Ghalib at Dusk Read online

  Night after night, he waited for Amira begum to appear in the neem in the courtyard. Once all those trees have grown up, he thought, she may come. A happy vision of himself came to him—pushing his cart along alleys where his trees shaded him, looking up to see Amira begum sitting in one of the branches with that impish child-bride smile. And then he would ask her, weren’t all these trees he had planted for her worth it? Weren’t they better than any gold earrings he might have bought her? Perhaps she would smile, perhaps she would say: I forgive you. And maybe one day he would return to find she had created her undying abode in the branches of the lonely neem.

  Mariam’s Bath

  MARIAM WAS THE tallest among the inmates in the Dangerously Insane Women’s Wing. When she stood up, all other women, and even most men, appeared dwarfed before her. When she squatted on the floor of her cell, her large bare buttocks splayed out like a split watermelon, and from between her legs poured out semi-solid shit which lay on the floor of her cell in steaming, muddy mounds.

  Mariam watched the moist mounds dry, get a crusty surface and turn a darker shade of brown. Several such piles collected before the cell was cleaned out. She watched the flies hover over her shit, settle down heavily and suck up her body’s refuse. Watched them sit and clean themselves with their forelegs like fastidious housewives. Saw them take off sated, buzzing up towards the skylight near the ceiling, and out into the free air of the world beyond. Mariam kept very still, with her face almost buried in her knees, her eyes riveted to the flies. The flies mistook her for a part of the room and didn’t bother her with their usual fly-like curiosity.

  All inmates were to be bathed at least twice a week. This was official regulation. In practice it translated into a bath about once a fortnight. For the dangerous inmates the regulation was further relaxed by the caretakers to a bath once a month.

  Mariam was considered violent though she had never attacked anyone. But her height and size were formidable enough so that the women who worked as caretakers would not take risks with her. If she ever decided to get violent, they’d be no match for a giant like her. Mariam always brushed the orderlies aside roughly and muttered loudly when they came to take her out of her cell. This resistance was enough to convince the caretakers that she was a potential danger.

  Mariam’s cell was cleaned out every third day except on Fridays when the orderlies had the afternoon off for prayers. Two hefty guards came to unlock the cell. They threw a chadar on her and clicked handcuffs on her wrists while she muttered and resisted. They dragged her out to the courtyard where she paced restlessly, trying to pull her hands free, squinting in the bright sunlight, her large frame trembling as she moved. The orderlies then moved into the cell with buckets and brooms, swept up the dried faeces and bits of food, and splashed buckets of water on the floor. They sprayed Phenyle to kill the stench and cursed under their breaths. Then they picked up their buckets and brooms and moved on down to the next cell, cursing and alternately chewing gutka as they worked. As they moved down the hallway, they shouted to the guards to bring Mariam back from the courtyard.

  Mariam crouched on the wet floor, watching one of the guards snap open the handcuffs while the other waited at the door, ready to bang it shut if she tried to move. She covered her head with her hands to hide her face as the door closed and the guards snapped the padlock and turned the key. The keys on their big ring jingled as they moved to the next cell.

  There was a new student volunteer at the institution from the psychology department at Karachi University. She had asked to be assigned to the Insane Women’s Wing by special request to the director of the home for destitute women. She was designing a research project for her thesis, her application to the director said, and wanted to study the long-term residents, the mentally disturbed, especially the ones whose families had given up on them.

  The dangerously insane women were housed separately. The entrance to their cells was through a corridor. Two heavy padlocks had to be removed to enter the corridor. The head caretaker, whom everybody called Amina baji, was a large woman, never to be seen without a paan in her mouth. She chewed paan all day and every so often stuck her head out of any window to spit out the juice. Her hair was oiled and combed back into a tight bun.

  ‘They’re dangerous women,’ Amina baji slurred, shifting the chewed bolus of paan from the right to the left side of her mouth.

  ‘I know but I think I’ll be all right,’ the student said.

