Grieving for Pigeons, page 10
All eyes now gathered together in his eyes. Time passed and evening descended. Because of the day’s hide-and-seek game of sun and clouds, the evening was a bit cool. For a moment it was as if everything had come to an end and stood still. The road emptied and then filled again. In the dark evening, he looked like a dot, and the glow of his eyes stopped me. He had full control, and I was caught by his eyes, imprisoned in his gaze. He looked like an insect under a bench, and I stood by.
Night had fallen. Who knows, was the old Anarkali group still sitting there, or had it come to an end? There were so many groups then. Back in those days there weren’t so many carts selling things, so many clothes and shoe shops, so many eateries. There was the professors’ group, the art college students’ group, the students from the university dorms. Tea was served all night, a flood of words, mirth and laughter. Someone would get teased, and if it had an effect, the news would scatter through all the groups. But nobody ever got angry or left in anger. There was a leader of every group who would take care of everything and ask everyone to contribute money for tea at the end of the session. Some might not have even a penny to give, and another might pay for everyone. What mattered was who had said what, who was the most educated, and who was the wisest.
How long did I stand there? The rush of the traffic slowed. Where he was sitting, behind the trees, that was only the idea of him. He could not be seen in the dim light.
I shouldn’t look back, I thought to myself. He will destroy me. I should look squarely ahead and go. The wind had slowly sharpened, and it was colder. The night helped the clouds to triumph and the air was damp. A sharp gust of air struck my face and blew up the dust. The air turned into wind, and with that the shopkeepers closed their shops, and the juice shop was deserted: only the plastic chairs and tables remained. I was able to see the old bodhi and peepal trees for the first time. How could they have survived the slaughtering of trees? Suddenly there was a blast, and the electricity went. The rain began to pound, and the cycles, motorcycles, and pedestrians disappeared. Only the cars crept along the road.
I looked towards him but couldn’t see anything. There was pure darkness but for the soft glow of the flowing traffic, which would then disappear. People gathered under the newly built wood roof of Tollinton Market, waiting for a break in the rain. I started moving under the roof towards the garden. “Keep going, keep going,” I said to myself. I knew that in just a few minutes I would reach the sidewalk on Mall Road, Gol Bagh, and the great Sufi saint Data Sahib’s shrine. Then I would reach the place overflowing with addicts, day labourers, and poorly paid manual workers. I didn’t look back and walked straight. Only my car was standing in the parking lot.
I started the car and drove along the road, towards the place where he had been. It was completely empty, pitch black, with the dim lights of cars slipping away. I didn’t see him. When I passed where Peeju’s café used to be, I heard the sound of weeping, and the sound of something falling. I stepped on the gas and kept on going.
The Silence of Saints
HE WAS NO SAINT, but he had gone quiet as if he were one—a silence of days, months, years, even centuries. I don’t know, he must be thinking about something; there must be some sort of worry, some kind of care. Why does someone go quiet? What takes their voice away? How can there be no desire to speak, to live?
He had retired after sixty years. But then he was at it again, on contract. He was back, going up those stairs at the office, and after fifteen days, he fell. Ganga Ram hospital was nearby, and so he was taken to the Emergency Room. Afterwards, we got word that they had done all sorts of tests on his heart, and he was fine, but there was something in his brain, they called it a “blood clot.” I don’t know. I heard those words, and it was as if blood started flowing before my eyes, a throbbing red. Then the doctors said, “Take him to the General Hospital.” They did a C. T. scan, and it was confirmed: a clot. After two days, he came home. He said, “I am going to write something against all those high caste people. They are all a bunch of fakes.” So he called his youngest daughter again and again to recite his story to her, because he wasn’t fit to write it down himself. Five decades passed before his eyes like water, with his homespun Salwaar Kamiz, his Peshawar-style sandals, his eyes like torches, and lips thirsty to break the silence. But he died before he could finish.
He was eight or ten years older than me. But he was always in a rush, as if in flight. He was the editor of the newspaper The Farmer then, and Uncle Sam was losing in Vietnam. His essays set things on fire. Then the newspaper closed, and the leader of the party he worked for became a government minister. He got a job and got married. The burning torches of revolution were extinguished, and silence became the law. The country fell into darkness. We accepted the Afghan war, and thence came the call, “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.” People had terrifying nightmares at night: blood, shredded and bloodied rags, hands coming out of police cars, and screams along the roads. Silence prevailed inside. The ruler of the city said, “There will now be safety and peace in the city.” So there was peace and safety, and not a breath of life.
They say he went silent then. Out of his four daughters and two sons, no one earned anything. Only one daughter was married, and the childhood engagement of another had broken. One was left sitting at home after her divorce. They had taken her dowry. The boy was sitting in Canada, but how to get to him? Then there was so much talk, only God knows. “The boys’ sisters-in-laws had gotten their hands on him,” they said. That simple girl couldn’t make sense of it. After two months, the boy said that he would call her to Canada soon, but then they sent the divorce papers instead. The whole house went silent.
