He Has Left, and Won’t Be Back

GOVERNMENT SERVANTS loathe getting out of bed on Sundays. First, it is time for what we call “bed tea.” Then, it is time for the newspaper. All that is good and bad in the newspaper mattered so much when one was young, feverish with the desire to change the world. Who knows if the world got better than it was before, or worse, but there was certainly enough of a fuss to change it.

Either way, one has to be taught how to read the newspaper. If there is some news of the U.S., no matter how small, that is required reading. Any news from India, too, has to be read. One has to look at the “Economy” page of Dawn, Pakistan’s premiere English newspaper, to keep up to date on practical matters. In time, reading the newspaper has become what I enjoy most: sitting up in bed on a Sunday morning, reading. And I would stay there, for hours, reading the paper.

That’s why when I heard my wife starting to talk in the distance, I was really vexed. I knew who would come at this time on a Sunday: it happened every six months or so. My wife was saying, “He is just about to get up. When he gets up, I will let you know.” Well, at that point I had already had my bed tea, and had read the newspaper for about an hour, and so I had gotten my share of pleasure. Because of that, my annoyance was a bit less than it otherwise might have been. My wife said to me, “Why don’t you speak honestly with her? Why don’t you tell her the truth? Poor thing, who knows what kind of hope she is holding on to? It’s her son, after all.”

I went to the sitting room, and she was sitting on the carpet. This is how it always was, as if the world hadn’t changed, and somehow the matter of respect had remained in people’s souls. I made her sit on the couch, and she quickly tucked herself in neatly to one side on the sofa, as if she wasn’t really sitting, but was perched on top of the couch. At that point, I had stopped smoking my cigarette and was smoking a pipe. She smiled and spoke: “Now you are smoking a hukki.” On hearing her say “hukki”—a small version of a “hukka”—I chuckled, and she opened up a bit and laughed. Shoki had placed his pawn before me, as the saying goes, and now I had to evade it for the rest of my life.

She slowly started to speak. The heaviness of her tearful voice filled the room. It was like this every time, like some scene in a play—two hours long—as if this were some kind of performance, not real life. But no, it was all true—it was just that, after being repeated so many times, it seemed like an act. The same characters, and the same lines. Fifteen years had passed like this.

Bit by bit, her grief created a bond between us. I began to listen to her intently, even though I had heard this story a thousand times before. But this time, it seemed as if her voice was coming from far off.

“In the end, some day he will be back. He told me he would in his last letter. Now, there aren’t any more letters coming. So many years have passed with no word. He’ll come back, won’t he? You said so, so why not? It’s been so many years since I have seen him.” Sobbing in fits and starts, she fell silent. In truth, I had no answer for her. I was so surprised the first time she came to see me. How had she found her way to my home? I had come back from abroad so many years before. Forgetting everything, I completed my studies, got a job, and got married. Everything that had transpired there was like a bad dream, something that I did not want to remember.

But she called all of that back to mind. At first, I thought that she had come to ask for money. Then when Shoki’s letters became less frequent, she came to ask, “Why isn’t he sending letters? Why isn’t he answering my letters? For a few years, he kept sending money. He used to say he would give money for a house. We got his younger brother married with his money. Who knows if he has even gotten married. Or had children. Either way, he could have written a letter.”

She seemed very fragile and small. My house was in a new development in the city: who knows how many buses she had to take to get there. This time, when she started to leave, she started saying, again and again, “He will come back, but I won’t be here anymore. You will meet him.” And then suddenly it seemed to me that he would return, and after all the years, my heart filled with joy. “Here are some of his letters. You keep them, where will I keep them, wandering about like this?” I saw that there were two or three cards, sent from Rome. They were worn through from being read and held. The ink on one of them couldn’t even be read.

