Bayazid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Rawalpindi. He had a memory more of forces than of people, a crowd, a hand, a hand no more. Yet the bazaars in those early nineteen-fifties were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found. That was a bitter day when he accepted years later that there might have been no hand, no desperate parent seeking him in the crowd. He might have been abandoned, not lost. Karim Khan, the owner of the tea-and-curry stall where his known history began, could tell him only that he had been sitting in front of the stall on a fine winter day, three or four years old, barefoot and clean, wearing just a shalwar kameez, holding a new pair of cheap plastic shoes tightly in his arms as if afraid they would be taken away, and scanning the crowds passing by. The shoes had caught Karim Khan’s eye, not only because they were brand-new but because the children of the streets, those sparrows, ran barefoot always. In those early years following the great Indian Partition, families drifted about, mothers dead, fathers dead, murdered for religion’s sake, for politics, unwelcome children without parents thrown on some relative’s mercy. Karim Khan thought this must be one of those stories, Hindus stuck on the wrong side of the border and on the run, an unwanted child—though that didn’t explain the shoes.
Karim Khan kept an eye on the boy all through the afternoon and evening, as he served customers by the light of a hissing pressure-gas lantern, dishing up dal or a meat curry that grew more delicious each year, for he never washed out the fire-blackened pots that sat over the coals, but replenished them with a double handful of lentils or meat, beef or mutton, whichever was cheaper, the mix of meat juices adding to the savor. The boy had a remarkable power of concentration, immobile all day and seeming quite unperturbed, but for the fierceness with which he held the shoes. He stood out even then as a person not to be treated lightly, as a being with resources of spirit if not of fortune. When Karim Khan finally approached him, the boy brushed him off, politely but firmly. He was waiting for his mother, who would soon be back, and must not move from this spot. Rebuffed, Karim Khan retreated to his cook fire, the evening crowd getting a quick bite before taking a bus from the nearby station up to the mountains or out to the plains, for the shop served mostly travellers. Finally, when the crowds had trickled away, when pye-dogs began sniffing around under the charpoys in front of the food stall for a last chicken bone or scrap of dry bread, when the lights in the shops along the road faltered out and the cold came down from the Margalla Hills so that breath showed in a little cloud, Karim Khan went to the boy, and took his hand, and drew him away from the road and over by the fire.
“Come on, have a dish of my curry,” he told the boy. “You’re shivering, you’ll get sick. Sit here and eat, you can still keep watch.” The boy came along easily enough then, his will weakened by hunger, heavy-headed over food and then burrowing under a blanket that Karim Khan pulled over him, lying on a charpoy in the open-fronted veranda, asleep so quick. At dawn he was back by the road, and for that whole day too he watched, not crying but just resolute, knowing that of course they would come back, his mother and father. Admiring the boy’s remarkable tenacity, pitying him, Karim Khan fed him morning, midday, and evening with unsold chapatis and the leavings from customers’ half-eaten plates—which otherwise would be poured back into the general pot. That evening Karim Khan said to him firmly, “Come on, little man. I’m not rich enough to feed you on charity. From now on you clean up and carry out the plates and then we’ll see. Until your people come.” Earlier he had been to the nearby police station but, as he expected, found the duty officer there quite uninterested in a street boy’s troubles. In any case, the boy had struck his fancy, though no one would have accused that Pathan of being fanciful, with his wife back home in a Mardani hillside village awaiting money and three daughters there to feed, and this food stall his enterprise, and his pride too—he’d built it up from a little cart that he hawked around the train station.
Karim Khan, who was a good man, took the boy in and named him Bayazid, after a Sufi mystic who was known to him rather as a magician, jaadu gar—more fancy, indulging himself in poetry!—and treated him not like a son, perhaps, but like a cherished apprentice, miniature serving boy, dishwasher, runner, paid in food and treated unsentimentally but fairly, hardly any use at first, then gradually indispensable. Yazid grew up to be exceptionally large for a Pakistani, six feet tall by the time he began shaving, and strong: big hands, big feet, a large head. He tended to be slovenly rather than unclean, ate enormously but without much discrimination, worked day and night slowly but implacably, and was a neighborhood pet as a little boy, and a person of accepted station by the time he was thirteen. He didn’t banter or fling himself around, as teahouse boys often do—but had a humor that called forth smiles in return, and accepted all who accepted him, and damn the rest, and even them he forgave easily.
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Most remarkably, Yazid had a long view of bettering himself, told to no one, an ambling bear moving to his own North. He taught himself to read, buying government-school grammars with his own money, encouraged and corrected by one of the regular customers, a schoolteacher who came in the afternoons for a cup of tea. To the extent that Karim Khan thought of such things, he accepted this as one of the boy’s caprices, a distraction in any station that he might achieve, but better than going to the cinema or flying kites. At ten, Yazid would read aloud the Urdu newspaper to illiterate Karim Khan, choosing the stories that he knew his boss would like. At fourteen and fifteen, he could be found whenever he wasn’t working reading gruesome stories of murder, or stories of thwarted love or lovers dying requited, bought secondhand from stalls and bound like magazines, with lurid pictures on the covers of fat-bummed girls and mustachioed men, lovers or enemies, kidnapped or eloping or on the lam, as only time and a hundred pages would tell. Yazid had charmed hands, became a master at making chapatis, hunkered cross-legged over the tandoor, slapping the flattened dough down into its orange glowing maw. He learned the technique of making naan, doing it so well that the shop became known for it, the local housewives bringing pots to fill with dal and curry, a treat for their poor homes in the nearby alleys, and picking up a bundle of naan too, flecked with sesame seeds, oiled shiny, crisp and then soft inside, hot and wrapped in day-old newspapers. “Always your nose in a book,” the regulars said, and were rather proud of him as he handed over the goods and then resumed his reading, sitting under a lone bulb hanging from a wire.
The bazaar around the food stall had been established in British times, with some later office buildings of two and even three stories, a little park, and next to the park, the Sir Khawaja Nazimuddin Government High School, known simply as Nazimuddin College and acknowledged to be among the best in the city. The boys wore uniforms—blazer, straight-legged khaki pants, and pointed black shoes, even a blue-and-brown striped tie, which made them conspicuous at a time when most Pakistanis wore shalwar kameez. They would come to Karim Khan’s food stall in the morning for a rusk and tea, or in the afternoon after school for dal, shouting and making a clatter, very conscious of their uniforms and their élite status. These were the sons of the wealthier houses nearby, of business owners, proprietors of the larger shops, local ward politicians, wholesalers, members of a rising middle class defined at the higher reaches by the ownership of a car, and at the bottom by the necessity of making hard sacrifices to buy their sons’ uniforms and pay for extra tuition.
