Spirit of a Mountain Wolf (19 page)

It was not a good week for Razaq. That night, a customer came for a massage. The man stood inside the door, and a strange look came over his face when he focused on Razaq.

“Massage, janab?” Razaq prompted.

“Do you do more than massages?”

Razaq licked his top lip. “I give you whatever you want.” He would never get used to that “whatever.”

“I will give you something you will never forget.” The man whisked a stick out of his shalwar. It looked like a policeman’s baton. How did that get past Bilal? “If those lazy police don’t do their job, I’ll get rid of you criminals myself.”

Before Razaq had the presence of mind to call for Bilal, the man threw him onto the bed. The force of it knocked the breath out of him, then came a burning pain on his head. Razaq screamed, but it only made the man more enraged. He kept beating Razaq with the stick, all the time shouting what vermin he was. Razaq tried to protect himself with his legs, his arms, even to distract the man, to talk, but the man didn’t hear him. With growing horror, Razaq realized the man couldn’t stop. He heard a crack and thought he would pass out with the pain, when Bilal burst in.

“Bas! Stop!” Bilal punched the man in the face, then wrestled the stick from him, pulled his arms behind him, and marched him toward the doorway. The man spat on Razaq as Bilal pushed him past.

After the outside door slammed, Bilal was back. “Are you okay? I am sorry I was late. Neelma was on the door, and she wouldn’t have searched him.”

He brought over the bucket of clean water. “Let me see the damage. Mrs. M will not be happy about your face.”

Bilal fell silent as he undid Razaq’s buttons and wiped the blood away. But some bleeding couldn’t be stopped. He muttered and went out the door. Razaq had no energy to cover himself. From his head to his backside he felt he was on fire. He was barely conscious of Mrs. Mumtaz in the room, of Bilal arguing for the doctor.

“He needs the hospital, a proper doctor, not a kacha hakim. Please, I beg you, look at him.”

The arguing went on in the courtyard, and Razaq tried to think of the cool forest on the ridge of the mountains, how he and Ardil used to track jackals up there near the old Angrez fort. Climbing down was like free falling from the walls of a building, but they both managed it without breaking any bones. Did Ardil ever get beaten? He had become so quiet after the khan’s friend took him to his house, never said anything about his life there. Razaq had had no idea. Now he knew too much about the world, too much of what men could do.

When he came to, there was a man sitting on his bed. Bilal was behind him, watching. “He needs stitches,” the man said. “I will give him opium for the pain.”

So Mrs. Mumtaz had won: no hospital, only a healer who would be paid not to tell. If Razaq went to a hospital, he could tell the doctor what was happening here. Would they believe him?

Razaq clenched his teeth throughout the stitching of his head, but when Bilal and the hakim turned him over for more stitches, a jagged red color shot through his head, pulsating as if he could see it flashing on the wall. He screamed as he blacked out.

Razaq woke. At first he didn’t remember, then he moved to get up and sank back with a groan. His head felt like the cotton his quilt was stuffed with. There was a bandage around his chest. How long had he been asleep? He had to get to the latrine. He sat up and clutched the bed, waiting for his head to stop swinging like a monkey through the trees. He pushed himself up to his feet, but his legs folded, and he fell. Maybe he could crawl to the bucket. He was not going to disgrace himself on the floor of his room like an animal in a cage. He dragged himself to the bucket and managed a crouch. He gasped with the pain, but at least he could still pee like a man.

Then he vomited. The pain racked his ribs and made him cry out. He sat on the floor, then thought better of that as well. Was there anywhere he didn’t hurt? He crawled back to the bed and rested his head on the quilt. He didn’t think his arms were strong enough to pull himself up fully.

When he woke again, he was lying on the bed and Bilal was putting a fresh shalwar on him. Razaq stared up at the ceiling. “This is the worst beating I’ve had,” he said.

Bilal sat beside him. “It is the worst I have seen also. I have asked Mrs. M to give you a chutti, some time off from work.”

Razaq tried to grin, but that hurt, too. “I can’t massage like this.”

“This is what I told her, but she said you were good for business. The sooner you are up, the better. She has given you until the stitches come out.”

“When is that?”

“Ten days.”

“I feel as if I will never get out of this room.”

“You will heal, the hakim said. You are young.”

But Razaq knew that in the places that mattered he would never heal.

He gazed at Bilal. “I feel old today. My grandfather was so frail he had to be held up to pee. Like me.” He paused.

“That man said I was a criminal. Was he some sort of policeman?”

Bilal shook his head and made a face. “Just a crazy man.” Then he leaned forward. “Razaq, what happened to you was wrong.”

“Everything that has happened to me is wrong,” Razaq murmured.

“The police say we are criminals, but it isn’t our choice,” Bilal said. “And they still take their pleasure before they arrest us. Hypocritical pigs.”

Razaq wondered what had caused that outburst. Then he said, “Bilal, thank you. He couldn’t stop—he would have killed me.”

It was a week before Razaq could walk without it hurting too much or crouch over the latrine bucket without excruciating pain. Everything seemed to hurt, but at least it wasn’t that jagged red pain he had felt before he passed out. Bilal said it would be a month before he could sneeze or laugh. He had broken ribs before, too. Razaq didn’t think he would ever laugh again. When had he last laughed? On the roof the first time Bilal took him up there? A few times with Tahira? Maybe he could force a smile to make her happy.

Before the ten days were up, Mrs. Mumtaz pushed him to the outside door. “Bilal is busy so you can get my pastries from the bakery. I see you won’t be running away today.” She watched him walking gingerly past her.

Outside on the gali, he should have enjoyed the breeze, the feeling of that small room rolling from him, but his mind was dull. He no longer thought of how he could get himself and Tahira out of Mrs. Mumtaz’s house. He had no interesting thoughts at all. He was a different boy from the one who had charged into traffic he had never before encountered to rescue a buffalo. He winced as his foot bumped against a stone and jarred his leg. Why did his head feel like a wall built of stone and mud? He would give anything to be running wild in the terraced fields on the slopes of the mountain near his home with Ardil. In September, the grass was so thick, the flowers so high, they could hide from each other. But Ardil had stopped coming with him once he moved to the khan’s friend’s house. Now Razaq understood why. He felt the regret of not being a better friend to Ardil, but how could he have known?

He had another thought. If he hadn’t left the mountains, he wouldn’t have seen Tahira. Was it worth it all to have met her? He mentally shook his head, but at least she was a light in a dark place. She was the only thing that had stopped him from shutting off every part of his mind for good. His father would have said she brightened his eyes.

He picked up Mrs. Mumtaz’s order from the bakery and was on his way back when he heard someone call his name. Was it Bilal? He hadn’t done anything wrong that he could think of, unless Neelma was up to her tricks. He glanced behind him and saw a boy with a jaunty cap on the back of his head. “Zakim?”

Zakim reached him and grinned. “Knew I’d find you one day, Chandi.”

“How did you?” Shame that he hadn’t returned for Zakim welled up, and he made to turn away.

“You’re in my beat, Chandi. This is not far from Moti Bazaar.”

Razaq nodded tiredly. “I can’t stop,” he said. “I have to take these pastries back.”

Zakim narrowed his eyes at him. “What’s happened to you?”

Razaq shrugged.

“So you are on the streets now? You should come back. You didn’t get beaten when you were with me.”

Razaq didn’t know what to say. If he was gone too long, Mrs. Mumtaz would question him or send Bilal to find him.

“Someone’s skewered you, haven’t they?”

Razaq’s nod was involuntary.

“That happened to me, too. Twice, by men I didn’t know.”

Razaq wondered what just twice would feel like—he couldn’t remember. He frowned. “You smile about it?”

“What else is there to do? Where are you living?”

“I can’t say.”

“Chandi —”

Razaq turned on him. “I am a slave—don’t you understand? I can’t even piss in the latrine when I feel like it. They only let me go to the bakery because they know I won’t run.”

Zakim frowned. “I find that hard to believe. You fought a bear and won, remember.”

An image of Tahira rose before Razaq’s eyes. She was his Moti.

“There is nothing that can be done now except work to pay them off,” he said.

“Chandi? Is this you? Something always can be done.”

Razaq walked away. “Not this time.”

“Wait. There is a man—he’s been asking for months for a green-eyed mountain boy in Moti Bazaar. Chandi, look at me.”

Razaq turned.

“I saw your uncle. He came to the scrap yard.”

The hollowness in Razaq’s heart should have frightened him, but it didn’t. He had heard about uncle-seeing before, and he wouldn’t fall for that story again.

“It is too late,” he said. Let Zakim decide what he meant.

When he glanced behind him, Zakim was standing where he had left him, watching the way he went.

The next morning, Razaq woke to the sound of wailing in the house. Then came a quiet knock at his door. It was Tahira. She stood there with tears running down her face; she didn’t even bother to wipe them away.

“What is the matter?” he asked. “Why is everyone upset?”

“It is Ismat,” she said. “She died.”

“How?”

Horrible possibilities flooded his mind. If Bilal hadn’t come when that man was beating him, he would have died, too.

“She had a shaving knife.”

Razaq frowned. “How did she get that?” None of them were allowed knives. Bilal even had permission to personally search the girls for forbidden objects if he felt it was needed.

“A customer gave it to her. She told him she wanted to shave for him.”

Tahira looked embarrassed, perhaps at what Razaq would think, but nothing could embarrass him anymore. He didn’t ask how the man had smuggled the knife into the house. Hadn’t a customer got a baton into his room without difficulty?

He sighed. “Afsos, I am sorry to hear that.”

Tahira nodded. “She was nice to me, but she had lost all hope.” She burst into sobbing, and Razaq drew her into his room. After a while, she looked up and touched his face. “Look at you. I heard you had been beaten, and still you have scars. I was sorry I couldn’t come. If I didn’t have you as my friend, I would be as lost as Ismat. She had no one.” Her eyes filled again but she kept talking. “We are disappearing. Every time I dance, it is eating a little more of me away. Soon there will be nothing left. Yesterday Neelma called me a gashtee, a whore, and it is true.”

The force of feeling in Razaq’s chest jolted him. It was the way he had felt when the boar charged Seema. That day he had a gun, but he had nothing to help Tahira.

“You are not a whore. Inside your heart you are pure.” He said it as if he could defy the jinns.

“But they are changing who we are. One day, I will wake up and find that is all I am—a prostitute. Ismat knew this and she couldn’t take it any more.”

Razaq tried something else. “You have your holy words.”

Perhaps he looked worried for she said, “I couldn’t do as Ismat has, but I feel so dirty now. Can God forgive this when I can’t stop doing it? In the Injil there is a prostitute who Yesu Masih forgives, but she leaves her way of life and becomes his devotee. I can’t leave this way of life. I am happy now that my parents are dead—if they knew what I do here they would be heartbroken.”