Young Writers Society

A/N: Based off Touched By An Angel by Maya Angelou for the Poetry-Inspired Contest. 

Word Count: 2929 words~

It is a sunny day in August and the streets in Karachi are spilling over themselves with traffic. You sit outside, on the front steps of the Edhi Centre, tapping your feet against the cemented floor; the heat seeps through the soles of your chapal, but you find it oddly comforting. It is the kind of day when the clouds have disappeared to sunbathe, and people have begun to rain. Tittering crowds of women walk past, their dupattas dancing at their heels, and tired street vendors tug their carts behind them. Dirt, smoke, the stench of paan and sweat--it is a typical Karachi morning, and you wouldn't have it any other way.

You lean forwards and light another smoke. How easy is it, to swallow all your worries down in a cloud of heaving grey? To wash it all away and metaphorically stab at your lungs with a decrepit, rolled-up piece of paper. It is unhealthy, you think to yourself, but after all you have seen, it's a small risk compared to many that other people take.

Light. Drag. Exhale. Repeat.

The ceiling fan whirs quietly in the hubbub of traffic; the new secretary occasionally peers through the window to ask you a question, and you respond, quietly, in a monotone that years of filing papers and comforting abandoned mothers has drummed into you. Technically, you're not even supposed to be here--it's your day off--but the family's in Lahore, and your friends are all busy, and something dragged you to these steps, to the welfare centre. 'Some sort of force,' you said casually to the secretary as you walked in that morning. 'I'm not one to question the universe.'

Now, it is midday, and nothing has happened yet.

You toss another cigarette stub into the small plastic bag you've kept at your feet, and stretch. It's time to call it a day, you decide, to go home and brood over how you've done absolutely nothing with your life. What's an MBA if you can't get a job? You scowl. And you've scarcely stood up that a woman sweeps up the stairs, her ragged, faded dupatta wrapped around her tighter than a shroud. She carries a child, whose brown face peeks through a cocoon of blankets--barely six months old, you think. You watch as she walks toward the jhoola (cradle) that sits right next to the entrance without hesitation. And suddenly, she stops.

'Mein ye nahi kar sakti hoon,' she says. ('I can't do this.') She whirls around, and her eyes are like slits in the night sky when she looks at you. Large. Frightened. Blacker than black. 'Mein apni bachi ko yahan chorna chahti hoon--lekin, lekin mein ye nahi karsakti,' she stutters. ('I want to leave my daughter here--but, but I can't.')

'Sister,' you say gently, 'come inside. You can talk to me and tell me why you want to leave your child--we can come up with a solution.'

She nods, and makes to follow you, but scarcely has she taken a step forward that she stops, abruptly. Her forehead wrinkles up, her small brown hands shaking as she clutches her baby. She shakes her head. 'I can't waste time. He will follow me. Take her.' She thrusts the child into your arms, now shaking visibly. Thin and frail, she looks younger than twenty, yet her eyes convince you that she is older than the sky itself. She takes a corner of her dupatta, one she has knotted several times, and extracts a piece of paper from her makeshift pocket. 

'Read this,' she says, giving it to you. 'Teach her to read, so that some day she will know why I did this.' A slight dip of her head, she mutters, 'Salaam,' and breaks into a run, her fists clenched as she weaves past the checkerboard of rickshaws and motorcycles and disappears into the crowd beyond.

You swear you hear her elicit a strangled cry as she goes. You wonder what her story is. You wonder if you could have helped her--if she needed help in the first place. But by the time you read the letter, it is much too late.

--

The city fades, slowly, into night. The letter the woman left is written in eloquent Urdu--you are surprised--and the words are precise and neat. You sit at a table outside a kebab house, telephone wires hanging like sagging tightropes above your heads. Crows squawk. The crowd thins as people head to the masjids for Maghrib prayer. Karachi never fails to entrance; it keeps you on your toes, the truest definition of a city, a Gotham city; but tonight, you are less concerned about the mobile in your pocket than usual.

You read the letter, and it feels like your throat is jammed with flies.

"My name is Marmuri,'' the letter says. ''It is a name meaning 'heavy rain', and it is the most ironic name my parents could have chosen for me. I come from Balochistan. My childhood was spent in barrenness.

Balochistan has a reputation for being a barren mother--a mother everyone turns their heads from, that the government pretends doesn't exist. It's funny: my province has often felt like a sister to me in this respect. We are both products of the same human sentiment: rejection. It runs in my veins, and it runs in the karez. We are both the same.

For a long time, I battled rejection. It wasn't until much later, when I had seen more than I had ever expected to see--when I had journeyed along the Makran coast, gotten tangled in several nets, escaped and fallen into a state beyond disrepair ... that I accepted it. Maybe we're special. Maybe we're not. But it's hard for the world to see us as a part of itself, and it is harder for us to let go of the coast, to float out like islands at sea.