Sitting at the tandoor and pushing out piles of chapatis and naan, Yazid had ample time to study these fortunate creatures. Gradually he began to bend his attitude and his appearance toward theirs, not quite affecting to wear pant-shirt, which would make him ridiculous in the eyes of Karim Khan and his customers, but cutting off his long hair, which had been modelled on gangsters in the movies, taming his rich sideburns, ditto adopted from the movies, and generally toning down his naturally exuberant style, though his loose walk and large size and appetite would always set him apart.
Rarely leaving the food stall, Yazid nevertheless knew much about the world, for he was observant, and all sorts came through the bus station en route to their far destinations. Weary passengers dropped their bags and filled travel-starved bellies and afterward confided in the sympathetic serving boy, indiscreet because they would never see him again. Gradually, as he became familiar with the college boys, he understood that their views were rather narrower than his, and this gave him confidence. While they might have fine manners and live in proper houses, cosseted by their mothers and sisters, they were tame and didn’t understand the unforgiving streets and city. He never presumed on his acquaintance with the college boys, always ready to step back into character as the fellow behind the tandoor, sparing himself from any rebuff by this discretion. Yet he observed them closely and bided his time. He wanted to make friends among them rather than among the boys like him who worked the shops and sold cheap trinkets to travellers and ran the scams around the gullies, gutter princes, loud and quick to dodge a slap, smoking cigarettes, shouting after the begging girls who floated around the bus stop unchaperoned.
One spring when Yazid was seventeen or eighteen, the Nazimuddin College boys developed a passion for carrom board, poor man’s billiards, played on a plywood square by knocking round wooden pucks into corner pockets with a plastic striker. The college boys would gather around a charpoy set in front of the food stall, playing for cups of tea or plates of biscuits, contemplating the next move with the seriousness of parliamentary debaters, discussing strategy. Yazid would serve the snacks they ordered, occasionally dropping in some humorous comment. Initially, they had a miniature board, which they carried to Karim Khan’s stall, but when they banded together and bought a regulation-sized one, three feet to a side, Yazid offered to store it for them in the shop. He thus became the master of ceremonies, keeper of the board. He even found a rule book in one of the secondhand bookstalls and so took on the role of umpire, his word on the finer points accepted as final. At night, alone, he would practice shots in his room, and so himself became an ace, rarely playing, because of his duties as a server, hard to get and therefore in demand, called when some outsider sat down and cleared the table of the locals. As he wiped out his opponent, Yazid would say, chewing the tip of his mustache in the corner of his mouth, “I’m feasting on him, just feasting on him,” and this became a catchall phrase for the college boys, used indiscriminately.
By the time summer came, when it was too hot to play out in front of the food stall, a little core had formed around Yazid. Center of operations for the carrom players shifted to Yazid’s shabby room, formerly a storeroom, looking onto a gully. For his first eight or nine years working for Karim Khan, Yazid slept rough on one of the charpoys lined up on a swept dirt apron in front of the stall, never even bothering to choose any particular spot but sleeping where he fell, cheerful under the stars, his clothes hung on nails in the filthy bathroom that leaked sewage out into a little grassy plot at the back of the building, his comb on a shelf, joined later by a shaver and soap to make foam. He hadn’t asked for the room. Karim Khan had told him one morning to clear the storeroom of the garbage lying there, empty Dalda ghee tins and piles of jute bags. Yazid had become too old, Karim Khan said, to be sprawled every morning in front of the stall, sleeping late as he often did and comfortably watching the street in front of him come to life as if in his own living room.
Now the room became a sort of clubhouse for the carrom players, so much so that several of the boys chipped in and had it whitewashed inside by a withered opium smoker who made a living in the neighborhood as a handyman. There were two charpoys, with a table that held the board squeezed between them, teacups crowded to the side, players sitting cross-legged. The great luxury was a secondhand ceiling fan, given to Yazid by a neighborhood buddy, which made him the butt of his friends’ jokes, who called it proof of his love of fine living. He also nailed pictures of actresses cut from the Sunday papers to the rough brick walls, although these were soon dust-covered and flyblown.
What the boys liked about this arrangement was that nothing was expected of them in that room. There were no rules, all came and went as they liked, sometimes one of them would be in a jam and would sleep there for a night or two. The college boys, who were mostly from respectable families, did not enjoy such freedom anywhere else. Yazid had the one indispensable quality for a man establishing a club: he was always at home, sitting on the veranda of the stall making naan and chapatis, or slumbering in his room, and even if he had gone off somewhere on an errand the room was never locked. Karim Khan had by now taken another little boy off the streets, this one of known parentage but with parents who asked no questions and gave him over to the business as a riddance. Yazid thus assumed an emeritus position, though he still made the naan and still dealt with the cash when Karim Khan wasn’t present. The old man—by then he would have been over seventy, wiry and likely to live forever—would go off to his far home in Mardan for several weeks at a time, and when he returned Yazid would hand him every paisa that the shop had earned, keeping a notebook with any subtractions carefully noted—cigarettes, a trip to the cinema. He still took no salary but asked for money when he needed it, never taking much, a few times asking a lot, given over by Karim Khan without ever a question.
One afternoon, several of the boys had gone shares on a case of pilfered beer sold from the back gate of the Murree Brewery, a sideline for the brewery workers. Kamran Khokar, a senior boy whose father was a counsellor in the Rawalpindi wards, knew one of the brewery managers, in fact knew all sorts of tricks and could get his fellow-students into scrapes and then out of them unscathed. A junior-school student who served as Kamran’s bullyboy and gofer brought the bottles in a gunnysack, the jute wet from being stashed in a nearby icehouse that belonged to yet another student’s father.
“Is it cold?” Kamran asked, pulling one of the bottles out of the sack and putting it against his face. “Oh, it better be cold!” He pinched the boy’s cheek and slapped him gently. “You’re lucky, anyway,” he said indulgently. “It is cold.”
