Translated from the Urdu by Muhammad Umar Memon
I am a refugee from the world.
—CHATEAUBRIAND
AN EVENT OCCURRED thirty years ago and brutally took hold of Aftab’s life. This is the story of that event. Events don’t occur in a void, but are related to the great unknowns that flank them on either side. Human life, too, is a continuum. For although we can measure an individual life within a definite time span, we cannot separate it from the flow of time. And just as man’s greatest asset is the duration that is his life, so the essence of a story is the event on which it is based. This story, too, derives its meaning from just two days in Aftab’s life. That some thirty years separate those two days is quite another matter.
20 June 1940
It was well past the noon hour but the heat hadn’t let up at all. The sky, a crisp bright blue in another season, was a blazing sheet of silver now. One couldn’t even look up. Shaikh Umar Daraz and his son had just performed the midday prayer in the mosque and got up from the prayer mat. On one side along the wall his boots lay on their sides, soles nestled against each other, with his khaki sun hat thrown over them. Shaikh Umar Daraz bent down, picked up his possessions, and started out. His son walked to the outer courtyard, where he had left his sandals, sat down at the edge, and began slipping them on.
Before leaving the mosque, Shaikh Umar Daraz wet his large square handkerchief under the tap, wrung it out thoroughly, and threw it over his head. Over the handkerchief he fixed his sun hat rather carefully. The white kerchief was about the size of a small towel and conveniently came down over the nape of his neck and ears, though on the forehead it sort of flapped an inch or so about the eyes. If you looked at it casually, you might even have thought the hat had a fringe stuck to it.
Shaikh Umar Daraz’s skin was a healthy pink. His face reminded one of those sepia photographs in which British colonial officers sporting knickerbockers or breeches, their heads covered with handkerchiefs and hats in a similar fashion, were photographed against a background of tropical jungles or sun-scorched deserts. Even the expression on his face was the same—as if he didn’t belong to his immediate world and lived comfortably away from it, like those colonial officers.
Of the travels of his youth just these two mementos remained with Shaikh Umar Daraz: the fringed sun hat, and that faraway look in his eyes. Below his face he was just an ordinary man: clad in a white shalwar-qamis suit and a pair of boots. Occasionally during winters, though, he would slip on the pair of khaki breeches and full boots. But then, instead of mounting a horse, he would hop on his bicycle and ride to work, or, if it were evening, stroll down to his grain fields, ostensibly to inspect them, all the way twirling his walking stick with a flourish.
As father and son stepped out of the mosque compound, a gust of hot wind slapped their faces. “Aftab,” Shaikh Umar Daraz said, “you go on home. I’m going out to the fields. I’ll be along soon.”
“Now?” The boy was surprised.
“Yes. I have something to take care of.”
“I’ll come along.”
“No. You go home. The wind is awfully hot.”
“I’ll fetch a towel,” the boy insisted. “Please let me come along.”
Shaikh Umar Daraz looked around uncertainly for a moment, then decided it was all right for the boy to come along. “But make sure you wet the towel well,” he shouted at the boy, who in the meantime had sprinted off to the house.
Minutes later the boy returned, his head and face covered with a wet towel. The two started off. The dry, white walls in the alleys shimmered in the sun. The hot wind would gust in, hit the walls, and bounce back like a ball of fire. The pair quickened their pace and soon came out of the complex of alleyways. A single thought occupied their minds: To get out of the city as fast as they could and hit the blacktop highway where you at least had some large shady trees. Within about ten minutes, they had walked to the city’s edge.
A hot, shimmering desolation enveloped the city. Although it was a district headquarters, the city was marked by a simple peasant ambience. Only the presence of a bazaar, a hospital, the Friday congregational mosque, a district court, a cinema, a horse-show ground, an assembly place, an intermediate college, and two high schools set it apart from a qasba—a town. A twenty-minute walk in any direction from the center of the town and one would be out of the city limits and in a countryside of open spaces and farmland.
Coming to Grand Trunk Road, the father and son felt a bit relieved. Tahli and shading trees, bordering the highway provided a welcome refuge from the heat and glare. Their dense shade somehow filtered out the heat from the scorching summer wind. They had barely walked a few paces down the highway when a tonga* came up from behind and stopped beside them. “Come, Shaikh Ji, hop in,” the driver said, slapping the front seat to wipe it clean of dust. “You’re headed to your fields, I guess?”
“Yes, Qurban,” Shaikh Umar Daraz said. “But you go on. It isn’t much of a walk…really.”
“All the same, hop in. The carriage is all yours.” Qurban climbed down from the tonga and respectfully stood beside it.
There were two other passengers in the tonga already: a peasant, settled in the front seat, and his wife, all bundled up in a white flowing sheet, behind him. Shaikh Umar Daraz climbed up and occupied part of the front seat, and a happy Aftab jumped into the rear next to the woman. The woman flinched, squirmed to the corner of the seat, leaving some empty space between the boy and herself. Qurban, balancing himself with one foot on the footrest and the other planted firmly on the floor of the cab, urged the animal to move again.
“Shaikh Ji is our provider,” Qurban said, seemingly to the peasant. “We live by his kindness.”
Here and there the sun had burned holes into the highway and a thick, molten tar oozed from them. Every now and then the wheels of the tonga would land in one of these potholes, come out laced with the tar, and leave a long, tacky black trail behind them.
“Shaikh Ji works as head clerk to the deputy sahib,” Qurban proudly enlightened the peasant.
Duly impressed, the peasant looked at the strange man sitting next to him, gathered his sarong respectfully, and shrank to the corner of the seat.
“It’s a scorcher, Shaikh Ji,” Qurban continued. “The poor animal, it can’t speak, but it feels the heat all right. He’s dearer to me than my own children. But what can I do, I have to fill my stomach somehow.”
Shaikh Umar Daraz nodded and said, “That’s true, Qurban.”
About a quarter of a mile down the highway, Qurban stopped the carriage. Shaikh Umar Daraz and his boy got down. From this point, the way to their cropland was mostly narrow dirt trails snaking through the fields.
The older man patted the horse’s back and said, “You’ve got a fine animal, Qurban.” He kept looking at the gorgeous animal, while caressing its body.
“If I’d my way, Shaikh Ji, I would never let him off my front steps,” Qurban proudly said, “but I have to fill my stomach somehow.”
Qurban raised his hand to his forehead to say goodbye and made a clucking sound to urge the animal on.
“Father, do you own this tonga?” Aftab asked.
Shaikh Umar Daraz laughed. “Qurban was just being nice. You see, I had him released from police custody the other day.”
“Had he beaten someone up?”
“No. He was talking to his horse…the idiot!”
“Talking to his horse?”
“Yes. He was telling the horse to go on undaunted just as Hitler did.”
Shaikh Umar Daraz laughed again.
“And the cops got him for that?…Just that?”
“Yes. You see, the war is on. And Hitler is our enemy.”
“Father, do you think we will win the war?”
“Who knows? Things don’t look good.”
