Ahtzaz Hassan
I am mercy. I am eternal.
The old woman tears offa piece from a slice of organic wholemeal bread and tosses it at the growing mêlée of ducks, geese and swans gathering at the water’s edge. The old man sits in his wheelchair and watches them, eyes occasionally moving from the Battle of Brown Bread to the old woman and back again. He watches as she tears off another piece and casts it further into the largish lake.
He listens as she scolds various individuals for their selfishness:
‘Stop it, Donald! You’ve had plenty already. That was for Shah Jahan.’
‘Gandhi, how many times must I tell you? Stop bullying Sikander!’
‘Quickly, Jinnah! Before Bush puts trade embargo on your share!’
He watches from his wheelchair as she turns to him and starts to laugh at her own political witticisms, and a smile slowly forces itself across his face. The surreal concept: Disney’s children stealing from Mughal emperors; adherents of passive resistance bullying would-be conquerors of the world; founders of a nation advised to be wary of oppressive US presidents. He shakes in amusement.
She has her favourite, of course – Sajjaad, a boisterous young swan with a single brown feather in his tail – and although she may occasionally raise her voice to him, she never quite manages to tell him off.
I walk around and past them to the weathered wooden bench some twenty yards away, where I am to meet Azrael. I am late. He is a stickler for timekeeping and won’t be impressed.
As expected, he is already there. A quiet, constant presence. He sits bent forward, poring over a piece of paper, engrossed, his stick leaning against the bench by his left knee.
‘Sorry, I’m late. You know how it is.’
I take a seat to his left. He looks up and continues to read.
‘Y’know, I’ve decided I enjoy these times we get to work together.’
I lean back and look around as he continues to ponder over the paper.
On the other side of the lake, a young mother is lying on the grass with her six-month-old baby on her chest. She stretches her arms and pushes him into the clear blue sky as he dribbles his approval. A seagull flies over them, cuts across the lake and joins in the free-for-all bread give-away.
My companion lets out a sigh and leans back, staring straight ahead and focusing on nothing in particular. He looks up searchingly, as a plane passes overhead on its final approach to Heathrow. The vapour trail slowly fades. He looks back down at his knees.
‘What troubles you, Azrael?’
He looks at me and passes me the paper.
Scribbled in peacock-blue ink…
A bloodshot moon,
clammy nights.
Mindless wonderances,
under soulless skies.
Time unrepentant,
yet hopeful sighs.
But what of hope,
when all else are lies.
‘Fifteen years old,’ he says. ‘Only fifteen years old and no hope.’
I read it again and then one more time.
I lean back and watch the bird.
‘No time to fulfil dreams. No time to have dreams.’
I fold the paper and hand it back.
‘Suicide?’
He nods.
We sit in silence a while.
‘It is not our place to question. Or judge.’
He says nothing.
‘It is their fate, Azrael, their destiny. What is to be will be. But what they choose to do with their lives, that is their choice. It was all decided a long time ago. We cannot change what is written.’
He looks across the lake at the flying baby.
‘We must do what we must do – nature of the job.’
He keeps watching the baby and it appears to lighten his mood.
‘We are just the harbingers, we cannot be involved.’
The seagull dives down and catches the bread inches from a duck’s mouth.
‘How have you been?’
He shrugs.
‘Why so upset about this child, Azrael?’
‘I remember when he was born.’
‘Hmm.’
The memory rushes through me – car crash, pregnant woman, Caesarean section. The child’s time had started; his mother’s was over. She had not wanted to leave the baby, she had cried for mercy, but I was just passing through, we cannot be involved – not my place to question, or judge. Azrael had done what he had to do and we had left.
The old woman is running out of bread. We watch as she aims a large piece at a young swan, away from the reach of the others and low enough not to be intercepted mid-air.
‘Do you remember them?’
He nods.
We remember everything. We never forget. That is our burden and our fate.
She places the last piece in the old man’s Parkinson’s-afflicted hand and urges him to throw it at the eagerly awaiting swan. He jerks his body – the offering flies through the air, one bounce on the bank and ends up in the water. It is accepted graciously. The old woman cheers and kisses the old man on the cheek. The disease may be taking his body but not his will.
I smile.
I remember when their story started, some sixty-odd years ago, in the small village of Dhok Duswandi, near Jhelum in India, now Pakistan. He used to sit on a mud wall near her house every morning and wait for her to go to the madressa. He would smile at her as she passed, and then throw dirt and mud on to her clean, pure clothes. ‘Haramzada!’ she would scream, and chase him around the village. The villagers knew they would be together; it was their destiny, they said. Then one day he took to throwing flowers at her and soon was caught and summoned before the elders. ‘The boy has no shame. This type of behaviour has no place in Islam – either you marry her or stop this nonsense outright.’ He wanted to marry her, he had said, if she would have him. She would. The families agreed to this joining and so it was arranged.
