There is no landscape like the landscape of our childhood.
——————————————————–——V.S. Naipaul
1
FANCY—THE BOY WITH BLOND HAIR and fiendish blue eyes. That morning I sat next to him on a jute mat, our satchels lying open in front of us. He leaned toward me, saying how during the recess period he wished to run through the dense grove of walnut and willow trees that surrounded the school and jump into the river. There, just like the grown-up boys and girls of our village, if I dared to join him, we’d swim and float on the water. Later, having jeered and jumped from the high green bank, having dunked our hot, tense bodies in the cold water, we’d sun ourselves on the tapering strip of sand between the brown round rocks and the part of the bank that fell steeply to the level of the river.
Gulam Rasool, our math teacher, wrote with a piece of chalk on the small blackboard he’d set on the bright, fragile-looking legs of the easel. A tall, robustly built man in his late fifties, he wore a safari suit of fine brown tweed. He had a long, solemn, white-bearded face, and a lifetime of praying and prostrating in the mosques had left a black bulge on his forehead. Roused by Fancy’s whispering, he suddenly turned around. His large, light-brown eyes darkened. Pointing the tip of his thin willow switch toward us, he called Fancy forth and ordered him to recite the table of four.
Fancy stood by Gulam Rasool, joining his hands over his navel. “Four ones are four, four twos are eight,” he crooned in his thin, high-pitched voice. Then he abruptly stopped. His eyes lost focus and went blank. His face flushed, the blood rushing to his taut ears.
“Stretch your hand out, you good-for-nothing,” Gulam Rasool rebuked him. He struck the middle of Fancy’s right palm, but not too furiously.
“Four threes are twelve, four fours are sixteen,” recited Gulam Rasool, nodding with his head. Fancy winced but recited along with him.
Fancy suggested we run away from school. I did not want to, because I was terrified by the last thrashing Brother had given me—the slaps that had fallen across my face after Brother pushed me into the bathroom with my clothes on and poured a bucket of cold water over my head. But somehow, minutes after the worn bronze bell was struck with a rock and the recess period was announced, I quietly gathered my satchel and followed Fancy.
“Don’t worry,” Fancy said, wiping his nose with his sleeve. “Master has gone inside the mosque to pray, and all the kids are either at home having rice or bathing in the river.”
Around the rhombus of the red brick building on its stout base of carved stone we strode, darting fearful looks into the distance. We walked past my family’s wooden granary and Fancy’s shanty-like stable. The door was open and the cow mooed once as she saw us.
“You see what a badass I am,” Fancy laughed. “Even the cow recognizes me.”
I laughed, forgetting the dangers that our straying away from the school entailed. I walked firmly beside Fancy as he entered the courtyard of his house.
“All you who can hear me,” Fancy announced, “write it down: Tomorrow is a holiday.”
I glanced at him, scandalized. “All you who hear me,” Fancy shouted, “tomorrow is Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s day.”
The front door opened and Fancy’s mother, Hajra Aapa, appeared, baffled and uncertain.
“What the hell are you talking about, you fool?”
“I am telling you, Mother, that tomorrow is Jinnah’s Day and the school is shut. It is a holiday.”
Hajra Aapa, her face blackened with soot, gathered the soiled hem of her gray woolen pheran. She closed her eyes, turned westward in the direction of qibla, and cursed Fancy. “Let a lorry run you over,” she said, invoking the wrath of Allah.
Fancy did not relent. He laughed mockingly, drowning the voice of Hajra Aapa. Clearly Fancy’s plan to scare his illiterate mother was not working.
I did not understand what Fancy was doing. Only now do I surmise that he was trying to frighten her by shouting Jinnah, making the surname of the founder of Pakistan sound like jinn. I felt confused and embarrassed by his confrontation with his mother. I ran away by the long-picketed fence of our cowshed into the courtyard of our house. As I entered the front door, my legs were shaking with fear. My steps grew hesitant as I approached the kitchen at the end of the corridor. The first thing I asked Mother was if Brother was home. “That loafer woke up late and left without eating lunch,” she said. I pictured him holding a handful of cards, sitting with his gang of potheads and idlers, drunkards and druggies, under a dense willow canopy across the river. At night before going to sleep and early in the morning when I opened my eyes before dawn, I knew I’d feel terribly selfish and guilty. But for the moment I did not mind Brother’s absence as he ruined his years of youth, gambling away Father’s hard-earned bills. I thanked Allah with all my heart for willing Brother to go away from home, for saving me from another brutal beating.
