The munshi didn"t come. Not after five minutes, not after ten. But the food came, brought up by a boy or young man in a brown Pakistani costume. He was of great beauty; it was strange to think that he had chosen the life of sacrifice and service. Razak (rounding out nicely at twenty-seven) pretended to share my nervousness about the food; but then almost immediately he fell on it and ate with luxurious concentration to the end. Still the munshi didn"t appear, and when the boy in brown came with the tea (stewed in the Indo-Pakistani bazaar way, sugar, water, tea, and milk boiled together: sweet and sharp and refreshing) I made him stay and talk about himself.
It wasn"t easy. Not because he was secretive, but because he seemed to carry no connected idea of his life. Experiences floated loose in his mind, and it was necessary to ask many little questions. He was oddly pa.s.sive. His words (which Razak translated) were spoken softly, with downcast eyes.
He had been with the community a year. He was going to go away in a year; there was no question of a lifelong commitment. But wouldn"t it have been better for him, since he wanted to get a job again, to have spent the time learning a trade or a skill? He said he had been a pipe-fitter with the waterworks, earning four hundred fifty rupees a month; he could get that job again.
He came from Peshawar, in the northern Frontier Province, on the Afghanistan border. His family had a hundred acres of land and a tractor; but there were six brothers, and he had joined the great migration south. He had gone first to Karachi (where there were said to be a million Pathan migrants from the Frontier Province); then he had come to Hyderabad. A friend had told him of the community and brought him to the house. In the house he had seen two men from his northern village. So he had come again, two or three times. But he couldn"t make up his mind; he had decided to stay only after he had met the pir.
Experiences floated loose in his mind: he seemed to have no goal. He was a wayfarer. Through him it was possible to understand something of the wayfaring life in the European Middle Ages. The religious community in the desert was a staging post; it helped him through a part of his life. And no doubt in Pakistan-with its migrant movement within and outwards-there were many more like him, adrift, taking life in stages, as it came.
I asked whether foreigners came to the community and whether, when they came, they behaved strangely. He brightened at the question, looked up, became like a boy with excitement. He said there was a Bengali who came once and stayed for a month. He had no money, nothing. One day a man came in a car and took away the Bengali to Karachi. When the Bengali came back he was driving his own car.
Was it luck? Was it some deal?
There was an exciting answer, clearly. But it never came, because just then the man in blue-with the shaved head, the firm paunch, the stout shoulders, and the a.s.sessing eyes-came in. And the boy in brown grew nervous, stopped talking, looked down again, picked up the teacups, and went out.
The man in blue squatted before us, sitting on his heels, resting his knees on the floor spread. Since (though he didn"t say this) the munshi wasn"t coming, he wished to talk to us himself.
He said in English, "What do you want to know?"
I was surprised by the clarity of his accent: it had improved since he had spoken to us in the yard. There was aggression in this new clarity, but it was a managed aggression: it could harden or soften: he still wasn"t certain about me. I said I couldn"t yet say what I wanted to know; I would be happy with what he had to tell me.
He said, and the English words poured out of him, "I will tell you. There are different categories of believers. Some want money, some want a good afterlife. I want to meet Allah. You can do that only through a medium. My murshid is my medium. I want to love my murshid. I want my murshid to enter my heart. Allah is with my murshid. And when my murshid enters my heart, Allah is with me. I have no doubt about that. I can meet Allah only through the medium and in the form of my murshid. Through the medium and in the form."
The murshid wasn"t the pir or ruler of the community, as I thought. The murshid was the original saint, whose tomb we had visited.
The man in blue explained with a political a.n.a.logy. "The Qaid-e-Azam [Mr. Jinnah] founded Pakistan." He was like the murshid. "But today we obey the president, Zia ul-Haq." The president was like the pir. The man in blue pointed at Razak. "You obey Zia ul-Haq." He pointed at me. "You obey Zia ul-Haq. I obey Zia ul-Haq." I was beginning to detect a quality of incantation in his speech.
