Children of Dust (20 page)

“I’ve been trying to persuade them to fly out here instead,” she said. “It’s a hellish trip to the desert.”

“But there’s nothing for us to do in Karachi,” I said flatly.

“We’re here to try to find you a good girl to marry. Uncle Saad told me he’s informed some of his colleagues that we’re looking. You’re an American citizen, which should be a draw. You’ll have plenty of luck here, I think. In fact, there are some girls over there,” she said, pointing toward the group I’d just turned back from. “Go talk to them.”

“Forget it,” I said, feeling angry by the
chador
-girl turning into a secular whore. “Those are
not
the sort of girls I want.”

“What are we talking about here?” Uncle Saad chimed in, joining his wife.

“He’s talking about going to visit the desert,” Ammi said.

“Why would you want to do that?” Uncle Saad asked. “Tell your grandparents to fly out here.”

“I want to go to the desert,” I said firmly, “because I can tell you now that I’m not going to like any of these city girls.”

“You want to go to the desert?” Uncle Saad asked. “Then tell me—have you ever grown a beard?”

“I grew a scruffy one at college,” I said. “Pops told me to shave it off before we flew here. Why?”

“If you want to go to the desert,” he said, “you’ll have to grow a long one.”

“But why?”

“Those people over there: they aren’t like they used to be. If you don’t have a beard, they’ll beat you up.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They say that men should wear a beard,” he explained, “because that’s what Islam says.”

I found nothing wrong with that. “Well, they’re right,” I said. “Islam does stipulate that men grow a beard. If you don’t have a beard, you’re not a good Muslim. There’s a
hadith
—”

“If you aren’t going to like a girl here,” Ammi interrupted, with a bit of doubt creeping into her voice, “then maybe we
should
look elsewhere. Besides, your grandparents don’t seem interested in flying out, and I’m
feeling guilty about coming all the way to Pakistan and not seeing them. Maybe we should go up north.”

I nodded eagerly. After hearing that in the desert the men were expected to grow a beard for religious reasons, it seemed like Sehra Kush was the type of place where people actually cared about Islam. I wanted to get there as soon as possible.

Within a week Ammi had purchased a
niqab
and the three of us were on a train.

I stroked my face and willed my youthful stubble to grow long like a true Muslim’s.

N
either garlands nor fireworks announced our homecoming. We were welcomed to Dada Abu’s house by a naked toddler named Usama who ran to the ledge above the courtyard and urinated on me as I entered. I should have considered it symbolic; instead I just purified myself with water.

Flim and I were quickly separated from Ammi as long-forgotten relatives streamed into the house and greeted us eagerly. Being able to speak Urdu, I was able to respond to them adequately, but they were disappointed by Flim’s incomplete grasp of the language. He was so young when we left Pakistan that he remembered only fragments.

“What has America done to this boy!” an uncle complained, and I felt a pang of shame for being an American.

Ammi, meanwhile, wasn’t feeling particularly sociable. Feeling dirty from the train ride, she wanted to freshen up, but the water had been shut off for three days. Except for a sun-warmed bucket of stale water, there was no clean water with which to wash up. She asked one of the cousins to go and purchase bottled water from the nearby pharmacy, only to find out on his return that the caps weren’t sealed. She made a disparaging comment about the desert’s backwardness, and I felt angry
with her for insulting a place where people were not only religious but pious.

“You’d rather be in Karachi?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered curtly. “They have bottled water there.”

“They’re irreligious there. I’d rather have a clean soul than clean water.”

“That’s fine,” Ammi replied. “Just know that you’re about to get diarrhea.”

“The Prophet lived in a desert just like this,” I reminded her sternly. “Things worked out fine for him.”

Ammi turned out to be right: I did get diarrhea. However, when I went to use the latrine in the ground, I didn’t indict myself for drinking bad water. Instead, as I squatted down I remembered the way I used to squat in the rooster position at the
madrassa
. It occurred to me that I should have embraced my childhood beatings, because they prepared me to be more adept at using a latrine. I exhaled a
subhanallah
. It was amazing the way Islam was everywhere.

