The Scatter Here Is Too Great (3 page)

Comrade got really riled though. He stopped abruptly and took his seat, muttering under his breath. And then the whole bus broke into applause, clapping for him. I whistled . . . you know the one I whistle, the long loud one. I shouted, “One more Comrade, one more!” But he didn't pay attention and continued to blather to himself in a low voice and kept staring at the back of the seat. Ha-ha! Old bugger. The man sitting next to me was looking over my drawing. He said to me, smiling, “Why tease the old fellow. Let him be. . . .” Well, I really didn't give a toss about him or his poetry . . . for me, I had to finish up my sketch. He was a God-sent cartoon on the bus. What more can a cartoonist ask for? I had to do him for my records.

I was trying to get his nose right but he turned his face the other way. I waited but then I got impatient. I shouted, “Comrade, you old man, have you forgotten your poetry?” That really got him! He turned immediately and began shouting, “Who said that?
Haan?
Who said that?” And waving his fists, stood up from his seat. “I will break your bones!” The college boys were having a ball. They were laughing like mad. One of them barked again loudly, at which the old man let his lid fling off and he began shouting at the bus driver. STOP THE BUS! STOP THE DAMN BUS! I AM COMRADE! COMRADE SUKHANSAZ! STOP THE BLOODY BUS!

Oh the bus conductor really panicked. He was already glancing suspiciously at the racket throughout, now he thought some fight had broken out or something. He brought out his steel rod from under one of the front seats and came directly toward the old man and waving it toward the old man, he said, “Babaji, why making noise
haan
? Where do you get off?”

“Show me some civility! I am a poet! People know me! They love me!”

The bus conductor was scratching his crotch, and seeing everyone laugh, relaxed a bit and said, “Babaji, just don't make any noise. Take your seat.” He pointed the rod to an empty seat. “Your stop is about to come.”

As soon as he finished saying this, someone shouted again from behind:
Oye Chicken-saz! You crazy old man!
Comrade turned to the students again, and having really lost it this time began shouting, “Fuckers! I have seen the likes of you many times! I have fought police with bare hands. I went to jail. Yes, jail! For eight years! People love me! Sisterfuckers! What do you know! I have given sacrifices for this country! I have fought against the exploiters, and you, you fuckers like you, don't care about anything!” Everyone in the bus was in fits. The conductor then came to him, “Get off, babaji, your stop has come. Get to the gate, come on, come on hurry up!”

As the old man moved toward the door, the boys kept up their chants:

Fight me Comrade!

Why are you scared, Comrade?

We also love you Comrade!

Comrade, you crazy old buffoon!

Another poem, Comrade, please?

Fight, Comrade! Fight!

He got off at Cantt Station, right at the end of it.

Yeah, just about ten minutes before the bomb blast. He was the closest person I knew who probably might have died there. Well, no, I don't know what happened after that. No, I have his cartoon though. Here.

I
was sweating inside my mother's car in that freak lane, saying to myself, Come on, come o-on, while glancing in my rearview mirror, searching for her female figure to hurry along in my direction. All I saw was a man of densely hirsute armpits uncomfortably seated on a chair too small for his awesome behind and poking a scratching stick in the back of his vest. Right opposite him, a little leftover fire nibbled at the heap of burned garbage, excreting a rancid smell I knew well from memory.

It had been three minutes now and nothing had emerged from the corner of the lane. I hated every second of it. I tightly clasped the ignition key. You had to be prepared when waiting for a girl you've never really met before. I was in an old, clunky Suzuki FX, matchbox of a car—but I could've been off with it in less than three seconds, and on a bet, out of the lane in the next five, pedestrians and the incoming traffic notwithstanding. The car, if you want to call it that, was impossible to accelerate. But I had mastered that art as well—if you simply floored the gas pedal, no matter your timing with the gears and all, it steadied out at around 58 km/h mark, often dwindling to 55. I knew how to jack it up to 77-type and keep it there.