They would stop briefly under an acacia or an ancient peepul along the trail to shield themselves against the relentless sun and then they would start on again. The last wheat had almost all been gathered and the parched fields, scarred and crusted by the sun, rolled out to infinity. The gusts of scorching wind would blow away the few remaining dried wheat stalks lying randomly in the stark fields. The monotony of the sun-drenched white landscape was broken only by the solitary green of an occasional hayfield, which also served as a reminder that the area was not a wasteland after all. The farmers had now begun to gaze at the sky in the hope of rain clouds.
On summer afternoons, Aftab found two sounds very comforting: the screeching of a kite flying high in the sky and the soft, sonorous cooing of a mourning dove. The latter invariably made him want to withdraw to a quiet corner and listen to it uninterruptedly. For the dove’s music was permeated with the dead stillness of the lazy summer afternoons and soothed him in the gentlest of ways. On the other hand, the screech of the high-soaring kite always filled his youthful imagination with distant thoughts.
“Father,” the boy said, “why do you finish the du’a* so quickly?”
“Do I? Whatever do you mean?”
“You barely raise and join your hands and run them quickly over your face.”
“That’s already long enough.”
“What do you ask God for in so short a time?”
“Forgiveness.”
“For what?”
“Sins.”
“You commit sins?”
“Oh, come on now. I don’t on purpose, but sometimes maybe I do without wanting to. Just happens….”
“And you don’t know about it?”
“Sometimes I don’t, but sometimes I do.”
“How can that be?”
“Oh, well, man is a fallible being.”
“Does Mother also commit sins?”
“Maybe. But surely less frequently than I do.”
“When she prays, she prays for a long time.”
“That’s her habit.”
“Is it a good habit to pray?”
After a prolonged silence, Shaikh Umar Daraz said in a feeble voice, “Perhaps.”
The boy continued, “You only pray for forgiveness?”
“Yes.”
“And Mother, what does she ask God for?”
“That, you must ask her,” Shaikh Umar Daraz looked at his son and smiled. “Young man, you do like to badger me with questions. You’ll make a good lawyer when you grow up.”
That made the boy’s thoughts take off on a different tangent: What would he want to be when he grew up?
“Father, you had run off to Bombay—is that right?”
“When?” Shaikh Umar Daraz flinched and looked at his son.
“When you were young,” the boy looked up at his father triumphantly. “Mother told me about it.”
A smile quivered on the older man’s lips. “Yes,” he said, “I did.”
“You were very young then?” Aftab asked.
“I was a young adult then.”
“How old is a young adult?”
“About twenty, twenty-two years.”
“And just a plain young man?”
“I’d say about eighteen, maybe twenty.”
“So is a twenty-year-old a young adult or just a young man?”
“Damn it, you’ll surely become a lawyer,” Shaikh Umar Daraz said as he smiled again.
“You had run off to become a movie actor?”
Suddenly, for the first time, the older man’s color changed. It was as if his son had pierced the thin, invisible membrane on the other side of which he lived in his world of terrible solitude. But this was not a color of worry; if anything, it betrayed a distant emotion that had surprised him with its sudden, inexorable closeness.
The boy, finding no answer, lifted his face to his father, but the shimmering sun flooded his eyes.
“Mother told me,” the boy said, “that you’d gone off to become a movie star.”
“That’s true.”
“So did you?”
“Well, yes. I did work in a movie.”
“Did it show in our hometown?”
“Oh, well, in those days only a couple of big cities had movie theaters.”
“What did you play?”
“A soldier.”
“Like a police constable?”
“No. An army soldier.”
“So, did you fight in a war?”
“A big one. Between the British and the Muslims.”
“Where?”
“Up in the hills…in the deserts….”
“Are there hills in a desert?”
“In some, yes. This sort of terrain is ideal for battles. I had a white stallion.”
Suddenly the boy had the feeling that his father was not just answering his questions but also taking a lively interest in the conversation that he had deftly veered toward things closer to his heart. And that made the boy very happy. This strange, wordless communication dispensed with even the need to know on whose side the father had fought. The boy knew, as certainly as his own being, that his father had opted for the role of the British cavalryman.
Finally, the boy asked, “Who won?”
“We did, of course. But, the Muslims, too, put up a good fight. It was a fascinating script. The movie cost hundreds of thousands of rupees. That’s like millions today. Our costumes came straight from England. A hundred and twenty horses were bought. They were later sold back, though. But those were gorgeous animals. Each had its separate groom. The white charger I was given was a real thoroughbred. I never saw a nobler animal. The first time I ever rode him, he bore me with such spontaneity and ease, as though we had known each other for a lifetime. I had him for a whole month. For the whole of that month nobody else ever dared touch him. For a full thirty days….” Shaikh Umar Daraz suddenly stopped, as if savoring a fond memory. “For a full thirty days I alone owned that animal.”
Aftab’s mind had stopped straying. He had been imagining the whole scene. “Did they use rifles in the battle?” Aftab asked with visible impatience.
“Yes. We started out with guns. Then when the armies began to fight hand-to-hand we threw away our rifles and drew our swords.”
The boy didn’t realize that sometime during the conversation both he and his father had stopped walking. With the montage of desert scenes, of hilly tracks, of the fierce battle between the British cavalry and the brave Muslims running, inexorably, through his mind, Aftab involuntarily raised the branch in his hand and wielded it a couple of times in the air like an accomplished swordsman. Shaikh Umar Daraz stretched his hand and took the shisham branch from Aftab’s hand. The boy lifted his head and looked straight into his father’s eyes, even though the shimmering sky still dazzled him. Before him was the same bright face with its sharp, sculptured features, but flushed with the heat of some uncontrollable inner excitement. It was as if the thin shisham branch had changed, the moment it came into the older man’s hand, into a sharp-edged sword, its point having pierced the membrane separating the two.
Shaikh Umar Daraz was standing next to a dead, stunted, leafless acacia. A few round, dried-out limbs poked randomly into the air.
“Imagine it to be a horse.” Shaikh Umar Daraz suddenly leapt into the air and landed precisely on one of the limbs, mounting it as if it were some charger. He raised his left hand in the air to take hold of the imaginary reins, and with the other started whirling the “sword” all around him with dazzling agility, his eyes shining with awesome brilliance. He seemed to be in the thick of battle, cutting down enemy soldiers by the dozen “And now my horse is wounded…it falls,” he shouted as he quickly dismounted, but the frenzied movement of his arms continued unabated.
That was a most bizarre scene. In the dead stillness of a sun-swept afternoon, in the middle of a parched field, a man wearing a fringed sun hat, his arms and legs outstretched, was brandishing a thin shisham branch with painful concentration, kicking up storms of blinding dust. A couple of fields away, a few village brats, driving their buffalo home, momentarily stopped to watch this comic sight. But for the little boy, who stood close to the sword-swishing man, the scene was all too sublime; it certainly wasn’t ridiculous. Oblivious to himself, and with total absorption and wonderment, the boy watched his father, who, standing beside his dying horse, attacked the enemy soldiers to the right and left of him, behind and in front of him, making short work of them with his shining sword. His eyes glowed with animal fierceness and his body moved with uncommon alacrity, as the sword swished and struck the air.
