Moth Smoke (6 page)

She isn’t gone for long, but I’m already imagining an elaborate rescue scenario when she reappears. ‘You can come,’ she says. ‘But only if you promise not to do anything macho.’

‘I promise.’

I have to walk quickly to keep pace with Mumtaz and the pimp. We pass a few men in the alley: satisfied customers, judging by their vacant smiles. Definitely stoned. Maybe even a little heroin. One is fastening his nala with both hands.

Then we enter a building, climb two flights of steps, pass through a door that opens only when the pimp knocks out a little code, part a curtain of beads, and find ourselves in a room with a shuttered window, dimly lit by a clay oil lamp which sits on a low table.

Reclining against a long, round cushion is a middle-aged woman with finely plucked eyebrows, her fleshy body well
proportioned and voluptuous. She takes a gurgling puff from the hookah beside her and with the tiniest dip of her chin indicates that we should sit.

‘It’s a man’s habit, but I love it,’ she says, taking another puff. Her voice is throaty, like Mumtaz’s, but much deeper.

Then she points one henna-decorated finger at me. ‘Have I seen you before?’

‘No,’ I say.

The woman chuckles. ‘Of course not. Your father, perhaps, but not you.’

A disturbingly young girl with long eyelashes brings in tea. She wears bells on her ankles that chime as she walks, and I find myself hoping this is the only service she’s made to provide, although I doubt it very much.

‘You’re not bad-looking,’ the woman says to Mumtaz, who smiles and lowers her gaze politely. ‘A nice face. And good hips. But your breasts aren’t generous. You should eat more.’

Mumtaz starts to laugh. ‘They’re bigger than they were. I’ve fed a boy.’

‘With those?’ The woman considers. ‘Perhaps it’s because you have broad shoulders that they seem small.’ She smiles. ‘Are you looking for work?’

Mumtaz flashes a sly grin. ‘Your tea is delicious, Dilaram.’

‘Thank you. Like all things in my profession, it is a learned art.’

‘How did you come to begin learning?’ Mumtaz asks, slowly taking out a minicassette recorder.

Dilaram laughs solidly, her body rippling. ‘It’s quite a funny story really. I was a pretty girl, like this one here.’ She smiles at our adolescent tea server. ‘Only younger. The landlord of our area asked me to come to his house. I refused, so he threatened to kill my family. When I went, he raped me.’

Mumtaz shuts her eyes.

Dilaram chuckles. ‘I was so skinny. Not like a woman at all.’

‘He paid you?’ Mumtaz’s voice is so soft I can barely hear her.

‘No.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘He kept making me come. He let his sons rape me. And sometimes his friends. One of them was from the city. He gave me a silver bracelet.’

‘Why?’

‘He said it was a gift. Then I became pregnant.’ She laughs. ‘Imagine, my mother was also pregnant at the time.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘The landlord told me the man from the city wanted to take me to Lahore to marry me. I didn’t believe him. But the villagers told me it was the only way to recover my honor, so I went.’

‘Did he marry you?’

‘No. He took me to a hakim who ended my pregnancy. Then he told me he had bought me from the landlord for fifty rupees. He said I would have to give him fifty rupees if I wanted to go back to my village.’

‘But you didn’t have the money.’

Dilaram chuckles. ‘He brought me to Heera Mandi and made me have sex with men until he had his fifty rupees.’

I look at Mumtaz, but she doesn’t notice me. The women are completely focused on each other.

‘Then did he let you go?’

‘No. He told me the villagers would not accept me back because I had lost my honor. I believed him. The others knew stories of girls who had returned to their families and were killed by their fathers or their brothers. So I stayed on. I worked for many years, until I was no longer young and had few clients. By then the man had grown old. He needed my help to run this place. Once it was clear to the girls and the clients that I was in charge, he died. Some people said I poisoned him.’ She laughs silently, shuddering.

I light a cigarette as the interview continues, and not seeing an ashtray, I tip the ash into the palm of my hand. Dilaram seems a little too well-spoken for an uneducated village girl, sounding more like a wayward Kinnaird alumna to me, actually, and I begin to wonder whether she’s making up her story as she goes along.

Occasionally I turn to look through the curtain of beads behind us. The giant pimp observes us closely, his arms crossed in front of him. I don’t see any of Dilaram’s prostitutes or their clients, but through the walls I hear sounds which convince me that business is continuing despite our presence.