Then after that, no daughter got married, nor any son. There was only the simmering of denial, which burns in all hearts. So many proposals came, and so many relatives and friends fought with them: “How can this come to pass?” But the girls replied as one, “We aren’t going to get married.” In the end, one of them said, “Why is it necessary for us to get married? We can live without being married.” The boys, like their sisters, didn’t get married. Then it was as if they had been extinguished inside. From then, there was just one silence: the silence of the saint, with the silence of the family.
One day I must have been on Circular Road when I met my friend Khaki near Crown station. I told him that the saint was gone. He was surprised. “Yes, yes, I know how it goes,” he said, remembering. “We had been great companions. We spent day and night together. He brought out The Farmer all on his own. Then Zia came to power.1 Our meetings diminished. That’s when he got married. How much time has passed since I met him.”
“Dear friend,” he brought his mouth near me and spoke, as if he were telling some secret. “There wasn’t anything to bring us together. This is all water under the bridge now. Time has taken its toll, and we’ve been left behind. Look at me, do I look the same?” I looked at him: his face was yellow, and it looked like it had dried up after years of deprivation. It was as if he was talking with something stuck in his throat, and his voice was slow.
We shared so much, once. Who cared for studying? We were all dropouts. I left during my B.A. I had just gotten my high school diploma when the demonstrations against the Ayub government began.2 There were demonstrations every day. Then the elections came. Who was going to read schoolbooks then? We wandered every street in the city, fighting for socialism. No party leader could say a single word to us. After the Awami government came to power, no one would meet with us. If they met with us, then they would say, “Leave it to the people, the people’s demands will never end. Take what you want.” I spit on their faces. Then Zia came and the party came looking for us again, and we said, “You take care of it yourselves.” He was a part of it, with us. I kept meeting with him, up to the time of his marriage. Then it all went up in smoke, and there were no more meetings. I heard that he lost his job. He was at home, and babies came. But it wasn’t time for him to go yet.
He moved slowly, and with care. Khaki’s whole world had aged along with him and was ending. He had been a leader of the 1968 student movement, an intellectual, a poet, and an author who had written several books. Who knew him now? I stood watching him go on Circular Road, and then he disappeared among the rickshaws, pushcarts, and people.
Then one day I was sitting in a big N.G.O. A friend of mine had come from London. He was having a party, and he called on us to come. Bava had come there, too. He had been the secretary of the election for the Mozang constituency in the 1970 election, where the big party leader Baba Socialism lived.3 Bava took a loan and built a cloth factory, but nothing came of it. He ended up living on the street. He didn’t earn a thing his whole life, and never did a day of work. He was jailed for his opposition to the Ayub dictatorship, but nothing more ever came of it. I told him that the saint had died. He said, “Hey friend, what is this?” He made a bitter face and threw back a peg.
“You are a few years younger than us; you haven’t seen anything. We demonstrated in ’68 every day. Our names are written on every brick of M.A.O. College. There’s nothing we didn’t do. He travelled all over the city then. He wrote magazines and pamphlets himself, and then he published them. Where did the money come from? Oh my friend, the clerks from offices, shopkeepers, the bus conductors, nurses, professors—they all gave money, and the magazines came out. Now, we don’t even hear that he’s passed on. What is this?”
Far from the headlines of the newspapers, away from the wide shining roads of the big city, and away from the blind glow of the television, and within the tiny little houses, life burns our bare feet, and then we die.
Even though the saint went quiet, he gave the power to refuse, and he gifted that to his family. That which he said to them in silence, gave them a silence that spoke with a clear voice.
1 General Zia-ul-Haq (1924–1988) was military dictator of Pakistan from 1977 to 1988.
2 Muhammad Ayub Khan (1907–1974) was a military officer who seized power in Pakistan’s first military coup in 1958; he maintained control until 1969.
3 “Baba Socialism” (Baba-e-socialism) (1915–2002) was the epithet used for Sheikh Muhammad Rashid, a founding member of the Pakistan People’s Party, who was renowned for his commitment to socialism.
Half Maghar Moon
IT WAS EVENING, halfway through the month of Maghar, as fall gave way to winter. The departing sun burned like a red ball among the dark rain clouds that gathered behind the shopping mall, which slithered like black cobras filled with poison. Clean, bright clouds could not keep their hold on the sky, as the departing redness of the sun bore holes through them with a biting winter wind.
But we poor folk, slowly dying in the city, thin and worn out, when did we ever have enough time to feast our eyes on this kind of show?
Perhaps it was on such a Maghar night, drenched in the seemingly cold but inwardly warm air, that one of my drunken poet friends had said, “My heart longs to kiss this wind.” I could understand the literal meaning of his words, but not their full meaning. This is the season that the playwright Balwant Gargi called “pink season,” sometime between summer and winter, with warm days and cool evenings.
But in my heart, the wind of another Maghar night was blowing.
I kept searching for the moon in the thick clouds, but the slices of cloud had become drunk, staggering and dissolving into the black night. Hidden within them were the drops of moisture carried by the cold winds of winter. The wind blew so hard that the clouds seemed to churn. This is the way the clouds of the middle of Maghar always are, unsettled and warm.
That old Maghar night smouldered on, like the moon. The clouds did their best to hide it away but were finally defeated and allowed it to shine through, letting it appear before us. This is one of those stories of my old home, in Krishan Nagar.
These thoughts of mine from thirty-five or forty years ago rise in the cold half Maghar night like a wind that continues to blow after the first rains of winter. The red sun of the last evenings of the month of Katak—I don’t know why it pierces the heart so. Thoughts of the long nights of winter fill the heart, then empty it.
I was in eleventh class then, at the preparatory college, and the pressure of the final year examinations for both the eleventh and twelfth classes was already upon us. I had gotten entangled in a strange situation that past summer and couldn’t get out of it. We started college in April, and then during summer vacation, student elections had been held, and who knows how, but my meetings with the members of our Leftist group had increased. We were beaten up once or twice by the Islamists and participated in some demonstrations on Lahore’s Mall Road. So we began to think a lot of ourselves. It was peak of the power of the People’s Party government and student politics were hot. There was always something to keep us busy, something that would set fire, that would then smoulder among us.
I was barely seventeen or eighteen years old. I had just entered the college, and I was still under pressure to leave it and get a job. Our house was in Krishan Nagar, and we lived on the second floor. It had only two rooms, one big and one small. My room, where I lived and slept, was tiny, and it was a bit lower than the other room. My mother and my two brothers stayed in the big room. After my father passed away, we had come here to live in Lahore, and my uncle and his family lived on the ground floor.
Because of my associations with the Progressives, I started coming home late at night. My uncle made a scene about it for some time, but when he saw my budding facial hair, he kept quiet. He would say, “Sons, you have to study for yourself and not for me. This is the time—two, three years and, that’s all. What you will earn for the rest of your life will be based on these years. These four years will count for forty years. Study, my sons, or else go find a job. I never went further than grade 10, but because of Partition, I got a good job. You won’t get that so easily, I think.”
But we were burning inside. After classes were finished for the day, there would be meetings in the college residence. There were discussions about new things happening, about new members. Group leaders from other colleges would come as guests. Long sittings, long discussions, hot and cold. The leaders would speak loudly, with anger, everyone would be reprimanded suddenly, and some would take offence. There was always fear of an attack by the Islamist party, and there was talk of confrontation. There was always a warning to be prepared and remain alert.
From one coffee house to the next, then from that one to a third. This is how the evening would pass, and then the night. I was new to all of it. Every day I would get some book to read and stay up all night reading it, understanding only parts of it. I caused my own bit of trouble, as I had not yet been included in the inner study circle of the group. My thing was about God. Is there a God or not? Every day I would stand up and half agree, and half disagree, with comrade Luqmani, a senior member of the group. But in the middle of the night, going home, I would become fearful. If there were a God, then what? That night Luqmani got angry, saying “Haven’t I already told you He doesn’t exist? We have created Him. Our fear has created Him. All religions were invented just to rob people. There is neither sin nor virtue. The only reality is man, and nothing else. Read this book and come back tomorrow.”
That night I lost heart. When I returned home, I vowed that I wouldn’t talk to him next time—he didn’t listen to me at all. It was a half Maghar night and drops of winter rain started falling. A gentle wind also blew. I walked along Lahore’s Mall Road, and, turning at the public library, I felt as if I had been bitten by the tall trees there. The old, tall peepal trees along that road blew in my mind, and I shivered from the cold. Perhaps I hadn’t eaten anything all day. My mouth was bitter from tea and cigarettes. The wind infused with the fragrance of the rain-soaked earth blew over the grounds of the Chishti High School, spreading in four directions.
I passed by the Laat Sahib, where the chief secretary used to sit in British times and the chief minister now sits, and crossed the Neeli Bar bus stop, named for that green and fertile region south of Lahore. I reached home and stood in front of the house.
It was crossing midnight. The rain had stopped, leaving the land drenched and making the coal tar roads shine like shivering mirrors in the blowing wind. Above, the clouds ran fast. Within them, the moon played like a child, peeking out occasionally by surprise. There was also a bit of warmth somewhere in the blanket of cold.
The usually alert houses of Krishan Nagar were silent today. The dim light of the moon made the shape of the standing houses more prominent. Otherwise, they couldn’t be seen.
The last hurdle was how to get into the house. If I knocked at the door, everyone would wake up. Climbing the wall adjacent to the empty plot next to our building, creeping along the roof next to the rain gutter, and finally clambering down to open the window into my room, I was inside. I slowed my breathing to normal and then realized there was a sound at the doorway into the hall. It was as if someone had sighed or sobbed. I looked out of my room but couldn’t see anything. I began to feel frightened, and I remembered Luqmani’s words about God. “Oh God, have mercy!” I unconsciously prayed to God in my heart. “Oh God, forgive me! I won’t listen to Luqmani.” Slowly I put my foot in the doorway. There was total darkness, and everyone was sleeping, exhausted, in the other room. Suddenly my foot touched a body. She was lying on the floor, face down. Oh my God! It was the daughter of the family from Dubai.
