Goat Days (9 page)

One evening, as I was walking with the goats, I noticed the eastern corner of the sky becoming dark and cloudy. I had observed the desert over the previous days. Usually the change of seasons was accompanied by a dust storm. By the time the dust storm disappeared, the weather would also have changed. In the desert, all changes were sudden; nothing was ever slow. The previous day might be very hot, but the next day might dawn chilly; it might be shivering cold one day and burning hot the next. One moment the sky would be pure without a speck of dust, but the next second a dust storm would churn that purity away. This storm too appeared in a similar fashion. The whole day had been fiery hot and all of a sudden a host of black clouds appeared in one corner of the sky. Within seconds the darkness flowed across the whole sky and blanketed the earth. A cold wind blew, slicing through my mind and body. I felt like I
had been thrown from the desert into the South Pole. As if caught in a frenzy, the goats bounced around aimlessly. A similar feeling overtook me. I was filled with ecstasy. Leaving the goats to wander, I spread my arms and sauntered through that chill.

It was only when the arbab came in his vehicle and admonished me that I gathered the goats and returned to the masara. By the time I reached the masara, it had started drizzling. When the first drop fell on me, I writhed like I had been stabbed. By my calculation, it had been eight or ten months since a drop of water touched my skin. The experience was incredibly painful. Soon, it began to rain. And as each drop fell on me, I felt like my body was being pierced. Unable to stand that excruciating pain, I ran to cover myself with a blanket. And it was not just me, even the goats suffered. They began to bleat, emitting a strange sound. The usually unruffled camels returned in the rain looking troubled and hurt.

Along with the rain came thunder and lightning. It seemed to me that lightning would strike and burn out the whole masara.

Every time a raindrop fell on my head, my hair stood on its end and trembled. My body alternately burnt and shivered. I longed to get wet in the rain and
bathe. But I couldn’t bear it. When I could take it no longer I ran to the arbab’s tent. The sight I saw! The arbab crouched in a corner like a coward. More than anything else in the world, the arbab feared water, I felt. Nowhere had I ever come across so frightened a man. The arbab seemed to fear water falling on his body, as though it were the touch of a jinni. As the rain droplets blew into the tent, the arbab retreated even farther into the corner. I thought the arbab had probably not had a bath even once in his life.

In an unprecedented gesture, the arbab invited me into the tent. When I tried to sit on the floor, he made me sit on the cot. Like a frightened child, he grabbed my hand and then slithered under a blanket to screen the sight of the rain. Sitting in that posture, my hand touched something under the pillow. Cautiously, I tried to feel it again. It was the arbab’s gun! Slowly, I pulled it out. The arbab did not notice, he was chanting ‘ya Allah, ya Allah’ and praying for the rain to stop.

A kind of wildness came over me. Just aim and pull the trigger and you will be saved. There is a vehicle outside with the key hanging from the ignition. You can find the road and escape somehow. This is the chance, the moment Allah the merciful has ordained
for you to escape. If you do not use this moment, you might never get a chance like this, ever. You do know that such opportunities do not come again and again. Do it. Escape from this hell somehow. My hand indeed moved towards the trigger.

Suddenly the arbab started praying loudly, ‘My Allah … you kept us safe. Had Najeeb not been here, I would have died of fear now.’ That was the first time that the arbab said my name. I had even doubted that he knew my name. He usually called me ‘himar’ or ‘
inti’
. That call of prayer softened my heart. I didn’t feel like escaping after killing a coward who had been crying for my help. I returned the gun to its place.

I felt very hot inside the tent, so I removed my wet sheet and released the arbab’s hand. I threw away the wet clothes and bravely walked into the rain. Initially, my body pulsated with pain, as if it were being stabbed by several arrows. I endured it, and the pain gradually faded away. After that each raindrop refreshed me. I enjoyed that rain. Like lambs that can sense the coming of rain, I leapt around. And thus, after a very long time, the rain washed me clean. Dirt quietly trickled down my body.

At some point in the night, as the rain eased, the arbab ran out of the tent and drove away in his vehicle.
The other arbab did not come that night. After a while, the rain grew heavy again. That whole night, I was free, out of anyone’s coercion or control. That night I could have run away. But I didn’t go anywhere. As always, I didn’t know where to go to reach a safe destination. So I gave up the desire to escape. How many such opportunities to escape do we give up every day? We who throw away the golden bowl of opportunities when it comes into our hand.

