Trespassing (38 page)

Salaamat took it sadly.

Fatah stopped, astonished. ‘I know where we are! This is the closest Mohana village to us. Who knew it could be accessed from here? Takes for ever by road. Look,’ he pointed to a row of orange trees. ‘I bet we can fill up on tangerine torture!’

There was a small thatched hut and in the distance, the kind of Mohana boathouse sometimes seen drifting down the river past their campsite: flat-bottomed with a high prow and a canopy of reeds. The boats were big, often with two or three families in residence. This one was about ten feet long – nothing resembling the smaller, canoe-shaped boats of his village. Fatah was right about the spring: an ox turned the wheels of a water pump.

Salaamat was wondering how they’d got the huge animal all the way here when Fatah gently tugged his sleeve. ‘Sit with me a while before we go any further. Here, in this beautiful bower.’ He pulled him into the shade of an orange tree, and reclined his head on Salaamat’s shoulder. He was the shorter one so when they lay with feet together, his hair brushed Salaamat’s ear. He kissed it loudly. The ear started ringing.

Fatah said, ‘If it weren’t for the Chief, I’d go to Sulawesi.’

Salaamat folded his arms. His Sulawesi was down there, with the Mohana fishermen.

‘You’re supposed to say, “What’s in Sulawesi?”‘When Salaamat still wouldn’t answer, he sang,
‘I’ve nursed you like the beat of my heart. I’ve snatched you from the hands of fate.’

‘I’m going across.’ Salaamat pulled away. He stood up and began walking.

Fatah followed. ‘All right. I’ll buy the drink if you stop being so foolish.’

Children were running along the bank, calling out to two women washing clothes in the river. They held strings in their hands, though Salaamat couldn’t see what was tied to the ends. Not kites, something much smaller. One woman looked up and saw him approach. She sent a child into
the hut, probably to call the men. Salaamat now saw what the boy had on the end of his string: a dragonfly, beating violet wings as the child twirled the line around and around.

Salaamat was roused early in the tent he shared with five others. ‘Get up!’ A man shoved him with the barrel of his gun. ‘Time to go.’ He peered out from under a grimy sheet, grabbing the man’s arm with one hand, his pistol with the other. It was Gharyaal Bhai, and his watch showed just after three o’clock.

‘We have a long journey,’ the man grinned. He prodded him once more, gently this time. Salaamat stumbled out with him.

Fatah had already washed himself. Under the stars his mop of hair shone like a cannonball, dripping over a beaming face. He thumped Salaamat’s shoulder. ‘Ready for test number two, meri jaan?’

Salaamat dunked his head in the dark river. He shook it dry, spraying Fatah. ‘What’s the hurry? There’s going to be no one on the highway to rob at this hour.’

‘We don’t rob. We clean. And you’ll be surprised how many cars we’ll find, especially around Thatta.’

Salaamat stared at him. Fatah knew his family worked on a farm near there. Why had he planned it this way? ‘Why do we have to go that far south? It will take hours.’

Fatah smiled mysteriously. ‘We have hours. We might even make it back in time for a quick walk up the gorge, just you and me.’ He winked, walking away.

One minute Salaamat loved him, the next Fatah was everything he despised. Everything. Anger welled inside him as he joined the half a dozen others awake now too. He helped collect sticks for the fire, his mind racing. What was he, the wife in this marriage?

Gharyaal Bhai made the tea. The jeep hadn’t brought supplies yesterday. They were down to drinking hot water with only enough leaves and milk powder for color. There was no sugar. Rusks were in short supply. No one betted away cigarettes. The Commander said it was all part of the discipline. No one argued. He was the Chief’s brother-in-law.

But in private, the men said the Commander had hidden sugar packets under his tent, which was why he never allowed his to be assembled and disassembled during morning drill. They swore they’d seen him digging up sacks in the middle of the night, shoveling crystals down his throat like a lunatic.

Fatah took the first cup Gharyaal Bhai poured. The men let him. He was, Salaamat had only recently discovered, First Lieutenant Muhammad Shah’s brother-in-law. Salaamat scowled: if everyone around him was related to the Chief in some way, wasn’t he the outsider again?

The other men too were growing increasingly sullen. They were losing weight. Only a visit to the Chief’s lair or an expedition to the highway animated them. They seemed to be thinking of this while sipping the hot water daubed with token Lipton leaves. In silence, they prayed together for parathas, chat, halwa puri, fresh milk. When no miracle hand served them, they talked about Thatta. ‘We can always get rewri there,’ someone said, and the others cheered up.

