In the City by the Sea Read online

  ‘But for all you know you could be saying in rooster-speech, “Be silent or be dinner”,’ Hasan said.

  ‘True,’ Salman Mamoo said. ‘Very true.’

  Little bubbles of water were beginning to form at the bottom of the pan. Hasan left his seat to stand by the stove while Salman Mamoo scooped up a spoonful of tea-leaves and flicked his wrist just so to deposit the leaves in the water in a perfect circle. On impact, the tea-leaves leaked a rich brown colour into the water. Another spoonful followed suit and Salman Mamoo lowered the flame. For a few minutes there would be calm.

  ‘So,’ Salman Mamoo said, cuffing Hasan’s ear, ‘what momentous things have been happening in your life while the President has arranged for me to catch up on my reading?’

  ‘I’ve stopped eating pomegranates.’

  Salman Mamoo merely nodded. ‘Uh-huh. Saira told me you’ve been reading Greek myths. The Persephone story had the same impact on me when I first read it.’

  Persephone? Hasan started to shake his head but Salman Mamoo had already turned away, distracted by the tea-leaves sinking beneath the rollicking surface of the water. Salman Mamoo whisked the pan off the flame, spooned in sugar, added half a cup of milk and placed the pan on a slightly higher flame. He bit his lip and flexed his fingers in preparation for the split-second moment of optimum boiling. Hasan rested his head on Salman Mamoo’s back for an instant brief enough to create the impression that his head was merely brushing against Salman Mamoo’s shirt. The tea frothed and rose in a mass of tiny bubbles, and just as it appeared to reach overflow Salman Mamoo had the pan in the air. A twist of the right wrist and tea was streaming into a mug; a twist of the left wrist and the tea poured back into the saucepan. Right twist, left twist, right twist, left twist, until the tea’s sheet of steam unravelled into long threads. Hasan held his face close to the mug and felt his pores open.

  ‘ ’Morning, ’morning,’ Ami greeted, yawning her way into the kitchen. ‘Sally, put the kettle on. Tea is needed with a vengeance.’

  ‘I can make my special tea for you,’ Salman Mamoo offered.

  ‘Spare me,’ said Ami. ‘Anyone who boils milk in tea . . . here we go again.’

  Salman Mamoo’s watch alarm was frantically beeping the hour. Salman Mamoo lunged past Ami to switch on the portable radio. Hasan rolled his eyes at Ami while foreign clocks chimed the hour; he had already heard that clanging three times last night. The chimes gave way to a clipped voice which conveyed an air of perfectly coiffed hair.

  Hasan twisted open the biscuit jar and contented himself with dunking biscuits in his tea while humming a commercial jingle that had been banned from the airwaves. ‘T. Tea, Man’s fantasy/Where oh where would woman be, if she didn’t have her own T. Tea.’

  Mid-bar, Hasan recalled Ami’s objections to the jingle and looked up guiltily to see if she had heard him. But at that instant the atmosphere in the kitchen took on the texture of bread that had soaked in milk too long. Salman Mamoo slumped on his stool with his hands spread across his face like dovetails in shadow pictures. Ami’s hand commanded Hasan into silence. Two words changed the newscaster’s babble into coherence.

  ‘. . . Salman Haq’s supporters clashed with police in riots around the city. The violence was precipitated by rumours that government-funded universities have been instructed to deny admission to applicants who are active supporters of Haq’s Anti-Corruption Enterprise. Official reports put the death toll at seventeen, but unofficial estimates suggest that the body count could be more than twice that number.’

  A biscuit fell from Hasan’s fingers and disappeared into the tea. Riots around the City! Hasan heard again the school riot alarms, smelled wet mud, felt dead leaves press against his skin as he hid in a flower bed. Stay or run? His eyes darted around. The boys on the cricket pitch were running into the Senior School building through the door farthest away from Hasan. There was another door, closer to him, but as he was about to rise from the flower-bed someone slammed the door shut from inside. Hasan heard the bolts fall. The last of the cricketers ran in and the farthest door also slammed shut, as did the lab doors and the music-room doors. A staccato chanting arose from the street, followed by crashing sounds, as though dozens of hands were beating against the side of a bus. Hasan held one hand over his heart to muffle its sound. This was no drill.

  Hasan’s eyes swept to the gaping front gate, where the chowkidar was on his knees, tugging at the vertical bolt which anchored the gate in place. Too late. The mob rushed in.

