He’d been trying and trying to remember where he’d heard that line. A childhood memory? For sure. A good memory, too. A happy one. And it sounded so... familiar. If his brother could speak right now, this may well be the first thing he would say to Hashim.
“Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into, bhai jaan!”
And Hashim had to admit that he would have a point. After all, whatever the state of the cause-and-effect cycle in the broader scheme of things, it was, sensu stricto, Hashim’s fault that Khadim had been present, wrongtime-wrongplace, at the site of the blast. “Hashim bachha, we’re out of Marmite,” Ammi-ji had said. “Meri jaan, zara run down to Agha’s na, and get me small pot. Your father will be back from office soon.”
Hashim’s father had, post-Ramzan, taken to munching slices of buttered and Marmited bread with his post-office pre-dinner tea. Before that it had been buttered-scones-ooh-la-la, lathered with homemade raspberry jam and – before that – any one of Ammi-ji’s world-famous mixed-fruit chutneys with roghni roti. Ammi-ji was an enthusiastic preserver. Of jams and pickles and unhappy memories. And of the fragile sanity of a family loosely bound together by the tightest of lips.
Abba’s most notorious evening snack, the one they all remembered with wrinkled noses and wry smiles, had been sevruga caviar on melba toast. That menu item had lasted just three days (thank God). That is, for as long as the solitary tin presented to him with much fanfare by Basit Uncle on his return from Baku had lasted. Abba had offered to share it with them, but all had politely declined. “Heh, so much more for me then,” he had smiled, before gingerly taking a bite.
Ammi-ji later told Hashim and Khadim that Abba couldn’t really stand the stuff, and only ate it cos that’s what sophisticated English pipples ate, y’know, y’know. And so he could brag about it at the Marine Club, or whenever he met Basit Uncle and his cronies at some high-funty shaadi or other. “I’m telling you,” she had smiled, “your Abba heaved a sigh of relief when that foul stuff finally finished.”
“Ammi-ji! Do I have to go?” said Hashim. “Let Khadim go, na? He won’t mind. You know he needs any excuse to drive the car, and it’s not like he won’t be able to find Marmite.” This approach always worked, cos Ammi-ji could never resist an opportunity for her twee li’l Khadim jaan to show how independent and reliable he was, the “mmm-waaaaah, schweety-pie.”
Thus Khadim was despatched to procure Abba’s tea-time condiment, which shouldn’t have taken him more than half an hour or so. Abba came home an hour later and there was no sign of Khadim. When he discovered that his Marmite hadn’t arrived he threw a right old fit.
“Aray, why did you have to send that good-for-nothing lafanga?” he asked Ammi-ji. He pointed a finger at Hashim. “Why not this good-for-something fellow? Voh moti-choor ka luddoo hai na tumhara, must be leaning against some greasy pillar eyeing all the fat-bottomed chhokris.” He turned to Hashim. “Call the bugger on his mobile.” But the line was engaged.
“Uffo! Kaunsi chhokri hai this time?” exclaimed Abba testily. “Jao, take my car and find the fellow. Or... no, no, just get me my bloody Marmite.”
A few minutes later an almighty bang shook the house, shattering all the upper-storey windows.
That night, all night, the media circus big-topped the blast with its customary gusto. “Karachi on fire,” was the most commonly heard phrase on tv. Fatality estimates of the many networks varied between sixty-three and seventy-nine. There were as yet no clues to the identity of the obliterated perpetrator, though at least three known terrorist groups had claimed responsibility, including the loathsome TTP. Next morning’s newspapers front-paged the story. A suicide attack of this magnitude, striking at the very heart of Burgher Central, could be said to rival the apocalyptic assault on the once-grand Marriott Hotel. At one point a baritoned anchor for an English-language tv channel referred to the crater that was once Schon Circle as “Ground Double Zero.” It wasn’t clear whether he’d come up with the line himself or had read it off the teleprompter. The phrase was not heard again, at least not in this context.
One Urdu language ’paper, after logging the names of the deceased, published a partial list of those injured in the blast. At number two hundred and forty-nine was one Qadeem [sic] Farooqi, vald Zaeem Farooqi.
* * *
After witnessing his brother’s disconnection from all the life-support gizmos and lengths of tubing, time of death having been duly noted, Hashim turned on his heels and strode out of the hospital, the sound of his mother’s funerary sobs fading away
behind him. There were papers to sign, but he had told the admin types his father was around and would return at some point to sign them. Nobody asked why the father had not been present. Nobody said much of anything.