He said, "I haven"t shown you hospitality. It is my murshid. I don"t know you. You don"t know me. But I serve you to the best of my ability because I love my murshid. I want my murshid to enter my heart."
There were about a hundred devotees in the community. They fed from eight hundred to a thousand people every day; they also ran a dispensary (it was in a cubicle downstairs, near where the man was doling out fresh water). But where did they get the money?
The man in blue said that the previous pir was a saint. "He was all the time for Allah. He fasted all day and he prayed all night. I am telling you. It isn"t easy to do, to hold your hands like this." He brought his palms together and held them open, the way Muslims do when they say their prayers, as though reading their hands like a book. And then he stood up and demonstrated the open-palmed act of prayer and repeated what he had said. "All the time for Allah. Fasted all day, prayed all night. You try holding your hands like that for even ten minutes." He sat down again on his heels. "He did miracles. He took no food for fifty years. He took no water for three years. The people told him he would be useless if he took no water, and that was when he decided to take water."
But how did they get the money to run the community?
The man in blue said, "That"s what I"m telling you. It was because of all that sacrifice that this place is now possible. Our murshid now has so many murids, followers, all over the world. They come here in lakhs. They give one rupee, five rupees, ten rupees. And we bargain for goods. I haven"t shown you hospitality. It is my murshid. There are different categories of believers. I want to meet Allah. The important thing is that I can do this only through-the-medium-and-in-the-form of my murshid. Do you understand?"
I asked him to tell me exactly what he felt when he stroked the stone that hung above the murshid"s tomb. To my surprise he appeared not to know what I was talking about. And when I asked again he said he was too busy here, with the community.
The boy in brown stood in the doorway-eagerness on his face-but when he saw the man in blue still squatting before us he turned and walked silently away on his bare feet. I was nagged by that story about the Bengali and the car; it began to torment me while the man in blue talked on, repeating himself, mixing up the sequence of sentences he had already spoken.
He told me another miracle of the previous pir. A faqir died, one of the ascetics of the community. They told the pir. He went to the room where the dead man lay. As he entered the room the dead man raised his right hand in the Muslim salutation. The pir became very angry. He jabbed his stick at the dead man and said, "You must learn greater control over your body. Surely you know it is incorrect for a dead man to salute me."
I asked the man in blue whether he couldn"t send up the boy with some tea for me. I asked many times. But we weren"t going to have the boy in brown to ourselves again. We would have tea later, the man in blue said; but we had to visit the kitchens first, and then of course we should look at the tombs of the old pirs. He didn"t intend to leave us now; I began to understand that it was his way of seeing us off the premises.
I tried to get him to talk about himself, and it was as hard as it had been with the boy in brown. He gave out random facts; they had formed no pattern in his mind; he knew only where he was now. He, too, was a wayfarer, part of the semi-medieval migrant life of Pakistan. In spite of his Central Asian features (emphasized by his shaved head) he, too, like the boy in brown, came from the Frontier Province. He had studied at an agricultural college, but he didn"t take a degree. He had done odd jobs for a few years. Then he came to the community. He saw the present pir and decided at once to stay. He didn"t ask anybody"s permission; he just stayed (and Razak added that he was now the pir"s "right-hand man"). His father was a farmer in the Frontier Province. How many acres? Sixteen. Good land? Very good. Any brothers? No brothers. So who was going to take over when his father died? He thought I had asked whether he was needed on the farm, and he said there were contractors with machines. What was going to happen to the sixteen acres when he inherited them? He said he didn"t know; he had given up that side of life.
We went down to look at the kitchens. The midday feeding was over, but cooking was going on. We had to take off our shoes to walk, in thick, tickling dust, from the main building to the kitchen shed. There they were boiling tea in big copper pots; and there, among the cords of firewood, the boy in brown stood idle; he kept his distance.
In an open shed in front of the deep fire holes a man was standing over a high marble basin, kneading brown dough, kneading up to the elbows; flies had settled on the kneaded dough in the marble stand beside him. Another man was making lentil soup; another man was in the fire hole, attending to the oven. The heads of all were shaved; their eyes were bright; their cheeks were round. They were friendly, pleased to be observed; they were at the source of food and plenty; they knew they served the poor and G.o.d. In northern-Indian painting these cooking scenes recur: the very faces I felt I had seen before.