From across the fire Fatah called out to him, ‘Oh Rani, the Chief said if you pass this test too all of us can get as many dishes of rewri as we want.’

A few men snickered. Though he didn’t like Fatah mocking him this way in public, Salaamat knew many of the others had paired up, some even in his tent. There was plenty of fire to throw around.

After the measly breakfast, they headed for the jeep. This time no one blindfolded him. He sat, as on the trip to the Chief’s, beside Fatah. The vehicle wove through dense thickets, sometimes paralleling the river, at others cutting perpendicular to it. A lank sunrise slowly crept around them, bringing the flutter of birds and the silence of crickets.

Gharyaal Bhai reached over and pinched Salaamat’s cheek. ‘You’d better pass because I’m getting very hungry.’ Conversation returned to food. Men exchanged notes on the best dessert ever made by their mothers. As excitement escalated, each man praised his own mother at the expense of another’s. Abuse flailed. Fatah, disgusted, growled, ‘Conserve your strength.’ He forbade anyone to speak of sweets till they were actually being eaten. A sullen silence descended again.

Further south, the level of the Indus began to drop. Fatah’s jaw muscles twitched. ‘They’ve stolen our Sindhu.’ The others nodded, urging him to continue. He did. ‘Once we called it the life of the lower valley. What valley? This is a desert. What life? We’re being buried alive.’ He recited the famous lines:
‘With homes on the river bank, those who die of thirst, die of their own making.’

There was consensual muttering,
‘… Of their own making.’

Salaamat watched his friend, feeling the performance was delivered partly to show him what a fine commander he’d make.

The jeep took a short cut through the dry riverbed, kicking up dust. It was June but the monsoons gave no hint of calling.
The sun rode beside them, stealing up from the parched land, roasting everything in sight. To preserve his saliva, even Fatah talked less.

Finally, they turned onto the National Highway. Salaamat again thought of his family. They were getting too close to the farm where his sister worked. He looked around him. Judging from the height of the sun, it was close to seven o’clock. They were near Keenjhar Lake; the farm was perhaps an hour away. Sumbul wouldn’t have arrived yet. He wished she had. What if their jeep intercepted her bus? He tried to remember which bus she took in from her husband’s house in the city, and what time it got to the farm. He realized he’d never asked her these basic questions. Now his mind swarmed with many others: if the men conducted raids this far south, who was to say she was safe, ever, not just today? And what about his brothers, Shan and Hamid, whom he always brushed by carelessly at the gate? And his father? Salaamat sighed with relief. The old man did not commute to the farm. He was safe.

It was the first time he’d thought of the old man with anything but disdain. What was happening to him? His stomach felt woozy. Liquid was floating in there. He squeezed his rectum and pressed a hand to his gut to stop the pain.

His thoughts returned to Sumbul. He saw her again with a baby suckling her Fanta-cap nipple. She looked beautifully up at him, the deep blue lapis lazuli stones as dazzling as her smile. He swallowed: what did the men do to the women and children on board the buses?

Fatah was still scowling at the naked riverbed. ‘It looks obscene,’ he declared.

‘What kind of vehicles get stopped?’ Salaamat tried.

‘Nice ones,’ Gharyaal Bhai flashed his teeth.

‘Not buses then?’

Someone else volunteered, ‘Depends.’

Fatah looked him full in the face. ‘You’ll do whatever’s expected.’

And then they turned west and Thatta flew by. They weren’t stopping. The arches of Shah Jehan’s Mosque receded like a massive ribcage: white bone after bone after bone.

But then there was a bus. It was heading toward them. They headed toward the bus.

Neither stopped.

Salaamat grew teary with relief.

They passed the farm. Inside, perhaps his brothers had already taken their place at the gate. He turned, but saw nothing – no shadows, no movement. Months later, when he saw it again, there’d be armed guards stationed there. But not today. Now they were entering the strip where his family commuted daily: between Makli Hill and Karachi. He could see the dome of the bat-infested tomb. Not long ago, he’d been witness to a secret tryst there. He carried that secret with him, down the National Highway, and the terror of intercepting Sumbul’s bus rose again. If anyone so much as laid a finger on her beautiful smile, he’d disembowel him.

