Children of Dust (4 page)

W
hy bother? I’m just ugly and old!”

Dadi Ma was fond of saying this to people who told her to cover her face when she went for her great walks around town. She was a small woman with a gold tooth, thin hennaed hair, and a loud voice. Although the women of Sehra Kush, when they left their compound, always wore the
niqab
, a full veil that covered the face, when Dadi Ma went out she preferred the comfort of a loose garment called the
chador
, which draped over her head and shoulders but was open at the face; she typically tied it with a ribbon under her chin.

During the days, I spent a lot of time in Dadi Ma’s vicinity. She usually sat near the kitchen on a small
charpai
, or cot, giving instructions to Ammi and the aunts about what to cook for dinner, how many pinches of salt should go in the cookpot, and why the milkman needed to be thrashed for adding water and skimming the cream.

She also told tall tales. How sleeping under a tree caused you to die from asphyxiation because the
jinn
s that lived in the branches sucked up all the oxygen; how the scary backward-footed
churayl
s were actually fallen souls seeking forgiveness for some crime they had committed; how going to a particular saint’s grave and spreading a ceremonial
chador
over it would lead to the expiation of one’s sins. Most of the
aunts and children had already heard the stories and never asked Dadi Ma any questions, but Ammi enjoyed talking to old people and often probed her, to my great delight.

One day they began talking about the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and Dadi Ma started telling
really
scary stories.

“Five of them,” she announced, making her hand into a claw. “Five girls. Count them. One, two, three, four, five. Five girls jumped into a well. Into the same well. Just to protect their honor. This was in 1947, back when we lived in Indian Punjab. All because that Mountbatten switched the borders on the founders of our country and put us in India when we would’ve been in Pakistan.”

“Who were the girls?” Ammi asked.

“
Our
girls! They were just girls. The virgin ones. My cousins-in-law. All single. No husbands. No children. Their whole life lay before them. What a waste! They just went in, one after another after another. Into that well. And what for? This country—Pakistan! What did this country give us? Refugee camps and then a war where they dropped a bomb—splat—on our house. Well, at least the poor girls are martyrs. Straight to Paradise.”

“Why did they have to jump?” Ammi asked—the very question that had been in my mind.

“The animals, Hindus and Sikhs, were kidnapping the women. Just picking them up and running off with them—just because the girls were Muslim!”

“Did they come after
you
?” Ammi asked.

“Of course not. They didn’t want married women. They just wanted the virgins. They had standards—even as animals.”

“Do you think maybe the girls were pulled out of the well? Maybe they’re still alive?”

“I don’t know. Those were Muslim girls. If they were pulled out? God knows.
I
don’t know.”

“Did anyone go back to find out what happened?”

“Our men went. Before he died, may Allah bless him, my older brother-in-law went back to the old house. To find out about the girls. To see if the treasure was still there.”

“What treasure?” Ammi asked, as perplexed as I was.

“Our things! Jewelry belonging to hundreds of years of women. Coins. Gold. Silver. Money. Deeds to land. Receipts for cattle. All of it. Before they fled, my father-in-law put it all in one big cauldron and buried it in the frontyard. Said he would go back when things were safe and retrieve it. You know, we all thought that this India-Pakistan thing was going to be temporary.”

“Did they get it?” Ammi asked.

“What do you think? It wasn’t there. The maid they’d had back then must have seen them dig the hole. She was a smart little Hindu girl. She dug the treasure up and disappeared, or so we think. She went to some big city. Maybe Bombay. Maybe Delhi. She’s gone. No use crying over what’s lost. We gave it up for Islam. That’s how it is.”

“The Holy Prophet and the Emigrants to Medina gave up everything also,” Ammi said. “All for Islam.”

“There you go,” Dadi Ma replied. “You live; you worship. That’s what this life is for. Rewards are in the next life. Riches are in the next life. Did you hear that, Abir? Pray. Pray and pray and you will have your entire existence to recline on beds of gold in Paradise.”

“I just want a regular bed,” I said. “And a ring for my pinky.”

“Whatever you want,” said Dadi Ma. “You should still pray. It will take you to Paradise. Now someone bring me my fan. At least it won’t be hot in Paradise. Too hot here in this desert. Imagine! To go from the cool breeze off the foothills of Kashmir to this desert, where the breeze—. No, this isn’t breeze, it’s furnace blasts; it’s what hell will be like. Well, what can you say? Everything has been written.”

