Moth Smoke (4 page)

I smile. ‘No. I met him while I was at Punjab University, when Ozi was off studying in the States.’

‘Well, his hash has certainly given me a buzz.’ She moves her arm back and rests both of her hands in her lap. I find my mind tracing the line her skin touched as it curved around me.

‘I’m pretty stoned myself,’ I say.

‘You look less unhappy.’

‘I feel completely empty.’

‘You’ll find something to fill you.’

‘Such as?’

‘I’m sure you’ll find something.’

I light a cigarette.

‘May I have one?’ she asks.

‘I’m sorry. Of course.’

I light it for her.

A bird passes overhead, invisible, the sound of agitated air.

‘Did you ever study with Professor Julius Superb?’ she asks me.

I grin. ‘Do you know where his name comes from?’

She laughs. ‘No, but it’s fabulous.’

‘His great-grandfather was the batman of a Scottish officer who tried for years to get him to convert. When the Indian Mutiny broke out, the old Scot wound up with a knife in his chest. Julius’s great-grandfather came to him on his deathbed and said he’d decided to become a Christian. And the last thing the Scot could croak before he died was: Superb. Julius is the fourth generation of the line.’

Mumtaz is laughing so hard she has to hold her sides. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she gasps.

‘It’s true,’ I say. ‘Professor S. told us himself.’

‘No.’ She’s smiling at me and shaking her head.

‘Seriously.’ I smile back. ‘But how do you know him?’

‘I came across an article of his today. It’s called “The Phoenix and the Flame.” Have you read it?’

‘No.’

‘Let me read a piece of it to you.’

‘You have it with you?’

‘Just one page that I tore out. Do you think that’s odd?’

‘No.’

‘It is odd, isn’t it? Whenever I read something interesting, I tear out a piece and keep it as a talisman until I find something new to replace it with. It’s a sort of superstition. I did it once and it helped me break out of writer’s block, so I’ve done it ever since. Librarians must hate me.’

I look at her, surprised. ‘What do you write?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

I shake my head. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m teasing. I used to write for some magazines in New York.’

‘That must have been fantastic.’

‘Not really. I wrote boring stuff.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I’ll read you this article.’ She opens a little bag and takes out a folded piece of paper. ‘Could you keep your lighter lit so I can read this? Thanks. Here’s what it says: “My father liked to wonder aloud whether the phoenix was re-created by the fire of its funeral pyre or transformed so that what emerged was a soulless shadow of its former being, identical in appearance but without the joy in life its predecessor had had. He wondered alternatively whether the fire might be purificatory, a redemptive, rejuvenating blaze that destroyed the withered shell of the old phoenix and allowed the creature’s essence to emerge stronger than it was before in a young, new body. Or, he would ask, was
the fire a manifestation of entropy, slowly sapping the life-energy of the phoenix over the eons, a little death in a life that could know no beginning and no end but which could nonetheless be subject to an ever-decreasing magnitude? He asked me once if I thought the fires in our lives, the traumas, increased our fulfillment by setting up contrasts that illuminated more clearly our everyday joys; or perhaps I viewed them instead as tests that made us stronger by teaching us to endure; or did I believe, rather, that they simply amplified what we already were, in the end making the strong stronger, the weak weaker, and the dangerous deadly?” That’s it.’

The gas coming from my lighter hisses, suddenly audible, until I relax my thumb and extinguish the flame. Back in my pocket, the metal radiates heat into the skin below my hipbone.

‘That’s vintage Superb,’ I tell her, a little wistfully. ‘He teaches economics, but basically he’s a freelance thinker.’

‘I like the image his article brought to my mind, of this old Punjab University fuddy-duddy hard at work in his office.’

‘He’s a comrade.’

‘Comrade?’

‘Communist.’

‘Are there many?’

‘Not anymore. The unshaven boys are the new populists. But they leave Professor S. alone. I think they’ve decided he’s harmless. Or irrelevant.’

‘What about the other Communists?’

