Ibrahim was an elderly man but looked old beyond his years. In his left hand, still sore from pounding the door yesterday, he carried a plastic folder secured by two large rubber bands. It contained rent receipts, bills, orders for repairs, records of disputes and court cases pertaining to the six buildings he looked after. Some of those disputes dated back to when he was a young man of nineteen, just starting in service with the father of the present landlord. Other cases were more ancient, inherited from Ibrahim’s predecessor.
So thoroughly was everything documented, Ibrahim sometimes felt he was lugging the very buildings around with him. The folder handed down almost half a century ago by the retiring rent-collector had not been of plastic, but rudely fashioned out of two wooden boards bound by a strip of morocco. It had carried with it the previous owner’s smell. A fraying cotton tape, sewn to the leather, went around to secure the contents. The dark, cracked boards had warped badly; when opened, they creaked and released a sweaty tobacco odour.
Young and ambitious as Ibrahim then was, he was ashamed of being seen with this relic. Though it contained nothing but respectable rent receipts, he knew that people would judge it by its cover, which resembled the filthy binders carried by disreputable marketplace jyotshis and fortune-tellers to shelter their quack charts and fake diagrams. That he might be mistaken for one of those odious mountebanks mortified him. He began to harbour grave doubts about this job which forced him to carry around a questionable folder — he felt shortchanged, as though a bazaar vendor had fiddled the weights and tipped the scales unfairly.
Then, on one lucky day, the morocco spine broke. He displayed the wreck at the landlord’s office. The clerk examined it, confirmed its demise from natural causes, and filled out the appropriate requisition form. Ibrahim was given a length of string to make do while the paperwork was processed.
After a fortnight’s delay, the new folder arrived. It was built of buckramed cardboard, very smart and modern-looking, in colour a dignified umber. Ibrahim was delighted. He began to feel optimistic about his prospects in this job.
With the new folder under his arm, he could hold his head high and strut as importantly as a solicitor while making his rounds. It was far more sophisticated than the old one, with generous pouches and compartments. Briefs, complaints, correspondences could now be organized methodically. Which was just as well, because around this time Ibrahim’s duties increased, both at work and domestically.
Ibrahim, the son of ageing parents, became a husband, then a father. And the role of rent-collector began to sprout branches too. He was appointed the landlord’s spy, blackmailer, deliverer of threats, and all-round harasser of tenants. His job now included the uncovering of hidden dirt in his six buildings, secrets like extramarital affairs, and he was taught by his employer how to convert adultery into rent increases — the guilty parties would never protest or dare to mention the Rent Act. When the situation demanded, Ibrahim could also play the pleader and cajoler, if the landlord went too far and there was legalistic retaliation. The rent-collector’s tears would convince the tenant to back down, to have mercy on the poor beleaguered landlord, a martyr to modern-day housing, who had never meant any harm in the first place.
To sort out the multiple roles in Ibrahim’s repertoire, the folder’s pouches and compartments were indispensable. At this stage in his career, however, he began to feel the increasing hindrance of his sweet automatic smile. Delivering threats and dire warnings while smiling pleasantly, he discovered, was not a good strategy. If he could have modified it to a menacing smile, that would have been perfect. But the muscles in question were beyond his control. The occasions when he had to express regrets over repairs delayed, or convey condolences for a death in a tenant’s family, were equally difficult. Before long, the burdensome dental display earned him an undeserved reputation for being callous, crude, incompetent, retarded, even demonic.
So he smiled his hapless way through three buckram folders, all umber like the first, and added twenty-four years to his own frame. Twenty-four years of drudgery and deprivation during which his youth disappeared, and the bright ambition of his golden season became tainted by bitterness. Desperate, and scarred by the certain knowledge that he no longer had any prospects, he watched his wife, two sons, and two daughters still believing in him and thereby increasing his anguish. He asked himself what it was he had done to deserve a life so stale, so empty of hope. Or was this the way all humans were meant to feel? Did the Master of the Universe take no interest in levelling the scales — was there no such thing as. a fair measure?
There no longer seemed any point in going to the masjid as often as he did. His attendance at Friday prayers became irregular. And he began seeking guidance in ways he had once despised as the preserve of the ignorant.
He found the jyotshis and fortune-tellers in the marketplace most comforting. They offered solutions to his money problems, and advice on improving his future, which was becoming his past at an alarming velocity. He discovered their confident pronouncements to be a soothing drug.
Nor did he restrict himself to palmists and astrologers. Seeking stronger drugs, he turned to less orthodox messengers: card-picking doves, chart-reading parrots, communicating cows, diagram-divining snakes. Always worried that an acquaintance would spot him during one of his questionable excursions, he decided, with great reluctance, to leave behind his distinctive fez. It was like abandoning a dear friend. The only other time he had forsaken this fixture of daily wear was during Partition, back in 1947, when communal slaughter at the brand-new border had ignited riots everywhere, and sporting a fez in a Hindu neighbourhood was as fatal as possessing a foreskin in a Muslim one. In certain areas it was wisest to go bareheaded, for choosing incorrectly from among fez, white cap, and turban could mean losing one’s head.
Fortunately, his sittings at the avian auguries were relatively private. He could crouch unnoticed on a pavement corner with the creature’s keeper, ask the question, and the dove or parrot would hop out of its cage to enlighten him.
The cow session, on the other hand, was a major performance that collected large crowds. The cow, caparisoned in colourful brocaded fabrics, a string of tiny silver bells round her neck, was led into the ring of spectators by a man with a drum. Though the fellow’s shirt and turban were bright-hued, he seemed quite drab compared to the richly bedizened cow. The two walked the circle: once, twice, thrice — however long it took him to recite the cow’s curriculum vitae, with special emphasis on prophecies and forecasts accurately completed to date. His voice was deafeningly raucous, his eyes bloodshot, his gestures manic, and all this frenzy was calculated as a masterly counterpoint to the cow’s calm demeanour. After the brief biography was narrated, the drum that had silently hung from his shoulder came to life. It was a drum meant not for beating but for rubbing. He continued to walk the cow in a circle, rubbing the drumskin with a stick, producing a horrible bleating, a groaning, a wailing. It was a sound to wake the dead and stun the living, it was eldritch, it was a summons to spirits and forces not of this world, a summons to descend, witness, and assist bovine divination.