When the interview is over, Dilaram watches us go, laughing to herself. Our eyes meet for a moment, and I’m startled by the anger in her glance.

Neither Mumtaz nor I say anything until we’re on the canal. She’s driving fast, shifting up through the gears, and I want to ask whether she believes Dilaram’s story, but something in her expression makes me think better of it.

I light a cigarette, the last from her pack, and pass it to her.

‘Thanks for coming,’ she says.

She passes the cigarette and we share it, each taking a few drags before passing it back. Soon we’re back in New Muslim Town, near my house. I want to touch her, to make some connection before she drops me off and I’m alone again. But she does it for me.

She pulls up to my gate and stops. Then she turns and kisses me on the cheek, her hand curling around the back of my head, touching my neck and my hair. We stay like that for a moment, and I don’t move, my arms at my sides, afraid of doing anything to make her leave. But she leans
away from me and smiles, and I have to get out. We don’t say goodbye.

I watch the taillights of her car flash red, and then she’s gone around a turn. I know I’m standing still, but I feel like I’ve stumbled and I’m starting to fall.

The day after I become privy to the secret of Zulfikar Manto, I find myself in a suit and tie, my shoes shining more brightly than new coins in a beggar’s bowl.

Butt saab is a master of the French inhale. He sits behind his desk, smoke slipping out of his mouth and up his nostrils, and watches me with the half-lidded, red-eyed superiority of a junior civil servant, which I’m told he once was. A flick of his tongue sends a tight gray ring drifting over my curriculum vitae. Mercifully, it disperses before reaching me.

‘Normally, I wouldn’t have agreed to see you,’ he says. ‘We have a hiring freeze in place at the moment. But your uncle is a friend, so I’m making an exception.’

Eight banks, eight c.v.’s, seven flat-out rejections. This is my first actual interview. ‘Thank you, Butt saab.’

‘Where else are you looking?’

I tell him.

‘And what have they told you?’

‘They say I don’t have a foreign degree or an MBA.’

‘And?’

‘They haven’t given me an interview.’

Butt saab drops his cigarette into his almost-empty teacup. It hisses and he lights another. ‘Listen. I don’t have a foreign degree. And I don’t have an MBA. And we’ve hired three people this year, despite our hiring freeze, and they don’t have foreign degrees or MBAs either. Well, two do have MBAs, actually. And, come to think of it, one has a foreign degree as well. But you have a master’s and a fair amount of experience. You’d be as good as any of them, if I had to guess.’

Sounds promising enough, but there’s no encouragement in Butt saab’s expression. ‘I know banking,’ I say. ‘And I’m hungry for a chance. I’ll work hard.’

‘That’s the problem. Work hard at what? There just isn’t that much work these days.’ Another French inhale. ‘We have more people than we need right now. And the boys we’re hiring have connections worth more than their salaries. We’re just giving them the respectability of a job here in exchange for their families’ business.’

I nod. There doesn’t seem to be much for me to say.

‘I’m meeting with you, to tell you the honest truth, as a favor to your uncle,’ Butt saab continues. ‘Unless you know some really big fish, and I mean someone whose name matters to a country head, no one is going to hire you. Not with the banking sector in the shape it’s in.’

I try to smile. ‘I take it your country head doesn’t know my uncle.’

Butt saab laughs. ‘Mr Shezad, I know your uncle. He’s a good friend of mine. But if I were country head right now, I still wouldn’t be able to hire you. Things are tight these days and favors are expensive.’

A boy brings in another round of tea, our second in ten minutes, and sets the tray on top of my c.v. Butt saab offers me a cigarette that I accept, but my attempt to match his French inhale gets caught somewhere up my nose and makes my eyes water. I content myself with a smoke ring instead.

Outside the bank I sit in my car and watch them go in, guys my age in blue shirts and light suits. Sunglasses, longish hair slicked back. Bored, a little sluggish after lunch, but comfortably certain of an afternoon that won’t stretch out too long and a paycheck at the end of the month. I never particularly liked my job, and wanting now what I didn’t like but once had is enough to make me look down when former colleagues glance in my direction. It’s too hot to sit in my car, so I turn the key in the ignition and head home, my perspiration smelling of an old iron and too much starch.

On Sunday I go to the weekly family luncheon. I tend to avoid these things because they depress me. But I make an exception today, because I’m bored and a little lonely, and I don’t feel like sitting around the house by myself with nothing to do. Besides, my cash is running low and I could use a free meal.

