Main Market

by Umar A. Riaz

The evening began to dim the sky over Lahore. It had been announced by a muezzin’s throaty call to prayer, sung in a sad scale native to no known musical tradition. Soon enough, others had joined in; more loudspeakers had crackled with static; thudded as mouthpieces were tapped; shivered with wet clearings of throat and mind; and, finally, boomed with Allah’s name stretched over countless syllables, scratching the air.

And, as twilight spread over the sleepy city, the simple message of the azaan was lost in overlapping, god-revering howls.

This had occurred five times a day, every single day since the invention of the megaphone.

A black Honda turned right into the Main Market roundabout. It was a new model, with spaceship eyes and a grille curved into a permanent scowl. Inside, Asad turned to Sara, who was sitting in the passenger seat with one heel propped onto the dashboard.

“Paan?” he asked.

“Have I ever said no?”

“Alright . . . I’ll get Nadeem to bring them—bastard always gets them right.”

Sara turned the other way and looked through the window, blurring out the legless beggar navigating the distance. Asad eased the car into a parking spot at the south-west curve of the market, idling the engine and taking it down a level. He sat back and waited for the runners.

In less than ten seconds, several kinetic, unshaven young men elbowed their way to the car. Asad pressed a button and took his window down by an inch. He was greeted by around half a dozen yes-sirs.

“Nadeem,” he said simply.

Their eyes lowered in disappointment. One of them turned on his heels and raised an arm with a shout-out. Soon the crowd parted, and Nadeem walked through at a brisk but measured pace.

It was immediately apparent that Nadeem was different. He always appeared to hover—elevated in comparison to the other runners. He looked bathed. His shalwar-kameez did not hang emptily on his frame. He rarely ever wore shalwar-kameez, usually choosing dusty t-shirts in bold colors, and jeans with the dye faded dramatically at the knees and buttocks. They always fit perfectly on his wiry form, complimented his look: slicked-back, matinee idol hair, and eyes always coolly narrowed.

“Sir,” he said to Asad, stretching the address with a punkish air of familiarity.

“Nadeem . . . ”

“New car?”

“New . . . yeah . . . ”

“It’s nice. The usual?”

“Yeah, but add a couple of paans to that.”

“The usual paan for you?”

“Yeah, but a meetha for her.”

“Done. And, if they don’t have Swiss Marlboro Lights?”

“Just get any imported pack.”

Nadeem took off toward one of the little shops that crowded the market.

Sara chuckled.

“What?” asked Asad.

“Nothing . . . I like how the way you speak changes when you talk to them.”

“Talk to whom?”

“Them,” said Sara, her eyes shifting toward the runners.

“What do you mean?”

Sara raised her eyebrows.

“You’re an idiot,” said Asad, smiling.

Asad’s Urdu did change when he spoke to anyone who wasn’t like him—not that he would speak exclusively in Urdu to anyone like him. To begin with, his Urdu was not particularly good; his pronouns were mostly English, and the remaining grammar was creaky, prone to faltering and flailing without an English crutch. Yet, when he had to speak in Urdu, to runners, maids, drivers, cooks, underclass yes-men, waiters at dingy tikka and kebab joints, security guards, sweepers, sweepresses, etc. he would always doctor his tones with the bullock-gait cadences of Punjabi.

Although learned in Punjabi swear words, and proud of his occasional innovations in their form, he could not string a coherent sentence together in the language common to them. So, for him, and many other moneyed graduates of British schooling in Pakistan, Urdu had to be the middle-ground for communication, pressed with a street swagger that fooled few.

“Do you have condoms?” asked Sara, a weariness lining her voice.

“Fuck, I completely forgot . . . there’s a Fazl Din’s right there. Lock the door behind me. I’ll leave the key in.”

Asad stepped into the pharmacy. He hated buying condoms in Pakistan because of the way the attendants, wearing badly stitched white coats and thick eyebrows, would look at him, acting as if nothing were wrong. He usually asked Akram, his security guard and servile confidant, to get them for him. It was simpler that way. Everything was, as long as Akram was there.

Now, Akram was not, and the condoms were under heavy guard behind the counter. Asad found himself flushing with anger at the irony that he could walk in and pick up powerful anti-histamines without a question asked but was supposed to walk up to the counter and ask for condoms. They might as well start demanding prescriptions for them.

Asad began to enact his usual condom-buying routine. He would meander through the pharmacy’s whitened spaces, inching toward the general direction of the counter, all the while pretending to look over rows of cold medicine for something in particular. Naturally, by this time, it would be obvious he was really there to buy condoms.

