Children of Dust Read online

  “Who is Iblis?”

  “The worst: Shaytan. Mankind’s mortal enemy.”

  Iblis was a jinn that, before the creation of mankind, had been raised up to heaven because he was pious, but then he disobeyed Allah and was cast out of the Garden and now sought revenge against mankind by leading people to falsehood. He did many evil things:

  If you yawned and didn’t cover your mouth, he slept under your tongue for the whole night and defecated in your throat, which gave you bad breath. If you didn’t recite bismillah—“in the name of God”—before eating your food, he ate all of it so you remained hungry. He was the one who told you not to take a walk around the block after dinner so you would have gas in your stomach and break your wazu, your ablutions, by farting. He was the one who was responsible for pulling a donkey’s tail and making it heehaw during prayers. He was the one who caused those scary shooting stars, because at night he tried to sneak into Paradise to topple the kursi—Allah’s throne—and the angels fended him off by throwing meteorites at him.

  “You must never follow Iblis,” Ammi said. “You are Abir ul Islam, and Iblis wants to deceive Muslims.”

  “I won’t. I promise. I am Abir ul Islam, and Iblis is my enemy.”

  I resolved to one day join the angels that fought Iblis, and in preparation for hurling meteorites I threw my tennis ball against the wall.

  3

  One day when he wasn’t working, Pops took me for a long walk alongside the canal and told me the history of Islam and Pakistan.

  He told me about the British taking over Mughal India; the fall of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, which took away the protector of the Muslims; the circumstances around the creation of Pakistan, a state for Muslims who sought to avoid being dominated by the Hindus; the emergence of the Jamaat-e-Islami Party; the breakup of East and West Pakistan; the rise of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his eventual hanging at the hands of General Zia ul Haq.

  “I support him,” Pops said about the general. “Because he’s a pious Muslim and because he gives unwavering support to the mujahideen in Afghanistan attacked by the Soviets.”

  “Why did the Soviets attack Afghanistan?” I asked as we crossed a street full of sputtering blue and green motorized rickshaws.

  “There are two reasons,” Pops said, giving me his pinky to hold. “First, the Soviets persecute people who follow Islam. In their country Muslims have to hide their Qurans and pretend that they are non-Muslim. Second, the Soviet Union wants to capture Afghanistan so that it can then capture a part of Pakistan and gain our warm-water port at Gwadar. They need this to attack America by sea.”

  “And Zia ul Haq is helping the mujahideen fight the Soviet Union?”

  “Yes. The mujahideen fight in the name of Islam, and even the world’s greatest army cannot defeat them.”

  The mujahideen immediately inspired me. When Pops wasn’t around I’d try to talk about them with Ammi, but she didn’t listen to news and didn’t have much to say about them. However, because I insisted on hearing about jihad, she told me stories about the famous battles waged by the Prophet and his Companions. There was the Battle of Badr, where the Prophet and his 313 Companions held off a polytheistic army far greater in number because the Muslims were joined by scimitar-wielding angels; there was the Battle of Uhud, where the Prophet suffered a wound in his side because of the treachery of the Hypocrites; and there was the Battle of Khandaq, where the Prophet dug a trench around Medina on the advice of his Persian friend Salman, who used to be a slave but was freed by Muslims.

  Because I insisted on hearing even more about the mujahideen, one day Ammi took me to a bookstore and bought me a children’s magazine that contained part of a serialized novella about a boy named Mahmud who lived in Kabul. His father fought against the Soviets while his mother tended to injured mujahideen. His little sister was mutilated when she picked up a land mine that the Soviets had disguised as a teddy bear. Mahmud wanted everyone to know that all around Afghanistan the Soviets had placed land mines that looked like toys and were causing all the little boys and girls in the country to lose appendages and eyes. He also described helicopter gunships that sprayed fire, and talked about how he dreamed of owning a missile that would allow him to take the gunships down. He wanted to liberate his land in the name of Islam. I wished I could help him.