On one card there was an image of a sculpture at Saint Peter’s Cathedral. A sculpture of white marble, created by Michelangelo, in which Holy Mary had taken the body of Holy Jesus into her arms. When I first saw this sculpture forty years earlier, in Saint Peter’s, I stared at it, mesmerized. I thought: this is the pinnacle of great art. Its name was Pietá, and it was created in 1499. At that time Michelangelo was young, just twenty-eight years old. Mary’s eyes are closed, and in the sculpture there is such desperation and helplessness, it was enough to stop one’s heart. The card was very faded and worn, perhaps because Shoki was Christian and perhaps had faith in this image. This was the last card that Shoki sent from Rome. The date on it was from ten years earlier.

Her eyes were wet. “He will come back some day.” I said it myself. She was overjoyed.

“When he comes, he will come to meet you first. You were his friend. It was you who took him abroad. But why did you come back alone?”

“He got a job aboard a ship. When I came back, he was aboard the ship. We had been separated.” At that time, Punjabi boys got jobs on Greek ships. Because of my bad eyesight, I didn’t get a job. But Shoki got one.

While Shoki’s mother spoke, I was shaking. Here I was, after all of these years, lost again in this story. I gave her some money and went back to my room and sat down. She kept talking with my wife; I have no idea when she left. After this she never came to meet me again. It seems that she had come to give me all the things that Shoki had left her with. Who knows if she had had some news of him or perhaps, as people say, mothers know something about their sons. I don’t know when she went, but everything I wanted to say got stuck in my throat. “We had been separated.” I said it without thinking.

I thought this would be an easy story to write. I wouldn’t need to change my name or hide anything. It seemed to me that I could write the story of Shoki however I liked. But that’s not true. I had never forgotten him. Remembering him made my heart feel empty, sunken, as if it had stopped—as if I had died, as perhaps he himself had died. Who knows?

Shoki had opened the door to Lahore for me. This all happened in 1975, ’76. There was a patch of grass in front of the Pak Tea House. It was summer, in the evening. One of those Lahore nights in the seventies, with the flurry of the birds in the trees along Mall Road. Beyond Gol Bagh, in the distance, the hot sun slowly cooled in the evening, letting loose a soft breeze. The evening dulled and turned grey. He always wore pants and a shirt. He wore a thick belt and said, “This comes in handy when there is a fight.” And whenever there was even a little bit of trouble, he was there—when the action started, he would take it out and make good use of it. He would make a band out of a handkerchief he wore around his neck and put it under his collar. This was his signature style. These days, one never sees people with handkerchiefs—we wore them in the summer heat, to wipe the sweat.

He was deeply involved in politics. I never asked him when he started lending his hand to the comrades. Back in those days, when we were young, who thought of such things? We only thought of the present, what was right before us, the “now.” Who thought of what would come next? In the end, the story only continues when there is someone left to tell the tale. At that time there was Professor Razi, Bava’s little brother. Shoki and the Professor both lived at Mochi Gate, in inner Lahore: Professor just inside the gate, and Shoki just outside. It was actually through the Professor that I met Shoki. Even to today, I don’t really know what he did for a living. The truth is, I never asked. I never really thought to. Shoki would come back every day, dressed in his finest, and we met a few times and got to know each other, but at that point we hadn’t really become friends yet.

We became friends later, after one time when I was sitting at Lawrence Bagh, with Naeem Mosquito. He was called “Mosquito” because when he spoke, he went on and on, and couldn’t really settle on anything. He couldn’t stop talking. He just kept going, talking under his breath, and when he would get up from his seat, it was as if there was the buzzing of mosquitoes. With that dry, thin nose, ashen face, and elongated mouth, it was all just like a mosquito. I don’t know who gave him that name, but whoever did it was spot on. Anyway, that’s how that was, and we were discussing something or the other, with Mosquito sitting back and relaxing on his chair, staying quiet in the background. We were discussing all sorts of things. In every point that was made, some fault would be found, and refutation offered. There were cliques inside every political caucus, and each of them had their own leaders who stood guard. We were just kids, and we really didn’t know anything. We were just getting into things, here and there.