After making sure that I’d greeted everyone, I took a walk in my old alley. The entire block had changed. Dada Abu had bought the house that had once belonged to the Balochi people; he’d torn it down and remade it in solid cement, adding a blue metal gate. This was now the primary residence, where he lived with Dadi Ma and one of my uncles, along with the uncle’s wife and six children. My other uncles lived in various houses scattered around the neighborhood. Uncle Saroor, who had taken two more wives after black magic Gina, lived directly across the street in a multi-story home, keeping each wife on a separate floor.

There were visible signs of material progress. The houses with the dung patties on the walls were gone. The alley was paved. The gutters were covered. The pungent
nali
smell was fainter. There were no cows or donkeys blocking the main square. The big empty lot that used to be full of trash and wandering cows taking plump dumps looked as if it had been bulldozed.

The desert had also discovered privacy. Everyone had erected huge walls around their roofs. This meant no more roof-hopping and no peeking into other people’s lives. No one left their doors open during
the daytime either; and no children ran from house to house, chasing chickens or stealing an egg or sitting down arbitrarily at someone else’s breakfast table. There were virtually no people in the streets. Even when the
azan
occurred, I saw no increased signs of activity in the neighborhood.

It was Dada Abu who finally helped me understand the neighborhood’s newfound obsession with secrecy.

“You shouldn’t leave the house except with a grown male relative,” he cautioned Flim and me. “And you,” he said to Ammi, “shouldn’t leave the house at all!”

“Why not?” I asked, disappointed.

“This place isn’t safe,” he said. “There are strangers here. Foreigners.” He was referring to the countless new sectarian and militant groups that passed through town.

Then he stepped closer and inspected the length of my beard.

I
hated staying at home with the women. What made it particularly irritating was that they didn’t treat me like the other men: when I walked past them, they neither covered their face nor threw a
dupatta
over their head. I considered this nonchalance an affront to my masculinity, and I blamed my lack of a legitimate beard.

I wanted them to scurry before me and be fearful of unleashing my masculine hormones. Instead, they treated me like a child.

There was one woman who did exhibit a bit of self-conscious modesty—my cousin Nyla. Whenever I came near her, she tossed her
dupatta
over her head or turned a bit to the side so as not to make direct eye contact. This suggested to me that she was wary of the possibility of temptation arising between the two of us; naturally, I became attracted to her and started following her around.

I spied her from a distance one day when she was in the kitchen. She squatted on her
chowki
and thrust her small hands into sticky dough on a tray, her thin body rocking back and forth. The
chowki
squeaked and the steel tray skidded on the cement floor as she worked and rocked. Her cheap
chooriyan
clinked on her arms. They were her only adornments. As I watched, one of the
chooriyan
snapped. She pulled the
broken pieces off her arm and placed them in her pocket so that the children wouldn’t step on them.

Nyla was a domestic dervish. She was a master of the kitchen. When she was working, she was under constant assault by the toddlers, who seemed particularly fond of her. The miniature Mongols wandered back and forth and tried to stick their feet into the food or upturn the tray of cut radishes. She withstood their onslaught by offering them vegetable bribes and sweet-talk.

At night, when everyone had finished dinner, Nyla cleaned the dishes at the trickling faucet. When—more often than not—there was no running water, she had to pump the
nalka
from a seated position, which required a great deal of force. As she did the dishes, the rest of the family, women included, retired to their
charpai
s on the rooftop, leaving her downstairs in the dark, scrubbing the brass pots with a steel sponge. When she was finished with that chore, she still wasn’t done: she walked through the house and straightened out all the scattered shoes and slippers. She paid special attention to those that were flipped over, since it was an insult against Allah for a shoe to be upside down. Seeing her respect for God, combined with her modesty toward me, I felt a great deal of admiration for her.