  Amina baji shrugged and eyed the slight figure and intent face of the student sceptically.

  The student felt Amina’s questioning eyes sizing her up and stiffened. She wasn’t about to offer too much of herself to this woman. But she sensed she would have to build bridges with Amina if she wanted her research to go smoothly in this institution. Research which she didn’t know how to frame in scientific language—the role of love in healing mental trauma. She was still thinking how she was going to define, quantify, and measure ‘love’, turning love into a construct that would be acceptable for a scientifically sound, academic thesis.

  ‘You mustn’t worry about me,’ the student said in a placating tone. ‘I had, I mean I have a sister who’s—you know, kind of what you’d call not normal. So I do know what it’s like to be around people like that.’ She didn’t tell Amina about the muted shame that hung at the table when her family members emerged from their rooms to congregate in the dining room. And how they tried not to look at the one empty place at the table. She couldn’t tell Amina the reason she was here was not just her thesis. She couldn’t explain that her sister had killed herself a year ago—barely a week after she returned home, from the city’s best psychiatric hospital. Her sister used to complain every time the family visited her in the hospital. She said the doctors and nurses taunted her, tied her down to her bed, force-fed her medicines and she hated hospital food. Her family had been told by the doctors not to interfere in her treatment. They watched fearfully from a distance, cowered by the cold, accurate efficiency of the hospital staff. ‘Because the world and even you refuse to treat me with the respect I deserve,’ her sister had scribbled, her last plea, her damning accusation, on the back of one of her rambling Urdu poems. The poems had been gathered and put away, along with her books and clothes in her closet.

  Amina baji’s expression softened a little. She nodded in sympathy and gave the student a thoughtful look. Her hand twirled a large key ring with many keys on it. She moved slowly, like a majestic ship, over to one of the windows of the large hall and spat out a mouthful of well-chewed paan. She stared meditatively at the dark patches where the betel juice had landed on the dry sand outside.

  ‘Your sister is also—?’ Amina baji asked, when she could speak.

  ‘Well—you could say, sort of,’ the student shrugged. She could see sharing that little bit about her sister had lessened the resistance from Amina baji, at least for now.

  The two big padlocks to the Dangerously Insane Wing were unlocked.

  ‘What’s that terrible smell?’ asked the student, covering her nose with her dupatta.

  ‘Shit and piss,’ said Amina baji.

  ‘Smells like shit and piss that’s been sitting around a long time,’ the student muttered into her dupatta.

  They were in the hallway. Through the iron grillwork to the right, light from the courtyard made a lattice of shadows on the floor. To the left were the doors to the cells. The unlocking of the hallway door had roused the inmates of three of the five cells and their faces were stuck like decapitated heads in the square openings in the doors. They seemed curious since this was not mealtime nor could it be the orderlies since they only came in the mornings. In the small square cut-out in the door of the first cell, was the face of Mariam. The student stared at her face for a few moments.

  ‘I want to see the inside of their cells,’ the student said through her dupatta.

  ‘The smell inside is much worse,’ Amina baji warned.

  ‘Let’s start with the first one,�
� the student said, undeterred.

  Amina baji retraced her steps, found the key and unlocked the door. The face in the square opening moved back as the door was pushed open. Inside stood all six feet four of Mariam, naked from head to toe, standing in a fresh pool of urine. On the sides of her dusty thighs were the dark paths the urine had traced moving down.

  Amina baji stood outside ready to snap the padlock at the slightest threat of movement from Mariam.

  ‘What’s her name?’ asked the student.

  ‘We named her Mariam,’ Amina baji said.

  ‘But what’s her real name?’

  ‘We don’t know. That’s why we call her Mariam.’

  ‘How long has she been here?’

  ‘Four years. Maybe five. We’ll have to look at her file.’

  ‘Who brought her here?’