  When I was done reading that story, I desperately wanted to go and get the next part in the series, but whenever I appealed to Ammi to take me back to the bookstore, she said it was too far and there was no use getting khajjal in all the traffic. I went back to the story of Mahmud and read it over and over until I nearly had it memorized. Eventually I grew bored and started reading another action story in the magazine. It was about a black South African rebel living under apartheid. Whites spat on him and segregated his people and insulted his family so that eventually he had no choice but to stand up for his dignity and take matters into his own hands. One day the white governor, under whose rule the rebel lived, was throwing a party on a lake, and the rebel, having read about the pending event, decided that he would drive a boat laden with explosives into the governor’s yacht. The story of his resistance ended with a blaze that consumed the yacht and the rebel and the governor. This story didn’t interest me so much because it wasn’t about Islam.

  It was then that I discovered Aakhri Chataan—“The Last Mountain”—a long-running serial produced by Pakistani TV. The series was based on the novel of the same name by a Jamaat-e-Islami journalist, Naseem Hijazi. The drama, set between the years AD 1220 and 1226, at the height of Genghis Khan’s invasions of Islamic Asia, and thirty years before the fall of the caliphate in Baghdad at the hands of Hulagu Khan, was lavish and star-studded.

  The protagonist, the proverbial last mountain, was Sultan Jalalud-din Khwarezmi, a prince of Persia, bereft of his kingdom when his father was killed by the Mongols. He waged a long-standing series of battles against Genghis, raising armies and chasing him from Armenia and Azerbaijan to India and back again. The serial was a tragic-romantic recounting of the major military and political events in Khwarezmi’s life, interwoven with the exploits of his allies.

  In the final episode, one of Khwarezmi’s cohorts gave a rousing speech to the leaders of Baghdad about making a call for jihad—which only the Caliph had the power to do—and sending troops to Khwarezmi’s assistance. He told them to believe in Khwarezmi because he was the only Central Asian leader who had defeated the Mongols in open battle. The speech caused the leaders to break out in spirited debate, because they didn’t want the Caliph to declare jihad. Meanwhile, the scene shifted to Khwarezmi, standing atop a cliff with his men near the front against the Mongols. At a distance he saw riders bearing Baghdad’s colors. The sight of the riders prompted him to break into a monologue in which he thanked the heavens for Baghdad’s support and lambasted the skeptics among his crew for doubting Baghdad’s mettle: “I told you that Allah would hear our prayers and they would come.” Once the riders came closer, however, Khwarezmi realized that they were simply messengers carrying a letter of decline from Baghdad. The Caliph had shown his cowardice.

  It was here that the tragic climax of the series occurred. Intermixed with scenes of dance, wine, and women—symbols of a Muslim warrior’s failure—Khwarezmi engaged in a sequence of monologues. He bemoaned his castles of sand, complained of the way the soldier’s blade melted before the enemy’s wealth, and wept that his voice didn’t reach the heavens. The series came to an end with tasbih beads falling ingloriously upon the ground as an anonymous old man cried, while Khwarezmi, no longer worthy of a horse, got atop an ass and rode off into the snow. The scene of his departure was followed by still paintings accompanied by melancholy music depicting Baghdad’s eventual fall to Hulagu Khan in 1258, a story of great tragedy and humiliation that all Muslims know well.

  The main character of the series turned out not to be Khwarezmi. It was Baghdad—its decadent elite, its political intrigue, its traitors, its emasculated Caliphs. It was the infil
tration of pro-Mongol elements, and the monopoly of sniveling, pacifist, fatalist, out-of-touch clerics who simply wouldn’t allow the Caliph to make an open call for jihad and go to Khwarezmi’s assistance. To avoid being defeated as Baghdad was by the Mongols, Muslims had to be more like the Companions of the Prophet or the mujahideen of Afghanistan. They had to engage in jihad. That was the TV show’s simple lesson.

  I took a tennis racket, tied a rope around it, and slung it around my torso like a Kalashnikov. Then I went around declaring people Mongols and shooting them.

