Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [22]
11
To try to find a better life for us, Pops went to Iran. Having heard a rumor that Tehran had a shortage of doctors, he decided to see whether he could line up more patients there than at his struggling clinic in Sehra Kush. Ammi didn’t want him to go—she’d just lost Zain and didn’t want to lose Pops as well—but our financial insecurity convinced her.
Pops took a midnight train that took him to Quetta, from which point he would enter Iran by bus. I went to the train station to see him off. I imagined Iran as a distant place made of legends and stories involving forty thieves.
“Bring me back a flute,” I told Pops as he stuck his head out of the window and waved. I figured an Iranian flute would let me conjure a jinn to whom I could make three wishes. One of those wishes would be that we could have all the money in the world so that Pops wouldn’t have to go away again.
To make the trip Pops took all our savings. Ammi had assumed that she’d be able to ask Dadi Ma for help with the day-to-day costs while he was gone, but Dadi Ma wouldn’t hear of it; she told Ammi that each family in the house had to pay for their own food. Ammi explained that she had only five rupees on her, which amounted to one American cent, but Dadi Ma was unbending.
Ammi didn’t want the other women in the kitchen—the women who had food—to think that she was in need of charity, so she picked up her kerosene stove and took it into our bedroom. Rummaging through our luggage, she found a few packets of lentils and set them to boil. The thick smoke gathered inside the room, seeping into our clothes, our hair, our pillows. The smoke blackened Flim’s tongue, and he ran around sticking it out at me and frightening Ammi.
Through the power of Islam, Ammi made those five rupees last a month. She made rice and lentils every day, the concoction becoming more watery each time. As the food bubbled on the stove before each meal, I would see her put her hand over it and recite something under her breath.
“What are you reading?” I asked her.
“I’m saying a prayer,” she said. “There’s a prayer that increases the amount of food.”
“How can that be?” I asked.
“One time the Prophet Muhammad was a guest at someone’s house, and the hosts were worried about what to offer him to eat: they had only a sick old goat, and she wasn’t producing any milk. So the Prophet, recognizing their dilemma, called for the goat and spoke this very prayer over her, and the little thing’s udders became full of milk, not just for himself, but for everyone. It didn’t run out all night long.”
I nodded happily at the idea of never running out of food and asked to learn the prayer.
Ammi’s prayers, while sufficient to keep food on the table, weren’t enough to address the constant hunger in my belly, so I turned into a scavenger.
If the children from the other families in our house were eating, I went to their tray and joined in with them. If I heard that someone in the neighborhood had ordered bread from the tandoor, I went up the street and parked myself next to the outdoor bakery, waiting for the baker to turn his head and reach into the clay oven to flip out a toasty piece of naan onto his stack. While his back was turned, I would grab a chunk off the bottom-most piece of bread. By the time he was done heaping the twenty or so pieces onto his stack, I would have fully consumed the bottom-most one and disappeared. One time, however, I stayed till the very end of his shift, wondering if he’d have any dough left over at the end.
My mouth watered a little when I saw that he did. “Are you going to throw that away?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, gathering his lungi to keep it out of the way while he cleaned the oven.
“The dough,” I said. “Let me have it, please. I want to make little toys from it.”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and handed it to me.
I didn’t want him to think that I was