The Pakistani Bride (6 page)

Many hawkers worked the camp, peddling a variety of goods, and among them were a couple of other paan-biri
wallas.

Nikka learned of their presence and was offended. He kept an alert lookout, and early one sultry evening, he spied a hawker with merchandise similar to his own. He nudged Qasim and they steered a passage towards the unfortunate man.

Leaving his tray in Qasim's charge, Nikka sauntered forward. He planted himself squarely before the surprised hawker and, raising his voice, spun off a facile string of practiced Punjabi expletives.

“You incestuous lover of your mother, lover of your sister, son of a whore, imbecile owl, dog, how dare you peddle this stuff here!”

Stepping forward, he slashed the clumsy tray from the man's arms.

The peddler set up a cry. “Why, you crazy bastard, what right have you to dump my merchandise?” A throng of onlookers gathered. “Here I stand,” he whined, “minding my own business, and this bully scatters my goods! I am a poor refugee. What right has he to harass me, I ask you . . . I ask you?”

He stooped to pick up his belongings.

Nikka glowered at him.

Qasim, holding the tray, edged closer. Three men at the inner ring of the surrounding crowd helped the peddler gather his strewn goods.

“Look, you fool,” Nikka shouted ominously, “I sell paan and biri in this camp. No one but I shall do so, understand?” He thumped his massive chest with both arms, arching his strong neck ever more like a stallion. “Go peddle your goods elsewhere. Peddle condoms.”

Emboldened by the throng of sympathizers, the man screamed, “You think you're the only man in Lahore? Who do you think you are anyway! Don't you glare at me like that! I shall sell my stuff where I wish!”

“I'll show you who I am!” said Nikka, and cutting swiftly through the crowd, he once again struck the tray to the ground.

The man wrapped himself round Nikka's waist, and they fell rolling in the mud.

Nikka forced the peddler flat upon his back. With one knee pinning his chest, he twisted the man's arm brutally.

Two young men tried to hold on to Nikka. “Let go, Pehelwan,” they cried, “let go of the poor man.”

The hawker sobbed pitifully, tears parting the dust on his cheeks. At last he screamed, “
Hai, maaf kar
—forgive me brother. Leave me, for God's sake.”

More men fell upon Nikka, trying to wrench him away. Abruptly he let go of his prey and wiggled his powerful, oil-moistened body free of its oppressors. He stood facing them in the alert stance of a wrestler. The young men were moving in cautiously. “Come on, you cowardly suckling heifers. Come, all you effeminate crybabies all . . . ,” he egged them on.

A thickset youth, wearing only a baggy shalwar, flung himself at Nikka's knees and the others closed in quickly.

Nikka grappled with them expertly. Bloody and hurt, he still punished them. The throng grudgingly acknowledged his skill. Hitting hard, slipping free, hanging on to an arm, twisting a knee, he held his own. Qasim placed Nikka's tray on the ground and drew his pistol from its holster. Casually he blew specks of dust off it. A man stared in amazement.

The fight was getting vicious. Mean, sweat-filmed eyes and pain-parted teeth flashed through the haze of dust they kicked up as now one face, now another, bobbed up in the tangle.

Qasim watched. Suddenly his attention was riveted to the stooped glistening back of one of the fighters. Nikka held down the man's head as in a vice and the youth danced and twisted on his thick legs trying to loosen the hold. Qasim saw his arm swivel to his back and his hand grope in the gathers of his shalwar. At once he fired into the sky.

The shot cracked, stunning the onlookers for an instant. There was panic. The wrestlers straightened, aghast and bewildered.

Qasim held the gun aloft and shouted, “Stop the fight. This swine was reaching for a knife!” He stalked through to the wrestlers and contemptuously pushed back the thickset youth. “Nikka Pehelwan has proved himself. Everyone disperse. The fight is over. Move on, come on, move!”

“Your friend is a strong man,” someone said and Qasim glowed with pride.

The crowd broke up reluctantly, leaving a knot of about ten admirers. They brushed the dust from Nikka's hair and clothes and handed him his slippers. He walked away erect and silent, followed by this group, the undisputed strong man of the camp and the only paan-biri vendor around.

 

A month later in the seedy neighborhood of Qila Gujjar Singh, Qasim and Nikka secured adjacent rooms on the second floor of a narrow three-storied building. Constricted balconies, floored by sagging planks, ran the full breadth of the facade one above the other. The rent was twenty rupees a month.

