Children of Dust (9 page)

B
eatings were a regular occurrence at the
madrassa
. The first good beating I saw involved a boy who hadn’t washed his feet properly before prayer. Someone pointed out this oversight to Qari Jamil, and even though the student pointed to his wet footprints in the courtyard as proof of good intentions, he was made to bend over and was hit on the posterior.

My first beating came soon thereafter.

I had been doing so well with my lessons that when I finished memorizing my required
ruku
for the day, I usually flipped through the Quran for something more to memorize. Just to prove how good I was, I memorized some of the better known passages and quietly tested myself while waiting for my turn to recite. This project backfired.

As I was reciting one of my assigned lessons for the
qari
one day, I inadvertently began connecting that recitation to a verse from an entirely different part of the Quran.

Grabbing his stick, Qari Jamil interrupted me.

“How did you get all the way over there?” he asked. “That’s not even part of your lesson.”

“Mistake,” I said, retreating back to my study spot to review my lesson, trying to forget the extra verses.

After some review I returned to my place at the bench and began rocking and reciting. Unfortunately, I persisted in the error.

“You aren’t paying attention!” Qari Jamil exclaimed, fed up with my mistakes. “Come over here.”

I bit my lip. I knew what was coming. His fat hand hung in the air and drew me close. I thought if I just apologized he might let me go. “I’m very sorry,” I said, feeling as abject as I sounded. “I’ll get it right after more review.”

My apology didn’t cut it. I had to be beaten to assure the perfection of the Quran.

Qari Jamil pulled me by my ear and then slapped my head with his right hand, my eyes rattling from the blow. Other students who were hit sometimes developed red splotches in the whites of their eyes, and I wondered if the same would happen to me.

“On the floor!” he instructed. “Become the rooster.”

The rooster was the preferred punitive position at the
madrassa
. It was so named because of the way you bent your anatomy in order to comply. I leaned forward and crouched into a squat, bending my head down until it was almost on the floor. I hitched my arms behind my knees and brought them forward to hold the lobes of my ears.

My posterior went up. Qari Jamil’s cane reeled back and came down. The bones accepted their walloping, though my thighs quivered from sustaining the squat. I constricted my rectum because I’d heard that some
qari
s shoved their stick into the anus. The pain of each blow required me to take a squatting shuffle forward.

After I finished crying, I went back to recite my lesson.

A
fter I’d been there several months, the
madrassa
hired a new teacher named Qari Asim. He was in his twenties, with sleek black hair, a chiseled face, and a kempt beard. He dressed in the finest white cotton, crisped with
kalaf
. His checkered red-and-white
kafiya
was new, neatly folded on his shoulders, and it smelled of Medinan musk. His sandals were black and polished. He rode a red Kawasaki
70cc and sported black-market Ray-Bans. Now the class was split into two. Marjan ended up in his section, though I stayed with Qari Jamil.

Within hours of Qari Asim’s arrival, news of his severity spread among the students. We gathered around the boys in his section before the evening prayer and looked at the signs of the
qari
’s violence upon his students. Many had had their ears yanked and twisted so that they turned blue and purple. A couple had received full-handed slaps on the face, the red imprints still radiating heat. Some had been beaten with sticks, either on their backs or on their shins.

Marjan didn’t say anything. He was one of the few who had managed to avoid getting called for a face-to-face encounter with the
qari
. But he had a guarded look about him: he knew his time was coming.

One day, on my way to the
madrassa
later than unusual, I detoured through Marjan’s neighborhood to see if he was still home and wanted to walk together. As I approached his house I heard loud wailing punctuated by cursing inside.

I flipped open the jute curtain to the house and went inside, where I found his mother shrieking hysterically, chased around the veranda by her husband, who was trying to gather his
lungi
into a knot.

“Bring my son to me!” she commanded.

“Sit down, woman. Sit down! It’ll be fine. We’ll go get him right now!”

“Bring my son! Allah curse the
qari
!”

