Trespassing (24 page)

He walked down to the shoreline again, the same that stretched all the way out to his village. There was a new game the boys were playing the year he’d left. They’d dare each other to swim out to the trawlers, even in the rainy season, and touch the anchor line. Then they’d wave to the band of boys on the beach. But if any boy swam out now and looked back, there would hardly be anyone awaiting his return. Boys were learning to be ajnabis younger every year.

His second year at Handsome’s, Hero left, and many of the Pathans followed. Salaamat presumed they’d joined one of the all-Pathan bus-body workshops sprouting all around. Or perhaps some had gone north to the border, and Amreeka was training them to be freedom fighters. Whatever the reason, the result was that he took over much of the paint work, though still not the most prestigious work of all: painting pictures. His job was piling putty on every hinge and joint of each bus. When this dried, he covered it with four layers of a mixture of limestone powder, mineral oil and gray tincture. Then he spray-painted from nose to tail, usually magenta, green or blue, sticking scraps of newspaper along the way. Later, he’d peel off the paper and spray the gaps a different shade. The fumes were toxic. His eyes grew bloodshot and nausea became part of the routine.

Most of the newspapers were in English. He tried to read the headlines and ads later in his room. He recognized the letters from the backs of cars, and repeated the sounds of z
in Mazda, o in Toyota. He fingered the words and enjoyed their weight on his tongue. He could string sounds without meaning, the way for years he’d listened without speaking:
Seven Years Into Soviet Invasion, Refugees Keep Pouring In. Hair Loss, What Hair Loss? MQM Calls For Strike. Nice Girls Don’t Shave. More Buses Set Ablaze. US Increases Aid To Iraq. Women Protest Hudood Laws. Jamaat-i-Islami Calls For Anti-Soviet Rally.

Afterwards, he practiced painting on the used scraps of wood that littered his cell, doing what Hero had done: sketching in chalk then daubing over with oils. Wanting somehow to depict the chronology of his life, he brushed four strokes and filled the shape green. A boat. He gave it a flag. Next was the gray-blue sea carrying large white fish with gills like pockets. And blind fish with razor teeth. And deaf ones blowing bubbles only they could hear. On shore were the dunes for nestling with Rani, for baring her round, egg-shaped shoulders. He drew turtles too.

The next day, he again lived in noxious vapor, waiting patiently for Handsome to tell him he could have the glistening metallic body of the bus he covered red and green yesterday as his own private canvas today.

It happened at last, before his third year.

It was a sixty-two-seater with a monkey seat in rear and bow. Electricians had nearly completed wiring up the fifty-three lights inside to the horn that sang when pressed. As the bus trumpeted, the lights dazzled. The owner, an enormous Punjabi with a mustache rivaling an eagle’s wingspan, had said: ‘Make it a disco bus. Make it from the heart. When it passes, everyone should know my glory. Otherwise, I want my money back.’ He slapped five lakhs cash into Handsome’s hand.

Salaamat was helping a child cut a sheet of steel with a pair of enormous tin snips when Chikna approached him. ‘Ajnabi, your lucky day has come.’

Salaamat held the steel between the snips while the child beat the blunt blades with a hammer. At last, they bit into the metal and a small rectangle fell apart. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ Chikna laughed. ‘See that bus?’ He pointed to the one bursting with activity. ‘Handsome’s going to let you paint it.’

Salaamat looked up. Workers were measuring leopard-skin plastic for the seats. ‘Of course I’m going to paint it,’ he shrugged. ‘That’s what I do now.’

Chikna flicked the hair at Salaamat’s jaw repudiatingly. ‘I mean really paint it. There’s no one else. All the others are leaving. So he’s picked you. If the owner’s unhappy, you’re fired. If he’s happy, you get paid.’

Salaamat watched him walk away.

At last.

The child hammered the dust. His hands and face were covered in grease and his clothes stank. He asked, ‘What will you make?’

Salaamat stared at the iron body. He wanted a hand in every stage of its shaping. He wanted himself shown, all over Karachi. In motion, with horn blaring and lights pulsing and at ease, for admiring fingers to touch. The name would be Handsome’s but the story would be his.

