The Scatter Here Is Too Great (6 page)

Your Qur'an classes were a conspiracy between you and your mother. Your father would not have tolerated it. He considered religion mixing up with everything was the cause of all problems in this godforsaken country.

He did not, in fact, tolerate it when he found out.

It happened one day when he came home early and caught you on the stairway with the Holy Book in its crimson silk envelope edged with golden embroidery and the
rehl
, its wooden stand, in your hand. He was puzzled at first. He asked you, Where are you coming from, what is this—but then he saw the white cap on your head and squinted his eyes. He calmly took the cloth envelope from under your arm and opened it. “
This
? Where—? For how long?” You were about to say something but you stopped. His face had started to tremble. He climbed up the stairs ahead of you and banged the door of your apartment. He was yelling out your mother's name telling her to open the door. The door did not open and he finally had to fumble the key out from his own pocket. When he entered, your mother was rushing out of the bathroom, water splashed around the neck of her
kameez
.

“Is THIS what you have been teaching my son?
This
?” he hissed. “You want to fill his brain with
this
?
What
do you want him to become?”—and then exploded: “I ALWAYS KNEW YOU. I KNOW YOUR KIND. YOU WITCH. YOU WANT TO TAKE MY SON AWAY FROM ME. I WILL KILL YOU. THINGS YOU HAVE BEEN TEACHING MY CHILD. YOU WANT TO STEAL HIM. I KNOW IT. I ALWAYS KNEW IT. I WILL KILL YOU.”

It was the one time in her life that your mother did not back down. She raised her voice to match his—“I will teach him what I think is best for him. He is my son first. Look at yourself—you want him to be like you? You think you are a role model for my son?
Haan
?” He grabbed plates and glasses with both his hands from the table and hurled them at her feet. Shaken, terrified, she stood with her back against the kitchen door, guarding her other things she had collected out of her savings, and kept answering back. You felt your father might hit her or throw her out of the house—as he was threatening her. You quietly moved to grab your mother's wallet and dupatta in case it happened.

Then the doorbell rang. And both of them fell silent.

There's an echo of that mortifying silence thirty years ago in this room now rocked by the bomb blast. How you had hated your father afterward as you watched your mother sweep the broken glass off the floor intermittently stopping to control her tears. Now with one-half of your face sweating against the floor, you feel a surge of sympathy for your mother. And the same deep hate for your father.

Oh he was about to visit you! You had forgotten! Your mother had told you when you came into the apartment with Noor Begum. She didn't try to hide her bitterness. “I am telling you so I won't have to hear anything later. It's up to you if you want to stay.”

There was no need for her to say that. She said it precisely to ask you to stay. She wanted you to reconcile with your father. You had yelled at her countless times, but she persisted. “My son, you need to be good to your father. He's your father after all. He's made mistakes but he's an old man. He's so weak even . . . mentally . . . My son, even God forgives. Who are we to hold grudges?”

“Then let God forgive him,” you gave her a curt reply.

But there's no escaping this now: if he comes into the apartment now, right now, and finds you like this, and says, Hello, son, what would you say?

You don't want to think of your father. You don't ever think about him—you have trained your mind to think away from him, to other things big, small, meaningful, meaningless. In your book you talked about his life in more general terms. His life is used as a symbol for irresponsible living. As a person, you do not discuss him in any detail: you've given him a nondescript life, “someone with Communist leanings” and you never mention him again.

Your father was a Communist poet, for whom family was largely an inconvenience. When you were twelve, he'd decided to separate himself from his family to commit himself to the revolutionary cause. So he disappeared. Later, he went into hiding for being a left-wing political activist; he quit journalism and took up carpentry. But he remained active in organizing workers and protests and wrote poetry.

All these years, you resented your father for his selfishness and for the suffering he inflicted on you and your mother for his idealism. Practical men, contrary to the idealists' bias, are the least selfish: they even use selfishness to benefit their families and country. Artists, poets, writers—idealists, all sorts—hide their selfishness in the garb of philanthropy, and they end up doing more harm than good—to everyone, most of all their own selves and families. They are weak men who destroy others. Your father was a weak man.

But when you were writing about your father in your book, you found yourself veering from this idea of your father's life. Your memory hemorrhaged into images and incidents that you thought never happened. You found yourself sleepwalking through secret doors, segueing into things that didn't fit the two dimensions of your life, falling through holes that led into vast halls of greater darkness.

When writing the story of your life, you, for instance, remembered that your father did not abandon you entirely. He used to come pick you up from the house—even during his days of hiding. He'd take you to his new place outside the city, where he worked as a carpenter. You started remembering, and then, without realizing, started writing about those afternoons: your father camped on his knees, vigorously planing a block of wood. Bent over, one hand clamped on the wooden block and the other firmly pushing the planer over its surface. The pedestal fan behind his sweat-drenched back lying dead. The recursive sound of planer scraping the wood echoing through the room with his hard, cavernous breathing. The room feeling like a grimy pool of heat.