One by one, the man in blue guiding us, we touched the tombs of all the pirs who had been buried here in the koli. And then we sat in the hot tiled courtyard, in the gaiety of the stepped coloured lines of the Hyderabad Boogie-Woogie. Shyly, the boy in brown came out with the tea. He didn"t go away. Our time was almost up. I asked directly about the Bengali.
The boy in brown said, "He went to Karachi and he came back. I told you."
"Bengali?" the man in blue said. "We get people from all over the world here. I don"t know you. You don"t know me. But I serve you-" And abruptly, sitting on a white-tiled ledge, he stopped, as though enervated by the midafternoon heat, the dust, the desert, the life, the boredom.
When we were in the car, going down the wet, black bazaar lane with the paying food stalls, Razak said, "You remember when he was talking about getting goods? He said he bar-gained. In the koli he should not be making bar-gains." Razak was speaking as a good Muslim.
We drove back between the river and the rock mountains: neat layers of rock folded over and then breached by some water cataclysm, the rock stripped off in layers, so that in places the mountain looked like the tiers of a vast stone amphitheatre tilted sharply to one side.
We stopped at one such breach. Razak had been energized by his lunch. And a bottle of a Pakistani version of Seven-Up, Bubble-Up (it was a pleasure just to hear him speak the name), had made him frisky, indifferent to the great heat.
The mountain grew as we walked towards it. When we were in the mountain shadow it was cooler. It was a site that called up awe. But the Hindu temples, expressions of that awe, small, pyramid-roofed structures, not old, only pre-1947, had been broken, emptied, cleansed, and then defaced with Urdu inscriptions: the enemy utterly cast out. And it was a famous site: of the water turbulence that had smashed the mountain, and the lesser turbulence that had afterwards washed between the layers of rock, creating smooth holes and caverns, there remained only a salt spring, known for its healing qualities: blue-green in the mountain cleft, leaving a white slime on the rocks its little stream now slipped over and still smoothed. In this stream there were more than pebbles; there were marine fossils.
Razak had the naturalist"s eye. He bent down and picked up pieces of stone on which I could see patterns of sh.e.l.ls; he placed in my hand a mussel, fossilized whole, and a small conchlike sh.e.l.l. Islam, Buddhists, Hindus, Aryans, pre-Aryans; and there had been a civilization in the Indus Valley even before the builders of the ancient cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. But the greater wonder, that took the mind far away, was that once all this land lay at the bottom of the sea. And still this thin salt spring, rising out of hot rock, brought up evidence of the sea past in a land that was now so far from the sea, so full of light and heat, so crying out for water.
There was trouble again at the Circuit House in Hyderabad when we got back there. I had been booked in for the previous night; there was no booking for me for this night. The place was empty; no one was expected. But it took a full hour"s telephoning, Razak being pa.s.sed on from official to official, before permission was obtained.
We didn"t have to go far in the morning. In Hyderabad itself, within one of the mud-walled forts built by the last Muslim amirs or princes of Sind, there was a shrine where the mentally disturbed went to be cured.
It was up a flight of marble steps. At the bottom were pathetic shrunken women, one with a little baby boy, waiting for alms; two or three steps up, a man was beating a drum and singing. At the top were two small buildings separated by a narrow paved lane. In the building to the left the saint had meditated; in the building to the right he was buried. The tomb was barred around, and the guardian of the shrine, a fat and friendly little man, sat amid a companionable swarm of flies on the tiled floor of the pillared porch in front. To people looking for health he must have seemed like a sweet-shop owner to children, the man who had it all. He was exchanging gossip with a demented, red-eyed man, and while they talked they also appeared to be bartering or exchanging beans of some sort.
One or two people came and made the circuit of the tomb, pa.s.sing slowly in the lane between the two buildings to get the emanations from both sacred places at once. They held the silver-painted iron rails of the tomb with a rubbing gesture, and then rested their heads on the metal.