The towel had rolled down Aftab’s head and was dangling from one shoulder. In that instant the boy was impervious to everything: to the incandescent, blinding glare, to the scorching heat. Pure human emotion and animal passion had come together in that instant—an instant in which every boy comes to recognize, unmistakably, his father in the man before him, regardless of whether the two are joined by blood. What is important, what counts, is the man’s ability to capture fully the boy’s attention.
But those moments flew away as fast as they had come.
Shaikh Umar Daraz abruptly stopped thrashing his sword about, thrust the slim shisham switch back into his son’s hands, and laughed gently. He had broken into a fine sweat, and beads of perspiration rolled down his face. He picked up the sun hat that had fallen on the ground with one hand and with the other dried his face with the handkerchief. Then he carefully spread the kerchief back over his head, over which he fixed his hat, and started to walk on again. The shisham branch had turned back into a mere switch in Aftab’s hands. Its thinner, flayed end had broken off. Within those few short moments the boy had stolen a fleeting view of a wondrous, expansive world where the days didn’t burn, nor did the nights strangle. His heart was suddenly like a bird—soaring uninhibited into uncharted space.
In a corner of ten acres of irrigated land stood a well, shaded by tall, dense trees. Aftab had already counted all of those trees many times over. He knew trees didn’t grow so fast as to increase their number in a matter of days, but he still would count them each time he came to their cropland. There were eighteen dharaik trees, four big sharins, a single one of jaman, and two tahlis. So dense was their shade that the sun never managed to penetrate all the way down to the ground underneath.
Father and son sat down on a cot lying in the shade and each drank a cup of refreshing salted buttermilk. Then Aftab got up to go through his ritual. He would come to a tree, touch the trunk, count it, and then move on to the next one and repeat the routine. Generally he would thread his way through the grove, passing by the left of one tree and the right of the next one. This made his trail a winding, snakelike one, which pleased him very much. Sometimes he would turn around after he had come to the last tree and loop his way back to the first, but without breaking the count. Then when he had returned to the first tree, he would divide fifty by two. This made him feel that he had completed a round, that the count was what it should be, but more important, that the invisible circle he had drawn around the trees would somehow protect them and keep them green.
In the meantime the sharecropper had come out of the hut, holding a hookah in his hand, and sat down near the cot on the bare ground. He began to tell them about the crops.
Shaikh Umar Daraz’s face once again looked normal. He was lying on the cot, his head propped up on the pillow of his folded hands, gazing into the trees above. From his manner of responding, it was obvious that he was only half listening to the man. The sharecropper had become used to it. Unbothered, he went on talking to the older man.
That peaceful look of mild self-absorption on his father’s face generated a feeling of strength and fondness in the boy’s heart. It was as if a gentle secret had come to be lodged there. Kneeling on the ground and resting his elbows on the thick, low wall, he leaned over the well and peered deep into the cavity—way down to the mercury platter of water—to catch a reflection of his head. A few yellowed dharaik leaves floated on the surface. Soon the peculiar smell of the water—musty, cool, aged, but above all, permeated by a sense of a certain past time (his grandfather had built this well)—began to rise up to his nostrils. Nothing, absolutely nothing, ever smelled like that. The boy, as if to retrieve that certain, long-lost time from the bowels of the earth, emitted a medley of sounds, some shrill, some heavy and hoarse, and listened to the well return them only as a volley of deep and muffled echoes.
It was not an electric well: a pair of oxen pulled the rope that raised the water bucket to the ground level where it was emptied into the irrigation ditch. If he came at the irrigation time, Aftab would himself drive the oxen, until his head began to reel. This afternoon, all was quiet at the well and the oxen quietly grazed on the fodder in one corner in the shade. Aftab got up from the well and walked over to the oxen. The cool, comforting smell of the well, which recalled his grandfather’s image for him, still lingered in him. He also carried another presence within him, that of his old father, which now began to grow like a tiny drop of ink spreading out on a blotter. For the first time, the boy, barely ten years old, felt the passage of ancestral time through his being. And it filled his heart with a certain uncanny satisfaction.
The boy’s eyes fell on a puppy dog that had sneaked up on him from behind and was now standing at his feet. It was a pup the color of gold, and so tiny that it wobbled all over even as it stood. When the boy bent over to pick it up, it shrank back, yapping shrilly, and tumbled off to the wall and disappeared behind it. The boy followed the pup. Behind the wall he noticed the dog belonging to their sharecropper lying with her young in a hollow. The dog knew the boy. She cocked her ears once, and finding that her pup was safe, went on leisurely suckling her litter with her full teats sagging to one side. Only last week the boy had seen the dog with her ballooned stomach swaying from side to side, but it never occurred to him that she was about to give birth. He came to the hollow, squatted down at the edge, and stared enraptured at the pups. He could see only four pups: Three were black and white, busy attacking the dog’s full teats with their eyes closed shut, and the fourth, this gold-colored one, that had just returned from its adventures outside the hollow and looked more outgoing than the rest. It had abandoned the teats and was struggling to climb up the dog’s stomach. The sharecropper’s son, seeing the boy’s utter fascination, grabbed the gold-colored pup and stuffed it in the boy’s hands. The pup began to yelp. The dog raised her head and growled a bit, then quieted down. The boy, holding the pup against his chest, came to his father and asked, “May I take it home?”
With half-opened eyes, Shaikh Umar Daraz looked at the pup that was still making faint noises and said, “He’s so tiny. He needs his mother’s milk. Wait till he’s grown a bit.”
The boy, still holding the puppy, returned to the hollow. Shaikh Umar Daraz dozed off for a while. His hands were still folded under his head. The sharecropper went on rambling between puffs of his hookah. The boy again sat back on his heels at the edge of the hollow and, supporting his chin on his hands with his elbows on his knees, returned to staring at the gold-colored pup in quiet ecstasy.
On the way back, many thoughts occurred to Aftab, among them to remind his father that the latter had skipped his afternoon prayer. But that was nothing new. Shaikh Umar Daraz offered his prayers only when the fancy struck him; at other times, he’d be content with just being by himself, happily self-absorbed. The strange thing, though, was that whenever he put off his ritual prayers, he never felt the slightest remorse. On the other hand, if Aftab’s mother ever forgot to pray at the prescribed time, she’d be so upset that just about everybody would know about the incident. Only much later, after he had grown up, did the boy come to know that the state of being at prayer was the state of being happily self-preoccupied.
The sun had begun its descent and the temperatures had dropped some. As they passed by the green hayfields, a gust of fresh cool air would sweep over them. Many times during the walk home, the thought occurred to Aftab to ask if that movie also had some pretty English memsahibs.* He couldn’t bring himself to, though. He was strangely aware that that incident, which only he knew about, had entered his heart surreptitiously, like a secret, and that he was never to let anyone in on it. If ever he broached it with anyone, the sense of a certain wholeness would be shattered forever. Many times he looked at his father to find his face still permeated by the same softness and serenity.
