Trespassing (40 page)

They’d stopped for over an hour to eat rewri while Mr Mansoor bled.’ If those bastards don’t hurry up,’ said Yawar, ‘the Chief will never get a look at him.’

Finally, the men returned with a dozen dishes for each vehicle, and again they were on their way. Mr Mansoor’s breathing grew increasingly uneven and he began muttering incoherently to himself. The car swerved unsteadily.

‘This will keep him conscious,’ said Ali, spooning the sweet into Mr Mansoor’s mouth. If he refused it, Gharyaal Bhai wrung the wounded arm and Ali dug into the other with a knife. He’d vomited twice on himself when the car pulled up outside the Chief’s house.

But before that, Salaamat memorized the route. The men had not blindfolded him. He stared outside absorbing every turn, stamping each detail in his mind: left at the spear-shaped rock, right at the flat one. How could he tell them apart? That one had a branch falling mid-way over it. And so on. Twice he got out to piss and mark the spot with stones. His vision was like a telescope. He ceased noting events inside the car. He was going to get on the other side of the fence even if it killed him.

That’s what he told Fatah as Mr Mansoor was thrown into the torture cell. He grabbed his collar and took him around the back. If they were seen, no one interfered. After
all, Fatah was First Lieutenant Muhammad Shah’s brother-in-law.

‘You coward,’ Fatah whispered, enraged. ‘You’re going to let others sell you. You’ll become their whore.’

‘I’m already a whore,’ Salaamat choked. ‘Yours.’

And then, for the first time since leaving his village, he began to sob. His shoulders jerked in a spasm of its own momentum, independent of the scream in his nose. He’d never lost control so utterly. He, the best shot, the tightest bullet. And the shame of it all was that Fatah saw him unravel. The dam he’d learned to contain fanned out of him; the water swirling in his gut rushed out. He loosened his shalwar and crapped a stream of rewri three feet from Fatah.

His friend did nothing. He didn’t kick or punch him in his filthy, exposed behind. He held his nose and looked away.

Outside the room from which Mr Mansoor would never escape, the dregs of the love Salaamat once had for Fatah surfaced again. He felt a rush of gratitude: he was not despised. Fatah loved him still.

When Salaamat stopped crying and dressed again, Fatah put a slip of paper in his shirt pocket, just as he’d done on their first meeting. ‘If you run the men will hunt you down, especially now that you know the route to the Chief’s. There’s only one way out for you. Go to the Mohana village we found. Have Hameed Bhai take you downriver. The boathouse will hide you well. When you get to Karachi, find him,’ he pointed to the slip of paper.

‘But who is he? And how can he protect me?’ Salaamat sniffled, staring vacantly at the chit of paper.

‘His company supplies our equipment. He always needs drivers and has used dissidents before. Everyone knows that. You’re running from one chief to the other.’

He went into the cell and that was the last Salaamat ever saw of him.

His job with Khurram’s family was simple. He drove a van to the designated place where the clearance agent waited. The fake bill of lading was handed over, the consignment of goods transferred to his van, and the agent paid anywhere between 20,000 to 50,000 rupees, depending on the size of the shipment, and the number and needs of other officials. Sometimes Salaamat met him along the coast of the Balochistan border. At other times, off the National Highway, close enough to the scene of the abduction. He asked no questions, though he did sometimes wonder how the goods came in – at one of the dark bays of Balochistan’s cavernous coast or via the porous Afghan border, like the heroin and firearms? Probably neither. There were more ways to cross borders illegally than legally.

Behind the wheel, Salaamat consoled himself that if he carried a load of torture equipment, it was better than being the one tortured. And he resolved never to belong to anyone again. It made no sense: Fatah’s men got guns from the
Pathans and these supplies from a Punjabi, who in turn imported from Amreeka and the Angrez. And Mr Mansoor had been Sindhi. What about Fatah’s talk of protecting his own people?

Never again. He worked only for himself, and occasionally, Sumbul. Nothing else mattered. Something that had come alive again in the gorge had finally shut down for good. God had gone and shrunk everything in His wake. Life was trivial now.

So he’d concluded the day he stumbled down to the Mohana village, after a night spent escaping the Chief’s den.

