Children of Dust (2 page)

D
uring the daytime, while Pops was off working at his clinic—he was a doctor—Ammi, my little brother Flim, and I often spent the daytime hours at Beyji’s bungalow.

Beyji came from a long line of elevated people. Her father, an
imam
at a small mosque in a village in Punjab, had commanded a clan of
jinn
s that converted to Islam at his hand. The old man’s piety was so great that when he died his fingers kept moving as if they were flipping
tasbih
beads in prayer.

Beyji prayed endlessly. When she wasn’t praying, she murmured Allah’s praises—
subhanallah
and
alhamdulillah
thirty-three times each,
allahu akbar
thirty-four times. Then she repeated the set. She kept count on the individual pads of her fingers, on black beans that were stored in a number of huge vats in her room, or on the
tasbih
, the wooden rosary.

Beyji had mysterious connections with the angels. In addition to having seen the Light that time in Ramzan, she seemed to know Jibrail, the leader of the angels, quite well. “He’s the greatest angel,” she said. “He brought the Holy Quran to the Prophet in the cave of Hira. He hugged the Messenger and imparted the Word.”

“Have you seen him up close?”

“I have. He’s beautiful. He has forty thousand wings, and each of his feathers is made of light. He can pick up the entire universe on one wing.”

“How many angels are there?” I inquired.

“Millions.”

“Did the Prophet meet all the angels?”

“There are too many for him to meet, but some of the angels used to come to him during his daily life. They came in the guise of men—beautiful men—and ate with him and asked him questions that prepared him to deal with his enemies in Mecca.”

“Who’s the most important angel?” I asked.

“They’re all important. Mikail is pretty important because he maintains the history of the world in his big book. Israfil because he has the trumpet that—”

“Do you think I can meet an angel?”

“Of course you can,” she said. “The Guardians are always with you. That’s why when Muslims pray we say
Salam
to the right and the left shoulder. That’s where they sit. It’s very good to talk to your angels, but make sure you say only good things, because they have little notebooks and they write down everything you do.”

“Everything?” I asked, horrified.

“Yes.”

“Even what I do in the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“Gross.”

Learning that angels were always with me made me want to learn more about them, so I went to Ammi. She told me that Guardians came in two shifts, one that lasted from dawn to afternoon and the other that covered late afternoon to morning.

“Why is the evening shift longer?” I asked. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Beats me. Ask Allah.”

That day I laid a prayer rug and prayed for equality among the angels.

My sympathy for the angels receded, however, when one day I learned that they could be as frightening as they were beautiful.

There was the angel that killed you, said Ammi; another angel that blew the trumpet on the Last Day and destroyed the world. There were angels that worked in Dozakh, where the hellfire burned, and stirred the bodies of sinners in huge vats full of hot water; angels that put a black flag in your anus if you listened to music; angels that turned people into pillars of salt and flipped civilizations over and caused huge storms of fire. There were even angels that urinated in your mouth—“for forty days minimum”—if you used a swear word.

“Why are the angels so scary?” I asked Ammi.

“Sometimes Allah sends them out to punish the people that follow Iblis,” Ammi said. “But you see, the angels are just doing their job. Most of the time they’re very nice; they just stand around and sing Allah’s praises. It’s Iblis who is the scary one.”

“Who is Iblis?”

“The worst: Shaytan. Mankind’s mortal enemy.”

Iblis was a
jinn
that, before the creation of mankind, had been raised up to heaven because he was pious, but then he disobeyed Allah and was cast out of the Garden and now sought revenge against mankind by leading people to falsehood. He did many evil things:

If you yawned and didn’t cover your mouth, he slept under your tongue for the whole night and defecated in your throat, which gave you bad breath. If you didn’t recite
bismillah
—“in the name of God”—before eating your food, he ate all of it so you remained hungry. He was the one who told you not to take a walk around the block after dinner so you would have gas in your stomach and break your
wazu
, your ablutions, by farting. He was the one who was responsible for pulling a donkey’s tail and making it heehaw during prayers. He was the one who caused those scary shooting stars, because at night he tried to sneak into Paradise to topple the
kursi
—Allah’s throne—and the angels fended him off by throwing meteorites at him.

“You must never follow Iblis,” Ammi said. “You are Abir ul Islam, and Iblis wants to deceive Muslims.”

“I won’t. I promise. I am Abir ul Islam, and Iblis is my enemy.”

I resolved to one day join the angels that fought Iblis, and in preparation for hurling meteorites I threw my tennis ball against the wall.

O
ne day when he wasn’t working, Pops took me for a long walk alongside the canal and told me the history of Islam and Pakistan.