2
An afternoon in mid-April. After thunderous showers of rain, the sky cleared up and the sun shone brightly. I caught up with Fancy in the grove, and we walked toward the river, to a place where a block of shale had sheared away from the embankment. In the moist pit grew a clump of morel mushrooms. Fancy quickly untied the knot of his shalwar’s drawstring and peed over the mushrooms.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“This is good for their health,” he said and smiled. “Mushrooms need minerals.”
He placed his foot on the lip of shale above the pit and jumped upward to land on the top. As I put my foot on the edge, wary I might slip and break my shin, Fancy gave me his hand and pulled me up. We walked up along the river, looking at the muddied waters and sinister depths of the swollen Sandren.
A new single-story bungalow with a bright, fir-panel door had been built by Patwari, a ruddy-faced man with porous skin prone to rashes. The villagers consulted him whenever there was a fight between two families whose farms shared a boundary. Patwari considered the pleas of both the parties, measuring the stolen landholdings with a pink plastic tape. He’d moved to the village recently; the air of authority that came with his power to arbitrate was mitigated by his aloofness.
Fancy spotted a hoopoe on the high branch of an elm tree and shouted in excitement. He ran heedlessly down the slippery embankment and, picking up a stray rock from the wet ground, flung it toward the bird, who narrowly escaped. The rock hit the tree’s trunk and fell near the veranda of the house, where sat a young girl with wavy chestnut hair and petulant black eyes.
Patwari’s daughter snorted. “Gowu kansar,” she cursed us. May you be afflicted with cancer.
I stood behind Fancy, quietly telling him that we should leave.
“Kansar gatsche maelis,” Fancy retorted. Your father will suffer from cancer.
“I wish Papa was here,” the girl said, somewhat taken aback. She stood up and placed her hands on her hips. “Papa will teach you a lesson.”
“I am not afraid of your father,” Fancy said. “He is Patwari for others, not for Fancy.”
The girl spat in our direction, launching a thin blob of phlegm that landed near Fancy’s feet. She cursed us again, stepped inside, and shut the door.
I was relieved when Fancy walked away without asking me to join him in throwing rocks at the emerald glass windowpanes. As we climbed back up the embankment, I wanted to ask Fancy what the hell was wrong with him. Instead I said, “You did the right thing, shutting that little bitch up.”
We crossed the brown timber bridge over the river that roared beneath. In a clearing, our friends, all of them older than us by a year or two, were playing a cricket match. We joined them, grateful that they allowed us to play though we were late and had no coins to contribute to the sum being betted.
When I returned home in the evening, famished and tired, Brother grabbed me by my elbow and pushed me from the dark corridor into a cold, empty sitting room.
“Why did you scratch the door?” he asked. “And why the hell can’t you stay home instead of loafing with these village kids, read a few pages of your book? Don’t you realize what happened to me? Don’t you know how I long to go back to college and build a career? Loafing is a dangerous drug. Once you develop a taste for it, no matter how studious and brilliant you were once, it is impossible to go back.”
I told Brother I did not know what he was talking about.
“Then who scratched the entrance door of Patwari’s home? His wife complained to Mother. Her daughter told her you and Fancy gashed it with a rock.”
Brother yanked at my collar, ripping away the two top buttons of my white school shirt.
“Look at me,” Brother barked, seizing my throat. He slapped me as I gagged. He raised his hand again but did not hit me. “You know what? You’re not worth it,” he said and left.