The stars were still bright when he reached the camp. The men who’d stayed back were asleep. He tiptoed past them and began lumbering up to the top of the world. Just before dawn the next day, he curled under an orange tree outside the thatched hut. The Mohanas nursed him with patience, asking for nothing in return. Some folks were as fine as that. Others weren’t. It made no sense.

The eldest boatman, Hameed Bhai, sat beside him every morning as he drank the reviving broth, echoing Salaamat’s thoughts. He spoke of how his people had built their lives around the river for thousands of years, but now were forced to find other means. It was always the same story. Always the same fight. And it was just so trivial. Every night, he fell asleep to the tune of Hameed Bhai’s lament. The next day, he woke to the women washing clothes, the children twirling dragonflies, and some of the older boys teaching cormorants to dive for fish. He watched as if from a great distance. None of it touched him any more.

On the long voyage down the river, he recalled his grandmother telling him that the last journey – the one that carried the soul to heaven – was in a quiet boat. All he wanted was for this to be that last journey.

He gulped tangerine torture while Hameed Bhai rowed
like he was in the prime of his youth, pointing places out to him. ‘The river would feed that lake over there. But the Mohanas who live on it weep now. The lake has grown salty. It is stagnant, filthy. Dead are the freshwater fish: kurero, morakho, thelhi. And what are the people to drink? We were born to water. We drown on land.’

The boatman’s woes drifted in and out of Salaamat’s tangerine stupor, in and out of the river’s song, in and out of the faces of the men who’d been with him on the highway. He imagined how they’d acted in the cell, invented their dialogue, and even pushed the button when they did. The next moment, when the oar dipped into the river, it pulled up a weed-entangled Mr Mansoor.

The phantom Mr Mansoor had hung there all the way down to the bank where Hameed Bhai eventually let him off.

Khurram’s father was loud and stout, like the son. He returned Salaamat’s greeting every morning with a hearty, ‘Waalai-kum-asalaam, Salaamat.’ Peace be upon you too, Peace. He never kicked or jeered him. He paid 4,000 rupees a month – twice what Salaamat made after toiling three years under Handsome. He had two daughters, both married, who came often to the house with their children. His ailing wife kept to herself. He had three cars – a Mercedes, Land Cruiser, and Honda Civic. The first for the evenings, the second for Khurram, and the third for the day. A second driver transported him to work. A third was hired for Khurram when Salaamat delivered shipments to the warehouse.

Salaamat’s quarter was at the back of the three-story house. It was twice the size of his cell at Handsome’s and he’d even been given a tape-recorder and a twelve-inch television. When not busy with a consignment, the day was his. He listened to pop songs, watched television, walked over to the nearest video shop, visited his sister or the workers down the street, or, if the daughters called in, played cricket and
pugan pugaai with their children. Sometimes he ran small errands for Khurram. If, for instance, there was no ice cream in the house, he fetched it. He also ran errands for Khurram’s friends, such as taking the Amreekan to the cove.

One thing he liked to do was share a cup of tea with the old construction worker down the street. It was a little like being back in his grandmother’s teahouse. The unfinished house, without a roof and doors, was strangely soothing, and as he sat there, he was a little closer to being in a cottage by the sea. He couldn’t explain why. But since the rains, the workers had gone away so he mostly stayed in his room.

This afternoon he lay on a charpoy and pressed
play
on the tape-recorder. It was the sound track to a movie he’d seen snippets of at the video shop. A luscious woman in a choli ghagra pranced around a mountaintop while her lover chased her. Her breasts were peaks in their own right, bulging through her blouse like cones re-routing traffic. She jingled and jiggled, pouted and fell flat on her back, writhing over the pasture while her man tumbled onto her. He belted out:
‘You and me, what mischief, what magic!’
She screeched:
‘Open yourself to me …’
He kissed her lips and peaks rolled down peaks.

Sumbul would say he was like his father in this respect too. ‘Aba spends all day glued to the television, imagining he’s Dilip Kumar. Who do you think you are?’

He never told her that if anyone had got him on to love-songs, it was Fatah.

He didn’t ache for him as much now. He could remember, without longing, a tender Fatah in the grass, nuzzling his neck, piping,
‘White, white is your body, made of electricity. 440 volts!’

‘But I’m black as tar,’ Salaamat would say.

‘Silly, close your eyes. We can pretend, can’t we?’

He didn’t want that any more. He belonged to no one.