In the following days he began on the undercoating. While it dried, he helped those who’d taken over the metal work. He cut steel strips into floral shapes to be nailed along the flanks when the spray-painting was complete. He sawed into the bus’s gut to make the luggage-boot and nailed iron sheets over the wooden planks of the floor.

Sometimes, he caught fragments of the workers’ chatter. The Soviets were receding but Karachi broiled. Some of the Punjabi workers too felt they should leave, now not to the border to defend the neighboring country, but to the Punjab, to defend their families from the stockpile of ammunition the battle was leaving behind. These were swiftly
gaining popularity in Karachi – the city that swarmed with immigrants. It was coming full-circle, Salaamat smirked as he listened to the gossip: those who’d pushed the local people of Karachi to the edge were themselves running from each other. Everyone was falling off the bus. Literally.

The bus-body-making business was one of the worst hit by the riots that began last year when a Muhajir student was run over by a Pathan bus driver. Members of her community insisted it was deliberate, and yet another way they were being exploited. They torched buses, smashed workshops, killed workers, learned to maneuver Soviet and American weapons. As the trouble spread, few remembered the college girl who’d triggered the mayhem by crossing the street at the wrong time on the wrong day.

Salaamat did. While the men gossiped and he worked on the bus, he saw her: books in hand, a blue dupatta sliding down the shoulders of a white uniform. Spectacles and a long braid. No, no glasses. White shoes. With right foot first, she left one side of the street but before reaching the other, she’d make history. If only she’d waited less than a minute. Forty seconds. Maybe even thirty. Had she screamed? Had she seen what the city would become at the moment the front fender smashed into her hips and threw her high into the smog-filled sky? If only she’d taken a different route. If only there had been a sign on her side of the road: Trespassers will be executed.

‘Is it only luck that’s made us successful?’ one of the workers was saying. ‘Absolutely not. They call
us
foreigners. And what are they? Hindustani, that’s what.’

‘They should have stayed there,’ another one spat, ‘in that heathen land.’

‘Pakistan would prosper if it weren’t for them,’ a third declared.

‘Oh ajnabi,’ they called out. ‘What do you say? The chaos is good for you. When has a Punjabi ever let a Sindhi paint a rich man’s bus?’

As always, Salaamat ignored them.

He cut the newspaper in fish shapes and stuck them on. Next, he mixed the blue and red Diko cans to get a different shade. The spray gun frothed a rich jamun color. Handsome grunted his approval. It would be the city’s first purple bus.

Days later, when he peeled the paper off, he painted the fish yellow and added glitter to their fins. The children stood around appraising the sparkle. He slapped them if they touched. He nailed ornate bands of steel around the enormous girth, like a belt, then around the rear- and headlights. He helped build and weld every possible frill: chains to dangle from the bottom, and three large sculptures: a huge turtle on the front fender (‘That’s not a turtle!’ the others laughed. ‘It’s a giant ant!’); a steel dhow with two triangular sails for the metal frame of the roof (‘And that’s a giant moth!’); an eagle for the back fender. His only worry was the Authorities. It had been three weeks since they last came to collect decoration tax. But they would not be the ones to trouble him.

When the bus was ready for the pictures, Salaamat started at the back. He shaped a younger, more tousled Rani. She still had the enticing sheer dupatta over her head and across her chest, but while one henna-painted hand held the cloth over her beckoning lips, the other, emerging from somewhere behind her neck, aimed a heart-shaped cricket ball at him. Around her was a forest of towering trees. A petal fell on her breast. It was yellow and the ball red. He made the red bleed. Her cheeks were flushed and sweating, as if they’d recently tumbled together.

On one corner of the front he painted another scene from his first visit to Dia’s house: the thick carpet of grass, parrots, a gondola drooping with blue-green tendrils. On the other, he made her farm: the lush foliage of mulberries on which had assembled moths, which he gave more pigment than real silk moths.

The bus’s interior he lavished with boats decked in flags, as during the annual mela at his village. Dogs lolled on sand dunes or chased baby turtles scrambling out to sea; women loitered outside the thatched-roof teahouse; and, at the back, exactly where his Rani was painted on the outside, he made a pair of old hands holding a hookah.

