The Scatter Here Is Too Great (9 page)

A couple had veered too close to us. The boy was wearing tight jeans and in one of his hands he was turning a key chain. They had their backs toward us and were walking toward the sea with their bodies rubbing each other's. The boy put his arm around her. He snuggled his face in the girl's hair and kissed her on the neck.

“Ha-ha! Did you see that?” I exclaimed to Sadeq.

I realized he had been looking at them for some time.

“Yes,” he said, not taking his eyes away from them.

“Just look at the guy! He's got the face of a shaved chicken. Even
he's
got a girl.”

They took off their sandals where the wet sands began and then began walking barefoot toward the water. At one point, the girl stopped and pulled the boy back with his sleeve. She pointed him toward the footprint he'd just made on the sand. The boy bent down to look at the footprint closely and clutched the girl's bare ankle. Both of them laughed as she tried to release her leg from his grip.

“You don't need a face to get a girl, my dear,” Sadeq said, still holding his stare. “You need balls that weigh two grams more than the rest of them. That's all.”

I am sitting with Baba on the roof of a tall building and we are both looking down. It is like flying, really—so little noise, full of air and happiness. You look below and think the world is a lovely thing playing many games. Cars are small, buildings have shapes, and everything moves in regular clumps within the straight lines of the roads.

“You see, my son, a city is all about how you look at it,” he says, looking at me. “We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.”

I sit with him and imagine myself going up even higher, on some even taller building, as high as the sky itself. I imagine everything becoming so small that the world becomes a dot. A dot full of games. I see that little dot in my head and feel elated because it has all the cars, roads, buildings, Baba, I and Amma, and my school. Everything.

That is how I first desire the city.

“So should we go and eat something? Do you see a bun-kebab stall here?” he said, flicking the last chickpea in his mouth. But it missed its mark as he abruptly turned around. Two policemen stood behind us, open collars; the one with the baton had tapped Sadeq's shoulder.

“What are you two doing here oye?” one of them asked, who looked like the senior officer.

“Nothing. Talking. What's wrong?” Sadeq replied.

“Talking? Ha!” He turned to the other and winked. “We know what
that
means. What are you two
really
doing?”

“O why don't you speak oye?” He paused to examine us, and then his belligerent tone turned malicious. “Have we caught you doing something, eh?”

I felt my tongue disappear.

“What do you mean, sir?” Sadeq replied firmly, his face flushed.

“What do I mean? Hmm.” His baton began tracing Sadeq's arm. It jumped to his waist and curved around his pelvis and hovered there for a few seconds and then started touching up his testicles. Sadeq twitched.

“Skipping school to have some one-to-one fun, eh?” he sneered. “Let's take them to the station. We can teach them about some
real
one-to-one fun there,” he indicated to the other fellow.

“Sir, sir, we are just students, sir,” I blurted. “We are not skipping school, sir. It's the last day of our exams and we got off early and thought we should come here. . . .”

He wasn't listening. He asked for our IDs and told the other policeman, who was the junior officer, to take down our names and school names. Then he walked ahead and we followed behind him with the junior officer. After we had walked a little, the senior policeman stopped outside a paan stall to get a pack of cigarettes. When he was gone, Sadeq said to the junior guy, who was standing with us, “Can something be done? You know with some fees we can pay here?”

The second fellow looked at us sympathetically. “Hmmm . . . I can try. Do you have something?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, and started pulling out the money from my pocket. Seeing the one-rupee bills, he was irritated and said, “Are you kids messing with me? See the sir's shoulder—he has
two
stars!” He turned to Sadeq. “What do you have?”

Sadeq turned his pockets and took out one ten-rupee note. He grabbed it. “Okay, go. I will speak to Sir. No, no keep those.” He pointed to my handful of one-rupee notes I was pushing toward him.

Both of us walked in the other direction as fast as we could, almost running. It was strange, because we were next to the open sea, always in sight, no place to hide, and they were right behind us. For all I knew, they could arrest us again for running away while in custody.

“Should we throw a rock at him? Smash the bastard's head?” Sadeq said in a vengeful tone.

“What?! At who?”

“It's easy, they won't be able to catch us. Look at the bellies of those fuckers. They won't come after us. We can just run away. What do you say?”

“No!” I said incredulously.

“It's easy. We'll just hit them and get out, get on a bus or something.”

“No! It will get us into trouble! You don't fight with crazy men on the streets.”

“But the bastards . . . they . . .” His hardened face suddenly broke into tears. I stood there watching him as he tried to push his tears back into his tough exterior.

I did not know what to do. He covered his face with his elbow and sobbed. Finally, I put my hand around him. “Let's sit.” I glanced backward; the policemen were walking away from us in the other direction.

Sadeq sat with me on the ledge, sniffling, rubbing his eyes. I felt calm myself. The air was punctuated with his sniffles. We did not speak.

I was looking toward the sea: the waves arriving calmly then scattering on the shore. One reared its head above the body of the water far away, gained shape nearing the shore and along its path, gulped many tiny wavelets, and then it hit the shore and simply dissipated and shimmered back into the sea.

