Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [9]
When it became clear that the medical practice was not going to do well, Ammi and Pops had fights and Ammi retreated to the bedroom to cry. As she sat and sobbed, I touched the tears on her face and flicked them away. Then, when she forced a smile between her tears, it was my turn to cry and she wiped my face with her wrist.
“Don’t cry,” she said reassuringly. “We will pray and all will be well.”
“Inshallah,” I said.
Then Ammi became devout. The jai namaz, her prayer rug, was flung open and pointed toward Mecca. A little red copy of the punj surah, which contained the five most important chapters of the Quran, kept perpetual presence in her hand. She went repeatedly to a neighbor’s to make calls to Beyji to find out what type of zikr, or chants with Allah’s various names, the saints recommended to improve one’s fortune. She told me to turn off the cricket matches and sat me down regularly to teach me the Quran. She appealed to Pops to establish all five prayers at the prescribed times of day. She calculated whether we had paid out adequate amounts of zakat to care for the poor. She fasted with great earnestness during the daylight hours of Ramadan, waking up to make food well before the pre-dawn meal, suhoor, and preparing food for the post-sunset iftar way before evening.
Seeing Ammi’s devotion, Pops was impelled to emulate it, albeit in his own way: his religiosity was communal and intellectual. He took me to Friday prayers at all the great mosques of Lahore, and we showed up early so we could listen to the entire sermon. We went to the house of one of the old Jamaat-e-Islami organizers at the university, and his daughter served us sherbet while he talked about how Islam was slowly changing the world. Pops found various religious scholars who held evening study circles at their mosques, and we tried them all out. He was particularly fond of one shaykh of the Deobandi movement—a revivalist branch of traditional Islam—who taught in a well-off residential area of Lahore. The lectures were long. The shaykh sat on the floor with a Quran supported on a rehal before him at the end of a long row of men. (The women listened from behind a partition.) Occasionally touching the skin of the Quran, the shaykh spoke evocatively about the importance of family life, the virtues of hard work, and how patience in the face of adversity was a form of worship, and then he tied all of these things together with events from the life of the Prophet and his Companions. He said that one had to put prayer and worship before everything else, and when that happened, success followed. As proof he’d point out that he used to be just a simple villager, but—Allah be praised—because he followed this method, Allah put him in a place where he was able to teach Islam in such a beautiful mosque to such wonderful people. Pops and I rode back home on the motorcycle after such evenings, and he often quizzed me to see if I had been paying attention.
One day Pops learned that my grandfather, Dada Abu, and my older uncle, Tau, who both lived in a town in the desert, were coming to Lahore to attend the Tablighi Jamaat convention at nearby Raiwand. They called ahead and asked Pops to meet them there.
Tablighi Jamaat, Pops told me, was a worldwide order numbering in the millions that had become disenchanted with the world. Its members—Tablighis—said that at some point in history Allah had become upset with Muslims and had