Yazid loomed over the carrom board planning a shot, his thick fingers dusted with the talcum powder they used to slick the surface. Without looking up he said indifferently, “Take some money for the booze, it’s in that vest hanging up there.”
“There you go again,” Kamran said, sitting down and putting the sack under a charpoy, pulling out bottles and handing them around. There were three other people in the room, the boy who brought the beer and two others of the core gang. “You drink on the house, we all know you’re broke.”
“I am the house,” Yazid said complacently. He took a beer and popped the top off with a quick smack on the wooden charpoy leg, catching it neatly in the air and shooting it into the corner—one of his tricks.
“You’re not a house,” Kamran retorted. “You’re a barrel. It costs the rest of us a fortune keeping you full.”
“I’ve told you not to bring all that garbage. You guys with your bags of samosas and God knows what. This is a tea stall, remember? I eat free.”
The younger boys grinned at Yazid’s insouciance with the big square-headed school bully. Kamran walked with a swagger and played the same role in the school that his father played in his ward of the city, poking a finger in all the pies and pushing in wherever he could.
Soon a heavy fug of cigarette smoke hung over the players. They were betting for small stakes, Yazid winning, talking a bit of trash to his opponents, then cracking a shot.
Another boy came in, Zain, whose grandfather and then later his father owned the old British grocery in Rawalpindi, selling fancy produce and select foods to the civil servants and officers and diplomats stationed there, the family distinguished by this commerce with the wealthy and with foreigners and more worldly for it. Zain stood at the door, without entering, caught Yazid’s eye, and nodded.
“Hey, mister, come in and slum around with us a bit,” Yazid said affectionately, patting the charpoy beside him.
“I’ll come back later. I brought you something.”
He stepped into the room and put a bag of apples on the charpoy, then slipped back to his place by the door.
“From my father,” he said. “We just got them in at the store.”
“Look at him!” Kamran cooed. “He’s so shy. It’s adorable!”
Yazid and Zain had taken to spending time together, one of those odd couples, Yazid big and broad and hirsute, walking with his rolling gait, and Zain slight and fine and finicky, with small hands, small feet, a long straight nose, and curly hair worn a little long in the back as his single extravagance, even in this following the fashion rather than defining it. Zain brought Yazid serious books, histories and leftist political tracts, not like the romances and adventure stories that formed his usual literary diet, Zain’s father an old-school lefty from the days of the anti-British movement, despite—or because of—his regular interactions at the store with the Blimps and pukka sahibs and their wives. Yazid jokingly called Zain the Professor and took pride in the connection.
“Tell your friend to sit down and join us,” Kamran said. “Give him a beer, it’ll do him good. Tell him not to be so ladylike.”
“I can speak for myself,” Zain said sharply.
Zain did in fact seem too prim for the situation. Slipping in, he perched at the edge of a charpoy near the door, his legs crossed, then borrowed a penknife from Yazid and cut up apples and fanned out the slices on the palm of his hand to pass them around. The other boys all thought there must be something going on between him and Yazid, a common enough occurrence at an age and in circumstances where girls were quite unavailable and hormones in full raging flush, Pakistani boys and their boy crushes, all forgotten when they married a few years later.
“Leave him alone,” Yazid grunted. “Cut the bullshit and let’s play.”
“Playing with you is like shovelling money into a well,” Kamran grumbled. “I’d rather bullshit.”
“It’s a paisa a point, man. Nothing for the rich politician’s son! Anyway, it’s good luck, tossing coins in a well.”
“My coins and your luck, boy. I bring the booze, and then I pay for the privilege too.”
Boys came and went, Yazid playing or relinquishing the table if he lost, a freewheeling game. Only a few of the boys drank, the ones who knew they could slip past their parents at the end of the evening. Yazid kept up too, chugging bottles when challenged to by Kamran, the two of them rivals here as in other things—in carrom board, in cards, even in arm wrestling, the son of the ward boss ready to crack heads.
The quarrel began over nothing, as these things do. A couple of hours had passed, Yazid holding Zain back when he rose to leave. “Stick around, after a while we’ll have food. I’ve got some of that marrow-bone nihari coming from Hajji Noora’s place.” As he rarely troubled Karim Khan for money and so took hospitality from his college friends too often, whenever he had a windfall Yazid would spend the lot on a blowout for the crowd, clearing all his debts at once. That morning he had sold a big pile of the empty ghee tins that accumulated behind the tea stall, one of his perquisites.
Kamran continued to needle Zain, joking about the apples. Finally, he went too far.
“Tell your apple-cheek friend to cut up more of that nice fruit. I wish he’d brought some peaches. He’s a peach himself. He’s like an egg, actually. Allah, I can imagine what that tastes like. We’re all jealous, Yazid Bhai. I suppose you tap that pretty often.”
Whenever Yazid drank, his eyes, irritated from staring down into the tandoor’s radiation all day, became extraordinarily red. He gave Kamran a heavy look. “Shut up, Kamran. You’re drunk.”
“You shut up, tandoori boy. I suppose when you’re brought up in the street even a little priss like your Zain here seems a pretty classy fuck. Your mother must be proud.”
Yazid usually moved so deliberately that they called him the Python. Now, as if released from a spring, his enormous hand shot across the table and took Kamran by the throat and lifted him till he seemed to hover over the charpoy.
He was cool. “You should be careful what you say.”
“Let me down, you fat bastard.” Kamran could barely speak; he wheezed. Yazid plopped him down, then put his hands in his lap, awaiting events.
“Wait, I forgot!” Kamran said. He slapped himself on the forehead, miming. “You’re actually a real bastard! Poor Yazid. We all know you popped out of one of those railway whores after your saintly Karim Khan snuck over to the wrong side of the tracks.”
Still looking into Kamran’s face, quite impassive, Yazid reached calmly down with his right hand and took the penknife with which Zain had been peeling apples and held it between forefinger and thumb, put the blade close to Kamran’s face.
“How about I make you not so pretty?”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Kamran gasped. The room had become very still.
Suddenly, as quickly as his hand had shot across the table, Yazid turned the knife downward and stabbed himself in the leg, burying the blade in his thigh. Rising slightly, flipping the bloodied knife into the corner, he took Kamran again by the throat and lifted him bodily and threw him out the door with a single hand, driving him into the ground like a ball thrown to bounce.
