Translated from the Gibberish

by Anosh Irani

  It unnerved him how easily Qadir Bhai could speak an untruth. Abdul’s parents had been dead for a long time and Qadir Bhai had never even met them. When Qadir Bhai spoke those words, Abdul wanted to reveal himself to the authorities, clear his name and tell them that he had been tricked by Qadir Bhai, who had promised him he was “legal.” But what good would that have done? Abdul would have been too terrified to speak in his broken English, using words that he had picked up here and there, scraps of a new language that had been thrown at him as though he were a beggar.

  How he envied the men who ate his food; they had acquired Canadian accents, and when they ate his food with their bare hands, broke a piece of naan, and dipped it in their dal, their bruised knuckles showed, their calluses showed. These were honest calluses; Abdul had burns from stoves and frying pans and cooking oil—but his were not badges of honour, they were marks of shame and punishment. The men who ate his food held Canadian passports and strode through the streets freely, while he was forced to hide in a room at the back of a restaurant. “If anyone asks, you live in someone’s basement in Abbotsford,” Qadir Bhai had told him. Then he’d handed Abdul a torn piece of paper: “Just memorize this address.” Once, on Abdul’s day off, he’d caught a bus to his fake address and seen how beautiful it was.

  But everyone could smell a rat.

  Especially in a restaurant, where the aroma of food was what drew people in. Which is why, perhaps, no one ever questioned him. One night, when the first M in the Mughlai Moon sign almost fell off and Abdul was sent outside to repair it, it occurred to him what his real address was.

  I live behind the moon, he thought. And it made his tiny room feel a bit warmer.

  * * *

  —

  TONIGHT, HIS BREATHING WAS GETTING heavier and heavier. It came over him every now and then, without warning—a sinking feeling, as if someone had taken dusk and poured it down his throat. Regret and anger, and a deep realization of his own impotence, brought him to his knees. Before he had come to this country, he fell to his knees only during namaz: his surrender to Allah had been glorious, so magnificent it had the scent of roses and the taste of sherbet. When he had prayed in Bombay, he got down on his knees out of sheer gratitude. Here, he was beaten into submission, a sick mareez looking to the sky for help. But there was no sky, just the cold grey paint of the ceiling. Everything was grey, everything was rat.

  Abdul knew he had to snap out of this.

  He walked over to where he kept his clothes. It was a shell of a cupboard, a hollow space without a door, a gift from Qadir Bhai’s university-educated son who had destroyed the cupboard in a fit of anger and then given it to Abdul as an act of charity. The empty hooks tacked to the upper panel reminded Abdul of the chickens that used to hang from hooks at the slaughterhouse in Bombay where he’d worked, where he’d taught his brother Hasan, fifteen years younger than him, how to skin the animals and cut through bone without making a mess. To think that he preferred the sight of dead animals to the grey woollen coat that hung here—as if a man was already in it, a very thin man, extremely still, afraid to move.

  Behind the coat stood his cricket bat.

  He grabbed the handle, felt the rubber grip against his palm. He hadn’t thought of going for the rat, but the rat suddenly sizzled with energy and bolted off. Abdul didn’t bother to trace its path. Instead, he felt the wooden surface of the bat. There were red marks on it, marks that he cherished because they were signs of victory, like the time his team had needed six runs off the final ball to win the league, and Abdul had pulled a shot out of nowhere—or so it seemed to the rest of the team—and won the match. Ten of his teammates holding their breath, then exhaling with joy. But things changed the minute he walked off the cricket field; the only reason anyone held their breath for him then was because he stank of the food he cooked.

  His thoughts were getting the better of him tonight. Usually, these were winter thoughts, thoughts that came with rain. Tonight was dry, and winter was over. He told himself that all he had to do was get through the night. Tomorrow was Sunday, his day off. And tomorrow was the beginning of the cricket season.

  He held the bat tighter, but all this did was make him sweat more, so he put it back in its place. He rolled out his mattress and switched off the light. In the dark, he imagined what being Canadian would feel like: to be able to sit at Tim Hortons and have a doughnut without feeling like a thief; to walk along the seawall in Stanley Park and not view the water as an endless extension of lost hopes and dreams; to be able to ride in a taxi once in a while; to afford an iPhone, to call Fido, as Qadir Bhai did, and give his full name and address and date of birth and make a complaint, or demand a better deal.

  Someday, he thought. Someday.

  His breathing calmed. He thought of that home in Abbotsford again, his fake address. How astonishing it would be to actually own something like it. It had a large wooden door with the number 123 on it. Outside, there was a lawn with a tree that was full in summer and went bald in winter. His breathing slowed even more. He walked up the three steps to the front door.

  But that was as far as he could go.

  Even in his dreams, he did not have the guts to enter his fake home.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, ABDUL SPRANG out of bed. The greyness of the night before was almost gone, and rays of the sun came in through his small window, a reminder that perhaps there was gentleness in store for him after all. He pressed the power button on his old Nokia cellphone—it took forever to come on—and saw that he had a text message from Randy, offering him a ride from Surrey to North Vancouver, where the cricket club was. He quickly gobbled down two boiled eggs and waited for Randy to show up.

