Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (54 page)

That was why when the sergeant in the police station in the town asked Rana to wash his plates and spoon, he was able to face the sergeant squarely and say, “I don’t like the job. I don’t want to do it.”

The sergeant didn’t do anything to him. He could have; he could have been brutal. It might have been Rana’s manner, or the fact that Rana’s uncle was coming. The uncle had to pay up when he came: five hundred rupees to the sergeant to hush up the matter, and a further five hundred for the rickshaw owner.

When they were leaving the station the sergeant said to Rana’s uncle, “Wait a minute.” He told the story about the plates and the spoon and said, “This boy is only ten, but he is already a
goonda.
” A thug. The uncle, though he approved of Rana’s behavior, said to Rana, when they were outside, “This is how the police will behave. In future you should be careful.”

That was the incident that made Rana want to be a policeman. A little while afterwards some policemen raided the house of a neighbor. This made Rana want to be a policeman even more. As a policeman he would be protected, his family would be protected; and, of course, it was a government job. A government job made a man secure. When he was thirteen or fourteen he began to think of himself quite seriously as a future police officer. He felt the instinct to power in himself. Then one day this changed.

He had a cousin who was a policeman, an ASI, an assistant sub-inspector, in a small village about forty miles outside Lahore. An ASI was a low rank, but Rana had always been proud of this cousin, had seen him as a successful man. Just as, in his father’s village, he had grown to feel pride as a Rajput and a landowner’s son, so the possession of an ASI cousin, when he began to understand about these things, made him feel “superior.” He was about sixteen or seventeen when he thought one day that he would go and visit this cousin. There was no reason; he just wanted to say hello to this successful man, to be in his presence. In his cousin’s police station he saw men in handcuffs, men in chains. He saw that the police had been trained to treat ordinary people like criminals. He remembered that, though his cousin was very nice with his friends, he was very rough with his family. Rana didn’t like what he saw; he decided he didn’t want this kind of power. He gave up the dream of being a policeman. It had been with him for a very long time; he had nothing to put in its place.

It was not long after this that Rana’s father sold his land in the village in order to go into business. The business failed almost immediately; everything was lost. And Rana discovered then that the respect he had grown to enjoy in the village as his father’s son was no longer there; even close family became distant. He wanted not to see people. He felt that his dream of power over people was wrong.

His father pulled him out of this gloom. He insisted that Rana should do some higher training. Rana’s father had always believed in education for its
own sake. He used to tell Rana when Rana was a child, “I will kill you or throw you out of the house if you don’t go to school.” Another thing he used to say was, “Illiteracy is death. Literacy is life.”

He suggested now that Rana should go to a law school. Out of the ruin of his fortune he found five hundred rupees a month for the school fees. Gradually, in the study of law, Rana found a kind of philosophical solace. It introduced him to another idea of power.

He spoke of this when he came with a friend to see me, some days after our visit to the courts. He said, “The more I learnt about the law the more I felt that all power doesn’t lie with the policeman. Anybody who is a man of means, and well educated, and with an awareness of his rights, can be a stable man, a man who can face any kind of consequences.”

His law studies lasted three years. Near the end of that time he became involved with a girl, and after the law examinations he thought he should spend a little time away from his family. He went to Islamabad and the mountain places, Murree, Kaghan, Naran. The girl didn’t marry him. She married someone with money. He didn’t hold it against her; it still made him proud that she had liked him. And again it was his father who came and pulled him out of his melancholy. He found Rana in one of the mountain places and said, “Enough is enough. Come back and file your papers for an advocate’s license.”

And now Rana, who had learned about the law, began to learn about the legal life. In his eyes he had made himself an educated, sensitive person; he expected people to respect him for that, to respect his sensibilities. He found, when he began to do his six-month probation, that there was no respect at all for him. His seniors treated him like a clerk or office messenger, a peon. He changed his firm. The senior in the new firm said, “I will pay you fifteen hundred rupees in the beginning. After fifteen days I will pay you two thousand. And after four or six months money will become immaterial.” Rana didn’t even get the fifteen hundred starting pay. It wasn’t that the senior didn’t like Rana; he liked Rana very much; he just didn’t think he should pay him.

Rana said, “Money became immaterial in the other way.”

Sohail, the friend who had come with Rana, said, “The problem with Rana is that he’s not a yes-man.”

Rana said, “Now I am living like a yes-man. Eighty percent I am a yes-man now.” But he smiled. He was out of office hours, and not in his lawyer’s black suit; he was more at ease. He could make little jokes.

Seniors were one thing. There were also the clerks to whom you had to give little tips before they did what, according to the law, they had to do.
Rana’s senior said, “This is part of the job”; but Rana didn’t agree. Then there were clients. They wanted lawyers with experience or a reputation. The better clients wanted lawyers who could speak better English than Rana could; in Pakistan everything to do with the law was in English. And after all of this there were the judges. Rana didn’t think they cared as they should about words and the meaning of words; they cared about personalities.

The first time Rana appeared in court on his own was over a petition for bail. The law, Rana thought, was that when injuries were not on the vital parts, and not grievous, bail should be granted. He stated his case. The judge said, “Young man, have you finished?” Rana said, “Yes, sir.” The judge said, “I will give a decision after a few minutes.” Rana turned and made to step down from the dais. The judge said sharply, “Listen to me.” Rana turned and looked at the judge. The judge said, “I have dismissed your petition.”

Rana went back in a gloom to his office. He talked with friends about giving up this branch of the profession. It didn’t make him feel any better when the next day a senior from the firm went before the same judge and the petition for bail was granted.

