The World We Found (11 page)

Adish’s eyes widened. “They hurt you? Your family?”

Iqbal sat back in his chair and stared appraisingly at Adish, as if trying to decide how much to tell him. Then, he exhaled loudly. “Not exactly. That is, we got lucky. My parents’ Hindu neighbors in the next building took us in. Mr. and Mrs. Sharma. Long-time family friends. They hid us in their apartment for a week. At night we watched Muslim-owned shops and houses burning up and down the road. But we were spared, praise God.”

“So, then why paint all Hindus with a broad brush, Iqbal? You just said that a Hindu family saved your life.”

Iqbal’s hands shook as he lifted his cup. “You don’t understand,” he mumbled. He stared at the table for a full minute and then looked up. A small muscle worked compulsively in his jaw. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve not even told my own mother. Even Zoha doesn’t know. You understand?”

Adish nodded reluctantly. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t wish to.”

“You remember Mumtaz?” Iqbal interrupted. “My baby sister? No? Well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is, Mumtaz was sixteen in 1993. Okay? Beautiful girl, sweet as sugar, innocent as an angel. Never even looked at boys.” He chewed on his lower lip, still avoiding Adish’s eyes. “So a week after the riots are over, we’re back in our own flat. Mumtaz is coming home from school and she runs into the Sharmas’ son. He’s a grown man, in his thirties. I had known him for years. Used to play cricket with him when I was a kid. Anyway, he tells her that our mother has forgotten a piece of her jewelry she’d given the Sharmas for safekeeping during the riots. Could Mumtaz stop by and pick it up, please? Mumtaz, she’s like a child. She’s never seen a snake. She follows the bastard home. And he—he does—he makes her do things to him, Adish.” And now Iqbal rested his head on the table and cried softly, his thin arms shaking with his sobs.

Adish stared transfixed at the man in front of him. “He—he raped her?” he whispered.

Iqbal raised his head. His eyes were bloodshot. “He made her suck him down, Adish. Can you believe? My pure, beautiful sister. She had never even received a boy’s kiss, let alone . . .”

“What did you do? How did you find out?”

“She told me. Three months later. I knew something was wrong, Adish, but I didn’t realize at first. We were all so shaken up by the riots, you see. Everyone we knew had lost someone or something. And I—married to a Hindu girl—I had always been so proud of what Zoha and I had done. And now I felt like everything I had ever believed in—socialism, secularism—everything felt like a joke. I had spent years arguing with my father and brother when they talked about how Hindus wanted to massacre Muslims so that they’d have India all to themselves. Now I didn’t know what to believe. So I didn’t see that Mumtaz was suffering at first. But little by little, I see something is wrong. We’d always been close. So one day I took her to her favorite restaurant for kulfi and she pushed the kulfi away. Then I knew. I said, ‘Little sister, whatever is wrong, I will right.’ Finally she tells me.”

“What did you do?”

Iqbal’s eyes were bottomless wells of grief. “Nothing. Not a damn thing. I should’ve killed that chootia with my hands. But I did nothing. Who would believe us? The police had stood and watched when they were burning Muslims alive. I was afraid if I said anything the wrath of the mob would come down on all of us. So, I talked my abba—he was alive then—and ammi into vacating. We sold the flat quickly for little money. And then, the only thing we could afford was the falling-down building we live in now.”

A million questions pricked at Adish’s mind. “You never told Nishta?” he asked. “And how is Mumtaz? Does she live with you?”

Iqbal stared through him, as if he’d not heard the question. After a long minute he said, “I was right not to have confronted that pig-eater. Ten years later it all happened again, didn’t it? In Gujarat.” He swallowed hard and then continued. “They say over twenty-five hundred Muslims died in the Gujarat genocide, Adish. The real number was probably twice that. Did anyone refer to that as India’s 9/11? At least the Americans who died were killed by foreigners. But the Muslims in Gujarat were butchered by their own countrymen. Has anybody been brought to justice? Of course not. Because a Muslim death means nothing in this cursed country.”