He told me about the British taking over Mughal India; the fall of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, which took away the protector of the Muslims; the circumstances around the creation of Pakistan, a state for Muslims who sought to avoid being dominated by the Hindus; the emergence of the Jamaat-e-Islami Party; the breakup of East and West Pakistan; the rise of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his eventual hanging at the hands of General Zia ul Haq.

“I support him,” Pops said about the general. “Because he’s a pious Muslim and because he gives unwavering support to the
mujahideen
in Afghanistan attacked by the Soviets.”

“Why did the Soviets attack Afghanistan?” I asked as we crossed a street full of sputtering blue and green motorized rickshaws.

“There are two reasons,” Pops said, giving me his pinky to hold. “First, the Soviets persecute people who follow Islam. In their country Muslims have to hide their Qurans and pretend that they are non-Muslim. Second, the Soviet Union wants to capture Afghanistan so that it can then capture a part of Pakistan and gain our warm-water port at Gwadar. They need this to attack America by sea.”

“And Zia ul Haq is helping the
mujahideen
fight the Soviet Union?”

“Yes. The
mujahideen
fight in the name of Islam, and even the world’s greatest army cannot defeat them.”

The
mujahideen
immediately inspired me. When Pops wasn’t around I’d try to talk about them with Ammi, but she didn’t listen to news and didn’t have much to say about them. However, because I insisted on hearing about
jihad
, she told me stories about the famous battles waged by the Prophet and his Companions. There was the Battle of Badr, where the Prophet and his 313 Companions held off a polytheistic army far greater in number because the Muslims were joined by scimitar-wielding angels; there was the Battle of Uhud, where the Prophet suffered a wound in his side because of the treachery of the Hypocrites; and there was the Battle of Khandaq, where the Prophet dug a trench around Medina on the advice of his Persian friend Salman, who used to be a slave but was freed by Muslims.

Because I insisted on hearing even more about the
mujahideen
, one day Ammi took me to a bookstore and bought me a children’s magazine that contained part of a serialized novella about a boy named Mahmud who lived in Kabul. His father fought against the Soviets while his mother tended to injured
mujahideen
. His little sister was mutilated when she picked up a land mine that the Soviets had disguised as a teddy bear. Mahmud wanted everyone to know that all around Afghanistan the Soviets had placed land mines that looked like toys and were causing all the little boys and girls in the country to lose appendages and eyes. He also described helicopter gunships that sprayed fire, and talked about how he dreamed of owning a missile that would allow him to take the gunships down. He wanted to liberate his land in the name of Islam. I wished I could help him.

When I was done reading that story, I desperately wanted to go and get the next part in the series, but whenever I appealed to Ammi to take me back to the bookstore, she said it was too far and there was no use getting
khajjal
in all the traffic. I went back to the story of Mahmud and read it over and over until I nearly had it memorized. Eventually I grew bored and started reading another action story in the magazine. It was about a black South African rebel living under apartheid. Whites spat
on him and segregated his people and insulted his family so that eventually he had no choice but to stand up for his dignity and take matters into his own hands. One day the white governor, under whose rule the rebel lived, was throwing a party on a lake, and the rebel, having read about the pending event, decided that he would drive a boat laden with explosives into the governor’s yacht. The story of his resistance ended with a blaze that consumed the yacht and the rebel and the governor. This story didn’t interest me so much because it wasn’t about Islam.

It was then that I discovered
Aakhri Chataan
—“The Last Mountain”—a long-running serial produced by Pakistani TV. The series was based on the novel of the same name by a Jamaat-e-Islami journalist, Naseem Hijazi. The drama, set between the years AD 1220 and 1226, at the height of Genghis Khan’s invasions of Islamic Asia, and thirty years before the fall of the caliphate in Baghdad at the hands of Hulagu Khan, was lavish and star-studded.

The protagonist, the proverbial last mountain, was Sultan Jalalud-din Khwarezmi, a prince of Persia, bereft of his kingdom when his father was killed by the Mongols. He waged a long-standing series of battles against Genghis, raising armies and chasing him from Armenia and Azerbaijan to India and back again. The serial was a tragic-romantic recounting of the major military and political events in Khwarezmi’s life, interwoven with the exploits of his allies.

