Children of Dust Read online

  All of these stories of Jewish “disobedience and decadence” finally reached a climax when Qari Adil announced that the Jews had been turned into apes. In a gleeful narration he described in careful detail—a mixture of his own speculation and Mawdudi’s imagination—how the actual transformation of a man into a monkey occurred.

  Allah turning people into monkeys bothered me. If I were turned into a monkey, I’d eat lice and be unable to fly kites or spin tops. Being able to flip myself from branch to branch using just my tail wouldn’t make up for the fact that I would be ugly, hairy, and loud. Besides, there was something strange about the punishment. It wasn’t like the other divine punishments: floods, storms of sulfur, civilizations flipped upside down. Monkey-making seemed to be designed solely for amusement and mockery, things I hadn’t associated with Allah. The possibility that Allah was a naughty boy in heaven who rolled around in the clouds making people into animals made me nervous. I came to fear God, but not just that: I became wary of Him as one does of a bully.

  Only a few weeks into our study, it was revealed that Qari Adil was using the lessons as an occasion to flirt with Ammi, by writing love letters to her. When Ammi told Pops, the house visits stopped and Mawdudi’s books were put away.

  There were a few other books besides the Quran that evoked respect in my household. The foremost among these was an old leather-bound volume of Muhammad Iqbal’s collection of poems, called Baang-e-Dra (“Call of the Caravan”). Pops often sat around on the veranda bellowing the first verse from the most famous poem:

  Ya rabb dil e Muslim ko

  woh zinda tamanna de

  jo qalb ko garma de

  jo ruh ko tarpa de!

  O Almighty, give to the Muslim

  that spark of vitality

  which enflames the heart

  which enlivens the soul!

  Ammi also held Iqbal in great esteem, but for different reasons. She was impressed by his piety. “Iqbal recited zikr thirty million times in his life. You can’t go wrong if you do the same.”

  “What invocation did he recite?”

  “The durood.”

  “All of it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Allahumma sallay ala Muhammad wa ala aal-e-Muhammad kma sallayta wa ala aal-e-Ibrahim innaka hameedun majeed.”

  “That’s long!”

  “Read that thirty million times and you can become the next Iqbal, the founder of a Muslim nation. Don’t you remember how you were taken to Mecca and had your heart rubbed upon the Ka’ba?”

  “How could I forget?” I’d heard that story a hundred times.

  The other household book was one I read was in English; it was called The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, by Michael Hart. We owned it for one simple reason: the Holy Prophet was number one.

  Hart explained his reasoning as follows: “My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world’s most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels.”

  I took great pride in the fact that someone from the West—a leader of science and education—recognized the Prophet Muhammad’s influence.

  The third book we had was a children’s book in Urdu called Lives of the Prophets. This book explained that while every messenger of God before Muhammad had brought earlier versions of Islam, with Muhammad that religion reached its culmination. Lives of the Prophets contained the story of Adam and Havva’s fall from the Garden; the story of Nuh’s wife seeing the water in her oven and warning Nuh about the Flood so he could launch his ark; the story of Ibrahim destroying the town’s idols when he was just a child; the story of Musa challenging the Pharaoh’s wizards by casting his staff on the ground and having it turn into a cobra; the story of Yunus, who was eaten by a whale; Yusuf, who rose from a prisoner of the Pharaoh to one of his officials; and Isa, born to a virgin mother. I liked reading this book before I went to sleep.

  One night the stars were out as we prepared to sleep on the roof. I had forgotten Lives downstairs. I couldn’t get to sleep without it, but I was too scared to go get it in the dark. So I turned to Ammi.

  “Tell me a story,” I pleaded.

  “About what?”

  “Tell me a Prophet story.”

  “Pick a Prophet.”

  “All 124,000 of them,” I suggested, smiling in the dark.

  “How about just one?” she countered, fluffing her pillow and putting her glasses under it.

  There were just too many options. “You pick,” I said.