  Randy was a south Indian businessman who had started out as a restaurateur. He was built like a wrestler—short, stocky, hard as hell—and he opened the batting with Abdul. With his muscular physique, Randy couldn’t run fast between the wickets, but when he hit the ball, he hit it out of the ground, so there was no need to run. Together, Abdul and Randy had garnered the North Van Cricket Club some serious acclaim.

  “Mr. Abdul,” said Randy, opening the passenger-side door of his car. “Long time!”

  Randy always called Abdul by a nickname. Sometimes it was Mr. Abdul, sometimes Abdul Bhai, or Abdul the Great, or Abdullah, but never Abdul. Abdul had never bothered to ask him why. He felt feted when Randy called his name, blessed with some grace that he didn’t have in real life.

  “How are you, man?” Randy asked.

  “Me good,” said Abdul in his halting English.

  “I’m good, man. I’m good!”

  Randy had taken it upon himself to be Abdul’s English teacher. Randy’s English was impeccable—in fact he spoke it better than most Canadian-borns, each word so clear that Abdul felt the English language acquired extra gravitas under Randy’s tongue.

  “I’m good,” said Abdul. He wished Randy could tutor him in English throughout the year, but Randy was part of his life only for a few months, four to be precise. Come September, when cricket season was over, his teammates went back to their lives, and Abdul to his.

  It felt so strange, so exhilaratingly strange, to sit in a car.

  Randy had a Lexus GX 470, an SUV that made other cars look tiny, as though Randy was seated on a throne that moved stealthily, a silent turbo-powered crocodile. Abdul couldn’t help but think of the contrast with Qadir Bhai’s van, an old, decrepit vehicle that smelled of vegetables and goat and had grains of rice strewn on the mat. Qadir Bhai had an expensive car too, an Audi, but Abdul never sat in that. It was reserved for Qadir Bhai’s family. “You are like a son to me,” Qadir Bhai had once told Abdul in that same liar voice he had used for the immigration officers. But that son never got to sit in the Audi.

  “Come on, for fuck’s sake,” muttered Randy.

  The car ahead must have been going 100 km/h, but that wasn’t fast enough for Randy. He could go faster, wanted to go faster, and Abdul und
erstood. One hundred wasn’t enough for Abdul either—at least, not on the cricket field. While very few batsmen could even dream of scoring a hundred runs in the league that Abdul played in, Abdul was always hungry for more.

  “You know, Al Pacino has this same car,” said Randy. “Oh.”

  “You do know who Pacino is, right?”

  “Scarface,” said Abdul.

  “Right on,” said Randy. He turned on some music—it was techno, and it made Abdul feel as if they were in space.

  They sped through the highway that led to North Van, and Abdul, as always, marvelled at the stretch of tall trees that lined either side of the road. The air was so crisp here, and he immediately thought of the contrast with India’s highways, long, dusty stretches of death, where transport trucks bullied every other vehicle, and accidents were so common they were cleaned up like the day’s garbage.

  “So…how’re things at the restaurant?” asked Randy.

  “Fine, fine…all good.”

  “Any new specialties from Master Abdul?”

  “Nothing new,” said Abdul. “Same mutton, same chicken.”

  “As long as it tastes good, right?”

  “Right…”

  Randy lowered the volume on the music. The techno played on, but now it seemed to come from very far away.

  “Listen, Abdul, I want to talk to you about something.”

  Abdul felt a small shock. This was the first time Randy had called him by his name.

  “I’m opening an Indian restaurant downtown. And I’m wondering if you’d like to come work for me,” said Randy. “What’s your PR status like? Did it come through?”

  “Nothing come through…” said Abdul.

  “But have you applied for it?”

  “I don’t know…”

  That was the issue. Abdul had no idea what was going on with his status. All he knew was that his passport was sitting in Qadir Bhai’s home, and each time Abdul asked Qadir Bhai what was happening, Qadir Bhai would say, “Abdul, my son, immigration laws have changed.” Then he was told how complex the laws were, how nuanced, as Qadir Bhai twisted his hands this way and that, reminding Abdul of serpents.

  “If you come work for me, my lawyer will handle things,” said Randy. “I’ll make sure you’re able to work in my restaurant as a chef. Legally. I’ll pay you well and you’ll get your Canadian residency, no strings attached. If you want, you can walk out of my place the day you get it.”

  Abdul was taken aback. Randy had eaten at the Moon a few times, and had mentioned how much he liked the food, but this was a surprise. Randy had an array of chefs who worked for him. Abdul was merely a cook. But now Randy had called him a chef.

  “Are you gonna say something or what?”

  “But Qadir Bhai…he…”

  “Let me take care of Qadir Bhai,” said Randy. “All I need is a yes from you.”

  “I…”

  “Take the rest of the week to think it over. But I’ll need an answer by next Sunday.”

  Abdul nodded, dazed. This was a total googly.

