Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [39]
Squinting harder, I realized that I was seeing something I had never seen before: angels.
“Do it the right way, Mikail,” said the youth who was standing, his enormous wings expanding and retracting.
“I’m doing it like you said, Jibrail.”
“Do you know better, or me?”
“You do. Definitely you.”
Mikail was kissing a curving feather on Jibrail’s body. It was of a pale golden color and it looked like an unearthly writing utensil. It was long and smooth.
“You,” Jibrail said, turning to me suddenly. “Come here and show us yours.” His eyes were piercing and powerful. There was no mercy in his voice.
“We’ll show you ours,” said Mikail with a suggestive smile.
Unable to resist their authority, I went close to the angels. They separated from one another and enfolded me in their wings. I felt pressure on my shoulders as I was pushed down to the floor. Before long I had Jibrail’s feather in my mouth. He gave officious instructions that echoed ponderously in my head.
After a little while, Mikail pulled me up and stood behind me. I could hear his breath full of conspiracies. As he spoke, his wings wrapped around me and got caught on my clothes, tugging at them. “I must dip my feather into you,” he told me. I could neither agree nor disagree. It wasn’t my place to talk. As Mikail slid the curved feather into my body, it caused me to wobble forward, which in turn made him take quick little steps and follow me around the room.
I felt neither pain nor fear. My eyes turned to the singular slant of light cutting a corner of the room, and I became lost in observing the little particles floating aimlessly. I could see each little atom, tumbling on its axis in the sunlight, doing headstands and cartwheels, dancing in place, tiny, so tiny—as if the motes weren’t dust, but children of dust.
Jibrail, meanwhile, stood back and watched. He had his head tilted and bore a curious expression on his face. When he saw me looking at him, he began laughing—a laughter that increased in volume until it was booming and loud, transforming into banging on the door, urgent and insistent. Someone else wanted in. I moved away from the angels to open the door. As soon as I ripped through the door, the unearthly visitors shrieked and hissed and then disappeared.
When I went outside, all the boys wanted to know what was happening inside, but I told them there was nothing to see, nothing to do. I went for a long walk up the canal where the buffaloes grazed. I didn’t know how to describe the feelings in my stomach. All I could come up with were analogies. I thought of the hollow feeling of forgetting my lessons and getting my hands beaten with a baton. I thought of the feeling of sickness that came with tripping and ending up with one foot in the cold nali. I thought of the feeling of feverish panic that had come over me when I had misplaced my new tennis ball and had searched for it haplessly for hours. That last memory came closest to my current mental state, so I went inside that memory to see if I could find a clue to what I should do now.
Ammi’s face shone through the haze of memory. “When you lose something,” she had said to me while I’d been looking for my lost ball, “recite, Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon. “To God we belong and to Him we shall return.”
Sitting up next to the canal, clutching my knees against my chest, rocking back and forth, I began reciting:
Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon
inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon
inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon
That was also the prayer a Muslim made when someone died.
18
After my meeting with the angels, I wanted to escape. One hot day I resolved to run away.
The city was hardboiled; the streets were deserted; a camel driver rested in the shade. Our cooler, the poor man’s air conditioner—a box-looking fan lined with roots and filled with water—rumbled