  “All right,” she agreed. “I will tell you about Yusuf. Did you know that when he was a little boy he had a dream in which the sun and the moon and the twelve stars were bowing to him?”

  “Why did they bow to him?” I asked.

  “Because Yusuf was so beautiful. Out of the ten parts of beauty in the universe, Allah gave nine to Yusuf.”

  “That doesn’t leave a lot for the rest of us.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she chided. “His beauty was a burden upon him. Women schemed and connived in order to try to seduce him. Things are always difficult for people who serve God. Take our Holy Prophet, for example. He had to struggle.”

  “Like how?”

  “The people of Taif threw stones at him until his shoes were filled with blood. He was insulted and attacked in Mecca. Instead of calling him Muhammad, they called him Mudhammam, which was a bad insult. A woman used to throw garbage on his head every day that he passed by her house. The Quraysh—the tribe from which he came—tried to kill him, so he had to flee for Medina. Even then they didn’t leave him alone; they sent armies after him so that he had to fight in battles and lose many of his friends.”

  “Why did God allow such things to happen?” I asked.

  “God didn’t allow them. God commanded them. He did it so that Muhammad would be prepared to deal with even greater challenges. Do you remember all the suffering Muhammad went through when he was a child? First his father died before he was born. Then his mother died when he was five. Then his grandfather died when he was eleven. Then his dearest uncle died when he was seventeen. When he grew up, all four of his sons died, each one shortly after being born. Why do you think all these things happened?”

  “Why?”

  “In preparation for his service to God. He was meant to do something great.”

  “Which was…?”

  “Serving Islam, of course. Just like you’re going to do.”

  Although Ammi smiled at me with pride, I felt a shiver run through me. “Does this mean bad things are going to happen to me too?” I asked.

  13

  Combustible and explosive jinns inhabited the kerosene stoves of Pakistan. These creatures were especially prone to heeding the incendiary commands of angry mothers-in-law, husbands dissatisfied by dowry size, and honor-obsessed brothers. At their behest, these jinns spat a shower of oily fire on a housewife’s body and then ignited, melting the skin of women all over the country. When the fire had been put out, the victim was usually taken to a hospital, where the entire episode was chalked up to an accident or attempted suicide.

  One evening when I was trying to use my tennis ball to kill the flies resting on the wall, a frail old masi, a woman recognized as an elder of the mohalla, leathered by time and wearing a lungi, entered the house and hurriedly gathered the women. I could hear the word afsos—meaning, in this context, How tragic!—over and over.

  “She was wearing polyester!” exclaimed the masi.

  “Oh, she was done for then,” said Dadi Ma. “That stuff melts and sticks to the skin!”

  “They say it was an accident,” said the masi.

  “Oh, please!” scoffed Ammi. “Stove explodes and it’s an accident? That’s a cover-up! They always call it accident; that’s what they always say! It has to be the mother-in-law!”

  “Oh, how can you accuse her?” Dadi Ma—herself a mother-in-law—said def
ensively. “I’m sure it wasn’t—”

  “Poor girl!” Ammi continued. “It sounds like third-degree burns. Is she at the hospital now?”

  “Yes, and her baby is at home!” offered the masi.

  “I pray for Allah’s mercy,” said my older aunt.

  “Me too—but it was definitely the mother-in-law!” Ammi said.

  “You! Stop saying such horrible things!” Dadi Ma said reproachfully.

  “Such things are common,” the masi said. “What can you say? Kismet had bad things in store for the poor girl.”

  I followed the conversation avidly. However, within a few minutes of hearing about the incident I forgot about it, the image of a burn victim replaced by dead flies.

  A few hours later I went to the kitchen and noticed Ammi sitting in front of the stove, turning a roti with her fingertips. When the bread puffed up, she pulled me over. “Look how it’s filling up. It’s Allah’s way of telling us that the person who is going to eat this roti is very hungry.”