The day after our sitting at Lawrence Bagh, when we met, Shoki told me that Mosquito had pushed his chair back and hid his face and laughed at everything I said. And raised his eyes, as if to say, “Look who knows so much!” Mosquito used to do this to everybody. He didn’t listen to anything or speak with any seriousness. He mocked everything, and in that way shut everybody up. And he was against every leader. Anyway, that’s when something came between me and Mosquito, and Shoki and I became close friends.

If you go downhill on the road from in front of Mochi Gate, to the beginning of Chamberlain Road, Shoki lived there, at the corner, on the left side. We used to go to his house all the time. At the end of the lane there was a small corner with a few houses. Just ten yards or so, square. They had just two small rooms and outside a small mud courtyard with just enough room to lay out a strung cot. The road was narrow and tight, and there were eight or ten houses in front of it. At night, in summers, it was difficult to get past all of the cots strewn outside in the heat. I heard that his mother was from the sweeper community, which took care of people’s excrement when there was no plumbing, and his father had an ancient open car that he would convey newspapers on. He would take the papers from the Penny Newspaper printing press and bring them into the city and deliver them to the newspaper agencies. The car was always breaking down. During the day, he would either be fixing the car, or he would be sleeping on the cot in the courtyard, because he had to get up at three in the morning to bring the newspapers from the Penny Newspaper press.

One day I saw him leaving in that car of his. The car had no roof, and when it started to move it was as if firecrackers were going off. It seemed like it was going to stop any minute. But he kept it going.

Whenever any of us didn’t have money, then we would go to his house to drink tea. Shoki bought tea and sugar on credit. This was the kind of house where they had food for only one day at a time, and then it would be finished: flour, ghee, soap. Everything. He would bring us to the only room left in the house. There wasn’t any window. There was a half a cot on the unfinished floor, and one or two trunks on the side. There were clothes and other things strewn about. All of us where people who wanted to change the world, and accept new ways of thinking, but it was one thing to criticize caste and privilege and an altogether different thing to drink tea out of the dishes in a sweeper’s house. The Professor and Mosquito, they didn’t have that kind of prejudice. But I remember that there were some friends among us who wouldn’t come to Shoki’s house for tea. Then again, they also weren’t friends with him, either.

Some of our friends were from good, comfortable homes. But whenever it came time to write on walls with chalk or to put up posters, or to meet in some corner, we all went to Shoki’s house. Eight or ten of us would come in silence and somehow fit inside his room. Shoki always made the tea. We would cook the flour glue for the posters in containers over the fire at his house. I never once saw fear on his face. He was in charge of postering in the most sensitive places. He was always ready for a fight.

There was some problem with his nose, and he would keep rubbing it until it turned red and swollen. There were always two or three sentences that he would say. One was “So what if he has no money, he is our friend.” This would annoy the guys from good families, when they didn’t have any money themselves. On top of that, whenever anyone was busy trying to say something important, or was trying to impress someone, he would yell at the top of his lungs and cause a scene. In Lahore, there is a saying that when one tries to “bring on the heroes,” one is trying to impress someone, trying to dishonour another person with words. Shoki had gotten it into his head that all those who wanted to “bring on the heroes” were liars and fakes.

No matter how busy it was, Shoki always got the “One Eight” tickets at the cinema hall. That was the name for the cheapest tickets that cost only ten or twelve annas. In the hall, they were the seats closest to the screen. We all loved to go see films. Once or twice a week all us friends would get together to go watch. When Shoki didn’t have money, all of us friends would put in for his ticket. The greater the rush for the movie, the greater his enthusiasm outside the movie theatre. He would use some ruse to get ahead of all the people standing in front of the ticket booth and reach his arm in, long, over their heads, and get eight or ten tickets, as much as we needed. All the people waiting in the line would look at his face and say nothing. If he wanted, he could have made a living doing this, but he didn’t have the heart for it.

