The Scatter Here Is Too Great (18 page)

So I wrote in fragments. My fragments were things as I saw them. Things as they were—I wrote as intensely as I saw and heard and felt but all the fragments I wrote had a hole in the center where life was supposed to be. All of them were meaningless. I wrote reams but the more I wrote the more I felt I was sinking deeper, each time ever more hopelessly, into the quicksand of my own little islands while the universe moved past me at its own indifferent pace.

That's when I found this job as the subeditor in a newspaper office, and it salvaged me from this despair. I spent my six hours in the news office, subediting the files of raw reported stories that were placed in my computer folder. The work itself was insipid, and most days left me with a stiff headache. But what made it tolerable—even pleasant, occasionally—was the continual relief of completing small tasks that punctuated the day. At the end of the day, my cup of tea waited for me. After that I headed home, where I'd spend a couple of hours drinking quality whiskey with Sadeq, and around seven, we'd go down to the dhaba to dine on tea and parathas.

That had been my schedule for the last three years and my release from the oppressiveness of writing. (Although it left me with a disgusting sense of loneliness, but that's a different matter.) This job had suitably shrunk my universe to myself—and the city had been reduced into a few roads that I traversed to and from work without paying any attention to my surroundings. I stopped roving the city too.

So when I received the phone call asking me to get to the hospital, I worried about Sadeq, but to be honest my first reaction was resentment that this bit of news threw me off my daily routine. I had to walk again on roads I had not walked on in years now. It made me nervous.

The bus beat rambunctiously with the Jhankar versions of old Bollywood numbers as it moved slowly and aggressively through the viscous traffic. It pressed down upon smaller vehicles like a big-chested bully who knew precisely how to execute its mass and noise into movement: it froze the traffic with a sudden burst of a honk and then—with a growl of the engine and the spit of the exhaust—thrust its snout into the gap that opened up between the slow-moving traffic. It pushed forward until the rear fitted snugly one spot ahead.

Across the aisle, a little boy was sitting with his father. He wore a red Coca-Cola cap (too large for his head). His father was explaining to him the dangers of the bus driver's irresponsible aggression. “One wrong move, the bus is going to scratch the side of some car, and these people will break into a fight, and we'll be stuck here. We are already late. Everybody is waiting for us at your
phuppo
's place.” I watched the little boy as he clasped the seat in front of him with his little hands and absorbed his father's anxieties. His father poked his head out of the window and looked ahead, and then shook his head. “Okay, what was that game you taught me? Rock-paper-what? Let's play that.”

When I was a kid, I played a game with my father called Blackboards. We closed our eyes and suggested to each other various things that we drew on the blackboards we imagined in our heads. It was a game I used to learn spellings. My first lessons as a writer. I closed my eyes and saw the blackboard again—only for it to vanish and my mind to be flooded with images of the hospital: the man with the guttural voice held down by the medics; that ambulance boy, Akbar.

Living in this city, you developed a certain relationship with violence and news of violence: you expected it, dreaded it, and then when it happened, you worked hard to look away from it, because there was nothing you could do about it—not even grieve, because you knew that it will happen again and maybe in a way that was worse than before. Grieving is possible only when you know you have come to an end, when there is nothing more to follow. This city was full of bottled-up grief.

It took a moment for me to realize I was the same in some sense. I had not yet grieved for my father.

My father was a writer of stories for children who gave up writing to become a street performer. He was haunted by nightmares. During the Zia-ul-Haq years, he had spent a fortnight in jail where he watched his friends get tortured. (For writers and members of the intelligentsia they favored torture methods that did not leave body marks. They force-fed them and did not allow them to either sleep or relieve themselves. By the end of the second day, most were ready to renounce their causes along with their kids and wives and all else that lies in between.) He had dreams about that time in jail and they kept getting worse as he grew older. During the long period after he had lost his job and the city was racked with violence, his nightmares turned worse too. He began fearing sleep. He wanted an escape, so he gave up writing and took up apprenticeship with a street magician, and soon he was popping live chicks from tennis balls while performing for children across poorer neighborhoods in the city for petty change that people spared.

My father met Comrade Sukhansaz in jail, and they remained friends till my father's death. They spent long hours together speaking of days past, and I sat by them overhearing their conversations. I never got the references and names they exchanged, but they shared a deep love for this city and I always sensed their conversations had a set pattern: an initial animation winding down into an abiding sadness.

I got off the bus at the Empress Market stop. It had been years since I had last been here, but no matter the time of the day, this junction was a full throat: a two-lane road with one lane encroached by street hawkers. This was also the patch of road where bus drivers left their buses in the middle of the road and went searching for some corner to piss.

I almost lost my balance as I squeezed myself out of the rear door crammed with men. If getting on the bus was a struggle, getting off a running bus was a downright challenge to survival. You risked your limbs at the least and falling flat on your face at the most. Only years of riding experience prepared you in the abrasive art of negotiating them. (To get on the bus you must be visible to the bus driver speeding at you. Wave at him. He will slow down if you're a man, slow down very much if you are a lucky man, but he will halt completely only for women, especially older ones. So if you're a man, which you were, run and try to be in front of others running with you. Catch hold of the side bars first, keep running, put one foot on the pedestal, and pull yourself up. There—you're off the ground and on the bus. To get off the bus, get to the rear door at least fifteen seconds before you want to get off and bang the steel door. Hit it hard. Make sure the driver hears the bang. If not, bang again. At all events, make sure the conductor hears the bang. He will be around somewhere, collecting fares, trying to adjust people to make room for one more person in there. If he hears you banging wildly, he will whistle the special whistle and the bus driver will slow down. This is also called stopping. Also remember: the bus driver doesn't care how you get off—or if you get off. The banging on the steel door—that must stop. Get off now.)