3
Not long afterward, I was taken out of the government-run school and sent to a private one. I hated Mother for agreeing on this matter with Brother, for sending me away to live with relatives a few villages up the river near the new school run by a religious organization. In addition to science and math, Islamia Model High School provided formal training in Quranic Arabic. During my first morning assembly, it was announced that during the recess it was mandatory for every male student to go inside the mosque and pray. I was frightened.
During those initial days, after two hours of morning classes, longing for a breath of fresh air, I walked under the shade of a sycamore tree and went to the freshwater spring at the eastern end of the school compound. Squatting on the concrete step built into the bank, I washed my hands, rinsed my mouth three times, and splashed my face and forearms with clear, ice-cold water.
The mosque, built on the opposite side of the compound by the main school building, had a pagoda-like roof of rusted sheets of corrugated tin. I took off my shoes and stepped inside. Dozens of students were prostrated in prayer. Others sat with their legs crossed and faces of perfect repose. I felt less lonely. But as the imam began namaz and we muqtadis stood in a straight line behind him, shoulder to shoulder, I suddenly felt cramped. I wished I could go to a mystic’s solitary grotto or a hermit’s forested hillock where I could commune with Allah on my own, in a place that was distant and free and boundlessly silent, and where fresh air blew, instead of the hot breaths of the multitude that made the white tiled walls of the mosque perspire.
As soon as the imam said the second greeting to the left, emerging from the trance of his prayer, I escaped the mosque and ran across the compound. I drank palmfuls of water from the spring and settled on the steps of my classroom.
A few girls wearing white flip flops and light blue pherans and black shalwars were skipping. Soon a trail of boys, rowdy and cacophonic, emerged from the mosque. I spotted a few of my classmates going beyond the spring into a willow coppice to play hati hati: a game in which you’d die if you lost touch with hati, wood. Going from one tree to another, if the chaser touched you, you’d burn and become the chaser.
Listening to the deepening commotion in the compound, to the profusion of footfalls, the shrieks of excitement and awe, watching blurring little clouds of dust, I longed for home and for friends from my village. Most of all I missed Fancy and our evening escapades during which we entered shrubberies and sometimes stole cucumbers from our mothers’ vegetable gardens. How triumphant we’d felt one mid-summer afternoon after stealing a cucumber with hardened gray skin from Hajra Aapa’s shrubbery. We climbed the four taut rows of barbed wire and jumped down into the tall paddies. Hiding, we broke open the cucumber with a rock to look at the hundreds of sparkling seeds clinging in rows to the coarse flesh inside.
After the recess period, I returned to the classroom. Our teacher, Gulam Nabi, was in his early twenties. He had a soft face and admonishing eyes and wore an ironed checked shirt and baggy beige pants. The son of an imam, he’d taken great care to trim his dense, pitch-black beard, and his shaven temples shone. But his bright appearance did not camouflage the bitterness brimming in his dark eyes. He knew he was an insignificant teacher in an underfunded private school. And no matter how magnanimously he wished to devote his energies to Allah’s cause of spreading the virtue of knowledge, he was aware of his measly monthly salary.
Gulam Nabi asked me to recite Surah Al-Bayyinah, one of the longer chapters from the Quran he had made us memorize. With thirty-five pairs of eager eyes watching me, though I knew the entire chapter by heart, I faltered; I could not get far.
Gulam Nabi asked me to stand in the corner, calling the tallest boy to come forward. As Aashiq Hussain came nearer, he turned, giving me his back. Gulam Nabi’s eyes hardened.
Aashiq Hussain grabbed my arms and pulled me onto his back. My heart thudding, my feet suspended a foot above the floor, I closed my eyes as Gulam Nabi delivered a quick succession of blows to my buttocks. The pain was a singing feeling, as though with each blow Gulam Nabi were sprinkling my welts with hot pepper or letting loose the serpents of hell on my body, and the pain was compounded with an immeasurable magnitude of shame. Did Allah hate me for failing to recall and deliver his word? And if Allah did, was I not deserving of the punishment?
I shared the dread of Gulam Nabi with Haroon, with whom I began to play hati hati during recess. Haroon told me the names of the girls who liked to skip. “That one, bouncing in the middle, is Asifa. The one holding the rope to the right is Ulfat, one to the left is Masrat, and the one clapping and cheering in the back is Tahmina.”
