The partner came forward. He was taller than Jutting Jaw and wrapped in an ajrak. ‘The bastard knows he has us now.’ He ran his fingers along the engraving. ‘It’s finer than a Turkish scabbard. Maybe the Chief will even let us use it.’
He looked up and noticed Salaamat. ‘Who’s this?’ He pointed the muzzle at him.
Hero continued smiling magnanimously. ‘He ought to be one of you. Instead, he’s suddenly feeling very shy. Must be the tea.’ The vests snickered. ‘He’s understood everything you’ve said. Every filthy compliment you’ve paid me.’ He laughed.
Something crawled inside Salaamat’s forehead, just above the bridge of his nose. He laid a hand there and held his breath. Both men were dark like him but without his pale blue eyes.
The one in an ajrak insisted, ‘Speak.’
Salaamat gulped the last of the sweet tea. It left a cool, menthol shiver on his tongue. He said, ‘Your words are music to my ears. I hate this man.’
The men looked at each other and burst into laughter. Then the Pathans switched to their tongue and laughed too. This made the Sindhis guffaw. More tea was made. More stools brought. The buyers sat down. ‘Shake hands,’ they said to Salaamat.
He shook the muzzle of the Winchester. ‘My name’s Salaamat. Not Ajnabi like this jackass.’
‘Fatah,’ said Jutting Jaw, gripping the rifle’s other end. ‘Second Commander. Not a cheat like this rat.’
‘Muhammad Shah,’ said the other, slapping his hand on the stock. ‘First Lieutenant and tea advisor. Next time, don’t drink it. You’ll wake up puking acid.’
Salaamat’s fingers curled around the slender barrel as he continued shaking it. He swayed, feeling increasingly queasy.
Hero offered him the butt of a Kalashnikov. When Salaamat took it, Hero said in a mocking child’s voice, ‘We make more than two thousand rupees.’ And to the others, ‘How many of these?’
The vests stood up and began wrapping the supplies. Fatah counted rupees. Salaamat learned there were thirty bullets in the magazine of an AK-47, and that each bullet cost a mere ten rupees. The machine gun itself was four thousand, the Winchester, sixty-five. Others, sold by the case, cost anywhere in between. These men had more cash than even a bus-owner.
He felt Fatah slipping something into his shirt pocket. He wasn’t sure what. His vision was blurry and he thought he might vomit. But he clung to the machine gun’s cylinder. It was as smooth as the slim neck of the frosted blue vase outside. It was cold, fragile. If he let go it would snap and little blue splinters would pierce his skin.
‘It’s a small world,’ said Muhammad Shah, in Urdu again. ‘From Amreeka to the Soviets, we all meet here.’
‘From the mountains to the sea, where black fish like you breed,’ said Hero.
If there was a fight, Salaamat missed it. While losing consciousness, he crumpled to the floor, believing he dived down the neck of a vase, into a vast blue bowl.
4
The Fire
When he came to, Salaamat’s head was an inferno. He touched it: his fingers came away sticky. Squinting, he saw he lay in the middle of a street in flames. Tires burned. A mob threw stones. He crawled onto the pavement behind him, seeking a door to duck inside. But there was only broken glass, burning carts, people scrambling, and the sound of shotguns. Shops had their shutters securely down. Those that didn’t were being smashed. He tried to stand up. Stumbling down the street, he vaguely recalled a different world of glass.
The stench of charred rubber mingled with singed hair, food and plastic, and his stomach heaved. A dismembered car stood deserted in the middle of the road, the holes where doors had been yawning, screaming. He remembered the maze. And the tea. He reached into his shirt pocket: the bills were gone. In their place was a scrap of paper. When he opened it, a pair of silver earrings inlaid with blue lapis lazuli fell into his hand. The ones he’d wanted. The paper had a phone number. He remembered the two dark faces who spoke his tongue. And the three pale men on stools. And the one he’d never seen at the back, making the tea. Which had stolen his first earnings?
