Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [123]
“I’m a little confused, though,” Rashad said toward the end of dinner.
“Why?”
“What are you trying to get out of meeting with the shaykh? It seems that you’ll just become a glorified messenger for his ideas.”
“When they started up the Pony Express to deliver the mail in frontier America,” I replied, “the horse was as important as the mail.”
“There seems little reward in it.”
“It’s a thankless job, but someone has to do it. Haven’t you read about the heavenly rams? On the Day of Judgment they’ll put people on their backs and zip them across the Bridge of Sirat, suspended over hell, and take them safely to the other side.”
“You’re aware that those are the same rams which had been sacrificed by Muslims at the Eid festivals in this life?”
Folding my napkin with exaggerated precision, I ignored him.
We both ordered dessert, enjoying Vienna’s famed baked goods, and then parted ways. Before leaving, Rashad promised that I’d hear from him again about a potential meeting with his teacher.
As I thought back over the meeting in my hotel later on, I was pleased with the way it had gone. I hadn’t come across as desperate or as a schemer—or at least I didn’t think so. Thus the shaykh wouldn’t be threatened when he met me, and if I could earn his trust then he might be willing to chair my institute.
Optimistic now, I started doodling potential names for the think tank.
8
Once I was back at Ziad’s I felt good about the future.
Now while he was at work I started venturing out, often spending time at the malls. Eventually I got bored with that and headed farther afield, finding and delighting in hidden souks. These were open-air markets, dusty and hot without air conditioners or fans, at which migrants from all around the world sold foods, wares, clothes, and used goods. Whereas the mostly Arab clientele in the malls wore dishdashas and abayas and niqabs, the market’s clientele wore mostly denim, topped by collared shirts and blouses. Many of the women didn’t cover, and there was no sign of any policing or monitoring. These souks reminded me of the old Pakistani bazars, seeming less formal and more jovial than any Kuwaiti mall I’d been in thus far.
The first day I discovered such a market, I walked around with a smile on my face. I sniffed cologne at one stall and then browsed through a magazine rack containing books from all over the world. I walked past a group of Filipinos, male and female, hanging about and carelessly chatting with one another. I heard clusters of Egyptians talking loudly with one another. A Lebanese man tried talking to me in English about how he was going to move to Canada. Toward the end of that day, as one of the Indian jewelers selling used watches closed up shop, his tiny companion, a dark-skinned Sinhala girl, walked past close enough for her hair to brush against his arm, and when they walked away, he momentarily reached forward with his hand and touched her fingers. I tried to pull out my phone camera to capture this moment of fleeting intimacy, this act of natural liberty, but by the time I got the lens in focus, the couple had gone.
After I got back to the apartment, Ziad and I went to a small café for dinner and I told him about my day while we waited for our food to arrive.
“It was lively,” I reported. “It was loud. There was music playing. I didn’t expect to see such…” I began, struggling for a word.
“Such what?”
“I don’t know the word I’m looking for.”
“You mean freedom,” Ziad said, smiling. “You saw poor people in a Muslim country—”
“An Arab Muslim country,” I interjected.
“—and you figured they’d be hard-core theocrats or fundamentalists.”
I nodded. “Something like that.”
“Quite the opposite,” Ziad replied, nodding at the waiter as he brought our tea. “The people at the bottom of the rung—migrants and Bedouins—are pretty laid-back, both culturally and religiously. Same goes for the ultra-rich. It’s the middle class—the mall-going, bureaucratic, Camry-driving portion of the population—which is uptight and stuck-up.”
“I guess you’re right,” I