“Kismet,”
Ammi said.

“Kismet.”
Dadi Ma took her fan, leaned back against the wall, and drew her
dupatta
over her head to form a makeshift tent against the flies. “Anyway, forget it. Send someone to get the
naan
. Put aside some curry in that pot over there. The boys from the
madrassa
are coming tonight to ask for food. I’m going to sleep. Wake me up when my husband comes home to bother us all.”

Unlike his wife, I couldn’t wait till Dada Abu came home. I liked him more than anyone else. He was a stylish old man who wore a
glittering watch and suits made of
boski
thread cotton. He drove an apple-red Kawasaki motorcycle and often gave me a ride. He usually arrived shortly before the
maghrib
prayer at sunset, made
wazu
, went to the mosque, and then came back for dinner, which he ate quietly with his hands. Then he drank three glasses of cool water from the clay
matka
—squatting on the ground for each chug as per the example of the Prophet—and left the house to go up the street and sit with his brothers. As he left the house, he often took me along with him and joked with me.

“Who is this strange boy next to me?”

“It’s me!” I said.

“What is that voice I hear?”

“It’s me,” I repeated. “It’s Abir ul Islam!”

“Oh! It’s the fragrance of Islam that I smell on my nose.”

“Yes!” I said, grabbing his pinky. “I’m coming with you.”

“My father, may Allah bless him, said your name should be Alauddin,” Dada Abu said. “The heights of the faith.’ But I think your name should be Naughty Boy.”

“You can’t change my name,” I protested. “I am Abir ul Islam. Do you want me to change
your
name, big man?”

“No, no, big boss,” he said, laughing. “You keep your name and I will keep mine. You serve Islam and I will serve you. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Dada Abu was the youngest of all his brothers, and when in the evenings they sat together it was his job to maintain the
hooka
, or water-pipe. He often passed this assignment to me.

“Take this chamber and go to Mateen’s house. Tell him to fill it up with tobacco,” he instructed. “And hurry back. Don’t start playing with those cows.”

I picked up the head of the
hooka
and ran over to a neighboring home. It belonged to a Gujjur family. Their entire existence revolved around their four black buffaloes. They milked them. They sold the calves. They piled dung and made patties, which when crisped in the sun they sold for fuel. They hitched the buffaloes to carts and took the
patties to the market. While there they rented their cart out to those not fortunate enough to have a beast of burden. To supplement this meager livelihood, they also refilled
hooka
s with bitter tobacco for the old men in the neighborhood.

With the embers like liquid gold, I brought the head back and placed it atop the
hooka
while Dada Abu patted me on the head. Then I quietly sat down in a corner, observing the four brothers with beards and turbans sitting cross-legged on low wooden beds, whispering smoky kisses to the desert—their wives either dead or irrelevant; their business troubles forgotten; their conflicts resolved through the placid acceptance of everything. When there was an occasional splatter of disagreement, a political confrontation perhaps, it resulted in one brother opening his mouth and then just as quickly closing it, because ultimately they knew that nothing had changed over the past forty years: they still considered everyone a crook and every leader a fool. We—the youth, the children—were the only ones to bring any disorder into their lives. But to counter the dissonance that we caused, they had perfected many methods of mollification. A son with troubled finances was given a room in the house. A boy rebelling too much was indoctrinated with Islam. A wife nagging too much was sent to her parents for a little while, where she started to feel guilty for being a burden and came begging back. A daughter getting too high-minded got married off to a humble man. Disobedient cattle got eaten. All such decisions were sacralized without speaking in that nightly circle around the
hooka
.

When I sat among the four old brothers, I felt assured of the continuity of the world. When the nostril-burning secondhand smoke gave me a buzz, the four brothers turned into white pillars of permanence. I felt immortal. One of the angels of Allah. Given the familiarity with which the brothers talked about the Prophets, I figured they were ageless. They must have walked with Ibrahim and crossed the Red Sea with Musa; surely they had walked with Isa and ridden with Muhammad. They were above and beyond history, beyond Shia and Sunni, beyond India and Pakistan, beyond Muslim and not. There was a God; His name was Allah; He was represented by the act of pointing an index finger to the sky. There were the sons that Allah blessed you with.
There was a
hooka
to be smoked at night. A prayer called
isha
preceded the little sleep. When the big sleep came, others offered a prayer on your behalf; then you were dormant till the Day of Judgment, when you were raised and whatever Allah had determined for you was given to you.

