on a cot in the centre of the room. A length of white cloth covered it; part of one heel had remained exposed and its tough cracked skin seemed to impart a pink hue to the edges of the sheet. Flanked on either side by her two eldest daughters Asgri Anwar sat cross-legged at the head of the cot. Azhar uncovered Judge Anwar’s face. The fabric resisted separation at the wound – the shot had obliterated the throat.
Dr Sharif entered the room. He had been sent for because one of the daughters had fainted earlier in the morning. As he advanced, the physician had to bend down several times and ask to be allowed through. The women shifted grudgingly. Because he insisted once a year on immunising children against cholera and typhoid the physician was barred from many homes. Many mothers did not want the limbs of their children ‘turned into sieves’. Undeterred, Dr Sharif would drag inside any child that passed by the surgery and, pinning the kicking and screaming girl or boy to the floor with his knee, inject the dose.
‘I sleep in the next room,’ Asgri was telling Azhar. ‘I heard nothing but the shot.’
Azhar looked about him uncomfortably. There was no air in the room. ‘We’ll get them, apa,’ he said quietly. ‘Whoever they were.’
Asgri lowered her head and made a dismissive wave with her hand. Suddenly one of the girls let out a scream and began hitting her head against the leg of the cot. At the same time she beat her breast with both hands. Her mother and sister and some of the other women tried to restrain her; the corpse shook gently on the cot. Judge Anwar was a large man, who had had the bearing of a Sikh. But the fierce constitution of his younger days had suffered in recent years from diabetes. The condition became more besetting when, on learning that the imported insulin he injected into his veins daily was extracted from the pancreas of pigs, he stopped the injections, turning instead to a local remedy – drinking boiled loquat leaves.
Dr Sha
rif approached. ‘I’ve given her something,’ he said to Asgri. ‘She’ll sleep for a few hours.’ Then he turned to speak to Azhar but his words were completely drowned out: two men had come in to collect the body for washing and the women had begun their wailing. The youngest daughter – a girl as beautiful as a seventh consecutive daughter had to be – slept peacefully in the arms of an elderly neighbour. One of the men carefully lifted the sheet off the corpse’s face to allow Asgri to see her husband for the last time. During the washing rituals the body was said to sever all ties made on earth; afterwards, therefore, a woman could not look at the man who had married her, it being a sin to lay eyes on a stranger.
‘Has Maulana Hafeez arrived yet?’ Asgri asked.
The man shook his head.
‘I want Maulana Hafeez to supervise everything,’ Asgri said curtly. ‘Everything is to be done according to the Sunnat.’ She nodded towards the man’s hands.
The man’s fingers let drop the corner of the sheet. ‘Everything will be done according to the strictures of the Sunnat.’
‘I hear you’ve added neem leaves to the water,’ Asgri said; and turning to the woman sitting beside her she said, ‘Is that allowed?’
Dr Sharif half-knelt towards the window and said above the din, ‘Neem leaves serve as disinfectant. It’s advisable to add a few to the water. It’s common practice.’
Asgri gripped the edge of the cot firmly. ‘Call Maulana Hafeez.’ And, as though responding to the call, the loudspeaker mounted on the mosque’s minaret came on with a hoarse growl and Maulana Hafeez proceeded to announce the death and the time set for the funeral prayers.
People in the street listened intently to the announcement. Each relayed word carried a tiny echo which in turn was accompanied by another echo, fainter still. The whole effect was that of a reflection on gently disturbed water. A sewer-worker, a Christian, went along the street, dragging behind him the long flexible bamboo pole used for unblocking the underground sewage channels. As he turned the corner the trailing end of the pole – more than fifteen yards separated the two ends – shot across the width of the street. The police inspector, a short man with a round stomach and a balding head, managed to step out of the way just in time to avoid a blow on the ankles. ‘Christian bastard,’ he murmured, shaking his head. Azhar was coming out on to the courtyard when the inspector entered the house.
‘The chief inspector, the superintendent of police and the chief superintendent have been informed,’ the inspector told Azhar. Azhar nodded. Elsewhere, as deputy commissioner, Azhar’s rank would have been too high for him to involve himself in such matters. As it was, he lived in the town – two streets away from Judge Anwar’s house – and the dead man had also been a friend.
Together the two men walked through the labyrinthine house room by room – each one high-ceilinged and excessively decorated – and tried to work out a possible sequence of events following the break-in, Azhar listening patiently to the theories that the inspector had had time to formulate since dawn. They asked the servants to open up the locked rooms. They peered under the beds and behind the cupboards and armoires. They unbolted several windows, all of them set in deep recesses and many of them never opened by the family, and looked out – without consequence – on to the back lane. They stood on the elaborate balconies that kept the edges of the street in shade at midday, and considered the drop on to the street below. ‘One of them probably climbed on to the roof’ – the police inspector pointed at the displaced cover of the water-tank at the top of the staircase – ‘and came down to let the others in.’
‘The servants will have to be questioned,’ Azhar said.