If we ran out of cigarettes, he would go onto the street to bum one, but he wouldn’t himself partake of anything. He took me to the Valmiki Temple, associated with the Dalit Hindu community, in the old Anarkali Market. I heard the music of the Mirasis, the hereditary singers of old, with him. When the famous classical singer Imanat Ali passed away, we went to his house to give our respects. He took me along to church. We went for kebabs inside Mochi Gate and on the tenth of Muharram went to see the famous Shi’a memorial processions of Karbala at Nisar Haveli in Lahore. We wandered through the lanes at Mochi Gate through the night. I was taken by meeting him. He knew every political worker and every leader of every party. He took me all over the city, and I absorbed it all the way a snow cone takes to colour.

Back in 1977, Lahore wasn’t like how it is today. Now, everyone is a stranger, but then there wasn’t anyone whom someone didn’t know. All the shopkeepers and residents of the different neighbourhoods knew each other. But Shoki’s world was larger: it went from Hiramandi, the famous old red-light district near the great mosque, to the Pak Tea House near Anarkali Bazaar. One time he came to meet me, and I wasn’t home. He got friendly with a few of the boys who lived in my neighbourhood. There wasn’t much traffic on the streets. He would sit on a tonga from Mochi Gate, head straight to Krishan Nagar, where I lived, and would get off at Neeli Baar stop. Then he would walk to my house from Arjun Road. He came to my house every night, and we would wander among the stalls in Krishan Nagar, drinking tea. At night, we’d get together with more friends.

In ’77 I got admission to university but after getting beat up a few times by the Jam’at, the Islamist party, I decided to give it up. In ’78 I started thinking about going abroad. It was me, Shoki, and Hakeem. We went over land through Kabul, Iran, Istanbul and then Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and then Italy, Rome. We stayed a few days in a hotel, and after that, it was the street. A month or two passed this way. At the station it seemed there had been a flood of people straddling to find their place. It seemed as if the entire world had come there, looking for work. Who was going to give us work? In truth, Rome was just a pitstop, a place to apply to go further. Everyone was angling to go to Germany, the USA, or London. Back then, no one had even heard of Pakistan. Agents would take money to find people work on ships. Hakeem gave money to an agent as soon as we arrived and got a job on a ship going to Germany. Shoki gave money to a couple of agents, but nothing came through. He fought hard and got his passport back. I had given him half the money for the journey. We thought we would get a place together and that together we had the strength to live abroad.

Then someone told us that there is no point staying in Rome, and that we should go to the shore and look for work on a ship. We decided that I would stay in Rome, and Shoki would go find work on a ship. So, one morning, very early, he left Rome and went to a harbour on the east coast of Italy, to a place called something like “Tarmo.” The map of Italy is like a hand, long from below and wide at the top. There is ocean on both sides, east and west, with harbours for ships. Neither one of us thought this was going to be our last meeting and that we would never see each other again. That’s when we got separated. We had decided that if he got a job he would write to me, care of the Pakistani embassy. One or two months passed, and no letter came. I went every week to the embassy. At that point, I was sleeping on the street and would sleep in whatever empty box I could find at the station.

One day, a letter came. He told me that he was trapped in a snowstorm. He had wandered for a few days, here and there, and was sleeping in telephone booths. Then one day he managed to get a job on a ship. He hadn’t been able to write to me. Now his ship was docked in some harbour in Russia and after two months he was finally able to write to me. He wrote that life at sea was really difficult. For some days, he vomited. He told me that he didn’t want me to do this job: I was a graduate, and I could get a job in Rome. Then he apologized for leaving me alone and said he didn’t know when we would meet again.

One day I was at Piazza Navona in Rome. It must have been the height of the hippie era, in ’78–’79. To one side there we were, sitting on the steps. Among us there were also some Italian young men and women. They were secretly smoking joints. Suddenly the police raided, and they pressed us against the wall to search us. When they saw my passport, they saw when my visa had expired. I had only one bag with me that I kept in the station. They searched that and got four or five hundred US dollars from it, which I had been saving for when things got really tough. At that time, if your visa was expired and the police took your passport, they would say, “Bring the money for your ticket home, and we will give you your passport back.” Without a passport, how does one get a job or a place to live? It becomes difficult to live. But if you are illegal and you have some cash, then they use that to buy the ticket, and deport you. The police bought me a ticket, then, and deported me.

