Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [25]
bring the water, wash it wash it
come on, Mother, wash it wash it.
Getting no response, they repeated the chant many times. For a while the three of us chanted along with them. Then, having reached our destination, we climbed the steps to the madrassa and placed our slippers in wooden boxes on a shelf just inside.
The madrassa was packed with boys and filled with the drone of Quranic recitation. All other sounds—the naked boys outside, the whirring fans, the running taps—were subsumed under the recitation.
At the front of the hall there was a long wooden bench. Five qaris with beards, turbans, and sticks sat on one side, and an assembly line of students passed before them. Each student held a little sipara in his hand. When he got to the bench, he flattened it out and began rocking back and forth as he pronounced the words. Once a boy finished his lesson, the qari either dismissed him with a wave of his hand or, if the boy had flubbed the reading, hit him on the hand with the fat stick. The boys that were hit took the punishment stoically, for the most part, though when they’d gotten some distance away they let their faces contort in pain and they pressed their hands into their armpits and cried. There was a reason the boys took the punishment to the hands without wincing: those who broke down while being hit on their hands were pulled around the bench by their wrists, and as they twisted and turned they were beaten on their back and stomach.
The students not currently involved in a lesson ran around the hall. They played hide-and-seek behind the columns, enjoyed a game of tag, or threw the mosque’s straw skullcaps at one another like Frisbees. An impromptu game of soccer—with two cloth topis stuffed with straw skullcaps serving as the ball—broke out as I watched, with twenty or more students to each team.
Tariq told me to take out my book and get in line with him and Muaz. “When you get to the qari, just tell him that you’re new and he’ll tell you what to do.”
“Will he hit me?”
“They always hit.”
I looked at my hands and then toward the fat stick leaning against the wall. I started shaking. The hall suddenly felt deathly cold. With each step that took me closer to the qaris, little daggers of chilly fear jolted my body.
Suddenly, I heard something like a crack of lightning and looked up at the dome, thinking that perhaps it had cracked. Loud wailing and screaming ensued.
I soon realized that one of the qaris had become fed up with all the playing and was taking the stick to any child that he came upon. His preferred method was to grab a boy from behind by the hair or the collar and, in the act of yanking him, hit him on the back, the thighs, or the calves. If the qari caught a boy from the front, he almost always smashed the stick against the student’s shins. That was what had created the unearthly cracking noise. As the qari rampaged, going one from one boy to another, there was a mad, chaotic scramble. I began running as well. One of the boys next to me was plucked by his shirt collar and yanked back. I had no way of checking whether Tariq and Muaz made it or not. I was concerned only with my own escape. I grabbed my shoes as I ran past the shelf, threw them down, and stepped into them while running toward home. I didn’t stop until I got there.
When I told Ammi and Pops about the anarchy at the madrassa, they said that they were going to look into private tutoring.
Pops thought it would be better if I received religious instruction at home. He arranged that an educated man named Qari Adil would make regular house visits. Since he would be coming to our home and we would pay him a lot, Pops asked him to teach me about Islam beyond just memorizing the Quran.
Qari Adil was a dark, squat man with a silver beard tinged with henna. He had a gleaming smile and wore nothing but immaculate white clothes, with matching white turban. He was articulate and cheerful, and to my vast relief he didn’t believe in punishment. He was the head of a popular mosque attended by many important men.
The first day that