  4

  I learned of sin from a girl named Sina.

  A few years older than my seven, she was a servant at Beyji’s house. She had dark brown skin and her musk was musty. She bore the irrepressible smell of a kitchen drain clogged with stale vegetables. She owned just one outfit, a light pink floral shalwar kameez. Due to age and infinite washing it had become nearly see-through, so that when she went into a squat and swept the veranda in long, controlled, side-to-side sweeps of the jharoo I could see her sinewy thighs—dark pythons wearing gauzy veils. When she picked up my plates I could see the small areolas on her chest. Day after day I watched her, wanting only that she raise her downcast eyes and look at me. Yet she remained expressionless. She performed her chores with such blind commitment, such indifferent exactitude, that there was never any reason for anyone to speak to her. If out of all the other servant girls she was arbitrarily selected to sift a batch of peas or pick a tray of lentils, she moved to the assigned task, completed it, and merged back into the shadows of irrelevance. I didn’t know how I could catch her interest.

  Then Adina visited the house.

  Adina was a rich girl from overseas who had recently moved to Lahore and was invited over to play with me. She had been well fed on romance novels and Indian films. The first day together she took me into a bedroom and had me act out various film scenes with her. In one, where I was a restaurant owner and she was the habitually late waitress, I was supposed to lower my sunglasses—our only prop—and give her a deep, stern, manly look, a look that she had me modify and tinker with until it fulfilled her vision. In response to the look she wiggled and squirmed in apology, softening up her boss with feminine pouts, befuddled sighs, delicate knee slaps of haplessness, and mildly sensual nail-biting. In another scene she scripted, she and I had just entered into an arranged marriage and now, after the reception, were meeting for the first time. We were supposed to do “dialogue” with each other, she instructed: she would say creative and adult things about how she resented her parents for not asking her consent before marriage, to which I was supposed to respond with dramatic pronouncements that proclaimed the inevitability of her love for me.

  I took Adina’s role-playing game to Sina.

  Following her around for a day, I found that there was a moment in her daily routine when she stripped off her cloak of invisibility, a time when she wasn’t a servant but became, for lack of a better word, a woman. It was in the evening, when it had become dark but was not yet late enough for dinner. During that interval Sina went to the shed in the backyard and took a shower in the partly open servants’ enclosure. Then, hair dripping, she put her clothes back on and walked around the backyard, airing herself. Save for the lights seeping through the curtains, it was completely dark by the time she finished. It was there in the yard that I approached her.

  “I want you to play with me,” I ordered.

  “You want to play now?”

  The darkness made me bold. “Yes. We will play here. I will be the husband.”

  “I don’t know…,” she said in a voice drenched with reluctance.

  “It will be all right,” I assured. I grabbed her by the hand and took her to the lawn. The moon, full and fourteenth, had broken out of the clouds, and her skin and eyes were glowing. “So, let’s see,” I said, stalling for time as I came up with a scenario. “How about we’re at a picnic?” I clinked an imaginary glass with her. “Drink!”

  She mimicked, but without any eagerness.

  “Come on, show a little joash,” I demanded. “You’re out on a beautiful day with your powerful husband! Show some desire!”

  She didn’t respond. After sipping my imaginary drink for a little while, I became annoyed by the silence.

  “I think we need more dialogue. How will you feel if I tell you that your beauty is like that of a Night Princess?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking genuinely bewildered.

  “Look,” I said, becoming the director. “You have options when someone says that to you. You can do nakhra, like whine and complain, to convey that you’re very shy. Or you can be my enemy who gets angry—”

  “I’m ashamed,” she interrupted.

  “Don’t be!”

  I pulled her close, more from affection than perversity. As she struggled against me, I made her fright a part of our role-play. She became the damsel in distress and I was her protector. As I held her body against mine, her hair spilled droplets on my arms. Her clothes were damp and sticky. My mood suddenly turned.