Nikka wasted no time in establishing his trade. He set up a wooden platform that projected right out on to the busy pavement. It was nailed to the building at one end and supported by stumps and bricks. Here he sat all day, cross-legged, shaded by a canvas canopy, near-buried under his wares. Trade was brisk, and Qasim hung around, offering occasional help.

They had been in business a week, when immediately after the Friday prayers, a massive customer sauntered up to Nikka's new stall.

Here comes trouble, Nikka guessed. He had been expecting a confrontation of sorts: a test to establish his trading rights. Glad of the opportunity, he turned to the stranger.

“Packet of Scissors,” the man said, demanding one of the cheaper brands of cigarettes. He opened the packet, removed the silver folder, and sniffed at the cigarettes. Throwing back the packet, he sneered, “Stale!”

Nikka studied the white scars crisscrossing the man's black, closely cropped head. He bided his time.

“A paan,” the man next ordered, “with crushed tobacco.”

Nikka withdrew a glossy leaf from a sheaf of betel-leaves wrapped in wet cloth and began coating it with a red and white paste.

The man was fingering a careful arrangement of biri bundles and cigarettes with clumsy irreverence. A tower of cigarette packets fell over.

Nikka swore, “. . . lay your leathery hands off my merchandise.”

The man folded his arms with an offensive smirk that appeared to suggest, “Just you wait, you innocent.”

Nikka handed him the paan saying, “Six paisa.”

The man popped the paan into his mouth, chewed, slurped and declared, “Also stale! Not enough tobacco either!” As he turned to go, he said, “Better learn your trade first. I don't see how I can allow a sloppy cheat like you to settle in my locality.”

“My money!” shouted Nikka, half rising and gathering his lungi up above his knees.

Ignoring the demand, chewing on his paan, the man stepped away.

Nikka leapt down to the pavement and his hand pounced on his huge customer's back.

The man swung round. “What do you want, shopkeeper?” he sneered.

“My money!” said Nikka, holding out his palm.

“Are you deaf? I told you, the betel-leaf is stale.”

He knocked Nikka's hand aside.

Nikka slapped him full in the face. “Spit out my paan first,” he said, striking him on the back of his neck so that the red, syrupy mixture shot out of the man's startled mouth.

The man clawed back in humiliated anger, and the two pehelwans grappled.

The crowd cheered the taller pehelwan, the acknowledged leader among the local roughs. Two policemen stood by watching the fight with professional detachment.

Keeping a wary eye on the shop, stretching on tiptoe, Qasim looked over the heads of the spectators. The stranger was a good wrestler, and the crowd fell silent when they saw Nikka get the better of him. He pinioned him to the pavement with his knees, and he twisted his face, crushing it into the gravel. The man cried out in pain.

Nikka stood up slowly. He looked around cool-eyed and arrogant. Dusting his torn clothes, and wiping blood from his palms, he jumped calmly on to his platform and settled down to business. He sat all evening as he was, victorious and blood-plastered.

News of the fight, of the strength of the new biri-walla in their midst and of the ignominious defeat of the extortionist, spread like a fire in dry leaves. Qasim felt a new admiration for his friend. Nikka, born with the instincts and destiny of a leader, knew just how to entrench himself. Three days later, the stall prominently displayed two intimidating photographs of his person. Clad only in his wrestling briefs, exhibiting the might of his muscle-bound body, Nikka posed before two stiff rows of diminishing cypresses, behind which hung a lavender Taj Mahal. In the other photograph, Nikka's image scowled handsomely at customers from between a pair of snarling stuffed tigers. Beneath them, inscribed in Urdu, were the captions, nikka pehelwan and tiger nikka.

 

Qasim, with nothing to do, wandered along the crowded bazaars of Lahore. Perched on his shoulders, captivated by the intriguing odors of fish frying in the Shalmi, of barbecuing liver and kebab, smiling at the colorful pageant thronging the streets and pouring out of cinemas, Zaitoon relished all his interests. They were blissful, absorbed by the shop windows, their noses glued to sweetmeat and fancy-goods casements.

