Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [40]
“I’m not going to the madrassa anymore,” I informed the household in a loud voice.
Ammi and Pops reclined behind me on a charpai, nodding limply in the noontime lull. When I made my announcement they didn’t say anything, and this raised my hopes. But then, just as I turned onto my side to stretch out and sleep, Pops got up, grabbed me by the arm to yank me to my feet, and pushed me out of the room. “You aren’t welcome back until you’ve gone to the madrassa,” he said coldly.
I stood and stared at the closed door. Then, before the sun-heated floor could burn my feet, I located an old pair of chappals and went to the bathroom to wash up. Because we got our water from a tank located on the roof—which heated up during the daytime—the water was boiling hot. With the hot afternoon loo blowing in from the dunes, the water felt even worse. Gargling with it almost made me throw up.
As soon as I finished, I heard a trilling bicycle bell outside. Opening the door, I saw that it was Bilal, a young orderly whom Pops sometimes hired on the hottest days to give me a ride to the madrassa. Feeling resigned, I swung my leg over and positioned myself on the crossbar of his Sohrab bicycle. As he leaned forward and pushed off, I felt his chest against my back. He smelled of sweat, adolescent cologne, and talcum powder. I knew that last smell well: expert carrom board players reeked of it. I knew that Bilal spent most of the hot days, days like this one, in the back of his father’s shop playing long games of carrom. He had invited me to play with him once, and I enjoyed using his donut-shaped striker to knock the little round disks into the four-holed game board. I knew that after he dropped me off he was going to go back and play—something I wanted to do as well—and the thought filled me with a mixture of hate and despair. Part of me wanted to cry and the other part wanted to hit him.
As we rode to the madrassa, Bilal saw something interesting and pulled up his bike at the curb.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Take a look.”
Coming up the street toward us was a bearded Gypsy in puffy clothes, with an assortment of red, blue, and green scarves wrapped around his body. He carried a stick upon which were bells, shakers, and drums. He held a chain in his other hand, and attached to it was a large black bear. The animal’s skin and face were scarred, making it look ferocious. A withered brown dog walked behind the handler and his bear, aimlessly following scent trails. The odd trio walked past us into the dusty ground within the gol daira. There the bear sat down on its haunches underneath a tree, while the dog lapped at crusty mud, searching for water.
I couldn’t get past the contrast between the two animals. The dog was small and meek; the bear was big and black.
“Why are they here?” I asked.
“There’s going to be a fight,” Bilal replied. “Bear versus dog.”
“Isn’t such a fight unfair?”
“You have to understand,” Bilal said. “At one point the Gypsy probably owned three dogs to fight the bear at once. But I imagine that in each fight the bear must have killed one dog, so now only this one is left. This one is probably going to get killed too. It’s supply and demand, after all.”
“I don’t know,” I said with a measure of hope. “This dog seems different.”
Bilal laughed. “You just think it’s different. Dogs lose; that’s just the way it is. It’s their kismet to be killed by the bear.”
We had hoped to stick around for the fight, but then we learned that the Gypsy was putting it off till later in the evening, when it would be cooler and more people would be around to make donations. “We don’t have time to wait,” Bilal said. He picked up his bike and we hit the road to the madrassa.
As I thought about the dog, my earlier sense of rebelliousness came rushing back to me. If that poor little dog, all alone, could stand up to a monster like the black bear, then I could stand up against Qari Jamil.
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