And he was right. Afterwards, no one could figure out just what it was. A transport for taking accused prisoners to court? A dogcatcher’s wagon? The bloody truck ferrying fresh carcasses from the slaughterhouse? It didn’t resemble anything he had ever seen, not even remotely. The mechanic assured him that if he stared at it from dawn to dusk, then after three months he would get used to it. This got Mirza to say, ‘Well, aren’t you brilliant — this is hardly his wife!’ He had the words on the back of his former car (and present truck) painted over, ‘Keep going, old truck, God may see you home yet.’ He also didn’t like the next line, ‘Pappu Yar, don’t bother me.’ Chaudhuri Karam Deen, the painter, said, ‘Sir, if you don’t like these names, then please pick some you like, and I’ll paint them in.’ He also had the following notorious couplet wiped out:
An adversary wishes a million harms, but what happens?
God’s will alone is what happens.
After these emendations and excisions, whatever was left might have been God’s will, but Basharat sure didn’t approve of it.
The car’s body was ungainly. But after the engine was rebored, all his worries vanished. Now it had the sort of unnecessary and ill-timed agility, as well as the showy healthiness, which those about to retire display when they decide to stay on for a little longer, or that some old people show after they get remarried: they jog while going to the bathroom; they bound up stairs two at a time. From the very first day, he put this truck-like car, or car-like truck, into lumber-delivery service, which lasted from nine in the morning to six in the evening. He multiplied that day’s haul, meaning 45 rupees (which is like 450 rupees today), by thirty days; then he multiplied the day’s haul by 365 days, and so he got 16,425 rupees. He told himself, ‘And when the car itself cost only 3,483 rupees, are you insane? This isn’t a day’s haul, it’s a life’s haul!’ So he started cursing himself for his foolishness — why hadn’t he switched it to a truck earlier? But there is a time for each and every foolishness. Suddenly the line ‘God’s will alone is what happens’ came to mind, and he couldn’t help but smile.
It’s Mine Too
Somehow the vehicle kept running for about a month, but the exhilaration he felt whenever he thought about the astronomical figure died out. He had to send it back to the auto-body shop ten times. The mechanic had guaranteed it would work for a month. That said, Basharat had had to pay for the donkey-carts with his own money. The driver of the donkey-cart came every morning to enquire when and where he would be needed that day. Then one day Basharat had had loaded two customers’ lumber worth 7,000 rupees, and, at ten in the morning, he sent off Khalifa to make the deliveries. It must have been around two when he came back trembling and shaking. He kept using his hand-towel to wipe his face, and he kept sniffling loudly. He said, ‘Boss, I’ve been robbed. I’m ruined. May God please take me now!’ Basharat guessed that his chronically ill wife had died. He consoled him, ‘No one can interfere with God’s will. Bear with it the best you can… God’s will alone…’ But Basharat’s apprehension subsided when Khalifa recited, ‘ “When I cry, the world laughs. / When I say nothing, the world stabs me.” Boss, my heart is crying tears of blood!’ That was because if a person is able to use poetry and use idioms while lamenting occasions of great distress and suffering, then he doesn’t want your sympathy — he wants you to appreciate his eloquence. When Khalifa stuffed his hand-towel into his mouth and began to cry, yelling reproaches at himself, Basharat suddenly realized that whatever bad had happened hadn’t happened to that bastard; it had happened to him! He said, ‘OK, what is it? What’s my problem now?’
During his fake sobbing, he managed to say, ‘It’s mine too!’ just like in the commercial for Habib Bank where men of every age and province hug the bank in their own way, and then a little, cute kid lisps, ‘It’s mine too!’ Then he told the whole story. The truck was overloaded. Even first gear wouldn’t work. He managed to get the truck out of the road on the strength of kids’ pushing and his praying. But then some spring busted. In order to lighten the load, he took out half the wood and stacked it very neatly next to the steps leading into a mosque. And then he set out to deliver the rest of the wood to Nazimabad No. 4. But no one was at the construction site. So without dropping off the wood, he went back to the mosque. Once there, he saw that the wood he had left was gone! He said, ‘Boss, I’ve been robbed in broad daylight! I’m ruined!’