  As I glanced at the roti, it occurred to me that Ammi was using a kerosene stove—the sort of stove that had blown up in that woman’s face. I imagined this stove blowing up in Ammi’s face. Her curly hair going crisp. Her face melting off her bones. Her screams echoing in the empty alley. I threw my arms around Ammi and buried my face in her neck.

  “Ammi,” I asked, “is your stove going to blow up?”

  “God forbid,” she said, slapping me on the shoulder. “Mine is fine.” Then, in a louder voice so that Dadi Ma could hear, she added, “And my mother-in-law doesn’t want to hurt me.”

  “Then why did that woman catch fire?”

  “Look here,” Ammi said, opening up a second stove sitting near her. “The girl’s stove, to explode like that, must have been tampered with. See, a stove has three parts. The bottom bowl is for the oil, and there’s a shell that protects these twelve cotton strands”—she gestured at them—“that suck the oil to the top. When the stove burns, it’s actually these strands that are burning. But if just one or two strands fall down, or if they’re removed by a malicious person, that creates a vacuum in the system, and during cooking the fire travels down the shell and into the bowl of oil, causing it to explode and splashing the cook with scalding oil. Then you have third-degree burns.”

  An image of the burned girl started to form in my head, a pristine image, the face of an innocent and happy mother, someone like my own mother. I decided that I would go and find her.

  I waited until late afternoon and slipped out of the house. The azan for dusk prayer—the commonly accepted time when a child must be back home—was about to occur, and I had never stayed out past that before. I was nervous. While I knew the block where the woman lived, I didn’t know which house she was in.

  Standing at the end of the block, not sure which house to go to, I acted on intuition, making my way to a small brick house with a thick brown curtain in the doorway. I chose it because the house seemed silent, there was no smoke signifying suppertime activity, and none of the lights were on. Because the curtain was hung improperly, there was a small sliver at the left side that I could see through as I approached. The inside of the house appeared dark as well, and there was no activity on the veranda, an odd thing for a house that still had its door open.

  “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” came the sudden call to prayer from the mosque.

  As the first verse of the azan went up, I panicked. I had to get home before it finished. Something drew me closer to the curtain, however, and I stepped across the nali and put my eye to the gap, hoping to perhaps see signs of an exploded stove.

  Without warning, the heavy curtain, rippling with dust, was flung outward, its thick edge smacking me across the face. I lost my footing, and one of my feet went directly into the nali, plunging down until my toes felt the sludge running between them. The sewage felt surprisingly cold. The man who had just emerged from the house—it was his exit that had sent the curtain flying—stopped in the act of wrapping his turban and turned to look at me. His eyes were dark and his teeth shone with a menacing whiteness. I had never been more frightened. I felt weak. Using my toes to secure my shoe before it floated away, I pulled my foot out of the nali—it came free with a sucking sound—and ran back home.

  At the nalka I scrubbed my filthy leg and my spattered clothes as thoroughly as I could. I used some dust that had gathered on the stairs as makeshift soap. It had the effect of muting some of the smell clinging to me.

  Despondent that I hadn’t gotten a chance to catch a glimpse of the burned girl, I hurried to the mosque, accompanied by the last few verses of the azan. As I prayed, the smell of nali, foul and acrid, wafted up off me. When no one was looking, I leaned down and breathed it in. The more it made me disgusted, the more I inhaled it.

  Then I fell ill.

  When I got typhoid, I became a jinn, my body enveloped by a 105-degree fire. Jinn smoke filled me up, and I vomited until there was no more liquid inside. My body went limp and my eyes closed shut. I felt myself raised into the air, elongated, compressed, and then stretched out again. Flesh gave way to vapor. A shriek escaped my lips and left cracks in the walls. My hair curled up, cringed in pain, and ran off my body. My tongue started to shrivel. There wasn’t a lick of saliva. “Ammi!” I cried. “Ammi!”