‘Most of them have become experts at couching their beliefs in religiously acceptable terms. The academic version of Sufi poets, you might call them.’

‘And the rest?’

‘Some professors were roughed up. They left.’

‘How sad.’

I shrug. ‘Good old Professor S. is still writing away. Which brings me back to you. You haven’t told me what you’re writing now.’

‘I have a question for you first.’

‘What?’

‘Tell me about boxing.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything. What’s it like? How did you get into it?’

‘Family tradition. I was an out-of-shape little kid. Very soft. One day my uncle took me aside and said, “The time has come,” or something like that. He trained me in the evenings: jump rope, speed bag, heavy bag. He was pretty lazy, so he usually sat on a chair and smoked while I pounded away, but every so often he put on his gloves and knocked me around so I’d learn not to be scared. I boxed until the end of college.’

‘You said you never won a championship.’

‘No. But I made it to a couple. And I won more fights than I lost.’

‘Did your mother approve?’

‘No, but she always came to watch when I asked her. She hid her face behind her hands, but she came.’

‘I’m sure she was terrified.’

I lean back on the bench and look up at the sky. Two stars, a low-riding moon, dusty haze. Cloudless but not clear. Not very dark but dark enough. Impossible to see anything falling.

I think of my mother on a rooftop, of waking beside her, early, at first light on an almost-quiet summer morning. The flies would come later, swinging up over the walls with the rising sun, buzzing and ripe like honeybees.

Someone calls our names. It’s Ozi.

‘There you two are,’ he says. ‘What are you doing out here?’

‘Talking,’ Mumtaz says. ‘I like this friend of yours.’

Ozi smiles and puts his arm around me. ‘You’ll get over it soon enough,’ he tells her.

We walk inside, Mumtaz and I on opposite sides of Ozi, and the pounding of the music gets louder as we approach, the lights from the dance floor reflecting off the walls so that colors start to blur and change, again and again and again.

The police don’t stop us on our drive home. We are in a Pajero, after all.

Z
ULFIKAR MANTO
: Good to meet you, Professor. I’ve read some of your work. None of the academic materials, I’m afraid. Econometrics scares the hell out of me and I can hardly even pronounce heteroscedasticity. But I enjoyed that piece you wrote a few months ago about the phoenix myth. Very witty.

JULIUS SUPERB
: Yes, ah, likewise.

ZM
: Your students speak highly of you. They say you’re a brave man.

JS
: They say I’m, ah, a man. A brave man. Do they?

ZM
: Is something wrong?

JS
: Wrong? No, no, of course not. Please excuse me. Never having met, you see. I was somewhat unprepared. But that’s your business. I don’t mean to presume. I’ve read all your articles. That is to say, all that I’ve come across. And they are top-notch. Really first-class journalism. Commendable. Ah, I’ve lost my train of thought. What was the question?

ZM
: Actually, I asked if something was wrong. But let’s
begin at the beginning. How did you first meet Darashikoh Shezad?

JS
: He was a student of mine. He distinguished himself by attending my lectures and taking notes. It was this second characteristic, note-taking, that really caught my eye. So one day I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ To which he replied, ‘I’m sorry, Professor?’ And I responded, ‘No, you’re not. You’ve been doing it for weeks. You’re taking notes.’

ZM
: Is that really so unusual?

JS
: Not really. But I confront each and every one of them. No one takes notes in my class without explaining themselves to me personally. I hit them with an impromptu quiz, right there, one on one. And if they do well enough, I ask them to come to my discussion group. Most refuse. Daru didn’t.

ZM
: Discussion group?

JS
: Yes. On alternate Tuesdays. From noon until two. Lunch included.

ZM
: What do you discuss?

JS
: Anything. Economics, development, politics, literature. Someone presents a paper and the rest of us tear it apart.

ZM
: Sounds fun.

JS
: It is. I soon realized Daru had potential, so I encouraged him to pursue a Ph.D. Which he did, for a while.

ZM
: How long?

JS
: I met him when he began his master’s. So that would
have been another … two years. Two years of dissertation work.