All this was beyond my mother's maddest dream, of course, this car being her lifeline. She had put her savings into it—that she had brought with her when she divorced my father. She treated the car like her ringdove; I thought it my fighting dog. I wasn't allowed to touch this car, except in extraordinary circumstances. She was sleeping when I pushed the car to the end of the lane before starting it and getting away. I had been waiting a long time to see this girl, Sapna, I had worked hard on. I called her before leaving the house; she said she was ready. Planning inside my mother's sleep schedule, I gave myself an hour to get back.

It took me fifteen minutes to reach the spot where she was supposed to meet me. She had explained her location with the crookedness of someone who did not venture out of the house much. “It is the second lane on your right, from the roundabout,” she had said. Wrong. It was the third. I was saved the frustration because she had mentioned, just as a by-the-way, “Oh and you will see a metal-shiner's pushcart. You will see pots and pans. He just stands at the corner of my lane. That's how I remember it myself.” That's how anyone remembers anything in this city, where most streets don't have names.

I turned into the lane with the pushcart which was neatly heaped with black pots, along with a smaller dump of gray, polished metalware. A man squatted on the pushcart, scrubbing a little pan. Her house was the third one on the left, the tiny white construction that occupied the tight space between two houses. For some reason, the house was named
Patang
, i.e., Kite. I spotted it without trouble. I slowed down the car to notice any suggestions of her through the windows. I didn't see anything, except maybe a curtain move on the top room. But that could have been anything. I was supposed to take the first left into the first lane and wait outside an old yellow house with the black gate. She would come, she'd said, when she sees my battered blue FX pass by her house. That was the farthest she had come in showing her interest in meeting me in our one month of phone conversations—and I was happy for it. Well, girls are like that. At least at first. They need to taste blood for them to discover their hungers. She was a shy one and I was actually quite thrilled to meet her. Finally.

Frankly, no matter how many times you did it, it was always nerve-racking to meet a girl for the first time, especially if you've already had intimate conversations on the phone. She was convinced I was madly in love with her. I was seeking to cement that impression, among other, better things. She'd seen me, of course—and probably liked what she saw too. We went to the same place for our after-college private tuitions that I had quit after two classes because I'd much rather spend that money on something more useful.

I fancied her from the moment I walked into that drab tuition center—dark, dusty, windowless room, lit with fifteen tube lights and furnished with secondhand chairs and desks from which nails poked out, and worse yet: full of mostly boys who spent their school time working their asses off and still came to tuitions for extra practice. Girls were too few, and perhaps that was the real reason why I left that place. She was pretty, though. Wore a half-sleeved yellow
kameez
, had short hair that fell around her face when she bent forward to read, and she smiled all the time. Her deep square necklines made quite an impression on me, and I studied her intently for the two sessions I was in the tuition center. The second day she wore a khadi-brown and even shorter sleeves, and I scrutinized the back of her taut, fine neck for the whole hour and a half, and was left with no doubts I was going to try her. She was small and beautiful and perfectly packaged to be taken home and played with.

I found it a little difficult to find her number, but I managed after bribing the registration handlers of that tuition center. I called her. “I know you, and like you too. I just want to talk. Make friends.” It confused her at first—or at least that's how she made it look. It's true, most boys don't approach girls like that. They wait around, do idiotic things like passing snide remarks or acting loud and brash. She was suspicious at first, understandably, but then I gave her time, let her make the choices (at least that's how I made it look to her), left my number and told her she could call me if she wanted to. She did, of course. And the rest, as they say, is history of one month ago. She had many questions for me, many sadnesses of her own to report. She lived with her mother and a dying father (cancer, something like that) and her brother, who paid for them and routinely threatened to turn them or himself out of the house. Anyway, after a point, I didn't care much about it. There wasn't much I could do. I was her only male contact and I broke her loneliness in a way that was new to her. In less than a month, she had fallen in love with me, she believed. And I with her. As I said, the latter was her own subjective judgment with which I did not interfere.