At the back, two young girls with covered heads were facing the tomb. They were not ill; they were just using the shrine as a meeting place, having a little Hyderabadi chat and giggle. But a man was there with a real djinn or spirit on him, a young man, dark, physically wasted, his mind half gone. It was this man that the guardian of the shrine presently rose to deal with. The flies swarmed up a few inches, then settled down again.
The guardian could be heard shouting at the back. "Come on!" The djinn in the man howled, suffering from the sacred emanations. But the guardian, like a man standing no nonsense from any djinn, led the man on, shouting roughly all the while at the djinn; and the man with the djinn pretended to pull back. For all his distress he knew what was expected of him. And in this very ill man there was still a remnant of vanity. He knew he was a case so bad that he had to be brought to the shrine; and he looked back at Razak and me, his only audience, to make sure that we were seeing how strong the djinn was that possessed him, how the djinn howled and resisted going nearer the emanations of the saint. But there he had to go, in the lane between the two buildings; there he would stay until he was p.r.o.nounced cured. "You sit here! You hear me!" the guardian shouted. After a little resistance the djinn quietened down, and the guardian, jolly once more, returned to his beans and his flies, which swarmed up six inches to greet him and then settled down again.
An African-sidi was the local word that caused no offence-came. His hair was neatly dressed; he didn"t look unwell. He sat beside the barred window of the meditation place, next to the man with the djinn, now pacific, even remote. And in a short while the African"s face altered; his eyes glazed, his cheeks hollowed, his pain became apparent. A small woman came with a child on her hip. She was pregnant again. And then I saw that she was herself hardly more than a child, twelve or thirteen, but excited at the idea of already being adult enough to experience important needs. Everyone was acting (though the man with the djinn, after his flash of vanity, seemed a little too far away); everyone knew his role. But was it acting when the whole world, or the world you knew, was in the play?
That was the point that Razak-who was awed by the djinn-struggled to make with his English. He had seen two or three other people possessed by djinns, he said. But then he said that he was sure that in other countries, other civilizations, people would believe in other things, mental illnesses would take other forms, and there would be other cures.
To drive back through the desert to Karachi, to cross the ancient Indus again, was to drive back through ascending levels of development, to leap generations. It was easy to see how the great city-not to speak of the Intercontinental, with its special traffic-drew them out of their villages and committed so many to the wayfaring life.
For some of the way, nearing Karachi, we drove behind an open van with freshly and correctly slaughtered cattle heads, skinned, shining in the sunlight, but still with horns.
I was glad that Ahmed had sent me to the interior. I had much to talk to him about. But when I got to Karachi I found that it was Ahmed himself who had cancelled my first booking at the Circuit House-there had been no visiting minister that day. Between his sending me to Hyderabad and my arrival at Hyderabad something had happened to make Ahmed change his mind about me.
He had known nothing about me before we met. His response to me had been the pure response of man to man; and I had responded to that. But now perhaps he had been told that I was not what I said I was. He became cold on the telephone; he failed to keep two appointments. So I couldn"t talk about the sufi centre with him. I couldn"t discuss with him whether the mixing of the two types of religion-the religion of revelation and rules, the religion of asceticism and unconfined meditation-didn"t diminish both. Nor could I find out more about the "cooperatives" of his youth or about his idea of the period-less purity of women in paradise. As with the boy"s story of the Bengali who had left penniless for Karachi and come back with a car, I had to be content with what I had.
I liked Ahmed. His withdrawal made me unhappy, and anxious to leave Karachi.
6.
The Disorder of the Law
At the sessions court in Karachi-just beyond the central bazaar-the prisoners were led out into the yard, usually tied up in twos, with chains attached to their wrists, and with the free end of the chain held by a khaki-uniformed policeman. It was friendly, and in the courtyard bustle, which was like the bazaar bustle, no one stared or paid too much attention. The prisoners chatted with the policemen and sometimes they stopped at the pan stalls to buy betel nut to chew. The faces in the main were like the faces of the street; though one man had disturbed eyes, and two barefooted little fellows chained together, possibly brothers, looked mentally deficient. There weren"t enough chains. Some prisoners were led along by ropes attached to their upper arms, and they looked a little like performing monkeys; but it was just as friendly.