I was relieved when I returned home, because I had discovered that living abroad is really difficult. I couldn’t find a decent job—but I was a university student. So I completed the remaining few years of my degree and got a government job. Then I got married. I left the old Krishan Nagar neighbourhood I grew up in, and then there wasn’t any connection left with Shoki. It was five or six years later when Shoki’s mother arrived to meet me. I don’t know how she found me. I thought this story was over, but then it returned. She told me that Shoki had been sending money home to her, but that after four years or so, there was no word from him. I tried to help her as much as I could. That continued for a few years.

Then, after a few years, I visited my old neighbourhood of Krishan Nagar and my old neighbour gave me some letters that had come from Shoki, for me. He had written the letters from jail and some woman had sent them from her home. He wrote that while he was working on the ship, he had met with Pakistanis working on a Pakistani ship. They had a lot of dope on them that they wanted to sell. “I bought some from them, and then came to Rome,” he wrote. “You had already been deported, and I arrived where you had been staying earlier, with Masoud. And so I started living there. For some time, I was selling the dope, and Masoud helped me. We earned quite a lot of money. I wanted to call you to come back. It is a good thing you didn’t come, though, because one day we were raided and I got caught. I am in jail now, for seven years. Masoud also got caught, but I don’t know what happened to him after that. My sentence is ending soon. I got married, and I have one child. You got to know the streets of Rome and ate from its charity kitchens. I want to show you a different Rome. And there is so much else to talk about.”

I sent him a couple of responses to his letters. He answered a couple of them, and then his responses stopped. No more letters came. I never told his mother the truth. I don’t know, even today I had the same dream I often have, that he had passed on from this life. In some of the dreams, I am in Rome, and I am wandering in a cemetery, and I find Shoki’s grave. And then the police come and catch me, and say, “You brought Shoki to Italy, and we have been waiting for you.” Then they catch me and take me away.

How long had it been—maybe forty years?—and he was still in my thoughts and my heart. I was afraid of visiting his street, and when I finally went, the lane was gone. In truth, all the neighbourhoods are like this, transformed from what they once were. Other people live there now. There is a large black gate. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and everything was silent. It is in the centre of the city.

One time, in the summer heat, I had gone to meet Shoki in the middle of the day. There was a huge commotion. As I was going out of one of the narrow streets, water from one of the houses above fell on me. I was drenched. I looked up in anger, and saw a young girl on the ledge above, standing, and laughing out loud. Then suddenly a woman ran straight into me. And then a few women and men threw water on her from behind. And then I realized that this was a tradition that was followed when there hadn’t been enough rain, a game that the Christian men and women in this area played.

I remembered all of this, one day. The face of that laughing girl, on the house—and how she might look now, forty years later: her deep colour, with open hair and strong eyes, with a glittering nose ring and full mouth. Our eyes had met for a moment. I was drenched through, and she was laughing. When I understood what was happening, I too was laughing. Men and women in the neighbourhood came running, throwing water, and running away again. I looked up and she was standing there. And then, laughing, she emptied the rest of the bucket of water on top of me. This is that lane. And now it is silent. And that is the house. I can see her, smiling and laughing. I am struck by paralysis, and the whole city has been, too.

I wander these lanes not with my true form today, but instead with my lost self, from my past life, and from my memories. Everything has been overturned, occupied and lost—how many people have been taken from their homes so that a warehouse can be built? Time has passed, and moved forward, that which has no form, no memory or sign, but I have been lost there, standing alone. I am lost in that play of false rain, with that laughing girl on the ledge.

The memories have returned. The lane is empty. Shoki’s family is gone. There are crows calling out, on the different stories of the house. I am looking at the crow, and the crow is looking back. The crow flies away and takes everything in my mind with it.