Maulana was absent the whole day. The next day when he came, he looked upset. Basharat wanted to ask questions, but he didn’t dare. No one had the courage to ask where Balban had been shot. People say that animals know when they are about to die. So did he try to run away when he was being led into the desolate foothills? Sometimes miracles happen at the very last moment. He had been a very hard-working, tough, and courageous animal. It was hard to believe that he would have gone quietly.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
9.
Ah! Ah! It’s Raining Again!
About two weeks later, Basharat ran into Tahir Ali Mussa Bhai in front of Spencer Eye Hospital. Mussa Bhai was a Bohri, and his lumber store was so close to Basharat’s that if he threw a stone it would land on his golden turban. I give this example because on many occasions Basharat had wanted to throw a stone at him. He was very arrogant. He was always after Basharat’s customers, and he spread rumours about him. In fact, he wanted to ruin Basharat’s business and buy his store. His scraggly beard was curled inward like a parrot’s beak.
He said, ‘Basharat, sir! Last month I heard you were going to have your horse killed. I said, “No way! This is definitely murder!” That horse was Duldul during Asharah [Muharram]. There’s a guy, Turab Ali, who works my power-saw. He said that the procession went right by his shack. It was your horse! Exactly the same. 100 %. Turab Ali fed it milk and jalebis out of his own two hands. That day your driver spared no one. He raked in fifty rupees. He said that his boss wanted to turn Duldul into a taxi. He walked in front singing “The King of Men” and “The Lion of God” and so on. That was fifteen more rupees. He even brought the horse over to me to say “hi.” The man’s got a big family.’
The next day Maulana didn’t come to work. It rained for two days straight. Four days before that, when Radio Karachi had seen the first drops of rain, they started raining down the songs of the monsoon. If the songs hadn’t told them it was the rainy season, then, in Karachi, they wouldn’t have known. But if you call the rainy season by the words ‘June’ and ‘July,’ monsoon songs won’t have the same romantic air. Basharat smiled. That morning, while leaving the house, he had told his wife, ‘Begum, you should fry some things up today. I’ve missed eating the monsoon foods in Karachi — crispy samosas, crunchy papad, and kachoris. I’ve gotten flabby eating Karachi papayas.’ That evening, as he was about to close the shop, a man came with the news that Maulana’s father had died the night before. He had been buried that afternoon. We belong to God, and to God we shall return. It was good. God had heard his cries. His years of agony were over. He was finally home. In fact, he had been raised up from the muck and buried in solid ground. He went straight to Maulana’s to offer his condolences. The rain had stopped, and the moon had come out. It seemed as though the moon was running quickly through the sky while the clouds were locked in place. The bricks, stones, and Dalda cans that made the paths through the muck were drowned in places. A group of butt-naked children were taking turns putting their mouths on top of the small opening of a water pot to sing film songs; as they did so, the pot bobbed up and down in the watery muck. In front of a collapsed shack, a man with an awful voice was singing the call to prayer so that the rain would stop. He stretched out so many syllables that it seemed like he was using the call to prayer as an excuse to sing the beginning of a classical raga. He had jammed his fingers up to the first knuckle into his ears so that he would escape having to experience the torment of hearing his own voice. The previous week the same man had stood in front of his shack and had sung the call to prayer in order to bring the rain. But, that day, small groups of children were going door-to-door singing, ‘Please, God, make it rain. Please, God, let it rain. All the ponds, wells, and jars are dry! God! Rain! Rain! Rain!’ And for this, they were being roundly scolded.
It was a strange state of helplessness. In one direction, the roofs made of matting, burlap sacks, reed mats, and scrap-paper were sinking under the weight of the water. In another direction, the men of the houses were patching one tattered mat with parts of another tattered mat. One man was pouring tar onto a burlap sack to make a tarp to cover his sick mother’s charpoy. Another man’s shack had completely collapsed. He couldn’t figure out where to begin repairing it. And so he started hitting a child. Here and there people were making drains whose function seemed to be to separate their muck from their neighbours.’ One man had thrust his arm (up to his armpit) into a sack of wet flour to see if any of it was still dry or whether it had all become dough. Outside one hut, monsoon flies were sitting on top of a heap of goat’s guts, and, like lazy aide-de-camps, they weren’t budging even when a scabby dog tried to shoo them away. These were the guts of a milk-giving (but old and dying) goat, that, just a little while before, had been slaughtered by three neighbours a metre in front of her two-month-old kid so that she wouldn’t die before she could be killed halal style. Her blood had spread through the network of drains into the far distance. The three men were congratulating themselves for having prevented their brother’s rightful earnings from going to waste at the last minute. How cleverly they had stolen the goat from death’s jaws! In several shacks, they would eat meat for the first time in months. Basharat was most taken aback when he passed in front of one shack in which girls were singing wedding songs. He couldn’t see anymore the colourful paper flags that had been hung outside, but the burlap was still stained with the streaks of their colours in psychedelic patterns. One girl was accompanying the singers on a large, flat bowl used for kneading flour.
Mom, send my brother because the rain has come!
Mom, send my brother because the rain has come!
The rain has come!
After every refrain, the girls laughed uncontrollably. Laughing while singing, and singing while laughing, the girls would lose themselves and become mixed up in the crazy hopes of youth. Actually, the giggling of these inexperienced girls was the cutest thing about the song.
In front of one shack, a man and wife were wringing out a quilt. The wife’s wet veil was hanging from her; it looked like an elephant’s trunk. Because of the rain, the twenty thousand people in the area hadn’t been able to light a cooking fire for two days. In the low-lying areas, shacks stood in water that went up to people’s knees. In front of the first row of shacks, a well-intentioned, God-fearing, bearded elderly man was trying to distribute the qorma and tandoori bread that he had brought in a rickshaw. He had also brought three quilts to distribute to the needy. But, leaving the house, he had had no idea that bringing three quilts to an area of twenty thousand people was like trying to put out a fire by squirting water from a syringe. But it was also true that no shack had even a dry island of two metres on which someone could lie down, pull the quilt on top, and go to sleep. The old man was surrounded by a crowd of two hundred butt-naked children to whom he was trying to explain the benefits of forming a line. But these illiterate, thick-skulled kids were better with numbers than the old man because their internal mathematician knew very well that if you divide thirty pieces of bread by two hundred hungry people, and three quilts by twenty thousand needy people, then the quotient will be nothing more than the old man’s body stripped to the bone. And things were becoming something like this. Basharat pressed on, and he noticed that there wasn’t a single shack from which he didn’t hear the crying of children. For the first time, he understood that the cries of children emanate from the guts. In half the shacks, children were being beaten because they were crying; in the other half, they were crying because they were being beaten.