  ‘Our ambulance did. She used to be lying around on the footpaths. The shopkeepers in the area were fed up with her lying there naked. She was a nuisance. They tried to cover her with chadars but she would tear them up. You know, some man could’ve taken advantage of her in that state. And respectable ladies and families didn’t like to go to the shops in the area with her lying around like that all day. No relative of hers ever came to take her home. Her family probably dumped her on the street. The shop owners kept calling our office, begging that we remove her from the footpath. So we went in our ambulance and picked her up. At least here, she’s safe, and she’s not embarrassing the world.’

  ‘Safe? Yes, of course. And she’s been in this cell ever since?’ the student asked.

  ‘She got into a bad fight with another woman as soon as she got here so we had to lock her up. Doctor’s orders.’

  ‘Would I be able to see her file today, please? And she could certainly do with a bath now.’

  ‘It’s too late in the day for a bath,’ Amina baji said.

  ‘It’s only four-thirty. And it’s so hot.’ The student glanced at her watch. ‘Mariam, Asalam-alaikum,’ the student turned and picked her steps carefully to get closer to Mariam, skirting the pool of urine. Mariam inched backwards into a corner of the cell. She crouched, covering her dusty hair with both her hands. The student squatted beside her. ‘Mariam, it’s so hot. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could bathe? You’d feel so much better? What do you say?’

  Mariam said nothing. She stared into the student’s face for a second, and then dismissed her presence and fixed her gaze on her bony kneecaps.

  ‘Does she talk at all?’ the student asked Amina baji, dismayed.

  ‘I haven’t heard her say anything in months. She used to swear and curse when she first came. But now she’s quiet. It’s also because of the medicines the doctor’s prescribed.’ Amina baji dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘We put it in her food. Or she refuses to take it. We’ll have to put handcuffs on her if you want to take her out of the cell.’

  ‘Handcuffs? No, no!’ the student was indignant. ‘She seems all right to me. She’s so quiet, she couldn’t harm a mouse.’

  Amina baji shook her head and moved towards the door very slowly to show her displeasure. She stepped out into the hallway, and barked: ‘Get me a new Lifebuoy!’

  The student held Mariam’s hand and gently led her out of the cell. Amina baji was walking ahead briskly, clutching a fleshy-pink bar of Lifebuoy in one hand. The student was struck by Mariam’s docility. How like a domesticated animal she seemed. Her bare buttocks reminded the student of a scene in a war movie where naked Jewish women were made to march towards the gas chamber. At the far end of the hallway, Amina baji turned right and stopped in front of a wall. Three taps were fixed to the wall. A bucket with a tumbler stood on the floor. Amina baji slid the bucket under a tap and turned it on. She handed the Lifebuoy to the student with a shrug as if to say, ‘She’s all yours now’ and stepped aside to watch the show.

  The student removed her watch, rolled up her kurta sleeves, and pulled her shalwar up to her knees. She looked up at Mariam’s tall, diffident figure, raised her arm and touched her tenderly on her shoulder. She pressed down, making her squat before the bucket. The water in the bucket was warm from the exposed water tank on the roof. She poured the first tumbler over Mariam’s shoulders and waited. Mariam sat on her haunches with her face buried in her knees. The student poured another tumbler, waited, and poured another. She wetted the Lifebuoy and started soaping Mariam. There was a curious way her hands moved gently and questioningly over the large woman’s body, washing away the encrusted dirt. And Mariam seemed lost, quietened by the touch.

  The student’s hands moved slowly, as if learning to overcome her repulsion at touching Mariam’s grimy skin. But as she continued to soap and rub her body, first with one hand and then using both, she began to lose herself in the pure pleasure of water and soap and skin. She scrubbed Mariam’s back vigorously as if it were a stubborn piece of soiled linen. She rubbed soap into her cropped hair, the colour of ash, from age and congealed dirt. Then she tugged at Mariam’s arm and stood her up. She moved down with the soap, down and around the sagging breasts, down to her belly, which was flat but loose-skinned, around the triangle of crinkly pubic hair, down her thighs, down to her knees, and down, down between the toes. The soap slid over Mariam’s body smoothly. The student splashed water onto Mariam’s skin to build lather. Mariam stood like a dark cavewoman covered with a layer of soft hoary frost. The student stood back for a moment and wiped the sweat off her brow with her sleeve.