The other boys in the room had stood up and now fled out the door. A surprisingly small red stain inkblotted Yazid’s tan shalwar where the knife had gone in.
“Why don’t you buzz off, Kamran,” Yazid said evenly. “We’ll talk tomorrow. Forget about it.”
“You’re finished,” Kamran spat, rolling onto his knees and then quickly twisting up, athletic. “I’m going to fuck you up.”
Yazid studied his bloody leg. “We’ll see,” he said mildly.
Only Zain remained behind. Yazid watched the other boys hurrying away, then turned to him and grinned.
“Ouch! That really hurts.”
“Hurts!” Zain said. “You crazy person. You stabbed yourself.”
“Better than stabbing him, I suppose.”
“That’s true. And now what?” He leaned down and peered at the bloody spot on Yazid’s shalwar, a look of distaste on his face.
“Don’t worry, this is nothing. I’ve cut myself worse than this butchering chickens. That blade wasn’t even two inches long.”
Zain took a handkerchief from his pocket and tore it into strips.
“I’ll have to take off my shalwar for this,” Yazid joked. “Then you will be compromised.” He was slightly hysterical, giggly at the sight of the now copious blood.
The wound looked like a gill on a fish, a slim keyhole weeping bright capillary blood. Zain poured water over the wound and then helped Yazid tighten the handkerchief strips around his massive leg.
“What are you laughing at?” Zain asked.
“Me sitting here with my shalwar off and your flowered handkerchief around my leg.” Limping up, Yazid took another shalwar from the tin trunk under the bed, where he kept all his clothes.
When he had dressed, he said, “Now what? Shall we keep playing?”
“You’re still pretending, are you? I’ll go get some spirits and a proper bandage.”
“I’ll come with you.” Yazid didn’t want to be alone after the beer and the excitement.
“Absolutely not. Sit down, or, rather, lie down. You’re an idiot. I’ll be right back.” Turning at the door, smiling at Yazid, he said, “Thanks, by the way. And the good thing is, we’ll all remember this in thirty years. Now you’re a legend.”
After that, the two were best friends.
With the beer and the drunkenness and the verve that Yazid had shown in stabbing himself, and not wanting to draw attention to the episode, Kamran didn’t make a fuss. After a couple of weeks, he rejoined the carrom-board mafia, and Yazid made no comment. Zain stopped coming to the matches, but instead would slip over at the first school recess and have an early bite with Yazid, always accepting his hospitality of naan and dal and curry without demur, his good manners and perhaps a kind of admiration for Yazid shown by his willingness to be indebted so often. If he found Yazid snoozing he would lean over him and push on his shoulder, rolling him about, and Yazid would groan, “Oh, God, you’re impossible. Lunchtime, is it? Where’s that bloody boy with my food.”
“You pasha! You used to be the serving boy here. What happened?”
These were happy days for Yazid. One of his bazaari friends, a taxi-driver, had taught him to drive, the friend generous to Yazid, as so many were, exactly because he took as easily as he gave and had no expectations and was excellent company. Yazid now passed this skill on to Zain, borrowing the taxi and driving him to the empty dirt tracks that spidered out into the scrubby plains around Rawalpindi. The boys made these excursions on the sly from Zain’s protective if unconventional father, who had plans for his only son that extended to Government College in Lahore and a rich career—who knows?—in the civil service, or as a lawyer, or a doctor, certainly something more than a grocer. His son fooling about with a taxi would not have amused Malik Kamal Sahib, who was a real Awan Malik, that martial landowning race. He maintained a car himself, a temperamental but immaculately kept Morris Minor.
The first time Yazid went to Zain’s house marked also the first time that he had entered any respectable middle-class family’s dwelling, if a higgledy house built up on four floors deserves that name, with a cracked wooden gate painted pistachio green leading into a courtyard too small for the car, which stood in the narrow gully outside. Zain had invited Yazid several times, but Yazid put him off, afraid that he wouldn’t know how to behave, or that Malik Kamal might be offended to find his son entertaining a server from a tea shop. That afternoon, a Sunday, the boys had borrowed the taxi, and Zain had driven on the blacktop road for the first time. They took the new avenue running along the outskirts of Islamabad and then drove up toward Murree on the winding, climbing road that followed the old Mughal horse-and-palanquin track up to Kashmir from the Punjab plains.
In those days, just before the 1970 election, which soon gave Zulfikar Ali Bhutto pretext to seize power, Zain and even Yazid had grown intoxicated with Bhutto’s socialist rhetoric, a promise that a new era of unimaginable possibilities would soon emerge before their eyes, that élite power in Pakistan would be toppled, the poor raised up, the system remade. Zain parked the car under a banyan tree beside the Murree road, and they ate samosas prepared by Zain’s mother and drank tea from a thermos. Zain lay flat under the tree, with his head on a rolled-up coat, staring up through the branches and speaking of the future, of his plans, Government College in Lahore, if he was admitted.
Simultaneously shy and passionate, he spoke of his larger dreams, of making a significant life under this new dispensation if Bhutto won, with the reconfigured socialist system that Bhutto had announced, real justice for everyone, land reform, equality, power in the hands of the people, the freedom of the vote. Yazid was thrilled by the moment, by the dry rustling of the wind through the leaves and by Zain’s handsome, earnest face in profile as he talked.
“That’s all very fine,” Yazid said. “But I doubt it’s for people like me. It’s for you, your people, and that’s good enough.”
“No, it’s exactly for people like you.”
As they drove back into the city at dusk, Zain said, “I want to ask you a favor, Bayazid.”
“Anything.”
“I want you to have dinner tonight with me, at my house. I’ve asked my mother to cook something special.”
“Another time. I need to dress properly and all that. Look at me, I’ve got samosa grease all over my shalwar leg.”
“I insist. We’ll stop and you can change in your room.”
At Zain’s house, Yazid perched at the edge of his seat and stood up every time Zain’s mother came into the room, bringing first pomegranate sherbet, then food, several dishes served on a low table set in front of the sofa, and even a dessert, carrot halvah with clotted cream. The mother was small, with a very fair face, like a girl from the north, and a single dark mole above her lip, adoring toward Zain and immediately familiar with Yazid, calling him “child,” urging him to eat more, then retiring to the kitchen for refills. Yazid had not seen Zain like this before, the boyish pride he took in his mother’s attentions, and also his brusqueness with her, slightly embarrassed, impatient, cool in response to her tenderness. Malik Kamal had recently bought an elaborate radio, square as a troll and as large, with a blond wooden case and speakers covered with tan cloth, a presence in the room. The boys listened to the news on Radio Pakistan and then to the BBC Urdu service, which was full of the upcoming election and spoke also of tensions in East Pakistan, of strikes, political rallies, upheaval, war clouds, all the elements that thrill young men at eighteen and twenty. Malik Kamal came in when the BBC broadcast began and sat down, nodding to the mother, who brought food for him also.
