Children of Dust Read online

  Pops entered the room carrying the season’s first batch of plums.

  “Aloo bukhara!” he said. Literally translated: the fever potato. He shoved plums down my throat and for days didn’t stop.

  Over each piece of fruit, Ammi and Dadi Ma read surah Yasin from the Quran.

  Within days the typhus jinn left my body. The hallucinations ended as well. The Quran had saved my life.

  Soon after I was cured, I was enrolled at another madrassa. My illness had been a case of God reminding us of the covenant—which we had to fulfill.

  14

  The red brick madrassa where I was enrolled sat on a muddy canal where buffaloes and bare-backed boys swam. The juicer up the street broke sugarcane spines and pushed them through his eight-armed machine, secreting juice into a glass, which he mixed with salt, ginger, and lemon. Nearby, a billiards hall and a restaurant catered to truck drivers passing through the desert town. Behind the madrassa was an open field used for Eid prayer, though it was infested with scorpions. On the other side of the field was an abandoned mental hospital.

  Wearing a light-blue shalwar kameez and topi, during my first day of class I found myself sitting in front of my new teacher, Qari Jamil. A heavyset man with fleshy pink hands and black skin, he wore an undershirt called a bunyan with a lungi that reached past mid-calf. A tan stick was propped close to him. The expression on his face—bemused irritation—suggested that he wouldn’t be averse to using the stick. We sat face-to-face in the center of the room as all the other students rocked in front of their Qurans. He appraised me with a supercilious look that asserted the totality of his authority.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Abir ul Islam.”

  “Incorrect.”

  I looked at him in confusion, frightened by the way he’d dismissed my name.

  “But it is Abir ul Islam. It means—”

  “That’s not how you say your name.”

  “Then how?” I asked.

  “You are pronouncing it as if it begins with an alif. In fact, your name begins with an ein. It is an Arabic word, and thus you must pronounce it in the Arabic way. Harden the ein. From your throat. Not from the front of your mouth like a housewife. Now say it again.”

  “Abir.”

  He reached forward with his stick and jabbed its blunt end into the small of my neck. “Pull it out from here,” he commanded.

  “Abir.”

  “No.” He jabbed harder. “Say it again.”

  “Abir.”

  He lifted up his stick and crashed it on the bench between us. “Wrong!” he exclaimed. “Say it again. Say it correctly this time—from the back of your throat like a man.”

  I tried. I added a guttural growl to the first letter, but it came out sounding feeble and meek. I looked down in shame. Apparently reflecting on one’s failure was not permitted, because he thumped the bench again.

  “Say it again. Say it loudly. Let everyone hear.”

  “Abir,” I said. “Abir, Abir, Abir, Abir…” until my voice became hoarse. Incrementally the class moved to laughter, and eventually Qari Jamil joined them.

  “We’ll work on it,” he said. Then he turned to a short boy with oiled and parted hair. “Jugnu. You, Jugnu. Come here for a minute.”

  “Yes, Qari Saab?” said the boy in a voice so obedient that it made me pity him.

  “Show Abir ul Islam here how to sit.”

  “Like this, Qari Saab,” Jugnu said, adjusting himself. I couldn’t get past how deeply reverent Jugnu was toward Qari Jamil. It was intimidating. Ammi and Pops had always told me that in Islam teachers were like parents—there was a hadith that said so—but I didn’t treat even my parents with such submission.

  Qari Jamil looked at me. “Do you see how Jugnu is sitting? Copy him. His back is erect. Both of his feet are tucked under him. His left ankle is turned under his seat and is parallel to the floor. His right foot is propped on the ground. This is how you must sit.”

  With a couple of false starts, I did my best to mimic Jugnu.

  “Good,” said Qari Jamil. “Just like that. This is how you will sit when reading the Quran. Do you understand?”

  I nodded yes even as a sharp pain shot through the arch of one foot. Pops had always told me that I had flat feet and couldn’t bend them the same way other people could. However, telling that to the qari didn’t seem like a particularly good idea.

