16
This is part one of a two part series.
Sindbad landed on these shores and met a strange people. They lived in cocoons. Not that they did not have homes. They did but gave them up for their cocoons. Each cocoon is stitched from inside. So they can come out if they want. They do not. They are waiting to be reborn as a pious nation. But each day changes some into worms. Those who venture out, rush back to their cocoons. The sun and fresh air scare them.
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In the group that meets at this Virginia tavern, there is a man who calls himself a wordsmith. He writes for newspapers and magazines, is always short of money and shabbily dressed. He visits places and people that others do not. So others hold it against him. The wordsmith loves sharing his stories and the group likes listening to him but with a sneer.Tonight, it’s his turn to tell a story. As the room filled with the shisha-smoke, he took a deep puff, grabbed his drink and started: “Tomorrow is April, the 4th,” he said. “Do you know what happened on April 4?”
“There he goes,” said someone in the audience. “Now he will lecture us on how little we know.”
He did not.
“We are separated by more than 30 years and thousands of miles from what happened on April 4, 1979,” he said. “It was the day when Pakistanis hanged their prime minister.”
His last sentence had an immediate effect on the people. They put down their drinks, pushed aside the shisha and listened eagerly.
Early April evenings in Washington are chilly but pleasant.
But it was different when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged so many years ago. That year the summer came fast in Pakistan, and by the end of April the heat was intolerable.
The wordsmith lived in a nameless street of an old Pakistani city in those days. It was the nameless men and women of those nameless streets who loved Bhutto and later his daughter, Benazir. They remained loyal to the Bhutto family as long as the Bhuttos were loyal to them; perhaps longer as many still love the Bhuttos.
“Since this story is about those nameless men and women who loved Bhutto, I dedicate this to an anonymous old man of my city,” the wordsmith said.
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This old man of our story looks around helplessly at the stubborn night that sits on the roof and refuses to come down. Perhaps it is scared of the dusty streets and battered mud houses that burn all day in the scorching sun and never cool. Now they were breathing the heat out. People prepare to endure another sleepless night.The old man lights his cigarette, takes a deep, bitter drag, coughs and spits under his charpoy in utter disgust. He curses the night and hits a dreaming child for talking in his sleep. The boy’s cries wake up an old mangy dog sleeping under the charpoy who drags out his weak, hungry body, stares angrily at the man and barks a short, feeble rebuff, which impresses no one.
An old woman throws a stone at the dog but misses. She curses the old man for ruffling the uneasy calm. The little row has no effect on the night, which stays on the roof, still refusing to come down. Nothing moves except the heat, the cruel, over-powering, vengeful heat that stirs the low-blowing wind. It picks up slowly and soon the subcontinent’s notorious luh wind starts to blow. It hisses in the streets like a snake, infusing poison in everything it touches. It seems to be coming from the nostrils of the gods of wrath.
A fight breaks out near the corner shop where scores of jobless young men gather every evening, escaping their low-ceiling homes that heat up like ovens by the time the sun sets. With nothing else to do, they often fight.
They always find a reason: a cricket match that the national team lost, local politics, and ethnic differences. And when it is a religious dispute, the fight assumes a holy garb.
When they fight, they really fight. All their inner hatreds — caused by unemployment, deprivation and sexual frustration — come out with a vengeance. An altercation leads to a scuffle, a scuffle to a stabbing and then the guns come out. Only sticky pools of blood searing the street can cool their tempers.
The fight raises a ruckus in the narrow streets where hundreds of half-naked bodies — mainly of old men and children — sleep out in the open. Women sleep on the roofs. Teenage girls stare at the wild, angry men from inside the narrow streets. The girls, unable to vent their own frustration, fight with their mothers who curse them loudly. But the night still refuses to cool.
Bats come out of hiding from the old banyan tree in the community graveyard. They fly over the heads of naked humans lying half-conscious in the streets.
“They like sucking blood, especially of young women sleeping on the roof,” says the old woman in a voice that betrays a strange passion for the blood-sucking bats.
An owl hoots. “The bird brings bad luck. We are doomed,” says the old man.
But both the night and the owl ignore him. The owl continues to hoot and the night remains as hot and oppressive as ever.
“Haven’t you noticed, it is only May and it is already so hot,” he says again. “It is all because of the hanging,” says his wife. “You don’t hang a king,” she says.
“He was not a king, only a prime minister,” reminds the old man. “It is the same, it is the same,” she says.
The wind blows hard, stirring dust, horse dung and dried leaves. Everybody falls silent. The luh wind reaches the banyan tree in the nearby graveyard. The tree groans a long, agonising groan.
“Don’t you see the man is not dead? He lives, on old trees and in holy places. On a night like this you can hear him,” says the woman.
The tree groans again. All remain silent. The wind magnifies the groan and the owl’s hoot.
“I can never forget what I saw in the graveyard,” says the old man. “It was a day after they hanged him. I went to the graveyard to see what those who live on the banyan tree were doing.”
People in this neighborhood have always believed that spirits lived on this tree, which was so old that nobody knew its age. Even during the day it was dark under the tree as its thick green leaves and hanging roots prevented the sun from reaching there. People said spirits of all those buried in that graveyard visited the tree at night and during hot summer afternoons.
By now the old man had the attention of all those lying within his hearing.
“It was already past midnight and the tree-dwellers were having their little meeting,” he says. “Among them I saw a new spirit. He was wearing a golden necklace that shone in the dark. When I looked closely, it looked like the marks you see around the neck of a hanged man. It was clearly he.
“He was addressing the spirits as he addressed us when alive. As he looked at me, the sadness in his eyes sent a chill through my spine. I wept like a child.”
The wordsmith was listening to them from his window. He lived in a small room in an old dilapidated building built during the British Raj. It was hot and stuffy. When the heat became intolerable, he lifted his charpoy and came down in the street.