In the middle of her daily duties Nyla often retreated to her sparsely furnished upstairs bedroom. In it, there was a tiny
charpai
that was leaned up against the wall during the day to give her more space. There were a few boxes with crocheted covers. There was a sewing machine, usually draped with a new outfit she was putting together. There were a couple of copies of the Quran wrapped in thick cloth to prevent dust from gathering on them.

During the midday breaks to her room, Nyla didn’t go to sleep or, as I initially imagined, write her frustrations into a diary. Instead, as I discovered one day when I peeked in, she wrapped an old white shawl around her body—and prayed on a mat. Her eyes were downcast as her thin lips murmured
surah Fatiha
. Her face was placid and serene, with a hint of water still visible on the upper lip.

The sparse beauty of her room, along with the quiet serenity of her prayer, filled me with a sense of dignity and decorum. This was a
real
Muslim woman: pious and patient, dutiful and persevering. If anyone was going to benefit from my American citizenship, it should be her. I felt as if God had brought me to Pakistan to serve as a conduit for Nyla’s ascension to America. I was like the winged horse Buraq, who took the Prophet up to the heavens.

I went to Ammi and let her know my intentions.

“I want to marry Nyla.”

“Our Nyla?”

“Yes. She’s a Siddiqui, like me.”

“But she’s older than you,” Ammi pointed out.

“I know. I don’t mind, though. The Prophet’s first wife was older than he was by fifteen years.”

“Do you know this girl’s story?”

“No,” I admitted. “I’ve barely talked to her.”

“She’s the maid,” Ammi said somewhat derisively.

“No she’s not. She’s my cousin.”

“I mean that she dropped out of college to come live here with your grandparents. Now she’s a glorified maid.”

“Why did she do that?” I asked, genuinely curious.

It turned out that Dada Abu had given Nyla’s father—one of my uncles—a loan, but he came down with lung disease and wasn’t able to pay it back. Instead of financial repayment, he’d told Nyla to drop out of college and had given Dada Abu authority over her.

“This means he has authority over matters of her marriage,” Ammi added.

“Fine. I’ll talk to him myself.”

“Won’t matter,” she said, waving her hand as if to brush the issue away. “You need to understand how these things work around here. A few years ago one of Dada Abu’s more distant relatives passed away and left a bunch of children in your grandfather’s care. He became responsible for raising them and getting them married. Nyla is already promised to one of them.”

“Which one?”

Ammi named a distant cousin I’d met many times.

“Him? He’s illiterate!”

“He’s not illiterate,” Ammi countered. “He’s mentally slow. But he’s gone to school every day of his life. Probably still does just because he likes it.”

“So this college-educated girl is going to marry someone ‘slow’?”

“That’s her
kismet
,” Ammi said.

“You have to do something to stop that,” I argued. “You keep saying that you’re a feminist. How can you support a marriage like that?”

“I’m an Islamic feminist,” she corrected. “But I can’t do anything anyway. This isn’t my family; it’s your father’s. Just understand that there’s a path that women follow. Girls get married. They get worked to the bone. They produce a baby every year—though God knows what the use of
that
is. Who’s raising the children? No one. Raising themselves. They’re like weeds. That girl Nyla won’t last. She’s too skinny.”

I was stunned into silence. None of this made any sense to me. This was an Islamic country, and Islam was supposed to be about justice. Perhaps Nyla didn’t have to end up with me, but it was downright unjust for her to end up with the neighborhood idiot.

“Pakistan was founded as a haven for Islam,” I protested, my voice raised.

I’d hoped for confirmation from Ammi, but none was forthcoming. She had stopped listening.

I suddenly felt as if my wings had been chopped off.

U
nwilling to stay housebound, given the torment I felt in proximity to Nyla, I disregarded Dada Abu’s edict and headed out to visit the men of the family at the
bazar
. My beard had started to come in, though it was far from robust, and I put on a pale yellow
topi
. Wearing dusty sandals and an old
shalwar kameez
, I could pass as a native. If I didn’t say anything in my English-accented Urdu, no one would distinguish me from anyone else on the street.