  For one terrible moment all Hasan saw was a mass of bodies, running, yelling, brandishing weapons and then . . . they’re just students, he realized. Their uniforms were not of some terrorist organization, but of the government-run school up the road, and their weapons were twigs, stones from the roadsides and pebbles used in hopscotch games. Hasan raised his head a little.

  ‘This is not a time for studying. This is a time for unity,’ a boy Hasan’s age shouted.

  And another voice: ‘Close your school. Tell your students to join our rally.’

  Police sirens wailed. There was a moment of absolute stillness and Hasan found himself thinking, ‘My shirt must be filthy.’ Then the boys turned, ran, but by now the chowkidar had tugged the vertical bolt out of its socket, and locked the gate. The sirens drew closer. Someone near Hasan yelled in a teacher’s voice, ‘Unlock it!’ but the gate was already swarming with bodies – climbing and leaping, pushing and yelling.

  ‘Quick! The wall!’

  The cry came from amidst the swarm, and some two dozen boys broke away from the gate to scale the boundary walls. Hasan remembered the shards of glass embedded atop the wall at the same moment as a dozen hands pressed down on them. When Hasan opened his eyes the boys were gone, and a redness that was not betel-nut juice trailed down the walls.

  Hasan stood up unsteadily. He could hear again the staccato refrain. It was fainter this time, but Hasan understood it now: ‘Sal-man. Sal-man.’

  A hand, ink-stained and hairy, dragged him to class, but he didn’t care because he knew people were celebrating on the streets, knew the President must have invited Salman Mamoo to form the new government. Then Mrs D. Khan asked, ‘Hasan, is that your neighbour outside?’ and Zehra walked into class, said, ‘The Widow’s sent Khan to take us home,’ and Mrs D. Khan let him go without protest. But Hasan still believed the news was good, though Zehra shook her head and Khan was silent as he started up the engine.

  The car turned on to the main street, and Hasan blinked at the unfamiliarity of the scene. Gone: the bustle, the almost-accidents, the games of chicken between drivers and pedestrians. Gone also: the newspaper hawkers screaming out headlines that included Salman Mamoo’s name, the beggars dragging deformed limbs towards car windows, the vendors selling smuggled goods on pavements, the fruitseller carving guavas into roses to show off the pink flesh. Shutters were shut at: the T-shirt stores where cool teenagers thumbed through hundreds of shirts that were identical except for the foreign designer name emblazoned across each one; the fur-shops where foreigners gaped over clothing too warm for the City’s clime; the cloth-shops where merchants unravelled bolts upon bolts of cotton and linen to dazzle all eyes, especially the Widow’s. In the absence of shutters, doors were locked at Aba’s tailor’s shop with its framed letters of recommendation from politicians long out of style.

  Khan drove through the strangeness without saying a word. When Zehra and Hasan tried to elicit some information – what Khan yaar why tell us please come on where’s Ami where’s the Widow why are you here what’s happening is Salman Mamoo we’re not babies – Khan only said, ‘I was told to bring you home. That is all I know. The rumours outnumber the flies today. Windows down, no air-conditioner.’ This last piece of information was the hardest to understand, but Khan was clearly not in a mood to explain. When Hasan and Zehra tried to talk to each other Khan told them to be quiet.

  The car had hurtled through three red lights before Hasan saw that Khan was leaning sideways in the dr
iver’s seat, his head inclined towards the open window as though listening for something. Within seconds Hasan heard the ringing sound of protestors – not young boys this time – warping Salman Mamoo’s name into a battle-cry. The cry was distant, but Khan slowed down slightly, looked around as though to judge its origin, and swerved on to a side street. Three more times the cry repeated itself, each time arising from a different source, and each time Khan slowed, and twice changed course. The fifth interruption was the sound of bullets, and that time Khan kept on going, pushing the needle on the speedometer farther and farther to the right.

  When Khan pulled up to Zehra’s house Uncle Latif and the Widow were standing outside the gate, clearly waiting for Zehra and Hasan. Uncle Latif’s hair was all out of place and he kept pushing the sleeves of his kurta above his elbows.