On a platform shaded by awnings were the notaries and commissioners for oaths, waiting for custom, with their little tables and gla.s.s paperweights and their little grubby books. One booth sold stamps and forms of all sorts. Outside, on the pavement, were the affidavit men, pecking away on old-sometimes very old and rusted-standard typewriters, filling stamped forms. And there were the letter writers ("Respected Sir"-and I longed to stop and read more, but already I had caught the warning-off, professionally jealous eye of the writer).
Around the corner, on the pavement of the main road, were the medicine men, with their strange stock. At first I thought the heaped-up lizards were dead or stuffed, or a kind of sculpture. But then one lizard (or iguana) moved, and all moved; and there were eleven of them tied to a big stone, tied by the thick end of the tail or by the waist above the hind legs, all now striving to break free on the hot pavement. It was Nusrat who later told me what the lizards were for: virility. You bought and killed your lizard; then you ate a certain part.
I went twice to the sessions court. The first time I went alone, and saw only the tableau in the yard. The second time I went with Nusrat. Nusrat was a journalist on the Morning News. He was a short, chunky man of about thirty, with big round gla.s.ses on a round face, and a thick walrus moustache. He was full of a great excited energy. He gave himself, for more than the normal working day, to his newspaper job. This absorbed some of his anxieties about his wife, who was not well, and his anxieties about what he felt to be his failings as a Muslim.
Nusrat was of mixed Punjab and Madras descent, so that in Pakistan he was half a native, half a mohajir or Indian Muslim stranger, half settled, half a man who felt that as a Pakistani and a Muslim he wasn"t doing enough. Almost the first thing he said to me, in his brisk, throw-away manner, was that he wasn"t much of a Muslim. He meant it only as an apology; he went on to say almost at once that the most important things to him were Islam and the hereafter.
And in all that bustle at the sessions court, in all the rooms Nusrat took me to, only one magistrate was sitting. In the little room, below the legal bench, there were two or three spectators, or simply people waiting. The atmosphere was casual; and the gravity of the depressed-looking man in the dock (blue shirt, loose Pakistani trousers) was slightly incongruous; he was like a man taking his role far too seriously. It was hard to know what was going on. People spoke loudly in Karachi; but in this little room they mumbled, and with the encircling hubbub it took some time to understand that they were speaking in English. It took longer to understand that it was a case of theft, that after a year the police had still not produced witnesses, and that the case had been called only to be adjourned yet again.
A federal prosecutor, who knew Nusrat, gave me a little harangue about the procedure while the case was going on. He was anxious for me to stay and see him handle his own case, which was against a teacher in government service who-anxious to emigrate-had given false information when he applied for a pa.s.sport. As a government servant the teacher should have had an NOC-a no-objection certificate-but the poor wretch, no doubt despairing of getting such a certificate, had hidden the fact that he was a government servant. The prosecutor said the case was going to come up in ten minutes. But with half an hour being the standard unit of stated delay in Pakistan, ten minutes meant a long time. Nusrat and I moved on (and indeed, when we looked in a while later, there was another case going on, and our prosecutor was still waiting).
In the verandah outside we saw four chained boys waiting without anxiety on a bench, and quite ready to chat about their adventure. They worked in a hotel and had been charged with theft. They said the police had "well" beaten them up. But they were laughing, and the policeman holding their chain also smiled, shaking his head. Next to them were two men charged with a stabbing; they had unreliable eyes. At another plane of crime and vanity was the young man from the north who now came stamping by. He wore leg irons in addition to the chains on both wrists, and two policemen with rifles walked with him. His pale skin was pimply on the cheeks; his narrow almond-shaped eyes were frightening. He was aware of the stir he was creating, a man marked for the gallows, high above the world of petty crime, and he was dressed like a chieftain for this public appearance: a freshly ironed pale-blue Pakistani suit, a red turban with a tall, stiff crest. There was no question of stopping him for a chat.
