Among the Believers (27 page)

On a platform shaded by awnings were the notaries and commissioners for oaths, waiting for custom, with their little tables and glass 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 glasses 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 passport. 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 classroom, 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 documents 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
sidi
s 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 trespassing on railway property. In fact, this trespassing 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 partition 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 God’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 God 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 balustrade 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 competition. 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 documents. 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.

A
T
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 mass 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?”