When as a boy he had thought of power he had thought of exercising it. Now he saw power from the other side, from below. One day he was in the district courts. Two young boys, ten and twelve, and their mother were charged with drug trafficking. The mother was crying. Rana went and talked to her. She told him that the policeman who had brought the charge against her and her sons had been pestering her to sleep with him. Rana believed her.

Sohail said, “There are two kinds of people who are living well in Pakistan. People with names, and people with money. Everybody else are like insects, worms. They have no power. No approach. Powers are in limited hands, and money is also in limited hands.”

The day came when Rana thought he could take no more. He wanted to leave Pakistan, get away. He thought—with a curious willful ignoring of immigration laws—that he would go to England, do a job there, improve his English, learn more about the law. When he went to the British consulate to get a visa the man at the counter didn’t let him finish his story. He threw Rana’s passport back at him. Rana remembered the insult; telling the story, he acted out the official’s throwing gesture. But he could do nothing about it. He had to stay where he was, and stick it out in the law.

Sometimes now he told his father that he was going to give the law just one more year. Then his father would say, “You have spent a lot of time
on the law. You better stay in, because at least you are earning something.”

He was living now on his nerves. There were all the strains of the profession and then there were the difficulties of daily life.

Once there was a lot of transport in Lahore, Sohail said. There were nice Volvo buses. Then they—the unknown “they,” who were responsible for so much—stole the air-conditioning systems and the carpets and the cushions. Then they began stealing parts of the engines. Now the depot was full of useless buses. And there were only minibuses on the roads. These buses had only fifteen seats, and there would be twenty or thirty people at the bus stop.

Rana said, “Sometimes I wait for an hour. How can you blame people if they want to take the law in their own hands? If they want to take the Kalashnikov. There are some basic requirements for life—you give people a chance to have their edibles, to travel in an easy way, to have other opportunities.”

Sohail said, “The people don’t know about their rights.”

Rana closed his eyes and nodded. There were ten in his family. He was the eldest son. Once, for the sake of his own security and the security of his family, he had dreamed of power over people. Now he talked of their rights.

I asked about his mother.

“She is a simple woman. From the village.” It had been an arranged marriage, a Rajput caste affair. “She just tells me to wait. And wait.”

It was one of the grand lawyers of Lahore who suggested that I should go to the Hira Mandi, the Diamond Market, the area of the singing and dancing girls, the prostitutes’ area. The lawyer’s office had something of the formality of the higher courts. Whenever the lawyer entered the outer office all the clerks and assistants stood up and fixed their eyes on him. This regard for rank and personality in the law was what Rana hadn’t expected, and suffered from; but it worked the other way with me. I knew at once from everything that surrounded this lawyer, and from what I saw in people’s eyes, that the lawyer was a man of weight. The lawyer had a very good guide to the Diamond Market for me. One of his clients, he said, knew the area well. And the client was there, in the inner office: a big man in a loose peach-colored long-tailed shirt.

The dancing and singing began late. My guide was to come to the hotel at eleven that evening. He came fifteen minutes after that. He was fatter than he appeared seated in the lawyer’s office. He had a muscular man with
him, and when we got to the van in the hotel drive there were two other men inside it, a dark pockmarked man with a baseball cap and another muscular man, with designer stubble, in a red-and-blue striped jersey.

The Diamond Market was in the old walled city, some way beyond the end of the Mall, and at the back of the Shah Jahan Mosque. It was strange—just at the end of a short van ride—to see the girls in the lighted rooms, with the men passing in the dark streets all the time, with rubble and dust all around, and food shops and sweetshops.

My guide in the long-tailed shirt walked with authority. People knew him. It was his area; the lawyer was right. The man in the red-and-blue jersey said, “He is terrorist of this area.” When my guide, in the peach-colored long shirt, greeted someone, the man in the jersey said of the man greeted, “He is small terrorist.”

So it went on, past the lighted rooms, with the musicians seated on the floor, the girls in groups or singly, with careful, worrying, blank expressions. Always above the lighted rooms were balconies, sometimes with girls, sometimes with young men. The guide said, “Their agents.” He offered everything that was going: sweets, food, the girls themselves. Always, with this, glimpses of derelict people, lepers, men withered away to almost nothing.

They wanted me to try a milk sweet. They took the thing they had in mind from a display in front of a shop; there was no objection, only compliance and a smile. I tried it with them, nervously. And then there was a meal in a famous restaurant or eating house. It was quite a big place. Chicken and goat simmered in pots outside. A table and chairs were wiped down for us in an inner room. As in ancient Rome—where a famous floor mosaic was of food scraps thrown down—they threw bones on the floor when they had finished chewing them. The big man in the long shirt used bits of naan bread to scoop up the liquid from the chicken-and-goat stew. He went then, as though demonstrating his power, to get some more from the pots outside.

When he came back I asked, “How many terrorists in this area?” His friend, in the striped jersey, winked at me and said, “Only one.” The big man talked of his time in London, in Whitechapel. He had got to know two African or black terrorists there, he said.

At the end they washed their hands at a tap over a sink and wiped their fingers dry on a towel. The big man pointed to the photograph of the girl on the calendar next to the sink. “You like her? You want to f— her?” Food had made him expansive. “On me. You f—. I have the money.” He slapped his side.

We walked again, past the hypnotic lighted rooms. It was hard not to be worried or frightened, with all the stories of the kidnapping and torture of women and girls.