Unstory

THIS IS NOT a story. It cannot be said.

This is just the rumbling of my memories.

It is a voice that swims and swims in the underworld of my unconscious. After remaining ensnared in the preoccupations of the day, it emerges after midnight, speaking in the quiet darkness.

Someone is hitting the electricity pole with a brick.

I had nothing but free time after I passed the grade 10 exams. I read detective novels from the neighbourhood’s penny library—one anna per book. On summer nights, I would light the table lamp on the roof, cover it with newspaper so that the light would not leak out, and read detective novels through the night. The distance between reading and not reading was finally exhausted after midnight. I became a spy from those detective novels and began my investigations in my dreams. During the day, I would watch people with suspicious eyes. Then, after some days, something odd happened. The worlds of novel and rooftop merged, and the spy came out of the book.

Someone struck the electricity pole a few times in the middle of the night.

I was frightened at first. Should I get up from bed or not? Should I turn off the table lamp and watch, or pull the sheet over on my head and forget it all? No. A shadow came from the house of the family of weavers in front of our house and went a bit further down the street. Then it was lost in a plot overgrown with dry and wild aak plants.

This became routine. Late at night, somebody would bang the electricity pole two or three times. With hesitation. And then after a long silence, a shadow would appear from among the weavers’ houses and disappear again.

What should I do? If I were from one of Ibn Safi’s famous novels, what would I do? What would I do, if I were his main character, Captain Imran? Investigate: that would be my mission.

There was a row of ten or so small, connected houses in the mohallah. People called them the “weavers’ houses.” Most had only one or two rooms. From our rooftop we could easily see into their courtyard. Children would run from here to there, across it. The women would sit in the sun, searching for lice in the children’s hair. There were handlooms in a couple of the rooms that were separate from the houses.

The men wove cloth all day long. Whenever we could manage to look inside the rooms, we would watch the cloth appear, woven out of skeins of many-coloured threads. Rehemta and his father would grab and pull the cloth in their hands, stretching it from side to side. The clatter of the handloom echoed through the houses in the neighbourhood, swimming through our minds.

Not a single girl from the weavers’ houses was considered beautiful. They did not go to school; they didn’t worry about adorning themselves in the name of fashion. Their noses flowed, and they would peek outside through tattered mats hanging on the doors of broken-down homes. I used to look over at their houses from our house above, but my eyes never lighted on anyone’s face. Sometimes it appeared as though someone there was looking back at me from some of the houses’ empty roofs.

But no, that’s not true. Mani was from one of those houses. Married or not, anyone would sigh upon seeing her. When she passed by on the street, it seemed as if she had crushed our hearts under her feet on her way. The boys would say: “She passes by, and everything hurts.” Everyone said, “She is the red in the colourful cloth of the fakirs.” Her body made waves that passed through everyone; when she had walked by, hearts would empty.

I became a spy. And I got a hint of something.

But my heart could not accept it. No, it can’t be. I must have misunderstood. What had I seen with my own eyes, anyway? Still, love and its scent can’t be hidden.

Bali used to drive a bicycle rickshaw. He was six feet tall, with deep black skin and red eyes. He would twist his thick moustache and oil would drip from his forehead. But it couldn’t be.

I started to watch ahead of time, in anticipation of the sound from the electricity pole. The man would come from one side. The long shadow and walk were the same.

Mani’s marriage was arranged by her parents. The husband would have been good enough, poor guy. But only God knows how things work with the heart. Even after the wedding she didn’t leave it. She ended up coming back with her two children. Bali took them all in. No one knows if there was actually a divorce or not, but Bali became the father of those two children and two or three more of their own.

They were a strange couple. Bali would come back in the evening with his rickshaw and take his rowdy gang of children to the bazaar for entertainment. They would stand outside and eat junk food there. They didn’t exhibit an ounce of shame or concern for what anyone thought. Women are supposed to feel the sting of shame, they say, but she behaved as if it was nothing. “Thank God, the witch has left us,” the others would say about her. And the men’s sighs were left in their hearts.

Bali did win his Heer, his beloved. But her story was reduced to rubble in the dust of the streets. The rickshaw didn’t bring in much money, and Mani’s beauty became tarnished. She had left the well-provisioned house of her first husband for her “dark ghost” who came in the night. She didn’t make a single complaint.

I still remember when the first procession against the Ayub government started from our neighbourhood, Krishan Nagar, and Bali was at the head of it. At the time, a huge billboard advertising the latest movie stood in front of Khoti High School, at the back of the Laat Sahib’s office, where the Chief Minister sat. That was the first thing to be broken down and turned into sticks. And then it was a free-for-all on Mall Road. The boards were set on fire and the painted faces of the actors burned and became ash. Then the tin used for the background was converted into doors and windows for houses. One of them remained as the door of Bali’s house for a long time.

He became a leader of the People’s Party, an unpaid worker who helped other people to gain office. Was there anyone in the neighbourhood to whom he hadn’t shown that photo of his, the one of him with Zulkifar Bhutto? That photo hung in Hanifa’s shop for many years.

The People’s Party did come to power, but what was there in it for him? He was neither literate nor educated. Though his influence was everywhere, his place was the same. Sometimes he was able to help people who came to him, and sometimes not. He became tense and irritated. The leaders started avoiding him.

He kept driving the rickshaw. Mani was unrecognizable after giving birth to so many children. Bali started taking drugs. Their relationship remained close and warm, but, outside, the world was cold. When Bhutto was hanged, Bali was the first to be arrested. Just like that. He had done nothing. He hadn’t even acknowledged Bhutto’s death. The Islamists must have been watching him.

By the time he came out of prison, Bali had fallen fully into the hands of the addicts. He slowly transformed into a skeleton. He couldn’t even drive the rickshaw anymore. Mani also became weaker and weaker.

The boys were given as bonded labour to shops. Time dissolved like intoxication. The houses became bigger, and streets became narrower. But Bali’s house was the same. The same old rough cloth over the tin door. Tall houses were built all around them, their tiny house folded in tight among them.

I went to visit my old mohallah recently and someone mentioned Mani. Is she alive? Maybe. After Bali’s death, the boys had sold the house and started their own small business. Until the end, Mani didn’t want to leave the house. For several years after the house was sold, she could be seen wandering like a shadow in the neighbourhood. Now there is a three-storey house standing where Bali’s house once was. Is she still alive? Perhaps. The handlooms are all gone now, and houses built in their stead. The boys are educated now and working in offices.

The visit to the mohallah had been forced on me. My younger brother’s first wife had passed on, and he had begged Rehmata’s wife to make a match for him. At last she sent a message that she had found someone for him. When I went to meet her on his behalf, I was shocked at how old she had become. While talking, I asked her about Mani, and just like that a shadow of remembrance passed over her face. She said that they had sold their house and left, who knows where they went, it was so many years ago.

Mani?

I don’t know.

But this is not a story. It is the sound of an electricity pole being struck at midnight.