Nusrat saw a man being led along by a rope, and became agitated. "You see, there aren"t enough chains. They"re using ropes. I must write about this. There"ve been many escapes from the courts. Perhaps they"ve imported the chains and they haven"t arrived. Perhaps they"re using the chains for political prisoners."
In a court without a magistrate, a room like a small cla.s.sroom, an unveiled woman sat with her very thin young son. Her pallid face was round and small, her skin rough; neither she nor her son was getting enough to eat. She had bought a property for four thousand rupees, four hundred dollars; but there had been trouble. She had her doc.u.ments in a plastic envelope, among them the precious, much-handled receipt for four thousand rupees. For three days in succession she had come to the court, and today again there was no magistrate. She lived fifteen miles out of Karachi. She said her husband was dead, from asthma. But Nusrat didn"t believe that. He thought she was divorced; but it would have been too disgraceful for her to admit that she was alone, unwanted.
And in the verandah just outside, more murder. A plump, moustached man from Swat in the far north: he had been arrested two days before. He had a good, straightforward face and seemed at ease, even with his shackled wrists. He said he was at ease because he had done nothing. The police had found a gun in his possession; but the man who had been killed was a man of bad character and there were many people in the area who would have wanted to kill him.
A sidi, or man of African extraction, charged with murder, had a large group of sidi well-wishers. (So many sidis here, the more full-blooded among them from the Karachi docks, those of more mixed race from the ancient Makran coast of Baluchistan; so many other idle people in the yard and verandahs of the courts.) A Muslim murder, this sidi affair, and a justified murder, according to the accused man"s supporters: the murdered man had seduced an unmarried girl.
And then, led along in chains, was a Pathan boy from the Frontier Province, drawn from home by the capital and committed now to the wayfaring life of Pakistan. For him that life was turning out badly. He was barefooted and his feet were black. He had worn the same clothes for weeks; the collar of his long-tailed shirt was grimed and black, as though with engine grease. An English-speaking lawyer, a man of some style, explained the case to me. The boy was charged with trespa.s.sing on railway property. In fact, this trespa.s.sing was the boy"s dangerous way of picking up a few rupees. He would board a moving train, force or bully his way into a seat, and later try to sell the seat for twenty rupees or so. It was a well-known trick. The policeman holding the boy"s chain smiled; the lawyer telling the story smiled; the only one who didn"t smile was the boy.
There was an office in which it was all recorded: a room that was a storehouse of files, racks and racks with bundles wrapped in red and yellow and white cloth, shelves and shelves with torn and dusty ledgers. At a table in the middle of this seeming debris was an old white-bearded man with a black cap. He had a story of legal dedication and bureaucratic success to tell. He had come to Karachi at the time of the part.i.tion of the subcontinent in 1947, and he had been with the courts for thirty-two years. He had migrated from Jaipur in India, where he had had three years" experience in court work. In 1947 there were only six city courts in Karachi; now there were forty. He had worked his way up step by step; he had eventually become the chief "reader" in the most important of the city courts. As reader, he sat beside the magistrate; he was the man who made a note of everything. Note-taking, records, had always been his vocation.
Finally he had transferred to the registry, this room of cloth bundles and ledgers and papers. It looked chaotic, but it was organized. He could find anything in fifteen minutes. All he wanted was the date of the judgement and the date of the consignment. The consignment date was the date when the records were sent down to the registry. But if the consignment date wasn"t known? Then, the old man said, it would be difficult. Or, I thought, impossible. He demonstrated his method, giving himself a judgement date and a consignment date, opening one tattered ledger, then consulting another, even more tattered, then-black-capped, white-bearded, his index finger seeming to beat time-picking his way along a rack until he disinterred and dusted down a bundle. I complimented him. He said he was a success by G.o.d"s will; everything was due to Allah.
"Would you like Islamic laws?" Nusrat asked.
"Indeed," the old man said, sitting again at his table. "It would be better." People were too wicked in Karachi; they needed swifter punishment. Many of the people hanging about in the yard were professional witnesses, appearing and reappearing in various cases; even he, taken up with his records, hidden away in the registry, had grown over the years to recognize some of those men.
