Maulana set up purdah conditions in the house — meaning, Noor Jahan covered her sick mother from head to foot in a greasy blanket and made her lie down — and then Basharat was asked inside. Both men sat at the foot of the charpoy, dangling their feet off its edge. On the charpoy’s foot there rested an embossed tray with a blue, enamelware kettle and two cups. Maulana filled a cup with a little tea, which he used to clean the cup by rubbing his finger vigorously this way and that. Then he filled the cup to the rim and offered it to Basharat. Basharat might not have felt such revulsion had that finger not have been smeared with muck just a short while before. As Maulana bent over to hand him the tea, his beard smelled like a sewer.
Then he started talking again, but Basharat no longer had enough courage to raise his head to meet his gaze: ‘The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals gives me sixty rupees as a salary. I’ve a son. He’s seven. He’s the smartest, most muscular, and best looking of my kids. Four months ago, he had a terrible fever for three days. On the fourth day, his left leg went limp. I took him to the doctor’s. He said it was polio. He wrote a prescription for a course of shots. Thank God that polio took only one leg. In the neighbourhood, in a shack just four down that way, it took both legs of one young girl. It’s an epidemic. Whatever happens is God’s will. The girl doesn’t have a father. Where will she get the money to go to the doctor? I gave her three of the shots meant for my son. I can’t tell you how her widowed mother has thanked me. I pray five times a day for that girl. Every Friday, I massage my son’s leg, and her legs as well, with a mixture of wild pigeon blood, and clove and almond oil. And then there are the doctor’s treatments. Whatever money I’ve taken from your driver has been for this.’
Basharat felt as though his mind had gone blank. Sickness, sickness, sickness! Did people here do anything other than producing numberless children and sicknesses? In the past half hour, Basharat hadn’t said any more than a dozen sentences. Maulana had held the floor. One question kept coming back to Basharat: Were all the shacks like this? Did everyone live such a miserable life?
Maulana went on, ‘Please consider it a loan. Your driver said, “My boss told me to tell that bearded mullah that he’ll give him a thrashing that he’ll never forget.” You see all this. The raincloud is our blanket and this filth is our bed. What could be worse? I prayed to God that I would earn money legally and speak the truth — that I wouldn’t have to stoop to anything to provide food. I’m a sinner. My prayers didn’t come true. God knows everything. This morning, I ate one piece of bread for breakfast. If even one morsel has passed through my lips since then, call me a liar. He gives more than is enough food to whomever He wishes. He says, “You are so helpless, so pitiful, that if a fly picked a piece of food from your hand, you wouldn’t be able to get it back.” ’
Maulana lifted his kurta to show his caved-in stomach. It rose and fell like bellows. Basharat lowered his gaze.
Maulana continued: ‘For quite a while, I’ve been trying to join the disciples of Hazrat Zaheen Shah Taji. A neighbour that wants to marry that widow, and thinks that I’m an obstacle in the way, wrote an anonymous letter to His Holiness saying that I take bribes. Now His Holiness tells me that Hazrat Baba Fareeduddin Ganj-e-Shakar (God’s blessings be onto him) says that an honest income is Islam’s sixth pillar. He has told me that he won’t take me on as a disciple until I have paid back all of the bribe-money. God have mercy on me! Please pray for me!’
Maulana stood with his hands locked in supplication. His off-white kurta was stained with tears that formed a pattern like a black, chain necklace. Basharat put his hands on top of Maulana’s.
5.
Two Lonely Souls
A week later Maulana Karamat Hussain was working at Basharat’s shop as a secretary, and as he carried around a measuring tape and sized up different planks of Himalayan cedar and pine, he looked quite happy. His salary was three times greater than before. After three or four days, Basharat had to say something, ‘Maulana, being honest is a good thing, but please don’t stare at the wood’s burls as though you’re inspecting a wound on a horse’s neck.’ There had been no need to fire Rahim Bakhsh, the driver; as soon as Maulana came to work the first day, he vanished on his own.
Still, no one came forth to buy the horse. As a favour to Maulana, the Cruelty Cops stopped coming after the horse. Basharat insinuated to his father that the tickets had stopped because of his prayers, and so he should relocate from the living room back to his bedroom. But his father had grown so accustomed to performing the morning rituals with the horse that he wasn’t ready to stop. As soon as the horse saw the old man, he would, in driver-talk, start to ‘buchiyana’—that is, he would perk up so much that his ears touched at their tips. First thing in the morning, the horse would be led into the living room with insistence and ritual punctuality; as soon as the cry ‘the horse is coming’ went up in the house, then anyone who cared about their religion, their person, or anything else for that matter, would step out of the way and watch the spectacle from a safe distance. This reminded me of the bride and bridegroom ritual. When the groom is called into the women’s quarters, the cry is raised over and over, ‘The boy is coming! The boy is coming!’ When the girls and women in purdah hear this, they raise their veils and stare with their faces as wide as washing tubs. The suspicion that some old men get married only to hear ‘The boy is coming!’ doesn’t seem that far-fetched, because, otherwise, when it comes to marriage and the duties of conjugal life,
What sinner finds pleasure there?
Basharat’s father wrote ‘Allah’ on the horse’s forehead. He had already switched to blowing holy breaths on the horse’s hooves and massaging them. He had started complaining about the members of the household by name while he combed the horse’s mane, and from that day forward it was no longer a relationship between man and animal. Basharat’s father would recount his new problems and then fall quiet, and the horse would brush his face against the half-paralysed man’s body, and then lower his head as though he were saying, ‘Baba, now you seem worse off than me!’ Basharat’s father would say, ‘I feel like I’m getting feeling back in my left leg.’
Long story short, Basharat’s father stopped treating the horse like a horse. And, for the horse’s part, he had grown so close to the old man that he no longer seemed human. Basharat’s father no longer called him a horse. Instead, he called him Balban or ‘my son.’ Whenever they met, it was worth watching and listening, it was
As though a crazy fakir showed up at another crazy fakir’s house.
One day, Basharat’s father said that the horse was suffering from chronic osteoarthritis. (He used an Arabic phrase for this diagnosis.) Then he elucidated this comment by saying that his joints were jammed. So, in order to unjam the joints, he had a brazier brought into the living room where, under his supervision, he had gheekawar halva made from three kilos of cream and pure ghee, which he ate for forty days, thus reactivating his appetite. He had also begun to say that the horse was possessed by djinns. In order to cure him, every Thursday he would burn chilli incense and distribute the best qalaqand sweets to the deserving. That is, he ate half of it himself and sent the other half over to his friend Chaudhuri Karam Ilahi’s house. He went on eating qalaqand and saying that some djinns were never satisfied. The ex-driver Rahim Bakhsh also had taken to saying that it wasn’t a horse but a djinn, and that corrupt men couldn’t see djinns. According to him, one morning he hadn’t been able to take Balban into the living room in the morning, and so after sunset prayers, the horse snapped his tether, went in by himself to get blessed by the holy breath, and then came back. When he brought his food, he couldn’t believe what he saw. His hooves had turned into camphor, and they radiated such dazzling rays that you couldn’t look at them straight on. The smoke of frankincense was streaming out of his nostrils. Abdullah, the snack vendor, swore on Rahim Bakhsh’s good name that as this was happening, he saw the horse in Clifton in front of Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s tomb. On his back was a bearded holy man wearing green robes and radiating light.