Marjan’s grandfather and an uncle, who had been standing to one side when I entered, conferred with one another and walked into the alley, concern on their faces. Meanwhile, Marjan’s mother made a beeline for the door, only to have a chorus of people remind her that her face was uncovered so she couldn’t leave the house. An old
masi
that cleaned their latrine, her sludge-tipped sweeper dripping slime on the floor, stood immobile, taken aback by the entropy in the house. Another one of Marjan’s uncles sat in the shade of a toy-fabrication machine. I recognized him. He had suffered near-electrocution a few weeks earlier when the machine had malfunctioned, and he’d come to Pops’s clinic for treatment. He sat in a stoic squat with his back to the wall; partially fabricated cars, tops, and plastic animals littered the floor near him, awaiting his final touches once he was fully healed.

Unable to leave for school in the face of all this drama, I waited, unnoticed, in the courtyard. Marjan’s grandfather and uncle soon came back, carrying Marjan in their arms. He was comatose. His pants were rolled up to his thighs, and his legs hung limply. The length of each leg was covered in blue and black bruises. There was blood dribbling from various blows to the shin. The beaten calves looked clumpy, protruding in some areas, deflated in others. His legs were clearly destroyed.

“Qari Asim!” said the uncle who helped bring him in. “He started beating him and wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop.”

“His legs are broken,” the grandfather declared somberly. “Set him down. Ya Allah mercy. Ya Allah health.” He then instructed someone to go find my father. Meanwhile, Marjan’s aunts began mixing butter with brown sugar and glycerin, then heated the confection to rub as ointment. Marjan’s father was more composed than his mother, but he looked like a beaten mule, excusing himself to the walls into which he crashed. After a few minutes, though, the entire house was quiet, lost in prayer.

Suddenly a powerful human conflagration erupted in the house. It was the uncle who had received the electric shock, enraged after learning of Marjan’s beating. “Who is this Qari Asim?” he shouted, his face dangerously red. “Sister-fucking Qari Asim! If I don’t get him back, I have no honor! If I don’t get him back, my name is no longer Farrukh the Stud!”

Grabbing up an old mop he marched around the house, breaking pottery right and left. By this time a number of neighbors had streamed into the house. Having seen Marjan and heard Farrukh’s vows, they became excited at the prospect of a beat-down. This kind of righteous violence was appreciated among us because there were no losers: an avenging relative, a beaten
qari
, and a satisfied audience vicariously unleashing their latent resentment against the masters of the
madrassa
. Uncle Farrukh exited the house head aloft, stick held like a broadsword, mouth streaming profanities about Asim’s incestuous anal activities. Children followed him up the street, making rhymes about the forthcoming beating that had already become legendary. I followed.

At the
madrassa
Uncle Farrukh bellowed a challenge for Qari Asim to come and get his. Students loyal to the
qari
ran and told him his death was here. In fear, the
qari
ran out of class, hopped on his Ka
wasaki, and rode away in a cloud of dust. Uncle Farrukh, upset that he wasn’t able to unleash his wrath, made a great show of strength, shattering the benches, Quran-holders, and pulpits, threatening and intimidating the student body. He made it indelibly clear to Qari Jamil that Asim was not welcome back. Qari Jamil, looking more than a little anxious himself, put up his hands and apologized.

A few hours later word came that Asim had been spotted at the
bazar
. Uncle Farrukh rushed home, picked up a bicycle, and went in pursuit, spending most of the night chasing the violent
qari
around various parts of the city, smashing merchandise, hurling rocks.

Marjan was out of the coma by the time Uncle Farrukh returned from his retaliatory spree, but it took him many weeks to recuperate.

O
ne evening after coming home from the
madrassa
I sat on the rooftop looking at the courtyard below. Ammi was moving a pot of black lentils off the stove. Tai, my older aunt, was bending over the drain, pouring the water out of a big pot of
basmati
rice. My other aunt was stirring the spiced yogurt in a steel tray with a wooden spoon. Suddenly there was a powerful banging on the doorframe and all three women dropped their pots.

“Ittefaq!” shouted a man from the street. “Ittefaq! Is my son Ittefaq in there?”

