Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [19]
“It was your son, Sabra?”
She nodded. “My oldest.”
“Evil men!” said my older aunt again, still aghast.
“Oh my,” Ammi said. “Look at the poor goat’s expression.”
“Bring it here, boy; we have to soothe it,” Dadi Ma said. She read a surah from the Quran and then put her hand on the violated goat’s head to bless it.
“He didn’t even care that it was so young,” Black Baloch said.
“How awful!” said Ammi. “I don’t know if it will survive.”
Then the women began discussing whether the goat’s meat had become un-Islamic. It was resolved that the animal should be slaughtered and its meat distributed to charity. As for the culprit, it was apparent that he needed to be married.
Before the marriage could happen, however, the Balochis fixed up their Land Rover, outfitted it with a machine gun, and left town.
Pops said that they probably moved to Karachi. He claimed that they had become rich enough to become one of the elites of Pakistan.
10
Ammi became pregnant with my brother Zain at a time when Pops had few patients and we had no money, so everyone in the compound at Sehra Kush worried how we would manage our finances. In fact, Ammi had to go stay with her relatives in Lahore for the delivery. However, when she brought Zain back, all the earlier concerns were forgotten. The baby had the ability to elicit smiles from everyone. As he grew up, his favorite activity was to bash Flim and me on the head with his favorite spoon.
One day, while Ammi was cooking in the courtyard, she saw that Zain was looking up at the rooftop. Inching along in his walker, he approached the staircase, pointing and cooing. She followed him, and as she drew near she began screaming: someone dark and menacing seemed to be staring down at mother and son. A few days later she heard pigeons congregating in the same staircase, but when she went to check there was nothing there. Then finally, at all hours of the day, she began to hear the sounds of jinns whispering from the darkness of the staircase, calling for Zain. The sinister presence on the roof lasted seven days all told.
On the seventh day Zain was playing with another infant as Ammi and Dadi Ma sat and gossiped. I was outside, tossing a ball with my cousins. Suddenly screams went up inside.
When I ran to the bedroom, Ammi was holding Zain upside down, shaking him as if he had swallowed something, while Dadi Ma shouted, “He’s not breathing! He’s stopped breathing!”
Ammi remained calm but she couldn’t get a reaction from Zain, whose body had gone limp. She tried CPR and the Heimlich maneuver, but still he didn’t respond. Suddenly, one of my uncles burst through the curtain, swooped Zain into his arms, and ran toward Pops’s clinic, approximately a mile away. By this time, Ammi was wailing too, and both she and Dadi Ma ran into the alley without a chador or niqab.
Inside the house, speculation began as to what had prompted Zain to stop breathing. Someone noticed peanut shells on the floor and concluded that he had choked on their contents. Ammi, when she came back in to await news from the clinic, said that she feared it was the mysterious presence she’d been feeling for a week that had strangled Zain. Dadi Ma pulled out a copy of the Quran and recited loudly, rocking back and forth aggressively as if the momentum of her body might affect the direction of destiny.
At the clinic, Pops performed a tracheotomy on Zain, but it was fruitless. A little before the azan for the evening prayer rang out, Zain was pronounced dead. Pops wrapped the body in a little sheet taken from the storage room of his barren clinic and walked his dead son back to Ammi.
Even before Pops arrived, word of Zain’s death had reached Ammi via the children shuttling back and forth between house and clinic. She screamed and then cried, her body alternately doubling and straightening in agony.
I had little idea of what to do. I stuffed my tennis ball in my pocket and went to the bedroom upon some adult’s instructions, but I still listened intently to all the goings-on and watched