The years had brought them closer, their lives intertwined by the dance of time, their lives apart a distant memory now. She would send him to work in his fields after morning prayers with a soft ‘Khuda hafiz – God be with you’, public shows of affection being frowned upon. She would take him freshly made pakoras and samosas for lunch and they would sit under the banyan tree, her banyan tree, he said, and they would eat together and he would make her laugh and laugh and laugh, and they would be grateful to God for what they were given.
She believed in him when he chose to join the army and fight for their freedom. She sent him away to war in some distant place with a soft ‘Khuda hafiz – God be with you’ and brushed her hand against his chest, and he promised he would write to her every day. She would wait for his letters and, when one came, she would race over to the headmistress and ask her to read it. He would write to her of where he was, what he did every day and his company, and how he wanted to come home but he must first make the world safe for their children – of which there would be many once he returned. He never told her of the trains carrying back the thousands of dead, nor of the fields soaked in blood, nor how he sometimes didn’t seem quite so sure whether freedom was actually worth the price being paid after all. Nor did he tell her that he doubted he would get back to her alive. He did tell her she was in his thoughts from his morning prayers until the night-time prayers, and thousands of miles away she would tell the headmistress the same.
He finally returned two years later, bringing with him numerous treasures: saris made of Japanese silk, bangles of gold, children’s clothes from Ing-laned. He was greeted with a quiet ‘Assalaam-u-alaikum’, and he could see she was crying.
They would have five children: two girls, a boy, a girl and another boy. There would be two miscarriages before the first child was born and she would blame herself and lock herself away from him for days, refusing to eat anything. He would finally talk his way in and the two would sit for hours in huddled silence. It is not your fault, he would whisper to her, it is our destiny, our kismet – what must be will be. I love you, he would tell her repeatedly, I love you.
When Nasim – a soft, cool breeze in paradise, the first child – was born, their joy was contagious and all-consuming. For days he would sing and dance and be thankful to God and buy sweets for the whole village, and she would watch proudly as he showed her off to the world. She went with him when he took the baby to his father’s grave and gave thanks.
He would be strict with his children and later his grandchildren, to teach them discipline, he said, but she knew. And so they knew. They would sit awake at night, watching their children sleep, and realize their place in life – it is only when you have found something worth dying for that you truly find something worth living for, he told her. He would promise her that he would protect them from the world until he could no longer breathe, and she knew he meant it.
It would turn out that he could not keep them all safe for ever.
The youngest son, Sajjaad, would be diagnosed with cancer of the gall bladder at the age of twenty-seven, four months before his wedding, and he would refuse to marry until he was fully cured. His fiancée would ask him why, but he would become annoyed and want to be left alone. But she would understand, and love him even more for it. He would never be cured. He would repeatedly beg forgiveness from his father, his brother and his sisters and he would ask his mother to hold him and rock him to sleep every night. She alone would know how scared he was. One night he would pass away quietly in his sleep, in a manner most unlike him. His brother would make the arrangements for the funeral and as people came to grieve and offer their condolences, his father would suddenly become an old man. He would sit quietly and listen to them recount stories of how boisterous and gregarious his son had been, how full of life. Too much life. While some aunties could be heard wailing from the other rooms, he would maintain a dignified silence and people would wonder why he never cried. But during the nights, when everybody had left and all was quiet, his wife could be seen holding him, and he would weep silent tears on her shoulder. I’m sorry, he would say repeatedly, and she would tell him ssshh and that she loved him.
It would take him a while, but with her help, he would eventually find his God again, and he would be thankful for what he had been given and he would finally be at peace. Even when he became ill and knew he wasn’t going to get better.
He would be distressed upon discovering he had Parkinson’s, but he would worry more about how it would affect her and he wouldn’t tell her for six months, while she worried why he was upset with her. He wouldn’t tell her at all that there was also something else wrong; the doctors didn’t know what it was, but his liver was giving up, as were his kidneys. Slowly his body would desert him, until he could no longer move freely and only she could understand his new language. Only she could see the pain he had to endure each day, every day. Always the pain. But he would not want to part with her, and as each moment of life became harder and more expensive, he would cherish it even more. He would still try to make her laugh and laugh, and through the coughing fits he would still succeed, and she would become a young girl again, sitting under her banyan tree. But always the pain. She would pray for it to be taken away.
‘Is it time yet?’
Azrael nods.
We rise and walk across.
She is standing a few yards away from him, looking out on to the lake, unaware of our presence, but he can see us. I look into his eyes and he understands.
‘Ma?’
They always see their mother.
‘It is time, Fazal-e-Rahmet.’
I take his face in my hands, gently kiss his forehead and take the pain away.
He turns his head towards his wife and says her name, ‘Bibi’. She turns and smiles, and in that instant, standing with the sun behind her, he sees the eighteen-year-old farmer’s wife who began his journey with him, as beautiful now as she was then, and he smiles back.
He turns to Azrael and nods. And Death does his job.
A tear rolls down his cheek, two tears.
‘He was one of the good ones,’ he says in her direction, as she continues feeding the swans.
We turn and walk away, and leave no footprints in the sand.