The family luncheons are invariably at Fatty Chacha’s place. My house is small, but my uncle’s is smaller. He has no satellite dish, one car, and three kids, and his wife is so quiet that Dadi, who lives with them, calls her daughter-in-law ‘the philosopher.’ Dadi is the real spirit behind these get-togethers. She hates being separated from family, hates rifts and divisions, maybe because she’s lost so much to partitions: her husband on a train from Amritsar to Lahore, and her eldest son, my father, in Bangladesh.

When I walk into the house through the open front door, Dadi, Fatty Chacha, my aunts – Tinky Phoppo and Munni Phoppo – and their spouses and children are already eating. They look at me in surprise and then surge in a collective welcome that leaves my cheeks damp and marked with lipstick and my right hand a tad sticky from the food they were consuming.

It’s all a little too eager. I sense something somber sitting behind their enthusiasm, something not-so-normal behind their normality. A little paranoia crawls into my lap, purring loudly, making me think maybe I’m the cause, reminding me how obvious it must be that my life is going nowhere.

My cousin Jamal gets up so I can sit, but I wave him back down.

‘Come here,’ Dadi says, patting the arm of her sofa.

‘Yes, Dadi?’ I say, sitting there, my head several feet above hers.

‘Where are you these days?’ she asks.

‘Where am I these days?’

‘Have you found a job?’

‘Not yet.’

‘When are you getting married?’

‘As soon as you find me someone, Dadi.’

‘Two such lovely girls are sitting right here.’

Tinky Phoppo smiles. Her daughters blush and look down.

‘Let him eat,’ Fatty Chacha says, handing me a plate piled high with food.

‘Do you need any money?’ Tinky Phoppo’s husband asks, his wife’s elbow pressed firmly into his side. He isn’t corrupt, so they survive on his pitiful salary and a small inheritance, including the Swiss watch that he likes to drop into a glass of water from time to time to demonstrate that it’s waterproof and therefore authentic.

I start eating. ‘I’m okay for now,’ I lie, because they have no cash to spare.

Muhammad Ali, Fatty Chacha’s son, tugs on my sleeve. ‘Daru bhai, do boxing with me.’

‘Show me what you know,’ I say.

He puts on a few moves. Not bad for a six-year-old. ‘Amazing,’ I say. ‘You’ll be better than Muhammad Ali.’

‘I am Muhammad Ali,’ he points out.

‘The greatest boxer ever was also named Muhammad Ali,’ Fatty Chacha explains.

Muhammad Ali laughs. ‘Noooo,’ he says.

‘Yeeees,’ says his dad.

Fatty Chacha was a boxer when he was younger, although to look at him now, you wouldn’t guess it. I think he was a bantamweight, but he’s since put on a generous paunch, so he’s basically a big belly with skinny legs and arms. He learned from my father, who learned from Dada. And Fatty Chacha taught me.

Jamal extends a plate to me and says, ‘Mango?’

I cut one open and eat it with a roti.

Dadi nods in satisfaction. ‘This one is really my grandchild,’ she says.

‘I’m also really your grandchild, Dadi,’ Muhammad Ali says, grabbing her from behind.

‘Of course, of course,’ she says, laughing. ‘You are all my grandchildren.’

Munni Phoppo looks at Jamal anxiously, but he gives me a brave wink. Jamal knows he’s adopted, and he makes no bones about being happier with his fingers on a computer keyboard than in boxing gloves. Maybe he’ll be the first Shezad male to make a success of his life.

I wink back at him.

When we’re done eating, Dadi tells me that her shoulder is hurting again, which is her way of telling me to massage it. She likes my massages. She says I do it like my father did. I bend to my task behind her, pressing away, my eyes on
the few wisps of white hair which grow on her bald head. Dadi feels as ancient as she looks, and when she tells me to do something I do it instinctively, as though the command passes to me through my genes rather than my ears.

Except, of course, that I won’t marry one of my cousins.

After the meal is done and the family has finished chatting and digesting, a process which takes a couple of hours, there’s a break in the cricket match we’ve been watching on TV and the clan begins to disperse. Jamal, who’s been learning to drive, demonstrates his reversing technique to me on his way out. Then he pulls away from the house with a little screech, probably for my benefit, and I can see his parents screaming at him as their old VW Beetle zips down the road.