When the melodic words of the
azan
for
isha
rang out in the evening, the brothers’ conference of silence would come to an end.

“Big boss,” Dada Abu would ask. “What should we do now?”

“Abir ul Islam says it’s time to pray.”

U
nder Dadi Ma’s tutelage, Ammi became an inveterate storyteller. When she was in the kitchen, squatting on her green straw
chowki
, grinding
masala
in the stone
chukki
, kneading dough in the steel
praat
, tinkering with the kerosene
choola
, and wiping her nose on her shoulder, she spoke and spoke and spoke until her speech became narration, her sentences bedizened with similes and metaphors, and my cousins and I were treated to epics. It was as if her imagination were composed of a never-ending series of photographs for which, some time long ago, at the primordial gathering of mothers, she had been given the most appropriate, perfectly descriptive words to use.

All her stories related to Islam.

There was the one about the People of the Cave—the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus—who were so disappointed by the idolatry of the society they lived in that they withdrew to a cave, where they were put into a miraculously deep sleep by Allah, and when they woke up, they were in a better age.

Then there was the story of King Zulqurnain, whose name meant two-horned one, a monotheistic ruler who believed in the afterlife and traveled to the east, west, and a third direction, dispensing wisdom and justice.

“He saw the sun setting in the water, which is the west,” Ammi told me. “Then he visited a place where the people had no cover from the sun, which is the east.”

“Then where did he go?” I asked.

“He went to a valley; we don’t know where,” Ammi said, lowering her voice. “The people were being killed by Yajuj and Majuj!”

“Who were they?” I asked.

“Absolute monsters!” Ammi said, making claws with her hands. “There were two tribes of them, and they were raiding the people of the valley, so the people begged King Zulqurnain to save them. He instructed the people to mine lead and iron and copper and brass, and he melted all those things in a huge furnace and poured the molten ore onto a wall, strengthening it to separate the people from the monsters.”

“But Yajuj and Majuj are going to get through the wall, aren’t they?”

“Well, each day Yajuj and Majuj try to break through the wall by licking it. They lick it all day, and each day they can almost see the other side, but then they get tired and go to sleep, and at night Allah thickens the wall again.”

“What if they get through one day?”

“Oh, that day will come,” Ammi said morosely. “Yajuj and Majuj are one of the promised
azab
s that will afflict the Muslims before the end of the world. When they lick their way through that copper wall, they’ll come out into the land and eat everyone—all except those people who hide in mosques. That’s why I keep telling you to go to the
masjid
. If you are in the habit of going, when the panic of Yajuj and Majuj strikes you’ll instinctively go to a
masjid
and save yourself.”

“I hope they come during Friday prayer. I’m in the
masjid
at that time for sure!” I said, feeling reassured.

“Well, whenever they come, we’ll know,” she said. “And we’ll know that the end-times are near.”

This made me nervous. “We can’t kill the Yajuj and Majuj? Not even with a gun?”

“Afraid not. From what I’ve heard, they’re supposed to take the Muslim world to the brink of extinction, and when they’ve done that, Dajjal will appear!”

Dajjal was the Islamic equivalent of the Antichrist.

“What does Dajjal look like?”

“He’ll be a regular man who will have one eye. Across his forehead the word
KAFIR
, or ‘unbeliever,’ will be written in black. He will be riding a donkey. He will come to the people and encourage them to abandon Allah. Those who listen to him will be given a Paradise on earth. To those who reject him, he will say, ‘I will make the world a hell for you.’ But righteous Muslims will reject him, seeking refuge from him in mosques, because he cannot enter a place where prayer is made. The Jews and Christians will become bound by his spell and because of submitting to him find glory in this world. Dajjal will be on their side. He will be their God, and he will tell them that he can make the sun rise from the west and they will believe him.”

The idea of a simple man, a man among us—riding a donkey, no less—dispensing the sort of justice I associated with Allah Azzawajal, filled me with terror. The tangibility and nearness of Dajjal’s presence—I imagined him offering me his earthly Paradise at the roundabout nearby—made me so nervous that I cannibalized my cuticles. But I couldn’t simply dismiss Dajjal to the distant future, because Ammi made it sound as if the arrival of Dajjal was imminent, if not already under way.

“If you look around the world, you’ll see that the Jews and Christians are glorious and powerful, while Muslims are persecuted and killed just for being Muslim.”