In the final episode, one of Khwarezmi’s cohorts gave a rousing speech to the leaders of Baghdad about making a call for
jihad
—which only the Caliph had the power to do—and sending troops to Khwarezmi’s assistance. He told them to believe in Khwarezmi because he was the only Central Asian leader who had defeated the Mongols in open battle. The speech caused the leaders to break out in spirited debate, because they didn’t want the Caliph to declare
jihad
. Meanwhile, the scene shifted to Khwarezmi, standing atop a cliff with his men near the front against the Mongols. At a distance he saw riders bearing Baghdad’s colors. The sight of the riders prompted him to break into a monologue in which he thanked the heavens for Baghdad’s support and lambasted the skeptics among his crew for doubting Baghdad’s mettle: “I told you that Allah would hear our prayers and they would come.”
Once the riders came closer, however, Khwarezmi realized that they were simply messengers carrying a letter of decline from Baghdad. The Caliph had shown his cowardice.

It was here that the tragic climax of the series occurred. Intermixed with scenes of dance, wine, and women—symbols of a Muslim warrior’s failure—Khwarezmi engaged in a sequence of monologues. He bemoaned his castles of sand, complained of the way the soldier’s blade melted before the enemy’s wealth, and wept that his voice didn’t reach the heavens. The series came to an end with
tasbih
beads falling ingloriously upon the ground as an anonymous old man cried, while Khwarezmi, no longer worthy of a horse, got atop an ass and rode off into the snow. The scene of his departure was followed by still paintings accompanied by melancholy music depicting Baghdad’s eventual fall to Hulagu Khan in 1258, a story of great tragedy and humiliation that all Muslims know well.

The main character of the series turned out not to be Khwarezmi. It was Baghdad—its decadent elite, its political intrigue, its traitors, its emasculated Caliphs. It was the infiltration of pro-Mongol elements, and the monopoly of sniveling, pacifist, fatalist, out-of-touch clerics who simply wouldn’t allow the Caliph to make an open call for
jihad
and go to Khwarezmi’s assistance. To avoid being defeated as Baghdad was by the Mongols, Muslims had to be more like the Companions of the Prophet or the
mujahideen
of Afghanistan. They had to engage in
jihad
. That was the TV show’s simple lesson.

I took a tennis racket, tied a rope around it, and slung it around my torso like a Kalashnikov. Then I went around declaring people Mongols and shooting them.

I
learned of sin from a girl named Sina.

A few years older than my seven, she was a servant at Beyji’s house. She had dark brown skin and her musk was musty. She bore the irrepressible smell of a kitchen drain clogged with stale vegetables. She owned just one outfit, a light pink floral
shalwar kameez
. Due to age and infinite washing it had become nearly see-through, so that when she went into a squat and swept the veranda in long, controlled, side-to-side sweeps of the
jharoo
I could see her sinewy thighs—dark pythons wearing gauzy veils. When she picked up my plates I could see the small areolas on her chest. Day after day I watched her, wanting only that she raise her downcast eyes and look at me. Yet she remained expressionless. She performed her chores with such blind commitment, such indifferent exactitude, that there was never any reason for anyone to speak to her. If out of all the other servant girls she was arbitrarily selected to sift a batch of peas or pick a tray of lentils, she moved to the assigned task, completed it, and merged back into the shadows of irrelevance. I didn’t know how I could catch her interest.

Then Adina visited the house.

Adina was a rich girl from overseas who had recently moved to Lahore and was invited over to play with me. She had been well fed on romance novels and Indian films. The first day together she took me
into a bedroom and had me act out various film scenes with her. In one, where I was a restaurant owner and she was the habitually late waitress, I was supposed to lower my sunglasses—our only prop—and give her a deep, stern, manly look, a look that she had me modify and tinker with until it fulfilled her vision. In response to the look she wiggled and squirmed in apology, softening up her boss with feminine pouts, befuddled sighs, delicate knee slaps of haplessness, and mildly sensual nail-biting. In another scene she scripted, she and I had just entered into an arranged marriage and now, after the reception, were meeting for the first time. We were supposed to do “dialogue” with each other, she instructed: she would say creative and adult things about how she resented her parents for not asking her consent before marriage, to which I was supposed to respond with dramatic pronouncements that proclaimed the inevitability of her love for me.

I took Adina’s role-playing game to Sina.

Following her around for a day, I found that there was a moment in her daily routine when she stripped off her cloak of invisibility, a time when she wasn’t a servant but became, for lack of a better word, a woman. It was in the evening, when it had become dark but was not yet late enough for dinner. During that interval Sina went to the shed in the backyard and took a shower in the partly open servants’ enclosure. Then, hair dripping, she put her clothes back on and walked around the backyard, airing herself. Save for the lights seeping through the curtains, it was completely dark by the time she finished. It was there in the yard that I approached her.

“I want you to play with me,” I ordered.

“You want to play now?”

The darkness made me bold. “Yes. We will play here. I will be the husband.”

“I don’t know…,” she said in a voice drenched with reluctance.