He got into Abba’s car, adjusted the rear-view mirror, the electrically-operated wing-mirrors. Strapped on his seat belt. Lit a cigarette. Cranked the engine. Took a long, deep drag and slammed the gearshift into drive, fishtailing out of the parking lot. His face, which had been the consistency of putty in the hospital, had set to granite. Only his blazing eyes betrayed any sense of purpose. And his hands – gripping the steering wheel so hard the knuckles were turning green.
Avoiding known bottlenecks, he arrived at his destination not long afterwards, screeching to a halt alongside the boundary wall of a not entirely modest house. Its ornate, though rusting gates, unlike almost any house in Karachi, stood wide open. Inside, on the wide, neatly tiled driveway, stood a dark-blue fin de siècle Honda Civic and a coffee-coloured Cadillac of Ayubian vintage. Both looked well-maintained. To one corner, amidst a clutter of parts and tools strewn around, stood a partly dismantled, partially mantled motorbike, as unHarleylike as one could ever wish for, hallelujah. Hashim called it The Workshop That Jackshit Built.
The house itself was shelter to his langotiya yaar Siddique Salam and Hashim marched through the gate like he owned the place. He would normally have stopped to admire the sleek lines of the older car, caressing the fenders, sometimes even speaking to it. Her. Whispering sweet nothings under his breath.
Today he walked right up to the front door and rang the bell. He always hated ringing the bell. The kitschy, atonal, digital rendition of Greensleeves never failed to send a shiver down his musically-inclined spine. The door was opened by a short, wizened baba dressed in saffron kurta and check lungi. He greeted Hashim with a toothless smile. “Salaam, chhotay-sarkar!”
Hashim brought his palms together in front of him. “Namaste, Prakash Dada.” Dispensing with his usual banter, he said, “Kidhar hai Siddu Seth?”
It didn’t take old Prakash more than a second or three to sense that all was not right with young Hashim Babu. “Kya hua chhotay-sarkar? Khadim Babu ki haalat behtar hai na?”
“Nahin, Prakash Dada,” he sighed. “Buss... jo hona tha, ho gaya. Par ye kumbakht Siddu ka bachha kidhar hai?” And without waiting for a reply from the old retainer, Hashim ran up the stairs and on towards the door of one of the rooms off the landing. He opened the door without knocking.
Siddique Salam, brushing his wavy, shoulder-length hair in the mirror, turned around to see who it was. “Man, I was just about to leave for the hospital. Tu idhar kaisay?” Then, seeing the look on Hashim’s face he asked, “Kya hua, bhai?” although he knew the answer even as he spoke the words.
At this Hashim finally broke down. Embracing his friend, he wailed a blubbering lament, the only words of which Siddique could make out were, “my fault, my fault!”
A couple of hours later, having washed his face and reluctantly swallowed the two tablets of Valium 5 that Siddu raided from his mother’s medicine chest, Hashim sat on an unsteady bench opposite a man whose name he had heard many a time, and about whom he had occasionally read in the City sections of certain newspapers. The man, commonly known as Veer, lolled amiably in a plush armchair upholstered in linen that might once have been snow-white. He wore a starched white shalvaar-kameez. His mustache was full and slightly upturned at the ends, and he was twirling one of the ends between thumb and forefinger. On either side of him stood stocky bodyguard types, AK-47s casually slung over their shoulders. One of them was inspecting his nails. The other had an index finger jammed up one nostril, digging for buried treasure with intense concentration.
The room they sat in was small, fairly neat, with recently whitewashed walls. An antechamber of sorts, where visitors of perhaps lesser importance were granted audience. Behind Hashim, and to his right, sat Siddu uncomfortably on what was either an upturned packing crate, or a stool designed by one of Mad’s madder artists. Siddu had already removed two splinters from the fleshier parts of his backside by the time Veer, who had been silently listening to Hashim trying to tell his story around Siddu’s frequent interjections, spoke.
“Kitnay paisay hein tumharay pass, bachha?”
“Not much, Saeen. Yehi, koi lakh, derh lakh.”
Veer emitted a hollow, sardonic laugh. “Buss? Iss khazaanay se teesri jang-e-azeem larogay? Take my advice – find yourself a healthy, poputt-si Punjabi mundi. For that much she’ll satisfy you up and down and all around for at least a month. Subb ghum bhula degi.”
