Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [134]
I could see that these men were all from working-class backgrounds. When I commented about that, Arif said, “Some of them come from the labor communities far outside the city—places where they sleep ten to a room.” I nodded and looked around at the dusty feet in torn sandals, the clothes that smelled of dust and desert, the turbans of aged fabric. Yet all the faces seemed serene. Each time my hand was shaken by a smiling man, my brand-name shirt—the same shirt I’d worn for the interview with Rashad in Vienna—rubbed against a man who spent most of his life sweeping dust from the streets, or clambering up and down the ladders of a building in progress, or slaving inside a boiling shop. I wanted to fling my shirt off my skin: maybe it was the expensive monogram on my chest that was keeping me from the warmth and serenity that Arif and his dusty friends seemed to share.
“Let’s go inside,” Arif suggested, leading me into a throng of men taking off their shoes. We stepped into an open room that resembled a mosque but was decorated with banners, streamers, and numerous lights. Some of the banners had a picture of the Ka’ba upon them. Crisscrossing the room just above head level was a patterned decoration made from gauzy paper that rustled softly in the occasional breeze. Arif and I went and sat on the floor near the center of the room. From there I could see a group of old men seated in front, facing the crowd, their heads bowed and their lips murmuring.
Soon a younger man rose and walked forward to a podium, where he introduced a fresh-faced singer in a blue T-shirt and dirty jeans. “This guy’s got an amazing voice,” Arif whispered.
By now the room was full. People that weren’t crushed together on the floor were standing along the edges. Others, Arif told me, had gone up to the roof to sit. As the crowd thickened and congealed, various people pressed into me from the back, the front, and the sides. Feeling a bit anxious, I tried to keep space for myself by extending my elbows and jutting out my knees, but to no avail. I noticed that Arif, rather than fighting the crowd, welcomed it: he leaned back against the man behind him, hugged another man in front of him, and gave smiles to the man to his right.
Finally the performer cleared his throat and began singing.
It was a hamd, a devotional song about God. This particular one was a mixture of many ethnic languages from Pakistan. As the young man sang, the crowd swayed, sang along, and raised their hands in jubilation. When the singer hit a particularly compelling verse, Arif or one of the other men near me would put his fist in the air and shout, Haqq!
The word meant truth.
Each shout sent a wave of euphoria through the crowd. It was apparent to me that all these hard-working men could understand haqq—not the word but the concept—but I couldn’t. I began to feel like an outsider, someone who had been accidentally dropped into a group of people to whom he couldn’t belong. My mind started wandering. What if a militant came and blew up the congregation? What if some hard-line Wahhabi came by and arrested all of us?
Suddenly the young man at the podium began singing Allah hoo Allah hoo, the legendary hamd. Arif let out a haqq that was echoed by others. As the beautiful notes of the song coursed through me, all concerns were erased from my mind. I felt as if someone had cut open my head and was blowing into the tube that was my body. The feeling softened me somehow. It melted away my skin and sinew and made me a part of the men around me. These men who were raised from dust, lived in dust, and would eventually rest in dust. I felt one with them. I was not alone. We were many. We were all children of dust. I swayed in time to the music and when a sweaty man put his head on my back to rest for a moment, all I could do was smile.
The song accompanied us as we exited and even as we picked up our free tray of food from an attendant waiting