Children of Dust (6 page)

T
o try to find a better life for us, Pops went to Iran. Having heard a rumor that Tehran had a shortage of doctors, he decided to see whether he could line up more patients there than at his struggling clinic in Sehra Kush. Ammi didn’t want him to go—she’d just lost Zain and didn’t want to lose Pops as well—but our financial insecurity convinced her.

Pops took a midnight train that took him to Quetta, from which point he would enter Iran by bus. I went to the train station to see him off. I imagined Iran as a distant place made of legends and stories involving forty thieves.

“Bring me back a flute,” I told Pops as he stuck his head out of the window and waved. I figured an Iranian flute would let me conjure a
jinn
to whom I could make three wishes. One of those wishes would be that we could have all the money in the world so that Pops wouldn’t have to go away again.

To make the trip Pops took all our savings. Ammi had assumed that she’d be able to ask Dadi Ma for help with the day-to-day costs while he was gone, but Dadi Ma wouldn’t hear of it; she told Ammi that each family in the house had to pay for their own food. Ammi explained that
she had only five rupees on her, which amounted to one American cent, but Dadi Ma was unbending.

Ammi didn’t want the other women in the kitchen—the women who had food—to think that she was in need of charity, so she picked up her kerosene stove and took it into our bedroom. Rummaging through our luggage, she found a few packets of lentils and set them to boil. The thick smoke gathered inside the room, seeping into our clothes, our hair, our pillows. The smoke blackened Flim’s tongue, and he ran around sticking it out at me and frightening Ammi.

Through the power of Islam, Ammi made those five rupees last a month. She made rice and lentils every day, the concoction becoming more watery each time. As the food bubbled on the stove before each meal, I would see her put her hand over it and recite something under her breath.

“What are you reading?” I asked her.

“I’m saying a prayer,” she said. “There’s a prayer that increases the amount of food.”

“How can that be?” I asked.

“One time the Prophet Muhammad was a guest at someone’s house, and the hosts were worried about what to offer him to eat: they had only a sick old goat, and she wasn’t producing any milk. So the Prophet, recognizing their dilemma, called for the goat and spoke this very prayer over her, and the little thing’s udders became full of milk, not just for himself, but for everyone. It didn’t run out all night long.”

I nodded happily at the idea of never running out of food and asked to learn the prayer.

Ammi’s prayers, while sufficient to keep food on the table, weren’t enough to address the constant hunger in my belly, so I turned into a scavenger.

If the children from the other families in our house were eating, I went to their tray and joined in with them. If I heard that someone in the neighborhood had ordered bread from the
tandoor
, I went up the street and parked myself next to the outdoor bakery, waiting for the baker to turn his head and reach into the clay oven to flip out a toasty piece of
naan
onto his stack. While his back was turned, I would grab
a chunk off the bottom-most piece of bread. By the time he was done heaping the twenty or so pieces onto his stack, I would have fully consumed the bottom-most one and disappeared. One time, however, I stayed till the very end of his shift, wondering if he’d have any dough left over at the end.

My mouth watered a little when I saw that he did. “Are you going to throw that away?”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, gathering his
lungi
to keep it out of the way while he cleaned the oven.

“The dough,” I said. “Let me have it, please. I want to make little toys from it.”

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and handed it to me.

I didn’t want him to think that I was
bhooka
—a derogatory word that implied greed—so I pretended to play with the dough, modeling it into little cars and balls and touching it nonchalantly, as if it were completely meaningless to me. Then, just as the baker was about to shut down the oven, I flattened the dough with my head and handed it to him.

“Stick it in there, will you?” I pleaded.

He sighed, flattened the dough further, and stuck it into the oven. Within moments a little piece of piping hot bread was ready—just for me. I took it in my hands, marveling over its thick edge, its crispy center, and then nibbled on it all the way back home.

A couple of months later, after Ammi had made many prayers for his return, Pops came back safe and sound, dejectedly explaining that there were no jobs to be had in Iran. He would reopen his clinic in Sehra Kush and hope for the best.