He wanted to freeze time. Or maybe it was only in retrospect that he wished he’d wanted to. Later, he’d need to know if Fatah was right: who you are depends on where you are. So he observed the men the way he should have then. He went back to the jeep racing along at 110 kilometers an hour. He gave each man the attention he wished he’d given his brothers, sister, nephew, nieces, cousins, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. He was never able to forget a single line on their faces.

Dil Haseen: the doolha with the deep, impassive voice, who joined the camp soon after his wedding. The men said he was too deadpan to consummate his marriage. No, he himself had said that.

Next to him was the baby-faced Gharyaal Bhai, always the first to volunteer for any expedition. Salaamat could see
him with teeth bared, meeting a crocodile’s fangs with his own. Those teeth were going to stay far, far away from his family.

Ali, the malakhras wrestler. He still oiled himself every morning. He shared Salaamat’s tent and Gharyaal Bhai shared him.

Mirchi, small and eager to please. He hailed from Kunri, which gave the world more red chilies than any other place on earth.

Those were the four sitting opposite him. On his side, other than Fatah and himself, sat Yawar. Though zealous as Fatah, Fatah did not like Yawar because Yawar was the most educated man in the camp. He insisted Yawar was really a Muhajir spy in Sindhi skin.

And finally, the soldierly Amar. Broad-shouldered and sinewy like Salaamat, and just as quiet.

Ten, maybe twelve kilometers went by. They were approaching a village. Wheat and millet sprang around them and the trickle of irrigation canals was heavenly.

‘Let’s stop here,’ Ali suggested. ‘We can get a drink.’

‘No,’ Fatah shook his head. ‘We’re nearly there.’

At last the jeep came to a halt. ‘Park around the corner there,’ Fatah told the driver. ‘Come on,’ he said to Salaamat, and hopped outside.

They walked on the highway, eight men with two firearms each. Fatah positioned Salaamat in front of a wire fence enclosing a field of wheat dotted with egrets. ‘Right here?’ Salaamat protested. ‘In broad daylight?’

Dil Haseen extended a hand as if testing for raindrops. ‘Sun’s up.’

‘What do you mean in broad daylight?’ Fatah snarled. ‘It’s daytime isn’t it?’

‘Maybe he’s missing his blindfold,’ Yawar suggested.

‘Stay there,’ Fatah ordered. ‘The first vehicle you see, you
stop.’ The other men crossed the street, leaving Salaamat alone to face oncoming traffic.

He had no watch, but it must have been after eight o’clock. His throat was so dry he could have sucked on a shoot of grass. In the distance, he saw farmers wandering about, and thought he even heard a goat bleat. Was he beginning to hallucinate? More than four hours without a drink, and with nothing in his stomach but a cup of feeble tea. The seven others stood across from him, maybe twenty feet away. They were haggard, humorless. They wanted nothing more than a cold shower, a hot meal and a soft bed. That ought to have been home. Instead, here they were, fighting for it on a sizzling day in June.

He began to see double. There were fourteen men across the street. There were two streets and there were four drops of sweat sliding all the way down his nose. When one drop struck his lips it was saltier than the godforsaken sea. He was ready to jump the fence and suck on anything, goat dung if he had to.

He heard a whistle. Someone waved from across both streets. It was Fatah, and he was excited. Salaamat knew why but he could not bring himself to look. Fatah whistled again, as if he had a bleating goat stuck inside him, the bastard. It was a dark car. Not a bus. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad after all. He couldn’t see the driver but the driver had seen them. About one hundred feet away the car stopped and began turning around.

‘Shoot!’ Fatah shouted.

Salaamat stared as the black car screeched and swiveled. The men had aimed their weapons and the driver panicked. He reversed into a ditch.

‘Shoot!’ Now the others were yelling too.

The engine roared. Tires pealed. The car was on the road again. In a few seconds, it would escape. Salaamat jogged towards it, holding up a pistol but doing nothing else.

‘Chootar,’ Fatah ran forward. ‘Fire!’

The air exploded in gunshots. At first Salaamat thought the shots had somehow turned to little flecks of light and the highway had shrunk into one of Hero’s magic vases. The glow was delicate, astral. Entirely at odds with the bellowing bullets. But then he saw it came from inside the car, or rather, around it. It was the windshield and the windows, and it sprayed the road in a light rain. Within seconds, the highway glittered like a forest of diamonds. When the men ran forward they crushed the diamonds to powder.