Chapter 6

Among the narrow and wide streets of Chittian Hattian, there was street number 3. This is where my family had been living for the last century. My grandfather and his two brothers used to live in one big house. It was called the haveli. It had enough rooms to assimilate three families. Back in those days, living in a combined family was a virtue. The elders would encourage a combined setup. They said it brought prosperity and bred love.

As the children of the three families grew up, they felt the need to go their own ways. My father bought a new house in the same street, and he moved there with the rest of his siblings and his parents.

Street number 3 was not that long. It had six houses on each side. The street was only wide enough for motorcycles to pass. A car could not come in. The oldest house in this street was built in 1890's. It was the house of the venerable Shah family. It was made of red bricks. The Shah's were known for their wealth and conservative family values. The women in their house were modest. They had a grave in their house. It was of their grandmother. She had never gone out in front of strangers uncovered. When she died, she requested to be burried inside the house. The Shah's owned several villages around the area. They had political and social clout.

The second house was of the Rana family. They had migrated from Indian Punjab at the time of the partition. They were three brothers. The eldest brother had left, and he had sued the younger two on their house. Each of the brother had at least six children, but number of rooms in their house was limited. This had irated the eldest brother. He moved out to live a better life with the rest of his family. He wanted his brothers to sell their house and give him his share. But the other two brothers couldn't do that. They had no place to go to if they sold the house.

The third house was a tall building. I think it was even older than the Shah house. It had three stories. On each of the stories lived three different families. They rented each floor. Every house in Chittian Hattian had a varandah. The roof would be open and the sun would come down to the lowest floor in every house. There will be railings along every opening on every floor. The railings on each house in this house were old and weak.

For every family that lived in this building, there were stories. The Shareef family who lived on the top floor had six sons and two daughters. Their sons worked at weekly fruit markets selling fruit on stalls. One of their daughters was Meena. When Meena was seven, she fell from the thrid floor. This broke her leg. They never had the means to get her cured. She limped on her one foot from one house to another.

When Meena became nubile, her parents wanted to get her married. They couldn't find anyone who would marry a lame girl. They found a boy who had a minor problem. He was a heroine-addict. The got the two married on the hope that she will correct him after marriage. He would make Meena pregnant and then disappear for months. He would come back again, and do the same thing until they had four children. Then one day, they found his body. Now Meena was left with four children and one leg. She worked from home to home to feed them.

The next house was ours. It was relatively new. My dad had sent money from the middle east to build a new house. So this is where we lived.

The last house on this side belonged to the Rana family as well. It belonged to the other brother who had migrated from India. He had two marriages, but only the second wife was alive. He had three sons from the first one, and two from the second. The eldest son had fled the house long time ago. They said he lived somewhere in Sindh. They had no contact with him. The second son lived in Makkah. He had a workshop there. He was married and he used to come once a year on his vacation. The third son still lived with his step mother. Her own two sons lived with her two. They had a shop in the heart of Chittian Hattian. It was called Jalindher Painting. Jalindher was the town in Indian Punjab where they had moved from.

Chapter 5

"Why should we praise God when he makes miserable things? Why should a blind man, or a lame man be thankful to Him?" I asked.

"When a painter paints a broken pot, he is admired for painting the pot as it should look. Not the way he thinks it might look pretty," the gentlemen replied. "Similarly, when God makes someone blind, look at the perfection of His action."

I started to think upon what he just had said.

I had come to this gentleman's place through a friend. He was a Pir. In farsi, Pir means an old man. Under the sufi tradition, Pir refers to the teacher, or the guide. Before you make someone your Pir, you had to pledge upon his hand. My friend had pledged on this Pir's hand. Now my friend was his Mureed.

I had never believed in Pir's or Mureed's. I had always thought that God was an equal-opportunity deity. He listened to all of us, and helped all of us. We didn't need a Pir to show us the path. It was all wrong.

I was still not convinced. I had read the story of Mansour a few days ago, and I had a lot of questions. Mansour Hallaj was cut to pieces by the people of Baghdad. His crime was his speech. He had started to proclaim that he was the truth, or God. Mansour kept saying "An-al Haq" all through his punishment, until he died. They say, every drop of his blood kept saying that until it was all burnt.