On the charpoy, Salaamat turned up the volume of the
song when Khurram’s old chawkidaar shuffled into his room. ‘There’s a woman asking for you at the gate,’ he said.

‘What sort of woman?’ Salaamat sat up.

‘How should I know?’ The man went back to his work.

At the gate stood a short and rather dowdy woman, clad in rubber slippers. The only thing going for her was a very fair complexion. He recognized her immediately: the Amreekan’s mother. She sometimes walked past them to throw litter in the empty plot. Once, while rummaging through a pile she’d left, he’d found the most enticing pictures imaginable, such as the one of the blonde woman in a skintight sleeveless top, with breasts like cones. Oh yes, she’d prance for him and sing,
Open yourself to me.
There was another with bare legs, sitting on the Amreekan’s lap. Salaamat had kept them all. The next time the video shopkeeper threw him out after he’d seen only one dance number, Salaamat had shown him a photograph. He’d been allowed to stay till the end of the film. On the next visit, he’d shown more. By now the shopkeeper and his friends had seen the pictures at least a dozen times but the bribe still worked.

When she saw him, the woman cleared her throat. Then she seemed astounded by her own audacity, and for several seconds, stood speechless. Finally, ‘Is my son here?’

‘No.’

Now she was astounded by his audacity. Well, he wasn’t going to address her by a title just because she expected it. The only man he called sahib was Khurram’s father and the only woman who was begum sahib to him was Khurram’s mother.

She cleared her throat again. ‘Well, it seems he’d been coming here a lot and you’d been taking him somewhere. Is this correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

Salaamat leaned into the tall gate. It was happening again:
he was being sucked into another world. Didn’t they all see how trivial it was? He chewed the inside of his cheeks.

Suddenly, she handed him fifty rupees. ‘Please tell me.’

He took it. ‘To a beach, far away.’

She nodded, as if expecting this. Then: ‘With whom?’

Again he chewed his cheeks. She came out with another fifty. ‘With the Mansoor child, Dia.’

She sighed but he saw she wasn’t surprised about this either. ‘And have they gone there again?’

He shook his head.

‘Do you know where they are?’

Of course he did. He often saw the girl getting dropped at his end of the street, then walking down to the teahouse. She chose this side so she’d not be seen walking past the Amreekan’s house. It was a silly plan, made by a silly girl, to get together with a silly boy. He frowned. She repeated the question, this time with twice the money.

He shrugged. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘We can take a taxi,’ she pleaded.

Maybe saving Dia from further disgrace would have been Mr Mansoor’s own last wish. Who could say? Sumbul had wanted him to talk to the girl’s mother. Now here was the boy’s mother.

He shrugged again. ‘We don’t need a taxi.’

Riffat Mansoor walked briskly, as always. Leaning over the trays of caterpillars she exchanged a few words with her employees, examined the mulberry stock, drafted notes on her clipboard, and exhaled so vigorously the curls on her forehead fluttered like down feathers. She was exhausted. Every few weeks a team of men arrived with a long list of reasons why they needed to be paid. Otherwise, they threatened to burn her farm, or simply cut off the water supply. She was tired of ringing her lawyer, who’d increased his charges. She’d been forced to hire engineers to tell her if the current water crisis had more to do with the Mafia than the drought. They said, ‘It could be,’ and sent a team of experts who complained about the heat and vanished. She’d hired someone else who sent a different set of experts. They dug around her land, shook their heads, demanded tea. If she lost her temper she was called a fool for breeding silkworms in Sindh. When reminded that she’d succeeded thus far, they waited for her to lose her temper. And this was a very small part of her day.

Another worry was that for the past few years, the trouble in the province made it hard for her workers to get to work. Transport was infrequent and unsafe. Besides, with the exception of the gardeners and guards, the staff was all women, and this meant family came first. There were days when husbands and in-laws threw tantrums or children fell ill. All this meant the caterpillars weren’t fed, and since there were as many as two hundred thousand to feed, it meant she or Dia spent the entire day chopping a ton of leaves. Once she’d even asked an armed guard to pitch in, and had had to laugh when he said it would get his Kalashnikov dirty. ‘Set it aside,’ she’d argued, certain that no woman had ever asked him to mince anything before. He grudgingly complied, wrinkling his nose at the foliage as though it were a used nappy.