Nadeem walked back to the car. He lowered his face to the window. Asad was gone. He looked at the instrument panel inside, the painted chrome around its dials glinting in the dark. His eyes shifted up the dashboard to the pale foot reclining against its far end. He frowned at these rich kids. No respect—not even for a new Honda.

Nadeem watched his murky reflection slide away with the window. He saw her light-skinned face in the light coming from the market. He found himself worrying about his hair.

“Asad’s just gone to Fazl Din’s.”

“Why? I could have gone instead.”

Sara raised her shoulders, tilting her head to one side.

“I have some money . . . how much?”

“Seventy for the cigarettes, ten for the paans.”

Nadeem’s Urdu had stiffened while talking to her, starched crisp by formality and a sudden shyness. Sara opened her purse and held it close to her in order to shroud its contents. She uncurled eighty rupees’ worth of notes. Nadeem carefully took them, making sure his fingers would not brush hers.

“Oh yeah, sorry,” began Sara, and handed him another twenty, “this is for you.”

“Thank you, madam.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Sorry mad—” Nadeem stopped himself quickly.

Sara laughed. “It’s alright.” Nadeem smiled.

Asad walked back to the pharmacy’s door, relieved. Moments ago, he had set a bag of Super Crisps, a tab of Paracetamol tablets, and two sachets of herbal tea on the counter.

“Will that be all?” asked the attendant, his white coat drooping over his shoulders.

“Yes . . . uhh . . . and some condoms,” Asad had said, pushing hard to sound as if he were talking about the weather.

The attendant had nodded and placed two boxes on the counter.

“Which ones?”

Asad scanned the two boxes, making it seem like this was a formality, like he was a veteran condom buyer. One was a simple beige box with the Durex logo, while the other was a deep shit-brown with a picture of a lingerie model pulled straight from the glazed pages of the eighties, straddling a white horse. The text above her said, “Rough Rider.”

“Durex,” he said.

Now he stood at the glass door, watching his car in the distance. He could see that Nadeem was back and talking to Sara. He saw Nadeem smiling and thought he could see Sara behind the speckles of reflection on the windscreen, smiling too.

Asad shook his head quickly, as if brushing something off, and walked toward the car.

“You should have waited for me. You shouldn’t have paid,” he said to Sara, looking over his shoulder as he reversed the car.

“It’s alright. He was cute,” she joked.

Asad let out a pitched laugh as he changed gears.

“Paan’s good,” she managed, her mouth brim-filled with its sweet spices.

“Yeah.” Asad’s fist tightened around the gear lever.

* * *

That night, Nadeem came back home late, as he usually did. His walk had been slurred against the chipped steps and dull grot of his neighborhood.

He now sat staring deep into the space of the living room, its walls peeling with tired paint, once a marzipan green. His sense of time felt thick, and his heart seemed to pump faster, reasonless.

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Yes, mad-”

“I thought you wanted me to take it down. Arshad just told me that you’ve been sitting here for hours, looking at it,” said Nadeem’s mother, interrupting his reverie.

Nadeem squinted against the light coming from her room, and the picture of black-bearded, wild-eyed Baba Khagghe Shah sharpened into focus.

“I wasn’t looking at it.”

“It’s alright if you were.”

“I really wasn’t.”

“Look, I think you’re finally turning the corner. Arshad did when he was your age. He didn’t believe either. Look at him now. He’s older; he’s on a path; and, he supports us because khuda-taala supports him. He just had to realize it. Do you know how lucky we are?”

Nadeem looked around the bare room.

“Yeah.”

“It’s a shame. A descendant of Baba Khagghe Shah, and all he cares about is getting groceries for people who are more than capable of walking.”

“They pay, and anyway, I don’t get groceries.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is it then?” he asked.

“The point is that money, rich, poor—they all mean nothing. What means is God. Baba Sahib was the first in our family to feel it. And, he is in our blood. He was a great man, and he belongs to us. Just as we belong to him. He still has a sense of power. If he didn’t, you wouldn’t be sitting here, staring at his picture for hours.”

“Can you please stop? Just not now, please.”

“You’re just a boy Nadeem . . . if your father had . . . ”

He got up. This was not the first time he had had this conversation with his mother. Each thought, sound, and sense since evening had been slipping over a constant undercurrent: the thought of the pale face in the black Honda. It was annoying him, as was his mother.

“Can I ask you something?” he said, stopping and turning back toward his mother, baring his forearm.

