Iqbal

by Francesco D'Adamo

  “Let’s go!” he cried.

  “Where?”

  “Let’s go out. We mustn’t be sad.”

  “Go out? Can we?

  “Of course we can. We’re free!”

  “What’ll we do?” we asked together.

  He smiled mysteriously.

  “Eshan Khan has given me a present. And I have a promise to keep with you.”

  The city outside was new to us, strange and noisy. We couldn’t stop staring. We climbed up the hill that dominates the city, until we reached a spot where there was only grass and stones and the midday sun. A kind of mist covered the city below us, but the spring air where we were was clear and clean and transparent.

  “Don’t look!” ordered Iqbal.

  We covered our eyes, but as soon as I realized that Maria was peeking, I did, too. I saw Iqbal take a package from under his shirt. He unrolled something white and colored on the grass. Then he began to run, yelling, “Now you can look!” The kite was already high in the sky, dancing with the wind. It flew higher and higher. For hours we passed it from hand to hand, until a sideswipe of the wind broke the string and we saw it disappear as it aimed toward the sun.

  We were sweating and breathless.

  “We’ll make another one,” we vowed.

  In the late afternoon, as we returned down the hill, Iqbal said, “I’ve decided. I’m going to stay with Eshan Khan, and both of you will, too.”

  Twelve

  That same evening, after dinner, Iqbal made a solemn declaration to the men and women who were meeting in the big downstairs room: “I want to stay and help you free all the children who are slaves in Pakistan.”

  Eshan Khan looked at him and smiled.

  “That’s not possible, Iqbal. You were very courageous when you rebelled and helped us rescue your companions, but you can’t stay here with us. You belong to your family. What would your father and mother say if we didn’t take you home to them?”

  “What good will it do me to go home, if after a year or even sooner I’m a slave again? Or Maria, or Fatima? Or the others? How many children are out there working the way we were?”

  “We don’t know for sure. There are hundreds of clandestine carpet factories just in Lahore, and in the countryside there are the brick-making kilns. Up toward the mountains there are the mines. And then there are the farm slaves … tens of thousands of children, hundreds of thousands, maybe …”

  “You want to free them,” said Iqbal. “And, so do I.”

  Maria and I watched, our mouths wide open, we were so impressed. Iqbal was talking like an adult.

  “Think it over, Eshan,” one of the men said. “The boy is clever and could be useful. You know how hard it is to get the magistrates to intervene. Iqbal could sneak in and talk to the children, who would trust him. He can find the proof we need. If it hadn’t been for him, we would never have been able to stop Hussain Khan.”

  Eshan Khan continued to shake his head.

  “No. He’d have to learn so many things….”

  “I’ll learn,” Iqbal promised. “I’ve already learned to read and write. Well … a little, anyway.”

  “It’s too dangerous. The carpet merchants and the kiln owners are very powerful. The moneylenders are influential. The police tend to protect them—you’ve already seen that. And the magistrates just look the other way. All of us here have been threatened and persecuted. No, we can’t allow it.”

  Iqbal stood up and drew himself to his tallest, which actually wasn’t very tall. He looked immensely tall to us, though, as if he could touch the ceiling.

  “I’m not afraid,” he said. “I’m not afraid of anybody.”

  They believed him.

  Iqbal went home to visit his family. Ten days later Eshan Khan brought him back, and he spent the rest of the day closed up in his room. Toward evening he came out and said, “My mother cried and my father was frightened for me, but now they understand my choice, and they approve. I’ve promised that I’ll go back as often as I can, especially for our holidays, but I want to stay here, Fatima. I want to study. I want to learn everything I can. I want to be a famous lawyer and free all the children in Pakistan.”

  “Good for you, Iqbal!” exclaimed Maria.

  I said the same, but my voice trembled.

  Iqbal did study. We all did. He also took part in the meetings of the Liberation Front, listening so carefully that his forehead would become wrinkled with the effort to understand.

  Iqbal read books, too, sitting up at night by the light of a candle, spelling out every single word. He learned how to use a camera, and whenever he could, he talked to Eshan Khan. They talked for hours and hours.

  They were made from the same mold, those two.

  Over time our companions returned to their homes. Mohammed left to go back to his mountains, and he stammered out his good-byes, trying to hide his feelings. Salman went home, too, and he said to Iqbal, “Brother, I really liked what we did to Hussain, and I’d like to stay and do my share, but my folks need me.”

  Our funny Twig left us, and little Alì crying his eyes out. The others went, too.

  Iqbal, Maria, and I remained, and Karim, who chose to do odd jobs around the house for his room and board.

  Less than a month after we had been rescued, Iqbal managed to sneak into a carpet factory that was hidden in a damp cellar in the northern outskirts of Lahore. He found thirty-two children covered with scabies and wounds, so thin their ribs almost cut through their skin. He spoke to them. He showed them the scars on his hands to win their trust, and he took photos of the chains, the looms, the water seeping in. The place was raided three days later by some men from the Liberation Front, accompanied by a magistrate and policemen, who arrested the proprietor and freed the children.