  If Qadir Bhai got a whiff of this conversation, he would fly into a rage. What if he threw Abdul out? What if he destroyed Abdul’s passport? Qadir Bhai was the kind of man who demanded loyalty. And if it weren’t for Qadir Bhai, Abdul’s brother wouldn’t be able to attend school in Bombay. Hasan’s fees were taken care of, his books were taken care of, his uniform, everything. In a year, Hasan would write his tenth-grade finals and be ready for college. Abdul did not want to jeopardize that. It was the one promise Qadir Bhai had kept. Five years ago, when he had visited the slaughterhouse in Bombay and had spoken to Abdul’s employer, Ali Bhai—Qadir Bhai’s friend from the old days—he’d placed his hand on the Quran and said, “I will make Abdul a Canadian citizen. But it will take time.” It had taken too much time, Abdul knew, but the other promise, the one about Hasan, had been kept, in its entirety.

  Randy took the turn towards Norgate Park, past an Iranian grocery store where a woman was stacking up watermelons, and parked the car behind the clubhouse. He took his cricket gear out of the trunk. Abdul had only his bat with him, and a ball guard—everything else he borrowed from his teammates, and they were more than happy to lend him whatever he wanted, because he was their ace. The team even chipped in and paid his club fees.

  If only his brother could see how beautiful the ground was. Abdul took the air deep into his lungs. It tasted great. How much better it would taste, he thought, when it was finally his.

  He scanned the ground and remembered the places he had hit the ball last season. Once he had almost hit the nearby Indian reserve totem pole but was glad he hadn’t. He didn’t want to offend anyone. He looked towards the trees in the distance where balls had left dents in the trunks. Then something caught his eye. Something that hadn’t been there before. He could hardly believe it. Through the trees, he saw the white marble minaret of a mosque. A year ago, it had been a church.

  “When they build?” he asked Randy.

  “Build what?”

  “That,” he said, pointing to the mosque.

  “Oh. They started after the cricket season was over. Came up pretty quick, didn’t it?”

  Like magic, thought Abdul. He felt elated.

  There were other mosques in the city, but he’d never felt like going to any of them. He missed his mosque in Dongri—it was the only one he had ever attended—the same mosque where his father had taught him how to pray. The very first time, when he’d watched his father close his eyes, he’d felt a calm come over him, as though his father, by closing his eyes to this world, was opening them up to another. Then, years later, it was Abdul who held Hasan’s hand and took his brother on his first visit to the mosque. Two boys without parents, kneeling together; two boys who knew all they had was each other. When Hasan asked Abdul why they had to pray, Abdul replied, “To give thanks to Allah.”

  “But Allah took Abba and Ammi-jaan away,” said Hasan.

  “But He left me for you,” said Abdul. “And you for me. So we give thanks.”

  At night, the singers would come and send their voices into the air, proof of their love and longing for the divine. Each time they sang “Dongri ke Sultan,” Abdul was convinced that song was prayer too. The songs went into the air, circled around the minarets, rested on the domes, then continued upward, towards Allah, and at night showed themselves to the faithful in the form of stars.

  Perhaps this mosque in North Vancouver was a star, too, and the fact that it was right next to the cricket field made it shine all the brighter. Maybe Abdul’s begging and kneeling at the back of the restaurant had reached Allah, and Allah had sent a sign. Perhaps it had been here all along, waiting for Abdul.

  Just like Randy’s job offer.

  Qadir Bhai, a man who shared the same faith as Abdul, had let him down.

  And here was Randy, a South Indian—a Hindu—lending a helping hand, offering to make him visible. That made Randy more Muslim than Qadir Bhai.

  Only one who behaved truly was a true Muslim. One who kept his promise. Why should Abdul be loyal to someone who had betrayed him? Someone who had used his passport as leverage? Who had made promises in India and pretended they did not count in Canada?

  Qadir Bhai had another restaurant in Calgary, another Mughlai Moon, and when Abdul asked him who worked there, he evaded the question. But the answer had slipped out of his son’s mouth one night, when he had woken Abdul up and demanded some dinner for himself and his drunken friends. There was another “Abdul type” in Calgary, Qadir Bhai’s son had said to his buddies, another Bombay boy. Was this other Abdul hiding at the back of the moon as well? Was this how Qadir Bhai had bought his Audi?

  Abdul looked at the cricket field. The grass was green, the colour of Islam. Another sign, another show of strength. He bent down and felt it against his palm, remembering the afternoon, on a chance visit to Stanley Park, when he had discovered that cricket was played in Canada. The soft carpet of grass had been a revelation. Unlike
the dusty maidaans of Bombay, which sent him home with cuts and bruises, the grass was a homely rug—gentle and inviting. He had literally gone to sleep on it, feeling it against his back. He had been in Vancouver for more than a year by then, but this was the first time he had smiled. And the grass had smiled too. No one in Vancouver had smiled at him, but the grass did.

  Now, as Abdul looked at Randy, he saw a person smiling, too.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME ABDUL GOT OUT to bat, the clubhouse was packed. The first game of the season always brought the immigrants and their families out of hibernation, and they drank beer and cooked burgers and smoked cigarettes while Abdul hammered the bowlers around.