Siddu had warned Hashim about Veer’s cynical manner. Anyway, he wasn’t going to pick a fight while two submachine guns were aimed in the general direction of his genitalia. “Saeen, sirf aik dhansu si banduq, aur tagra sa aslaha dai do. And leave the rest to me.”
“And I suppose you’re going to tell me you saw an orchard full of gun trees planted in my front lawn when you drove in, huh!” said Veer, mockingly. He turned to the nosepicker. “Kyun Makku, kaunsay darakht pe ugti hai banduq? Oi mujhe yaad hai tu ne kaha tha teray baap ne klaashin-kove ke beej lagaay thay! Kya bana unn ka, kuchh mehnat ka phull mila teray baap ko?”
Hashim squared his shoulders. The close, stale atmosphere of the room made him woozy. With a concerted effort to focus on Veer, he said, “Saeen, aik Uzi, aur do-chaar hazaar round ki baat hai. Jo daam boleingay Saeen, manzoor hai.” He knew that unless he met Veer’s piercing gaze unflinchingly he was unlikely to get anywhere. (That’s what Siddu had told him.)
Veer looked over at Siddu. “Kyun Billoo Mian, kaisa banda hai tera yaar? Mard ka bachha? Gaandh mein dumm hai?”
“Haan, Saeen. Meray bachpan ka dost hai. Jaan dainay ke liye tayyar hunh iss ke liye.”
“And this one? Would he give his life for you?” countered Veer, in his measured missionary-school accent.
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“So, what about it, little boy? Would you give your life to save this vee baa lamb?”
“Perhaps,” shrugged Hashim. “But I’d sure as hell cut the balls off anyone who threatened the life of baa-baa-blockhead. Why should it come down to either of our own lives?” And for the first time since he entered the antechamber, the first time since time-of-death, Hashim smiled. A bold smile. A cavalier smile, which Siddu later told him sealed the deal.
“How could you tell?” asked Hashim.
“I could see it in his eyes. I’ve known that fucker Veer all my life. He’s queer. I don’t mean like a poof or something, you know, a faggot.” Hashim nodded. “I mean he’s weird. Loves you or leaves you. Very often for dead, kind of thing.”
Hashim unwrapped the oil-cloth set across his lap and fondled the frame of his recent acquisition. A shiver ran down his spine. Then another. He lifted the piece, slowly turning it from side to side, admiring its compactness, enjoying the chill of cold steel against his burning palms.
“Oi, point that thing somewhere else,” exclaimed a nervous Siddu. “It might be loaded.”
* * *
During times of stress Hashim’s mother made jams and chutneys and pickles out of anything and eveything that came to hand. Rows and rows of glass jars filled to the brim with solid- and parti-coloured concoctions were the result of this creative therapy. It had been passed on to her by her own mother, who, according to Ammi-ji, had thus preserved her sanity in the bloody aftermath of Partition.
In the days that followed, acres of kitchen workspace remained bare. There was not a lime chutney in sight. No jars of apricot compotes, no shaljam ka achaar. The picture-perfect Farooqi household faded to a rusty shade of sepia photograph curling at the edges.
Ammi-ji settled into a spot on the edge of the back lawn. She would sit motionless for hours on a cushioned, white-cane armchair, facing one corner of the boundary wall, responding to queries with a slight, noncommittal nod of the head. Hashim sometimes sat with her, usually cross-legged on the grass. He wanted to talk to her. Talk her out of her stupor. But he could find nothing to say, except, “Ammi-ji, chai banaon aap ke liye?”
Abba would reel in every night after midnight, reeking of mean-spiritedness and vodka.
Then on the fourth or fifth day Hashim came home to find his mother in the kitchen conjuring up a storm of preservation. She looked radiant, barking a steady volley of orders, which the servants gladly followed, for they were happy to be forced out of their mourning. Sticky, sweet, sour, tangy, spicy fragrances floated through the house, vying with each other for dominance. Ammi-ji turned to her son and smiled. “Just wait till you taste this plum chutney. It’s to die for!”
Ignoring the bizarre choice of words, Hashim smiled back. He could now get on with the job at hand.
* * *
The standard Uzi submachine gun has seen much action in military battles and urban conflicts all over the world. It is a compact weapon, which can be fired in full-auto mode at a rate of six hundred rounds per minute. It is said that, if fired by an expert spraying from left to right, it can sever a victim’s body in two. This claim has all the hallmarks of urban legend.