ZM
: And what was the subject of his dissertation?

JS
: Development. Microcredit, specifically. Small loans to low-income groups, guaranteed by the community. The Grameen Bank model and variations. Explaining low default rates, analyzing claims of paternalism, social critiques, that sort of thing.

ZM
: What did you think?

JS
: Daru? Brilliant. Though a bit of a seat-of-the-pants economist. Could have used more quant training. Liked to assert rather than prove. And not the best at handling criticism. Took methodological challenges very personally. But talented, definitely.

ZM
: And his dissertation?

JS
: Needed focus. But, to be fair, he was more into implementation than theory. Could have done some good work.

ZM
: Why did he stop?

JS
: Money, I think. His girlfriend had just left him for a textile baron’s son. He got a job offer from a bank, and he couldn’t resist. He told me it was impossible to make a living in academia or development. I told him he was wrong: students will pay good cash for exam questions, and multi-laterals certainly make some poor people (their employees) well off. He didn’t appreciate the humor. So I said he was too bright to work for a bank, which was true. And I asked
him about his commitment to being someone who acts rather than complains. He said he was acting for himself so he could stop complaining. And he left.

ZM
: How did you feel?

JS
: I was disappointed, naturally. But more, I was worried for him. I didn’t think he was choosing a path that would make him happy. It’s hard to stop thinking once you’ve started.

ZM
: Did you remain in touch afterwards?

JS
: No, unfortunately. Which is another bad sign. Most of the students I bring into my discussion group don’t just disappear. I suspect Daru was too dissatisfied with what he was doing to let himself look back. Actually, don’t quote me on that. How would I know? As a professor I have a tendency to slip into omniscient narrative.

ZM
: How did you hear he had been arrested?

JS
: The same way the rest of the city did, I suppose: everyone is talking about this case.

ZM
: Why do you think that is? Why has it received so much attention?

JS
: I’ve given quite a bit of thought to that question. It can be analyzed using a three-dimensional matrix. On the X axis, that is, the horizontal axis, is the accused. On the vertical axis, Y, is the crime. And on the Z axis, rising up off the page, is the defense. And this situation is clearly in the … I can see I’m losing you.

ZM
: I’m afraid so.

JS
: Well … let’s use a box instead of a matrix. The case is a box. In this situation, the accused is bright, well educated, and charismatic. An orphan. Extremely sympathetic. So the box is wide. The crime is violent and despicable: the needless killing of a boy. So the box is long. And the defense invokes a grand conspiracy, corruption, which is particularly resonant these days. So the box is tall.

ZM
: Criminal, crime, and conspiracy. That’s why everyone is talking about it?

JS
: One more thing: sex, which is purple. This box is covered with it. Painted. Smeared. Naturally, if there is a big purple box lying around, people will stare. That’s why everyone is talking about it.

ZM
: And do you think he’s guilty?

JS
: That, my dear, ah, Mr Manto, I just don’t know. From my experience, Daru is completely crazy. Quick-tempered, oversensitive, inconsistent. But so am I, and I haven’t killed anyone, yet.

ZM
: Thank you.

JS
: It has been my good fortune, I assure you.

May arrives with a burst of heat that leaves nine dead in Jacobabad, but one evening a flirtatious breeze makes the trees swell and it looks just bearable enough for me to step outside with a cigarette in my mouth and another behind my ear. These are my last two smokes and I smoke them like an addict consuming all that’s left of his stash, half-preoccupied with the thought that each drag brings me closer to the point where I have to get some more.

Just as I flick the second butt over the wall and turn to head indoors, I hear a rickshaw sputter up to the gate and honk. Murad Badshah’s massive form is squished into the driver’s area, and he waves a hello when he sees me, sending a stream of paan-red spit over his shoulder. I open the gate and he pulls inside like an adult riding a tricycle. ‘Greetings!’ he exclaims, hauling himself out of the rickshaw with some difficulty.

‘Hello, gangster,’ I say to him.