“Yes.”

“It’s always about our blood isn’t it? Its purity, its connections. Just look here and tell me this: who, aside from you and Arshad, even cares about my blood? Whether it flows or spills?”

“You’ll know,” she said confidently.

* * *

Asad woke up that night and fumbled in the blackness for his hand-held. He pressed a button and checked the time, a blue glow fading into the dark. He slid out of bed and walked through the familiar space of his room. He dug out packet and lighter from his pockets and stepped to the window, opening it slightly after parting the curtains. The room brightened to grey, enough to see the smoke mist through it.

He watched her thin form carved out from the sheets. Hours ago, she had lain there beneath him, waiting for him to drop down on her with a lasting breath. When he had, she had curved her arm around him, settling her hand in the groove running down his back. She had kept it there.

He raised a hand up to the side of his head, rubbing his temple with his fingertips. He wished he could stop his thoughts, tie them down. But when he tried, his feelings would erupt and fissure through his body.

“He’s cute.”

“Impossible,” he thought, looking back at her. “Im-fucking-possible.”

He saw her face when they had made love only hours ago, her eyelids tightening, her pupils drifting to the clock on the bedside table. He saw her face behind the windshield at the market. She was smiling. Was she? He cursed the dull lights at the market, the enveloping spray of dust and smog in Lahore. He cursed Akram for not dusting the windshield before they had left for the market.

Akram.

He wondered what Akram was doing. He was probably asleep or with a local whore. Asad looked at the scarlet and white of the soft Persian carpet he was standing on.

“Fuck it, he gets paid.”

Asad stepped lightly across the room, back to his mobile phone, some scant part of him wondering if he even cared anymore that it was probably all in his head.

* * *

Nadeem walked up the stairs and into the green dinge of the Red Hat Snooker Club, his near-daily haunt, just a curb off the Market. His friends would be there, drifting in and out after seven.

“Nadeem yaar, you look weak.”

He knew it was true: after just a week, his clothes were beginning to hang on him; his features defined his face more aggressively; and his hair was half-heartedly oiled, jutting out at places with newfound freedom.

He picked a cue up and walked to the nearest table. The cigarette-stained surfaces of these snooker tables was where Nadeem found his natural place in the world. He never bothered much with angles or talcum powder. He felt and played and, nearly always, won.

Pappoo the Pimp walked in. He usually sat in a corner twirling his bushy handlebar, conducting the odd bit of after-hours business by thumbing through his mobile. He lived in a starched white shalwar-kameez, always wearing a fierce middle-parting and the glazed eyes of a prophet.

“Papoo!” some familiar face shouted out. “So . . . when’s the world going to end?”

“Oh, soon . . . ” replied Pappoo, smiling.

Nadeem’s face was barely an inch from the body of his cue. His eyes were still, looking at nothing but the red ball in the distance that sat right next to a pocket. He leaned in, struck, and missed the cue ball spectacularly—the tip of his cue shaking like a junkie in thin air.

He stood straight and shivered with frustration as dull murmurs of laughter surrounded him. He wanted to knee the stick into two.

He felt a light hand on his shoulder. It was Pappoo, who leaned in and spoke with silky concern.

“You alright Nadeem?”

“Yes . . . yes . . . ”

“Really? You know I can always tell.”

“I’ll be alright.”

Pappoo leaned in more.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Nadeem paused, silent. He then sniggered.

“You know I don’t have any money.”

“I know someone who runs a very nice, very quiet little business around the corner. We’ll find a nice girl for you, skin like ivory, good hips. Consider this a favor, from a friend.”

“Here? In the Market?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Do you have reason not to?”

Nadeem was quiet. He saw the room’s lamps reflected in Pappoo’s eyes.

“So?” asked Pappoo. “Remember that I am a man of principle, but I am not so often this . . . generous.”

Nadeem nodded very, very slowly.

* * *

Sara sat back at the edge of one of the grass courts at the Gymkhana. She watched Asad and another friend from the American School lobbing a ball back and forth with violence. She smiled as the tension increased on the court, and the game grew fiercer with every grunt and groan—neither of them was any good, so it was a perfect match.

She looked at Asad through the violet cast by her sunglasses. She watched as he stood—ever sinking with the ship—pointing at a line with his racquet, insisting, “It was out! I swear it was out!”

She felt a sudden glow of affection. She wanted to hold him, stroke his hair and wrap him in, tell him that it didn’t matter that it was a point. That he was losing.

And she stopped herself right there.