The gun that Hashim bought off Veer was a Micro Uzi. This version is much smaller than the standard Uzi, but uses the same 9x19mm rounds. It weighs just two and a half kg with a 25-round clip attached, and is barely ten inches long with the wire stock folded. In full-auto mode it fires in excess of 1200 rpm, thus discharging an entire clip in little over a second.
As is widely known, the firearm of choice in this benighted land of the puritanical is the AK-47 assault rifle or “Klaashin-kove.” Not for Hashim. The main advantage to him of the Uzi was, of course, its concealability. But there was another reason for his choice. The Uzi is an Israeli-made weapon. In a perverse application of the adage “the enemy of mine enemy is my friend,” Hashim befriended his Uzi. In his mind revenge would be all the sweeter.
A few weeks of self-instruction followed, though not with the frequency Hashim would have liked. Finding a place isolated enough to fire off a few rounds without being heard was not easy. Everyone was nervous, jumpy. The sound of a bottle falling to the ground and shattering could raise the average pulse rate of those in the vicinity by at least ten beats per minute.
Police checkposts mushroomed and cars were stopped and searched on the slightest suspicion. Hashim found that the best place to practice was on the increasingly deserted beaches of Hawke’s Bay. His routine was to form a hill of wet sand into which he would draw small targets with his finger, firing at close- and medium-range, careful to collect all the shell casings and bury them deep in the sand after he was done. He knew he would never be able to (or want to, for that matter) take apart and reassamble his diminutive firearm, blindfolded or otherwise. But he began to get a feel for what the deceptively lightweight weapon might achieve in a live action situation. He wished he had access to the kind of indoor shooting ranges and urban-landscape sets shown in Special Ops-type Hollywood action flicks. That would have injected a further dose of drama into the proceedings, if nothing else.
Hashim decided that he needed a “look” and took to wearing a cloth headband, tied in a knot at the back. This was soon substituted with a red, white and green bandana, and he would spend hours in front of the mirror getting the angle right. On his left wrist he wore the copper bracelet he’d bought across the border from Livingstone, in the no-man’s land between Zambia and Zimbabwe, site of the mighty Victoria Falls. The boy who sold it to him was about the same age as him then (and now, he supposed, supposing he was still alive), in his late teens. He claimed to be Zimbabwean and had chided Hashim on not being sympathetic to the abject plight of his once great nation and it’s once great subjects. The boy had wanted fifty thousand Zambian Kwacha, fifteen dollars. Hashim bought it off him for ten grand. It now became a key part of his new regalia; bandana, bracelet, khaki combat pants, solid red T-shirt. The ensemble was rounded off by a lightweight black-leather jacket with an inside pocket deep and wide enough to stow his doozy Uzi. On the back of the jacket was emblazoned, also in red, white and green, his battle cry, Death to Infielders!
As his technique, if not his aim, improved, Hashim started thinking about basic attack tactics. He devoured all the Bing Fa he could find. Many a Sun Tzu. Sun Bin. Norman Blockhead. Lawrence of Araby. Clausewitz proved unuseful, and he tossed it aside after flipping through the first few chapters. Old Carl von wasn’t out to train vigilantes. He stumbled across Michael Herr’s Dispatches. It, too, was no manual for conducting urban guerrilla hit-and-run assaults. But it did make him think about the differences in ideological, strategic and tactical objectives between him and the enemy. In the end, though, he figured all this reading-sheading was a waste of time.
He could often be heard singing, “To everything, turn, turn, turn... there is a season, turn, turn, turn...” in his cracked falsetto.
He worried that the ethical underpinnings of his plotificationings were weak. Siddu agreed. “Have you bothered to think about the moral issues involved?” he had asked early on.
Hashim was watching the Kill Bills a lot, often back to back. “Siddu-ji,” he replied, “revenge is a dish best served cold.”
“That’s non sequitur, buddy, and doesn’t answer my question.”
“So was your question, yaara! From whence does it sequitur into what we were talking about?”
“Whence it flows into the raging whitewater rapids of madness that you intend to surf through blindfolded,” countered Siddu, mixing his metaphors with great gusto.
Hashim knew there was nothing in his inchoate plan which could claim to have an ideological basis. But he was convinced that his adversary was in the same proverbial boat, the only difference being that he, Hashim, realised this fact.
All he wanted was blood. Not glory. Not victory. Not peace. Not time to plant, not to reap, not to heal. Not even to weep.