  All that night and throughout the next day Maria and I worked alongside Eshan Khan’s wife and the other women, carrying pots of hot water back and forth for baths and making beds for the new arrivals.

  Were they ever dirty! It was hard to believe that we were like that when we arrived.

  Iqbal continued to take his declaration seriously. Over the next few months, he helped close eleven more factories. Almost two hundred children were liberated. They all passed through Headquarters, which at times looked like an orphanage! They were cared for and then sent back to their families. All the children told the same story, “our” story. They came from isolated villages in the middle of the countryside; there was a bad harvest or an illness, and the families had to ask for loans from the moneylenders. Then the families had to bond their children to pay back the debt.

  Iqbal wanted to do more.

  “We have to hit the moneylenders,” Iqbal said. “They’re to blame for everything.”

  By now he had taken his place in the meetings of the adults, speaking up with authority. He was tireless. The minute he finished one mission, he began another.

  “We have to send them all to prison, every single one!” he would say.

  Maria and I were uncomfortable when he was out scoping illegal factories. We worried and waited anxiously for his return.

  One night he didn’t come home and we were afraid something had happened to him. He returned the next morning with a black eye and a cut on his cheek.

  “I found another workshop,” he said, “but they caught me. They smashed the camera, too. Let’s just wait a few days, then I’ll go back.”

  Eshan Khan was proud of him and treated him like a son. And Maria and I were treated like daughters. We had everything we needed, but still I fretted sometimes. Iqbal’s and my paths were going in different directions, and I felt that soon we would have to separate. I was also occupied by thoughts of my family. Sooner or later my relatives would be found. What would I do then?

  But there were problems much more important than mine. Eshan Khan was worried. “We have to be careful,” he said, “because they, the moneylenders and the people who get rich by exploiting children, won’t give in so easily. The more children we
liberate, the more exploiters we accuse, the more they will try to silence us. That’s what they’re afraid of … our voice. They get rich and fatten where there’s silence and ignorance.”

  One evening I overheard Eshan Khan talking softly to his wife.

  “It’s Iqbal who worries me. By now they know him. They know that it’s thanks to him that we can find them. He’s so enthusiastic, but he’s rash. We’ll have to be more cautious.”

  Soon there were two men on guard in the big downstairs room.

  One night something woke us. We heard strange noises, then gunshots. Then there were shouts and the sound of running feet.

  “What’s happening?” we asked.

  No one answered.

  Out in the street some people shook their fists at us, and there were tough-looking men on the sidewalk in front of Headquarters. They would stand there for hours, watching us go in and out.

  When I thought about Eshan Khan’s they, I thought of Hussain Khan, but I also realized they had to be something even bigger and much worse.

  Then came the episode in the market to reinforce my fears.

  Even in a city as big and modern as Lahore, the outdoor market is the true center of life and activity. Sooner or later during the day everybody passes through, perhaps to shop and meet friends, perhaps simply to look at people. Periodically the activists of the Liberation Front would go to the market, where they would build a little platform to speak from. Over the platform they hung a banner that said NO MORE CHILD LABOR, and there were signs with slogans against bonded labor and slavery. The volunteers distributed handouts exactly like the one Iqbal had brought back to us at Hussain Khan’s. The men gave short speeches, using a big trumpet-thing they called a megaphone.

  A little crowd always gathered. The merchants, especially the richest ones, ridiculed and insulted the speakers. They even threw things at them. The majority of the audience listened passively. Only a few had enough nerve to show timid approval. These were usually farmers or laborers, usually people who understood what it meant to lose a child in that way. At least, that’s what Iqbal told us, for Maria and I weren’t allowed to go. They said it was too dangerous.

  That day Iqbal spoke, too. He stood balanced precariously on a fruit crate, holding the heavy megaphone. Despite his shyness and embarrassment, despite the shouting, the whistling, and the racket of the onlookers, he managed to talk about his experience. He spoke about Hussain Khan and the carpet factory, about children chained to their looms. Then he named names. He shouted all the names he had heard during the meetings at Headquarters, the names of the great moneylenders, the names of rich, important, mysterious men who lived in luxury in the center of town, who traveled, who had business all over the world: Eshan Khan’s they.

  He called them flesh merchants, exploiters, vultures.

  A riot broke out in the square. A small group tried to attack the platform, pushing, slapping. The police had to intervene, not very willingly.

  They weren’t in the square, of course. They don’t go to the open-air market, but evidently they have lots of supporters.

  The next morning, Eshan Khan came in with a pile of newspapers under his arm. There were articles in all of Lahore’s papers, and also in a Karachi paper. Two of them even had printed photos of Iqbal, standing on the platform with that funny trumpet-thing in front of his mouth.

  One of the papers called him “the courageous child who had denounced his oppressors” and another talked about the “shameful exploitation of a child’s innocence.”

  “This is a good thing, isn’t it. Father?” he asked Eshan Khan. “You said that they keep getting stronger thanks to ignorance and silence. Well, this isn’t silence.”

  “Yes, Iqbal,” Eshan Khan said, “this is good for our cause.”

  But he didn’t seem convinced. He looked worried.

  I remember that period so well. Iqbal was happy, enthusiastic about everything, hungry and thirsty for anything new.