  “Now take out your qaida,” he said. “Let’s start.”

  I produced the instruction manual, placed it on the bench, and opened it to the first page, where the alphabet was written. Meanwhile, my ankle stiffened and hurt.

  “The reason that you cannot pronounce your own name is because you know only the Urdu alphabet,” Qari Jamil said. “The Quran is in Arabic, so I am going to teach you the Arabic alphabet and its correct pronunciation. This way is different than how the housewives of Punjab pronounce things. This way is the correct way. It is the way of Islam. Do you understand?”

  The Arab way was the Islamic way, I told myself, and nodded. The qari then began to teach me how to gutturally pronounce the three Arabic letters most difficult for an Urdu speaker to master: the ein, the ha, and the qaf. After half an hour of lessons, I was instructed to go sit near the wall and practice saying those three letters for the remaining eight hours of the schoolday. From time to time as the hours passed, Qari Jamil, with laughter in his voice, said my name loudly to the class.

  Abir ul Islam.

  Like it was a joke.

  Urine caused tremendous concern to all Islamic worshippers and was an object of great disdain at the madrassa. In fact, after I learned the pronunciation of the Arabic alphabet, my second major lesson had been about liquid excrement.

  The first principle of urine was that you couldn’t ever let a single drop get on your clothes, because that would immediately render them impure and you wouldn’t be able to make prayer without changing clothes.

  The second principle of urine was that you couldn’t ever let a single drop get on your skin, because every part of your body that urine had touched would have to be burned in hellfire before you could regain purity.

  The third principle of urine was that you had to recite a certain prayer before going to the bathroom, because if you didn’t, you allowed jinns to take over your spirit. This happened because jinns were particularly active, and your defenses were particularly weak, when urine was flowing. The prayer read: Allahumma inni aoozo bika min al khubusi wal khabais: “O Allah, I seek refuge with you from all evil and evildoers.” There was also a prayer for when you finished urinating. I was required to memorize that as well.

  The fourth principle of urine was that you could touch your penis only with your left hand, because it was the devil’s hand.

  The fifth principle of urine was that you had to wash up with water afterwards, an act called istunja.

  The final principle of urine was that you couldn’t urinate standing up, because that increased the likelihood of the first and second principles being violated. The proper way to urinate—the way I was taught at the madrassa—involved getting down in a squat, spreading your legs, keeping your shalwar out of the way with your right hand, and directing your stream by holding your penis with the left. Then you used your right hand to pour water on your organ as you rubbed it clean with your left. Afterwards you washed your hands, saying a shorter prayer as you scrubbed: “O Allah, I seek refuge with you from the devil.”

  When I began at the madrassa, I heard and practiced the lessons about urine with great fervor, making a dedicated effort to avoid getting even a single drop on my clothes or skin. I drank as much water as I could so that I could practice the squatting technique.

  Mastering the art of urination wasn’t easy, but it was the way of Islam and therefore I had to know it.

  Back in class we learned about a method for memorizing the Quran based on the architecture of the Holy Book.

  Each of the Quran’s thirty juz—volumes—were split into fou
rths. The first fourth was called arba; the second fourth was called nisf; the third fourth was called salasa. Each fourth was composed of four sections called rukus.

  A student began memorizing the thirtieth juz first, because it contained the shortest verses. Then he went to the twenty-ninth juz, where the verses were a little longer. After a student had perfectly memorized the last two juzes, he began memorizing from the first juz onward. Memorizing the entire Quran in little quadratic sections like this could take anywhere from two to eight years. The average was around five.

  My class was split between part-time and full-time students. Full-timers studied from dawn till night with breaks for prayer and food. Part-timers like me came in after the noon prayer, and we all sat together.

  “Make sure that you rock back and forth as you read,” Qari Jamil said, extending his stick to pat my shoulder. “Rocking makes it easy.” I looked around and saw that all the other students were rocking quickly.

