The Good Son (15 page)

She was just avoiding a particularly importunate
bazaari
when she turned a corner and saw Ismail Raza Ali on his mat. He was telling a story to a small group of men and boys sitting or standing around him. The public storyteller had almost disappeared from Lahore’s markets in those days, drowned out by recorded music, unmuffled scooters, motor tricycles and trucks and unable to compete with the attractions of film
and TV. She was surprised to see even one survivor, so she stopped and listened.

He was telling the story of the fisherman and the demon, and the magical fish the demon taught him how to catch, in colors red, blue, green, and yellow, and what happened when these fish were brought to the king and fried: the mysterious woman who appeared though a wall in the palace kitchen and asked, “O fish, have you kept the pledge?”

Like all stories from the
Thousand Nights and a Night
, this one has no end but blends into another one, and another. The storyteller stopped his tale at the point when the king journeys from the enchanted lake where the colored fish are caught and finds the palace with the unfortunate prince inside it, half man and half black stone.

A sprinkle of small coins and crumpled rupee notes fell into the man’s profferred brass bowl and the little crowd dispersed. But Sonia stayed.

The storyteller placed his takings in a leather purse and, leaning on his staff, stood and wrapped a patched gray cloak over his shoulders. Sonia saw he was only as tall as she herself and just as wiry, his face the color of an old saddle and curiously saddle-tight and smooth over the high cheekbones. His eyes had the Asiatic fold in them, she noticed, when he turned them on her, and they had in them a look that combined amusement and penetration. He said to her, “That is thirsty work. How about a cup of tea down the road?”

She followed him to a tiny stall, where he was known and salaamed amid smiles by the host, who served them sweet milky tea and small cakes twice as sweet as the tea.

Sonia was a little shocked because the man had addressed her in English. In Pashto she asked him why he had spoken thus to a Pashtun boy. He said, laughing, “Because you are not a Pashtun boy but an English girl.”

“American,” she said. “How did you know?”

“Wrists. The line of your neck. The way you listened, which is the way a Westerner listens and not the way a Pashtun boy would listen.” Here he produced on his face an expression of dull amazement and laughed when she did. She introduced herself as Sonia Laghari, and he wished her peace and announced himself as Ismail Raza Ali.

She pointed to his cloak and asked, “And are you really a Sufi sage or are you as fraudulent as I?”

He answered, “Indeed I am fraudulent or I would long since have overcome
my
nafs
, what you call the ego, and would be conversing with angels instead of fake Pashtun boys. But I am also a sincere Sufi, of the Sufi order Naqshbandiyya. I have been in the south, in Sindh, where the shrines of our saints are thick on the ground and where the Sufi
pirs
are even more fraudulent than I, being very rich and driving around in limousines while the peasants starve. So I am going north. There are shrines and tombs I must visit, and I especially want to visit the shrine of Hazrat Shah Azar Basmali again. It was there many years ago that God spoke to me and set me on this path I am now upon.”

“North,” she said. “As far as Pindi?”

“Farther.”

“Peshawar?”

“Farther.”

“Beyond the passes? Afghanistan?”

“Beyond Afghanistan.”

“But there is no going beyond Afghanistan,” she said. “It’s the Iron Curtain.”

He smiled. “It’s rusty nowadays. People do pass. The guards are ill-paid and lazy. They like tapes and tape players as much as anyone, you know, and the eyes of Moscow are far away. Also, I am a very obscure person, no one notices me. I leave one week from now.”

She said without thinking, reflexively, like a knee jerk, “Take me with you!”

Another, thinner smile. “And why would you want that, ‘boy’?”

She said, “Because the life of a little begum does not suit me. My husband is a fine man whom I do not love. My baby is cared for by many hands, all more skillful than my own. My mother was eaten by a lion. I wish to find God and ask him why. If I don’t get away, I will kill someone, or disgrace myself in some hideous way, which I don’t wish to do, for it would harm people who have been nothing but kind to me. Yet kindness is not enough.”

“No, it is not. But unfortunately,
you
would attract notice, even as a boy. Perhaps even more as a boy. You know the Pashtun song that goes, ‘I know a boy with a bottom like a fresh peach, but he is across the river’?”

“They would not notice me if I was your
murid
. I would wear my sleeves long and a Pashtun scarf around my neck. And I would make sores on my face with flour paste and rouge. Although I will be ugly and
contemptible, I will still be of use, for you must have a disciple like other Sufis do. What if you got sick or hurt? Who would care for you?”

“And how would you care for me? How would you earn bread? Would you tell stories in languages you cannot speak?”

“No, I will be mute. But I can do this.” So saying, she tossed some small coins into her empty teacup, covered them with the saucer, shook them to a rattle, and then upended the cup on the saucer. She lifted the cup with a flourish. The coins were gone.

“A useful trick,” he said, after a short pause. “Although it is more useful to make money out of nothing than to make it vanish, which I can do all too well by myself. But you are right in that it is traditional for someone like me to have a disciple, and I have none. Regrettably, I do not attract the more devout youth, ah . . . what shall I call you? Not Sonia; but Sahar is a good Pashtun name; we met in the morning, after all, and that name means
morning
in Pashto. So, Sahar, I have no murid because I am not very holy. I drink, I run my fingers under the buttocks of devout youth, I eat the food of unbelievers—well, many Sufi do that—but I also say disturbing things about Islam.”

Ismail shoved his stick in the path of a genuine street boy.

“Ho, you, boy! Stop!”

The boy paused, wary as a fox.

“Here is ten rupees,” said Ismail. “Take a message for me to the house of Amu the goldsmith on the street of the jewelers, and you will get another ten. Here is the paper. Go!”

The boy ran off through the crowd.