  That night my body became a balloon and floated up to the ceiling. When Ammi entered the bedroom, she beheld my body jerking and twitching eleven feet in the air. She took a running start and leaped up to retrieve me. Unable to touch me, she ran out for tools and came back with a reel of kite string. She took a heavy lock from one of the trunks, attached it to a length of kite string with a sturdy knot, and then threw the lock up to me. I put it in my pocket as she instructed, and she pulled me down. But when she took the lock out of my pocket, I floated upward again; a draft came from the veranda and my ascent became wobbly. Jumping up, Ammi grabbed hold of my pants and dragged me to the bed. This time she used a bedsheet to tie me down. The other end of it she tied to the doorknob.

  “You’re moored now,” she said.

  “I’m so very hot,” I said.

  She went to the kitchen and returned carrying a huge steel bucket, filled to the brim with water. Little cubes of ice occasionally showed their sweaty bald heads at the surface. When Ammi dunked my feet, the jinn inside me, made of so much fire, shrieked loudly. The bucket soon steamed and became a bubbling cauldron. Ammi unbuttoned my shirt and ripped it off. She then wrapped a turban around my head, with cubes of ice lodged like diamonds in the gaps. Her attack alarmed the vaporous jinn and it rebelled, rocking back and forth, trying to float upward to safety. This time the whole bed lifted off the floor as the jinn pulled up on me, but the knot on the doorknob held me in place. Ammi, meanwhile, finished off my new outfit by giving me wristbands of chilled gauze, which regulated my pulse and kept cool the blood in my body’s irrigation system. I slept then, but fitfully.

  For that entire summer, every day became for Ammi a race to procure more cold water and more cubes of ice, and to tie the jeweled turban before the morning sunlight empowered the jinn inside. Still I became more and more frail. When my brother fell to a lesser jinn, her attention was momentarily diverted and she took to procuring other types of treatments. There were tablespoons of honey kissed with hope. Cool yellow rice chilled with desperation. Iced teas and custards refrigerated with a mother’s love.

  Nothing worked. My skin darkened. The jinn inside me, so eager to take me to heaven, had started to disfigure me, turning me into a shadow right here on earth.

  With squeals of pain Ammi watched the splotches on my body expand. By the time the last of my hair fell out in clumps, she was broken. She gave in to exhaustion and fell asleep, forgetting to wrap the straitjacket of ice around me. She also forgot to set my feet in a bucket of water, so the jinn smoke rushed into my ankles and I began aspiring upward, to Allah Mian. Soon I was flipped upside down, my hair scraping the floor like a broom and the soles of my feet rubbing against
the hot skin of the lightbulb.

  I closed my eyes. I was cooked. That’s what Dadi Ma said—and that’s certainly what it felt like.

  Then, right then, Ammi put her hand on my forehead and started reciting a teleportation spell. It sounded just like Quranic verses.

  When I opened my eyes I saw that I was flying—not Superman style, but held under each armpit by Ammi, who flew above me. Transformed into a parri, she was covered with a lustrous, light-colored cuticle, and her wings dripped with light. As her long hair flowed free, she carried me through the vague fog.

  “Where are we?” I asked, my voice echoing as if through a thousand invisible hallways.

  “We’re in the seven heavens,” she replied.

  “What level are we on?”

  “Fifth.”

  “Who lives here?”

  “Humans live on the first world,” she said, “jinns on the second and third, the Prophets on the fourth, the parris on the fifth, and the angels on the sixth.”

  “Allah is on the seventh?”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “Why can’t I see into the other heavens?”

  Ammi explained that the architecture of the seven heavens obeyed the laws of hierarchy. Imagine a house with seven stories, she said, each story separated from another by a pane of glass, and each pane of glass a one-way mirror, with the various mirrors arranged in such a way that the individual looking down from the seventh floor could see all the way to the bottom, but one couldn’t see anything looking from the bottom up.

  “So what are we doing here?” I asked.

  “We’re looking for a cure,” she said.

  “A medicine for me?” I asked.

  “A magical fruit,” she replied. “And look at your luck! There it is!” She pointed to a man carrying a paper bag.