Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [3]
I nodded eagerly.
“So,” Ammi said. “Do you believe you are special now?”
I felt as if the entire universe was listening to my answer. God. The angels. Even the parris.
“Yes. I believe you. I believe that I’m special.”
“By the way, did you know that when the Black Stone first came down from heaven it was white?” Ammi said.
“What happened to it?” I asked.
“People touched it and it became dirty,” she said.
I imagined billions of hands touching a large, egg-shaped crystal over thousands of years and gradually making it black. Suddenly I pulled away from Beyji and stood up in the center of the room, feeling proud and powerful.
“I will take a towel and make it white again!”
Beyji kissed my hand and told me that I would be Islam’s most glorious servant.
2
During the daytime, while Pops was off working at his clinic—he was a doctor—Ammi, my little brother Flim, and I often spent the daytime hours at Beyji’s bungalow.
Beyji came from a long line of elevated people. Her father, an imam at a small mosque in a village in Punjab, had commanded a clan of jinns that converted to Islam at his hand. The old man’s piety was so great that when he died his fingers kept moving as if they were flipping tasbih beads in prayer.
Beyji prayed endlessly. When she wasn’t praying, she murmured Allah’s praises—subhanallah and alhamdulillah thirty-three times each, allahu akbar thirty-four times. Then she repeated the set. She kept count on the individual pads of her fingers, on black beans that were stored in a number of huge vats in her room, or on the tasbih, the wooden rosary.
Beyji had mysterious connections with the angels. In addition to having seen the Light that time in Ramzan, she seemed to know Jibrail, the leader of the angels, quite well. “He’s the greatest angel,” she said. “He brought the Holy Quran to the Prophet in the cave of Hira. He hugged the Messenger and imparted the Word.”
“Have you seen him up close?”
“I have. He’s beautiful. He has forty thousand wings, and each of his feathers is made of light. He can pick up the entire universe on one wing.”
“How many angels are there?” I inquired.
“Millions.”
“Did the Prophet meet all the angels?”
“There are too many for him to meet, but some of the angels used to come to him during his daily life. They came in the guise of men—beautiful men—and ate with him and asked him questions that prepared him to deal with his enemies in Mecca.”
“Who’s the most important angel?” I asked.
“They’re all important. Mikail is pretty important because he maintains the history of the world in his big book. Israfil because he has the trumpet that—”
“Do you think I can meet an angel?”
“Of course you can,” she said. “The Guardians are always with you. That’s why when Muslims pray we say Salam to the right and the left shoulder. That’s where they sit. It’s very good to talk to your angels, but make sure you say only good things, because they have little notebooks and they write down everything you do.”
“Everything?” I asked, horrified.
“Yes.”
“Even what I do in the bathroom?”
“Yes.”
“Gross.”
Learning that angels were always with me made me want to learn more about them, so I went to Ammi. She told me that Guardians came in two shifts, one that lasted from dawn to afternoon and the other that covered late afternoon to morning.
“Why is the evening shift longer?” I asked. “That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Beats me. Ask Allah.”
That day I laid a prayer rug and prayed for equality among the angels.
My sympathy for the angels receded, however, when one day I learned that they could be as frightening as they were beautiful.
There was the angel that killed you, said Ammi; another angel that blew the trumpet on the Last Day and destroyed the world. There were angels that worked in Dozakh, where the hellfire burned, and stirred the bodies of sinners in huge vats full of hot water; angels that put a black flag