Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [91]
I finished my cup of chai and headed up the street.
In an alley in the bazar a sugarcane juicer’s cart had been upturned and the vendor was rummaging around trying to contain the mess. First he bundled the big green sugarcanes; then he took care of his jugs and finally his machine. Although he was swearing loudly, invoking all sorts of incestuous relations and fecal matter, he seemed to be talking to the ground. Certainly he wasn’t swearing at the culprits who had overturned his cart and now stood all around him.
A group of six or seven bearded men, their pants hiked up above their ankles, and checkered scarves worn over white topis, stood in a half-circle around the cart. In a restrained voice the leader of the group told the juicer to shut his mouth and stand up.
“I told you I’ve got nothing!” the juicer pleaded. “You think I’m making any profit here? These bastard shop owners don’t pay me a thing!”
“You’re avoiding your duty toward God and the Prophet,” the leader replied.
“What’s happening?” one passerby asked another.
“They’re collecting ‘donations’ in the name of God,” the man said sarcastically, as if this happened often.
I couldn’t believe my ears. The idea of religious men—men garbed in the clothes that pious people wore—extorting money from a defenseless and impecunious sugarcane juicer struck me as impossible. Good Muslims didn’t do things like that, and everyone could see from these men’s beards and wardrobes and the way they hiked up their pants that they took Islam very seriously; you could even hear it in their Arabized inflection.
No. There had to be a reason unknown to all the onlookers that had prompted the maulvis to accost the juicer. Maybe the juicer was peddling some form of immorality, for example. Or maybe he was a cheat who defrauded the patrons. Maybe he used bad merchandise. It had to be something like that which brought this punishment upon him; it had to be something un-Islamic.
The juicer fumbled through his pockets. He lifted the cushion on which he customarily sat and looked underneath. He lifted a corner of the straw mat on which his sugarcanes were spread and peered beneath. He was checking all the places where he might have kept money.
“See? Nothing—I have nothing!” he said to the men surrounding him.
One of the maulvis struck the juicer for failing to pay, knocking him to the ground. Another man delivered a kick. I didn’t want to question these men who talked in the language of Islam, so I turned away.
When I arrived at Ittefaq’s uncle’s shop, a pair of boys were unfurling huge rolls of cloth for a customer. The brightly colored fabrics lay crisscrossed in front of the potential buyer, who rubbed his fingers on each sheet and then inquired about the price. Every time he demurred, Ittefaq’s uncle stepped in and explained the type of cotton he held in his hand and why it was the greatest in the world. When the patron still continued to dither, the uncle calmly asked one of the boys to bring tea for the guest. Such hospitality put additional pressure on the reluctant patron. Once the chai arrived, the sale was put on hold temporarily. Ittefaq took advantage of the pause to introduce me to his uncle and his cousins.
As soon as Ittefaq mentioned that I was from America, everyone, including the customer, swiveled around in their seats, making me the center of attention. The customer, a clean-shaven man in his early thirties wearing a T-shirt and jeans, pointed his finger at me.
“Why did your Clinton shoot all those missiles!” he demanded.
He was referring to President Clinton’s use of Tomahawk missiles to strike militant camps in Afghanistan.
“Do you know that some of those missiles landed in Balochistan and killed children?” he continued, his tone suggesting that I was equally responsible. “Your Clinton is killing innocent Muslims!”
I looked to Ittefaq for support, but he was completely, perhaps purposefully, oblivious to me. Everyone else jumped in with pointed comments linking me with Clinton. I felt besieged. I tried to think of the reasons that Clinton had used to justify