“Take a seat, young man,” he said to Yazid, and then, when Yazid continued to stand, he winked at Zain. “Come on, tell this fellow it’s O.K.”
“I cannot take a seat in front of you, Malik Sahib,” Yazid said.
Malik Kamal looked at him shrewdly. “You’re the one from Karim Khan’s stall, aren’t you? My son talks about you.” He made an impatient gesture, flapping his hand downward. “Come on, don’t annoy me. Sit and eat.”
They listened to the broadcast, and after it finished Malik Kamal switched off the set and turned to Yazid. “So what do you make of all this?”
“What can I say, Malik Sahib. You know the saying, whoever holds the whip owns the buffalo. This is maybe just about some new people grabbing the whip from the old ones.”
“And who’s the buffalo, then?”
“People like me, I suppose. Karim Khan says I’m a buffalo, and I have to admit that even I can see a resemblance.”
“And people like me?”
“No sir. You and yours are the new rising group, if you forgive my saying so.”
Malik Kamal laughed. “You’re a clever boy! I can see why my son speaks of you so often.” He stood up. “Anyway, any friend of my Zain is always welcome here. Perhaps in Mr. Bhutto’s new Pakistan you’ll be the one holding the whip before long.”
After that, Yazid regularly was asked to Zain’s house, the radio broadcasts providing a pretext and an occasion. The mother took him in, pitying his orphan status and appreciating his straightforward manners, neither servile nor presumptuous, but respectful and unembarrassed and warm. When Malik Kamal debated the new socialist politics with Zain, he would call on Yazid to back him up, and after some time Yazid allowed his humorous side to emerge, and even his rough but serviceable philosophy. He could call forth delighted laughter from that quite jolly little man. As Yazid discovered, Malik Kamal had developed liberal tastes while running his fancy-goods grocery shop and liked to play a bit of the radical, proud that he was educating his son for a great future, educating even his daughter, and willing to send her too for higher education.
Gradually Yazid began to understand the dynamic of the household, as if he had stepped into a wood and, in his wonder and appreciation, gradually perceived there a whole community of flowers and birds and shy woodland creatures. The mother’s brother lived on charity in the house, smoking endless cigarettes up in his room and rarely emerging, coming down to listen to the cricket scores, wearing pajamas and a threadbare robe, fingers yellow with nicotine, a hacking cough, lighting a cigarette with trembling hands as soon as he sat down. The old humbug would remonstrate against the British, how they should never have given up India, and thought of Lord’s Cricket Ground with the same reverence that Zain’s mother offered to the Holy Places. Yazid’s compendious memory included a remarkable store of cricket scores and batting averages and matches and catches and stumpings, all the minutiae that a quick-witted boy poring over the newspaper in a tea stall between customers might graze upon. It’s a good thing to be in with the family dog—especially a snappish one—and soon Yazid and Uncle Rizwan had formed an exclusive little cricket club.
The family had only one inside servant, Mai Viro, an ancient crone with a bead of sweat perpetually on her upper lip, who washed and carried and ruled the household from the kitchen and might in her sleep have pedalled a generator to provide electricity, if that had been required. Ill-tempered, grumbling against Zain’s mother, worshipping his father, she took a poisonous disliking to Yazid, be-damned that the family’s status should be fouled by this jumped-up tea-stall boy treated as an equal. She would come into the room, squatting and flicking a filthy black rag reeking with disinfectant along the floor, and flick it a couple of times at Yazid too for good measure, before retreating into the corner to hear the Urdu broadcast. Yazid tried everything, courtly language and shameless bribes of delicacies lifted from the tea stall and even once a little mirror with a painted frame, but nothing would appease the old bat.
Finally, with a piercing note like a French horn rising up from the background of an orchestra, or like a deer that steps last of all and most shyly into a clearing, came Yasmin, Zain’s younger sister, almost his twin. Yazid of course knew that his friend had a sister, and had seen her moving through the streets, his impression being mostly of a little froth of white, a white head covering, a girl so slight and floating that he had always assumed her to be much younger than Zain.
Because he had never had close contact with respectable girls or even with women, had rarely spoken to any female other than brusque customers coming to take away food, he was aloof from them, lumped all women and girls together, creatures whose movements and concerns were unfathomably foreign. At fifteen he lost his virginity in a backstreet brothel to a woman twenty years his senior, to her greedy hands, her body in his imagination carrying the lion reek of all the men who had possessed her, went again in pain like a man suffering blinding toothache, and fought against returning into the arms of those brutes, and failed. One day, after a particularly unsavory experience, involving an ancient greasy madam and an attempt at blackmail, he swore never to go there again, and kept his resolution in the face of all temptation and crude desire.
Yazid would no more have associated Yasmin with this category of experience than he would compare shit on his shoe to a melody calling far away in the night, when he lay with his soul bared and receptive in his little room. For many weeks, into the spring, into the summer, he was aware of her occasionally flitting past the open door at the corner of his vision while he sat with Zain or Uncle Rizwan, listening to the news. Dimly he allowed that this other person also lived here, in his absence would own these rooms as much as any of the others. A young man would not ordinarily be invited into a house harboring a young girl. His status as an orphan, a tea boy, both made his presence possible and humiliated him, for his presence could not be misconstrued, must be exceptional. He could not compromise Yasmin. His developing awareness of her therefore seemed to him illicit, a betrayal, and he began to avoid the house, until Zain took offense and ordered him back.
“What’s happened to your manners? My mother keeps asking if you’re upset with us for some reason. Come with me right now, the cricket starts in twenty minutes. Uncle Rizwan sent me especially.”
