Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [43]
“Sounds good to me!”
He produced a set of keys, sorting through until he found an appropriate one. Then he unlocked the padlock at the storage room with the bars on the windows and pushed me inside.
I was incarcerated.
Hours passed. By now the courtyard of the madrassa was empty. The dusty, hot loo blowing off the desert broke its head against the bars. At a distance I could hear the noise from the people witnessing the fight between the bear and the dog.
With each roar of the distant crowd, I grew more unsettled. I yanked ineffectually at the bars. I kicked the door. I used a little wooden stick from the rubbish in the corner to poke at the cracking cement wall. I sat back and imagined what it would be like if I could just manage to escape.
A satisfying scene formed in my mind.
Me outside. Everyone else still in class. A warm breeze. The jubilation of emancipation. The dusty scent of evening sand. The noise of rambunctious children. A hefty truck painted with murals rumbling past me on the highway. Me trotting like I was on an imaginary horse. The feeling that I could do anything. Me creeping to the edge of the madrassa. Me pulling down my shalwar. Me drawing out my member—with my right hand, of course. Me urinating upon the bricks. Me doing it standing up. Me peeing on the madrassa.
It was such a fluid and well-drawn image that it left me smiling. But then I realized that in order to fulfill my vision, I actually needed to escape from the room. So ensued another round of pushing and tugging on the bars. Another round of kicking the door and boring tiny holes in the wall. Another round of frenzy.
It was all for naught.
As I sat, alone and lonesome, the shadows elongated further. The walls screamed and leaned over me. Standing again, I clung to the bars, not daring to look behind, thinking that at any moment a hand made of smoke might grab me by the neck and pull me into Dozakh. I looked to see if there was a lightbulb inside the room, but there wasn’t.
Soon I could see no light outside the room either. When the call for the evening prayer went up and night descended upon the desert, I was plunged into blackness. The rest of the town fell quiet. I felt as if I hadn’t seen a human in ages. I remembered Anar Kali, a legendary courtesan who had been buried alive in a wall. I channeled the specter of her death, her futile and frivolous death, and it filled me with despair. She had been foolish for loving a prince, just as I had been foolish for rebelling against the madrassa.
I stood back against the wall and realized that since I couldn’t hear the roaring crowd anymore, the dog must have been martyred.
I sat down in a squat and started crying. I put my face into one corner of the room where the walls met one another and smelled the cement. I licked the salty surface to distract myself. As I tasted the rough wall, I felt a desert centipede crawl across my mouth, over my lips and toward my neck. My insides turned to mush. I stood up and maniacally beat myself with my topi, but that only made the creature drop down into my shirt. I hopped around in a frenzy, hoping it would fall to the floor. In the dark it wasn’t possible to tell whether the centipede had fallen out or not; perhaps it was just hanging on and waiting. I began to run in small circles in the room, shimmying as I ran in an effort to get away from the beast and pressing my belly button with one index finger in case the vile creature tried to enter my body. Out of fear of the centipede, I urinated a little bit in my clothes.
I felt disgusted with my own cowardice. That new emotion stopped me in my tracks, and I forgot all about the centipede.
As I thought about it, I felt as if I deserved to feel disgusting. By my refusal to uphold the norms of the madrassa—a place where the Book of God was taught—I had behaved like the most reprehensible of people. Spurning Qari Jamil as well as Ammi and Pops,