| By ,
on 14-09-2002 01:25
|
Views : 1410  |
Favoured : 37 |
Published in : , Stories |
After reading the Urdu newspapers, Khan Sahib put them down in disgust. He had only just recently returned from America, where he spent the past 27 years working as a taxicab driver. Many years back, when his children were still young, Khan Sahib had decided to return to Pakistan when he had enough money to retire. Almost three decades of 15 hour workdays later he fulfilled that aim, going back to the land he grew up in, teenage children, and American wife in tow.
Today’s papers were no worse than the usual, but they added heavily to the old man’s feelings of desperation. All those years in the States, living as an unwelcome guest in a foreign culture, putting up with the sand-n**** and camel jockey comments from his passengers, working dog days to save some money, Khan returned to find his country only a hideous shell of the land he once knew.
A newspaper today reported a tribal council’s decision to punish a young woman with a sentence of gang rape for her 11 year old brother’s relationship with a higher class woman on an inside page, hidden from impressionable readers. The council made the decision in front of 200 people and no one came to the girl’s rescue as she was repeatedly raped for an hour. The city’s mayor and police chief new about the ruling and hid it. The idea of a little boy having an ‘illicit relationship’ in this country made him laugh. Why, he himself did not learn where babies come from until he was well into secondary school.
Khan took off his glasses and rubbed his cataract filled eyes. This is what I slaved for, he thought. It frightened him. He worried that if anything ever happened to his two daughters he would have no one to turn to for justice. No, that wasn’t exactly true. I can have all the justice I want, for a price. Money talks and BS walks. The strange line from a movie he watched years ago played in his head. But Khan had never paid a bribe in his life.
Almost 27 years of plying America’ s roads as a cabbie and hed never once greased a cop’s hand to get off a ticket. Of course not, he thought. In the US giving a bribe is a dangerous thing. Not like here. Here it is more dangerous not to give a bribe. Khan shifted in his chair and pulled his feet up. He wondered if Gallup had ever done a poll on bribe taking in Pakistan. The results would not be good. I must be among the smallest per cent of the population who have never given a bribe. The realisation was both heartening and depressing. But the same will not be for my son. Khan bought his teenage son, his youngest child, his own motorbike, in a subconscious exchange for agreeing to live in his father’s homeland. The boy drove everywhere, going to school, taking friends to play pool, looking for pick-up games of basketball, though he rarely found good competition, and running errands in all the lost corners of the old parts of the town where Khan himself had never been. That boy knows the country better than I do, he chuckled. The little curly-haired baby he used to feed sweet milk and cheese sandwiches to after his mother had sent him to bed hungry for not eating his fruits and vegetables was now a grown man, twice the size of this father. Though he was not yet 18, Khan had received a number of veiled wedding proposals for his strapping boy. The thought made him giggle. The boy hasn’t even graduated from high school and these idiots want to marry him. Khan dimly remembered that the boy still didn’t eat his fruits and vegetables. He’d grown so big without them.
It was inevitable that one day his little ladla*, his kurchen*, would have to pay off a cop. The thought made Khan sick to his stomach. All those years of moral training, all my attempts to set a good example will be for nothing. They never take your example. Though a fastidiously neat man himself, both of Khan’s sons were messy and careless, a point of much contention between the three. Khan knew that all the men of his family gave bribes. All but his brothers. Of course not, they’re upright Muslims, he corrected. My dear father taught us how to live. The boy’s many friends in the village nearby thought rishwat* to be a great joke. They had regaled Khan’s young son with stories of beating up rich young scions who disrespected the village elders, only to pay off the cop that came answering the men’s shouts for help.
What did it mean? Was his homeland a bad place? All those years living in the civilized US had taught him not to condemn any people or culture. After all, we’re all equal aren’t we? He’d heard the phrase repeated time and time again as he argued politics, religion, philosophy, and anything else a customer felt like beginning. Anything to stay awake. Though his daughter claimed that her father was a machine, Khan thought to himself that the truth was the four hours of sleep he’d run his body on, since taking up sailoring before landing in the US, was really never enough. He just didn’t complain. Now, after leaving it all behind, Khan could bitterly laugh about the tricks he used to stay awake while driving endless miles and all the near-misses he had when his tricks failed. Biting his lips, smacking his face, chewing on hard cereals, eating nuts and putting his face into the cold air temporarily chased the constant fatigue away a few hours longer, until he earned his target amount and could go home.
Khan tried to keep condemnation from his mind, like he had learned listening to a wide slice of cab-going people, when he had rosy thoughts about his land. But when Khan picked up the dailies, or drove down streets and was affronted by garbage piles, stray dogs, dozens of unemployed men sitting on street corners and cops shooting the breeze as VIPS broke every traffic law he’d burned into his mind; he knew that all those noble thoughts amounted to nothing. My country is nothing. The room swam about him and Khan reached a calloused hand forward to steady himself. What is left?, he angrily asked. So many times he had told his kids stories from his childhood, living as a poor immigrant after partition. How his mother sold her bangles to make a floor and walls in their mud hut. How he used to run through fields of tall grass to catch butterflies and beerd bagotis* to press into his notebooks after class. How he had the option of eating a plate of cholay* at a thayla outside school or taking a bus home with the four anay* his brothers gave him when things started looking up for the family. He still remembered gathering peacock feathers in the open areas around the squatter camp where his father built them a hut. Khan’s children could hardly believe that the cramped, dirty, haze-filled city they visited sometimes ever had grass, let alone wildlife aside from stray dogs and cats.