One afternoon, Yazid and Zain had gone to hear the great Zulfikar Ali Bhutto give a speech at Liaquat Bagh, a park where political rallies were held. Bhutto cupped the crowd in his hands and shook them and filled them with his invective, until finally the young blades who had been bused in from near and far lost all restraint and began throwing chairs and charging the police and were lathi-charged in return. The two boys happened to catch the attention of some zealous constable, and Zain received a cunning two-handed slicing blow from a cane whip, which cut the cloth on his back like a knife and left a stripe—the innocent always suffer in these circumstances, he and Yazid were in full retreat—a welt rising and blood seeping through, much more blood than might be expected. Zain added to his fine sensibilities a fainting aversion to pain and a spirit not equal to rough blows. He thought he’d been killed and had to be dragged by Yazid all through the bazaar and home.
When they reached Zain’s house, thankfully they found no one there. Malik Sahib and his wife had gone off to see relatives, for once taking Uncle Rizwan with them. Even Mai Viro, who haunted the place like a resident ghost, had disapparated somewhere. The boys crashed inside, Zain throwing himself face down on a sofa still wearing his bloodied shirt, and Yazid nosing about looking for bandages and disinfectant.
“Cabinet next to the stairs,” Zain croaked. “Third floor.”
Yazid had never before penetrated the sanctum beyond the living room. Tentatively he climbed the stairs, the house built around a shaft like an atrium, larger than he expected, dark and then open at the top, so that sparrows got in. On the second floor, passing a room, he saw Yasmin lying curled up on a bed, napping, back to him, feet bare and up on the bed, her little slippers tucked beneath. The bottoms of her feet glowed pale white. Yazid had never before seen her uncovered hair, which was long and black but had a reddish tinge. Later he would surmise that it was hennaed, to him a mysterious refinement. Silent, retreating, he went back to the stairway, down a few steps, and coughed, loud, a coughing fit.
Nothing. Then he heard Yasmin call, “Who’s that?”
“Excuse me, Bibi Jee. It’s Bayazid.”
He had frightened her. “Who? Yazid?”
“Nothing, Bibi. Just Zain has a little cut. I’ll go back now. If you can bring some disinfectant.”
She came out, putting on her dupatta, unperturbed now but brisk at this intrusion into the family quarters.
“Hello. How are you? Is everything O.K.?”
“It’s fine. If you can come.”
Yazid feared she would shriek when she saw all the blood. Instead, she was perfectly composed, helped Zain to remove his shirt, told him to lie down again, studied the wound, and said dismissively, “You’ll live, my dear.”
Zain sat up. “You heartless thing. I’m in agony.”
Yasmin laughed, the first time Yazid had heard this, for she had always been circumspect, self-effacing, slipping past and ghosting up the stairs if she found him sitting in the living room with the cricket fans. He expected her to be shy and tinkling, and instead her laugh was broad, a bit husky even.
“You’re such a baby. Go on, lie down again. I’ll be right back.”
Yazid’s thoughts roamed. She had surprised him. Her reaction had been remarkably—how to put it?—normal. His only intimate experience of decent girls had been when Karim Khan invited him to each of his three daughters’ weddings. Treated as family, he sat across from the girls singing around the bride and groom and smelled their musk and cheap desi scent, village girls dressed up in bright colors, and felt happily invisible to them, who could marry only within their families and knew him as the orphan boy from the tea stall, a favorite of their father. Yasmin was so much cooler, quicker, more assured. Her notched chin expressed more strength and even stubbornness than her brother’s sensitive mien. Yazid had never permitted himself to look directly at her before, nor to consider her personality, for any such thoughts would be a betrayal of his friendship with Zain.
She returned with a bowl filled with hot water and a cloth, crouched down beside her brother, and dabbed at the wound, an angry ridge oozing drops of blood that looked as if a razor blade had scored soft leather.
“Come on, can’t you be gentler?” he hissed between clenched teeth as she applied the disinfectant. “I thought you wanted to be a doctor!”
“I’m in a hurry. If your papa sees this your career as a political activist will end before it even began. It’s an honorable wound, really. You’ve bled for your idol.”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“Notice how your friend here is too smart for whipping.”
“That’s what comes from being brought up in the streets,” Yazid suggested. “I’m like one of those railway-station dogs. You can’t hit them with a stone if you try.”
Yasmin cocked an eye at him. “You look pretty well fed for a railway-station dog. I’d say you’re more one of those fancy bulldogs that aficionados raise on butter and milk mixed with sugar.”
“Not at all. Those are kept for fighting. Not for show. I’m not the fighting type.”
Yasmin laughed, easily brought to it. “You’re Karim Khan’s great pet and luxury. I can see why he’s never prospered much, keeping you in chicken curries.”
“Stop it,” Zain protested. “Poor fellow. He’s a hero, and you’re talking about chicken curries. He carried me out of there on his back, more or less.”
“Tell me all about your rally,” said Yasmin, who had finished wrapping a bandage around Zain’s chest, the wound stanched. Yazid held the knot with his blunt finger while she nimbly cinched it down. “I wish I could have been there.”
Confidence in his storytelling powers overcame the reserve Yazid felt in front of this pretty girl.
“I guess it began with those boys they bused in from the university in Peshawar. They were all standing together, and they started making a fuss just out of sheer craziness. Bhutto Sahib kept pushing and pushing until finally they couldn’t control themselves.”
“You mean your Comrade Bhutto. And you should all be calling each other comrade too.”
Yazid smiled, keeping company with his audience. “As you say. So, our Comrade Bhutto talked and he built it up and built it up for longer than you could imagine, soft and loud and taking it here and taking it there.
“Then out of nowhere he shouts, ‘We’ll smash it down, and we’ll break it down, and we’ll level it to the ground!’ and he was standing alone on that big stage with one of those tall microphones on a metal pole. He waits, and then he shouts again, ‘I swear to you. We’ll smash it all to pieces and we’ll make it new again!’ There’s perfect silence, then suddenly, roaring, ‘You’ll own the world, we’ll forge with fire a sword of steel from ice!’ And he slams the microphone down to the ground and the crowd just went completely wild.
“That’s when I started pulling your brother toward the gate. I knew what was coming. Those boys would have torn up anyone who got in their way then. Even I was about ready to start marching wherever that man told us to. I was ready to believe anything. . . .”
Yasmin interrupted him with amusement. “But tell me, bhai, what exactly is it that you believed in?”
“That we’d smash everything up and then we’d have it our way.”
“And then the police step in and slice and dice my brother here. Wind you up and then beat you down.”