My father was a pig who married several women and cared for none. My mother died in childbirth. My father died soon after, and I am glad he did, because on the rare occasions people speak of him, they do so with contempt. 'Was a landowner,' my foster mother told me once, when I pressed her for information. 'Didn't work. Had lots of land. Branded us with coils, and people feared him, because he was powerful and he was rich and the two together become a dangerous thing.'

The hate my father bred, I inherited. It was the only thing he saw fit to leave me, his only daughter. I ought to be glad, I guess. Balochi villages are not the only places where superstition and arrogance has fogged religion: I could very well have been buried alive, and no one would have thought the worst of it.

My foster mother was one of my father's wives who got remarried and took me in. To this day, I do not know why she did this. Perhaps it was pity, or perhaps she did it out of kindness for the only progeny my father had been able to bear. My bloodline has long since been a barren one. Barrenness produces barrenness. So I came to be.

Sometimes, I wish she had not taken me in. Her husband owned a great black hound--his name was Ugust--and together, foster father and loyal pet, they were the watchmen of my village.

But it was never my village.

My foster father and his hound shared the same name. You might find this funny, but I never did. When I came to Karachi, I was a prostitute, and one of the girls told me that the universe balances, that negativity and positivity exist in the same conch. Dark to light, sun to moon, earth to sky. But I have seen darkness submerge itself in darkness. I have seen fear join hands with fear and lunge my way, a heaving, black monstrosity in the dead of night, when I used to trace the lines in my palms to fall asleep. Father tied the hound up inside the house; it was not until 2005 that the beast ventured outside. Sometimes, the sight of it was an apparition, a djinn with clinking chains. Other times, its manic breath would whip clouds around its nostrils, and it would be realer than the feel of the earth against my skin.

'It senses fear,' Father told me once, sneering down at me from the pedestal he hung upon. 'It senses fear, and it hates the weak, because the weak are filth meant to be crushed into the earth.'

'But who decides,' I asked him, 'who the filthy are?'

'People,' he said, and his many chins wobbled when he laughed. 'People like me--strong, powerful, smarter than the rest. We lead this world by the collar, and us, it follows.'

I've always wanted, dearly, to tell him that he may lead this world, but he would never lead the next. By daylight, Father would do odd jobs around town, while the other men made for the date gardens near Turbat, where they could earn a living. By night, he would stalk the village, listening for the sounds of the hyenas in the distance, circling the few cows and goats that we owned, collectively. Ugust-the-hound followed Ugust-the-man. And together, they never failed to haunt me.

It was at night that my imagination would outstrip me with its vicious paces. For ages I would lie, still, on the ground, watching the spirit of the great, black devil dance within the quiet spectacle of my mind. I would watch him bark, and yelp, and I would watch my father approach him. My father would then move to embrace the hound, gouge his eyes out, whistle into his ear, and swallow him whole.

It is hard to trace back to those nights now, because they were caught in that time between midnight and dusk when nothing seems to make sense, and the clouds are closer to rubbing your chest than the ground is firm beneath your back.

By the time I turned eleven, a patch of dried, cracked earth was all I had for a bedroom, and I would spend nights reaching out to turn stars over in the sky. My foster parents, whose generations traced so far back in our little village, sometimes claimed that they could have been plucked from the very earth they stood on. But they rejected me like they rejected the care of their soil. Their summers were spent in Peshawar, in the cool orchards, wrapped tightly in the valley's tongue. Their summers were spent with their /real/ children, and my summers were spent drawing lines in the earth, counting down the days until they would come back, and I would once more have to play their game--avoid eye contact, do the small tasks they assigned me, and try--try to disappear.

My foster brothers, October and November, hated me. Those are not their real names; I have forgotten them. And that is all I have been able to forget.

My clothes have been torn from my skin in front of the elders, our jirga; I have been called names and touched in ways I shall never be able to expunge from memory. My only solace was Kaka, my foster father's mother who shrunk in his presence like a dried prune in the burning sun--he was the sun, she was the prune, and she was the reason I stand today. She fought for me, made sure I ate--sparse meals, of dried roti and daal, but meals all the same. The day she died, I left the village. Perhaps of all the mundane details in my life, this is the most exciting. It would be exciting; it would be dramatic ... if only it had been out of choice.

'Learn to read,' Kaka said, 'learn to write. Learn to run.' We would sit in the shade of the sun and she would wax philosophies, teach me the art of harnessing the flowing river of written script, and she would love me in her silent, subtle way.

When I was fifteen, Kaka died. When I was fifteen, I left the village. It sounds dramatic, phrased like that, but it was the worst day of my life. Kaka died, they wouldn't let me see her before the burial, and Ugust sold me off as a prostitute. I was tossed, like an animal, into the back of a truck, and by the time we'd trundled along to Gwadar, I was only one of several girls stripped of their identity, of their pride and dignity and everything that had been important to them.