Instead of a flute that would summon a
jinn
, he brought me back a jacket.

A
s Pops began looking for a place to send me to school, people wondered why I wasn’t becoming a
hafiz-e-Quran
—someone who memorized the Holy Book.

“It’s the highest form of learning,” Dadi Ma declared.

“First you memorize the Quran,” said Tau, whose two sons, Tariq and Muaz, were enrolled in the
madrassa
. “Then comes everything else.”

Being a
hafiz
was considered the apex of knowledge because of the revered status of the Quran—a status reflected in the names we gave it: the
Lawhul Mahfuz
, or Preserved Tablet, and the Uncreated Word of Allah. The Quran existed jointly with God. Timeless, immutable, perfect, the Quran was all Allah (though not all of Allah was the Quran). Allah had poured it through the mouth of Muhammad, and as it existed on paper now was how Allah intended for the Quran to look, taste, and sound. The Quran was the Islamic equivalent of Christ. The act of repeating the Arabic words, as they passed through the mouth and throat and echoed in the chest, was a form of transubstantiation: a way of making what was divine enter the human body. Christians took a piece of bread and a touch of wine and thought that they had taken of the body of their God; Muslims passed God in textual form in and out of their larynxes.

Most important, when Allah chose to impart his final, clearest message, he chose to convey it in the literary language of the Bedouin poets. Human translations of that message were not considered to be the Quran because they were not in Arabic, and thus not in the language of God. In fact, a Quran that was not in Arabic couldn’t even be referred to as a Quran. The language of Arabic had a divinity of its own: the simple act of opening one’s mouth and spouting Quranic Arabic was enough to endow the speaker with blessings. It was for this reason that a Muslim didn’t really care whether or not he understood the Quran. It mattered only that he could pronounce the Arabic words situated between the covers—or, as Ammi put it in easy-to-understand theological economics, “Each Arabic letter in the Quran is worth ten blessings. Just saying three letters—
alif lam, mim
—that’s thirty blessings, creditable on the Day of Judgment!” In other words, the Quran was code, a sequence of 77,701 Arabic words, composed of 323,671 letters, which, at ten a pop, amounted to more than three million blessings. This is why rote memorization of the entire Quran was such big business. With the gazillions of blessings that a
hafiz
racked up in his life, he would be assured of entrance to Paradise. And that was the point: the afterlife was the most important thing in life.

Beyond being guaranteed heaven, there was another benefit to being a
hafiz
, one that extended to everyone around the Quran memorizer. On the Day of Judgment a
hafiz
would be allowed to save seventy-two people from hellfire in Dozakh. By having a few
hafize
s in every generation, entire families would be spared that suffering. The only other type of person that Allah would allow to intercede on behalf of seventy-two people was a martyr; but obviously to become
that
one had to die, a far more painful task. Since many boys in Sehra Kush were studying to become
hafize
s, Pops decided to send me to a
madrassa
as well.

“It will sharpen your memory,” Pops concluded. “Besides, I made a covenant with Allah that you would serve Islam, and it is because I wasn’t fulfilling it that Zain died.”

I
was awakened at dawn the next morning. “You’re going with your cousins to their
madrassa
,” Dadi Ma said. Then she ordered the other women away from her kerosene stove and made me a butter-fried egg with the flatbread we called
paratha
.

The
madrassa
that Tariq and Muaz attended was on the
bazar
side of town. Ammi was nervous about letting me go alone, but everyone reassured her and she relented. When I’d finished breakfast, she plopped a
topi
on my head and handed me a frayed little blue lesson book containing Arabic.

I walked up the alley with the boys, eager to see my new school. As we entered a square, we came upon a donkey tied to a big nail that was driven into the ground. Tariq threw a rock at the donkey, and the animal’s grizzled gray felt quivered.

“Go pull its tail,” he instructed me.

“Why?”

“When the devil pulls its tail, it brays.”