I disentangled from the mass of people and leaped out from the rear door, and stumbled as I landed on the road.

“Look out,
bhayya
!”—a hand grabbed my arm and helped me gain my balance. I thanked the man, who replied, smiling, “I usually charge a fee for such help, you know . . .”

A crowd was building up next to a small cart selling fried innards of assorted animals, releasing a putrid smell.

I went closer to the crowd and tried to glance over the huddle.

“Look at that dagger!” was the whisper going around. “Look at that
thing
in his neck!” Ah, the dagger: a full foot long—at least. Half of it on either side of his neck. “Look, the damn thing even
looks
real!” someone exclaimed again in a whisper.

He was a stick of a man with a dagger going through his neck. Dressed in a pink tattered cloak, he was singing at the top of his voice:

I am the bird of death

I have come back from the Land of the Dead

To tell you . . .

He had a round face, a thin neck, and his facial expressions were deeply crumpled, as though he was in great pain. His eyes were looking straight ahead at no one in particular and he held a large cardboard sign to his chest and was singing at the top of his voice:

I am the bird of death

I have come back from the Land of the Dead

To tell you . . .

I looked around to see the people watching this—half-believing, half-amused.

Friends: my brother was a soldier. Once he was passing by a graveyard while returning from his duty when he heard terrifying cries that would burst open your head. When he went inside, what he saw was nothing short of hell on earth: a little, rat-like animal, red eyes, white-fur was sitting on a pile of bones. When that animal with his venomous teeth struck at the bones, they let out excruciating screams. They were screams the likes of which my brother had heard neither in war nor in torture. He wanted to save the dead man's soul from this torture of the grave.

So he took out his gun and shot at the little-ratlike-animal. Next thing he knew the creature was running after him. He ran as fast as he could and finally, when he came across a pond of water, jumped in to save himself. Now listen to this and find lessons for your salvation: that creature stopped just short of the pond. My brother thought he was saved. The animal took a mouthful of water in his mouth and spit it back into the pond. My friends, the water of the pond turned into acid. I swear.

The body of my brother became witness to it. He lost his body from his chest down. It was burnt with an acid which has no cure. The government of Pakistan has shown him to all kinds of doctors, but no one understands the burns or the cure. This is his picture . . .

He then turned around the cardboard he was holding to his chest and we all witnessed a collage of black-and-white pictures of a horribly scarred back and arms. The crowd fell into a hush. Men looked around, searching one another's faces for clues about how to react.

. . .
if any one of you, respected brothers or friends, still doesn't believe me, or has doubts, he is welcome to come with me and visit my brother and ask him to pray for him. Because God put him through such a misfortune, his prayers are heard and people find their heart's desires through his means. If you cannot come along and still wish to benefit, here is some water that he has prayed on. It will cure all kinds of pains and aches. Five rupees each bottle . . .

I wasn't sure what to make of it but in a strange way I felt an affinity toward him. He reminded me of something—something I did not wish to think about. I kept watching him from a distance as the crowd thinned out. He sat on his haunches, carefully removing the two pieces of the dangling dagger from the sides of his neck. I stepped closer. He continued to wipe his neck and face with a little white towel, which had turned crimson with the goo he had pasted all around his neck. He threw the towel on the road, and stood up.

“I want to see your brother. I am a news reporter. I have to interview him and ask him for some prayers.” I said all this in a rush of breath and immediately realized my mistake.

“Mash'allah.” He smiled welcomingly. God has willed it. And then, putting his finger inside his mouth to pick his teeth, he asked, “You want to come with me now?”

But I did not wish to go. I wanted to be home, to be in my apartment. To be away from this man. From this feeling of knowing him.

My father was particularly fond of stories from the long epic fantasy
Tilism Hoshruba.
In those stories about evil sorcerers and good tricksters, when a sorcerer was killed, his head would split open and a bird would spring out announcing the sorcerer's name and the murderer's name one by one. “In this city, a part of us dies each day, and a bird springs out of our open skulls each day announcing our deaths and the address of our murderers,” he said to me once while we were taking a walk at the beach, “but nobody listens. The air is thick with the chorus of these birds of death. Listen.”

My father imagined the world and each object as part of continuous stories. In his stories the unfounded were found, the universe answered his questions, the past was visible, and the future illuminated. Things had reasons and they all connected.

But unlike my father, when I looked back into the past, all I saw was pitch-black darkness and heard unnamed voices trying to override each other in their attempts to reach me—and I felt indifferent to all of them. That's when I concluded that my father's way of imagining the universe was naïve, simplistic, and wrong, just plain wrong. He was wrong about the world. The world and its stories did not continue or cohere. We were all just broken parts and so were our stories. True stories are fragments. Anything longer is a lie, a fabrication.

But now, faced with the Bird of Death, I felt as if one of my father's fabrications had come alive and I was in the middle of one of his stories. I had no choice but to follow.