Kids were gushing forth from every nook and cranny. Such a big family, and only one salary! Basharat couldn’t believe it.
The entire universe is one big net of children
A Wall Has Just Collapsed
A little while later, Maulana appeared. He carefully stepped from brick to wobbly brick through the muck. The uncertain path forced everyone to walk like a woman juggler walking on a tightrope at the circus. And what a sight she is! She balances herself with an open umbrella. And if she sways just a little, the spectators hold their breaths. God knows if Maulana saw Basharat and so got startled, or whether his wooden sandal just slipped, but he stumbled to the right, where, in his hand, he was carrying a glass of blessed water. His lungi and beard were slimed with muck, and it looked like his hand was wearing a muck sock. His son poured water from a dirty little pot for him to wash his hands and face. (Without soap.) He daubed clean his rosary, hands, and face with his cotton scarf; then he shook Basharat’s hand and stood with head bowed. Basharat was already defeated. His rehearsed, sarcastic remarks about his beard, praying, and his forehead’s permanent prayer scar drowned in the muck, and his witticism about ‘the eaves of the sacred’ sank as well into the fermenting funk. He wanted more than anything to flee. But whoever tries to flee through such muck ends up sinking into it as quickly as they tread.
Basharat couldn’t figure out where to begin. Faced with this dilemma, he happened to scratch his lip with his right hand, the very hand with which, just a little while earlier, he had reluctantly shook hands; smelling his hand, he felt like throwing up. After this, he made sure not to touch his clothes and person. Maulana guessed why Basharat was there. He took the initiative and admitted that he was taking money from his cart-driver Rahim Bakhsh in order to pay for medicine for a neighbour’s girl. He also said that before he had been hired, it was customary for Rahim Bakhsh to keep half of the ticket-money, but now everything that Basharat spent reached him. Rahim Bakhsh got nothing. That was because one day he had given the driver an amulet for his wife, and God had cured her. God alone is the cure, God alone. He gives life, and He takes life. So Rahim Bakhsh had become his devotee. He was a very miserable person.
Maulana also told him that whenever Basharat ordered Rahim Bakhsh to use detours to avoid getting tickets and so having to pay bribes, he would forewarn the Cruelty Cops. He was always willingly and happily caught. In fact, it went so far that when one of their officers caught pneumonia and had to stay home for three weeks, Rahim Bakhsh ended up coming to the office to ask why we hadn’t given him a ticket in so long. Was everything OK?
Basharat did ask him a couple of questions about his driver, but now he had no desire to confront Maulana. So he continued, and Basharat listened in shame, ‘My dad broke his hip two years ago. Take a look at him. He can’t even sit up. I’ve cut the charpoy. Since he’s always lying down, he’s developed fistulas. One’s so deep that I can stick my entire finger into it. It’s so wide that I can see a vein inside that’s as thick as twine. It’s always emitting puss. While cleaning it, I’ve thrown up several times. I’ve put Dalda [vegetable oil] cans filled with water underneath the charpoy’s legs so that red ants won’t climb into his wounds again. My neighbour is often at my throat. He says my father snores all day and screams all night, and that because of the reek coming from his wounds, they aren’t able to eat. And he’s right. Only a reed mat separates our homes. By God’s good grace, four months ago we had another boy. He is God’s gift. God gives pearls without asking; people don’t give anything even to those forced to beg. God increases the number of the Prophet’s people. After my wife gave birth, she had white leg disease. She still can’t walk. It’s God’s will. I put her in a rickshaw and took her to Jinnah Hospital. They said, ‘You have to admit her to the hospital right away. But there’s no beds here.’ I took her back after a month. This time they said, ‘You bring her now? She’s been sick for so long. We can’t admit someone like her.’ So I’ve learned to live with it. God’s will is my will. I clean their bedpans before morning and sunset prayers. After praying, I cook some food so the kids will have something in their stomachs. Once, when Noor Jahan was warming some goat’s milk for her mom, her clothes caught on fire. Thanks be to God — a million thanks — that I’m still healthy.’
Basharat reached a new plane of existence. He neither smelled the stink nor felt like throwing up. He was numb.
What could we understand?
But we listened to the story of the world anyway.
When we understood
We didn’t want to hear any more.
Maulana said, ‘A midwife is treating her. She’s prescribed a paste of black nightshade, Turkish gum mastic, sparrow brains, and opium. She’s a very compassionate woman. After morning and sunset prayers, I bring a glass of blessed water from the mosque. Even the rich and famous don’t have the good fortune to be blessed by the breaths of two hundred men who have just prayed. But maybe God doesn’t want to heal them. God’s will is above all else.’
In that half hour, Basharat heard mention of God’s will more than he had heard in the previous ten years. Listening to Maulana made it seem like everything that happened in that godforsaken place was God’s will.
And at the end of the tunnel, all he saw was darkness. Only Dante could portray such a hopeless, helpless, dark, dismal place.
Dirty Hands
Then all of a sudden, as though he had just remembered something, Maulana excused himself and went inside. Outside, Basharat was soon lost in thought, ‘In this open-air shack without rooms and without curtains, without walls and without doors, where sounds, groans, and thoughts are bared to all, and where probably even dreams aren’t private, here, in one corner, an old man is dying, and there, in another corner, a baby is being born, and in between the girls are growing up. My brother! When you’re already accepting bribes, what’s the problem with asking for a little bigger bribe so that you can take your wife to the hospital? Even liquor isn’t forbidden, if it’s a matter of life and death. Who’ll cook? Who’ll sweep the floor? How will the kids eat?’ Maulana said that the day after delivering the child, his wife was up, cooking for the kids, and washing clothes. Basharat started to think about how history was full of encomiums written to the Tartar warrior women who, according to Arab Shah, had fought shoulder to shoulder and spear to sword with Timur’s army. If a woman began to go into labour, she first let the rest of the cavalry pass. Then she dismounted from her horse and gave birth. Then she made a swaddling cloth, tied it around her neck, and with the baby inside, mounted the horse, and, riding bareback, caught up with the forces. But who is going to write the elegies of these women who die without complaint in their shacks? Basharat felt like he was suffocating. Up till then, Maulana hadn’t even taken 150 rupees. He shouldn’t have come. He began to think about the effects of the blessed water. Now the poor woman was suffering from one disease, but after drinking the blessed water — breathed on by two hundred men — she would have a hundred more.