“I am
not
the devil,” I replied. “I am Abir ul Islam.”

Tariq shrugged and we kept walking.

We soon passed a parked donkey cart. Tipping it over, we tried using it as a slide, with only limited success. As we continued our walk, we passed a pair of dolorous cows and tried to stick hay into their big nostrils, but we were chased away by a couple of barefoot girls with gooey hands and feet who had been piling cow dung into buckets. Muaz told them that they were ugly hags with backward feet, and they told him that his head was squelched in his father’s anal sphincter.

Rather than taking the most direct route to the
madrassa
, we ducked in and out of people’s houses, asking if this boy and that was awake. Then we abandoned the streets altogether: we entered a cement house and, without asking its owners—who sat on the floor of the courtyard eating breakfast—climbed the stairs to its roof and roof-hopped all the way to the end of the block. When we descended the stairs in another house, we chased a few hens around the veranda and discussed stealing an egg so that we could raise our own little chicken.

Eventually, we came onto a large paved road. Here there were a few rickshaws and numerous horse-drawn
tanga
s, along with fruit and
vegetable vendors on donkey carts, as well as boys urging goats and bullocks toward the canals.

We crossed that street and entered a part of town even less developed than ours. Not only were the dusty alleys unpaved and run down, but sewage from the
nali
s spilled out onto the street, creating wide black pools infested with mosquitoes. In the pools of sludge some good Samaritan had laid a row of rocks upon which pedestrians could step. However, they were laid down for adult-length footsteps, so we youngsters had to hop from one to the next with both feet.

As we went forward, there were more emaciated cows, more donkeys, and even a big bull with lowered horns living a life of surrender.

“Look!” Muaz said suddenly. “Naked nincompoops!”

Looking where he pointed, we saw a row of naked boys—brothers, by the look of them—coming out of one of the houses. They had rich brown skins, bellies unnaturally rotund from tapeworm infestation, and dark navels. In a line, as if choreographed, they squatted quite near us with a wide stance over the
nali
and relieved themselves. In their sleepy state they didn’t even bother to wave at the flies coming to sit at the corner of their eyes. Even from where we stood, we could see that the anuses of some, red and round, protruded a few inches out of their holes.

“Why does it look like that?” I asked.

“They’re experts at shitting,” Tariq said authoritatively.

“Does mine do that?”

“Want me to check?” he offered.

“Mine does,” Muaz said with a grin.

Before I could laugh, the naked boys finished their business and started up a loud chant directed at their mother inside the house:

Getting no response, they repeated the chant many times. For a while the three of us chanted along with them. Then, having reached our destination, we climbed the steps to the
madrassa
and placed our slippers in wooden boxes on a shelf just inside.

The
madrassa
was packed with boys and filled with the drone of Quranic recitation. All other sounds—the naked boys outside, the whirring fans, the running taps—were subsumed under the recitation.

At the front of the hall there was a long wooden bench. Five
qari
s with beards, turbans, and sticks sat on one side, and an assembly line of students passed before them. Each student held a little
sipara
in his hand. When he got to the bench, he flattened it out and began rocking back and forth as he pronounced the words. Once a boy finished his lesson, the
qari
either dismissed him with a wave of his hand or, if the boy had flubbed the reading, hit him on the hand with the fat stick. The boys that were hit took the punishment stoically, for the most part, though when they’d gotten some distance away they let their faces contort in pain and they pressed their hands into their armpits and cried. There was a reason the boys took the punishment to the hands without wincing: those who broke down while being hit on their hands were pulled around the bench by their wrists, and as they twisted and turned they were beaten on their back and stomach.

The students not currently involved in a lesson ran around the hall. They played hide-and-seek behind the columns, enjoyed a game of tag, or threw the mosque’s straw skullcaps at one another like Frisbees. An impromptu game of soccer—with two cloth
topi
s stuffed with straw skullcaps serving as the ball—broke out as I watched, with twenty or more students to each team.