My friend and I had a lot of arguements about this concept as we left Pir Sahab's house. My father was an anti-pir type of a person. He never believed in any Pir's. And neither did I.

It was almost night now. We were walking back from my friend's Pir's house to Chittian Hattian. We passed through the narrow streets of Moti Bazaar. Moti Bazaar was famous for its shops. The night before Eid, it would be full of women. My group of friends would always make plans to go to the Moti Bazaar on that night. We would just go their and check out girls. "Look at that yaar, what a piece!" one would whisper in my ear, and the other one would say, "This one is really tight man!" Another said, "You know what guys, we should open a bangles shop here. So when girls will come, we will say, Baji, please sit here. Baji, give me your hand." We would laugh and just come back home. I don't know what we got from this excercise. Maybe it was some sort of a relief.

Lately, the police had decided to patrol that area during the holiday season. The women had actually complained. "You don't know yaar! These aunties have become very tricky. They would start crying for help even if you didn't do anything. Just to get you a beating from the police." My friend told me. The whole idea of a guy being beaten up by a police havaldaar in the heart of Moti Bazaar amused me a lot. And of course, no matter how corrupt our police was, for some reason they still cared for women. I found it very strange.

As we entered Chittian Hattian, the shops were closing. People had left the mosque after the last prayer meeting. There was a scrap metal shop there. They had big chests made up of steel. People must have sold them to these scrap metal buyers. These chests would become beds for the young kids who worked at these shops. These young children had come from far-off lands to earn bread for their families back home. Most of them were Pathan kids not older than 12. They wore dirty shalwaar kamiz's and their faces would always be under a layer of dust. At day time, I used to see these kids do hard labor, which I never thought I could do. And at night, they would get inside one of these big chests, and close the cover, just like they were going into a coffin. These were their bedrooms.

Chapter 3

"How do you love someone without seeing them?" I asked Sir Ahsan Shah.

"By remembering them," Sir Ahsan Shah replied. "Well, when you start a friendship, you have to start meeting that person, and love develops from there."

I was still confused.

Sir Ahsan Shah was our 11th grade teacher. We didn't call them Mister so and so. Our teachers were either Sirs, or Madams.

I got out of the classroom, and headed for the bicycle stand. I used to park and lock my sports bike there. It had ten gears, and very thin tires. Unlike my friends' bikes. They rode locally-made Sohrabs, with big handles and stiff breaks. Their breaks were not of wires, they were sheer steel starting from their hands going all the way down to the breaks. One got a better work out riding a Sohrab, which was heavier and unweildy. We rode our bikes back to our house every day after school. When it rained, I would take a Suzuki to school. Most of the times, the Suzuki would be full of people and we would hang outside the cabin. We never thought how dangerous it was, or it could take our lives if we fell. We rather enjoyed it.

On Murree Road, just before Committe Chowk, there was a big graveyard. It was called the graveyard of Shah di Talian--Shah's branches. It had the grave of a sufi saint with a big tree trunk lying on the ground. People said that Sufi Shah had brought it with a miracle from the jungles of Kashmir. It sounded true too, as there were no such trees in that area.

Sufis preached love. They preached the love of the unseen god. They said you could see him if you really tried. They said love was made to be given to him. I would always get confused on this. That day, I somehow articulated my question and asked my teacher. His answer didn't really satisfy me. I wanted to ask him a few more questions. I wanted to ask him why is it that I can fall in love with a pretty girl without any effort, and falling in love with god was so difficult. Maybe Sufis had the answer. I wish the saint of Shah di Talian was alive. I wish I could ask him this.

They said love was of two types. One was for the mortals, and the other for the immortal. The love of mortals is mortal itself, and the love of the immortal is immortal. One makes you mad, while the other takes you to gnosis. One blinds you, the other opens your third eye. I kept thinking of this as I rode my bike back to Chittian Hattian.

Just before making the last turn into my street, there was the house of our local sourceress. She had her sign boards outside her house. "Black Magic--Your beloved will be in your feet instantly." The lady of the house used to offer her services to people. Everyday, many a customers visited her place. She had more women customers than men. Most of the women came there to seek help in their troubled marital relationships. They bought Taveez's from her. They also paid for magic. I always thought she faked it. I knew her son. He flunked school many times. How could she help others when her own household was crumbling.