Adish nodded in agreement. “I know. Those bastard politicians should rot in hell for Gujarat.” He stopped, not knowing where Iqbal was going with this, his mind still reeling from what Iqbal had told him about his baby sister. “Is Mumtaz all right?” he asked. “Where is she now?”

“I never told Zoha about Mumtaz,” Iqbal said. “But I made my wife convert and change her name when we moved.” He looked at Adish defiantly. “Forced her. Threatened her. I couldn’t risk a Hindu wife in the new neighborhood. And I didn’t
want
to be married to a Hindu by then. As for Mumtaz, I did the only thing I could. I married her off. I couldn’t risk any of this getting out, you see. She would’ve never found a husband, ever.”

“You married her off? At sixteen?”

Iqbal’s face twisted. “Don’t judge me, Adish. She’s happy now. Has two beautiful children of her own.”

Adish shook his head. “It’s not my place to judge, Iqbal.” He looked at the man in front of him. How far we’ve traveled, he marveled to himself. What different paths life has taken us down. He had a sudden insight that beneath Iqbal’s bearded visage, beneath the religious garb, there lay a wreck. That he was gazing upon a broken, tormented man, whom secular society had failed completely. His eyes burned at the thought. “I’m so sorry, dost,” he said. He felt he had never meant anything more.

Iqbal’s eyes glittered with tears. “Religion gives me comfort, Adish,” he said softly. “When I’m at the mosque, I feel safe. Like I am listening to beautiful music. Or swimming in the sea.” He smiled mirthlessly. “I know Zoha thinks I’m using religion as a crutch. She even gave me a hard time when I became a trustee at my mosque.”

Adish made a wry face. “I know what you mean.” Seeing Iqbal’s surprised look, “Same situation in my house, yaar. Laleh’s still a confirmed atheist. Whereas me . . . I’ve come to believe in the power of prayer.”

To his relief, Iqbal smiled. “Laleh,” he said. There was a lifetime of wonder and awe and affection in that word.

Adish’s voice was gentle as he spoke. “I promised Laleh I would try to convince you to let Nishta—Zoha—travel with them. What should I tell her?”

Iqbal looked Adish straight in the eye. “Tell her I said no, Adish. Tell her please to not interfere with the only beautiful thing I have left in my life. Tell her I said please.”

Chapter 10

A
fter they shook hands outside the restaurant and said goodbye, Iqbal stood on the busy street corner and watched as Adish walked away. For a brief second, he felt the urge to run after Adish, to ask him not to disappear from his life as he had ordered him to do minutes earlier, but instead to walk down the crowded streets with him, as aimlessly and happily as they had done a thousand times in their youth. A lump formed in his throat as he caught sight of Adish’s familiar head one more time in the crowd. He was convinced that if he yelled Adish’s name loud enough, he would hear him, hear him above the roar of the traffic and the cries of the vendors, and would turn around and walk back toward him with a wide, guileless smile. Adish had never been able to hold a grudge, and the fact that he, Iqbal, had told him minutes ago to exit their lives and leave him and Zoha alone would be forgotten in an instant. Of this he was sure.

But what then? After they’d walked for an hour or two, after they’d stopped for another cup of tea, say, after they’d exhausted their supply of new jokes and old stories, after they’d reminisced about how torturous their pursuit of their respective wives had been, what then? What did the two of them possibly have in common other than the wisps of memories that still had the power to caress and tantalize? He remembered how casually Adish had tempted Murad with the prospect of placing an order that was larger than the number of items they would sell in months. A rich sahib toying with a poor man, trading on his hope and aspirations, in order to get his own way. He remembered how puzzled Adish had seemed when he’d told him about marrying Mumtaz off. How could someone like Adish possibly understand the claustrophobic atmosphere of the basti, where everybody knew each other’s affairs and rumors ran like barefoot children from one flat to another? And despite Adish’s declaration of being devout himself, Iqbal knew it wasn’t the same—Adish probably still drank alcohol, indulged all his senses, enjoyed every decadent pleasure that the life of the rich offered. The piety, the discipline, the purity of Islam—how could Adish know the joys of sacrifice and self-restraint? What could he, Iqbal, have in common with a pampered, middle-aged man who had the spirit and look of an overgrown baby, who had never known a day’s suffering or deprivation? All the while that he had sat across from Adish in the restaurant, he had observed him—the expensive haircut, the big, gold watch, the soft, delicate hands, hands that had never been empty, that had seldom curled into a fist, clean, manicured hands, hands that had never known a hard day’s labor, that had never had to grasp, fight, claw.