Normally someone would have simply shouted no in response, but not when a boy’s father was out looking for him. That meant something was wrong. A pair of my uncles went out to greet the old man. I ran to the edge of the roof overlooking the alley and looked down.

“He hasn’t come home from the
madrassa
,” explained Ittefaq’s father, a grizzled old man who owned a small shop in the
bazar
. “If he comes here, will you send him home?”

My uncles came inside and informed the women that Ittefaq was missing.

“That boy has been trouble for his family since day one,” Dadi Ma observed.

“What do you mean?” Ammi asked.

“You think this is the first time that man has come looking for the boy with fear in his voice?”

During the evening we kept receiving updates about Ittefaq’s absence. A neighborhood manhunt was launched, and people from his side of town kept coming over to our house, thinking he might be with me. As evening became night, people started wondering if Ittefaq hadn’t run away but had been abducted.

I didn’t think much of it. I ate dinner and went to sleep. I figured Ittefaq would turn up at the
madrassa
the next day. But when I went for my lesson he wasn’t there. He also didn’t come the day after. When I asked Ammi if he had been found, she told me she hadn’t heard anything positive.

Two days later, Ammi was gossiping with the women and learned that Ittefaq had been recovered. Apparently one morning at dawn one of the women from his house went down from the roof, where everyone was sleeping, to wash up for the morning prayer. When she was down there she heard what seemed to be a cat scratching at the front door. She pushed the door ajar to check what was happening and saw Ittefaq lying prone, scratching the paint with his nails. He was mewling and whimpering. She screamed and pulled him in, and he was put under his parents’ supervision.

It turned out that he had spent three nights hiding in an open grave at the cemetery.

“What in the world would make a little boy go running to live in a grave?” my aunt asked.

“He was too ashamed to come home,” Dadi Ma said, avoiding discussing the difficult topic directly.

“He was raped,” said Ammi bluntly. “Taken on the way home from the
madrassa
and raped.”

“
Hai hai!
” Dadi Ma exclaimed. “Why would you say something like that?”

“Someone has to say it.”

“
Know
it, yes. Don’t
announce
it.”

Ittefaq’s parents had eventually heard from Ittefaq what had happened, but instead of blaming the
madrassa
, from which he had been taken, they blamed their son. They said that he had become a disciplin
ary headache and that neither they nor Qari Jamil’s
madrassa
could set him straight. A young
qari
from another
madrassa
far north arrived at Ittefaq’s house, encouraging his parents to allow him to take the boy away. The smart-talking stranger made it seem that his institution was a discipline-oriented place.

Through my parents I also came to hear of this more efficient northern
madrassa
—because they were considering sending me there—though in the end they decided to wait and see how Ittefaq’s experience turned out.

I went to Ittefaq’s neighborhood the day he was leaving. A
tanga
pulled up in the street. The recruiter sat in the front with the driver. Ittefaq was put in the back, looking dazed, carrying his things in a knotted bedsheet. With a click of the driver’s tongue, the horse clopped away. There was a vacant look on Ittefaq’s face. His eyes were glued to a faraway place.

As the horse clopped forward I followed my departing friend and ran after the
tanga
, suddenly desperate to keep Ittefaq from going. Running as fast as I could, I grabbed at the footstep on the back of the carriage, hoping to stop the horse and
tanga
. I wasn’t strong enough. My fingers slipped and I fell on the street.

Ittefaq was gone so long that I forgot we were ever friends.

A few months later, however, I learned from Ammi that Ittefaq had recently reappeared like a dusty apparition in the heart of the night, his face covered with soot, his clothes dirty and torn. The vaunted
madrassa
had turned out to be less concerned with religious education and more with breaking the will of the students. Children, brought in from far-flung places on the promise of a disciplinarian institution, were brutalized under the gaze of young angry
maulvi
s, who were really soldiers coming back from Afghanistan—men who were far angrier than the rotund and aged Qari Jamil. Food wasn’t a right at that
madrassa
, but a reward. Students were kept chained to the walls all day long, shackled, beaten, and broken. Ittefaq had tried to escape repeatedly, only to be caught and jailed and punished, until one day he snuck into a truck and convinced the truck driver to take him back to the desert.