Tariq told me to take out my book and get in line with him and Muaz. “When you get to the
qari
, just tell him that you’re new and he’ll tell you what to do.”

“Will he hit me?”

“They always hit.”

I looked at my hands and then toward the fat stick leaning against the wall. I started shaking. The hall suddenly felt deathly cold. With each step that took me closer to the
qari
s, little daggers of chilly fear jolted my body.

Suddenly, I heard something like a crack of lightning and looked up at the dome, thinking that perhaps it had cracked. Loud wailing and screaming ensued.

I soon realized that one of the
qari
s had become fed up with all the playing and was taking the stick to any child that he came upon. His preferred method was to grab a boy from behind by the hair or the collar and, in the act of yanking him, hit him on the back, the thighs, or the calves. If the
qari
caught a boy from the front, he almost always smashed the stick against the student’s shins. That was what had created the unearthly cracking noise. As the
qari
rampaged, going one from one boy to another, there was a mad, chaotic scramble. I began running as well. One of the boys next to me was plucked by his shirt collar and yanked back. I had no way of checking whether Tariq and Muaz made it or not. I was concerned only with my own escape. I grabbed my shoes as I ran past the shelf, threw them down, and stepped into them while running toward home. I didn’t stop until I got there.

When I told Ammi and Pops about the anarchy at the
madrassa
, they said that they were going to look into private tutoring.

P
ops thought it would be better if I received religious instruction at home. He arranged that an educated man named Qari Adil would make regular house visits. Since he would be coming to our home and we would pay him a lot, Pops asked him to teach me about Islam beyond just memorizing the Quran.

Qari Adil was a dark, squat man with a silver beard tinged with henna. He had a gleaming smile and wore nothing but immaculate white clothes, with matching white turban. He was articulate and cheerful, and to my vast relief he didn’t believe in punishment. He was the head of a popular mosque attended by many important men.

The first day that Qari Adil came to tutor, the atmosphere in the house was expectant and serious. Ammi made the sitting room spotless and the house smelled good. Food—
paratha
s and eggs for the
qari
, along with a glass of milk—was set forth. A brand new Quran sat on a new wooden holder, and there were Arabic textbooks and two copies of Abu Ala al-Mawdudi’s exegesis. Normally one didn’t study exegesis at a
madrassa
, but normally a
madrassa
didn’t have teachers like this one.

Qari Adil rang the bell on his bike as he arrived, and I went to greet him. It was a gleaming silver Sohrab.

His comportment was unlike that of any other religious figure I’d seen in Sehra Kush. He was graceful, sparkling clean, and had an obvious sense of fashion. Riding in the sun made him sweat profusely, so that droplets fell from his forehead. When he arrived, he dabbed the end of his turban against his face and shook his shirt. Even with me—a kid—he had a nervousness that made me like him. When he finally sat down each day, he began by making small talk with me in a gregarious manner.

On most days, after I read the Quran with him we would read Mawdudi’s
tafsir
, starting from the first
surah
, “The Opening,” and move quickly into the dense material of the longest chapters in the Quran: “The Cow” and “The Family of Imran.”

We talked about Jews a lot, because the story of Moses and his people takes up a large part of the two longest chapters of the Quran. The reference to the cow in the chapter by that name comes from a story involving a special cow that the Jews were asked by God to slaughter, but which they refused to kill on account of its lactic productivity. Qari Adil told me many stories about the Jews, such as the one about Jewish fishermen who were told to stop fishing on Saturday but wouldn’t, because on Saturday, to test them, God would fill the lakes with fish, “and greedy people would become tempted to disobey God.” He told me of the way the Jewish people compelled Moses to tell God how to show Himself on Sinai—and then refused to accept Moses’s recounting of the event. He told me how the Jews in exile had started to starve, so Moses had God bring huge, heaping plates of
mann-o-salwa
from Paradise. After a period of eating such rich heavenly food, the Jews demanded lean legumes and shrubs and vegetables instead.