Moth Smoke (25 page)

‘I’m running out of things to sell,’ I tell him. ‘Yesterday someone bought my television.’

He adjusts himself inside the folds of his shalwar. ‘I wish I could help, old chap, but the rickshaw business has been dead since the tests. My customers are worried about food prices. They prefer to walk.’

Luckily, I have another idea where I can get some hairy.
I’ve seen fellow aficionados chilling out in the old city near Badshahi Mosque.

I wait until late at night. The last prayer of the day has been prayed, and there isn’t much traffic in the area except for revelers and diners on their way to Heera Mandi. I park my car and walk down the street, the walls and minarets of the mosque towering up to my left. Scattered beneath them, sitting or staggering about in their moon shadows, are the very people I was hoping to meet: junkies.

I know I’m in the right place by the smell, and by the faces floating in the great womb of the drug, content to stay there until they die. Which shouldn’t be long, by the looks of some of them.

I hunt for someone to buy from, but he finds me before I find him.

‘Heroin?’ he asks from behind me.

I turn. He has awful teeth, a rotting smile. But he’s clean, unlike the addicts. Without waiting for an answer he puts out his hand and says, ‘One hundred.’

I give it to him, and he passes me something that I slip into my pocket.

‘How do you know I’m not a policeman?’ I ask him.

‘It doesn’t matter if you are. Same price, same price.’

I grin, but he seems to find nothing funny in what he’s said and wanders off, prowling around the addicts like a shepherd tending to his flock.

At home I’m apprehensive until I try the stuff, wondering if he’s sold me rat poison, but it turns out to be fine. I spend much of the night smoking and wake up exhausted the next evening. The curtains are wide open. A murder of crows flaps around the gray sky, coming to land one by one on power lines across the street. Somewhere a dog offers up a token bark, but they ignore him and go about their business in silence.

I know I need a meal, even if my stomach isn’t bothering to say it’s hungry, so I fry myself a couple of eggs and toast some bread over the gas flame. Sometimes hairy kills my appetite.

The other thing hairy kills is time, and that’s good, because when Murad Badshah isn’t visiting, which is most of the day, I have nothing to do. My only fear is that some relative or unwanted visitor will drop by and see me and my house in the state we’re in, which is filthy. So I keep the gate locked and don’t answer unless I hear the right open sesame: beep beep bee-bee-beep.

I’m getting good at moth badminton. I now play sitting down, and I try to be unpredictable so the moths will never know when it’s safe. Sometimes they whir by my face or even land on me and I leave them alone. At other times they fly at full velocity several feet away and I slam them with an extended forehand.

Here are my rules. I play left hand versus right hand, squash-style. That is, I switch hands whenever I try to hit
a moth and fail to connect. At first, I gave a hand a point just for hitting a moth. Then I made it more difficult by adding the ‘ping’ test. According to the ‘ping’ test, a hand scores only when the moth makes a ‘ping’ as it’s struck by the racquet. If I hit a moth but there’s no ‘ping,’ it’s a let and the hand must ‘ping’ a moth on its next attempt, or the racquet switches to the opposing hand. Three factors come into play here: moth size (small moths rarely ‘ping’), stroke speed (only delicate swings produce ‘pings’), and racquet position (most ‘pings’ come from the racquet’s sweet spot). My racquet is made of wood, and I’ve managed to misplace its racquet press, so it’s beginning to warp in the humid monsoon air. As a result, finding the sweet spot and successfully ‘pinging’ becomes increasingly difficult. Scores drop rapidly, until a good evening ends with a tally of left four versus right two, or something like that. I’m right-handed, but my left seems to win more often than not, which pleases me, because I tend to sympathize with underdogs.

I often find myself smiling when I’m playing moth badminton. What amuses me is the power I’ve discovered in myself, the power to kill moths when I feel like it, the power to walk up to someone and take their money and still put a bullet in them, anyway, just for the hell of it, if that’s what I want to do. And I’m amazed that it took me so long to come to this realization, that I spent all this
time feeling helpless. Self-pity is pathetic. Hear that, little moth? Ping!

Murad Badshah drops by at night. I try to interest him in some moth badminton, without success. He’s decided on a boutique, a shop in Defense near LUMS.

