The Scatter Here Is Too Great (14 page)

The joint's gone in a suck. I'm still hungry. Things taste sweeter when you have some hunger left to linger. You feel it hunting your head for buried things; digging into the fractures of your brain with its sharpened nails. It makes your breath warm and greedy.

The signal's green now. The girl next door is thumping the horn with the meat of her palm. Cars spill forward. We get ahead of her but then—she turns—left. I feel my pit turn into stone—

“2219! I saw it!” I yell. “To the left! Behind us!”

“Behind! Behind us! Quick!”

“We cannot turn now!”

“What!”

“Fuck! FUCK!”

Pannoo hits the brakes and the accelerating cars behind us screech into each other. I hear three quick blows; the Suzuki pickup behind us takes the hits, but we feel it too.

“Pannoo!
BHANCHAUD!
” Chuchu shouts and pulls out his gun. He turns on his seat and sits on his knees. Some cars go past us but the road before us all of a sudden is empty. Pannoo hits the accelerator and we lurch into the hole in the traffic in front of us. We race in with a loud constant honk. The traffic ahead of us slows but Pannoo keeps pressing.

“Turn it on the next left, LEFT,” Chuchu shouts. Pannoo thrusts the car in front of somebody making the turn. The guy breaks and then honks like a real mother of fuck. I turn around and look at him in the face. It is that brown-brick-faced driver. I raise my fingers to my lips and flash the gun at him. The honk stops. Then turn and zoom. We're traffic.

There's no 2219. We are parked at a tea-
khokha
, in front of us is Jinnah Hospital. I am sitting on the footpath, swallowing my tea. It's dirty hot and its sweetness sears my chest. Pannoo is fixing the car (some knocking in the engine). Across the road, an old man is trapped inside a rickshaw. He's trying to stand up but his body shakes and his muscles seem all out of power. He's probably here for a hospital visit.

My mind still ducks when trying to think of Asma. Her grandmother yanked her down the stairs by her hair. I watched her squeal but I didn't move an inch. Stood watching as if I was the victim, and she some sort of criminal. Nobody paid me any attention. Her grandmother pulled her down, and that moment I knew I will never see her again. It starts a sinking inside me.

“Are you sure you saw 2219?” Pannoo asks me, placing the teacup back on the car radiator. “Was it black? Honda Civic?”

“No.”

Pannoo stands with his mouth agape. He keeps staring at me, keeps staring at me, keeps staring. I don't look.

I think: she's probably still in the apartment. I understood her better when she touched me, sucked me breathless. She wanted to give me something. What we exchanged mouth-on-mouth was pain. For a moment, I understand what I did wrong with Sehr: I wanted to possess her. That's how I destroyed her. Like the sorceress destroyed her husband because she wanted to possess him.

The motherfucking old man is still stuck inside the rickshaw. Now I can't even see him. He's collapsed on the seat, probably. And the rickshaw driver, instead of helping him get out, is leaping over to my side of the road. He's aiming for a paan shop. Fuck him. I am done with tea.

I cross the road and look inside the rickshaw. The old man, all bone and teeth, is lying stiff in his seat. He sees me peeping in and moves his hand to cover his pocket. I tap him on the shoulder. “Baba ji, hold it.” I lean closer and lift him up in my arms out of the rickshaw. He lets out a weak grunt, which turns into feeble oomph, oomphs.

I sense a cool liquid on my left arm and my nostrils are invaded with a sickening smell. Suddenly I know why he couldn't move—there was a rotting fucking wound on the side of his stomach. The old man is panicked, he's staring into my face, oomphing. His body stiffer in my arms and I'm standing there thinking, What the fuck do I do now? I am also aware that my clothes stink of
churs
.

I see a man speeding toward me. He's pushing a wheelchair. “Aay! What are you doing with my father?!”

“Who? Oh!” I look at him with a forgotten look. “Oh. I was . . . just trying to help . . . get him out of the rickshaw.”

I place the old man on the wheelchair and watch his son drive him away. I still feel the cool trace of the old man's wound on my forearm. There's numbness in my feet. Holding this man's limp bones has filled me with a strange kind of sadness. It was similar to when Sehr said she did not love me. That she would never love me. That she was going to marry somebody else. I feel that kind of darkness overcoming me. I throw around my hands to keep it from creeping down on me. And then I suddenly see it: I see Asma was wrong. Yes, she was lying with those stories. She knew she was lying. That she loved me when she kissed me. She did not want to destroy me. Her story was wrong. Love is not destroying; it's touching like she did, touch not to tear and snatch but to give something you cannot give because after giving it you will have nothing and the other person will take it all and still feel it's nothing. And it kills you because it's everything you have.

I realize I was mad at Sehr for this. I was angry because she took everything I had and then said it wasn't good—not good enough.

My head swims. I feel deep within myself and think: what am I doing. I have nothing to give to anybody. I think of Chief and Pannoo. This work. Hot smoke rises in my chest. I feel seething dense smoke rising up and up through my chest in my brain. I stand there feeling it and then it maxes out and breaks and wafts into invisible wisps. Then it's gone. And then, I breathe. I am done. I am done with this work. Chief and Pannoo can go fuck each other forever. I am decided. Fuck this. Fuck this. Fuck this work. This snatching from everybody. Let Chief live with this business. I will go away. I am free.