That night, I felt the need to do something. Something that violated captivity, something that would have annoyed the arbab. If I didn’t do anything, it would have been a waste of those precious moments of freedom. The desire blossomed instantaneously: I must go up to the neighbouring masara, I must see my Hakeem. He was dropped there the night we arrived in this country, and he has not been seen since. I did not even know whether he was alive or dead or if he had escaped. The poor boy was so near, yet so far. It was only then that I registered the extent of my cocooned existence. Once or twice I had asked the arbab about Hakeem, but he had ignored the question as if he hadn’t heard it at all. In that downpour, I walked towards Hakeem’s masara. Apprehensively I knocked on the gate fastened with an iron padlock. I
feared that I would be in trouble if there were arbabs present. Still, I called out. ‘Hakeem, Hakeem, can you hear me? This is me, Najeeb … the Najeeb who had come to the Gulf with you … Are you there?’

There was no reply despite my incessant knocking. I was about to walk back disheartened when I saw a shadow moving far away. I called out loudly. ‘Hakeem! Is that you? It’s Najeeb.’ I was afraid the rain’s snake-whistle would drown my voice.

But I saw the shadowy figure slowly walk towards me.

‘Hakeem, is that you? Come closer, it is me, Najeeb.’

When that figure came near me, I looked at it carefully. Dark, skinny, dishevelled, ugly. Another scary figure. This was not my Hakeem. He did not look like Hakeem. Hakeem was handsome. Very fair. Very good to look at. Strong for his age. I had even advised him in jest to stay put in Bombay and try his luck in Hindi films.

‘Is there someone called Hakeem here? He is a friend of mine. He came along with me. I haven’t seen him since then. Do you know him, or where he is?’ In one breath, I bombarded the scary figure with questions as he walked towards me.

For some time, the hideous figure stared from the other side of the gate, as if I were speaking in a strange language. Then, quite unexpectedly, he hit his head against the gate and started crying. I got scared. Then, between sobs, came his heart-wrenching cry, ‘My Najeeb ikka.’ It was only then, only then, that I recognized Hakeem. Alarmed, I understood how circumstances could redraw a man’s shape beyond recognition. I could estimate how the same circumstances must have changed me too—completely. I had not looked in a mirror since I had entered the desert. If I had, I might not have been able to recognize myself as well.

He cried a lot, recalling his ummah, uppah, relatives and Allah. I had no answers for him. I only had the strength to cry with him, holding his hands to my chest through the iron railings. The night washed away in tears.

It rained for two more days. The masara was filthy and full of muck by the time it stopped. The foul smell of goat droppings, urine, decaying hay and grass rent the air. It took me three or four days of back-breaking work to clean it all up.

Then the desert’s vaults were flung open for the winter. It was foggy and cold in the mornings. When I got up and looked around, all I could see was the white film of winter. Everything—the masara, the goats, the arbab, the tent—disappeared into that whiteness. It was only around nine o’clock that the fog faded and everything became visible again—though the hour is a guess on my part, for I was a lonely being with no sense of time—and, so, all routines were disrupted. During summer, the days were very long. The sun rose very early, by about three in the morning, and the light didn’t fade till eight at night. But in the winter, the sun didn’t rise till nine, and the
light would fade just after lunch. By four it would be completely dark. So the hours one got to do work were limited. In the winter one had to finish work in about six to seven hours, the same work that took ten to fifteen hours in the summer. Moreover, it was hard to work properly because of the cold. Even at noon it was spine-piercingly cold. I could not even touch the water. My hands would become numb if I had to work with water. It was in those days that I learned that even cold water could burn skin. On one occasion, blisters appeared on my left palm as if it had been scalded with hot water, after it was in cold water for some time. I have heard that it is cold at the poles, but I don’t know from where such cold comes to the desert!

I didn’t have any special clothes to protect me from the cold. I only had that abaya, the long unwashed garment that the arbab had given me on my first day, which I never removed from my body. What I had was a woollen blanket left behind by the scary figure. I wore it during the first days of winter, but it was a bother. How could one run after goats and enter the masara to fill the containers with water or hay wearing a blanket? I gave it up. It became my habit to walk in the cold in that single piece of clothing.

Though I discovered it a little late, there was something that gave me heat even in the height of winter: sheep! It was a real comfort to walk among them. When the cold wind came whistling, I would hold the sheep close to my body. Whenever the cold pierced through the blanket to maul my body, I would go to the masara and lie there embracing the sheep. I spent the winter as a sheep among the sheep.

Apart from the raucous wind, another unwelcome guest came to the masara in winter: flies. There were flies all around. A thousand flies would sit on the khubus when it was taken out. One hand had to be free all the time to keep them away. If one went to the masara, one could hear them buzzing like wasps. Though I disliked those wretched flies, I began to think that they too had to live somewhere. And if they liked the masara the most, then let them live there!