Three years of drudgery, three with no home or family, three listening to Handsome’s men jeer him. And now this. Hadn’t God thrown enough humiliation his way? He turned back. But then he paused: to get to Hero’s shop, he’d have to pass the mob.
When a man ran by him, he grabbed his arm and demanded, ‘What’s happening?’ His face was seared and oily. He must look like that.
‘You should be heading that way,’ the man said, pointing away from the building with Hero’s shop. He pulled away.
Slowly, Salaamat followed. I’ll be back, he swore.
When the next shot rang he found himself wondering which kind of gun had fired it. He’d never known each could be so different. Some shapes were finer than others, and the finish varied greatly, just like in bus-body-making. But when instead of a single shot, he heard a burst of several dozen in succession, he remembered the machine guns. Salaamat began to run.
5
Ashes
An old man’s face shone an eerie green in the last glare of the fire that consumed the bus.
‘It was a nice one,’ muttered a youth beside him. ‘New. Not even two weeks old. There was a big ant there,’ he pointed at the fender.
Salaamat knew before he’d even reached it. Maybe because of the purple strip a child kicked all the way down the street – the only part that survived. Or maybe he’d simply heard death in the smoke that swished toward him. It smelled different this time, different from all the burned rubber he’d walked past to get to the bus stop. Maybe it was the smell of premonition. His entire life had been pointing to this moment. He was a fool not to see it before. He was always meant to stand here, at this junction.
There was no turtle now. The paint, metal, and pictures were all singed and furled. Only one wooden plank still burned. Orange flames rose around it half-heartedly. They’d bored into the iron, shattered the disco lights, stripped the plastic seats, gorged the tinted windows, blackened the silver steering wheel.
Salaamat walked around his bus. His. His months of barely any sleep; his runny eyes; his hands sliced by steel; his glittery fish; his Rani; his chronology. His first income, also gone. He kicked the front tires. Smoke permeated every cell in his body. He shut his eyes, overcome by an exhaustion that was absolute. There was not one thing around him that suggested the order he’d slogged to construct since the day he’d left his village. No, before that: since the trawlers and his attack. His father’s cowardice. His mother’s silent humiliation. Her death. Or maybe even earlier. Maybe the lines on his hands, if he could read them, told that it had all gone wrong at his birth. That was the real mistake.
There were no beautiful things to focus on in this life. He had to begin another. And he knew now which road would take him there. The scrap of paper in his pocket pressed into his chest. He tossed it in the cinders. But first, he memorized the number.
6
Brother and Sister
APRIL 1987
Salaamat visited the farm often after that. Sometimes he rode on buses with torn red seats and sometimes he stood. He noticed little about any of them. He spoke to no commuters. And he paid no attention to the daily strikes or the burgeoning body count.
‘I won’t be seeing you for a while,’ he said to Sumbul one morning in mid-April. She sat under a mulberry tree, feeding her second child.
The last time he’d been held like a baby was the day his grandmother found him drifting in the sea. She’d rocked him after his uncles pumped his chest. And she’d sung, just like Sumbul sang now.
She buttoned up her shirt but he glimpsed a nipple twice the size of a Fanta bottle cap. She was only fifteen. She, who’d been flat as a coastline and lithe as a fish. A strand of hair strayed loose from her braid. He gently arranged it behind her ear, grazing her earlobe, where a thin ring hung. ‘Remember how you screamed when Dadi put those in?’
‘I thought she’d pierced my heart and I�
�d bleed to death! If I’d known then what God still had planned for me, I’d have screamed a thousand times louder.’ She laughed.
He reached into his pocket. ‘These are for you.’ He placed the lapis earrings on the baby’s cheek. He’d been saving them for this last visit before he joined Fatah and his men. He’d gotten his money back too, and much more besides.
Sumbul gasped, holding the earrings up for inspection. ‘Where did you get them?’
Salaamat carefully removed the old circles from her ears. ‘Do you like them?’
‘Of course,’ she laughed. ‘They’re beautiful. And they must have cost a fortune.’
‘Shake your head.’ She did. ‘They were made for you,’ he smiled, admiring how her creamy brown neck offset the smooth dark stones. ‘You need a mirror.’