  We were beginning to get used to our new life, to freedom. We could go out whenever we wanted … well, almost. Eshan Khan’s wife kept a close eye on us. Once she gave us some money and we went to the movies. It was just like Karim said. We saw an Indian film that lasted four hours and I cried the whole time. Iqbal was nasty and wouldn’t go see it a second time. We discovered television. We listened to strange music that came from far away—from America, they said.

  Iqbal was full of plans for the future. He talked about them to Maria and me. He wasn’t afraid of all the new things. I was, at least a little. Everything was happening so fast, or maybe I was afraid the happy dream would end, too fast.

  One day a foreign person in strange clothes came to Headquarters. He said he was an American reporter. He interviewed Iqbal and Eshan Khan for two hours. A few days later an international correspondent came.

  “When people abroad know about our cause, they’ll help us and we’ll be safer,” said Eshan Khan.

  One night we were awakened by a loud explosion. We could hear screams and see flames rising up to the windows on the second floor. We tried to go downstairs but Eshan Khan stopped us.

  “You stay here!” he roared.

  Someone had thrown two incendiary bombs against Headquarters. A man was injured and had to go to the hospital. They had sent a warning.

  Thirteen

  One day in the fall, the Liberation Front heard about an illegal brick factory and went to investigate. Iqbal went with them, and told us about it the next day.

  “We traveled for more than an hour in the dark. The night was cold, so we took cover under the tarp in the back of the pickup truck. We must have looked like little babies under a blanket.”

  “I wish I had seen you!”

  “I felt like laughing, but something stopped me. Everybody felt strained. They were very serious and nervous. Nobody was about to laugh. Eshan Khan had warned us before we left. You both heard him. ‘Be careful! Be careful! This time it’ll be much more difficult than usual.’ In fact, we had never done anything like it before. After awhile we turned off the main road onto a dirt track full of potholes. I haven’t the slightest idea where we were. There was only darkness, silence, and that freezing wind that bit at our noses.

  “We came in sight of the kiln just before dawn. There was a large level clearing, all stones and mud. There wasn’t a tree to be seen, not even a blade of grass. The kiln was ugly; in the early light it looked like a hill of bricks with a tall thick chimney. People were already working, because they can produce the most bricks in the early hours. Later on the sun and the heat and the fatigue take all the strength from their arms. When we arrived nobody even paused to look up at us. You should have seen them. They were scattered throughout the clearing, almost like ghosts. Each family has its own hole, where the boys use a little hoe to dig because the clay is hard. They mix the clay with water to make little round loaves of mud. The girls fetch water from the well, which is almost a kilometer away. They go back and forth carrying big plastic twenty-liter jugs. The boys throw the clay loaves to their mothers, who knead them like bread and then throw them to the fathers. They put each one into a wooden mold, scrape away the excess, and then overturn it onto the ground, where it will dry in the sun. The bricks are in long rows that cross the clearing. The rows get longer every minute, like the tail of a snake.”

  “So whole families work there.”

  “They have to. They get paid by the piece. They have to make twelve hundred bricks to earn a hundred rupees.”

  “A hundred rupees! That’s a lot of money.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. But listen. We got out of the trucks and approached a family, and Eshan Khan told them who we were and what we were there for. The man didn’t even lift his head. He was crouched on the ground, and every thirty seconds he turned out a brick. He was dirty. His hair and beard were full of clay. Eshan Khan insisted. The man never looked up or stopped working. He just murmured. ‘For the love of God, brother, get out of here.’ I swear it m
ade me want to cry. It’s always terrible to see a little child working in inhuman conditions. We know what it’s like. But this was worse. Because this time it was a man. A grown-up. A father. And … and … I don’t know …”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t seem like a man anymore. He didn’t have anything anymore. Like all of them. There they were, in the early morning light, crawling along their rows of bricks. Now I know why Salman refused to talk about work in the brick factory.

  “I moved away from the others and got closer to the hole and I spoke to the children, but at first they didn’t want to answer me, like their father. Then the eldest, about my age, started to talk, all the time digging with his hoe and pouring on water. He was covered with mud from his head to his heels.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That there were six of them in the family, and that on lucky days they even managed to make fifteen hundred bricks. If the clay wasn’t too hard. If there was water in the well. If only a few bricks broke in the heat of the sun, because broken bricks don’t count. That on some days they earned a hundred twenty rupees, but that wasn’t enough.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they had to pay rent for the hut they lived in. The boy explained this to me. He pointed to a low, narrow building next to the kiln, and told me that each family has a hut, three meters by three, with a small cooking stove, some cots, and a window without glass. They have to pay the master for everything. They have to pay for the coal they burn and the food they eat. Everything costs a lot. Once they’ve bought grain for bread and some lentils and onions, a small bottle of oil and some vegetables, nothing is left of their day’s earnings. The family had an enormous debt, but they weren’t able to pay back a single rupee. The boy told me that he’ll inherit the debt from his father, and his children will inherit it from him. Then he said, ‘Go away. The munshi—the director—will arrive in a few minutes, and he doesn’t like to see people here.’”