  “Take off your clothes,” I instructed. Then I paused for a moment, hearing the swishing of the trees, checking for the sound of footsteps in the driveway, listening to the laughter of oblivious adults safely lodged deep inside the belly of the bungalow. “I want to see your girl things,” I said. “I will show you my privates in return.”

  It was a command. She was a servant: she obeyed. She pulled her shalwar to her knees and lifted up her shirt to her neck. The blue light danced on her scrubbed nudity. I stood back on my knees and pulled down my shorts for a brief moment. Then just as quickly I pulled them back up but let her remain naked so that I could touch her stomach.

  While stroking her skin I made melodramatic filmi comments about her body, the moonlight, and fragrant roses. Then my mouth sought her chest, stomach, and thighs. Because I was not yet familiar with the concept of kissing, my movements were just that, actions that represented affection.

  Yet, for all my interest in maintaining the integrity of the game, I couldn’t bear to keep my lips against her body. Her smell oozed out of her skin and burned my nose. It was the smell of her poverty and servitude; of her caste and lower station. It disgusted me. In a sudden move I pulled away from her and stemmed a wave of nausea by holding my breath.

  My withdrawal was an act so savage and sudden that it cut through the conditioning that over the years had made her obedience personified. It sliced through her submission. She pulled her clothes into place and writhed away, turning violently like a stepped-on worm. One pink chappal, hanging off her foot as she pulled away, dragged against the white marble as she disappeared into the dark.

  Then she went and told on me.

  The next day I was playing in the backyard when the adults came to punish me.

  “Good boys don’t play games with girls,” Ammi said. “It is gunah to play games with girls. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Have you become Shaytan?”

  “No. I am Abir ul Islam.”

  “You sure aren’t behaving like it.”

  “Put out your left hand,” my aunt said.

  I obeyed.

  Upon it she placed a piece of paper and a pencil and told me to write the penitential sentence—“I ask Allah for forgiveness”—one hundred times in neat handwriting and then make a signature at the bottom.

  “Do you know why you’re getting this piece of paper in your left hand?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Because of Islam.”

  “What about Islam?”

  “On the Day of Judgment, when Allah raises mankind from their graves and decides who goes to Paradise and who goes to hell, everyone will be gathered under the Throne. Then a quick breeze will blow and it will deliver a piece of paper into each person’s hand. If the paper is in the right hand it means the person will be bound for Paradise. If the paper is in the left hand it means the person will be bound for hell. What hand is your pap
er in?”

  “Left.”

  “Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now go and write your punishment.”

  Until that moment I hadn’t assigned any significance to what had happened with Sina. Now, with the introduction of Allah’s judgment, with the introduction of penitence and forgiveness and apology, with the threat of hell hanging over me, the entire sequence of events took on a dark tinge. I could feel gunah creeping on my skin like a lizard on a hot summer wall. I had done something that Allah didn’t like. He would find me impious and unvirtuous and punishable. He would lean forward upon the kursi and look at His angels and say, “That Abir ul Islam really wasn’t worthy of his name!” The angels would agree. Then they would revoke my membership from among the meteor-hurlers. Suddenly I couldn’t bear how full of gunah I was and began crying. Then I wrote each word individually down the sheet:

  I-I-I…

  ask-ask-ask…

  Allah-Allah-Allah…

  for-for-for…

  forgiveness-forgiveness-forgiveness…

  As I finished my hundredth petition, I began loathing girls. Being nice to them upset Allah, and upsetting Allah’s rules was not something becoming of Abir ul Islam.

  5

  My family had ended up in Lahore because we couldn’t get into America.

  When I was an infant, Pops was a zoology professor at a university in Saudi Arabia. It was a good job that allowed him to buy a Volvo and send money to his parents in the village. But Pops dreamed about being a true medical doctor—and not in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, but in America, where his children could grow up and become someone without having to pay bribes. So Pops left that job and moved us all the way to the island nation of Dominican Republic, where he enrolled in medical school. People said it was easy to get into America from there.