Once again Khan’s mind returned to the police. It was an issue that nagged him, wearing away at his peace of mind and forever begging to be answered. The police scare me. Often Khan had given rides to young officers hitchhiking to their posts. He always spoke with them along the way. It was like being a cabbie again. The young ones were okay enough. They explained how policing was their last resort, how being a burden on their families had forced them to take up the dirty job of being a cop. Many wanted to ‘serve the country’. After all, a job is a job, though a police officer can’t hope to feed more than himself with the 4,000 rupees he was paid. I can either watch my children go hungry or I can do naka* on wagon drivers, he often heard. That made enough sense to Khan. But where did it go from there? Did taking five rupees hidden in car registration papers turn a man into a godless mercenary? That’s what they are, he thought, mercenaries. You could buy justice, a hired gun, a bodyguard, a thief, an assassin, a pimp, anything you need if you can pay well enough. They are just criminals for sale. Khan’s body shook with hate and anger. How he wished to kill them all. Just line them all up and shoot them down, he yelled to no one in particular. This country needs a bloody revolution, was a line echoed by other frustrated and cornered men like Khan. If I just had a hammer I’d smash everyone of those criminals in the head, right on the spot, he would shout as drivers cut him off and diplomat cars drove him off the rode. When did you become so violent, his wife and children asked. Dad, you were never like this growing up. Maybe I was. His youngest daughter said he sounded like that guy from the Honeymooners. Khan wasn’t sure what that meant.
One day Khan Sahib was coming home from the commercial district with his son driving the motorcycle and himself riding behind. They were coming up on a police post when an officer stepped forward and aimed his rifle at them. Still aiming at Khan’s son, the police ordered them to stop. My boy looks like an Afghani, he thought. True enough, Khan’s children were all fair-skinned like his wife, but his son had picked up a mean tan from tooling around on his bike. He looks like fried chicken, one daughter insisted. And plus, Khan thought, he’s got brown hair and hazel eyes, not like a Pakistani. He wasn’t a snappy dresser though. No, the boy likes to wear old shalwaar kameez*, far too big for him. The idiot never irons them and doesn’t even bother to match the tops and bottoms, he sighed. Dressed like that the boy will always be taken for a poor Afghani labourer, Khan thought. This happened after Busharraf* decided to go to war with Afghanistan. Idiot man. It made him worry that Afghanis were going to start a little war of their own from Pakistan. There were hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees living just around the capital before Busharraf had them ‘repatriated’. Hah. So the man tells his pharone* to crackdown on all the Afghanis. So my boy looks like an Afghani, we get stopped. The tulla* stopped us with his gun still pointed at my boy’s head. I couldn’t hold it. What did he want with us other than to get some cash and the chance to say he’d put a huge SOB Afghani in their thana* of homosexuals. I let him have it. I don’t speak Urdu when I’m mad. I went off in English. I called him every name I knew. I even used the F-word. It scared my son. He never heard his old man use the F-word. I told that cop that if he was going to stop us American citizens then he’d have to answer for it. That shut him up. He just kept on saying, “sorry sir, ok sir.”
Since then my son is ashamed to go out with me. He tells me I can’t control my temper. I heard his sisters and their mother talking about my driving and my temper behind my back. They’re worried about my heart. My eldest daughter, the one that wanted to be a doctor, says that getting mad is bad for my heart. What can I tell her? Compared with what I felt like doing, yelling at that animal was nothing. But you can’t say things like that. No, they’ll think I’m becoming a grouchy, old man and they won’t let me go out by myself. Well, maybe I am.
The daily papers lay spread before Khan Sahib as he sat erect in his chair. The wind from the fan overhead picked up their pages and spread them wide, casting the print across the room. Traces of anger and frustration etched in Khan’s brow mirrored the cryptic verse written before him, as if their weighty words planted wrinkles directly on his weather-beaten face.
*ladla: favoured boy. *kurchen: literally the remaining rice stuck to the bottom of a pot; a idiomatic expression for the youngest child.
*rishwat: bribery. *beerd bagotis: small red beetles prized for their red colour, used to make dyes. *cholay: a dish of chickpeas, potatoes and tomatoes; traditional lunch food. *anay: a division of the rupee. There are 16 anay in one rupee. *naka: arbitrary stopping of vehicles practiced by Pakistan’s corrupt police to take bribes. Transport vehicles are targeted especially. *shalwar kameez: the traditional dress of Pakistan; a knee-length loose tunic with baggy pants. *Busharraf: an derisive nickname given to Pakistan’s military leader Pervez Musharraf (1999- ) due to his unfaltering allegiance to American President George W Bush (2001- ). Bush + Musharraf. *pharone: A Qur’anic reference to Pharaoh, for his cruelty and injustice. It is a common colloquialism for powerful and unchecked rulers or figures of authority. *tulla: derogatory term for police, similar to flatfoot. *thana: a jail in Pakistan’s law system. They are reputed for their lack of sanitary conditions, poor availability of common necessities and rampant lawlessness.
Last update : 14-09-2002 01:25
|
|
|
(0 vote)