Outside in the street Gul-kalam, the nightwatchman, was talking excitedly to a group assembled around him. He moved his shoulders and hands boisterously. On seeing Azhar and the police inspector appear at the front door he became suddenly grim and, abandoning his audience, crossed the street hurriedly.
‘I was two streets away when I heard the shot,’ he said in his clipped north-western accent. ‘I couldn’t have done anything.’ He had pale blue eyes which he kept rimmed with antimony; his great bushy moustache curved into his mouth, obscuring the upper lip.
‘You’ve already made your statement, Gul-kalam.’ Azhar placed his hand on the man’s shoulder.
But Gul-kalam shook his head miserably. ‘I’m worthless. I couldn’t save him.’
‘Later, Gul-kalam,’ the police inspector said impatiently. ‘First, get these people to clear the street.’ And turning to Azhar he said, ‘We had better erect a shamiana out here. Soon there won’t be enough room inside.’
Gul-kalam had walked away from them. The brass whistle, which he would blow at the ends of each street on his rounds, dangled from his neck. On his feet he wore brown leather sandals whose thick soles held his feet inches above the mud. They watched him in silence for a few moments.
‘So,’ the inspector turned to Azhar and said, through a half-smile, ‘what’s this I hear about you, deputy-sahib?’
Azhar looked at him in incomprehension. A man carrying on his head an enormous basket as wide and flat as a stork’s nest, heaped with flowers, sidled past him and went into the house. ‘What?’ said Azhar, at the same time expelling the heavy fragrance of marigolds from his lungs.
The inspector smiled more openly. ‘The men who went to your house this morning to tell you about the death say there was a woman there with you.’
Through the small window of his room the old man saw Kalsum and Suraya open and enter the cemetery gate. He stopped kneading his limp biceps and went to that corner of the room where, in the angle between two walls, there was a heap of soil covered with a tough canvas sheet. With slow shovelfuls he filled a large basket and, heaving it up to his left shoulder, followed the two women down the narrow path of cracked slabs.
Kalsum squatted by her son’s grave; in lowering herself she drew the tails of her loose tunic between the back of her thighs and her calves, to prevent the hemline from getting muddied. One by one she picked up the rotting leaves that had accumulated around the grave since her last visit. Suraya walked around and began to clear the other side of the mound. The drizzle had ceased, and on the trunks and boughs of the large trees growing amongst the graves, mottled patterns left by last year’s honey-fungus showed vivid, lit by the raking afternoon light. A few of the graves had planted at their heads the colours – small square or triangular flags – of the fakirs and sufis that the dead person had followed in life. The wet rags hung stiffly, clinging to the poles, the surface-tension of water holding the folds firmly in place.
‘You should have waited for a dry day,’ the old man said to Kalsum. With a heavy sigh he brought down the basket of soil and remained bent at the waist – hands gripping the rim of the basket – for a few moments, trying to catch his breath.
Kalsum did not look up; she simply said, ‘I come on the last Wednesday of every month, baba. Have you forgotten?’ Suraya had cleared her side of the grave and was standing up, cleaning her fingers with a handkerchief. The keeper’s milky eyes examined her. She wore a large coat tightly fastened at the waist. The rigid fabric and exaggerated collar and cuffs gave it the appearance of a garment intended for a marionette, a doll.
‘This is my sister, baba,’ Kalsum said, ‘Burkat’s wife. Do you remember Burkat, baba?’
‘Burkat,’ the old man mumbled to himself, very quietly, as though turning in his mouth a piece of food never before tasted, waiting for it to release a flavour that the tongue might recognise. ‘Little Kazo Nur’s brother?’
Suraya nodded.
‘Well, well,’ he brightened. ‘We are practically family then.’ He laughed quietly to himself, pleased. The dark flesh on his cheeks had slackened with age and sunk into deep hollows on either side of the nose. ‘But didn’t he go to live in England?’
‘Canada,’ Kalsum said. ‘They went to England first, but then they moved to Canada.’
‘Canada,’ he said lifting his head towar
ds Suraya. ‘Is that far from England?’ And, narrowing his eyes to think, he added, ‘Here to Karachi?’
‘Much farther.’
Kalsum was spreading the soil evenly over the grave. The soil caught beneath her fingernails appeared green. Suraya too sat down once more and began to take handfuls from the basket. The old man pulled up a grass stem and, snapping it in two, began to pick his teeth. ‘When did you come back?’ he asked. ‘From Canada.’
‘Ten days.’ Suraya packed the spongy soil tightly, pressing down with the palms of both her hands. The old man nodded and spat loudly over his shoulder. Sensing that he was about to speak again Kalsum chided gently, ‘Baba, have you eaten crows? You are talking too much.’
At the other end of the graveyard a group of women emerged from the small enclosure, sheltered by a corrugated-iron roof, where funeral prayers were said. The iron rails of the enclosure were wrapped in trumpet bindweed. The keeper followed the sisters’ glances and said, ‘They are servants from Judge Anwar’s house. The widow sent them to clean the floor of the jinaza-gah. I told them it is clean, it is swept every other day, but they wouldn’t listen.’