I reflected on her assessment, and it seemed to be based in reality. I had seen
Full House
and
Sesame Street
and
Star Trek
and
Airwolf
and
Knight Rider
on TV. Everything about the world of those people—those Christians—smacked of luxury. Ice cream whenever they wanted it; houses with air-conditioning; lights that never went out; cars that talked. The difference between them and us was evident: they were rich and had many possessions, while we were deprived. There was no way to explain this difference except to believe that they had given obeisance to Dajjal.

“Dajjal will rule the world for forty years,” Ammi continued. “Then there will be hope for Muslims. A man from Hijaz, whose name will be Muhammad, whose mother’s name will be Amina, and whose father’s name will be Abdullah—”

“Those were the names of the Prophet’s parents!” I shouted.

“Yes,” Ammi continued. “At the age of forty, which was the age at which the Prophet began receiving revelations of the Quran, this man will be leading a prayer at the Grand Mosque in Damascus. Suddenly the sky will split open. There will be a beam of light that touches the dome. In that beam, the Christian Prophet, Isa, will descend, wearing all white.”

“Isa is alive?” I exclaimed. “I thought he was crucified!”

“Yes, alive! He wasn’t crucified. Allah put Isa’s face over someone else, over a traitor, while he raised Isa to the fourth heaven,” Ammi clarified. “So Isa will come and stand before the congregation, and he will say, ‘I am Isa, son of Maryam, Prophet of God, and I am a Muslim. This man here is Muhammad, the
mahdi
, and you must follow him.’”

“The messiah!” I pumped my fist.

“The
mahdi
will step back and let Isa lead the prayer,” Ammi said. “But Isa will push him back to the front and say that he himself has come only to serve as a general and will fall in line behind the
mahdi
. They will finish the prayer and go east. Then they will start liberating the world. Isa will tell the Jews and Christians to believe in Islam, and many people will convert, but the stranglehold of Dajjal will be too strong for most people, and they will refuse. Isa will kill all of these nonbelievers. He will destroy them. If they hide behind a stone, the stones will bear witness against them and reveal them to Isa. If they hide behind a tree, the trees will bear witness against them and reveal them to Isa.”

“What about Dajjal?”

“Isa will battle him and kill him with his sword,” Ammi said somberly. “Then Isa will die a natural death and finally be buried as a Muslim, and the
mahdi
will continue liberating the world. His reign will be forty years.”

“What will that world be like?”

By this time, Ammi had become tired, so she sped up the narrative. “In those forty years Muslims will thrive, but then they will lose all their gains and face utter humiliation, bringing a forty-year reign by their enemies. That’s when the Day of Judgment will finally come. The
mountains will blow away like puffs of wool. Humanity will be gathered naked underneath the Great Throne for the Day of Reckoning.”

Then, shivering from fear and guilt, Ammi asked Allah for forgiveness and announced that it was time for prayer. I hastened to make
wazu
.

Prayer was the only protection against the apocalypse that was already here.

U
pon hearing Ammi’s story, I began to train myself to go to the mosque more faithfully. I prayed all five prayers there most days, and my preparations for attending each prayer were meticulous.

I took Ammi’s heavy iron, applied gobs of
kalaf
, and starched my clothes until they were cardboard-hard. I found in Pops’s closet a checkered red-and-white
kafiya
that I learned to tie as a turban, though most of the time I simply draped it on my shoulders with the corners hanging forward on my chest, as the Quran reciters did on TV. I also had a hand-stitched
topi
, snow-white and delicate as gossamer, to grace my head.

There were many old men at the mosque, all of whom were regulars, and they loved to hobnob with me. One of them told me to give up using a toothbrush and opt for a wooden
miswak
like the one the Holy Prophet had used. Another one saw me using the pads on my fingers to count the
zikr
and gave me a wooden
tasbih
to use instead. “Now instead of counting in fifteens,” he said, “you can count in hundreds.”

I noticed that many worshippers had calluses on their foreheads and ankles from a lifetime of prostration and sitting on folded feet. Those were marks of piety that I wanted to develop as well. Thus, instead of praying on the carpet inside, I took to praying in the courtyard of the mosque, on straw matting that was hot and rough. During prostration I rubbed my forehead on the mat until it became raw.

I figured that if Yajuj and Majuj came and saw that I had marks of piety, they would know not to lay a hand on me.