He worked in that hard, resolute manner till his bushy brows were completely soaked up with sweat; he then paused, put aside the planer, took off his large square spectacles, tilted his head sideways, and wiped his brows with his finger. Sweat poured down his temples in a sudden stream and rapped the straw mat that he was squatting upon. He then walked up to the dirty orange watercooler, which had a dripping ice block piled on top of it and filled a big steel cup with water, and drank it in slow gulps.

You wrote this and remembered more. You remembered the nights too.

You were pressing his legs, with your little hands. You realized how his legs had grown thin, and he heaved loud and sibilant sighs when your fingers pressed into his calf muscles, which were stiff and knotty. After a while, your wrists began to ache and you asked, “Baba, should I stop?” He did not reply, so you covered his feet with the bedsheet and were about to get up when he said in his wispy, shredded voice, “You must say to yourself, ‘What a father. What a
fucking
father.'”

For a minute, it was as if a flash exploded in your face. You did not move. It was too dark to see his face, but you were certain that a tear was shuffling down his cheek. You took his cold, sweaty hand in yours and held it awkwardly. And obviously, it brought no relief to either of you. You were trying to console him, but even then you knew he was right. You did hate him for loving his revolution more than you and your mother. It was impossible to give him any consolation, so you just sat there quietly on his bed, listening to the bleached silence between both of you, collecting the frothy sounds of the passing cars. A few seconds later, he lapsed into mumbling angrily to himself. His eyes were aflutter, his head moved as if trying to encircle his escaping thoughts. Every few seconds he sucked in the air with a loud sibilance. “Yes, yes,” he'd say in his scratchy voice, and then lapse back into, “Hmm, hmm,” as if agreeing with somebody absent. When you drew out your hand from his, you realized that he was not holding it at all.

These were pages that didn't make it into your book but they all return to you jostling and clambering for space in the story of your life now as you're lying chest down, shoulders down watching a cloud of dust billowing into the room through the empty window socket.

This suddenly feels much worse than the terror you've felt.

Or is it another face of the same fear?

Listen: you look ridiculous, lying on your belly holding your breath like a lizard stuck on the ground darting its eyes both ways.

You cautiously rise to your knees and walk up to the windows that are poking at the netting. Without touching anything, you peep through the side of the windows and see a lot of fire and dispersing men. From five stories above, you can discern a clear circumference of explosion. You quickly run your eyes, looking for guns, for somebody sitting in a sniper's position—and find nothing. Everything is scratched and seared. Buildings like live charcoals. Smoke in hot black clouds. Tar and scrapes of fire.

But now, so close to death, your mind is suddenly thinking about what you had written and discarded. You realize that you have suddenly become conscious of wounds you carried but could not see. Now looking out this broken window at people rushing toward sources of smoke, throwing water over burning cars and buses, you realize that what you had felt for your father was much worse than hate: it was a kind of love where it's impossible to know what you want, and where every act of reaching out lacerates you more deeply, and expression is impossible because no matter how hard you try you'll inevitably fall at odd angles to each other's needs.

Perhaps your son feels the same way about you.

And now you look at Noor Begum and realize you have no language to describe what you feel. No way to say how it wounds you to see her this way. Now, standing here, it is clear as day: more than anything else, you want to find words for what you feel and think and everything that is dark. And then this terrifying thought hits you: Yes: your father wrote poetry to find a language for his wounds. Yes: you in your own way have become your father.

People are still pouring in toward cars and buses that stand blasted out of shape. Should you go downstairs and try to help? You see a car toppled over, as if it had stepped on the bomb and was flung up in the air. A man tears away from another burning car with a large scrap of metal sunk into the back of his shoulder. He's screaming but his screams barely reach you. There is noise. People are shouting pointing to roasted bodies, skulls pierced with bits of shrapnel—soft and musty with blood. You pull away from the window with the image of a man squatting on the ground, holding his head.

You recall your car was parked close to the building. You must go down to examine the damage.

You ask your mother if she's okay. If Noor Begum's okay? She's still moaning, “Hai, hai Allah, hai Allah . . .” Your eyes pause over the gentle throb of the jugular of Noor Begum's neck, the raisin skin of her neck. She's still alive. But is she well?

You ask her to move to the other room with Noor Begum, which would cordon you from the worst, if it comes to it. You lift Noor Begum's papery body in your arms. Her face still doesn't seem to register anything. She stays numb and your mother gently lifts her dangling arm and wraps it around your neck. All of you move to the other room behind this one.