Amazingly, I was not thinking of Sadeq or the policeman. I thought of the old man. He seemed a man who existed only in stories. I began remembering things he'd said that I thought I had ignored. He said some really strange things. “The only thing you have is what's inside of you. Be hungry for your heart. Find it. Run away with it. Marry it. People just forget their hearts and do philosophies. Huee huee! When I run away I begin to
feel
my heart. I am usually in that café, eating fruitcake—but don't tell anybody—it's our secret, okay? Huee huee huee! And no, you can never run away from fruitcake and chai. Huee hueeee!”

I realized the old man had given a voice to something in me that had been buried under a different voice that had imperiously ruled my life. I imagined sitting with this old man in the café, listening to his stories, surrounded by the shouting bus drivers and paan sellers, and the hotel waiters. I imagined shaking his hand again, traveling on a bus with him. And even though I was only a reluctant truant, I had no doubt that we were friends. The thought made me happy.

Sadeq and I finally got on the bus to return. He had gone completely quiet, and I did not wish to speak to him anyway.

I wanted to stop at the Cantt Station and look for the café but the bus conductor said no bus was going there and instead would go straight to Shahrah-e Faisal from Teen Talwar. It was closed for some official function. “Where do you want to go? Take out the money.”

I paid him the fare and looked at the sea in my window that we were rapidly passing by. I dreamed of being surrounded by it. I wanted to lose all land. I wanted to suspend myself in the vast blue, where the same sea reenacts itself all around me. It was another way to look at the city. That was how I desired the city the second time.

A
sma Aapa's stories had become strange. She did not tell me old stories anymore. Stories like the ones about the clever cobbler who enters the king's palace by saying he's a rich merchant and is then helped by the princess who falls in love with him and makes him rich. Or that other story about the beggar who makes the king realize his mistake and the king rewards him by making him his vizier. . . . Now her stories ended with strange problems like sadnesses that couldn't be cured. Not even with happy things.

“So,” Aapa said, smiling, rubbing cream on her hand. “I have a new story for you. Have you brushed your teeth?” she asked, untying her black hair, brown in the lamplight. “Take off your socks. No stories if you don't do as I say.” She turned out the lights in the kitchen and was checking the locks of the main door.

Aapa had said the blanket does not have heat of his own. So I was already in the blanket rubbing my hands and giving some heat to him. She came and sat on the bed. And then she told me the story of a king whose body was turned into stone by his wife.

“The king, of course, did not know he was marrying a sorceress. He thought her a very, very beautiful woman. His viziers and counselors cautioned him about marrying a woman he did not know, but he ignored them and followed his heart's desire and married this beautiful girl who had come to his court and won his heart. Some months after the marriage, they had a fight and she got angry and turned him—from his belly down—into stone.”

As she said this, her warm hand petted my belly under the blanket and I wondered if the king's stone body could feel warm hands.

“And then she took over his kingdom.” She paused. I waited for her to tell me how he got his old body back, but she didn't say anything. So I asked.

“But didn't his friends and viziers look for him?”

“They did, but the sorceress-queen did not allow anyone to visit him in person. In fact, she made it known that the king had died. She even arranged a dummy funeral for him, and cried so much that everyone believed her. She locked him in her chamber where she visited him every night.”

“What's a chamber, Aapa?”

“A chamber, my dear, is a big, big bedroom, with a king-size bed and lots of red velvet cushions. But”—she paused—“here's the interesting part: the queen-sorceress returned to her chamber every night where the king was writing poetry, lamenting his condition and fate. She sat with him, and tenderly said words of love to him and asked him to read his poetry to her. She cried when he read. She then took his poetry and sang it on her one-stringed guitar, which she played to perfection. In those moments, there was no enmity, no hate, no bitterness between them, and the king would feel like he had done absolutely the right thing by marrying her. He forgot his pain and his stone body and all his animosity for this woman. When the queen's song was over he looked at her, thinking she would cure his body again. But she left him without saying anything. This happened every night till the poor king died.”

I was very sleepy. Aapa turned off the lamp. It would not be possible for a stone person to turn in his sleep, I imagined.

“So what did the poor king do if he wanted to take a bath?” I asked Aapa with my eyes closed.

She laughed a little. “Well, the queen would bring him soap and a bucket full of water . . .”

In my head, I saw the crying king washing his legs of stone with sponge and soapy water, and foam and water sliding down his legs into a blue bucket. . . . With his other hand, he was writing poetry on a piece of paper. His tears were slipping into the exact same curve on his face one after the other.

Aapa and I had come to spend our winter holidays with Nani in her apartment because Amma and Baba were out of our city, Karachi, and we were her grandchildren and we loved her. This was also the reason why Aapa washed Nani's dishes and her dirty clothes.

Nani's apartment building did not have any elevators, so Nani couldn't go anywhere because she once dropped a full bottle of strawberry jam on her foot and fractured it. I mean nothing happened to the jam bottle, but she was crying when she called Amma. Yes, she was crying even though she's so old. But it was not at all like when I cry; because when I cry, I just cry and forget about everything else. I can tell you she cried because I saw a tear stuck in the corner of her eye when I went to see her in the hospital; she was sitting on the hospital bed behind a curtain with one foot swollen and raised on two or three or four pillows. She asked me to come close and then she kissed my head.