Yazid relaxed, spread his big hands on his knees. “Anyway, my blood is already too cold for that. I was watching the exits the whole time.”
“Thank God for good sense. And you, my beloved brother, should stay away from all this. You’re not built for rioting in the streets.”
“I should go,” Yazid said. “Before Malik Sahib returns.”
“Not at all,” Yasmin said. “You’re the hero. I was just joking about my father being angry. He’ll be secretly proud that his son got a bit blooded. You should stay and bask in it.”
Yazid felt confused, embarrassed. He couldn’t bear to be so close to Yasmin anymore. “No, I must beg leave. I promised Karim Khan I wouldn’t be late.”
Without rising Zain waved his hand. “All right, then. Come see me in the morning. Yasmin can let you out.”
Walking past the kitchen, which always smelled of spice and good food, Yazid thought of his ambling bulk and felt inadequate and experienced the loneliness that sometimes plagued him in the night. What right had he to be here?
At the door, he opened the catch and let himself out.
“Please, Bibi Jee, go in.”
“It’s nice,” she said, coming partway out the door. “The air smells like rain.”
“We can wish for rain,” Yazid suggested, uttering the first words that came into his head.
“You’re a good friend to my brother,” Yasmin said quietly.
“Please.” They both were embarrassed to be alone.
Yazid didn’t know how to end it. “I’ll go,” he blurted out, and as he walked he thought he heard her trilling laugh behind him and hated himself and wanted to slam his head against a pole or bend a piece of steel or run into the countryside and not stop.
Bayazid had never quite given up the fantasy he nurtured in boyhood, of discovering himself a child of some minister or prince. His romantic soul took refreshment from this impossibility, and his love for Yasmin could grow expansive and pure exactly because he looked at her from so very far away and yet could imagine, dream, that he would rise to her station. She was immaculate, each little curve, her dimple when she smiled, her fine gestures, the way she moved her fingers idly in her lap when she spoke with animation. Once when a strand of hair fell into her face while her hands were busy, she blew it back with a little puff from the corner of her mouth, blowing it up only to have it drift down again in a falling grace across her forehead, and this seemed to him adorable. Yazid went to Zain’s house only by invitation, and later, when he counted up the visits where Yasmin too had appeared and joined the conversation, there were not more than five or six of them, and it pained him that soon they all blurred together.
For many weeks he did not see her, keeping away as much as he could, until summoned by Zain, uncomfortable now while sitting talking of politics or of cricket with Uncle Rizwan. When next he saw her up close, she had just returned from the bazaar on a day so hot that drops of sweat dimpled her slender forearms as she raised her dupatta to cover her hair.
Now in front of Uncle Rizwan she was demure, quite different from her quick teasing after the rally.
“As-salaam alaikum, Yazid Bhai. I hope you’re talking cricket and not politics.” Still, she had that impudent smile, amused by him.
Yazid had stood up when she came in and stood shifting from one foot to the other and looking unfocussed at a spot in the air.
“Look, they haven’t even brought you water,” she said, and went in the kitchen and made tea with her own hands. When she brought it, then he dared just for a moment to look into her face, as she handed him the cup. Nothing in his life had prepared him for her perfection.
He thought of her often, dreamed of her, the stories that he had read in those many romance novels now come to life, wishing that some mad chance should allow him to give his life for her or to worship her from a distance, but in sight of her. He was desperate and happy and shy, a tiny shivering piercing emotion inside him all the time. His throat ached when he thought of her, and at unexpected moments suddenly he would feel deep joy, gratitude. The world could not possibly be bigger than now.
One Sunday morning Yazid came to pick up Zain for a trip to Rawal Dam on the other side of Islamabad, where there were rowboats for rent. Always before he had visited in the afternoon or evening. The house had a different morning feel, fresher, the single mulberry tree in the courtyard fruiting, so that Mai Viro stood washing away the fallen fruit on the concrete slabs with a hose and a broom, her shalwar rolled up to her knees, hair uncovered.
“Hello, Auntie,” Yazid said.
“Hello, young man. When did I have the honor of becoming related to you?”
“I’m afraid no one’s related to me,” Yazid replied, cheerily deflecting her temper.
That morning for the first time Yazid wore pants and a white shirt, as the college boys did, and black pointed shoes, all new, the largest size in the little shop where the schoolboys bought their kit, the shoes cruelly laced.
“Those teddy-boy pants will split when you sit down in front of your tandoor,” Mai Viro said, sweeping ferociously at the water bubbling from the hose.
“Let’s hope not,” Yazid said blithely. “Is Zain Sahib up?”
“This is an early-rising house. The big Sahib’s already gone to the store. Shouldn’t you be at work too?”
“It’s my day off.”
“Well, then you’re luckier than me,” she said, and returned to sweeping.
Inside, the rooms were cool and a breeze seemed to blow through and into the atrium. He found Zain in the sitting room with the newspapers in front of him, still wearing a dhoti, and eating eggs with paratha.
“Come on,” he said. “Tuck in. I’ll go change. I’ll tell Viro to make you something.”
“For God’s sake, don’t! She’ll add a dose of rat poison as flavoring.”
“Yeah, we all worry about that, except the revered father. When they built that woman they injected her personality backward. The rest of us try to hide our bad temper, but she hides the good one.”
Yazid sat down, throwing out his legs comfortably. “That’s how you know she’s loyal. She doesn’t bother to try and win you over.”
“That’s a subtle thought. Anyway, give me twenty minutes. I need to look smart with you all dressed like a bridegroom!” He joked, making his only reference to Yazid’s attire, but it was a serious matter, the tea-stall boy putting on schoolboy clothes.
Yazid sat listening to the sounds of the echoing house. Sparrows that had flown down into the roofless atrium chirped noisily. Zain’s paratha, torn and dabbed with grease, looked delicious, and after satisfying himself that no one was around he got up and tore a piece off, sprinkled it with salt, and sat down, munching. He mustn’t wipe his hands on his new pants.
A rustling behind him, and he knew immediately that it was Yasmin. He pretended he didn’t know she was there, and she also stayed quiet for a long moment. Then she walked in and stood across from him, one hand touching the back of a sofa, the glass bangles on her wrist making a little chipping sound.
“Caught!” she said. “Go on, Yazid Bhai, chew and swallow. Don’t pretend you don’t have a mouthful of paratha.”