I breathe, and it feels like for the first time I have done it in years. It feels empty and amazing. It feels like having found something to give.

Just then, across the road, Chuchu springs up from the footpath. His tea flings out from his cup and smashes a curve on the tarmac. He runs to Pannoo and points him to something. I follow his finger and I see the metallic side of a black Civic cruise past us.

Next moment Pannoo is in the car and whirring the engine madly. I am stranded on the wrong side of the road. Chuchu waves to me but there's still traffic and I can't go anywhere. Chuchu gets in and the car races out. I watch their car go after the Civic, and then I see a hand emerge out of Pannoo's side of the window. He's waving me good-bye. Good-bye, motherfucker. BYE. I am done. Yes.

Then I see the hand that Pannoo's stuck out. It's not a good-bye. It's his middle finger.

A shot of poison surges through my brain.

I am not done with this work. Not yet, I suddenly know. I hate these people more than I love anything.

I go after them on a rickshaw. I spot them just before the Cantt Station turn: the Civic roughly cornered and Chuchu's gun on the car window. Pannoo is sitting in the car for backup.

I see Chuchu swing the door open and grab the man's collar to yank him out. The man holds on tightly to the steering wheel. Chuchu throws a raw slap on his face. “Get out of the car! All of you!” he screams.

They shuffle out of the car, a family of four. Two little boys. They are wearing shoes with lights in the heels which blink red and blue like police cars. When I join Chuchu's side, the woman has broken into sobs. She says to Pannoo, “Don't hit. Take whatever you want. Just don't hit anybody.” I signal to her with my finger on the lips and push the family to the side of the footpath to let Chuchu take control of the car.

“The car does not start!” Chuchu yells. “Bring him here! The bastard has a security lock somewhere—”

I signal to the man. Chuchu's slap loosened the blood-tap in his nose; his mustache looks like a curdle of blood. His face looks scared and disgusting. He walks to the car and kneels before the open door and scrambles his hand under the driver's seat where Chuchu is sitting. “Here's a little bump,” he tells Chuchu. “You will feel it if you press it firmly.” We hear a click.

“Hold your hand,” Chuchu tells him, trying to locate the exact spot. “Where?”

“Here.”

“Here?”

“No here.”

“Here?”

“No. This, here.”

“WHERE IS IT YOU FUCKER?” Chuchu crashes a punch into his back.

“Chuchu!” I hold his hand.

“You fuck with us, I shoot you right here,” he starts to yell at him. “You hear that?”

The man is trembling. He sniffles on the blood drying in his nose. “I can tell you an easier way if you let me sit on the seat.”

Chuchu pushes his gun into his belly. The man steps back. He gets out of the car and points the man to get in.

He sits in the driver's seat and splays open his legs. “Slide your hand in like this—” He shows us the exact place where the hand must slide in. “Just slide in your fingers. It's right here. Easy.” He clicks the switch again for us.

“Get out.” Chuchu gets in. This time he finds it. I tell the man to join his family in the corner and give him the instructions: no need to alert the police, no need to get angry. This car was overdue.

I tell Chuchu I need to drive. I can't sit with Pannoo. He says, “What the hell, I am not doing this again with you two around.”

He moves out to Pannoo's car.

I follow Pannoo, I know. Standard operating procedure. It's all over.

I click the security switch and start up behind Pannoo's car. My throat is still sticky with the sweet tea and I am thinking of Asma's lips. I feel my heart clamped as I begin to follow Pannoo's car. I will never be able to get out of what I do, I know. I will be here, doing this. I will be snatching; breaking things, people. I feel a sinking inside of me.

Pannoo blinks the left indicator. He turns, I speed up, but then I break the car completely. I am in a dream. I am holding the old man's paper-stuffed body and he has his hands up, waving to me. He's trying to tell me. His voice is too low, but then I realize that I do not want to hear him speak because he reeks of wounds.

I wake up with an explosion. The air in front of me shatters like glass and something tears into my side of the door. My head hits something. Hard.

Something.

Seconds later, I see a car lying crashed on its head. It's Pannoo and Chuchu's. And although I did not see it, I have a clear memory of that car flipping in the air and a gush of heat blew in from beneath it and engulfed me. It was fire and light and air and for once I saw clearly.

M
y brother, an ambulance driver, was on duty on the day of the Cantt Station bomb blast. Now only God is witness to what he saw or heard, but when he returned from his duty later that night, his condition was beyond description. I was asleep, but my mother says he walked in the door without his soul in him. His collar was torn open and shirt buttons were all broken, as if he had been in a fight.

At first, he seemed all right, a little quiet, as you are usually after facing such a horrendous atrocity. He even said, “Yes, bring the dinner,” when she asked him if he was hungry. But then when he saw the food, he immediately left and locked himself up in the bathroom.

I must mention that my brother, aside from being very diligent and dutiful, was also a lively and spirited boy. He was nineteen years old.

My mother woke me up and told me that Akbar had locked himself inside his bathroom and was not replying to her. My mother and I stood outside the bathroom door, trying to persuade him to come out, but he wasn't replying to anything we were saying. Then we heard vomiting, followed by little shrieks that turned into loud sniffles.

“Are you feeling all right, Akbar?” I asked. No reply. “Akbar? Answer me?”

“Akbar, my son, open the door, my love,” my mother pleaded. “Tell us something. What happened?”