Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [11]
6
The Prophet Sulayman, son of Daud, King of the Jews, controlled the elements, spoke to animals, and commanded the jinn. He traveled across the world on a throne made from a diamond so flawless that before the Queen of Sheba stepped upon it, she hiked up her dress, thinking she was about to step in a pool of water. One day Sulayman’s aerial adventures took him to a great mountain at the easternmost edge of the Iranian plateau. He looked across South Asia but found it covered in darkness; then he turned toward Jerusalem. That mountain where he stopped, later known as Takht-e-Sulayman, sits in what is now the arid desert of central Pakistan, west of the mighty Indus. In that desert, my father’s family lived in Sehra Kush, a tired town surrounded by sand dunes.*
We had no throne. We took third-class rail to get there.
On the multi-day trip we occupied a window seat and a sleeping berth. We rode with migrant workers smelling of soil who slept with their turbans pulled over their eyes. Those who couldn’t snare a seat were comfortable sleeping in front of the train’s pungent latrine and in the aisles, apparently unconcerned about being stepped upon by barefoot passengers coming in from the muddy fields. Men brought aboard everything from bicycles, to a line of women in veils, to lambs and goats—along with a wide range of similar life essentials—minding them with a dismissive nonchalance. The atmosphere in the train was jovial. Chai flowed freely; roasted nuts, poured out into paper cups, were omnipresent. The predominantly good-natured conversation was punctuated by laughter, and there were many jokes about politicians and their corrupt char so beesi. There was occasional yelling as well, especially whenever a shepherd led his bearded goats onto the train track ahead of us and caused a delay. A delay was usually considered deplorable only if it was overnight, however; even then, if it was a precautionary stop in order to avoid an ambush by dakooz, it was shrugged off with a casual reference to Allah’s ownership of the universe (followed by a stream of profanities about the incestuous anal activities of the armed degenerates). When there was a woman discovered to be traveling all by herself, she was shuttled off to some other part of the train, where a coterie of hefty matriarchs who had heard about “the poor creature” yelled at their men for not showing more initiative in bringing the vigorous jawan girl under their protective umbrella.
A few nights after leaving Lahore we came upon a deserted train station and switched to a midnight lorry that would take us over unpaved roads the rest of the way. Because we had a woman with us, Flim and I were put in the front, while numerous men—Pops among them—jammed themselves into the back.
I looked out the window at the station we’d left behind and in a cloud of dust saw a pair of men running at the moving lorry, holding their sacks with one hand and their falling lungis—a traditional Punjabi sarong—with the other, cursing at the driver in a language I didn’t understand.
They shone with a blue luminescence that made me wonder if they were angels.
Unlike Lahore, where the immensity of history forced hierarchy to become subtle in manifesting itself, Sehra Kush felt no qualms about segregation. The town was bisected by a highway that did the job.
The lower portion of the town, in the shape of a polygon, was for the administrators, judges, civil servants, and military men, all of whom lived in bungalows inside compounds marked by streets of the blackest asphalt, manicured lawns complete with imported trees, and an order epitomized by security guards