Children of Dust Page 9

  My posterior went up. Qari Jamil’s cane reeled back and came down. The bones accepted their walloping, though my thighs quivered from sustaining the squat. I constricted my rectum because I’d heard that some qaris shoved their stick into the anus. The pain of each blow required me to take a squatting shuffle forward.

  After I finished crying, I went back to recite my lesson.

  After I’d been there several months, the madrassa hired a new teacher named Qari Asim. He was in his twenties, with sleek black hair, a chiseled face, and a kempt beard. He dressed in the finest white cotton, crisped with kalaf. His checkered red-and-white kafiya was new, neatly folded on his shoulders, and it smelled of Medinan musk. His sandals were black and polished. He rode a red Kawasaki 70cc and sported black-market Ray-Bans. Now the class was split into two. Marjan ended up in his section, though I stayed with Qari Jamil.

  Within hours of Qari Asim’s arrival, news of his severity spread among the students. We gathered around the boys in his section before the evening prayer and looked at the signs of the qari’s violence upon his students. Many had had their ears yanked and twisted so that they turned blue and purple. A couple had received full-handed slaps on the face, the red imprints still radiating heat. Some had been beaten with sticks, either on their backs or on their shins.

  Marjan didn’t say anything. He was one of the few who had managed to avoid getting called for a face-to-face encounter with the qari. But he had a guarded look about him: he knew his time was coming.

  One day, on my way to the madrassa later than unusual, I detoured through Marjan’s neighborhood to see if he was still home and wanted to walk together. As I approached his house I heard loud wailing punctuated by cursing inside.

  I flipped open the jute curtain to the house and went inside, where I found his mother shrieking hysterically, chased around the veranda by her husband, who was trying to gather his lungi into a knot.

  “Bring my son to me!” she commanded.

  “Sit down, woman. Sit down! It’ll be fine. We’ll go get him right now!”

  “Bring my son! Allah curse the qari!”

  Marjan’s grandfather and an uncle, who had been standing to one side when I entered, conferred with one another and walked into the alley, concern on their faces. Meanwhile, Marjan’s mother made a beeline for the door, only to have a chorus of people remind her that her face was uncovered so she couldn’t leave the house. An old masi that cleaned their latrine, her sludge-tipped sweeper dripping slime on the floor, stood immobile, taken aback by the entropy in the house. Another one of Marjan’s uncles sat in the shade of a toy-fabrication machine. I recognized him. He had suffered near-electrocution a few weeks earlier when the machine had malfunctioned, and he’d come to Pops’s clinic for treatment. He sat in a stoic squat with his back to the wall; partially fabricated cars, tops, and plastic animals littered the floor near him, awaiting his final touches once he was fully healed.

  Unable to leave for school in the face of all this drama, I waited, unnoticed, in the courtyard. Marjan’s grandfather and uncle soon came back, carrying Marjan in their arms. He was comatose. His pants were rolled up to his thighs, and his legs hung limply. The length of each leg was covered in blue and black bruises. There was blood dribbling from various blows to the shin. The beaten calves looked clumpy, protruding in some areas, deflated in others. His legs were clearly destroyed.

  “Qari Asim!” said the uncle who helped bring him in. “He started beating him and wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop.”

  “His legs are broken,” the grandfather declared somberly. “Set him down. Ya Allah mercy. Ya Allah health.” He then instructed someone to go find my father. Meanwhile, Marjan’s aunts began mixing butter with brown sugar and glycerin, then heated the confection to rub as ointment. Marjan’s father was more composed than his mother, but he looked like a beaten mule, excusing himself to the walls into which he crashed. After a few minutes, though, the entire house was quiet, lost in prayer.

  Suddenly a powerful human conflagration erupted in the house. It was the uncle who had received the electric shock, enraged after learning of Marjan’s beating. “Who is this Qari Asim?” he shouted, his face dangerously red. “Sister-fucking Qari Asim! If I don’t get him back, I have no honor! If I don’t get him back, my name is no longer Farrukh the Stud!”