When I got to the mouth of the
mohalla
and went past the mosque, I heard a yell behind me. “Hey,
bhai
. Wait,
bhai
!”

I turned and saw a guy about my age with a beard but no mustache running toward me, his hand holding on to his
topi
. He had a desperate look on his face. I thought I recognized him as someone from my extended family, but when he came closer I realized I didn’t know him.

“You came from America, right?” he said. “You just got here a few days ago?”

I nodded, apprehensive because he seemed to know so much about me. He picked up on my unease and flashed a big smile.

“You don’t remember me, do you? I know you haven’t seen me in forever. I’m surprised you forgot me, though. Tell me: who did you use to play with when you were little—before you left and became an American?”

I jogged my memory, trying to place his face. Suddenly I remembered the cut of the jaw, the shape of the lips, the excitable eyes, and the broad-shouldered build. It was Ittefaq, one of my buddies from the
madrassa
years! He was older, weather-beaten, more muscular, bearded, and taller, but it was definitely Ittefaq. I said his name out loud and he happily shook my hand. Then we gave each other an awkward hug.

“I heard that someone came to town from America and wondered if it was you. I’ve been hanging outside your
mohalla
ever since, hoping to meet up with you.”

The revelation that he had been watching for me struck me as kind of strange, given that we hadn’t told anyone we were coming and that I hadn’t ventured out of the house at all. I told myself that I was being too Western in my suspicion. After all, I knew that Pakistanis liked to stare at one another, which was something people never did in the States. Perhaps Ittefaq’s willingness to wait for me was just another traditional Muslim custom that westoxification had caused me to forget.

“The
bazar
is still that way, right?” I asked, pointing.

“The
bazar
? Yes. You’re going to the
bazar
right now?”

“I’m going to Dada Abu’s shop. That’s where all the men are.”

“The
men
leave early in the morning,” he said, as if to imply that I was less than a man for waiting this long to go join them. His comment stung.

Wanting to establish my masculinity, I pounded him on the back—harder than I needed to—and then gestured with my head. “Walk with me,” I invited.

As we walked I asked him about what he’d been up to all these years, but he ignored my questions and kept asking me about America. Where did I live? What did I do there? What was it like? Did I go to school? Was I forgetting much of the Urdu language? Did I practice Islam? He asked that last question in an accusatory way.

“Of
course
I practice Islam!” I said emphatically. The force in my voice seemed to catch him off guard—and this pleased me.

He grinned apologetically. “I was just asking. Just making sure you weren’t a CIA agent!”

He said it in a joking way, but I didn’t think it was funny. I glared and looked away. First he had implied that I was womanly, and now he was essentially calling me a traitor to Muslims.

However, along with my outrage, I also felt insecurity. Ittefaq and the people of Sehra Kush represented the traditional Islamic life that was impossible to attain in the secular West, which made them purer than me, and if they thought that I was lacking in some way—if I wasn’t man enough, if I wasn’t trustworthy enough—then the presumption went against me and in their favor. I told myself to show a little more humility going forward.

As we continued toward the
bazar
, Ittefaq dug into his pocket and produced a little card. With an eager smile he handed it over.

“Check this out,” he said. “It’s something else.”

I took it and inspected it. It was a stamp-sized picture of a topless Bollywood actress. Her mouth was in a sensual pout, her breasts large and glossy.

I admired her for a moment and then handed the picture back to him. I tried to indicate by my expression that I wasn’t interested whatsoever.

“No!” he insisted. “It’s fine. You keep that one. I’ve got more—many more! Put it in your wallet.” He opened his wallet to show me that he’d done the same.

Not wanting to make a big deal about it, I shrugged and tucked the picture into my wallet as suggested.

Together we walked into the bustling
bazar
. There were hundreds of fruit carts and vendors and guys selling roasted corn and sugarcane juicers with windmill machines and little boys squatting at the street-side faucets washing pots by hand. Letting memory lead me, I walked toward Dada Abu’s shop.