This was how she had changed during their relationship. When she had first seen him in class, they had both been sixteen. He’d had an edge to him, a cockiness that she had found as attractive as his spiky hair. That was until she’d realized that he was as lost as she was; as prone and as vulnerable. The swagger was a front, and beneath its jagged surface was a person deeply human, and she could not understand which Asad she had loved, and if she could even use the word “love.” It just sounded so heavy now, as if it sank with its own weight every time that it was spoken into the air.

A year ago, she would have found herself just knowing when a love song would come on. Now, she wondered if “love” was just a word at this stage in life, a promise disguised as an arrival; whether, like structure in wine, it was one of those things that you could only really understand once you were older, greyer—less caught up.

She knew very few people in her life whom she cared for as much as him, family included. But over these two years, they had talked for hours, idled together for hours, walked into cocktail parties and dance floors bound at the hip, and out of them sozzled and falling onto each other. She was now eighteen and felt like she knew of little else but him and their Lahore. It felt as if the expanse of her passage into adulthood had been whittled down into a cozy corridor. And she couldn’t breathe.

What now?

She didn’t know, but she felt a piercing mixture of sadness and elation as she remembered when he used to call her “Rabbit,” and she would ask him to say it again.

* * *

Nadeem had no idea why he was doing this. He stepped out of a rickshaw that coughed fumes as it died on its driver. The driver kicked at the accelerator pedal, shouting, “C’mon buoy! C’mon!”

“Thanks,” said Nadeem, barely heard over a wave of fruity expletives, as he handed the driver a couple of notes and walked into the open court of the Data Darbar shrine.

It was Thursday afternoon, and Sufis—part-time mystics, beggars, vagabonds, idlers and common-folk alike—were crowding the space, hungering for the sweet saffron of the charhawa rice being handed out. Alcohol-plied dervishes were spinning endlessly to the jigsaw march of dhol drums. The scene was thick with sweat, incense and atmosphere.

Nadeem felt heady as he made his way through the crowd. He asked around for a mujaavir, a Sufi seer-quack who might help him. A bearded man, whose glazed eyes and diluted pupils seemed to speak of God and the greater universe, offered to help. He led Nadeem into one of the quarters of the main building, the beads around his neck chinking through the din.

Nadeem found himself in a small room lit by green tube-lights with a crowd of people sitting on the floor. They seemed to converge at a point on the far end of the room where Baba Channey Shah sat cross-legged with two young boys on either side massaging his upper-arms.

“A new soul!” he shouted, flicking the boys off. “Come!”

Nadeem walked toward him, careful not to step over anyone. He sat down, gaunt and weary, right in front of the Baba.

Baba Channey Shah had an intense, if visibly unfocused stare, and a long, salt-and-pepper beard that meshed with his lips.

“Are you worried about how a blind man can be a seer?” asked the Baba with a thin smile. “Don’t you worry now. I may be blind, but I can see what you can’t. What is your name,” he said, as if it were a statement—as if he already knew.

“Nadeem.”

“I see. And why might you be here, Waseem?”

Nadeem was about to correct him when one of the boys shot him a look that told him that this man knew what he was doing.

“I was hoping that you could help me with that,” Nadeem said, lowering his eyes. “I have not been feeling very well lately.”

The Baba nodded, knowingly.

“Ishq,” he said.

Nadeem looked around the room, embarrassed. His cynicism began to thin slightly.

“Many a man has fallen to a woman,” began the Baba. “Read our poetry, hear our ghazals. Or, read our ghazals, if you will. Have you heard of Baba Bulleh Shah?”

“Yes,” lied Nadeem. He might as well not have, as the Baba began before he finished the syllable.

“Bulleh Shah was a man who was possessed by ishq,” the Baba said, raising his voice and his finger, “its anxieties, its questioning, its longing . . . ”

Nadeem felt a great desire to run out of the room.

“ . . . except!”

“Except what?”

“Except, you know whom he felt this love for?” The Baba leaned in, savoring every period in the ellipsis before he stated the obvious.

“God,” he said simply, his voice dipping into gravel.

Nadeem stayed silent.

Sensing the dramatic pause to have been a success, the Baba continued. “I can cure you of your obsession, but I cannot redirect your love toward God. You have to do that yourself. Do we have an agreement, Waseem?”

“Yes.”

“Good, now show me your head.”

Nadeem tilted his head forward. The Baba’s thin fingers felt it out, and he clasped his palm hard over Nadeem’s head. Then, his eyes rolled upwards in their sockets, and he began swaying, chanting furiously beneath his breath. Nadeem prayed for it to be over soon.