On their return trek through open spaces along shaded paths, it didn’t feel so uncomfortably hot, but the moment they entered the city, broiling heat and eddies of hot grit and stinging dust struck them with oppressive force. After the paralyzing midday heat, the city was returning to normal activity. People—freshly bathed, neatly combed, and clad in gauzy malmal kurtas†—had sauntered out of their houses and were now milling around in alleyways or crowding up storefronts. Circular Road was again busy with tonga traffic. An old, beat-up, rickety bus zoomed past them, kicking up clouds of dust and sending a few bicyclists in front scrambling off to the sides. Dust particles, fired by the day’s heat, cut into Aftab’s body. A water carrier was squirting water along the edge of the street.
Shaikh Umar Daraz bought Aftab an ice from a vendor and said gently, “Your mother doesn’t like dogs. She thinks dogs are unclean. Don’t tell her anything about the pup. I’ll talk to her about it myself.” Then after a pause, he added, “Let’s go visit Chaudhri Nazeer.”
They turned into an alley, abandoning the path leading home.
Chaudhri Nazeer, Shaikh Umar Daraz’s childhood friend, emerged from the house wearing only an undershirt and a white sheet wrapped around his lower body. Aftab always found the man a bit too intimidating: not only was he the vice-principal of one of the two local high schools, but he also had this habit of talking to children with an air of unnerving seriousness. With Shaikh Umar Daraz, though, he appeared altogether relaxed, even informal, and addressed him as Shaikh Ji, sometimes just as Umar. With him he wouldn’t mind even laughing heartily, slapping him on the hand every now and then with great informal joy.
Chaudhri Sahib led them into the small sitting rooms and later served them a sweet iced drink. A while later, he started to pull energetically on the cord of the hand-operated ceiling fan and talk somewhat secretively but in a loud voice, his bespectacled face thrust slightly forward. This feeling of closeness and informality was reserved only for Shaikh Umar Daraz. Only with Chaudhri Sahib did the boy find his otherwise reticent father talk a lot, be perfectly at ease, and sometimes even break into gales of laughter.
By now Aftab was quite beside himself with the heat. The cool drink brought rivers of sweat gushing out of his body. Suddenly he wanted to leave this horribly stuffy room, dash off home, peel the clothes off his scalding body, and throw himself under the steaming tap.
“Jot down the file number,” Shaikh Umar Daraz said to Chaudhri Sahib. “Who knows, I might forget it.”
The Chaudhri looked disbelievingly at Shaikh Umar Daraz, “Umar,” he said, “you have never forgotten anything in your whole life; how will you forget my file number?”
“All the same, write it down,” Shaikh Umar Daraz laughed gently. “It might just come in handy.”
The Chaudhri suddenly became silent and gave the other man’s face a deep, probing look. Shaikh Umar Daraz quickly turned his face around to look out through the open door. The Chaudhri extended his arm, put his hand over his friend’s and said in a concerned voice, “You’re all right, Umar, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine,” Shaikh Umar Daraz laughed. “I’m just fine.”
The heat was now stinging Aftab and he was beginning to lose patience with Chaudhri Sahib, who was needlessly prolonging the conversation, asking after his father’s health over and over again. Finally, when the two got up and started for home, Aftab’s heart began to pound fitfully, as if Chaudhri Nazeer’s silent fear had somehow crawled into the boy’s heart, where it was generating numerous other fears, large and small. Suddenly the boy felt he no longer wanted to go back home. Mother would be sitting on the wooden prayer platform, he imagined, and Bedi would be filling the earthen water jars under the spigot. But these thoughts failed to ease his heart. His mother’s voice kept hammering away at him. “Your father would have been a magistrate today,” she often said, “if only he hadn’t wasted his time in his youth.” Adding a little later, “He has a brilliant mind. He just doesn’t pay attention. We don’t even make a penny from the land; the sharecroppers eat up everything.”
His mother was a wonderful woman—forbearing and affable—and he loved her very much. Right now, though, the heat emitted by the closed alleyways was so oppressive that the boy was overwhelmed by the desire to get out of the steaming city once again with his father, walk down the shaded highway, then along the cool, comforting hayfields, till they returned to the well. Abruptly an irrepressible desire arose in the boy’s heart to shout and ask, “Father, why did you come back from Bombay?” But when he lifted his face, the stern look of his father completely unnerved him.
At home it was exactly as he had imagined: in the small, brick courtyard, his mother was sitting on the low, wooden prayer platform, fingering her beads in quiet absorption as her body swayed gently from side to side; and Bedi, done with sprinkling water over the bricks from which arose a soothing moist, warm aroma, was now filling the water pots at the spigot. Aftab went straight to his mother and sat down beside her on the platform. She patted him affectionately on the head and pressed him to her side. Shaikh Umar Daraz entered and greeted, “Assalamu alaikum!” It was an old habit. Every time he entered the house, he would say those words, even if no one were around. His wife threw a casual glance at him and greeted him with a slight nod of the head, still preoccupied with her beads. Shaikh Umar Daraz stood a while in the middle of the courtyard, looking around blankly, and then quietly repaired to the sitting room.
The moment he was gone, Aftab hurriedly peeled off all his clothes and made a dash for the spigot. The cold, crisp water streamed over his body and tickled it. The boy began to shiver and scream with delight. The girl laughed at his ecstatic squeals and worked the hand pump harder. A couple of minutes later, Aftab’s body stopped shivering. He wet his head under the spout, sucked into the streaming water to catch a few cold gulps and choked over them, then stuck his head under the stream and with his eyes closed began to enjoy the cool sensation of the refreshing water flowing over his body. The dark, uneasy feeling that had earlier gripped him at Chaudhri Sahib’s had now completely disappeared, and he was feeling nicely hungry. He knew that after he had dried and changed, his mother would get up from the platform and bake fresh chapatis and they would all eat a hearty meal right here in the courtyard. He was happy.
Daylight was fast ebbing away in the sitting room. Shaikh Umar Daraz, a creature of habit, would always leave the sitting-room door and windows open in the evening. Today, he didn’t though. In the stuffy closed room, he sat sunk in his rattan chair. Today, in fact, he hadn’t done anything according to his routine: he had neither taken off his sun hat and set it on the table, nor removed his boots nor even turned on the table fan in the corner. Fat drops of heat oozed out from under the hat’s fringe and flowed down over his forehead to the web of his thick, bushy eyebrows, where they hung poised. For some time he sat motionless and quiet, as if exhausted from his long daytime trek through the summer heat, then, as one suddenly remembers something, he removed the hat with both his hands and set it carefully down on the table. He dried the sweat off his skull and forehead with a handkerchief and then let it hang from the chair arm. Then, instead of bowing down to remove his boots, he got up from the chair, walked over to the door opening into the house, closed the door, and latched it noiselessly. He opened the wardrobe, took out his double-barreled shotgun, and stuffed a pair of cartridges in the chambers. He put the rifle butt on the ground and lowered his ear directly over the round, dark barrels, as if straining to catch some elusive sound. Then he extended his arm, stuck his fingers into the trigger, and pulled both triggers down forcefully.