Ittefaq put his hand on my shoulder. “I have to go see my uncle,” he said, pointing in the other direction. “You come with me. Let’s go to his shop. There’s
chai
and food there.”

I didn’t want to start exploring the city without touching base with my relatives first, so I asked him for directions to his uncle’s shop. “I’ll come there after I go and sit with my grandfather.”

He nodded reluctantly. “Make sure you come,” he said. “We’ll eat and drink.”

After saying my farewells, I pressed through the crowd to Dada Abu’s store. I found him sitting in the back of the shop. He smiled when I arrived and pulled me into his sitting room by my wrist. After getting me a cup of
chai
, he began asking me questions.

“Why didn’t your father come with you to Pakistan?”

“He had to work,” I explained. “He gets only a certain amount of time off.”

“He’s always worked hard,” Dada Abu said nostalgically. “When he was a child, he was the only one of my sons who was serious about studying. He was an example for everyone, but not everyone followed his example.”

“He still likes studying,” I said, recalling the way Pops had pored over his residency books.

“He must make you and your brother study hard.”

“Oh, he does!”

“That’s good. Very good. You must know that I’m an illiterate man. I only know business. I can sell anything, but being a salesman is low-class. Your father did right. He went and became a doctor.”

I nodded.

“What do you want to be?” asked Dada Abu, looking at me intently.

“I want to be an Islamic scholar,” I said.

“No,” he said, “for your
profession
. A man needs a profession.
Everyone
can study Islam.”

I tried to explain to him that I would get an advanced degree in Islamic philosophy and become a professor. Dada Abu shook his head.

“Not a good idea,” he said. “Mosques and
madrassa
s are good for worship, and it’s good to be a Muslim scholar, but a man can’t make money from Islam. That’s not allowed by God. You can’t use the religion for money. So I ask you, what will you do for money?”

“I’ll study law,” I said, hoping to reassure him.

“Yes!” He nodded eagerly. “Yes, that is an honorable profession. Allama Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah—founders of Pakistan. They were both barristers. Gandhi was a lawyer also.”

Satisfied with my answer, he leaned back and lit his
hooka
. Then he closed his eyes again, gripping the nozzle of the
hooka
with his left hand. He smoked the bitter tobacco, causing it to smolder. The water gurgled softly. I leaned against the far wall and relaxed. A soothing tedium buzzed in the air, and the noise in the
bazar
sounded far away, a distant din of clattering feet and murmuring voices. As I looked through the shop toward the
bazar
beyond, I could see the hot
loo
—the infamous wave of noontime desert heat—emanating from the pavement; it gave the atmosphere a shimmering quality.

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
topi
s, 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
maulvi
s 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
maulvi
s 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.

W
hen 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 the missile strikes, but I couldn’t remember a single thing. My mind went completely blank.

Somehow I needed to change the subject away from missiles toward something, anything, that might earn me some good graces in the eyes of the hostile gathering. “After the Soviet Union fell,” I improvised, “America needed an enemy. It has targeted Islam.”

I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d heard this idea discussed, but I recalled reading that a professor named Samuel Huntington had said something similar. My comment silenced the group, so perhaps my strategy was working. Imagining that I could turn the hostility around so that these people would trust me, wouldn’t think I was a CIA agent but would see that I was a good Muslim, I went further. “America wants to be the world’s only power. Just as the British took over the world centuries ago, now America is doing the same.”

I was surprised at how easily these thoughts came to me. Feeling encouraged and powerful, I kept going. I recalled a particular e-mail I’d once received that had listed all the times the United States had invaded a foreign nation or supported covert action or engendered a coup d’état, and I did my best to echo its contents to the group. I started with the Spanish-American War and cited examples all the way up to U.S. sanctions against the regime in Iraq. Recalling my political science classes, I marshaled the views of Francis Fukuyama, who had declared that the West represented the end of history, and Kissinger’s realist school of foreign policy, which said that
all
countries were enemies to the United States. Speaking forcefully, I explained that America was on a mission to turn Islam into its enemy.