After Mr Kasmi had gone, Zébun performed her ablutions and took down the Qur’an from the top of the wardrobe. ‘Poor man,’ she said under her breath. With a clarity that defied the passing of more than three decades, the image of Gul-kalam as a twenty-year-old, leaning against the doorframe of her bedroom, remained with Zébun. She was alone in the house: the man who had had the house built — intended as a family home — had abandoned her two days before they were to be married, having decided at the last minute that the honour of his family, stretching back decades, was more important to him than his love for her, a woman of the hira mundi, the diamond market. She had turned around from making the bed and seen Gul-kalam — then unknown to her — at the entrance to the bedroom with his gaze fixed on her. The young man was not under the influence of hemp as she first thought but had drunk half a bottle of turpentine. For the next twenty minutes both of them had stared at each other across a distance of two yards without moving from their positions. The silence rang in Zébun’s ears like the noise of cicadas. The room became saturated with the metallic smell of turpentine. Then he turned around and — swaying and gently stumbling — crossed the courtyard into the street.
Zébun shook her head to dispel the memory and opened the holy book.
Rain seeped in, in regular pulses, through a crack in the roof and grew into triangular drops. Azhar had been watching the ceiling for several minutes, half asleep; now fully awake he yawned and sat up. In another cot set by the opposite wall a policeman was asleep in his underwear, using his clumsily folded uniform as a pillow. His brass whistle and beret lay beside him.
Azhar rested his feet heavily on the floor and looked around. The skull-faced barracks was a relatively recent building. Before it opened there had been no police in the town. Minor fights and scuffles were resolved by the intervention of elders; and the consequences — always bloody — of vendettas and feuds over matters of honour or land were dealt with in the cities. Politics itself had not touched the town fully until a few years before. There had been no adult franchise until the beginning of the last decade; and the five months of unrest that had forced the first ever ruler to resign had been confined to the cities. It was only when the country’s third chief martial-law administrator sentenced to death his immediate predecessor — the only democratically elected prime minister since independence — that police stations began appearing everywhere, even in the remotest towns and villages.
Azhar opened the door by the sleeping man’s feet and went into the lock-up. A damp, dark silence seemed trapped inside this part of the building. The cells received no natural light and a dense smell — of urine and of the monsoon — hung in the air. One cell was bare except for a bucket lying on its side and a length of iron cable undone into asterisks at either end. In the centre of the other cell Gul-kalam lay hunched, his knees drawn up to his chest. His head hair and moustache had been shaved off. Azhar stared at him through the bars, trying to locate the familiar face behind the newly transformed features. Gul-kalam had bled from his ears and nose and both corners of the mouth. An electric wire hung from the ceiling but there was no bulb. Azhar yawned deeply and, shooing away the flies, came back into the office.
‘Where are the others?’ Azhar kicked the leg of the cot.
The policeman awoke. The inspector had gone home during a let-up in the rain, and the other sergeant on duty was at the tea-stall across the street, eating breakfast.
‘Were you working on him last night?’ Azhar gestured towards the door to Gul-kalam.
The man nodded. He yawned and shook his hairy shoulders, dispelling sleep.
‘You should learn to be less noisy,’ said Azhar. ‘I couldn’t sleep for all that noise.’
The man smiled, revealing a gold incisor. ‘Lying is a sin, deputy-sahib. You were snoring like a whirlwind. I could hear you clearly through the walls.’
Azhar went outside. The rain was stopping. There were tiny water lizards — slimy, sinewy or, depending on the light, glimmering and prismatic — in the mud. Standing with his legs wide apart Azhar urinated on to the tyre of the police van. It was just past midday and between the arches of the courthouse typists were setting up their tables and chairs, machines, letter-writing manuals and almanacs. Yusuf Rao was coming along the street to open his office, his game leg lending a graceful rhythm to his hurried trot. Behind the courthouse, above the roofs and the tops of trees, were the minarets of the two mosques holding up the drizzly sky.
‘I don’t snore,’ Azhar said when he came back inside. He walked around the desk and settled in the swivel chair. Behind him there were three rifles and cartridge belts studded with rounds. The old desk sagged creakily to one side, legs diagonal, like a puppy resisting being dragged along by schoolboys.
‘Nobody believes they snore,’ the policeman said, smiling. He was still in his shorts and vest.
The second policeman came in bearing a tray with an earthenware teapot and a small heavy cup. There was a plate of kulchas and a boiled egg. He cleared a space on the desk by pushing aside the telephone and the folders and files, and set the breakfast before Azhar.
‘So,’ Azhar said to the policeman who had brought in the tray, ‘what happened after I’d gone to sleep? What else did he say?’
The man shrugged. ‘I too left soon after you did, deputy-sahib. I couldn’t watch what these cannibals were doing.’
The remark was met with a smile from the policeman with the gold tooth. Still half dressed he was on his hands and knees mopping up water with an inadequately small piece of cloth. ‘He has no balls,’ he said over his shoulder.
The other policeman’s lips were set in a half-smile. He shrugged: ‘I’m a poet at heart really.’ And he unbuttoned the top of his shirt and briskly revealed the left side of the chest. Scrawled across the dark skin, just above the nipple, was Wamaq Saleem’s signature.
‘When did you meet him?’ Azhar asked, dislodging a crumb from between his teeth with his tongue.
‘Years ago in Lahore. I was on duty the night he was transferred from the fort in Lahore to the Montgomery prison. In the van I asked him to autograph my heart and had it tattooed in the morning.’
Outside, the inspector jumped under the shelter of the portico and, turning around, shouted into the drizzle, ‘Don’t swing your hips, son. Walk like a man.’
The small boy at whom the remark was directed looked over his shoulder with frightened eyes, then hurriedly disappeared into a small side street behind the courthouse.
The inspector was shaking his head as he entered the office. ‘He turned into a lane,’ he said as though to himself, loudly. ‘Lanes are for women. Men keep to the open streets and roads.’ He had changed into a clean uniform and his raincoat was draped over his head. He hung it behind the door and carried a stool to his desk. He looked at Azhar and asked, ‘What’s the plan for today?’
Azhar poured himself another cup of tea and broke the second kulcha in half; sesame seeds from the first floated on the surface of the tea. ‘We’ve informed all the stations. I’ll go up to Arrubakook today.’
‘What about Gul-kalam?’
‘Get him cleaned up,’ Azhar said, standing up. He dropped the piece of kulcha into the tea. ‘I’m going home to change. I’ll come back and sign a court order and take him with me. He’ll have to be signed over to them.’
He had reached the outside steps when the inspector shouted after him, ‘Maulana Hafeez has been asking around for you, DC.’