Out of the blue, Iqbal remembered the old rivalry between him and Adish about their grades. Despite their almost identical ranking at the top of their class, he had always believed that Adish was the more gifted, the more naturally talented student. Adish had always boasted about how he never did homework, about how he would start studying a few days before their exams, that any more preparation was a waste of time. And Iqbal was too embarrassed to admit that he actually began to study for their final exams months earlier, thinking of this striving as some kind of an intellectual defect. But now, his lips twisted with bitterness as he thought back to the conditions in his home during his youth—all of his family crammed into a sunny but modest two-bedroom apartment, his mother insisting that Iqbal turn off the lights as soon as his father went to bed, so that there was no chance to pull an all-nighter like most of his classmates did, the constant quarrels between his parents about money, his guilty awareness of how much his mother endured so that he could go to college. Adish, on the other hand, had his own bedroom where he could read late into the night, a mother who woke up early each morning during the exams to prepare him a special drink made with almonds and saffron and milk, parents who groomed him for academic success as if he were a thoroughbred racehorse.

Why had it never occurred to him before, the unfair advantages that Adish had had over him? But even as he asked, he knew the answer: he had been deluded by all the bullshit talk of comradeship and equality. Just as he had almost been lulled, a few minutes ago, while watching Adish’s retreating back, into believing that they still had something in common, that there was a possibility of friendship between them.

Iqbal shifted from one foot to the other in his agitation. Adish had disappeared into the crowd, had probably stopped thinking about him the minute he walked away, and still, here he was, rooted in the same spot. He glanced at his Timex. He had been away from work for over two hours. Murad would be phoning him any minute now. But the thought of returning to work, of facing his uncle’s inquisitive questions, Murad’s open curiosity as pungent as chili powder, produced a feeling of revulsion in him. Besides, he needed to think, to calculate what and how much to reveal to Zoha, to weigh whether he could trust Adish to keep his word. Reaching for his cell phone, he took shelter on the first step of the Irani restaurant they had recently exited, stepping away from the incessant wave of people rushing past. He dialed Murad’s number.

“Where are you, yaar?” He could hear the annoyance in Murad’s voice. “I gave you time to go to lunch, not to go on a damn honeymoon.”

The feeling of distaste grew. He had not taken a day off in so long. The thought of returning to that crowded, narrow strip of a shop for the rest of the day depressed him. “Listen,” he said. “I’m feeling sick. I think I ate something bad for lunch. I’m thinking of going home.”

He held the phone away from his ear as his uncle went into this usual tirade of insults, threats, and ultimatums. “Murad bhai,” he said finally. “I have to go. I have to use the bathroom again. See you tomorrow. I’ll make up the time. I promise.”

The feeling of freedom that he felt as soon as he hung up reminded him of the delirious feeling he used to get when he and Zoha used to skip classes to go to the seashore or to Hanging Gardens. It convinced him that he had made the right decision. The afternoon hung before him, an empty stocking that he could fill with the currency of his choosing. A movie? A short bus ride to the sea? Dropping by to visit a friend? Just the idea of choosing, of options swirling in his head, made him feel rich, a member of the leisure class. He reentered the Irani restaurant and was greeted by his waiter, a quizzical look on the man’s face. “Kya hua, seth?” the waiter queried. “Forget something?”

Iqbal smiled expansively. “Nahi. Just wanted another taste of your excellent tea.”

He sat sipping the tea, looking out at the bright, sunlit street. As he sat, his earlier resentment of Adish ebbed. Adish was a decent fellow, he decided. Trustworthy. And he had as good as confessed that Laleh had put him up to this. He remembered how single-minded Laleh could be and felt a shot of sympathy for Adish. Picking up his cup, he took another sip.

And felt something in his mouth. Something soft and furry. Stopping in mid-swallow, he reached for the saucer and spat out the liquid. Along with the dead fly.