Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [14]
Unlike his wife, I couldn’t wait till Dada Abu came home. I liked him more than anyone else. He was a stylish old man who wore a glittering watch and suits made of boski thread cotton. He drove an apple-red Kawasaki motorcycle and often gave me a ride. He usually arrived shortly before the maghrib prayer at sunset, made wazu, went to the mosque, and then came back for dinner, which he ate quietly with his hands. Then he drank three glasses of cool water from the clay matka—squatting on the ground for each chug as per the example of the Prophet—and left the house to go up the street and sit with his brothers. As he left the house, he often took me along with him and joked with me.
“Who is this strange boy next to me?”
“It’s me!” I said.
“What is that voice I hear?”
“It’s me,” I repeated. “It’s Abir ul Islam!”
“Oh! It’s the fragrance of Islam that I smell on my nose.”
“Yes!” I said, grabbing his pinky. “I’m coming with you.”
“My father, may Allah bless him, said your name should be Alauddin,” Dada Abu said. “The heights of the faith.’ But I think your name should be Naughty Boy.”
“You can’t change my name,” I protested. “I am Abir ul Islam. Do you want me to change your name, big man?”
“No, no, big boss,” he said, laughing. “You keep your name and I will keep mine. You serve Islam and I will serve you. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Dada Abu was the youngest of all his brothers, and when in the evenings they sat together it was his job to maintain the hooka, or water-pipe. He often passed this assignment to me.
“Take this chamber and go to Mateen’s house. Tell him to fill it up with tobacco,” he instructed. “And hurry back. Don’t start playing with those cows.”
I picked up the head of the hooka and ran over to a neighboring home. It belonged to a Gujjur family. Their entire existence revolved around their four black buffaloes. They milked them. They sold the calves. They piled dung and made patties, which when crisped in the sun they sold for fuel. They hitched the buffaloes to carts and took the patties to the market. While there they rented their cart out to those not fortunate enough to have a beast of burden. To supplement this meager livelihood, they also refilled hookas with bitter tobacco for the old men in the neighborhood.
With the embers like liquid gold, I brought the head back and placed it atop the hooka while Dada Abu patted me on the head. Then I quietly sat down in a corner, observing the four brothers with beards and turbans sitting cross-legged on low wooden beds, whispering smoky kisses to the desert—their wives either dead or irrelevant; their business troubles forgotten; their conflicts resolved through the placid acceptance of everything. When there was an occasional splatter of disagreement, a political confrontation perhaps, it resulted in one brother opening his mouth and then just as quickly closing it, because ultimately they knew that nothing had changed over the past forty years: they still considered everyone a crook and every leader a fool. We—the youth, the children—were the only ones to bring any disorder into their lives. But to counter the dissonance that we caused, they had perfected many methods of mollification. A son with troubled finances was given a room in the house. A boy rebelling too much was indoctrinated with Islam. A wife nagging too much was sent to her parents for a little while, where she started to feel guilty for being a burden and came begging back. A daughter getting too high-minded got married off to a humble man. Disobedient cattle got eaten. All such decisions were sacralized without speaking in that nightly circle around the hooka.
When I sat among the four old brothers, I felt assured of the continuity of the world. When the nostril-burning secondhand smoke