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Lado was the first hero to be created by the coffeehouses on the garbage hills. Long before the rumour that he was moving to Flower Hill, every night of his life had been eagerly worked up into a separate adventure and on Flower Hill, even when the number of coffeehouses on Nato Avenue alone had reached 150, Lado’s adventures remained as the finest examples of the squatters’ oral tradition. All his life Lado had sought an answer to the question, ‘Who was greater, God or the man who invented gambling?’ His special gear and garments, the time he stole from gambling to write the novel about his life, and his reasons for divorcing four wives, all played a part in making him a hero. Lado had won the right to be recognized as a remarkable gambler not just for his skill in gambling but for his colourful life.
White was one of Lado’s colours
Summer and winter Lado wore sharp-pointed white shoes with platform heels which he never took off but preserved very carefully from the dusty muddy roads of the garbage hills. In his back pocket he carried a dark red velvet cloth to polish them up when they got dusty. On the strength of his first winnings from gambling he had two black satin waistcoats made with belted backs. A metal buckle shaped like a devil’s head with sharp horns was fastened to his waistcoat belt. And round his neck he hung one of the devil heads on a solid shining chain. His fondness for lace and pink showed in his shirt. He embellished the upper half of his body with a dawn-pink shirt with cuffs made from three layers of ruffled lace. His jacket with its broad rounded lapels and flared trousers of black and white stripes were chosen in the best taste. The final touch was a white handkerchief in his jacket pocket, its corners displayed on his breast like an open rose. While echoes of his reputation ran through the coffeehouses he cleverly created a new image. He gave up the laugh that sounded like wooden logs thudding from a horse-drawn cart and put on a fixed smile fit for a hero. At every fountain he saw he got into the habit of washing his hands a long long time. Then with a shake of his shoulders he drew the white handkerchief from his pocket and dried his hands on it.
Lado — a butterfly with spangled wings
He had meant to live for many years with his first wife whose fragrance, he believed, came from the flowers of her native village. But one evening Lado’s wife used a hot iron on the black nylon socks he wore inside his white shoes. Lado angrily grabbed the crumpled socks and dragged his wife outside. With tears in her eyes she tried to clutch his flared trousers, but Lado’s ears were stopped with anger, and he was deaf to his wife’s entreaties. Though later on he gave way to the insistence of the go-betweens and consented to make up with his wife, he was not willing to renew his marriage. He took the care of their children upon himself and gave her only friendship.
Ten days after separating from his first wife Lado began to lust after the sister of another gambler who was making a name for himself on the garbage mounds. Burning with this passion and unable to bear the agony, he got himself engaged. His fiancée made him an embroidered necktie covered with coloured sequins and beads, and Lado wore it with his pink shirt. For the wedding he took over the three biggest coffeehouses. After the wedding to which Kurd Cemal’s men, together with the gamblers of the garbage hills, paid a visit and distributed largesse, Lado failed to appear in the coffeehouses for seven days. In the following nights his weary smile made everyone at the gaming tables envious. He leaned back stretching his legs to full length. But this wife gave Lado’s dawn-pink shirt to the mice to eat. He did not forgive her carelessness, and affecting a nervous blink, divorced her too.
His two matrimonial disappointments made him take a third ‘wife’ without marrying her. The bride came quietly and was made known to Lado’s closest friends in a very simple ceremony. Lado offered sweets to his friends while his wife sat shyly on the divan. As she was lame Lado forbade this wife to go out. For months she submitted to his orders but became depressed at being stuck between four walls and went to a wedding without telling Lado. Lado claimed that he had come home and found the pots and pans empty and had gone to bed hungry that night, so he took his third wife home to her father as quietly as he had brought her.
He went far afield in search of a fourth wife, found one and brought her from her own country. He agreed to pay a large price for his young bride who lacked three more years to be half his age. But soon after he decided to write his autobiography she became victim, according to Lado, to her own insensitivity and foolishness.
Once Lado became an inveterate gambler he fell for the exciting tales and rumours he had generated and got it into his head to make a novel out of his life-story. Till then he had read only a slim, yellow-paged book of Karacaoǧlan’s life and poems. So he went off to visit one of Kurd Cemal’s men who worked in the municipal office, got one of his books and soaked himself in it. He started to record in a secret notebook the recollections which he had put in order in his head, but then lost heart during the exercise. News spread on the garbage hills, however, that Lado was going to write a novel. Too late he realized that he had subjected his carefully-clad body to a heavy responsibility. Everyone who heard that Lado was to write a novel knocked at his door, and the gamblers of the hut community competed to encourage him. Through a justifiable mistake the story of Lado’s life was understood by the hut people to be the history of the garbage hills. Invitations began to pour in and in the houses he visited people placed cushions under his feet and at his back. He was moved by the quavering voices of the people as they vied with one another in telling the thousand and one sad tales of their experiences. He felt he owed something to the hut people when they said, ‘Let’s all make a nice novel together’. So he decided to write the story of his own life at least, if not of the garbage hills. Every day he got up from his usual gambler’s sleep two hours earlier and shut himself in his back room. Six months later he had managed to write the first half page of his novel. He made his gambler friends and other dilettantes in the coffeehouse read the half page he had written. Those who read it declared that Lado’s novel would be one of the greatest ever written. He picked up speed when he saw the smiles on people’s faces as they read his half page and he shut himself up confidently in his room and for a whole month forgot the way to the coffeehouses. On waking every day he grabbed his pencil and settled down with his paper. During that month he never took a comb to his greying hair; he never took off his pyjamas which got worn out at the knees, and he wandered around his house in a dream without looking at his wife and children. He was unaware of the rising anger in his wife’s eyes. She finally lost her temper as he wandered about abstractedly in a totally different fantasy house. She stood in the way of his daydreams and planted herself before him with clenched fists. He was overcome by fury at her shrieks. Breathing rapidly he leapt on her and showed her what it meant to disturb the delicate balance of a mind hanging by a thread between dreams and reality. She lay on the floor like an empty sack which Lado left lying as he clung to the curtains and walls. He rushed out, leaving the children yelling with fear.