4.
Below Sea Level and the Poverty Line
Basharat grew sick of the continual tickets. He thought, ‘What a joke! This is the only crime left in all of Pakistan! Enough is enough!’ Now he wasn’t going to rest until things were set right. By this time, he had already met Maulana Karamat Hussain, and he was no longer terrified of him: he was a midget an inch short of five feet, and his neck was about as thick as Basharat’s wrist. On his round face and small forehead, pockmarks shined like dings on a copper pot. Having discovered where he lived, he was going to tell him off. He had prepared everything he was going to say, as well as his hand gestures and vocal inflections. He was going to grab his beard and say, ‘So you go around showing off your half-finished trademark on your forehead. Why don’t you go to a smith’s and have it branded on so you don’t have to bother hitting your forehead on the ground five times a day?’ He remembered the witty words apropos beards that some black-hearted man had coined: ‘The eaves of the sacred…’ All his sarcasm was tied to praying and having a beard, as though those things were the real sin! He would go on, ‘You think you’re special? I’ve squashed a million lice like you. You religious perverts eat your halva and pulao and stroke each other’s beards and think you’re sitting on the right hand of God the Almighty! And you call yourself Muslim! If I decide to show you what I’m made of, I’ll have you cough up each and every cent that you’ve swallowed!’ His rehearsals were so specific that he had already decided to ask God for forgiveness right before uttering the ‘right hand of God’ line.
He got to Liyari, but then he had a hard time finding Maulana Karamat Hussain’s shack. The directions that he had got were accurate. Look for electricity pole #23, go behind it, to the other side of the mud pit. (They had been waiting for three years for electricity.) Then, on the right, look for a pregnant brown water buffalo. It would be around there. In areas like this, there are no roads or streets, no alleys or footpaths. There are no house-numbers or — names. Each house has its own personal, identifying character. While he was looking for the electricity pole, he suddenly saw the name Karamat Hussain written in red ink on a piece of burlap serving as a shack’s door. The effects of rain had turned the good calligraphy into something like the khatt-e-ghubar style [big letters filled with flourishes]. This, the worst of the Karachi slums, was several metres below sea level and the poverty line. The sea was held back by a dike of human bodies. Alkaline water rose from the ground so that wood and steel rotted in just a couple of months. The reek of the dead sea permeated the wind, and this was worse than the stench of rotten fish. There was knee-deep mud in every direction. Basharat didn’t see dry land anywhere. To make a pathway through this, people had placed stones and bricks. A — year-old girl was approaching with a bucket of water on her head that was heavier than she was; by moving her neck and waist, she was balancing her feet on the loose stones and the bucket on her head. Sweat streamed down her face. Everyone told her to walk carefully. Every so often, there was a traffic island of five or six bricks, where people waited to let others pass. And inside the shacks, it proved to be more of the same. Kids, the elderly, and the sick clung to stilt-legged cots. The Holy Quran, folded up bedrolls, pots and pans, paperwork from abandoned property, and high-school diplomas were kept in bamboo scaffolding underneath a tarp on top of which were kept chickens. In one corner, Maulana Karamat Hussain had set up a brazier on top of a little mound of earth. A goat was tethered to the leg of one cot. In front of some of the shacks, water buffalos waded in the mud, and their backs were coated with mud-plaster. It was heaven for them. No one picked up their dung because there were no walls or dry land on which to dry the dung into cakes. The dung disappeared into the muck along with human excrement. Inside these shacks, Basharat saw the tin milk canisters recognizable from the white-tiled dairy shops of Saddar. A lame dog stood outside a shack. When he suddenly shook himself, the flies that had been sitting on his wounds and the half-dried mud flicked off and onto Basharat’s shirt and face. For those readers who never saw Bihar Colony, Chakiwada, and Liyari back in those days, it might be difficult to imagine how people not only live in such filthy places but also give birth there as well. I haven’t seen such foul places even in East Pakistan. There, while people might not be any different, at least nature is better. The sun, the water, and the wind clean and purify each and every thing: the scorching sun, the sandstorms, the monsoons that fall like children’s tears, the floods of the foaming sea, the cyclones. What’s a quicker and more thorough — a more merciless and surefire — disinfectant than them? I will never forget two images from Barisal. It’s like they were engraved in my mind with an acid pen.
My Golden Bengal!
In 1967, I had the chance to travel through East Pakistan by car and ferry. Out of the seven hundred miles across which my journey took me, there wasn’t one eighth-of-a-mile stretch where I didn’t see a half dozen people walking along. On average, only one out of twenty wore sandals. And I never saw anyone whose clothes covered their entire body, except for corpses! I saw three funeral processions where the shroud was made by tying together two lungis of different colours. In another procession, an old man was holding a broken umbrella above the corpse. This was the father of the young boy who had died. He was crying, and the rain was streaming off his beard. We were passing through Barisal. The humidity was unbelievable. We were dying from thirst. Drinking water or lemonade was out of the question because cholera was sweeping through the area. It was one funeral procession after another. A close friend of mine said that if I was in the mood to commit suicide, then I could go buy anything to eat and that would be it. A Bengali friend said to me about coconuts the same thing that Ghalib said about mangos:
By God’s command
Sealed glasses filled with honey have been sent…
This friend told me that germs can’t get into coconuts; that instead of drinking water, I should drink coconut water; and that it’s good for ulcers, too. I bought two coconuts for six paise each. My driver asked the coconut-seller for water. He drank it, and then he put his coconut in the trunk. Then I broke my coconut. The coconut had very tender, soft flesh. The water of green coconuts is very pleasant, good for digestion, and sweet. After drinking its water, I flung the shell onto a trash heap. I bought a pack of Three Castle cigarettes from a paan shop. When I opened the pack, I saw that they were extremely old and withered. Bugs had eaten little holes in the cigarettes, and so I had problems drawing on them from time to time. In our culture, you get ‘treated’ to cigarettes like these only in those houses where the man of the house doesn’t smoke: during Eid, he tests the throats and morality of his guests by forcing upon them the cigarettes he bought the previous Eid. It made me think about which sneaky little bugger it was that ate tobacco to sustain itself. We can treat cancer by making a soup or paste of them!