After finishing, and barely suppressing a burp, the Baba opened his eyes again. He reached out to his right, and produced three tiny scrolls of paper with verses written on them in Arabic.

“Take a glass of water. Read these to yourself in this order; the first, first; the second, second; the third, third; and, then the second, first; the third, second; and, the first, third. Then, take a deep breath and blow into the glass. Then drink the water. Do this once in the morning, on every alternate day.”

Nadeem narrowed his eyes. The Baba turned to the silent crowd.

“Everyone, Waseem will be cured!”

The crowd remained silent.

“And, take this . . . ” He rolled another scroll into a tiny bronze box and strung it, making a necklace. “Wear this around your neck, at all times,” said the Baba flatly.

“Thank you,” muttered Nadeem, standing up.

The Baba cleared his throat, significantly. Nadeem looked confused. One of the boys whispered into the Baba’s ear. The Baba nodded and purposefully lifted his gaze up to Nadeem.

Nadeem wondered how a blind man knew where he stood.

“Waseem, there is the small matter of a . . . what’s the word . . . yes, a donation.”

“How much?”

“How much can you spare?”

“I have fifty rupees.”

“I see. You see, most people do not donate less than a hundred . . . ”

“I’m sorry, I only have fifty.”

“Not a rupee more?”

“No. I have nothing.”

“Very well. You seem like a bright young man . . . in need of help. Consider the other fifty a favor, as long as you come see me again.” The Baba smiled for the first time, baring a chiseled set of teeth the color of stale cream.

Nadeem tossed the notes on the ground and turned and left as briskly as possible, through the quarters, through the court, not stopping until he was back on the street.

He caught his breath and took a moment to compose himself. He pried out the nearest urchin from the crowd and pressed the necklace into his hand.

“Don’t you have any money?” the child asked, looking disappointed.

Nadeem scratched his stubble, and looked around, breathing as if he had only a few minutes before the world’s unnatural end. He could see the evening seeping into the sky. He could hear the ensuing azaan. He could hear the dhol drums clatter, and he continued to feel that, between the sky and the earth in Pakistan, God remained just a promise—a favor.

* * *

Asad sat in his room, looking out to nothing in particular, with smoke idling out of the narrow partition at his lips.

Akram had left in his car an hour ago. He had assured him that no one would be hurt. Asad found that he could not justify a single thing any longer. He knew that he never could. It all seemed pointless, and it always was.

“And, if they don’t have Swiss Marlboro Lights?”

“Nadeem,” he thought, “always so meticulous, unlike any other runner. . . . ”

He covered his face with his hands, hoping to fall into their dark. He did not think about what might have already started. He could not think about calling her, though a vague part of him wanted to. All he could think about was when, during an argument with his mother last year, she had pointed a hard finger at him and shouted, “You’re just a boy Asad, what do you know?!”

* * *

Nadeem sat on the curb at the southwest corner of the market. It was one in the morning, and the Market was dark, mostly shut, and mostly empty. He was alone under the blanketing shadow of an oak tree. He liked it this way. He smoked a Pall Mall cigarette that tasted like wood, looking out onto the green patch within the roundabout where the lost and the homeless junkies came to sleep at night. He smiled to himself bitterly.

“You’ll know . . . ”

He suddenly found himself lit in headlights. He saw the familiar curves of a new black Honda. The expectation rose in his chest. He had not felt as fulfilled in weeks. He rose to his feet.

The door opened and a tall, thick man got out.

“Nadeem,” he said simply.

Nadeem was disappointed, but open to a late-night customer—must have been a referral. He needed more cigarettes anyway.

“That’s me,” he began.

That was when the world turned over, and then kept spinning as if on a watery axis.

Everything was sharp noise, hammering, and pain; black as pitch with sudden flashes and ruptures of light. He could hear panting, alarm and shouts up close and far in the distance, wrapping him inside a thick cloud of sound. He prayed that it would end soon.

When his vision came back into focus, it was as if the Market had been rotated clockwise and then left there. All that was left of the Honda was the residual glow of its rear lights.

His whole body pulsed with pain, and he could not understand where exactly he had been hurt. Lying there in the market, his day-by-day kingdom, he found himself wondering why he could not see it yet—or feel it. He had expected to open his eyes and see his own face mirrored softly in its spreading pool. Yet all he could see were figures melting out of the shadows, running toward him ghost-lit and concerned as he finally felt it slide down his forehead in a thin, warm line.