  She opened the tap and started refilling the bucket. She pushed Mariam down to make her sit. And then began pouring tumblers of warm clear water on her. The soapy water flowed towards the drain in a frothy trickle, carrying away dirt, urine, hardened faeces, and dried bits of food with it. The student watched with pleasure the gushing of water from the tap, and Mariam’s dark body glistening like heated chocolate as the water washed her clean.

  Then Mariam stood up, surprising the student and stretched out a timid hand for the tumbler. The student handed it to her. Mariam poured water over her head, rubbed her armpits, her breasts, her thighs, and as if possessed by the magic of water, kept pouring and pouring. The student watched her with a smile. ‘Arre, Mariam, aren’t you going to say anything? You are loving the water, aren’t you?’

  Amina baji shook her head. She didn’t seem to approve of the student’s overtures. She removed another paan from a little case she had in her purse and placed it in her mouth. Mariam didn’t look the student in the eye. She behaved as if she were alone. But the student could see Mariam’s joy. Getting hold of another tumbler, she bent down to fill it and began to splash Mariam playfully.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Amina baji said, unnerved by such recklessness. ‘If she comes down with fever, we’ll have another headache to deal with.’

  The student gave her a pleading look. But Amina baji stepped up to the tap and turned the water off.

  The student led a dripping Mariam back to her cell. Mariam left damp footprints on the concrete floor which evaporated quickly in the dry afternoon heat.

  Slowly, the student let go of Mariam’s hand. ‘I want to tell you about my sister,’ the student almost said, peering into Mariam’s vacant eyes. The new dampness from the bath and the leathery feel of Mariam’s rough skin lingered on sadly in the student’s hand. The thought of what Mariam did once the day ended, once night came on, once the flies were replaced by mosquitoes in that cell, made her anxious. Did Mariam stay up in the night, unable to sleep? Did words she never mouthed rise from the depths of her soul in the darkness of those long nights? The dank stench from the cell made the student recoil at the thought of what it would be like to spend a night there with her. The cell was poorly lit by a diffused shaft of light coming in from the skylight. It was hard to say what time of day it was in the dimness. In that ashen light, Mariam stood uncertainly in the middle of the cell, her tall naked body silhouetted against the thin light like a sculptor’s model. The student noticed Mariam had somehow avoided stepping into the urine pool. She turne
d cheerily to Amina baji who was impatiently jingling the keys on her key ring.

  ‘You see, she knows! She didn’t go near that filth after we bathed her.’

  ‘But she’ll forget soon enough,’ Amina baji said.

  ‘Even so, I’m happy for now. I’m sure she has lice in her hair,’ the student said. ‘Why don’t I comb her hair with a lice comb?’

  ‘I’ll get the barber tomorrow to shave her head off,’ Amina baji said.

  ‘Is that what you do if they get lice?’ the student asked, remembering the gaunt Jewish women in the war movie who were also without hair.

  ‘Who has the time to sit and comb the lice out of their hair? We had her shaved a few months back but it’s grown again,’ Amina baji snapped. ‘We had better go now if you want to meet the other special ones in this wing.’

  Amina baji clicked the padlock and turned the key. The student lifted a hand to wave to Mariam.

  ‘Mariam, I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll come and visit you every day,’ the student said, not sure whom she was trying to reassure.

  Mariam scratched her head and looked long into the student’s face for the first time. Her eyes locked with the student’s in a gaze that lasted just a little longer than what the student had expected.

  ‘I know your scalp is itchy. I’ll bring a lice comb tomorrow. But won’t you say a word before I go?’ she said pleadingly. ‘Won’t you tell me how you enjoyed the bath? Or maybe you didn’t?’ the student asked, feeling encouraged by that gaze.