Often they sat on the spidery mud-caked grass of the parks, watching boys at a kabbadi match. The boys would crouch in
rows facing each other. One of them, brown, his limbs shining with oil, would dart into the clearing slapping his naked thigh, calling “
kabbadi kabbadi kabbadi kabbadi,
” until holding his breath, he would touch a boy of the opposing team and swerve and dodge back to his line. If caught, the two would wrestle, trying to pin each other down on their backs.

They visited Shahdara, Emperor Jehangir's tomb, its marble minarets rising in delicate towers set like a jewel in the jade of the gardens. They lay in the cool, fountain-hazed Shalimar Gardens, the summer sanctuary of Emperor Shahjehan, and strolled down Anarkali, the crowded bazaar named after the beautiful dancing girl who was bricked in alive by the Emperor Akbar because Prince Salim was determined to marry her.

Qasim perched a frightened Zaitoon on the tall, proud snout of the Zam-Zam cannon, known because of Kipling as “Kim's gun.” They sat on the sands of the shallow Ravi, gazing at its gentle brown eddies . . . Lahore—the ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings, the courtesan of Moghul emperors—bedecked and bejewelled, savaged by marauding Sikh hordes—healed by the caressing hands of her British lovers. A little shoddy, as Qasim saw her; like an attractive but aging concubine, ready to bestow surprising delights on those who cared to court her—proudly displaying Royal gifts . . .

“Don't you want to find some work?” Nikka inquired once, but Qasim, with typical tribal disdain, saw no need for it. “I get my keep from you for so little. And don't forget, at the end of six months, I'll be receiving four hundred rupees from you. We shall see later.”

Nikka didn't mind, especially since Qasim was often at hand for odd jobs. Besides, a burly tribal—a bandolier across his chest—added to the shop's prestige. Once he borrowed Qasim's pistol and holster and garlanded them round his photographs.

When Qasim accompanied Nikka to a fair he was surprised how easily the wrestler picked off an array of balloons strung up to test marksmanship, and with a gun that Qasim suspected had been doctored to miss.

At the end of six months Nikka returned Qasim his two hundred rupees with an additional two hundred in interest. The new terms they arrived at compelled Qasim to find work. He was to give Nikka forty rupees a month for his and Zaitoon's keep. Zaitoon would be looked after by Miriam while he was at work. Good jobs were hard to find. Qasim sheepishly asked Nikka to take him on as a partner in his business. Nikka brushed him off with a casual, “Too late, friend. Too bad you missed the bird when it sang at your window.”

Qasim worked at odd jobs as a construction laborer and coolie.

L
ahore was getting cooler. A soft breeze from the foothills of the Himalayas gently nudged the merciless summer away. Disturbances subsided. October, November and then December, with its icy cold, checked the tempers. Hordes of refugees still poured in, seeking jobs. The nation was new. The recently born bureaucracy and government struggled towards a semblance of order. Bogged down by puritanical fetish, in the clutches of unscrupulous opportunists—the newly rich and the power drunk—the nation fought for its balance. Ideologies vied with reason, and everyone had his own concept of independence. When a tongawalla, reprimanded by a policeman, shouted, “We are independent now—I'll drive where I please!” bystanders sympathized. Fifty million people relaxed, breathing freedom. Slackening their self-discipline, they left their litter about, creating terrible problems of public health and safety. Many felt cheated because some of the same old laws, customs, taboos, and social distinctions still prevailed.

Unused muscle, tentatively flexed, grew strong, and then stronger. Dictatorial tyrants sprang up—feudal lords over huge areas of Pakistan.

Memory of the British Raj receded—shrinking into the dim past inhabited by ghosts of mighty Moghul Emperors, of Hindu, Sikh and Rajput kings.

The marble canopy that had delicately domed Queen Victoria's majesty for decades looked naked and bereft without her enormous, dour statue. Prince Albert, astride his yellowing marble horse, was whisked away one night from the Mall;
as were the busts of Viceroys and Lords from various parks. No one minded. Portraits of British gentlemen bristling with self-esteem and dark with age vanished from club halls and official buildings, to surface years later on junk stalls.

Jinnah's austere face decorated office walls and the Jinnah-cap replaced the
sola-topee.
Chevrolets and Cadillacs gradually edged out Bentleys and Morrises and, the seductively swaggering American Agency for International Development (A.I.D.), the last sedate vestiges of the British East India Company.