Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [37]
Normally someone would have simply shouted no in response, but not when a boy’s father was out looking for him. That meant something was wrong. A pair of my uncles went out to greet the old man. I ran to the edge of the roof overlooking the alley and looked down.
“He hasn’t come home from the madrassa,” explained Ittefaq’s father, a grizzled old man who owned a small shop in the bazar. “If he comes here, will you send him home?”
My uncles came inside and informed the women that Ittefaq was missing.
“That boy has been trouble for his family since day one,” Dadi Ma observed.
“What do you mean?” Ammi asked.
“You think this is the first time that man has come looking for the boy with fear in his voice?”
During the evening we kept receiving updates about Ittefaq’s absence. A neighborhood manhunt was launched, and people from his side of town kept coming over to our house, thinking he might be with me. As evening became night, people started wondering if Ittefaq hadn’t run away but had been abducted.
I didn’t think much of it. I ate dinner and went to sleep. I figured Ittefaq would turn up at the madrassa the next day. But when I went for my lesson he wasn’t there. He also didn’t come the day after. When I asked Ammi if he had been found, she told me she hadn’t heard anything positive.
Two days later, Ammi was gossiping with the women and learned that Ittefaq had been recovered. Apparently one morning at dawn one of the women from his house went down from the roof, where everyone was sleeping, to wash up for the morning prayer. When she was down there she heard what seemed to be a cat scratching at the front door. She pushed the door ajar to check what was happening and saw Ittefaq lying prone, scratching the paint with his nails. He was mewling and whimpering. She screamed and pulled him in, and he was put under his parents’ supervision.
It turned out that he had spent three nights hiding in an open grave at the cemetery.
“What in the world would make a little boy go running to live in a grave?” my aunt asked.
“He was too ashamed to come home,” Dadi Ma said, avoiding discussing the difficult topic directly.
“He was raped,” said Ammi bluntly. “Taken on the way home from the madrassa and raped.”
“Hai hai!” Dadi Ma exclaimed. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Someone has to say it.”
“Know it, yes. Don’t announce it.”
Ittefaq’s parents had eventually heard from Ittefaq what had happened, but instead of blaming the madrassa, from which he had been taken, they blamed their son. They said that he had become a disciplinary headache and that neither they nor Qari Jamil’s madrassa could set him straight. A young qari from another madrassa far north arrived at Ittefaq’s house, encouraging his parents to allow him to take the boy away. The smart-talking stranger made it seem that his institution was a discipline-oriented place.
Through my parents I also came to hear of this more efficient northern madrassa—because they were considering sending me there—though in the end they decided to wait and see how Ittefaq’s experience turned out.
I went to Ittefaq’s neighborhood the day he was leaving. A tanga pulled up in the street. The recruiter sat in the front with the driver. Ittefaq was put in the back, looking dazed, carrying his things in a knotted bedsheet. With a click of the driver’s tongue, the horse clopped away. There was a vacant look on Ittefaq’s face. His eyes were glued to a faraway place.
As the horse clopped forward I followed my departing friend and ran after the tanga, suddenly desperate to keep Ittefaq from going. Running as fast as I could, I grabbed at the footstep on the back of the carriage, hoping to stop the horse and tanga. I wasn’t strong enough. My fingers slipped and I fell on the street.
Ittefaq was gone so long that I forgot we were ever friends.
A few months later, however, I learned from Ammi that Ittefaq had recently reappeared like a dusty apparition in the heart of the night, his face covered with soot, his clothes dirty and torn. The vaunted madrassa had