Well, that's what it's really all about if one thinks about it. Conversations. You want to be seen by others the way you see yourself. Boys think girls are looking for something that they could worship—and they go on adding weight to their six-packs and nine biceps and so on, and all they ever end up doing is stand posing in busy markets. Jerks.

I took my eyes off the rearview mirror—I'd had enough of the man in the lungi who seemed to have located the spot of his itch and was resolutely scraping it—and was checking the fuel tank indicator when the door opened abruptly and a figure wrapped in a shawl jumped inside. “Let's go, let's go!” For a second, I couldn't move. But the next moment with the invasion of a perfume I was assured. She was prepared, I was happy to note. The car screeched a little and in less than five seconds, we were out of her freak lane and on the main road.

She sat diagonally on the passenger seat, facing me. My first thought was: Do I look all right? I hope I'm not sweating. Well, I was sweating. But so what, she loved me—and it was all right for a lover to sweat. She took off her shawl. I got a chance to look at her—and ah, that yawning neckline. She saw me looking at her and smiled. I smiled too.

My plan was to take her to an ice cream parlor with an empty second floor at that time of the afternoon. We could improvise something there. And besides, I had little money and that was all I could afford. But then, I was a little nervous myself, and didn't want to appear abrupt, so I kept silent. She didn't say anything and we drove quietly. Finally, after a while, I broke the silence. “So, where should we go?” I asked.

She didn't reply for a few seconds. I was about to navigate her to my preferred spot when she said, “I don't know . . . I want to go somewhere far where we could talk.” Ah, yes. Talk.

At that moment, we had reached Shahrah-e Faisal, the jugular vein of the city, and I was still thinking of something funny to tell her to break up the tension. I put my FX in the fast lane and pumped the pedal to top up the speed. I could feel the exertions of the engine. She sat with her hands folded and I felt happy that she was wholly concentrated on looking at me. Suddenly she blurted, “Why not go to the sea?”

Well, not a bad place to be, but I knew it would be impossible if I were to get back in an hour. After being kicked out of school, I had been my mother's prime cause of insomnia for the past two years. My communication with her had collapsed when I was expelled from the school. Things had improved lately since I had enrolled in an accounting degree diploma, but there was no way I could explain this running away to her—with her Car. I had already broken the excuse-bank of friendly accidents and flying donkeys trampling me in their descent from the heavens. I found it difficult to imagine how much further I could damage her and what that would look like—“Yes, that's what I was thinking as well,” I said to her. “Okay, let's go. You have time right?” I was surprising myself. This girl had unanticipated effects on me.

“Ha-ha!” I heard her crackle. “Yes, yes. I can be out for another two hours. But not more, okay?”

I smiled but with a tightening in the chest. I had noticed the man intently staring at us from the car next to us. I didn't know what the hell was up with everyone in this city. Why must you face distrusting stares and smiles from everyone if you have a girl next to you in the car? But again, that depends upon your car: if you have a shiny, sexy four-wheel drive, you may well be screwing her in there and no one would dare take any notice—well, that's an exaggeration, but really. If you are in a little broken car, well, everyone will screw you as they cruise by. I stared back at the man who was staring at Sapna from the bus window on my right.

Actually what really scared me about being on the road with a girl next to me were my own memories. When I was at school, we swiped ink from our van window at passersby. We especially targeted old men, and young couples we suspected of doing wrong by meeting each other in private. You jerked off your ink pen when you were close enough—and
pha
! You stunned them if your ink-lasso caught them on their faces. They usually broke into curses. Young couples were the most fun to target because they showed the most reaction and could do the least harm in return because they were tied up with each other and would not come after you. There were exceptions, of course. In that sense, I was afraid someone like me from my own past would leap out and do what I did, or something like it, like fling an egg at the windscreen.

I looked around and told Sapna, “Turn up the window and lock the door.”