Haroon was not remarkable in what he said in class. His grades were average, but he seemed to know a lot about the girls. I learned that when it came to dancing secretly, Asifa spun like a top. Masrat, slim as a straw, hid her bouffant beneath a black scarf. Ulfat had enormous, long-lashed eyes and soft, chubby hands. The braid of her lustrous black hair reached below her waist. She had a regal air and was unquestionably the queen of the group.
Haroon left me on the steps of the classroom and asked the girls whether he could skip with them. As Asifa stepped out from the whirling rope, Haroon stepped in effortlessly and winked at me. I blushed, wondering what the girls would say, but none of them seemed to notice.
When we went back to the classroom, Gulam Nabi did not show up. The class devolved into a ruckus. I shouted on top of my voice, asking Haroon why he had winked. “Did you watch the movie last night?” he asked. He was referring to the Mumbai romance thriller in which the hero had winked at the heroine to begin a sexual advance.
Haroon suggested we turn toward the row of girls behind us and do the same. I hesitated, but after Haroon did it several times, winking at Tahmina, who winked back, I joined in. Initially Ulfat giggled, covering her eyes with her hand. But then, parting her fingers, she too winked.
4
Almost a year passed. Then, on an overcast afternoon just before the Eid, Brother appeared outside my classroom. “I’m here to take you home with me,” he said.
I wanted to hug him and cry aloud, but in front of my friends and schoolmates I resisted.
Brother held my satchel, and we walked down a potholed and dusty road, watching the wind ripple through fields of silvery oat grass. To reach the village of Akhran, we took a boat across the River Yethyethur—another river with its origins in the Himalayan foothills, but shallower and more temperamental than the Sandren when it came to deluging the villages on its banks. The air became heavy and still. The sky rumbled. A bolt of lightning, originating at a single point and quickly dividing into three, struck the earth.
As it began to pour, we stepped under the blue tarp awning of a shop. Since we still had a mile and a half to walk, Brother bought me two Bakeman’s candies, asking me to hurry up.
By the time I reached home, I was drenched. Mother embraced me, gave me fresh clothes, and served me a plate of rice with hot meat stew. I fell asleep before I finished the food.
I awoke in the morning to the scent of green cardamom. The rain had ceased, and daylight flooded the upstairs bedroom. The birds chirped shrilly, heralding the day of Eid.
In the kitchen downstairs, Mother poured me a cup of kehveh and served me
cookies and cake on a tray. Father greeted me and asked me to take a bath and prepare for prayer. When I asked for my eez kharach, he gave me a crisp ten-rupee bill, making me promise not to waste it on toys, least of all a gun.
After I bathed and dressed in a sky-blue shalwar and kameez, Mother complained that while the whole world was making preparations to seek Allah’s blessings on the great day, Brother kept on sleeping.
I went out to look for Fancy and found him near the school. He had a fat-bellied gun in his hand, and his eyes lit up as I approached. He smiled and pulled at the trigger, striking the hammer hard—khataak, khataak, khataak—the shots deafening.
“Where is your gun?” he asked.
“Father did not give me eez kharach yet,” I lied.
I regretted making my father that promise. I followed Fancy down the dirt road that meandered through clusters of houses to the three-storied mosque with its skullcap dome and many megaphones. Little stalls selling food, pakode and jalebis, and gaudy whistles and miniature pianos and trumpets had sprung up all around. At one stall, a bunch of yellow and red balloons fluttered from a wooden pole.
As Fancy examined the balloons, I could not control myself; my feet took me to the stall. I bought a gun with a striped black grip and a slender double barrel for five rupees and a red strip of munitions with dots of phosphorus for fifty paisas. Behind me, droves of men and women from the village, their faces humble, their hearts grateful, disappeared into the mosque.
I stole away with Fancy, past a brook throttled by plastic bags and bottles. We entered the graveyard, where the branches of a dying walnut tree, like gnarled, bony fingers, hung low over countless flaming tongues of nettle.