20 June 1970
A little before noon a tallish man got down from the train at the railroad station, accompanied by a boy of about nine or ten. In facial features and gait, the boy bore a striking resemblance to the older man. They were father and son. The former, Aftab Umar, was a lawyer who practiced in Lahore. He had come to this city with a single purpose in mind.
The sun was spewing fire overhead and the gusting wind rose in blazing fireballs as it bounded off the scorched brick platform. To escape the sun, Aftab Umar snapped open his umbrella and quickened his pace along the platform, carefully keeping both himself and the boy in the shade of the umbrella. Coming to the long roofed porch of the platform, he stopped, threw his attaché case on the bench, yanked out a handkerchief from his pants pocket, and began drying his face and neck with it. Then he extended his arm to do the same for his son, who flinched, jerked his face away, quickly pulled out his own handkerchief, and used it instead to dry himself. Both unfolded their handkerchiefs, examined the lines left on them by sweat and dirt, and stuffed them back into their pockets. Aftab squinted in the glare at the platform.
“When I left here,” he said, “the station didn’t have this platform.”
“Didn’t the train stop here?”
“It did. But the platform wasn’t here.”
“Where did the train stop then?”
“On the bare ground.”
The boy, a bit confused, looked at the platform and asked, “So when was the platform built?”
“A few years ago.”
“You never saw it before?”
“No.”
Twenty years ago a single peepul tree stood outside the station building—everything else was the sun above and the raw earth below. Now the space directly opposite the terminal was paved and lined by tall shishams. Standing under their shade on the ground covered with pollen-packed, tiny white flowers were many tongas, too many to count. A half dozen private cars were parked in the small parking area reserved for automobiles. The cars, all except one, were being loaded, and people, those who had just disembarked from the train as well as those who had come to receive them, stood near them talking animatedly, laughing, fanning themselves with a magazine or newspaper. Next to the area for car parking was a stand for scooters and bicycles. All these developments had fundamentally altered the look of the railway station Aftab once knew.
All at once a number of drivers swarmed up to Aftab and the boy, each trying to offer his tonga for hire. Aftab looked intently at their faces but failed to recognize a single one. Finally he got into a tonga and said to the driver, “Take us to a good hotel.”
“Rivaz Hotel is the best. Very clean and quite close to the courthouse. Gulnaz isn’t bad, either, but it’s got a bad name. Respectable people stay away from it. Sire, you look as though you don’t live here—right?”
The street was still the same—broken and riddled with potholes—but many new shops had sprung up on either side. It was almost noon and, despite the hot wind that had started blowing, all you saw around you was a surging sea of heads. Automobiles, scooters, tongas, and bicycles crowded the street. Aftab took out his sunglasses, put them on, and stared at every passing face from behind the cool lenses. He strained to recognize a single familiar face, but in the twenty-minute ride found none and began to doubt whether he had spent the first twenty years of his life here. Twenty years ago, when he had left here, he had just finished his BA in the newly opened college. He knew hundreds of people. Where had they all run off to? he wondered. It seemed as though the entire population of the city of his time had been physically lifted and relocated elsewhere, making room for a population of strangers.
Aftab was familiar with the Rivaz Hotel. But it was not the old, smallish, bungalow-style building he expected to see; a box-shaped, off-white, four-story-tall monster with cement floral vines crawling along the windows greeted him instead.
A gust of moldy smell, characteristic of entombed places, struck Aftab’s nose as he opened the door to his third-floor room. He quickly flung the window open. The rooms had all been built disregarding the prevailing air currents. In this season of hellish heat, Aftab marveled at this architectural travesty. The hotel attendant, trailing behind them, had in the meantime checked out the light switch by flipping it on and off a few times and was now dutifully trying to get the ceiling fan to work. A couple of wires had perhaps come loose in the fan’s regulator, which was covered with fly specks.
“Would you like me to bring up the meal, sir?” the attendant asked.
“We’ll eat downstairs in the hall…after a while,” Aftab said. “Could you bring us some iced water for now?”
“Right away, sir.”
“I think I’ll take a bath,” Aftab said to his son as he took off his shirt.
“Daddy, let me take a bath first.”
“Tell you what. Let’s slip on our shorts and take a bath together.”
Aftab opened the attaché case and took out a towel, bar of soap, comb, talcum powder, two clean boxer shorts, a big and small one, and piled them all up on the bed. The room was furnished along modern lines. Two single beds with a side table wedged in between, all lay flush against the wall. The sheets were clean and crisp white. The bathroom boasted of a shower, but the pressure was too weak to pump the water high enough for the shower to work properly. Water flowed down in a faint stream from the showerhead and was collected below in a bucket with an enameled mug set close beside it. Aftab gazed wide-eyed at everything, hoping to find at least one familiar object. He stepped back into the room and sat down on the bed. His son stood in the middle of the room with only his boxer shorts on, cooling himself under the ceiling fan.
“Daddy, where was your house?”
“There—” Aftab pointed in a direction.
“Who lives in it now?”
“God knows. I sold it before I left.”
The attendant returned with a jug of iced water. It was an iron jug and its handle was riddled with reddish-gold welding marks. They had a glass each and stepped into the bathroom.
The marble-chip floor of the dining room was messy with dried-up gravy spots. Even though curtains had been lowered over the doors and windows, it didn’t help much against the attacks of pesky flies. They swarmed on tables, chairs, plates, on people’s arms and incessantly working jaws—just about everywhere. Gingerly, like an actor on his first appearance on an unfamiliar stage, Aftab entered the half-lit dining room. He had briefly hesitated at the door and looked cautiously around, as if startled—becoming aware, suddenly, of an awesome loneliness, crawling into the dead center of his heart.
“Daddy, aren’t you going to tell me the story? Remember you promised?” the boy reminded Aftab over the food.
“Not now.”
“When?”
“When we go out for a stroll.”
“At four o’clock?”
“Yes, about that time. After the sun’s gone down a bit.”
After they had returned from the dining room, the boy lay down on the bed and read his comic book for a while, then turned over and fell asleep. Aftab also tried to sleep, but couldn’t. He got up and walked over to the window. Opening out before him was a view of the city’s busiest square at the busiest time of the day. People were returning from work; young men and women from schools and colleges. There was a messy traffic jam. Seemingly, the passage of twenty years had left the square’s appearance intact. The same business were still around: three shoe shops, including Bata, a tailor’s shop, a dentist’s clinic, a stationery store, and the cigarette-and-paan* shop. The atmosphere in these stores hadn’t changed either, nor had the ambience of the streets where girls, crammed into tongas, most of them without their veils, were on their way home from school. Aftab had heard that an all-girls’ college had been opened here. This was his hometown. He had passed through this square countless times on his way to and from school, and then later as a college student. Hundreds of times in these very streets, he and his friend Mustafa had chased after the perky government-school girls who were always bundled up in their black burkas. A quarter of a mile down the street into the inner city was the house where he was born. Even today, if he climbed down the three flights of stairs of the hotel and took himself to the square, he could walk blindfolded to his house or, for that matter, in any direction, as though he had never left here. Between him and his city there were just these forty-five stairs.
All at once he was overwhelmed by just such a desire: to climb down the flight of stairs to the square, remove his sunglasses, look up old acquaintances among the milling crowd, shake hands with them, talk to them, and then push on to his house, or to Mustafa’s. Mustafa’s father might still be alive, he thought.
Aftab took off his sunglasses for a second. The glare stung his eyes. The traffic was thinning out in the square and the shops were closing one by one for the noon break. Within an hour the square will be deserted, he thought.
Nothing, absolutely nothing in the city, now belonged to him. He was nineteen years old when he had received his BA and landed a job in the Government Secretariat at Lahore. A year later, during his mother’s sudden and fatal illness, he had briefly returned to his hometown to dispose of everything, house and all, and permanently settled down in Lahore in a new house outside the city in the Model Town suburb. He was still living in that house. After getting a law degree, he had given up his old job and set up his own practice. Every year he would promise himself a visit to his hometown and childhood friends, some of whom dropped by now and then to visit him or to ask a favor. They had all been married and raised children. Mustafa had died in action in the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War and Aftab hadn’t even been able to go visit his survivors and console them, managing, instead, a letter of condolence. When Iqbal, another friend, fell seriously ill, he had him brought to Lahore and admitted to Mayo Hospital. But in the past twenty years he hadn’t once been able to travel these seventy miles to his hometown. How on earth could he now go and stand in the square? Standing in his hotel suite, the thought that he has now gone from this city for good hit Aftab with a chilling finality.
“Daddy—” his son’s groggy voice called at him.
Aftab turned around. “You’re up?”
“Imran’s daddy has bought a brand new chair.”
“Oh. What kind of chair?”
“A swivel chair.”
“Is that so?”
The thought of visiting his hometown had emerged so suddenly, so unexpectedly. Not even a whole day had passed. Faruq, his son, was playing with his friend Imran in their backyard. Aftab, too, had come out in the yard after his shower and was now seated comfortably in a chair studying a brief. Nasreen, his wife, was sitting in the chair opposite him, browsing through a magazine. Aftab removed his feet from his slippers and slowly put them on the ground, letting the cool grass tickle his soles. Once during his work he casually lifted his head and his eyes fell directly on his son. And the whole matter gelled in that single instant.
All his thoughts became ineluctably focused on that frozen instant of time. In that instant, much went swirling through his mind: It was 19 June today; tomorrow would be the 20th. Faruq, his son, was ten years old, while he himself was reaching his fortieth year. Exactly thirty years ago he was ten and his own father, forty. These uncanny resemblances, these striking harmonies became concentrated, inexorably, in the whirling instant, which swept over him like a magic spell. Aftab became oblivious to the brief of the case due to start the next day lying open in his lap, his wife sitting opposite him, everything. He felt as if that instant was whirling around a pivot that drew him irresistibly toward it. Slowly it dawned on him that the pivot was none other than his hometown.
Then and there, sitting immobile in the grip of that spell, Aftab decided that it was time he visited his hometown. He told his wife about his decision. She could understand his desire, but not why he should insist on dragging Faruq along in the miserable heat. But she didn’t fuss over it, thinking that, after all, his parents were buried there and that he had never once gone back.
Aftab sent for his assistant and gave him instructions about the court hearings scheduled for the next day, June 20th. He talked Faruq into accompanying him with a promise of showing him around his hometown and telling him a fascinating story once they got there.
That night he couldn’t sleep a wink. His thoughts remained fixed on that instant, where time seemed to have hit a dead end and halted. As the night progressed, the thought that that instant was steeped in a mystery became a conviction. That mystery had, in fact, kept a part of his mind paralyzed for thirty years. Perhaps the time had come to solve it!
“I tried it out myself,” Faruq said.
“Hmmm.”
“I mean the chair.”
“You did?” Aftab said absentmindedly. “You said it’s a swivel chair?”
“Yes. It goes round and round,” Faruq explained, tracing circles in the air with his hand. “Yes, Daddy, it does—round and round!”
“Hmmm.”
“What time is it?”
“Four o’clock.”
“Let’s go.” Faruq was impatient for the “fascinating” story his father had promised to tell.
“All right,” Aftab said, “let’s go.”
It was getting on toward late afternoon but the city still hadn’t fully snapped back into action; here and there, though, some tentative signs of life had begun to show: water was being sprinkled in places and shops were again opening, but it would be a while before the customers showed up. The only people who were there now were shopkeepers’ acquaintances and friends who regularly dropped in for an idle evening chat.
Carefully huddled under the shade of the umbrella, both Aftab and Faruq walked into the bazaar. Aftab stared at some faces and for the first time recognized a few, vaguely though, just as one does trees and dwellings. What he thought he recognized were the timeless, anonymous faces of shopkeepers whom he had seen all his life glued to their storefronts. Some had visibly aged, with a pronounced gray showing in their beards, while others looked strangely unaffected by time. None of them, however, paid any attention to Aftab. He walked through the bazaar unnoticed, hidden behind the anonymity of dark sunglasses and an umbrella. At the spot in the road where they had to take a turn toward Circular Road, Tunda—who sold spicy grilled shish kebabs—was just setting up. On the front of his box-shaped stall lay the flat, rectangular, open barbecue grill that he had filled with charcoal, but he hadn’t gotten it going yet. Instead, he was scrubbing the dozen or so skewers with a piece of dirty rag. An old, beat-up small fan was set beside the grill which he used to blow on the coals. Perhaps it was the same fan, Aftab imagined, that Tunda had used twenty years ago. Shortly smoke will billow out of the grill, he thought, carrying the appetizing aroma of roasting spiced meat, and bring otherwise perfectly satiated people scrambling out to Tunda’s stall. Already before the time for the sunset prayer, a crowd could be seen milling around his stall and wouldn’t begin to thin out until it was time for the night prayer. Then, as the cry of the muezzin arose from the neighborhood mosque, Tunda would wash the skewers in the large empty bowl in which he kept the spiced ground meat for the kebabs and carefully put them away. Then he would empty the grill in the gutter, where a few coals, still red hot under a layer of ashes, would expire, hissing loudly and sending up clouds of smoke; he would put the grill back into the stall, lock up the stall, and make for home. Although Tunda’s left hand was intact, his right had been amputated just below the elbow. In spite of the handicap, he did all his work alone. From the time Aftab was a mere child, he had always found Tunda perched on the platform of his stall, no bigger than a chicken coop, working away using the one hand with a deftness and speed that defied description. Tunda was famous throughout the city for his delicious kebabs.
Suppose he were to take off his sunglasses—Aftab toyed with the idea—and install himself in front of Tunda and accost him. Would he, Tunda, recognize him? Surely he would. Had he not, after all, from childhood right up to his late teens found himself twice a week standing in the crowd at Tunda’s stall waiting for his turn to buy a few sizzling-hot, crackling kebabs smeared with peppery-hot onion sauce, which Tunda would wrap for him in a piece of newspaper, before dashing home with his mouth watering?
Passing by the stall, Aftab turned his head to look behind. Tunda was still busy scouring the skewers.
By now the two had crossed the bazaar and reached Circular Road. The traffic was sparse, mostly tongas and bicycles; the irritating dust had not yet begun to rise. They walked on Circular Road for a while and then, instead of following the curve, walked straight up and got on the path connecting the city’s center with Grand Trunk Road. This barely half-mile-long stretch stood in Aftab’s memory as a dusty, unpaved path that looked deserted even in daytime. Not so now. It had been paved and an assortment of big and small factories had sprung up along both sides, with large and small bungalows wedged in between them. A completely new neighborhood! Pools of stinking water, covered with mosquitoes, had formed next to the factories and houses. Aftab hurriedly strode out of the area.
The moment they got on Grand Trunk Road, Aftab felt as though time had suddenly reversed itself and then stopped, preserving unchanged in its core a pristine vision of the world as he once knew it. And, today, still very much the child he once was, he had returned to play in that world.
The open fires, the land, were still the same: ancient and familiar. The same shisham trees lined the road and swayed in the wind and provided, with their shade, a refuge from the scalding winds.
Aftab snapped shut the umbrella, removed his sunglasses, and put them back into his pocket. The glare no longer hurt his eyes. Off the road, the landscape was dotted with the same old fields. Wheat had already been harvested and the parched fields looked mournfully sad in their stark nakedness, their surface riddled with dark rodent holes where freshly dug-up dirt was piled in tiny hills. Dry wheat chaff lay strewn all around the fields. These mouse holes, Aftab remembered, used to scare the daylights out of him because as a boy he had always thought they harbored vipers. Today he knew they were just mouse holes. He still couldn’t look at them without fear. He told his son to give them good clearance. Walking by a hayfield, he bent down a little, broke a long green leaf, and began to chew on it.
That dead, ancient tree was still there in the field. Aftab stood a few feet from it and gawked at it; he couldn’t believe his eyes. All along he had been thinking that when he got there, chances were the tree wouldn’t be there, and even if it were, he would have to look around quite a bit to find it (he was obsessed by the desire to return to it once again and narrate the whole story to Faruq right beside it), but as soon as he had crossed over the tall hedge of bushes, what do you know, the trees stood right in front of him, immobile as a statue. Aftab took a few slow steps to the tree, and then extended his hand gingerly to touch a twisted, black branch, as if afraid that the merest touch would send the whole tree crashing down. But the tree stood firm. And although every single fiber in that tree had been dead and dry for a long time, its stiffness, its mournful spread, and the tremendous force with which its roots gripped the earth had not changed at all. Even the line left behind by the stripped bark was in its place. It was as if the tree had become frozen in the moment of its death and become a permanent mark on the earth’s topography. The single thing that didn’t fit in Aftab’s memory of the tree was this new, awesome-looking shisham that had sprung up a few yards from it. After the incident thirty years ago, Aftab had stopped coming to their land. Later his mother had rented it out. And though he did come here once or twice as a young man, it was by chance; and then again he didn’t walk but bicycled down to it on the paved highway recently built by the District Board, the highway that passed by their well and went to Ahmad Pur Sharif.
Aftab lifted his head and looked into the dense shisham foliage above.
“Daddy, I’m tired,” Faruq said.
Aftab wiped his son’s sweaty face with his handkerchief and said, “We’re almost there.” He ran his fingers through Faruq’s hair. “There, you can almost see it.”
“Where?”
“That grove of trees…you see it?” Aftab pointed in a direction.
“Yes.”
“There’s a well under those trees,” he said. “Around the well are many fields. Well, that used to be our land.”
“But, Daddy, I’m really tired,” Faruq said, whimpering a little.
“It’s cool and shady down there,” Aftab said. “Come on, it isn’t all that far—really.”
“Unh-nh-nh!” the boy whined. “The sun’s killing me. I don’t want to go there.” He flopped down under the shisham.
Aftab looked ardently and let his eyes linger a while on the familiar dark, dense foliage of the grove a quarter of a mile down the trail and felt its comforting cool touch on his sunburnt cheeks. The touch seemed so familiar, so recent that he thought he had been in the grove only a fortnight ago, catching his breath a while in its shade. His throat was badly parched and a desperate longing arose in his heart to gulp down a bowlful of that refreshing salted buttermilk. Who might be living here now? he wondered, with a trace of confusion and anguish.
“Daddy, let’s go back home.”
That sensation of comforting shade suddenly vanished. Aftab walked over to his son and sat down beside him, leaning against the shisham trunk. Then he said, “Son, let’s rest a while here, and then we’ll go.”
“Daddy, when will you tell me the story?” the boy asked in an exasperated voice, tired of waiting.
Aftab lifted his eyes and looked far into the bright sun. Way down, the dead tree stood still in its stark nakedness, mutilated, terribly mangled—like a frightening nightmare. Aftab put his sunglasses back on and started to tell his son the story…that story.
In a soft and collected voice, he recounted the event that had occurred thirty years ago and paralyzed his life since. The entire incident was fresh in his memory, and yet he couldn’t begin relating it without a certain diffidence. He was having difficulty talking about it; he felt as if something was buried deep inside the earth and he had to actually dig and pry it out of there. For a while, he talked haltingly, as if trying to press disjointed events into a rational order but finding them too stubborn to connect. Later his voice grew more confident and coherent as randomness coalesced into order and each insipid detail became vibrant with life. His words formed into slithering links that closed in on him like a chain. He was now speaking with flow and smoothness, the words flying out of his mouth like birds following the track of sound that terminated in a frozen moment of time.
In that sun-soaked broiling afternoon, sitting under that intruding shisham, Aftab saw the dark, long tunnel of his life recede to reveal a tiny point of light at the other end. The speck of light gradually moved toward him and stopped in front of his eyes, causing everything and every moment to ripple over Aftab’s skin with a remarkable tactile sensation. It felt as though the past thirty years had suddenly become divested of all meaning—that not only time and life but even man’s own body had no significance at all before his inexorable memory—a memory that integrated one generation into the other and gave the world its sole meaning.
Aftab raised his head to look at his enraptured son and ran his fingers into his hair, as if transmitting through touch the end of the chain. He had hit the end of his story.
In relating the incident, Aftab had made one change: he never did reveal that the man with whom he had gone out on a stroll through the fields exactly thirty years ago, the man who had, on returning from the stroll, shot himself without uttering a word, was in fact his own father. He didn’t have the courage to let his son in on the secret; instead, he told him that the man was a neighbor of theirs.