She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. ‘I can see my pretty gift in your pretty eyes and need no mirror.’
They sat quietly awhile. Around him rose other trees planted soon after his family had come to the farm. It was they who’d sowed the seedlings, watered and pruned them, stood guard outside, and helped raise the caterpillars in the shed opposite from where he now sat. Sumbul would go from feeding the baby to feeding the silkworms. But he never went inside the shed. The white wriggling bodies reminded him of the shrimp his mother had spent her last years peeling.
‘Are you happy here?’ He turned to Sumbul.
She cuffed him lightly. ‘You always ask me that. I always tell you yes. They are good people.’
‘But you work with grub,’ he snarled.
‘There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s honest work. And Aba’s treated kindly at the house. Their daughter’s really taken to him.’
Trying to appear casual, Salaamat asked, ‘Is she here today?’
‘My poor lovesick brother,’ Sumbul pinched his cheek. The baby lay in the crook of her crossed knee. Wiping the girl’s chin with the folds of her shalwar, she continued, ‘Instead of asking after rich girls, you should ask after your ageing father.’
‘Don’t start on that.’
‘Forgive him, Salaamat Bhai. Just let it go. He was weak. We all have our weaknesses. If Ama forgave him, you should do the same.’
‘What kind of man would loll in bed while his wife slaved in a stinking factory?’
‘The kind I too have married. Only I’m on a farm and it doesn’t stink.’ She glanced at his waist. Strapped to it was a pistol. ‘Are you going to tell me what kind it is?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘I see it’s different from the German one you had last time. That was, let’s see, half pistol and half Kalashnikov. You got it at a subsidized rate, if I’m not mistaken. All thanks to the bountiful General.’
‘Do you think I’d be any safer without it?’ he retorted.
‘You’d be safer if you stayed away from people who used it,’ she rejoined.
‘And do what, spend my life feeding maggots?’
Her lips trembled. She picked up the child and as her head tilted to the side, a tear rolled down to her ear and on to the blue lapis. He sighed, wiping it off.
She leaned into his shoulder, whispering, ‘I love you. I don’t want to lose more of us.’ And then she talked, as she so often did, of their family’s last year at the village, and how she’d ached for him, her favorite brother.
Much as this pained him, it was so delightful. He stared proudly at the stones and let her ramble, sensing it would be a long time before anyone would speak of love again.
Sumbul arranged her dupatta on the ground and rested the baby there. Then she took Salaamat in both her arms and twirled his coils with her fingers. ‘I always wanted hair like yours.’
‘Yours is much more beautiful.’
‘Then at least give me your strange blue eyes. Just like Dadi’s.’
‘But I love looking into yours. Round and cinnamon-colored.’
You hear everything I say.’
‘Yes. All of it.’
‘Then you aren’t deaf any more.’
‘Sometimes I am. But somehow, never with you.’
She laughed, ‘One of those is a lie.’
He promised, ‘When I come back, I’ll buy you many more jewels. I’ll have so much money you won’t even have to work here.’
‘And if I want to, will you still give me money?’ she teased.
He grinned. ‘I’ll always give you half. And we can send that stupid husband of yours to a land of permanent rest.’
‘Shh. Children listen in their sleep.’
‘Good. She should know there aren’t only men like her father. There are men like her mamu.’ Then he pushed Sumbul gently away. ‘I must say goodbye to Chachoo now. Don’t worry about me.’ He kissed first her forehead, then the baby’s. ‘I will return.’
Sumbul pledged to always adore and defend him, at any cost.
7
The Witness
Salaamat passed his brothers standing guard at the farm’s gate. He embraced them quickly and with a minimum of words. They’d not missed him when he’d left the village; he owed them little in return.
He walked the half-kilometer to Makli Hill, where his father’s brother was the guardian of the tombs. The man had decided not to work at Mr Mansoor’s farm or his house, and Salaamat respected him for it. Whenever he came to see Sumbul, he visited Chachoo as well.
Little was left of the tombs besides broken walls and chipped tile. But one in particular still offered a glimpse of its six-hundred-year-old self, and it was outside it that his uncle usually paced, as he did today.