  After I had spent a whole day on my assigned ruku, Qari Jamil called me up along with two other students. We started reciting simultaneously from disparate places in the Quran while he closed his eyes and listened. If any of us made a mistake, the qari simply stated the correction; then the talib, or student, reversed mid-sentence and carried on as before. Most students made at least a few errors each time. If a student persisted in the same error, however—or if there were too many errors sprinkled in a recitation—Qari Jamil sent the offending talib out of the group and back to his place. This wasn’t seen as particularly embarrassing, and Qari Jamil usually gave the student an opportunity to reclaim his spot later in the day. However, if the errors continued, it was likely that the student would be beaten. The severity of punishment depended on the qari’s mood, the student’s previous performance, and the student’s reputation for either laziness or diligence. Once a student got a bad reputation, beatings became progressively worse; and one’s reputation couldn’t be reclaimed except through an intervention by the student’s family.

  I completed my first lesson without getting beaten.

  15

  Before I became a regular student at the madrassa, though I did occasionally play with Flim, I didn’t have any real friends. With so many of the boys from the mohalla in school, I had to play with girls. They particularly liked to play wedding. They took turns being bride, drafted me to be groom, sang songs in Siraiki and Punjabi and Balochi, fed me and my bride sweetmeats (which were really rocks), and saw off the happy couple with rose petals (which were really tiny pieces of cow dung). Sometimes I played house with a pair of girls named Bina and Samia and married both of them simultaneously. Up on the roof they lived in two separate “houses” that I constructed for them out of turned-over charpais covered with sheets, and I took turns spending time with each. This continued until I was caught by a stone-faced Pathan widow while running my hands over my wives’ bodies. Fearing that she would report me to Dada Abu, I regretfully gave up this activity.

  At the madrassa I became friends with Marjan and Ittefaq. They were also part-timers. Marjan was mild and mellow—a short guy with a white topi. Ittefaq was aggressive and rambunctious—a taller guy in loose shalwar kameez. He was older than Marjan and me and was the leader of our little crew.

  During school breaks and on Fridays we played cricket at the Old Hospital or looked for soccer games near the dusty roundabout.

  Marjan told me that his older uncle had a spot in one of their family homes from which they could look into other people’s houses and see naked housewives. We did that for a little while, but the women were old.

  One time we stole adult bicycles and scissor-kicked them—with our legs through the frame—all the way into the military part of town, turning back when some soldiers in a Jeep glared us away.

  Another time just Ittefaq and I went for a long excursion in the afternoon on the dusty streets heading out of town. We passed withered, turbaned men walking with their bullocks; wooden carts tilted back from the vast amounts of weight on them; women in the bright-hued scarves that Gypsies wore. Eventually we came upon a clearing amidst a collection of dunes where a carnival was underway. There was a tent with freaks of nature which we wanted desperately to enter, but we were too afraid to go near because we’d heard there was a backward-footed churayl inside, and Dadi Ma had warned me against those. Beyond that tent there was a merry-go-round, a massive seesaw, and many stalls selling food. After wandering among those, we made our way to one of the main attractions at the festival.

  It was a hollow wooden tower made of large, curved planks screwed together. It rose up nearly three stories high, with a diameter of about thirty feet, like a bloated parapet from the Crusades. Attached to its exterior was a latticework of rickety wooden staircases that took the audience up to the rim, which was guarded by a railing. From the rim we could see into the pit below, where a Suzuki sedan, stripped of color and doors, and two denuded motorcycles were parked. Suddenly a small, shutterlike door snapped open at the bottom, and the audience—knowing what was to come—cheered loudly. Two men in jeans and collared shirts came out and waved. They kickstarted their bikes, the sawed-off mufflers coughing and roaring, and then rode around in circles, kicking up dust, picking up speed. Suddenly, with the assistance of a little ramp and centrifugal force, the bikes leaped up against the wall of the tower, going around in circles, still gaining in speed until they were going around perpendicular to the floor. Like cream coming to a boil the bikers rose ever higher, and I was afraid they would reach the very top and fly off into the crowd. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more exciting, the car below came alive with a roar. It turned on its headlights and made preliminary circles on the ground before it too jumped onto the wall. The weight of the car caused the entire tower to creak and groan. It strained against itself as if it were a mighty jinn trying to hold down a bad meal. The bikers crisscrossed in front of the car, teasing it, forcing it to follow them higher. Sometimes the bikers rode opposite from each other, giving salutes in our direction. Sometimes they were one in front of the other, the tires threatening to touch, evoking gasps from the audience. The drivers were men of momentum, artists of inertia, fearless and intrepid gamblers who put their lives in the palm of their hand. Their unbuttoned shirts fluttered like capes. They wore numerous taweezes of protection around their necks. They were desert superheroes blessed by the Quran.