The story told, both got up and started back. In spite of the blazing sun, Aftab neither popped open the umbrella nor put the sunglasses back over his eyes, but kept walking into the sun, impervious to its searing heat and blinding glare. A crushing load was suddenly off his heart and his body felt strangely unstrung and weightless—weightless, but strong. And although his mind was empty of thought, his body vibrated with the feeling that this city of his childhood was still very much his own. These fields, these trees, these streets now alive with traffic, tongas and automobiles that zoomed past kicking up clouds of dust, the bazaars full of popsicle vendors and sellers of fragrant motiya garlands, the alleyways where women sat on their house fronts or doorways fanning themselves as they chatted with their neighbors, mouths thrown open from the deep heat, the children who tumbled and rolled and capered about in the dust as they played unbothered by the heat, the houses from which rose the sound of metal bowls striking against earthen water jars, or the pungent aroma of frying or sautéed onion or garlic spreading everywhere around—all these places and sights and smells Aftab felt, through an unbroken continuous sensation, to be his own. He had left his hometown for good twenty years ago, but throughout that time and at no place—Lahore where he had settled down, the cities where he was obliged to spend some time on business, and those other places he had merely passed through—nowhere, absolutely nowhere had he experienced the state he was in now, the state in which one becomes oblivious even of one’s body. Although for thirty years his heart had remained numb, his body had shivered every instant with a nameless fear, as if somebody would sneak up on him from behind and grab him. Only now his body had stopped trembling and become light, every muscle so perfectly unstrung, relaxed and calm, that he was not even aware that he had a body. Only the heart was the seat of every sensation and knowledge. For the first time in his life, Aftab found out what exactly the two words “my hometown” meant, which he had so often heard people say.
Sitting across a table from each other in the small front garden of the hotel, Aftab and Faruq were sipping Coke from chilled bottles. Condensation formed into droplets in the smudge marks left by their fingerprints and trickled down, cutting crooked pathways into the frosted surface. It was getting on toward evening. Beyond the three-foot-high garden wall, a second wave of traffic had started to funnel down the street. The time for the last evening trains was approaching and the anxious tonga drivers were crying “Station! Anyone for the station?” People, freshly bathed, neatly combed, and wearing fine malmal shirts, had come out of their houses for their evening stroll. Faruq got up, walked over to the chair near the wall, sat down in it, leaned back, and, resting his feet on the wall, began reading his comic book. A little later, Aftab too got up, grabbed his Coke, walked over to his son, and slumped down in the chair next to him.
“So, did you like the story?” he asked.
Faruq inattentively mumbled something and went on reading the comic book in the fading daylight. A naked lightbulb burned in the hotel veranda, its light too far and too feeble to do him any good. After a while, Faruq got tired, stopped reading, looked up, and suddenly asked, “Daddy, are you going to write this story?”
Aftab thought for a while and then said, “I might.”
“Daddy, you could become the world’s greatest lawyer if you didn’t write stories.”
“Oh!” Aftab broke into laughter. “Whoever told you that?”
“Mummy.”
“Really? What does she say?”
“Just that if Daddy didn’t waste his time writing stories he could become the biggest lawyer.”
Aftab laughed again and became silent. After a while he said, “Faruq, shall I write this story? What do you say?”
Again the boy emitted a faint disinterested sound and began looking at the street. Aftab continued, “Tell me one thing.”
“What?”
“Why did the man kill himself?”
“I don’t know why.”
“Come on. Think about it,” Aftab insisted. “Only when you tell me that will I write the story.”
“Why?”
“Because I myself don’t understand why the man shot himself.”
The boy stared unbelievingly at his father, then turned around to look at the street, as if thinking. Both remained silent for a while. Aftab’s heart pounded violently. He shifted his weight on his elbows and lowered himself over the table. The same old fear his body knew so well began to return.
Suddenly Faruq turned around to look at Aftab. There was a strange glint in the boy’s eyes.
“Perhaps he loved horses,” the boy said.
The fog began to lift from in front of Aftab’s eyes and narrowed into a tiny bright dot of uncommon intensity. The dot slowly expanded into a large pool of light in the middle of which Aftab saw a shimmering white stallion galloping away. The sun poured over its body with such brilliance that the eyes skidded off and could not behold it. Every muscle in the horse’s taut body was so firm, so prominent as though it had been carved out of granite. A rider was firmly mounted on the horse’s back, confidently holding the reins. The rider was outfitted in the white uniform of a British soldier, with a sun hat stuck on his head. He held a bared sword pointing to the sky. With each gallop, the horse and the rider soared into space in such unison that it seemed they were a single body that would jump across the length of the earth in one gigantic bound. In the ebbing light, still leaning on his elbows, Aftab stared at this scintillating picture of perfect beauty and harmony, until the fog rose again and obscured his eyes. The scene disappeared as fast as it had appeared, but it left in its narrow wake the knowledge that that was the finest moment of his father’s life.
It was getting dark. The momentary brightness was gone. In the crowding darkness something quite new had emerged. It was as though that swift-footed bright moment had left its dark shadow behind. Something was found, but something was lost too; something was revealed, but something had also become forever hidden: “This city,” Aftab found himself thinking, “this city where my father had lived his whole life had finally lost its appeal to him. And here I am; I left it for good, only to return and be fully alive again. Anyway, what does it all mean?”
The confusion that had been gnawing at his heart had certainly been removed. Or perhaps it hadn’t been. If there was anything he knew with certainty, it was this: he belonged here….
It was night now. Streetlights had come on. Faruq, his legs still resting on the low wall, was again browsing through his comic book in the dim light of the electric pole in front.
“Daddy,” Faruq said suddenly, “I’ll go to America when I grow up.”
Startled, Aftab looked at his son. The boy’s eyes were sparkling. Aftab stared at him for the longest time, then, somewhat casually, said, “Is that so?”
“When I grow up I’ll become a doctor. And then I’ll go to America.”
In the comic book that lay open in the boy’s lap, a gigantic black man was crossing the street with his giant-size strides, while a string of cars funneled through his wide-apart legs. Faruq turned his face to look at the street again, his eyes still gleaming with an illicit, faraway look.
A little later Aftab got up from the chair and looked at his son, as if contemplating whether to say something, but then he said nothing. He left the boy in the garden and went into the hotel. In the hall he stopped and looked around for a few moments and then slowly began to climb the stairs.
A few minutes later, Faruq too decided to return. When he opened the door, it was dark inside. He jumped up and turned on the light. His father, still in his day clothes, his feet in socks and shoes, was lying stretched out on the bed. His arms were gently folded over his chest and his face was drenched in sweat. It was terribly hot and stuffy inside the room.
“Daddy, shall I turn on the fan?” Faruq asked.
Aftab remained immobile. Faruq walked over to him and called out gently, “Daddy!”
Aftab opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, as if trying to recognize it. “You may, if you like,” he said in a faint voice.
“Daddy, I’m hungry.”
Aftab got up. He went into the bathroom, washed his face with cold water, and dried it on a towel. Then, taking the boy along, he walked out of the room.
“Daddy, when will we go back home?”
“Early in the morning.”
The two began walking down the stairs to the dining hall.