  Grabbing up an old mop he marched around the house, breaking pottery right and left. By this time a number of neighbors had streamed into the house. Having seen Marjan and heard Farrukh’s vows, they became excited at the prospect of a beat-down. This kind of righteous violence was appreciated among us because there were no losers: an avenging relative, a beaten qari, and a satisfied audience vicariously unleashing their latent resentment against the masters of the madrassa. Uncle Farrukh exited the house head aloft, stick held like a broadsword, mouth streaming profanities about Asim’s incestuous anal activities. Children followed him up the street, making rhymes about the forthcoming beating that had already become legendary. I followed.

  At the madrassa Uncle Farrukh bellowed a challenge for Qari Asim to come and get his. Students loyal to the qari ran and told him his death was here. In fear, the qari ran out of class, hopped on his Kawasaki, and rode away in a cloud of dust. Uncle Farrukh, upset that he wasn’t able to unleash his wrath, made a great show of strength, shattering the benches, Quran-holders, and pulpits, threatening and intimidating the student body. He made it indelibly clear to Qari Jamil that Asim was not welcome back. Qari Jamil, looking more than a little anxious himself, put up his hands and apologized.

  A few hours later word came that Asim had been spotted at the bazar. Uncle Farrukh rushed home, picked up a bicycle, and went in pursuit, spending most of the night chasing the violent qari around various parts of the city, smashing merchandise, hurling rocks.

  Marjan was out of the coma by the time Uncle Farrukh returned from his retaliatory spree, but it took him many weeks to recuperate.

  One evening after coming home from the madrassa I sat on the rooftop looking at the courtyard below. Ammi was moving a pot of black lentils off the stove. Tai, my older aunt, was bending over the drain, pouring the water out of a big pot of basmati rice. My other aunt was stirring the spiced yogurt in a steel tray with a wooden spoon. Suddenly there was a powerful banging on the doorframe and all three women dropped their pots.

  “Ittefaq!” shouted a man from the street. “Ittefaq! Is my son Ittefaq in there?”

  Normally someone would have simply shouted no in response, but not when a boy’s father was out looking for him. That meant something was wrong. A pair of my uncles went out to greet the old man. I ran to the edge of the roof overlooking the alley and looked down.

  “He hasn’t come home from the madrassa,” explained Ittefaq’s father, a grizzled old man who owned a small shop in the bazar. “If he comes here, will you send him home?”

  My uncles came inside and informed the women that Ittefaq was missing.

  “That boy has been trouble for his family since day one,” Dadi Ma observed.

  “What do you mean?” Ammi asked.

  “You think this is the first time that man has come looking for the boy with fear in his voice?”

  During the evening we kept receiving updates about Ittefaq’s absence. A neighborhood manhunt was launched, and people from his side of town kept coming over to our house, thinking he might be with me. As evening became night, people started wondering if Ittefaq hadn’t run away but had been abducted.

  I didn’t think much of it. I ate dinner and went to sleep. I figured Ittefaq would turn up at the madrassa the next day. But when I went for my lesson he wasn’t there. He also didn’t come the day after. When I asked Ammi if he had been found, she told me she hadn’t heard anything positive.

  Two days later, Ammi was gossiping with the women and learned that Ittefaq had been recovered. Apparently one morning at dawn one of the women from his house went down from the roof, where everyone was sleeping, to wash up for the morning
prayer. When she was down there she heard what seemed to be a cat scratching at the front door. She pushed the door ajar to check what was happening and saw Ittefaq lying prone, scratching the paint with his nails. He was mewling and whimpering. She screamed and pulled him in, and he was put under his parents’ supervision.

  It turned out that he had spent three nights hiding in an open grave at the cemetery.

  “What in the world would make a little boy go running to live in a grave?” my aunt asked.

  “He was too ashamed to come home,” Dadi Ma said, avoiding discussing the difficult topic directly.

  “He was raped,” said Ammi bluntly. “Taken on the way home from the madrassa and raped.”

  “Hai hai!” Dadi Ma exclaimed. “Why would you say something like that?”