Salaamat kissed the man’s grizzled cheek. He was tall like himself, and stronger of build than Salaamat’s own father. He’d been a good fisherman. Now he wandered here alone all day, staring at the deathbeds of kings and queens.
The iron gate leading into the tomb’s courtyard was unlocked. This was rare. ‘Visitors?’ Salaamat asked.
Chachoo paused. ‘You could call them that.’
‘Let’s go in as well.’
The old man paused again. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t disturb them.’
‘And why not?’ He stepped inside. Reluctantly, the old man followed. ‘I like coming here,’ Salaamat said over his shoulder, climbing the narrow, decrepit staircase to a verandah that wrapped around a second chamber. ‘I prefer it to the farm Sumbul loves.’
He moved carefully, stopping to finger the cool blue mosaic tiles of the brittle terrace. He wondered about the hands that had made the delicate pattern, or fired the clay, or glazed it, and for an instant, wondered if he’d miss his work at the workshop. After all, he’d been good at it.
He turned to his uncle. ‘What did you do today, Chachoo?’
The old man shrugged. ‘What I always do. I walked off my age. And watched these mirrors dance on the rock.’ The sun bounced off his cap and tiny yellow diamonds flickered on the sandstone. He pointed to this. But when Salaamat reached another staircase, this one leading to the crypt, he placed a firm hand on his shoulder. ‘I must speak plainly. I’ve been paid today to keep others away from here.’
Salaamat was about to ask him why, when he realized he could hear a rippling murmur. Voices. Despite the old man’s repeated warnings, he pushed Chachoo aside and began descending the stairs, eventually arriving in the dim chamber housing the crypt.
Above him rose a richly carved dome supported by four pillars. Several hundred bats swung from the ceiling, gazing down from their nests of chiseled vine. Their invasion gave the design, already in relief, an even more three-dimensional appearance. Mid-way up the canopy’s length and spanning its breadth hung a net. It kept the tittering aerialists at bay. The mesh was ideal for snaring insects: the bats were like spiders in a web they didn’t even have to weave. Every time Salaamat came here the colony appeared to have doubled. Now, as he approached the first pillar, one creature shot down like a trapeze artist toward him, only to bounce back up at the net.
But today he and his uncle were not the only ones the bats struck at. There was someone else behind
the next pillar. Chachoo frowned but Salaamat kept advancing.
In the dusky tomb he gleaned two figures. Surely one was Mrs Mansoor? Yes, that was her, exactly as she’d been that time in the garden, sitting beside a table laid for tea. Except now she stood. They’d never met on his visits to the farm, but he recognized the straight, boyish physique and short, masculine hair. She hadn’t changed. Salaamat leaned forward, but Mrs Mansoor obstructed the other figure from his view. He listened. Her voice, and a man’s. Why would husband and wife pay Chachoo to keep their meeting quiet?
The old man caught up with him.
‘Who is he?’ Salaamat whispered.
Chachoo shook his head.
There was a movement behind the pillar now. The man reached for her but she pulled away. In this way, he came into view. It was not Mr Mansoor. Their voices rose.
‘You should not have asked to see me,’ she was saying.
‘I have a right to stay in touch.’
A moment later, two bats plunged toward them and all four figures ducked.
‘Oh what a place to meet!’ the woman cried.
Outside, before Salaamat left him, Chachoo cautioned, ‘Today you are a witness. But you are also deaf, dumb and blind.’
ANU
1
The Doctor Looking In
JULY 1992
Anu said goodbye to a friend who’d come to condole, and offered her afternoon prayers. Then she entered the television lounge where Daanish was reading the paper. He sat where the doctor had always sat while doing the same. But first, the doctor would set breadcrumbs out in a small saucer for the birds. He’d then settle in that chair, which granted the best view of them feeding, and smack his thighs when the sparrows fought each other. Daanish would run in from the kitchen where she was giving him breakfast and if any other kinds of birds – parakeets, bayas or babblers – visited, father and son would talk at length.
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