The thing is getting serious. For two days we take turns staking out the boutique, recording what time police patrols pass and guards change. Sometimes I smoke hairy and doze off on my shifts, napping in my car right in front of the place we’re supposed to rob. As a result, my reports are impressionistic rather than empirically accurate.

Even though I’ve stopped scratching myself, I can tell Murad Badshah still wonders if I’m on hairy. The doubt makes him angry. When he gets angry I can see why people might be afraid of him. But I deny it, and he never hits me. Which is good for him, and for me, too, because I don’t want to break up our partnership. Besides, he has thick bones, the kind that can hurt your hand if you aren’t wearing a glove.

Always remember to lock, I tell myself. The gate, the front door. There isn’t much of value in the house that’s light enough to be carried away, just a powerless AC and fridge, really, so sometimes I get careless. And when Dadi comes in, waddling as she has since she broke her hip, and Fatty Chacha follows behind her, then I shut my eyes for
an instant, at once desperate to disappear and furious with myself for letting this happen, before I get to my feet and greet them.

A half-filled aitch-in-progress crumples in the fist of my left hand. A smattering of tobacco peppered with hairy falls quietly from my right. It’s dark inside and sunny out, a rare bright afternoon, and I’m hoping their eyes haven’t adjusted enough to make out what I was up to.

‘I’ve been trying to call you since your birthday, but there was no answer.’ Fatty Chacha’s voice trails off. Dadi is staring at me.

‘I’m so happy you’ve come,’ I say, gesturing to the sofa. ‘Please.’

They don’t move. Finally, Dadi speaks. ‘What happened to you, child?’

I force a laugh. ‘This?’ I say, raising my cast-encased forearm. ‘It’s nothing. A car accident.’

Dadi’s eyes are watery but still keen. She touches my face. ‘You’ve been hurt badly.’ Her horrified expression makes me want to recoil. She strokes my scars, her shriveled finger remarkably soft.

‘But when did this happen?’ Fatty Chacha asks.

I want to lie, but I’m afraid they won’t believe me. ‘A month ago,’ I admit.

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

‘I didn’t want you to worry.’

‘Foolish boy,’ Dadi says, sitting down.

Fatty Chacha remains standing. ‘What’s happened to the house? It’s a mess.’

‘Manucci left.’

‘Impossible.’

‘He walked out on me.’

‘But why?’

‘He wanted more pay.’ I can see that Fatty Chacha is doubtful, and I’m about to say more when Dadi calls me over to sit beside her and pats me on the cheek.

‘Do you know,’ she says, trying to reassure herself, ‘your father never told me when he broke his nose at the military academy. Just like you.’

‘He was far away,’ Fatty Chacha points out, sitting down. ‘There was nothing we could have done to help.’

‘But I’m fine,’ I protest.

‘You don’t look fine, champ,’ Fatty Chacha says. ‘Is there some kind of infection? You seem ill.’

‘No infection. It was a bad accident.’

‘You must have lost twenty pounds.’

I force a grin. ‘I’m back in my weight class.’

Dadi takes a proprietary hold on my upper lip and pulls it back. ‘You’ve lost a tooth.’

‘So have you,’ I say cheekily.

She chuckles, but I can see she’s still shaken. She asks
how the accident happened, and I invent a story, claiming I don’t remember many details because of the shock. Dadi strokes my good hand as I speak and Fatty Chacha keeps shaking his head, whether in sympathy or out of disbelief it’s hard to say.

To change the subject, I ask about Jamal’s business.

‘He’s doing well,’ Fatty Chacha says. ‘They have two new clients, with no discount this time.’

Dadi offers to move in with me and stay until I’m better, but I manage to convince her not to. She tells me I must promise to visit her every day or she will worry. When they ask if I have tea I admit that I’m out of milk.

As they leave, visibly reluctant to go, Fatty Chacha insists on giving me five hundred rupees. Taking hold of my upper arm, he says quietly, ‘Come to see me tomorrow. I’m serious, Daru. I’m very worried about you.’

And with that, I’m alone again. I lock the gate and the front door. Then I retrieve the battered aitch from my pocket and see what I can salvage.