He had stood up, heart fluttering. “Waste not want not.”
“Will you have some tea?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
“At least let me get you some water. To wash down all that paratha.”
“It was just a scrap, not enough to need washing.”
“But then you’d have to say that. You’ve probably had two or three of them. I notice the plate’s nearly empty.”
“On my honor.”
She went to the kitchen and returned with a tray and jug of water and two glasses, poured herself one, and offered him one also.
“There you go,” she said. Again, they were embarrassed to be alone. Shy, after a moment she continued, “Have a good time at the lake.” Still she didn’t leave, but stood, her hand playing with a loose thread on the sofa. “Another time, I’d like to see it too.” Her voice raised at the end, as if asking a question. Putting her empty glass on a table, she disappeared into the atrium. He heard her chappals on the steps going up, clattering, noisy where usually she drifted silently.
Her glass glowed on the table after she left. The sparrows still were calling, and still that delicious breeze, the one that blew through this house and funnelled up the atrium, this house that included Uncle Rizwan and his cricket scores and Britisher humbug and the damp beautiful mother and the principled timid father and impossible brilliant difficult Zain and then Yasmin Yasmin Yasmin. And he couldn’t help himself, though he knew he mustn’t. He stood up—he had sat down again when Yasmin left the room, like a man shot, or whose legs go out from under him—and went over and took the glass that she had drunk from and put his lips exactly where hers had been.
And then he heard Mai Viro’s voice.
“What’s this! What’s this!”
Yazid turned and faced her, the glass still clasped in his hand. She looked triumphant, impossibly old, her face settled down like a sack into her mouth.
“Nothing, Bibi. I was just putting the glass back.”
“Don’t lie,” she seethed. “You’re doing some magic with her glass, aren’t you? Spit it out, what do you have in your mouth? You think I haven’t been watching you? Just because Malik Sahib thinks there’s no dirt in the gutter doesn’t mean I do. I know about the gutter, it stinks and it sticks to your skin. Open your mouth and show me.”
She thought he had some magic spell written on a paper in his mouth, to mix it with Yasmin’s saliva. Hobbling over, she reached up with her bent crabbed hands and took him roughly by the face, barely able to reach high enough.
“Open it! Now! Or I’ll scream.”
He opened his mouth and she looked carefully, studied it. She wanted to put her fingers in there, and it seemed awful to think of her rooting around with those claws.
“You get in here, I’ll have you in my kitchen. I want to deal with you right now.”
He trailed her into the kitchen, then into the little room behind it where she took her afternoon rest on a greasy mat lying on the floor, with rags for pillows.
When she turned, he put his hands together as if in prayer. It all would come tumbling down now—he couldn’t bear it—for such an innocent trespass. Tears came to his eyes. “For God’s sake, Bibi. What have I done?” He reached out to touch her knee in supplication.
“Keep your hands off me. I know what you are, and I know what you’ll be. You should never have come into this house. Malik Sahib with his social this and social that, he’s proof that too much education makes an idiot. I’ve been waiting for this. Don’t tell me you weren’t doing some magic on that little girl. See these hands?” She held her cupped hands in his face, slightly shaking, her anger. “See? These hands brought up that girl. I fed her, I cleaned her, I bathed her. No one else in this house has any sense. And I’ll tell you another thing, I’d rather strangle her with these same hands than see a thing like you anywhere near her. I promise you, if ever you come again through those gates, I’ll say such things about you that you’ll not make that mistake a second time, and I’ll tar you and shame you forever. I’m an old woman, and I’ve served them all my life. They’ll believe me over you, no matter how much you’ve tricked them with your tongue and your made-up manners. Look at you, coming here with those pointed shoes and those pants like a college boy. You’ll never be that. Go away.” And she spat on the floor.
“Out!” She picked up a broom lying there and poked it at him, driving him. “Out!” And she poked and pushed him out the door and to the gate and stood there watching him, eyes blazing with righteousness and triumph.
When he stopped at the gate and turned, huge bulk of him, she looked him in the eyes and began screaming, “Thieves, robbers, I’ve been killed,” shrieking it now so loud that people would come running soon.
Unmanned, he turned and scooted away.
Where could he go? He hurried through the streets, turning left and right without thinking. It seemed to him that he might be pursued. He had forced his feet into the new shoes, which pinched at the front, and now they hurt terribly. Finally, he could walk no farther. Sitting down on a boulder, he removed the shoes, then also his new checkered socks. His big feet popped out, seeming to inflate as they pulled loose, twice the size that would again fit those pointed shapes. Even in his sorrow, he thought, They’ll never make me wear that shit again.
He remembered then the shoes he had held the day that Karim Khan found him, new shoes in a little boy’s arms, as much as he knew of his arrival on earth. They threw those away and I never saw them again, he mourned. He had never wept for that boy as he did now, for his new shoes, people hurrying past, this big man wearing pants too tight and barefoot, holding a pair of shoes clasped against his chest, back shaking, how sad he felt for himself, whatever name he once had—he must have had a name. Yazid. Bayazid. His pain ran its course and subsided, it was over. He stood up, began walking, barefoot. People looked sideways at him hobbling along. Finally, he flung the shoes that he’d bought with such a buoyant heart into an empty lot.
He had thought it must be late in the afternoon, but he found the lunchtime rush at the stall in full swing. “Come on, out of the way,” he told the boy whom he had taught to make the chapatis and naan. “Let me show you how it’s done!”
He set to work, and everything fell to hand and felt right, the balls of dough cupped in his palms, the play of them, the liveliness of the dough as he worked it, and the satisfying whack as he slapped the wet chapatis down into the seven-hundred-Fahrenheit mouth of the radiant tandoor. So many thousands of these tandoori rotis had passed through his hands, sometimes he dreamt that he’d fed half the country. That was his bounty, that was his gift. Sitting cross-legged with his back to the wall and surveying the twelve charpoys arranged out front all the way to the road, he felt himself sitting at the wheel of a bus, or even in the cockpit of an airplane, seen in a movie. This was his domain, undisputed. He would sit here four-square while they built their new Pakistan. Thank God the customers rolled in, and each one got a signature piece hot from his hands, no chapati allowed to cool, but thrown into the scrap bin if not taken right away. ♦
This is drawn from “This Is Where the Serpent Lives.”