Siddu stopped trying to dissuade him. On a random surf through cyberspace he had come across a line of verse to which he would not have been able to relate just a few weeks ago. It read, “Guilt is the cause of more disorders than history’s most obscene marorders.” It made perfect sense to him now, quirky spelling and all.
Hashim was a lost cause, and for Siddu the only thing to do was stick by him to the bitter end. It seemed the poetic thing to do.
* * *
After having, over the course of an infuriatingly uncathartic fortnight, single-handedly despatched thiry-five bearded, avaami-suited “fundos” to what he hoped were the nether regions of hell (as he recorded in his meticulously kept diary), Hashim’s weapon jammed one day. It was a cool Karachi afternoon in early February. The kind of late afternoon on which, in better days – in days when the smog, and the suicidal horn-ok-please rush of diesel buses, and the wretched stench of gunpowder had yet to consume the city – a “respectable” man might have considered taking Jimmy the dog for a walk. Hashim had never owned a dog.
During the interminable lull in proceedings he thought about his father, who might have known many such days. And perhaps his grandfather, who wrote him long, meticulously punctuated emails in agonizingly correct King’s English. (“Not the Queen’s English, mind,” he had written. “That would, more appropriately, to my mind, refer to the excruciatingly painful speech adopted by the Queen’s subjects nowadays. Ah, Long Live the King!”) Daddy, that is, Abba’s Daddy, lived what Hashim called his “fixin’ to die” life a million miles away in sunny Toronto. He had chosen the company of his daughter, Abba would say in an accusatory tone. The reasons for this decision, nor Abba’s notion of the reasons, were never made clear.
In muted slow motion Hashim saw the man in front of him draw an unsilenced repeater from the side pocket of his kameez. .32 calibre, Hashim guessed. Probably unlicensed, too. He had stopped tugging at the trigger of his recalcitrant Uzi. Without a backup plan, he stood rooted to the spot. This wasn’t supposed to happen. All the websites he had visited had assured him that Uzis never jam. Oh crap! Maybe this wasn’t a genuine I.M.I. Uzi. Maybe that infernal Veer had sold him a lemon. Maybe time was not on his side.
Taking deliberate, two-handed aim, the man with the .32 fired three rounds. Bang/recoil... Bang/recoil... Bang/recoil... all three of which hit Hashim in the chest. The man pocketed his gun and slowly walked away.
Hashim didn’t die on the spot. On the way to the hospital, bouncing around in a battered old Edhi ambulance, he was accompanied by a middle-aged man whose beard he estimated to measure exactly a fist and a half in length from stem to stern. Over the course of his recent misadventures, Hashim’s outlook on life had turned from vivid, optical colour to high contrast black and white. Through the mist of tears and pain he saw this attendant as simply The Enemy, for which dramatic role he qualified by the fact of sporting copious amounts of facial hair, wearing shalvaar-kameez, and reciting a Quranic prayer.
The boy had lost a lot of blood. In his weakened state he made a vain attempt to raise himself off the stretcher, arms outstretched, as if he wanted to strangle the attendant. The effort was too great. His heart, which had shrunk to the size and consistency of a prune during his killing spree, simply gave way. Time of death was not duly noted.
He was buried with little fanfare in a simple grave in the vicinity of Golimar, along with the hundreds of victims of the by now almost daily bomb blasts and drive-by shootings. The grave was religiously maintained by Siddique/Siddu, who visited at least twice a week, often accompanied by Prakash Dada.
Contrary to Siddu’s expectations, his comrade-in-harm’s-way Hashim Farooqi did not become the martyred poster boy of the New Left. There was no New Left. There was no Old Left, either. In fact, there was nothing left of any kind of ideology anymore. Just a whole lot of self-righteousness masquerading in an interchangeable set of death masks.
Hashim’s father returned to the graves of each of his sons just once, placing on each of them a single red rose, as he had once seen someone do in a movie. He never went back, since he was not familiar with the words to Surah-e-Fateha, and was in no mood to learn the incantation by heart. That’s what he told his wife who, at forty-three years old, now looked seventy. She just shrugged her drooping shoulders, her comatose eyes registering no emotion.
She had lost all desire to preserve.
3 comments:
*claps and bows*
You are getting into top form, bhai-jaan. This is wonderful!
aadab. behn-ji. glad you enjwaayed.
am planing "Death to Infielders. Six in the City" but am stuck for plot lines. any ideas?
No,
But now that your writing has freed up and you are in this vein, perhaps this is a good time to start exploring the characters/ scenes of your novel?
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