  “Someone has to say it.”

  “Know it, yes. Don’t announce it.”

  Ittefaq’s parents had eventually heard from Ittefaq what had happened, but instead of blaming the madrassa, from which he had been taken, they blamed their son. They said that he had become a disciplinary headache and that neither they nor Qari Jamil’s madrassa could set him straight. A young qari from another madrassa far north arrived at Ittefaq’s house, encouraging his parents to allow him to take the boy away. The smart-talking stranger made it seem that his institution was a discipline-oriented place.

  Through my parents I also came to hear of this more efficient northern madrassa—because they were considering sending me there—though in the end they decided to wait and see how Ittefaq’s experience turned out.

  I went to Ittefaq’s neighborhood the day he was leaving. A tanga pulled up in the street. The recruiter sat in the front with the driver. Ittefaq was put in the back, looking dazed, carrying his things in a knotted bedsheet. With a click of the driver’s tongue, the horse clopped away. There was a vacant look on Ittefaq’s face. His eyes were glued to a faraway place.

  As the horse clopped forward I followed my departing friend and ran after the tanga, suddenly desperate to keep Ittefaq from going. Running as fast as I could, I grabbed at the footstep on the back of the carriage, hoping to stop the horse and tanga. I wasn’t strong enough. My fingers slipped and I fell on the street.

  Ittefaq was gone so long that I forgot we were ever friends.

  A few months later, however, I learned from Ammi that Ittefaq had recently reappeared like a dusty apparition in the heart of the night, his face covered with soot, his clothes dirty and torn. The vaunted madrassa had turned out to be less concerned with religious education and more with breaking the will of the students. Children, brought in from far-flung places on the promise of a disciplinarian institution, were brutalized under the gaze of young angry maulvis, who were really soldiers coming back from Afghanistan—men who were far angrier than the rotund and aged Qari Jamil. Food wasn’t a right at that madrassa, but a reward. Students were kept chained to the walls all day long, shackled, beaten, and broken. Ittefaq had tried to escape repeatedly, only to be caught and jailed and punished, until one day he snuck into a truck and convinced the truck driver to take him back to the desert.

  The existence of the demonic madrassa that was recruiting boys all over the country was big news for a little while. But after making a striking impression, it was just as quickly forgotten. No one in Sehra Kush could conceive of industrial madrassas like that.

  I couldn’t forget about it, though. I stayed awake many nights wondering what I would have done had I ended up at a place like that. Would I have been able to run away? I knew the answer was no. I would have been too afraid to try to leave. I then imagined all the pain that Ittefaq had put up with while he was there, and it made me sad. I stared at the sky and wondered why Allah wasn’t nice to some people. I wondered if perhaps it was the case that Allah singled out some people for happiness and some people for suffering.

  At night on the rooftop of the house, I stared at the stars. They were little specks, scattered like gravel across the sky. Where there was a cluster of stars, I imagined that it was an angel, resting. Where there was a shooting star, I imagined that it was the angels firing at Iblis, trying to keep him from coming too close to heaven. I imagined the angels looking at me. Did they see me and think, “Look, there’s a speck of dust?” What about Allah? Why couldn’t I penetrate this blackness He kept between Him and me? What would He say when I asked Him why he was so willing to let people be beaten?

  Eventually I turned over and went to sleep. Allah was Light. What did little specks of dust matter to Him?

  The angels must have heard my doubts, because they soon paid me a visit.

  17

  When he was a child, the Holy Prophet once found himself alone with a number of angels. They took him out into the desert one night, cut open his chest, drew forth his heart, and then—with a bottle full of milk from Paradise—washed all the blackness from it, and that is why Muhammad was the most pious and honest human being ever.

  I wasn’t the Prophet, so my angels were punitive.

  Some afternoons I used to sneak out to a house near the madrassa where some of the students and older kids from other neighborhoods went to hang out. The owners, whose son was a ringleader in the group, tended to go off and visit their neighbors, leaving the whole house to us. It felt like a sort of playground. We sailed paper boats into the nali, shot buntaz with precise finger strikes, played games of seven stones, and even sometimes went to the roof and flew kites.

