Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [29]
An image of the burned girl started to form in my head, a pristine image, the face of an innocent and happy mother, someone like my own mother. I decided that I would go and find her.
I waited until late afternoon and slipped out of the house. The azan for dusk prayer—the commonly accepted time when a child must be back home—was about to occur, and I had never stayed out past that before. I was nervous. While I knew the block where the woman lived, I didn’t know which house she was in.
Standing at the end of the block, not sure which house to go to, I acted on intuition, making my way to a small brick house with a thick brown curtain in the doorway. I chose it because the house seemed silent, there was no smoke signifying suppertime activity, and none of the lights were on. Because the curtain was hung improperly, there was a small sliver at the left side that I could see through as I approached. The inside of the house appeared dark as well, and there was no activity on the veranda, an odd thing for a house that still had its door open.
“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” came the sudden call to prayer from the mosque.
As the first verse of the azan went up, I panicked. I had to get home before it finished. Something drew me closer to the curtain, however, and I stepped across the nali and put my eye to the gap, hoping to perhaps see signs of an exploded stove.
Without warning, the heavy curtain, rippling with dust, was flung outward, its thick edge smacking me across the face. I lost my footing, and one of my feet went directly into the nali, plunging down until my toes felt the sludge running between them. The sewage felt surprisingly cold. The man who had just emerged from the house—it was his exit that had sent the curtain flying—stopped in the act of wrapping his turban and turned to look at me. His eyes were dark and his teeth shone with a menacing whiteness. I had never been more frightened. I felt weak. Using my toes to secure my shoe before it floated away, I pulled my foot out of the nali—it came free with a sucking sound—and ran back home.
At the nalka I scrubbed my filthy leg and my spattered clothes as thoroughly as I could. I used some dust that had gathered on the stairs as makeshift soap. It had the effect of muting some of the smell clinging to me.
Despondent that I hadn’t gotten a chance to catch a glimpse of the burned girl, I hurried to the mosque, accompanied by the last few verses of the azan. As I prayed, the smell of nali, foul and acrid, wafted up off me. When no one was looking, I leaned down and breathed it in. The more it made me disgusted, the more I inhaled it.
Then I fell ill.
When I got typhoid, I became a jinn, my body enveloped by a 105-degree fire. Jinn smoke filled me up, and I vomited until there was no more liquid inside. My body went limp and my eyes closed shut. I felt myself raised into the air, elongated, compressed, and then stretched out again. Flesh gave way to vapor. A shriek escaped my lips and left cracks in the walls. My hair curled up, cringed in pain, and ran off my body. My tongue started to shrivel. There wasn’t a lick of saliva. “Ammi!” I cried. “Ammi!”
That night my body became a balloon and floated up to the ceiling. When Ammi entered the bedroom, she beheld my body jerking and twitching eleven feet in the air. She took a running start and leaped up to retrieve me. Unable to touch me, she ran out for tools and came back with a reel of kite string. She took a heavy lock from one of the trunks, attached it to a length of kite string with a sturdy knot, and then threw the lock up to me. I put it in my pocket as she instructed, and she pulled me down. But when she took the lock out of my pocket, I floated upward again; a draft came from the veranda and my ascent became wobbly. Jumping up, Ammi grabbed hold of my pants and dragged me to the bed. This time she used a bedsheet to tie me down. The other end of it she tied to the doorknob.
“You’re moored now,” she said.
“I’m so very hot,” I said.
She went to the kitchen