“It will be all right,” I assured. I grabbed her by the hand and took her to the lawn. The moon, full and fourteenth, had broken out of the clouds, and her skin and eyes were glowing. “So, let’s see,” I said, stalling for time as I came up with a scenario. “How about we’re at a picnic?” I clinked an imaginary glass with her. “Drink!”

She mimicked, but without any eagerness.

“Come on, show a little
joash
,” I demanded. “You’re out on a beautiful day with your powerful husband! Show some desire!”

She didn’t respond. After sipping my imaginary drink for a little while, I became annoyed by the silence.

“I think we need more dialogue. How will you feel if I tell you that your beauty is like that of a Night Princess?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking genuinely bewildered.

“Look,” I said, becoming the director. “You have options when someone says that to you. You can do
nakhra
, like whine and complain, to convey that you’re very shy. Or you can be my enemy who gets angry—”

“I’m ashamed,” she interrupted.

“Don’t be!”

I pulled her close, more from affection than perversity. As she struggled against me, I made her fright a part of our role-play. She became the damsel in distress and I was her protector. As I held her body against mine, her hair spilled droplets on my arms. Her clothes were damp and sticky. My mood suddenly turned.

“Take off your clothes,” I instructed. Then I paused for a moment, hearing the swishing of the trees, checking for the sound of footsteps in the driveway, listening to the laughter of oblivious adults safely lodged deep inside the belly of the bungalow. “I want to see your girl things,” I said. “I will show you my privates in return.”

It was a command. She was a servant: she obeyed. She pulled her
shalwar
to her knees and lifted up her shirt to her neck. The blue light danced on her scrubbed nudity. I stood back on my knees and pulled down my shorts for a brief moment. Then just as quickly I pulled them back up but let her remain naked so that I could touch her stomach.

While stroking her skin I made melodramatic
filmi
comments about her body, the moonlight, and fragrant roses. Then my mouth sought her chest, stomach, and thighs. Because I was not yet familiar with the concept of kissing, my movements were just that, actions that represented affection.

Yet, for all my interest in maintaining the integrity of the game, I couldn’t bear to keep my lips against her body. Her smell oozed out of her
skin and burned my nose. It was the smell of her poverty and servitude; of her caste and lower station. It disgusted me. In a sudden move I pulled away from her and stemmed a wave of nausea by holding my breath.

My withdrawal was an act so savage and sudden that it cut through the conditioning that over the years had made her obedience personified. It sliced through her submission. She pulled her clothes into place and writhed away, turning violently like a stepped-on worm. One pink
chappal
, hanging off her foot as she pulled away, dragged against the white marble as she disappeared into the dark.

Then she went and told on me.

The next day I was playing in the backyard when the adults came to punish me.

“Good boys don’t play games with girls,” Ammi said. “It is
gunah
to play games with girls. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Have you become Shaytan?”

“No. I am Abir ul Islam.”

“You sure aren’t behaving like it.”

“Put out your left hand,” my aunt said.

I obeyed.

Upon it she placed a piece of paper and a pencil and told me to write the penitential sentence—“I ask Allah for forgiveness”—one hundred times in neat handwriting and then make a signature at the bottom.

“Do you know why you’re getting this piece of paper in your
left
hand?” she asked.

“No.”

“Because of Islam.”

“What about Islam?”

“On the Day of Judgment, when Allah raises mankind from their graves and decides who goes to Paradise and who goes to hell, everyone will be gathered under the Throne. Then a quick breeze will blow and it will deliver a piece of paper into each person’s hand. If the paper is in the right hand it means the person will be bound for Paradise. If the paper is in the left hand it means the person will be bound for hell. What hand is
your
paper in?”

“Left.”

“Do you understand what that means?”

“Yes.”

“Now go and write your punishment.”

Until that moment I hadn’t assigned any significance to what had happened with Sina. Now, with the introduction of Allah’s judgment, with the introduction of penitence and forgiveness and apology, with the threat of hell hanging over me, the entire sequence of events took on a dark tinge. I could feel
gunah
creeping on my skin like a lizard on a hot summer wall. I had done something that Allah didn’t like. He would find me impious and unvirtuous and punishable. He would lean forward upon the
kursi
and look at His angels and say, “That Abir ul Islam really wasn’t worthy of his name!” The angels would agree. Then they would revoke my membership from among the meteor-hurlers. Suddenly I couldn’t bear how full of
gunah
I was and began crying. Then I wrote each word individually down the sheet:

As I finished my hundredth petition, I began loathing girls. Being nice to them upset Allah, and upsetting Allah’s rules was not something becoming of Abir ul Islam.