That winter, had I wanted, I could have escaped along with Hakeem, taking cover in the heavy mist. But the same doubt that I had on the first night of rain cast a spell on me, paralysing me from making my escape. Where to go? I did not know anything about this country, not even about the area I was in. In which
direction—east, south, west or north—should I run to find a way out? Here, surely, I didn’t have enough food, water, clothes, a proper place to sleep, wages, dreams or aspirations. But I did have something precious left—my life! I had at least managed to sustain that. If I ran away into an unfamiliar desert I might lose even that. Then what would be the meaning of all that I had endured so far?

Every prison has its own aura of safety. I didn’t feel up to bursting that bubble of security. I decided to wait for the appropriate opportunity to strike—when I was sure of reaching a safe location. Was my decision correct? I didn’t know.

At the beginning of winter more sheep had been offloaded in the masara by trucks. It was their breeding time, the six months till summer. Actually, sheep survive best in cold, mountainous climates. Rearing them in the desert is an injustice to them. The desert is congenial to goats as they can endure the high temperatures. The arbab kept the sheep because of the profit he made from selling their wool. Although three-quarters would be sold by the time summer came, the ones that remained, suffered. As
the temperature soared, they died sweltering in their own woollen coat. I witnessed this many times. The arbab didn’t throw away any of the corpses. He’d drag them into his vehicle and drive away. They must have been served as fresh mutton in some restaurant or the other later.

One day, when the winter was coming to an end, two men came to shear the sheep. They were Sudanese and both of them had broad smiles. Filled with the joy of meeting people after a long time, I followed them around like a puppy. But they didn’t understand much of what I said and neither did I make sense of what they said. But it was with broad smiles that they remained uncomprehending of my words.

That year the Sudanese came with a machine to shear wool and a generator to work it; previously they had used hand-held scissors. The arbab began to jump around like a troubled jinni as soon as they started the generator and the machine. His first fear was that his sheep would get electrocuted. The poor men had to struggle to convince the arbab that the machine wouldn’t kill the sheep with electric shocks. The arbab’s second fear was that the machine would shear more wool than necessary and the sheep would burn to death in summer. (There would be no demand
for such sheep in the market.) It was only after they had demonstrated on a sheep that the machine was set to shear only to a certain thickness that the arbab half-heartedly gave his consent. Even then he continued to express his displeasure at the use of the machine.

It was my duty to secure the sheep for shearing. I had to do that after carrying out all my daily chores. I held the sheep by their necks between my knees, like I had the kids that were castrated. It took hardly a minute or two to finish shearing one sheep, but it was a back-breaking job for me to hold some six hundred of them like that over two days. The machine would shear the sheep bare, only leaving some wool on its tail. ‘This is how we shear in our land. The tail hair is our gift to the sheep to swat flies,’ the Sudanese smiled, showing his white teeth.

All the sheep were shorn by the next afternoon and they looked like gorgeous lads and lasses. By evening, the Sudanese packed the wool in sacks and left in their pick-up. The sense of dejection that descended on me as they departed! I had been enjoying the scent of two humans till then. Now, there were only the animals and me. Grief came, like rain.

Winter was also the time when I learned that it was impossible to wipe out life on this earth whatever man’s misdeeds. For how many months had this desert been lying under scorching heat! There had been no sign of life on those burning sands. As the cold wind blew, signalling summer’s end, a green carpet surfaced on the dry sand. This was within two days of the rain! It was as if all the scents of life had been lying dormant beneath that brown surface, straining to hear the music of resurrection: cactuses, creepers, rock fungi, touch-me-nots, bushes with shiny leaves. And from the ends of the sky came flocks of birds that spread their long wings, warbling swallows, chattering green parrots, pairs of cooing doves. Where did they all come from?

The realization that those plants and animals had been lying quietly—preserving their lives, withstanding the heat of the desert—filled me with delight. I saw with my own eyes how those little plants grew big, bore flowers and fruit, and concealed life for the future in the womb of the earth. How much I admired them! Those plants taught me life’s great lessons of hope. They whispered to me: Najeeb, adopted son of the desert, like us, you too must preserve your life and wrestle with this desert. Hot winds and scorching days
will pass. Don’t surrender to them. Don’t grow weary, or you might have to pay with your life. Don’t give in. Lie half dead, as if meditating. Feign nothingness. Convey the impression that you will never resurrect. Secretly appeal to Allah the merciful. He will recognize your presence. He will hear your cries. And finally an opportune moment will come for you. This hot wind will blow away. This heat will dissipate. The cold wind of time will beckon you. Then, only then, should you slowly raise your head from the earth, announce your presence and, then, quickly, spring to freedom. Bloom and come to fruit in the morrow.

I lent my ears to the words of the little plants. I waited patiently for the opportune moment.