“That is a messenger,” said Ismail. “He carries a message to my friend Amu; Amu reads it and carries out my instructions. What he does not do is to treat that ragged, ignorant boy as if he were me, filled with however little wisdom and sagacity I have been able to gather in a long life. Amu would be a fool to do that. Yet the Muslims treat God’s messenger as if he were God Himself; every remark someone heard fall from his lips is sacred, as if it were Qur’an itself. As for the noble Qur’an—I was not there when it was written down, nor was the Prophet, peace be upon him. Who can tell what was slipped in or revised or mistranslated? Arabic is in any case a slippery, allusive tongue. They say, you know, that any word in Arabic can be made to stand for
camel
. So I believe that God wants us to pray and fast and give to the poor and help those in need and be compassionate,
yes? But what interest can the Lord of the Day of Judgment possibly have in eating pork or drinking wine? And did He who created women with the same hand really want their witness to be worth half that of a man? When anyone with eyes can see that the world is full of women more truthful and penetrating than the mass of men? But the Muslims don’t want to hear this, for they much prefer their religion to God. In this, all men are the same: Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian; they say, Lord, Lord, here is this little ritual, be content. O God, do not love me out of existence! God, however, is not religious. God is the flame of love. He desires us to love Him as He loves us, but all human things, including Islam itself, stand in the way of this love, for all human things strengthen the nafs. Even fighting to supress the nafs strengthens the nafs. And piety strengthens the nafs more than anything else. I am good, they cry, so God must love me. But there is no ‘because’ with God’s love.”

“Then why be a Sufi?” Sonia asked. “Why not sink into drunkenness and lechery and forget the whole thing?”

“I
do
sink into drunkenness and lechery,” cried Ismail. “I
do
. But that only makes me remember the more, not to forget.” He gave Sonia a grin that demonstrated the latter vice. “And as my murid will you warm my bedroll in the cold of the hills, as a good murid should? Perhaps you have a bottom like a ripe peach.”

“If you like,” replied Sonia, and he laughed in delight.

“But,” he said, “we must first supply you with a thing which, once seen, will establish your identity as a boy beyond question. All boys love to shoot their stream off bridges and down precipices, and so must you. Therefore we must visit the false-penis-wallah and have one made.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“In Lahore? City of utter depravity? Of course, and his name is Harun Elahi, and if you let him, he will tell you how his ancestors made such things for Babur Moghul at the beginning of history.”

“So I conclude that when I have been fitted with this item you will take me as your murid.”

“I will. It is our fate, just as it was my fate to be at the shrine of Hazrat Shah Azar Basmali with my heart twisted and full of poison, where God was waiting for me like a cobra on a rock and struck me in the heart and filled it with His love. All my life since then I have been trying to recover that moment. I think that at the next shrine He will be waiting again, or
the next. In the meanwhile, I struggle to wear down the poisonous nafs with the exercises and devotions of my order. These I will teach you, Sahar, my murid, and, God willing, by the time we arrive at the sacred place, He will have mercy on both of us.”

“Where is the sacred place?”

“In Chechnya.”

“
Wa-illa!
That is a long way.”

“Longer than you think, murid, for we must retrace my journey in a great circle and pass through all the Muslim lands now under the Russian boot. Do you still want to go?”

She did; and she went.

Her reveries are interrupted by a change in the motion of the truck. They seem to have moved onto a smoother road, they are traveling faster, and there is a wonderful hot dusty breeze coming up through the holes in the truck’s floor.

The truck stops several times and they hear the voices of men and the sound of other motors and once the unmistakable clanking of an armored vehicle. They are passing through military checkpoints. It grows hot, then roasting, in the narrow space. The road grows rough again and the angle of the truck changes so that they slide against their restraints, first one way, then the other. The heat diminishes and then the light. It is nearly dark again when they stop at last, and they hear the sounds of male voices and movements of the truck’s load. The false floor is lifted and the prisoners are dragged off the truck. None of them can stand but all have survived the journey. They have all pissed themselves, and there is a distinct odor of human waste in the chill air. They are unbound, and armed men half-carry, half-drag them into a building.

But the two women are not touched at all; they are allowed to support each other and totter down a dark hallway and into a small room. The door is shut behind them and they hear the squeak of an antique lock turning. Sonia is shining a penlight around the room.

“Where are we?” Annette asks, and then, startled, “Where did you get that light?”

“I have pockets sewn into my clothing,” she says. “An old traveler’s trick.”

The thin beam shows them a room about eight feet by ten, with tile floors and roughly plastered stone walls. The ceilings are high and there is a tall window closed with thick wooden shutters. The only furnishings are two wooden rope beds—charpoys—with quilts and, in one corner, a galvanized bucket. On a shelf sit a brass kerosene lamp with no chimney and a brown earthenware basin. A large brass ewer with a long spout squats on the floor nearby.

Sonia turns off the penlight, retrieves a match case from a pocket, and lights the wick; the lamp yields a dim and smoky flame. Sonia says, “Well, that’s better. We can see where we are.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re in a
hujra
, a village inn, probably somewhere in the Northwest Frontier Province, up by the Afghan border. We certainly were on the road for long enough. My God, you look terrible; your face is all banged up. Come here by the light.”

Sonia uses a corner of her dupatta and water from the brass ewer to clean the livid bruises on Annette’s face. After this, Annette breaks down and Sonia holds her while she cries. It is a fairly short breakdown, given what has happened to her, and after she has recovered herself she asks, “How come you didn’t get banged up? Your face looks fine.”

“Because I wasn’t tied up. I could brace myself with my hands.”

“How did you do that?”

“My dad was a circus magician. He had an act where he’d get some guy in the crowd to tie him up and he’d get free. It’s not hard if you know how, and if the person who’s tying you up is in a hurry and working in the dark. Excuse me, I’m dying for a pee.”