Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (71 page)

“Will you live, or will you die, you think?”

“There was firing even this morning. I take the risk of dying every day.”

“Who was firing?”

“Someone. Unknown.”

Nusrat said, “Often we know when we say unknown.”

I asked Abdul, “Does your father talk of the old days in Simla?”

“My father used to say that the British were better than these governments. It was not injustice in this form. My father used to say that in the British days there were little kerosene lanterns on the street. But now we have no streetlights.”

Only food shops and newspaper shops, small places, were open. The bigger shops were closed; the gray steel shutters were down. A park had been
turned into a rubbish dump; in another street rubbish was uncollected. There were slogans on the walls.

This was the most troubled part of the city, and Mushtaq, a teacher of English literature, lived here with his in-laws in a two-story house. The inlaws had been in that house for twenty-five years. The “colony” (a word of the subcontinent) was one of the first to be developed in Karachi after independence and the great migration from India. At that time, between 1949 and 1950, it was considered a middle-class and educated area, and it would have been beyond Mushtaq’s family’s means and style.

Mushtaq had come to Karachi in 1949. He was eight. The family was from Banaras. Mushtaq’s father had been a small trader in clothes in that town, with a shop which Mushtaq thought was “sizable”; it was ten feet by twelve. Mushtaq’s elder brother was a civil servant in Delhi; he opted for Pakistan, and the whole family migrated with him. They brought very little with them. They weren’t allowed to bring jewelry and money; and they didn’t sell the clothes shop; they left it to neighbors and relations. By that time migration to Pakistan was no longer a free-for-all; there were visas and permits. The family couldn’t get a visa for Lahore. So they came to Karachi, and they came by rail, on a line now discontinued for strategic reasons.

Mushtaq said, “There was a great charm and fervor in those days for being a liberated people, to be in our own country, Pakistan.”

I said, “Why did you think it was your own country?”

“Because my family voted and worked for Pakistan. I don’t know whether our elders knew the meaning of Pakistan or the two-nation theory.” The theory that the Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations. “But emotionally they were attached to the idea of Pakistan.”

The family was supported by Mushtaq’s elder brother. He had got a job with a foreign company as a salesman. The family was living in a small rented two-room house near the Central Jail. It was a one-story brick house with a concrete roof. The kitchen and bathroom were in the verandah. All the other houses in the area were like that. The plots were tiny. Some were eighty square yards and some were ninety; none was more than a hundred and twenty. It was more crowded than Banaras, and new people were coming all the time. But in that little house they were very happy. They thought that there were good days ahead.

The story Mushtaq now began to tell was like a story of immigrant success after early hardship. His brother, who had carried the burden of the family for some years, stopped supporting him when he was thirteen. But Mushtaq was now able to look after himself. He began to do part-time typing
and clerical jobs. He got the jobs through the newspapers and employment exchanges. He found he could make eighty rupees a month, about two dollars. It was more than enough. He joined a private school, Sindh Muslim College. The fees were fourteen rupees a month, about thirty-five cents; the bus fare to the college was an anna, about a fifth of a penny. After those expenses, and after he had bought his books and treated himself to a little of this and a touch of that, Mushtaq found he could hand over fifty or sixty rupees to his father, who was retired and earning nothing.

He didn’t mind the struggle. Karachi had a pleasant climate and it was a place of opportunity. The mohajirs were practicing the bazaar skills they had brought and year by year they were establishing themselves. With all his hardships Mushtaq, too, began to move ahead, though at his own pace. When he was twenty he joined a teachers’ training college. He got his teaching degree three years later; and while he was teaching at a secondary school he enrolled at the University of Karachi as a “casual” student. He got his master’s in English literature when he was twenty-seven.

It had taken time, but he had got there. There had been a special price, though. He hadn’t married. He said that this was because no one in his family had assisted him. It was a real problem for people like Mushtaq. In the mohajir culture marriages were generally arranged. There was no one in the new country, the new setup, to find a wife for him; and as a young man, still close to the old ways, he wouldn’t have known how, he wouldn’t have had the brazenness, to go about finding a wife for himself.

But he was not unhappy. He had left his brother’s house now (his parents had died) and he was living in rented rooms in Central District. (This was the area where we were talking.) He had become a lecturer in a college of commerce and economics. He was getting five to six hundred rupees a month, twelve to fifteen dollars, and he was paying only a third of that in rent. So he had money to spend and he was very happy. He loved going to coffee houses and chatting with mohajirs and Bengalis, who were coffee-house people.

Then things began to go wrong. In the 1960s the capital shifted in a phased way from Karachi to the new city of Islamabad. This meant that more government jobs were going to go to people in the north. Mushtaq thought that the people in the north, Punjabis, Pathans, were socially and culturally not like mohajirs; they were “alien.” And then in 1971 Bangladesh seceded. That was an agony for Mushtaq; the Pakistan of 1947, for which his family had given up India, had ceased to exist.

“Many of the Bengali friends who used to sit and talk with us in the coffee houses left. A major part of our culture had been lost. The Bengalis
were the pioneers in the freedom movement, and one comes to the conclusion that one is forsaken and betrayed.”