  ‘If you roll them up, they won’t keep slipping down,’ the Widow was saying to Uncle Latif as Hasan stepped out of the car. Uncle Latif thrust his sleeves up again and moved forward towards Hasan. Another car came tearing down the street and Ami stepped out, very calm. She took Hasan’s hands in hers. ‘Salman’s under house arrest,’ she said.

  Now, three months later, Hasan smiled at the memory of his panic. Ami raised an eyebrow at him and he smoothed out his mouth. He wondered if Ami shared his relief at having Salman Mamoo so much to themselves again. No rallies to attend or speeches to write. No ribbons to cut or bribes to refuse.

  Salman Mamoo passed his hands in front of his face as though signing off a prayer, and tilted his head back. He seemed about to speak, but Ami clamped a hand over his mouth and shook her head. Salman Mamoo nodded and stood up. He fumbled around the back of the spice cupboard and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Saloo!’ Ami exclaimed. She picked up a wooden spoon from the kitchen counter and used it to flick the packet out of Salman Mamoo’s hand. Within seconds Ami and Salman Mamoo were duelling with wooden spoons over possession of the cigarette packet.

  ‘Who gets them for you?’ Ami asked, thrusting forward with her spoon. ‘Zahoor?’

  Salman Mamoo parried the blow. ‘After his wife ran off with the guy from the tobacco company! Uh-uh! Ouch!’ This last regarding a wooden rap on his knuckles. ‘I buy mine off the guards outside.’

  ‘Multi-layered irony!’ Ami said. ‘And of course Gul doesn’t know. Honestly, Saloo.’

  He shrugged. ‘It keeps my hands occupied.’

  The spoon-swords locked, bowl to bowl. Ami, left handed, and Salman Mamoo, more conventional in his grip, stood like mirror images who had wandered apart long, long ago and now, reunited, found expressions, hair length and final chiselmarks on features altered. The whistle of the kettle startled them out of reflection.

  Ami bit her lip and turned away from Salman Mamoo. ‘Those things will be the death of you,’ she said.

  Salman Mamoo muttered a response which Hasan could not make out.

  ‘What was that?’ Ami said.

  Salman Mamoo just shook his head. It was much, much later, almost five weeks later, that Hasan would realize what Salman Mamoo had said:

  ‘Optimist.’

  Chapter Four

  It was during that mid-term week within those high, high boundary walls which, mountain-like, cut off the outside world, that Hasan rediscovered the morning dew ritual, which he used to perform when he was five.

  He awoke every morning and knew, by opening his window and gulping in the air, that it was 6.30 a.m. Outside, the grass glistened with dew that had sprinkled from the wings of dusk-fairies as the sound of human eyelids opening sent them flying backwards through time-zones. Barefoot, his body trembling with the possibility of cold, Hasan ran lightly across the grass, and knelt down.

  Within seconds he heard the call to prayer: ‘Ashad-o-ana-illaha-il-Allah-o-akbar . . .’, the words falling from heaven like a rope that Hasan had only to grab to be pulled up into the sky. Hasan bent his torso forward so that his whole world was the sound of the azaan in his ears and a single blade of grass before his eyes, dew poised on its end. He bent further down, licked the dew off the grass and, with the taste of fairyland in his mouth, he whispered . . . but here the routine changed. For, while Hasan had once whispered his wishes, ‘A day at the beach’, ‘A new cricket bat’, he now only whispered ‘Azeem’.

  This was the only time he could think about Azeem without that strange sensation running from the pit of his stomach to the back of his throat. The only time he could safely recall last Friday when he was unable to climb down from the roof until Zehra, unquestioning, took him down by the hand as though they were four and six again and she was once more leading him past clawing, night-draped, witch-inhabited bushes into the sanctuary of lamplight and food smells.

  Later that day Ami and Aba had returned from lunch at Farah Khala’s and told Hasan . . . a terrible accident . . . your cousin’s cousin, Azeem . . . remember Azeem from Ali Bhai’s wedding three years ago . . . well, his family just moved back here . . . bought a house just near us, and today, while Azeem was flying a kite on his roof . . .

  There was a photograph from that wedding, in which Hasan and Azeem crouched in one corner, oblivious to cameras, on their faces the instant friendship of two boys exchanging views on how to fly.

