Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [24]
“It will sharpen your memory,” Pops concluded. “Besides, I made a covenant with Allah that you would serve Islam, and it is because I wasn’t fulfilling it that Zain died.”
I was awakened at dawn the next morning. “You’re going with your cousins to their madrassa,” Dadi Ma said. Then she ordered the other women away from her kerosene stove and made me a butter-fried egg with the flatbread we called paratha.
The madrassa that Tariq and Muaz attended was on the bazar side of town. Ammi was nervous about letting me go alone, but everyone reassured her and she relented. When I’d finished breakfast, she plopped a topi on my head and handed me a frayed little blue lesson book containing Arabic.
I walked up the alley with the boys, eager to see my new school. As we entered a square, we came upon a donkey tied to a big nail that was driven into the ground. Tariq threw a rock at the donkey, and the animal’s grizzled gray felt quivered.
“Go pull its tail,” he instructed me.
“Why?”
“When the devil pulls its tail, it brays.”
“I am not the devil,” I replied. “I am Abir ul Islam.”
Tariq shrugged and we kept walking.
We soon passed a parked donkey cart. Tipping it over, we tried using it as a slide, with only limited success. As we continued our walk, we passed a pair of dolorous cows and tried to stick hay into their big nostrils, but we were chased away by a couple of barefoot girls with gooey hands and feet who had been piling cow dung into buckets. Muaz told them that they were ugly hags with backward feet, and they told him that his head was squelched in his father’s anal sphincter.
Rather than taking the most direct route to the madrassa, we ducked in and out of people’s houses, asking if this boy and that was awake. Then we abandoned the streets altogether: we entered a cement house and, without asking its owners—who sat on the floor of the courtyard eating breakfast—climbed the stairs to its roof and roof-hopped all the way to the end of the block. When we descended the stairs in another house, we chased a few hens around the veranda and discussed stealing an egg so that we could raise our own little chicken.
Eventually, we came onto a large paved road. Here there were a few rickshaws and numerous horse-drawn tangas, along with fruit and vegetable vendors on donkey carts, as well as boys urging goats and bullocks toward the canals.
We crossed that street and entered a part of town even less developed than ours. Not only were the dusty alleys unpaved and run down, but sewage from the nalis spilled out onto the street, creating wide black pools infested with mosquitoes. In the pools of sludge some good Samaritan had laid a row of rocks upon which pedestrians could step. However, they were laid down for adult-length footsteps, so we youngsters had to hop from one to the next with both feet.
As we went forward, there were more emaciated cows, more donkeys, and even a big bull with lowered horns living a life of surrender.
“Look!” Muaz said suddenly. “Naked nincompoops!”
Looking where he pointed, we saw a row of naked boys—brothers, by the look of them—coming out of one of the houses. They had rich brown skins, bellies unnaturally rotund from tapeworm infestation, and dark navels. In a line, as if choreographed, they squatted quite near us with a wide stance over the nali and relieved themselves. In their sleepy state they didn’t even bother to wave at the flies coming to sit at the corner of their eyes. Even from where we stood, we could see that the anuses of some, red and round, protruded a few inches out of their holes.
“Why does it look like that?” I asked.
“They’re experts at shitting,” Tariq said authoritatively.
“Does mine do that?”
“Want me to check?” he offered.
“Mine does,” Muaz said with a grin.
Before I could laugh, the naked boys finished their business and started up a loud chant directed at their mother inside the house:
Ammi, pitthi
tho thay tho thay
paani la dey pitthi tho thay
aaja Ammi pithi tho thay.
Mother, ass
wash it