Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [12]
There was a larger upper portion of the city expanding like a heinous goiter. It belonged to bazaris with their stalls, traders, cart-walas, maulvis on their way to teach at the mosque, and mendicants. Most of these people lived in mud houses lined up haphazardly on streets of dust marked by trash, open sewage, and the furry green droppings of low-breed donkeys. The central institution of this section: the mosque; the popular mode of transportation: the horse-drawn tanga; the favorite type of violence: insult. This is where we were headed.
We arrived in Sehra Kush on a hazy morning and took two tangas to Dada Abu’s house. After clop-clopping on a highway for a while, we turned onto a badly paved road and passed an empty field full of trash where a pair of wide-horned black buffaloes—whose milk was sold to the neighboring families—swished their tails. We then took a turn into an unpaved alley, passing open gutters leaking witch blackness onto the street. Homes were on both sides of the alley, set off from the narrow street by a foot-wide gap for the nali, the open sewer, which flowed in a slow froth full of everything from stones, to phlegm, to animal dung, with light-brown dollops of human feces bobbing to the surface. Each house had a thick wooden plank that bridged the nali. The doors on the houses were all flung open, although there was a heavy curtain in each doorway that assured privacy for the women within.
When our tangas made their way into the alley, children ran toward us from each side. They yelled greetings and stuck sticks into the churning spokes, picking up another stick whenever a grinding wheel snapped a spear and nearly took a child’s hand along with it. Soon we came to a dilapidated Land Rover from the mid-1950s that was parked in the middle of the alley. (We later learned that it belonged to the Balochi neighbors.) The tanga drivers, clicking their tongues at their horses as they reversed, cursed at the ungainly car for blocking the thoroughfare. The horses took short, unsteady steps backward during this process, and the heads of the animals swayed from side to side as if they were intoxicated mystics.
Dada Abu’s house, constructed from a mixture of mud, hay, rope, and wooden beams, was airy but not big. He lived there with Dadi Ma and four of my uncles and their families. The house had a courtyard, a kitchen, a cemented area for the hand-operated nalka that supplied the water, a tiny latrine with an unpaved hole in the ground, a sitting room, two bedrooms with shuttered windows, and an open staircase going to the roof. On warm nights people slept on the roof; on cooler nights in the courtyard. In the desert it never got cold enough to require sleeping inside.
As this host of relatives greeted my brother and me with pats on the head and pinches to the cheeks, I took a look at the cramped quarters and realized that we had moved in as well.
7
Why bother? I’m just ugly and old!”
Dadi Ma was fond of saying this to people who told her to cover her face when she went for her great walks around town. She was a small woman with a gold tooth, thin hennaed hair, and a loud voice. Although the women of Sehra Kush, when they left their compound, always wore the niqab, a full veil that covered the face, when Dadi Ma went out she preferred the comfort of a loose garment called the chador, which draped over her head and shoulders but was open at the face; she typically tied it with a ribbon under her chin.
During the days, I spent a lot of time in Dadi Ma’s vicinity. She usually sat near the kitchen on a small charpai, or cot, giving instructions to Ammi and the aunts about what to cook for dinner, how many pinches of salt should go in the cookpot, and why the milkman needed to be thrashed for adding water and skimming the cream.
She also told tall tales.