I am telling you this, not because I want you to pity me, but because I want my daughter to know, one day, that leaving her was hard. I have been through trials; they might not be the worst of trials, but believe me, nobody wants to carve their own hearts from their breasts. It is the most painful thing imaginable."

--

At nine o'clock, the owner of the kebab house chases you away. 'Order something,' he says, 'or leave.' Your head is filled with smog; normally, you would be offended at the brassy manner with which he speaks to you, but now you just want to find somewhere to sit, somewhere where you can finish reading Marmuri's story.

You walk home, to your tiny apartment that's shoved above an electronica market at Saddar. It is not your favourite place to be, normally, but your old two-seater sofa and reading lamp look like they drifted in from heaven tonight.

The letter feels heavy in your pocket. Hastily, you spoon achar onto a slice of bread and continue to read:

"At Gwadar, we were given jobs. We were made to 'entertain': that was their conception of a woman. I have done things I am ashamed of; I have fallen in love with people who twisted my spine and broke my heart like a toothpick. I have fallen in love, and out of love, and I have faced nights of torment with men whose touch was like an iron brand. I cannot erase the marks they made; make sure my daughter never faces the same.

From Gwadar, we were 'shipped' to Karachi. I was seventeen. One of the men took an interest in me, bought me, and married me. For a while, I lived in the lap of luxury. A roof above my head. Three meals a day. I became pregnant. I believed myself to be in love.

Even now, after all the torture I have taken at his hands, I am uncertain as to whether or not this love was real. I still love him, I think. But a man who tries to skewer his wife with a stick of charcoal can never love. He is not made for something so precious, so pure.

He did not want the child. He is threatening to kill her and me. I ran away, and Karachi is a big city, but it is not big enough for me. He will find me. He will hurt me. He will come with guns and sticks and this time, he will not leave me be. While my love is a desire to care for him, to help him, he is obsessed with hate and hurt. Keep my daughter away from psychopaths and strange men. Keep her safe. I do not want her to spend her life being pursued by hounds. I cannot chain myself to her. Tell her that by giving her up, I have freed her, and that I have also freed myself. Tell her that it is love--only love--that sets us free."

--

You inhale, deeply, and drop the letter on the couch. You open the window, relish the feel of the salty sea breeze as it tickles your nostrils. 'Shit,' you swear. You grip the windowledge, breathing in. You have seen so much--flood victims, abandoned parents, corpses--but nothing has hit you so hard as words from a sacrifice. You sit by the window, thinking, reevaluating everything, and it is only as dawn seeps in through your window and the sound of the azaan hails your ears that you stand up.

Morning prayer. A cup of tea. A decision. Everything is jumbled yet clear. You make a few calls, book an afternoon flight, and walk down to the Edhi centre. You never finished reading the letter last night, and before you hand in your resignation--and the letter--you cast a quick glance down it again. Marmuri's story is branded in your mind--it's something you'll share with your mother when you go back, even though she's in a coma and probably won't hear you.

But it doesn't matter. She'd have appreciated knowing it anyway.

The last sentence of the letter reads: "Call her Zainab.''

'Give this to the big boss himself, all right?' you tell the secretary. She nods fervently, batting her eyelids furiously as though her lashes are playing ping-pong with one another.

'Mr Edhi?' she asks, as you make to turn away.

'Yeah,' you confirm. 'Tell him I said good-bye--and tell him that kid is as special as they make 'em. Give her to someone who'll appreciate her, someone who knows what it's like, I mean, to be touched by an angel.'

The secretary blinks confusedly at you, and you grin widely at her before you leave. Dirt, smoke, and the stench of paan tickle your nerves. It is a typical Karachi morning, and you wouldn't have it any other way. 

--

A Note on Language: 

- Chapal: The Urdu word for 'sandal'. 

- Dupatta: A kind of scarf. See here.

- Paan: A 'preparation combining betel leaf with areca nut and sometimes also with tobacco.' Tends to leave orange-red stains, and is quite often found gracing pavements and streets in Karachi. It's quite an exercise trying to avoid stepping on them.

- Masjid: Mosque.

- Balochistan: One of the five provinces of Pakistan.

- Karez: A kind of  underground canal that is commonly found in the Balochistan region. These canals are very deep and are accessed by vertical shafts. See: Turpan water system.

- Turbat: A city in Balochistan, along its Makran coast. 

- Gwadar: A port city in Balochistan, also along the Makran coast. 

- Karachi: Provincial capital, industrial hub, Pakistan's largest city. In Sindh.

I've probably missed several out, but feel free to poke me and I'll add them here.