The day I go to the hospital and have my cast cut off and emerge from the last of my cocoon, the day I can again see the muscles in my forearm when I flex my hand into a fist, is also the day Murad Badshah finally takes me out of the city for some target practice. He’s bought me my gun: a 9-millimeter automatic, black, used, Chinese. Just a tool,
really, like a stapler. A stapler that can punch through a person. Pin them. Drive blunt metal through flesh and bone.

I’ve always had steady hands, so I’m surprised to discover that I’m a bad shot. Horrific, really. At twenty paces, I can hit a tin can about one time in five. As for moving targets, I have no hope. Walking from left to right, I don’t hit it even once in fifteen minutes of shooting. Murad Badshah tells me not to worry. There will only be one guard, and with my gun pressed against his head there should be no reason to actually shoot, and no way to miss if I do. At the end of half an hour of practice we start running low on ammunition, and we can’t afford any more. So that’s it: our prep work is over and we now have no reason to procrastinate. Time to move on to the real thing.

At home I keep playing with the gun, unloading and reloading the magazine, chambering rounds, popping them out. It’s strange that pistols are such inaccurate devices. If I designed something with the power to kill people, I’d want it to give the user a little more control. But I’m not complaining. There’s something appealing about it, something wonderfully casual in the knowledge that when you squeeze the trigger you might kill someone or miss them completely. I like that. After all, moth badminton would be less fun if my racquet wasn’t so warped.

My father gets off his motorcycle and runs his hands through his short hair, cropped close in accordance with military academy regulations. He gives his olive suit a once-over, making sure that nothing is amiss, and heads inside. For three coins the white-gloved attendant at the ticket box gives him a seat, not in the most expensive section, but not in the least expensive one, either.

He chooses a well-upholstered couch behind a group of young ladies, students at Kinnaird College who pretend not to notice him, and lights a cigarette. Refined conversation fills the enormous cinema with a gentle murmur. Once all have risen for the national anthem and then sat down again, once the lights have dimmed and the projector has whirled to life, only then does my father reach forward and squeeze the hand my mother extends back to him.

At intermission they eat cucumber sandwiches and sip tea, standing next to each other like strangers. Although he does bow slightly to her as he passes a plate, and her friends cannot help smiling with their eyes.

The Regal Cinema did at one time deserve its name.

Now I sit on a broken seat at the very back, a seat, not a couch, with a crack that pinches my bottom when I move, munching on a greasy bag of chips, trying to ignore the shouting of the men next to me as Chow Yun-Fat kicks his way to another victory for the common man, for good over evil, for hope over tyranny. I love kung fu flicks from Hong
Kong. They’re the only movies I go to see in the cinema anymore. Everything else is better on a VCR, without the smells and sounds of the audience. But not kung fu.

A fight breaks out somewhere in the middle rows, with much yelling and hooting. People surge up and at each other as Chow flashes a six-foot grin over the scene. One of the men to my left throws a packet of chips into the scuffle. There are no women to be seen here, except on screen, and when those appear, the men in the audience go wild, whistling joyously. Maybe the real ones are in private boxes. Maybe they know better than to come to see Chow Yun-Fat on opening night. Or to go to the cinema at all. No woman I know goes unless the entire cinema has been reserved in advance. Reserved for the right sort of people, that is.

I sit for a while after the movie is over, watching the unruly audience make its way out, sad at what’s happened to this place since my parents were my age. Look at us now: we can’t even watch a film together in peace. I cover my face with my hands and it feels hot, my entire head feels hot. I’m on edge. I think I need some hairy.

The cinema is almost empty when I realize someone is watching me. I stare at him, and he hesitates for a moment before walking over, motorcycle helmet in hand. Thick black beard. Intelligent eyes. Looks about my age. Salaams.

I return the greeting.

‘Have we met before?’ he asks me. Calm voice.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Were you at GC?’

‘I was, as a matter of fact.’

‘I remember. You were a boxer.’

I nod, surprised.

‘So was I,’ he says.

I extend my hand. ‘Darashikoh Shezad.’

He shakes it firmly. ‘Mujahid Alam. I was a year junior to you. Middleweight.’

‘Now I remember. The beard is new.’

He looks around the deserted theater. ‘I came over because you looked upset.’

‘I’m fine,’ I say, a little taken aback.

‘Did you find today’s spectacle disturbing?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All the shouting, the fighting, the disorderliness. Our brothers have no discipline. They’ve lost their self-respect.’