How did he feel, then, living his professional life among these wicked people? He misunderstood my frivolous question; he said sternly that he had never accepted bribes. Now he was going to retire in three years. He had no plans. He left the last years, as he had left the others, to Allah.
I said, "Your children?"
"Please don"t ask, sir."
And only now it came out that this full and successful life in the Karachi courts-the life for which G.o.d had to be thanked-was cruelly flawed. Four of his seven children suffered from calcium deficiency. He used the English words. Their bones crumbled away. Two of the children had already died. One girl was now paralyzed and helpless at home. Raising his forearms and crossing them, as though he, too, was shackled at the wrists, he demonstrated how her legs were. Even if a fly settled on her face she couldn"t move to brush it away; someone had to do it for her.
For this girl, though, he had hopes of a medical cure in the United States. He had written letters; there had been a reply. And, sure enough, this man of files had the file to hand, on the table: handwritten letters in Urdu and a typewritten letter in English. The United States! The world of knowledge, beyond the world of faith: even here it was known.
On a bench next to the bal.u.s.trade of the verandah two peasant women sat, old mother, grown-up daughter. The mother was no more than four feet high, very thin and wrinkled, and her lips were thickly coated with the purple paste of a pan leaf; it stained the muslin orhni that covered her hair and flat chest. When she spoke she shrieked; and her daughter-her old-young face marked by sun and labour and undernourishment-shrieked as if in compet.i.tion. In their patient, feminine way they were waiting for someone to show an interest. They were people with a grievance and they had grown to love the legal atmosphere; the court building was their wailing ground.
They had trouble with a tenant. He didn"t want to give up the property. They had had a lot of trouble until the military had taken over and imposed martial law. So it was all right now? They had got back their property? Yes. But he hadn"t paid the rent. Fifty rupees a month for five years. Five years? Had they allowed him to live rent-free for five years?
The daughter showed her doc.u.ments. There was a letter in English, the work of a letter writer. The letter-it jumped about-said that the daughter"s husband wanted to divorce her, and the daughter in consequence lived in constant terror of being murdered by her husband. She had gone to the local police station and made that statement. She was now living with her mother. She had "only three clothes." Her husband, who wanted to murder her, had taken away all the rest, had even taken away her burqa, her veil.
But what did this have to do with the tenant and the unpaid rent?
Well, they shrieked at me, one after the other, it meant they had no man, no protector. It meant they had no livelihood, except the rent from the property.
And they also had trouble with the lease of that property. They had bribed someone three thousand rupees to get the lease through. But that man had taken the money and done nothing. And they had bribed somebody else eight hundred rupees to get back the three thousand rupees, and that man had also done nothing.
So they shrieked and wailed in the upper verandah of the court, the old woman spitting out the thick pan paste, until the azan sounded, the muezzin"s call to the midday prayer. The government had decreed that government departments should cease work for these prayers. And in the courts, not especially active that morning, the azan seemed less a call to prayer than a signal to people who were not doing much to do absolutely nothing.
AT lunch Nusrat said, "Give me your advice. Should I stay here? Or should I go to the West?"
"What would you do there?"
"I could do a master"s in ma.s.s communications in America."
"And afterwards?"
"I wouldn"t teach, I would travel and write. Travel and write."
"What would you write about?"
"Various things. Afterwards I would get a job with some international body as an expert in third-world media."
"What would you do if you stayed here?"
"I would go into advertising."
"I should stay here and go into advertising."
"But it"s so dishonest."
"Is it more dishonest than what you do now?"
"I wouldn"t like it."
"How much would you get in an advertising agency?"
"Four thousand." Four hundred dollars. "Now I get two thousand. But I wouldn"t like it. You may not like the Morning News, but I am a free man on it. I couldn"t do public relations. Don"t you think that someone like me should go into third-world media? Do you think the Americans and Canadians should be travelling around talking to us about third-world media?"
"Yes. They know what newspapers should do. You wouldn"t be able to tell us much."