  One day I noticed that there was a room in the back of the house whose shutters were closed. It looked as if it was locked from the inside, but there was a strange glow coming from within that drew me to the room. I went over and started banging against the door.

  “What do you want?” said a voice.

  “Let me in.”

  “No!”

  “Let me in or I’ll get everyone else and we’ll break down the door.”

  “Everyone can’t play this game!”

  “Then just let me in. I won’t tell anyone about it.”

  The door opened and I passed through. Once inside, I locked the door. Except for a sliver of light that slipped through the top window, the room was dark. A copy of the Quran wrapped in pink cloth was sitting atop a dresser. There was a prayer rug, a corner of it rumpled as if someone had slipped on it. The room smelled musty, of feathers and wet dust.

  As my eyes adjusted, I noticed an area of intense brightness in the center of the room. I rubbed my eyes with my palms and then blinked rapidly. Before me were two golden youth, luminescent and shiny, nearly translucent, with wings of light from whose tips milklike nur dripped to the floor. One of the youth was standing while the other was on his knees.

  Squinting harder, I realized that I was seeing something I had never seen before: angels.

  “Do it the right way, Mikail,” said the youth who was standing, his enormous wings expanding and retracting.

  “I’m doing it like you said, Jibrail.”

  “Do you know better, or me?”

  “You do. Definitely you.”

  Mikail was kissing a curving feather on Jibrail’s body. It was of a pale golden color and it looked like an unearthly writing utensil. It was long and smooth.

  “You,” Jibrail said, turning to me suddenly. “Come here and show us yours.” His eyes were piercing and powerful. There was no mercy in his voice.

  “We’ll show you ours,” said Mikail with a suggestive smile.

  Unable to resist their authority, I went close to the angels. They separated from one another and enfolded me in their wings. I felt pressure on my shoulders as I was pushed down to the floor. Before long I had Jibrail’s feather in my mouth. He gave officious instructions that echoed ponderously in my head.

  After a little while, Mikail pulled me up and stood behind me. I could hear his breath full of conspiracies. As he spoke, his wings wrapped around me and got caught on my clothes, tugging at them. “I must dip my feather into you,” he told me. I could neither agree nor disagree. It wasn’t my
place to talk. As Mikail slid the curved feather into my body, it caused me to wobble forward, which in turn made him take quick little steps and follow me around the room.

  I felt neither pain nor fear. My eyes turned to the singular slant of light cutting a corner of the room, and I became lost in observing the little particles floating aimlessly. I could see each little atom, tumbling on its axis in the sunlight, doing headstands and cartwheels, dancing in place, tiny, so tiny—as if the motes weren’t dust, but children of dust.

  Jibrail, meanwhile, stood back and watched. He had his head tilted and bore a curious expression on his face. When he saw me looking at him, he began laughing—a laughter that increased in volume until it was booming and loud, transforming into banging on the door, urgent and insistent. Someone else wanted in. I moved away from the angels to open the door. As soon as I ripped through the door, the unearthly visitors shrieked and hissed and then disappeared.

  When I went outside, all the boys wanted to know what was happening inside, but I told them there was nothing to see, nothing to do. I went for a long walk up the canal where the buffaloes grazed. I didn’t know how to describe the feelings in my stomach. All I could come up with were analogies. I thought of the hollow feeling of forgetting my lessons and getting my hands beaten with a baton. I thought of the feeling of sickness that came with tripping and ending up with one foot in the cold nali. I thought of the feeling of feverish panic that had come over me when I had misplaced my new tennis ball and had searched for it haplessly for hours. That last memory came closest to my current mental state, so I went inside that memory to see if I could find a clue to what I should do now.

  Ammi’s face shone through the haze of memory. “When you lose something,” she had said to me while I’d been looking for my lost ball, “recite, Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon. “To God we belong and to Him we shall return.”

  Sitting up next to the canal, clutching my knees against my chest, rocking back and forth, I began reciting: