The Sweetness of Tears (6 page)

But he still tried to be humble—as humble as his wealth allowed him to be. He was a philanthropist, opening schools for the poor, and hospitals. He prayed all of his five prayers, three times a day, as Shias do. And fasted in Ramzan. In Muharram, he slept on the floor and ate no meat, so strong was his love for the House of the Prophet. Wealth and piety—impossible, they say, to reconcile the two—my grandfather worked hard to balance both.

I never went to women’s
majlis
es in Muharram anymore—the one at my grandparents’ house took place in the mornings, when I was at school. Instead, I went to men’s
majlis
es at night with my grandfather—to gatherings of men, some of whom cried as loudly and unashamedly as the women did by day. We would sit right in front of the
zakir
’s chair—not because we arrived early. Rather, because when my grandfather’s figure appeared at the entry to the hall, men cleared a path for him, waving him forward, fawningly, until he was seated in the favored position, which, because of his wealth, he had grown accustomed to expecting. On Ashura, every year, my uncle, Jaffer’s father, took us to the
juloos,
where I was now able to participate without fainting. I wasn’t afraid anymore. Of anything.

At the side of those processions, I saw another way that people remembered Karbala—those who believed that the shedding of blood through self-inflicted grief was a waste, who organized blood drives every year. As we grew older, Jaffer and the other boys and I scoffed at those who donated blood at these stations, thinking them weak and afraid of the manly rituals of
matham
that those who we considered to be
real
men, brave and bold, practiced.

Abbas Ali Mubarak, Dada, rarely spoke of my mother and never about his son. His wife, my grandmother, was less reticent. “Your father was the sweetest boy—just like you, Sadiq. Losing him was like losing my heart. Until you came to live with us, I was only half-alive. Your mother kept you away from us, from your rightful place in your father’s home, making you live in that hovel of a house that she came from. So we waited, Sadiq. I prayed and I prayed. And now, your mother has gone. To build a new life for herself. Over there,” she waved her hand, “in America. With that new husband of hers, Umar, that Sunni man with his Sunni name. Ah, well, that doesn’t matter. Your life is here, now. With us, in your father’s home. The way it was meant to be. How happy I am, that the son of my son, my very own, is back where he should be. You
are
happy here, aren’t you, Sadiq?”

“Are we going shopping, Dadi? You said you would buy me a bicycle. And that Sharif Muhammad would teach me how to ride.”

“Yes, of course. Anything, Sadiq. It makes me happy to see you happy.”

Already I had stopped calling Sharif Muhammad, the driver,
chacha
—a title of respect that means “uncle.” I had no need to. I was the master of the house, above having to give respect to mere servants.

At first, Sharif Muhammad chided me, “You have stopped calling me
chacha,
Sadiq Baba. The way your mother taught you. The way she addressed me.”

I ignored him and his references to my mother. I had to. To remember her, with him, was also to remember how he took me away from her.

Almost every day, Jaffer would come to visit. I had not realized before that he lived just across the street, in a mansion that was a smaller version of the one I now lived in. Together, we would take over our grandparents’ garden, shouting and running wildly in a way I had been too timid to do before—building forts and holding battles, sometimes as brothers in arms and sometimes as mortal enemies, using flower petals for weapons and unripe mangoes, jungle
jalebi
s, and
badaam
s for booty as we waged war, against each other and also against other children, whose parents dropped by to visit my grandfather and pay their respects—supplicants who came to curry favor, to ask for advice, jobs, guidance, references.

The first time my mother came back to Pakistan, a year and a half after she had left, she came to see me at my grandparents’ house. She didn’t come alone; she was carrying a baby with her, who she said was my sister. The baby cooed at me and cuddled up to my mother, tugging on her
dupatta
for a game of peekaboo. I was filled with rage and refused to speak. She came again the next year, this time without the baby, Sabah. But the same rage filled the room and she cried when she left. I refused to see her after that, refused to speak to her when she phoned from America.

In my grandparents’ home, I had the world at my feet—quite literally. Every day, a different hawker was invited into the gates of our compound. Jaffer and I would inspect the wares they laid out for us, taste of their goods, or avail ourselves of their services, with no worries about who would pay—this was a house where the adults set no limits on the children, and all accounts, the hawkers knew well, were settled with no questions asked. There was the
kilona-walla
on Monday, the toy man who sold old-fashioned string tops; squirt guns; paddle balls; ugly little baby dolls with blond, plastic, painted-on hair; cap-guns; balloons; and little pieces of junk that would pass no safety regulations that any sane person would have ever subjected them to. We bought slingshots from him, which we practiced at every chance we got, aiming for a line of old cans that Jaffer ordered the servants—a full retinue of them, assigned to follow us around and see to our needs and wants—to set up in the driveway, hoping to perfect our skill enough to shoot at something live one day.

Jaffer even managed to do it once, killing a bird—a sparrow, I think it was, a small, undistinguished specimen—which the driver, Sharif Muhammad, lectured Jaffer against killing, telling him that hunting was only allowed in Islam if you ate what you killed, because life was sacred and even the lives of the lowliest of God’s creatures could not be taken lightly. So, I remember with disgust, Jaffer asked the cook to marinate and grill the dead little bird and managed to swallow a couple of bites before throwing up all over the new shoes his mother had sent for from London.

The horse handler passed through our neighborhood on Tuesday afternoons, giving us slow, plodding horses to ride slowly, ploddingly around the neighborhood, while the servants followed us on foot to make sure that no one stole us away to sell to a beggar-master who would maim us in order to increase the return on his investment—this was more Jaffer’s worry than mine. Jaffer had never been anywhere on foot, nor commuted by rickshaw, like I had with my mother. Without the glass windows of chauffeur-driven cars to keep him safely separate, he was afraid of the evidence of poverty that was everywhere in Karachi’s streets.

On Wednesdays, we’d wait for another hawker, who would sell us
buddhi ka baal,
old-lady hair—a wonderfully disgusting name for cotton candy. On Thursdays, it was the
kulfi
man, who sold a heavenly sort of ice cream on a stick, set and frozen in aluminum molds, sold from a pushcart loaded with wooden barrels that smoked when he opened them. The monkey-man came on Saturdays—twirling a handheld drum and jerking on the poor monkey’s leash to make him dance, bow, scrape, and gesture to accompany the silly story his master narrated. Whatever pity rose up in my heart for the monkey, I smothered, trying hard not to remember the favorite old story and the voice—my mother’s—that had told it.

Those vendors and what they had to offer were merely the daily, routine indulgences that now defined life. My grandparents also took me to Europe every summer. We shopped at Hamleys, in London, for remote-control cars and train sets and racetracks, watched movies in Leicester Square, and fed pigeons in Trafalgar. In Paris, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, I looked down at the world and wondered at how small it was.

One year, Jaffer and his family went to America, a place I longed to see and yet hated the thought of at the same time—its whole population, in my mind, reduced to one woman, my mother, and one man, the crocodile. Jaffer told me about the buildings, the big cars, the roads, the freeways, and the bridges. Once, he made the mistake of telling me about the toll roads and booths he’d gone through. I was intrigued with the idea of charging money for the use of roads. One lazy afternoon, when there were only servants around to stop us—which was no impediment at all—I suggested that we build a barricade in the road in front of the house that no one would be able to pass through without paying the requisite toll—money we had no need for at all, but that was beside the point.

We used big, heavy rocks, which we found a few houses down, in the plot where construction for a new house had begun and been abandoned, and spent quite a bit of time and energy lugging those rocks, boulders really, closer to the house, drafting the labor of the servants in our effort, directing them to line the rocks up, effectively blocking passage for any car that might drive by. It’s amazing, now, to think that no car actually did pass through during the whole time it took us to complete our ragged blockade. After we were finished, we sat down at the side of the road and waited.

Some minutes later, a car came by—most private cars in the area that I lived in were driven, during the day, by chauffeurs rather than by their owners, and this, we could tell by the shabby and traditional clothing of the man behind the wheel—was one of them. The driver of the car stopped abruptly upon seeing the barricade of rather treacherous rocks in his way, as well as the little boys—Jaffer and me—who flagged him down using an old piece of red cloth that Sharif Muhammad used to polish the car. Jaffer explained the situation, speaking with an authority that comes with class and privilege—throwing in enough English words to make everything sound official—and the poor, old, bearded driver moved his skull cap around on his head for a few seconds, scratching, before pulling out a wad of notes from the dirty side pocket of his
kurtha
and peeling a
paan
-stained one-rupee note to hand over to Jaffer, who took it and scratched
his
head, as he realized it would take some time to clear the way, since it was blocked with rocks instead of the striped hydraulic arm that he had described to me. The poor old driver waited patiently while Jaffer and I made the servants earn the rupee we had just extorted, lugging a portion of those rocks out of the way with heavy breaths—just enough for the skilled old driver to wave his hand cheerfully and shout:
“Bas. Teek heh,”
before pulling through with a screech into first gear.

The next driver was a little more skeptical, but still polite. And the one after that—for whom Jaffer raised the toll to two rupees, given the relative ease with which these men seemed to be convinced of our authority, and the amount of labor moving those rocks back and forth entailed, for the servants, not for us—cursed at us, using language that made my ears turn red, involving, as it did, both our mothers and our sisters. Jaffer met the volley with a string of equally colorful epithets, and the two of them rallied back and forth for a bit before the driver jerked the car into reverse and bumped backward up the street, waving his fist at us all the way.

Altogether, we made about fifteen rupees before Phupijan, Jaffer’s mother, came running out, screaming and yelling, having been informed of our activities by the big-mouthed cook, who must have come out for a smoke and seen what we were doing and knew that
his
job, at least, depended on pleasing adult taste buds rather than allaying children’s tantrums. The money was nothing to us, but well worth the effort for the number of times we laughed later, marveling at our own audacity.

W
hen I was fifteen, I learned the truth about how my father had died, though I didn’t accept it as the truth then. And not for many years after. Jaffer and I got into a fight, a very bad one—I don’t remember over what. We were trading insults of the usual kind lobbed back and forth between boys. I pushed him, hard. He fell on his wrist, breaking the new watch Dada had given him for his birthday. A digital watch, with a calculator on it.

He was furious, standing up to rush at me with his fists stretched out in front of him, shouting, “You bastard! Look what you’ve done! You’re a bloody, mad bastard, Sadiq! Just like your father! And your mother is a whore, marrying that son-of-a-bitch Sunni bastard. No wonder your father killed himself!”

I didn’t even hear him. Not at that moment. I was fending off his blows as he shouted the words. Dada came running at the sound of the commotion we were causing in the lounge.

“Jaffer! Shut your mouth! Get out! Go home! Now!” Dada shouted as I’d never heard him shout before.

The expression on his face, the fury in his voice, made me stop and turn, my anger at Jaffer suddenly dissolved, to look into Dada’s face very carefully. His eyes would not meet mine. I reviewed what Jaffer had said, what I hadn’t really listened to as I warded him off. Dada turned and left the room. It took me a few hours to go and find him, to ask him about what my cousin had said.

“Don’t listen to him, Sadiq. It’s all nonsense, what Jaffer said. You boys! What horrible things you’ll say out of anger. Lies, all lies.”

I pretended—to him and to myself—that I was convinced and reassured. If Dada was lying, covering up the truth, a part of me decided that I didn’t want to know. Jaffer came over later and apologized. I told him I was sorry about his watch. He never raised the subject again.

Neither did I, too distracted by the gift Dada bought for me the very next day. A car of my own, though I was still too young to legally drive it. Dada sent Sharif Muhammad to obtain a license for me—illegally, bribe in hand—and, after Sharif Muhammad taught me to drive, Jaffer and I were free to wander around town on our own, to pursue a suddenly feverish social life that began to involve other licenses that my grandfather did not approve of when he found out. I am ashamed, now, to think of how I fought with him—an old man who had given me everything and anything I wanted. But I thought I was a man. He himself had told me I was. I spent the money he gave me as if it were no object, buying gifts for my friends, picking up the tabs at restaurants, buying booze and hashish for everyone. Soon, Jaffer was no longer allowed to go out with me. But no one could stop
me
. I was the youngest at every party and felt I had something to prove. The slightest provocation was all it took for me to come to blows. I deserved the reputation I had—racing my car against others’, equally indulged—for being wild and reckless.