  Hasan retraced the green stain of his footprints back across the grass, his tread a little heavier with each passing day, for he knew this perfect morning moment would end soon, as soon as he went home to his bed in direct earshot of the new mosque which crackled the azaan over the hiss of a loudspeaker and did not allow the Arabic to descend, petal-like, from heaven. Besides, he couldn’t breakfast on dew at home with Uncle Latif liable to lean over his balcony at any moment and yell across jocular warnings against malnutrition. And if it wasn’t Uncle Latif it would be Zehra, the Oldest Man, the Widow, one of the Bodyguard.

  Really, Ami was the only person Hasan could bear to be watched by on those mornings. The final morning at Salman Mamoo’s house she was seated on a cane chair, sketch-book in hand, when Hasan walked back across the grass to the verandah. He squeezed down beside Ami and wrapped the trailing end of her sari around his shoulders.

  ‘I’ll miss this smell,’ Hasan said, inhaling the pine smell which clung to every blade of grass, every leaf, even every fruit on the kumquat tree.

  ‘I won’t,’ Ami said. ‘It’s the smell of my miserable adolescence.’ She began to enumerate on her fingers. ‘It’s the smell of resenting my parents for moving us up North; it’s the smell of wanting to wallop Salman for his insistence on rhapsodizing over the different shades of green his eyes registered in a single Northern morning; it’s the smell of rebelling just so that I could escape the category of Justagirl, though in the process I had to become Whatkindofgirl!’ Ami stopped and gave a short laugh. ‘Salman went on about shades of colour and I smoked in secret. Oh, perversity of fate!’

  ‘You don’t like this smell, huh?’ Hasan said.

  Ami kissed his hair. ‘Not a lot.’ Salman Mamoo crowed out of the kitchen window, and Gul Mumani wandered out on to the lawn. ‘Go get some tea. I’ll join you later.’

  When Hasan entered the kitchen Salman Mamoo handed him a steaming cup as though this were any other day, but when Hasan dipped his tongue in the tea he tasted salt.

  ‘Sorry if it’s a little watery,’ Salman Mamoo said, staring at the tine of a fork as though it held all the secrets of the universe. Hasan turned his back on Salman Mamoo, poured the tea into a plastic container and left the kitchen.

  In his bedroom, tea container clasped to his chest, he squeezed his body into the window frame. He averted his eyes from the gaping suitcase on his bed, hoping that if he was still, perfectly still, Time would join him in petrification. But though his body maintained a rigidity of muscle that would impress any drill-sergeant his mind rushed on faster-faster and Time had to leap through hours in moments just to keep up with it.

  ‘You’re not the one under house-arrest.’ It was Ami’s voice. She and Gul Mumani sat down on the verand
ah chairs, holding a bowl of raisins between them, unaware of Hasan curled just feet away. ‘You have the freedom to come and go, so come to our place more, don’t go to visit dreary relatives.’

  ‘Saira, what do you think, that I enjoy, what, prefer seeing Saba and Sabiha and whatnot to seeing you and Shehryar and Hasan?’

  ‘No, I don’t. That’s why I don’t understand it.’

  ‘Well, it’s not that I see them more often than before. It’s just that I see you less. It’s not a complex thing. Simple as a simile, really. How do you think Salman would feel if every evening I left him here, locked away from the world, while I went to see you and Shehryar?’

  ‘If you were in his place . . .’

  ‘He’s not as strong. We both know that. Strong in other ways, yes. Strong like knights and martyrs, but not like the knights’ and martyrs’ parents.’

  Hasan wrinkled his nose at the sudden image of Sir Lancelot having to be in bed by eight. No late-night jousting. No jousting at all, in fact.

  ‘Well, what about your schools?’ Ami’s voice turned hard. ‘Are they supposed to go around administering themselves while you sit blithely in the City playing the good wife?’

  ‘Saira, Oscars await you! I’m fine. Fully occupied, I swear. Though let’s be frankfurter – you must have dropped your brain in a flowerpot somewhere or you’d realize the schools would be shut licketyspliteky if I stayed involved with them. Chalo, let’s see what the boys are up to.’

  The two women linked arms. Then, in that moment between moving out of Hasan’s eyeshot and out of his earshot, Ami whispered, ‘Gul, I’m scared.’

  And Gul Mumani: ‘Saira, I’m terrified.’

  Hasan stared at the whorls in the wood of the frame, trying to memorize them so he could take with him the frame, take with him a doorway into a world of fairy-dew, take with him a space through which he could crawl into a moonlit conversation with Salman Mamoo.