  Marjan, Ittefaq, and I also played joda-mitti, team tag, with other boys from the madrassa. Two people were “it.” Everyone else had a partner, and those pairs held hands. As long as you were holding someone’s hand, you couldn’t be “it.” Meanwhile, the “it” pair carried out a countdown. When it ended, everyone let go of their partner and tried to get a new one without getting tagged by the “it” pair. One day as we played joda-mitti I jumped from a raised porch into an empty lot and stepped barefoot on a shattered cola bottle. Blood ran everywhere, and the pain was fierce.

  “You’re it!” Ittefaq said.

  “I’m bleeding!” I objected, using my hand to stanch the flow.

  “Doesn’t matter! Hazrat Ali’s arm was cut in battle, hanging only by a tendon. He stepped on it and pulled it off himself so that he could keep fighting.”

  “Be a warrior,” Marjan told me.

  With a deep breath, I let go of my bleeding foot and started chasing the boys. Dirt and gravel pushed into my wounds. I shook off the blackness that threatened to curtain my eyes. I had to be tough like my friends. It was the only way to survive.

  16

  Beatings were a regular occurrence at the madrassa. The first good beating I saw involved a boy who hadn’t washed his feet properly before prayer. Someone pointed out this oversight to Qari Jamil, and even though the student pointed to his wet footprints in the courtyard as proof of good intentions, he was made to bend over and was hit on the posterior.

  My first beating came soon thereafter.

  I had been doing so well with my lessons that when I finished memorizing my required ru
ku for the day, I usually flipped through the Quran for something more to memorize. Just to prove how good I was, I memorized some of the better known passages and quietly tested myself while waiting for my turn to recite. This project backfired.

  As I was reciting one of my assigned lessons for the qari one day, I inadvertently began connecting that recitation to a verse from an entirely different part of the Quran.

  Grabbing his stick, Qari Jamil interrupted me.

  “How did you get all the way over there?” he asked. “That’s not even part of your lesson.”

  “Mistake,” I said, retreating back to my study spot to review my lesson, trying to forget the extra verses.

  After some review I returned to my place at the bench and began rocking and reciting. Unfortunately, I persisted in the error.

  “You aren’t paying attention!” Qari Jamil exclaimed, fed up with my mistakes. “Come over here.”

  I bit my lip. I knew what was coming. His fat hand hung in the air and drew me close. I thought if I just apologized he might let me go. “I’m very sorry,” I said, feeling as abject as I sounded. “I’ll get it right after more review.”

  My apology didn’t cut it. I had to be beaten to assure the perfection of the Quran.

  Qari Jamil pulled me by my ear and then slapped my head with his right hand, my eyes rattling from the blow. Other students who were hit sometimes developed red splotches in the whites of their eyes, and I wondered if the same would happen to me.

  “On the floor!” he instructed. “Become the rooster.”

  The rooster was the preferred punitive position at the madrassa. It was so named because of the way you bent your anatomy in order to comply. I leaned forward and crouched into a squat, bending my head down until it was almost on the floor. I hitched my arms behind my knees and brought them forward to hold the lobes of my ears.