Around the palanquin-like iron scaffold atop the roof, where the dhow sculpture was welded, he stuck pieces of colored tape. On the tape he scrawled
Allah
and
Muhammad
in flouncing letters in black ink, or copied snippets from the children’s section of the English newspaper:
Neighborly love is the best love; Never judge a book by its cover; Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
Finally, down both its sides, in bold gold he printed:
Handsome Body Maker, Qaddafi Town, Karachi.

When the rich owner came to collect the bus, Salaamat grinned. The mustachioed man liked it. Now his purple vessel would parade the hidden life of a native in the city of ajnabis.

The Friday after was the first he ventured into town with a pocket full of money. Handsome had given him a delighted thump on the back and two thousand rupees, promising the next bus would be his too. Salaamat determined to spend his first income on gifts – for himself, and for his sister Sumbul.

He discovered his bus’s route ended at Orangi Town, on the northwestern tip of the city. He’d never been that far before. According to Sumbul, this was where Riffat Mansoor’s weavers lived. She said cloth bought directly from one of their looms cost a fifth of what Riffat sold it for. He’d go there. He’d surprise Sumbul with the finest silk her fingers had ever touched. She, who fed the filthy grub but never got to enjoy the results – a bright, sheer mesh would sit beautifully on her shoulders.

Inside the bus Salaamat was shoved into the aft of one of his boats. Two of the tinted windows were already cracked and the disco lights only added to the suffocating heat. In all his Fridays, he’d never traveled with so many commuters. Was it
because of the beauty of his bus? Was everyone admiring it? He wanted to believe this, except there was scarcely any room to twist around and absorb the finer details, let alone think of the hands that made them. All anyone wanted in here was air. All anyone got was the stench of hair oil, farts and feet.

Someone complained, ‘Karachi has only two seasons – dry and damp.’

‘In two months moisture will bloat you like a buffalo and you’ll wish for this,’ another replied.

‘Still, March is the limit.’

Salaamat couldn’t see out the greasy glass, so he asked where they were.

‘I think we’re near the Stadium. That’s my stop.’

‘No, you missed your stop.’

Salaamat interrupted them again. ‘How much longer till Orangi Town?’

Everyone enjoyed that.
‘Hours.
Besides, what do you want to go there for? It’s more dangerous than Landhi. Shops have closed. There’ve been too many killings.’

Salaamat frowned. If they were really near the Stadium he wasn’t even halfway there yet, and already he’d been riding the bus over an hour. The thin ribbon of air that crept around his ear was an offshoot of the scorching loo that blew in from the desert, sapping every last drop of him. He licked his lips, his throat as brambly as a bed of cactus. He wondered how much longer he could bear this.

Half an hour later, he had to hop off. Without asking where he was, Salaamat headed straight for a drinks-stand. Somewhat rejuvenated, he looked around him: an unknown, congested commercial district. He began to walk. Within minutes, his throat again screamed for a balm of ice. He could return to the drinks-stand. He could spend the entire day and all his cash on heavenly bubbles, then return to his cell in the evening. But in his pockets the crisp notes whispered something else. His first income: he must spend it
well. In the distance was a maze of brightly-lit lanes. Rubbing the bills between thumb and forefinger, he went there.

One passage housed bangle stalls, another led into the shoe district, a third to souvenir stands selling perfume, leather merchandise, cloth. An increasingly dizzy Salaamat turned blindly into bend after bend. Bodies rubbed into him. Rancid breath hit his face. Swallowing back the 7-up rising in his throat, he collapsed on the first stool in his way.

When his head cleared and he looked up, Hero was staring at him from across the narrow alley. The man was surrounded by blue glass: vases with voluptuous bowls and long, slender necks; frosted glasses, both thick and fine; jugs with chatoyant handles. Salaamat was transfixed as one handle changed from green to purple. Hero started combing his hair, gazing at his milky reflection in a viscous blue plate. He said, ‘I thought something stank.’

There were two child helpers, both fair-skinned with wheat-colored hair. One sat on a frayed rug while the other picked up articles and dusted them. Aside from glassware, there were goods of veined blue and cream marble, rugs, coins, and jewelry.

‘So this is where you’ve been all this time,’ said Salaamat.

Hero patted his hair into place and slipped the comb into his shirt pocket. Still looking in the glass he said, ‘I take it you’re still slaving for that fat Punjabi.’