As the azan for prayer began, we took positions behind two gravestones some ten feet apart, over the earthen mounds hiding bodies gnawed by worms. God is great, the imam called several times. The entire village lay prostrate in Allah’s home, asking for his mercy. The butt of my gun seemed to throb in my palm. After months of bearing it, the memory of Brother’s existence had become so crushing and oppressive that something snapped within me. A wave of pain shuddered through my torso and shoulders. Holding the grip tighter, I knew my gun was as real as Fancy was my enemy. Before he fired, I fired, so ready was I to spill his brains out.
As we left the graveyard, Fancy told me about the fair that went on for three days in Akhran, suggesting we head there after lunch. How deeply Brother terrified me, I realized as I walked back home. Ulfat lived in Akhran. As I had walked through the village with Brother the previous day, my mind refused to register that she had been there too. After spotting me from a distance she had come by to the shop where we waited under the blue awning and bought chewing gum. With raindrops on her face, she had turned and smiled at me.
At lunch I sat by Father and across from Mother. Despite the delicious wazwan dishes she had prepared, risteh and rogan josh, Brother sat at the distant end of the dastarkhwan, looking dismal, as though eating that wonderful food was the worst kind of drudgery. I had a sudden wish to stand up and throw my food into his fucking face. Along with my anger, I swallowed large morsels of food, and I left the kitchen quickly.
Fancy and I walked fast, without bothering to pull up our special Eid shalwars to save them from the muddy potholes filled with rainwater. I led the way, telling Fancy about the shop with the awning and how a girl in my class had stopped to smile at me. But once we left the vicinity of our village, he looked lost and forlorn. He did not ask whether I was trying to be her lover. We passed an earthen wall covered in tangles of ivy that fenced a massive house with a bright façade of red brick and carved stone. I pictured Ulfat standing behind each of its dozen white-painted windows, watching me arrive.
As we passed the open wrought-iron gate, I glimpsed her at the hand pump. She was leaning toward her mother, who was a larger copy of her. Ulfat froze when she saw us stop, quickly gesturing at me to go away.
We kept walking, toward the center of the village. We turned at a shrine with a gleaming conical roof and innumerable wish knots tied to its green latticed windows and passed between two long rows of brown, decrepit houses, arriving at an open space haphazardly planted with dozens of wooden carts. A multitude of kids from several villages milled about, a snack vendor swatted away delirious flies with his dishrag, and a brown stray dog flared its nostrils and wagged its tail.
“I want to buy carrot halwa,” I said.
“I’m not hungry,” Fancy replied.
Ulfat arrived with her two friends. Asifa looked razor sharp in pigtails and pointed shoes. Masrat, without a scarf, was all mascara and bangs. Ulfat wore screaming red lipstick and had thrown a shamrock dupatta across her shoulders. I thought of Gulam Nabi, and what he would do if by some wild chance he saw the girls proudly wearing makeup and mingling with the boys. Would he beat them too? Would he lacerate Ulfat’s forearm because as she approached me she winked, slightly brushing it against my hand?
I looked to my right. Fancy was drifting toward a vendor with a bunch of hydrogen-filled balloons. As he tiptoed by an amoeba-shaped puddle, his foot slipped, and he lost his balance and fell face forward onto the ground. The girls laughed, as did other onlookers. Fancy grinned and lowered his mud-spattered face. I had an impulse to dissociate myself from him. I stood still, my face singed, my guts knotting up, watching him squirm like a tadpole in mud. What if I became one more person in the crowd? What if I mocked and laughed at him? What if I looked away and left with Ulfat, not waiting to witness him struggle to stand, slip, and fall again, his eyes scarlet with shame, his face contorted with betrayal and accusation and hurt.
Feroz Rather is the author of The Night of Broken Glass, a novel-in-stories about the war in Kashmir. His work has appeared in Granta, The Common, Adroit, Carve, and elsewhere. An associate professor at Simmons University, he is working on his second novel, The Derby Shoe. www.ferozrather.com
Photo by Daniel Hall on Unsplash
