Ghalib at Dusk Page 3

  Maqsood Ali shook the conductor’s shoulder. ‘Arre bhai, at least allow those who want to get off—’ but Maqsood Ali couldn’t finish. People behind him started pushing. Before he knew it, he found himself on the ground. His head felt airy and he placed his palm against the shuddering bus to steady himself. He stared disinterestedly at the men buzzing like flies at the bus entrance.

  Then he remembered Nasima.

  There she was, covered from head to foot in her burqa, hesitating like a ghost at the women’s entrance at the front of the bus. She saw him and raised her arm.

  ‘Are you all right, beti?’ he asked, going up to her and touching her lightly on the shoulder.

  Her head bobbed within the burqa. ‘And you, Abbu?’ came her burqa-muffled voice.

  ‘I’m alive.’

  The conductor slapped the side of the bus to signal the driver to move. He had somehow squeezed everyone in except a couple of elderly men who stood gazing wistfully at the departing bus. Someone from one of the windows shouted at Maqsood Ali. ‘Old fellow, caught a beauty in a burqa. Wah, wah!’

  Maqsood Ali turned towards the bus and spat. ‘Behnchod, I could show you—’ he muttered under his breath. He was not alone or he would have liked to pull the loafer off the bus and teach him a lesson. But restraint was a lesson he had learned with the weariness of age.

  They walked in silence, encapsulated by the din of vehicles, fumes and men.

  Outside the Empress Market there were hundreds of more men. Maqsood Ali walked close beside Nasima. He didn’t want to lose her in the crowd. Fruit sellers with neat pyramids of fruit were yelling out their prices over each other. Maqsood Ali was always uncomfortable when accompanied by any of his daughters. Should he get some oranges for the children? What if some lecher sidled up to his Nasima and brushed against her thighs or breasts while he was busy selecting the oranges? If he ever found a man touching her like that he would surely break his hands.

  ‘I’ll buy some oranges and then we can catch the mini home,’ he said to Nasima. ‘Now, stay close behind me.’

  It was almost nine when they reached home. Nasima disappeared into the girls’ room. Maqsood Ali went into the kitchen where his wife stood by the gas stove rolling out chapattis. He put down the bag of fruit on the cement counter, took off his glasses, and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief even though there was no sweat. ‘The news is not good,’ he said.

  ‘Allah, have mercy! What do you mean?’ his wife asked.

  He went and looked out the door. In the next room, Hamid was sitting at a table doing his homework. His youngest son, Baqir, was asleep on the divan. He closed the door and came back.

  ‘Begum, have you heard of cancer? Breast cancer?’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘Hai Allah! Is that what poor Nasima—?’ Her mouth began to twitch and the tears gathered in her eyes. ‘So what is to be done now?’ she asked, pressing her dupatta to her mouth to stifle whatever wanted to escape.

  ‘An operation. Probably. But we don’t know yet. The doctor wants more tests.’

  ‘What operation? Is it dangerous?’

  ‘They’ll remove the part—where the cancer is.’

  ‘You mean, they’ll cut off a part of—’ she asked, incredulous.

  ‘Yes, I think so. I’m not sure, but that’s what the doctor was hinting at.’ He saw the chapatti burn on the griddle and stepped forward to turn off the gas. He didn’t want any dinner.

  ‘But how can they? What will the girl look like afterwards? No, no. I can’t allow that. All she had was a lump, and now you tell me—I must take her to the pir sahib.’

  ‘Must you always talk like an illiterate woman?’ he said irritably. ‘I took her to the best doctor in town. Do you know how much his fee is? I haven’t even told you all he said and you’ve started howling!’ He paused to gain his breath.

  His wife was sobbing into her dupatta, no longer bothering to conceal anything from the children outside. She was a short, round woman, with a broad, good-natured face. Eight pregnancies had given her figure a soft, dilapidated look. He continued in a low, decided tone, unburdening himself of all the doctor had said. She would have to listen.

  Finally, she wiped her eyes, and said, ‘Don’t rush into this. It’s a matter of her future. Let me go to the pir sahib first.’

  ‘How well have your pir sahib’s prayers worked so far?’ he snapped. ‘We’ve seen what happened when you went to him for her marriage.’

  A year ago, Nasima’s marriage had almost happened. The groom’s family didn’t make any demands thankfully, but on the day of the engagement, the father drew him aside and asked if Maqsood Ali could spare, not much, just twenty thousand rupees. God forbid, he shouldn’t think they were crass enough to ask for a dowry. ‘It’s just a loan, so that the boy can get started, after all, you know, it means your daughter will be happier. Maybe with this he could start a small provisions store?’ All the relatives were gathered in his house. Maqsood Ali couldn’t risk saying no. A month after he got the money, having begged advances from two businessmen for whom he was making office furniture, Nasima’s fiancé went to Dubai. Six months later, the boy’s father came and broke the engagement. That was the last he had seen of the father, the son, and his money. If only he could believe in the pir sahib, as simply and wholly as his wife did.

  ‘Do I have to remind you how I was cheated, thanks to your pir sahib’s prayers?’

  ‘I don’t want such an operation,’ his wife said firmly. ‘Have you thought of Nasima? Does she know?’

  ‘No, of course not. The doctor sent her out. You’ll have to tell her.’

  He opened the door and went into the adjoining room. ‘Where’s your brother?’ he asked Hamid about his eldest, Rehman.

  ‘I don’t know, Abbu,’ Hamid replied without looking up. Of his three sons, Hamid was the only studious one. He wanted to become a doctor when he grew up.

  ‘Tell that loafer when he gets home that I’ll break every bone in his body if he’s not home by eight every day.’ He moved over to the divan where little Baqir was asleep and stroked his hair.

  In his room, he took off his soiled shirt and trousers, examined them closely, decided they’d do for another day, and hung them on a nail on the wall from which he removed his kurta and pajama. He lay down on the bed that he had made with his own hands at the time of his marriage. He had used Burma teak for it. Who could think of building with Burma teak these days?

  Nasima’s face came up as soon as he closed his eyes.

  His wife had told him a month ago that Nasima was complaining of a pain in the chest. He wished Nasima’s illness had been just that. His own mother had died of TB when he was fifteen. She used to press her bosom with one hand and cough up little clots of blood into a handkerchief. Soon after his mother died, his father brought home another wife to take care of the children. The new woman made his father beat him with an oiled cane. One day he took two of her gold bangles. He didn’t consider it stealing: they had belonged to his mother. That night he left home and never went back.

  They could cure TB very easily nowadays, he had heard. Why hadn’t Nasima got that? Why breast cancer? Weren’t such diseases meant for shameless women, like prostitutes? Why his quiet daughter who said her prayers and fasted every Ramazan, who never stepped out without a burqa? The image of Nasima minus one breast came to him. He had allowed the doctor, a complete stranger, to examine his daughter’s breasts. He covered his eyes in shame.

  He heard Hamid’s chair scrape against the floor as he got up to open the door for Rehman. He sat up, meaning to go out and give his son a scolding he’d never forget. What did he mean by coming home so late? But he fell back limply on his pillow.

  He had avoided speaking to Nasima after they left the doctor’s office. In the bus he had been grateful there were separate sections for men and women. Nasima was his favourite among his children. Maybe because she was his first. When she was two, she had come close to dying of pneumonia. All night he and hi
s wife had sat by her side, waiting. The doctor had told them if she made it through the night she’d live. When she was still alive the next day, he felt so exhausted, he lay down beside her and fell into a deep sleep. All the other seven after her had been mistakes, a price to pay for those short bursts of pleasure for which he despised himself later. He signed the forms to have his wife’s tubes tied after Baqir despite her protests that it was un-Islamic. He waited a long time for his wife to come to bed. After a while he drifted into sleep.

  A dream awakened him. His heart was beating as if he had been running, and he was damp with sweat. He felt submerged under a heavy sea, and he couldn’t swim. But the solid surface of the bed under him was proof that he was in his room. He found his glasses and felt his way in the dark to the light switch.

  In the kitchen, he drank two glasses of water. Still his thirst remained unquenched. He filled the glass again and on his way back, stopped at the girls’ room. The door was ajar. A night bulb bathed the room in an unhealthy green light. On the bed slept his four younger daughters, covered by a single quilt, their faces the colour of algae. He felt solaced that it was his sleep, not theirs, that was marred. On the floor, close to the door, were Nasima and his wife. Nasima was the closest to the door. Her mother’s arm was thrown around her middle. In the faint greenish light they looked like lovers clasped in a desperate embrace.

  Nasima turned. The quilt slid down below her shoulders and her face came into better view. Had she been crying? He could make out her breasts under the loose cotton kurta. Again he tried to imagine her without a breast. The asymmetry. The shame. The operation was going to change more than her breasts. If his Nasima couldn’t get married, who would look at his other girls? ‘What’s wrong with the oldest daughter?’ he could hear the women’s hushed whispers.

  He knew his wife’s breasts. Now they were like the udders of the cows in the milkman’s shed on his way to work but there was a time when they had been firm, supple mounds that he would reach out for in the dark. He tried to imagine a scarred, flat place where his wife’s soft, mango-like breasts had nestled under her kurta. He knew then how he would recoil, if he were a man becoming intimate with his daughter’s body for the first time.

  He returned to the room, turned out the light and sat on his bed, sipping slowly from the glass. He pulled out his watch from under the pillow: it was a little past three. A thought occurred to him. It was despicable and persisted like evil. Sabir, one of his workers, could marry Nasima. He was about her age and unmarried. A month or so after the marriage Maqsood Ali could bring up the question of the operation. He would pay for it. But Sabir was uneducated. He had a pockmarked face, black and shiny as an eggplant, and a missing ear—he had lost it in an accident in childhood. A missing breast. A missing ear. It shouldn’t cause such a stir. He held his head in both his hands and wept unmanly tears into the pillow.

  The maulvi’s voice came over the loudspeaker from the mosque. He sat up straight. The voice was an inspiration to get up and do something. It was twenty before six. The faithful were preparing to go to the mosque. Maqsood Ali went to the mosque only on the two Eids and on some Fridays. Had he fallen asleep? He wasn’t sure. His thoughts had followed one another in his mind until they had become blurred. His eyelids drooped like lead and burned at the edges. He stretched and threw aside the quilt. The room had grown chilly during the night. He needed a cup of tea. He thought of waking up his wife but then remembered how tired her face had looked in the green light. He poured water and milk, added sugar and tea leaves, and set the pot on the stove.

  Quickly he finished his cup and went into his room to get dressed. In less than five minutes, while everyone still slept, he was getting out of the house. He opened the front door very slowly so it wouldn’t creak and wake up the boys.

  Out in the street he buttoned his jacket and wound his scarf around his neck. The morning light was a misty blue-grey. Grey figures draped in shawls and caps were returning from the mosque. Maybe he, too, should have gone to say his prayers. But Allah would have seen through this one-time effort at piety. He walked on, head bowed, shoulders drawn in from the cold, his eyes refreshed by the sting in the air, until he reached the end of the lane. Here he turned right. His feet seemed to walk to the bus stop on their own. He realized he was going to ride the bus into the city and stop at Sabir’s room. He was going to take him out for tea and ask him to come and see a new client’s kitchen. And while they took measurements, he would ask Sabir about his plans for marriage. At the bungalow if things worked out, he would negotiate an advance payment with the owner. That would take care of the wedding and even the operation.

  But fate had aligned another meeting for him. Hasnain Ahmed, on his way back from the mosque, saw him just as he went past his house. Once a month or so they went fishing together. In fact, fishing was the only thing they had in common.

  ‘Maqsood sahib, Asalam-alaikum,’ Hasnain Ahmed’s cheery voice greeted him. ‘I say, whither to at this early hour? That too, on a Friday morning—rather unusual for you?’

  ‘Wa-alai-kum-salaam, Hasnain mian,’ he returned the greeting. ‘Just out for a walk.’

  ‘At this hour? In this cold? Come in and have a cup of tea instead.’

  ‘No, no. You go ahead. I’ve had mine. And besides—’

  Hasnain Ahmed placed a hand on his shoulder and he couldn’t say no. Maqsood Ali and he had emigrated to Pakistan around the same time, in the early ’50s, from different cities in India. Hasnain Ahmed was from Delhi and had the robust health and speech of a Northerner. Even now his cheeks glowed from his morning walk to the mosque. He had done well in the cloth business. His shop in Jama Cloth Market was a dazzling array of bright lights and walls lined with bolts of rich silks. They had bought Nasima’s engagement sari there. Maqsood Ali respected his friend. He had never asked why Nasima’s engagement broke up.

  His friend was a true businessman. Maqsood Ali never grasped the business end of things well. He was deeply aware of this and yet, in some way, proud of it. But lately his beliefs were beginning to weary him. He clung to them out of habit—or pride? In his heart there were deep wounds, and childish yearnings for justice, recognition, a reward for his way of life.

  Hasnain Ahmed opened the door to his drawing room. In his house the drawing room was for receiving guests only. Maqsood Ali sank into a velvet sofa carefully as if he were lowering himself onto ice. He had never invited his friend to his own home: in his drawing room, they ate, Hamid did his homework, the boys slept, and by the window, Nasima and her sisters sat on the divan and sewed and embroidered clothes they got on order from the neighbours.

  ‘Maqsood sahib, allow me to show you something which I know only you can truly appreciate,’ Hasnain Ahmed beamed.

  Hasnain Ahmed went out of the room and a servant entered with a tray full of tea things. He set it on the low carved table in the centre of the room and proceeded to make the tea like an expert. The tea was in a pot, hidden under an embroidered tea cosy. The milk and sugar were in separate containers.

  ‘Sahib, how much sugar?’ the servant asked.

  ‘Oh—well, one—no, two,’ Maqsood Ali replied, feeling a little baffled.

  Hasnain Ahmed returned with a long cylindrical cardboard tube, and setting it on the divan, he dismissed the servant. He offered Maqsood Ali nimakparas from the tea tray and then took the plastic lid off the tube.

  ‘A new fishing rod!’ Maqsood Ali exclaimed.

  ‘From Amrika.’ Hasnain Ahmed’s round face glowed like an oversized radish. ‘My nephew, remember? The one I told you about.’ This nephew had disgraced the family name by marrying an American woman. ‘Yes, that same one. He asked me if I wanted anything. “Beta, just bring me a fishing rod," I said. I sent him the name of the company and all that.”

  Maqsood Ali had brought an angling magazine from the American Consulate library and shown his friend the picture of a rod he particularly liked. He sipped his tea and ran his free hand over the shiny rod. He
had asked for too much sugar, he realized. The rod he had dreamed of was in his hands. He was at once transported to another world where big, red-faced American men, wading knee-deep in blue lakes framed by dark pines, were holding up a fish almost as tall as themselves, triumph and pride spilling over their smiles.

  ‘It’s a beauty!’ he murmured, suddenly breaking into English.

  ‘What do you think? Shouldn’t we try it out?’ Hasnain Ahmed asked.

  ‘Yes, we must.’

  ‘Sir, why delay a good deed? Friday is an auspicious day to start new things. Let’s go right now. Haleji is full of good rahu and katla this year, I hear. We’ll be back before dark.’

  ‘Haleji?’ He became thoughtful. ‘All the way there and back?’ Haleji was a good seventy or eighty kilometres from Karachi.

  ‘Janaab, what is there to think about? You’re hesitating as if you’ve never been there. Let’s go if we’re going. Before the day warms up. Then the fish won’t bite.’

  ‘I was thinking—haven’t told them at home.’

  ‘That’s not a problem. I’ll send the servant right now.’

  ‘No, no.’ He wanted to be gone before they found out. ‘In an hour or so. They’ll be awake by then.’

  ‘As you wish. I’ll get breakfast packed. We’ll eat when we get to Haleji.’

  Here was the offer of escape. And yet, he wavered. Then he thought of the immense lake bathed in early morning light. And he knew that he didn’t want to be any place else. By the time they got to Haleji it would be close to nine. Maybe not quite in time to catch the silver-grey mist over the lake. Still, it was winter and the day warmed up slowly. There would be plenty of fish around, near the banks. He knew just where to look for them—among the tall reeds and the lichen, where they came to rest and to look for food.