They Are Old-Timers; Don’t Talk Back to Them
Now Basharat began to regret his foolishness: why had he loaded into a ramshackle car goods worth twice the car’s amount? Too bad thieves hadn’t made off with the car. Then he would have been free of it. But he thought that it must have been due to Khalifa’s old habit. He had probably parked the car somewhere with all the goods still in it, then gone off to shave someone, perform some circumcision, or gone to some wedding to collect congratulations money from a customer just because he had shown up. He had done things like this a thousand times. Suddenly he remembered the Persian saying, ‘Mountains will get up and move before you teach an old dog new tricks.’ And he remembered that it had been Master Fakhir Hussain who had used this phrase on him. He had been acting up in class, and so Master Fakhir Hussain had called him ‘buznah’ and then had crucified him with this Persian saying. When calling him ‘buznah’ had no effect at all, Master Sahib asked what the word meant. He went through the class one by one, asking each boy. No one knew. So he made everyone stand on the benches and said, ‘You worthless rascals! You’ll be the death of me! “Buznah”—“b”—“u”—“z”—“n”—“ah”—the crying out in sadness “ah”—not the “halva” and “bastard” one — a “buznah” is a monkey — got it?’ He thought to himself, ‘My, such were the times, and such were the teachers! They explained the meaning of even the most absurd words. Even when they were mad, they abided by the prerogatives of education. They didn’t just curse you out, they also told you the curse words’ spellings and meanings. Where can you find such cranks today?’
Then Basharat said, ‘Yes, I remember something else. Once for Urdu dictation he made us write something like, “Scholars are well respected in our culture.” But I made a spelling mistake, and Master Fakhir Hussain bent over laughing for quite a while. Then he grabbed me by the ear and ordered me to write what I had written on the blackboard, “Go show everyone how you’ve written the plural of scholar.” (My spelling mistake had turned the meaning of “scholar” [fuzala] to “shit” [fuzlah].) After I wrote it, he set the end of his five-foot-long pointer on the “ah” at the end of the word. Then he said, “Son, today I won’t make you stand on the bench. That’s because you, a boy, have summarized the quintessence of scholarship.” Sir, it was none other than Master Fakhir Hussain who taught me how to get to the gist of something and how to call “reality” “quintessence.” ’
6.
It Turned Out to Be My Fault
He went straight to the Bolton Road Police Station to file a report. But a duty officer there told Basharat to go to the station where he lived and file an FIR [First Information Report] there. When he got there, they said, ‘Sir, of course you can file an FIR in the neighbourhood where you live, on the condition that you’ve committed a crime. Go to the station in the neighbourhood where the incident took place, and file your report there.’ He went there, and they said, ‘The incident happened on the boundary between two precincts. Of course, the mosque is in our precinct, but its steps are in the adjoining precinct.’ He went there, and he couldn’t find anyone, except a man with a bloody forehead. His right hand had suffered a compound fracture, and his left eye had swollen shut. He said, ‘I came to file a 324 report. I’ve been waiting for two hours. It’s absurd. The Civil Hospital says that until the station files an FIR report and gives me a copy, they can’t treat me. The wounded man was proudly holding the confiscated weapon — a walking stick with a ferrule that had split open his head. With him was his uncle, who was the secretary to a civil-court lawyer. He was assuring his nephew, ‘When he picked up the walking stick and struck you over the head, the criminal took the law into his own hands. He not only broke your head, he broke the law too. If he isn’t arrested, then I’m a bastard. He’s committed a serious crime, after all. And I’ve sent many men to jail for absolutely no reason!’ He gave Basharat the legal advice that he should go to the police station that had jurisdiction over where the accused lived, that is, where the thief lived; that that was how civil cases went. Basharat got fed up with him. He started asking this man pointed questions, and so he learned that the SHO was attending his daughter’s engagement ceremony. Most of the station was there. They would be back in an hour and a half or so. The station’s sub-inspector had been playing the role of a crossing guard since the afternoon; he was grouping schoolgirls on either side of the street because the prime minister was taking a tour of town. The head constable was out on business.