The tense had changed in that last sentence, and the language had become strange, as though spoken by another man. It was like a fracture in his story. And the success he had appeared to be speaking of became something else.

I said, “It was too emotional, then, that idea that you were coming to a land of your own.”

“I began to feel that.”

The words undammed his grief. The Muslims who had stayed behind in India were now better off, he said; they had laws and members of parliament and ministers. I said it wasn’t quite like that. I said that once the call for Pakistan had been made, partition had to come; if there had been no partition all the energy of the state would have gone into holding itself together. (And I thought, but didn’t say, that if there had been no partition all the cities of the subcontinent would have been like Karachi.) He didn’t listen; behind his blank, and now tremulous, face he was too deep in his own life and calamity.

I said, “You made a career here. You couldn’t have done that in the other place.”

And now, having spoken before of his career rather formally, as a series of steps up, he began to talk of the terrors he had been living with as a teacher.

“I first became aware of the MQM in 1982. In their ‘chalkings’ on the walls of the college and the schools and buildings. It went on, chalkings and counter-chalkings. There were two groups in the college. Leaders of those groups would come to me and ask me to leave the class, so that the students could go out and take part in rallies or protests. They were about eighteen to twenty years old. They used threatening, abusive language, in Urdu. They were lower middle class. The issues were that the fees were too high, or a sympathy strike for a student killed in Punjab. I was horrified. I felt insecurity. I went to the principal. He was a man of forty-five or fifty. A tall man, a man of science. A mohajir. He was helpless. He said, ‘Let us complain to the next higher authority.’

“In 1985 a local leader of the party, a man of about thirty or thirty-five, visited the principal’s office. He was well dressed, educated, a graduate perhaps. I was sitting in the principal’s office. I had a chat with that gentleman. It started when he asked me to give support to his organization. I asked him, ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘I want your help in the conduct of the
examination.’ I understood what he meant. He wanted my connivance in the examination hall, letting the boys do what they like. He wanted freedom for the boys to copy and cheat. I said, ‘No. I will perform my duty.’ The principal was just listening. The meeting lasted fifteen minutes. Two or three days later I received a sort of threat. A boy in the verandah told me, ‘You have not acted well. You may be facing bad consequences.’ ”

I asked about the boy.

“Lower-middle-class boy. Nineteen. Families residing in Orangi.” A mohajir slum with a population of about a million and a quarter. “I said to him, ‘I will face the consequences.’ ”

Nusrat, who had been with us all the time, and mediating when he saw the need, said in his very special innocent-brutal style, “He is naïve. He is teaching literature to students who are unreceptive, undeserving, and he doesn’t know what’s gone wrong in his own life. This is one way in which you can suffer without even knowing the cause of suffering.”

Mushtaq had suffered acutely at his school for the last ten years. Ironically, they were the years of his marriage. Marriage had come to him when he was forty-three.

He said, “I leave the house mentally disturbed, remain in the college mentally disturbed, and then come back to the house with the same disturbance.”

“Something happens on the way back? The students wait for you?”

“Sometimes on the streets I come across students creating disturbance.”

“What sort of disturbance?”

“Burning buses, hijacking buses. Near the college. From 1987 to 1988 the MQM did those outrages. Groups of fifty or a hundred.”

“Have they lost interest in education?”

“Definitely.”

“A humiliation for you?”

“As a teacher I am not treated …” He didn’t finish the sentence. “Misbehaving, not attending my class. That has degraded me as a teacher. Two weeks back two students came to the college for submitting their examination. The students of a rival group gave them a good beating. With sticks. No weapon at that time. When I saw them I was scared.”

I said, “What would you like to do now?”

“I would like to teach them.”

I was bewildered. “You’ve just said they are thugs.”

But Mushtaq was only saying that he wished the world were arranged in such a way that he could actually teach his students. And when I asked
again what he wanted to do now, in the world as it was, he said, “I feel now I want to leave the profession. I am fifty-seven years old.” By my calculations he was fifty-four. “I’ve been in the profession for twenty-nine years. That is the tragic aspect of my life.”

“A life in vain?”

“It may be called that, because I haven’t achieved anything.”

His faith was still the one clear point in his life. He had done the pilgrimage; he had the beard of the hajji. He was wearing shalwar-kameez; on him, with his white beard, it looked like a kind of sacrificial religious dress.

Nusrat had lived through hard times before. I had first met him in 1979, at the time of the Islamizing terror of General Zia. Nusrat, a devout man, had tried to meet the fanatics halfway, but had had little stumbles. And one careless day he got into serious trouble. He was working for the
Morning News.
It was Mohurram, the Shia mourning month. He thought it was a good idea to run a feature piece from
Arab News
about the granddaughter of Ali, the Shia hero. The piece was flattering about the woman’s looks and artistic attainments. But the Shias were outraged; to them it was insulting and heretical even to say that Ali’s granddaughter was good-looking. There was talk of taking out a procession of forty thousand and burning down the
Morning News.
For three days the paper was closed down. Nusrat himself was in danger; he could have been set upon at any time. Some months after this incident I passed through Karachi again. Nusrat had turned gray.