Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [20]
By this time ladies from across the mohalla were streaming into the house. They lined up against the wall, standing stoically, neither joining in the fray nor commenting to one another. With blank expressions on their faces, they murmured verses from the Quran.
Zain’s body was brought into the house and passed from uncle to uncle until Tau and Dada Abu took the body and put it through the ritual washing at the nalka. Pops, masking his emotion with activity, left to make arrangements for the funeral prayer. Ammi, meanwhile, refused to accept that Zain was gone and kept trying to snatch him away from those washing him. Despite her pleas, she was held far away, twisting and writhing at a distance because women weren’t allowed to give a corpse its ritual washing.
Zain was wrapped in a white shroud and his body was placed on a little bed set atop a large box in the center of the courtyard. As the gathered crowd picked up copies of the Quran, they sat down in a circle around the platform and began reading surah Yasin.
It still hadn’t really sunk in for me that my brother was dead. I was too caught up in watching Ammi’s mourning. Gradually, though, the death was brought home to me. A woman thrust a Quran in my hand and told me that the departing soul would be comforted if the words of surah Yasin went along with it. I looked at Zain’s body and at the dark evening sky, searching for a column of light in which the angels taking Zain’s soul could be traveling. Another woman said that reciting the Quran would cure my grief.
Wanting the comfort of my mother, I went to the room where Ammi was being held. Numerous women rubbed and massaged various parts of her body, all the while exhorting her to give in to the balming effect of the Quran. Dadi Ma and other elderly women whispered how the Prophet Ibrahim lives with the dead children in the seventh heaven, and how a child that dies before the age of two is considered to have died during jihad and is thus considered a shaheed, or religious martyr, meaning that he can take his parents to Paradise on the Day of Judgment. This didn’t comfort Ammi.
Eventually I fell asleep in the midst of all the wailing.
By the time I woke up in the morning, Zain had been buried, Ammi had collapsed from exhaustion, and Pops was nowhere to be found. One of my recently arrived aunts hugged me and then informed me that I should head off to the mosque to pray and participate in the qurankhani, a communal gathering during the period of mourning at which the Quran was recited.
I walked through the house and looked for a chador because it was cold. Suddenly I was aware of everything. Here was the place where my brother had taken his first steps just a few days ago. Here was the place where my brother had choked. Here was the place my mother had wept. Here was the place my brother was given his last rites. Here was the place where his dead body had lain. Yet now, a few meager hours later, the entire house dripped with indifference. There was nothing to suggest that Zain had ever been there. The alley, which the day before had been filled with people, was empty. The housewives expressing concern had gone home, having fulfilled their social obligation and recited the requisite amount of Yasin.
I left the house and wandered for a time. When I came upon the square where the donkey was parked, my eyes fell upon the mosque. Bathed in the soft blue of early morning, the building’s architectural simplicity—a minaret, a dome, and an archway—left a deep impression upon me. It was the one place that welcomed my sorrow.
Before prayer, I sat on a straw mat in the cold courtyard, inhaling the dusty gloom. I pulled the edge of my chador across my face as Ammi had done and drew the other end like a hood. Then, thinking of the night long ago when Zain had hit me on the head with a spoon, I cried for my brother.
In the subsequent days, an investigation into the cause of death was launched.