Chapter 2

Rawalpindi was nothing like Lahore. It neither had rivers flowing through it, nor did it have the culture and the vibrant people of Lahore. I think it got its name from a tribe of Sikhs that lived here hundreds of years ago. One beautiful thing about Rawalpindi was its proximity to the Himalayas. When I stood on my rooftop, I could see the purple-blue mountains. I loved the Monsoon season too. It rained the most in this city than any other during those months.

They decided to build the capital even closer to the mountains. It was to become the prettier twin sister of Pindi. They called it Islamabad--The abode of Islam. As with everything else in Pakistan, idealism was prevalent in its building. From our heroes in the movies, to our pop singers and politicians, everybody had to show their idealism and patriotism in anything they did. Idealism is good. It motivates you. It just makes you feel worse-off when you fail.

Murree Road was the jugular vein of Pindi. It began in the Cantt area, and went all the way up to hill resort of Murree. On its way to Murree, it offered a turn-off to Islamabad. Everyday, hundreds of federal government workers took public transportation from the Murree Road to their work. A lot of them could not afford housing in the captial city. Many just didn't want to leave their family houses.

If you took a bus from the Cantt area, the bus stopped at Marirh, then at Liaquat Park, then at Committee Chowk, and it continued on. If you made a left turn at the Committee Chowk, towards Raja Bazar, the first turn on your right hand side was Chittian Hattian.

Chittian Hattian. You could call it the Harlem of Pindi. Its name sounded funny even to the people who lived there. It never sat well with them. In punjabi, Chittian means white, and Hattian means shops. People say that there used to be white shops here a long time ago. There weren't anymore. Chittian Hattian was the name of that quarter-mile long stretch of the road. The road itself was wide enough to take two cars. At the end of the road, there were small streets, though. So narrow that you couldn't drive a car into them. You could only walk into those streets.

Our house was in one of those narrow streets. This is where I grew up. This is where my family had been living for a century. My grandfather used to tell me the story of our family. My great grandfather was born in a rich family in Sialkot. He was the only son from his father's third wife. At his birth, his step mothers tried to poison him. His mother fled with him to Pindi and settled here. I would often joked with my cousins about going back to Sialkot and getting our share of the wealth.

My grandfather, or 'Pahpa Ji', as we all used to call him was my best friend from my father's side. Pahpa is a very commmon title for Pindi'ites. Everybody is a Pahpa if you don't know his name. My Pahpa ji and I used to go to the movies. He would not do that with any other grand child. I was special. I was the only one who used to get two rupees from him ever. Everybody else was limited to half a rupee at the most.

Chittian Hattian had all the qualities of a downtownish area, except the modernity. Both sides of the road had shops. Grocery shops, blacksmiths, scrap-metal sellers, barbers, bekeries, laundries, and every other thing that you could need in your day to day life. Besides those shops, there would always be street hawkers and carts. Those carts changed from season to season. There was always life in Chittian Hattian. It was always loud with noises. You could always find a cab or a rickshaw.

Chapter 1

My heart plunged for the last time, and I hung up the phone. I had been crying for a while. My face was drenched in tears. I tried to clean my face and hoped that nobody saw me. I came out of the conference room, and walked towards my office. There was nobody in the hallway and I burst into tears again. Somehow I made it back to my cubicle. I don't remember what happened after that until I got out of the office building.

I wasn't crying anymore, but I was still collapsing from within. I got onto the ramp towards Dallas, like every other day. I saw the same billboard that was fixed at the entry to the freeway. They hadn't changed it for a while. It still showed some new designer brand that was being sold at the Macy's. The traffic was the same, too. As soon as I got on the freeway, I played the first and second gear game with the stop-and-go traffic. The evening was the same as every other evening. Nothing had changed. But I knew I had lost something. I had lost something I never wanted to. The dragon that I wanted to slay had slain me.

My hand would raise and my wrist would twist, as if I was asking a question. Then I smashed my hand on the passenger seat. I didn't know who to hit. The tears started flowing again, as I stood helpless in the face of the biggest fear of my life. For some reason, I saw nothing but pain in the days to come. I didn't want to go through this pain. It was hopeless.