In December of 1990, a gritty grey fog settled down over Suratwala village.
A few years ago, too, it had come in the same extent, and as opaque, but ever since it had lost its way, and the folk had forgotten how enduring and dominating it had been.
In the fourth week running, it still wasn’t thinning. Hovering from door to door, in the muddy gullies, it crept along the bare mud and brick walls, and stole around corners, and saved for the trickle of the water from the open drains flanking the gullies, and the squawks of the ducks belly-warming, the silence was complete.
In the main bazaar, running broad and straight down the middle of the village, dark figures drifted in the air. Heads and shoulders peaked in glimpses, and fell in pointillist nothingness. Colors got dissolved in one gloom spread everywhere, and shapes died, and sounds buried one another.
Yet a day had begun in Suratwala. Under the surface business had commenced in the bazaar. When one paid attention, the drone was divided into voices. Identities had begun to form, eyes had started to discern.
And here was Master Attaullah, a man much older than his years, with his rough, whiskery face, dented cheeks and deep, saggy eyes; his checkered coat, beige worker’s cap, saleti pants, and black boots, passing on in his simple, straight way. Quiet like the fog, as he had always been: an unfelt, moving presence, appearing and vanishing around the corners; diminishing in the distance of the gullies.
He was a little crooked, and these past few days, he’d worn the face of a man in a brown study. Removed from the world. Lost.
So seeing him now, from the counter of the store which he passed, the gazes of the shopkeeper and his helper boy followed his slow and absent-minded steps, brimmed with compassion.
The boy asked his boss, ‘Have you ever seen him any different?’
‘No,’ the boss replied, immediately. ‘No..no, no. Not him. Always the same coat. Same cap. Never seen him any different. But he’s getting on. Really getting on. The way he moves, look. Not steady.’
‘I wonder how he puts them on,’ the boy remarked.
The shopkeeper sighed. ‘Poor old man. My kid says, Aba, he can no longer write straight, and all the time he’s forgetting things. Sometimes he can’t find what he’s written on the board, and then he’s pointing to things not even on it. Then he dozes off, on his desk, and wakes up in a fuss. My kid says, Aba, sometimes he let us out too soon. Sometimes he won’t, even if the bell’s rung. Then he forgets … what he taught us last time, and teaches the same thing all over again.’
The shopkeeper paused here, exhaled, and started reflectively. ‘Ah, and I can tell you what a fox he was. I remember those days. He taught us all. Theorems, all those theorems, angles this and that, and lines here and there. All those potash and chilly peters, those experiments, those laws of …reflects…what was it? Ones with the mirrors and pins, and that long rail and the metal ball, and those Newton laws, the one, two and three, and those long, long quations. Quations over quations! I swear to you boy, even I learnt something. And I’ve never learnt anything in my life.’
‘Hmm,’ the boy nodded. ‘I bet it does keep him warm though. Maybe hard to put on but, it’s pretty cold out here. And the fog, you see.’
‘And now look at him. He’s got nobody. Wife died of TB and where’s the son?’
Once again he shook his head. But Attaullah passed the shop. In the fog, too, he had been able to keep his straight line.
The Hajveri Foundation was where he was headed. A private school owned by his old friend, Nazir Ahmed, who’d also been the headmaster at the public school where they had both served till their retirements at sixty.
Nazir had retired a couple years earlier, and set up this new school in his old family home. Then, soon as Attaullah was relieved from his duties at the public school, he had hastened to procure his services. For Attaullah was the most gifted and tireless pedagog he’d ever known. Back in the day they had a saying; Attaullah could teach a blind man how to perform the titrations, or read the scales on the Vernier caliper! Indeed, there were slugs he’d pushed over the hard finish-lines of annual board-examinations, and no-hopers he’d saved from the doomed corner of some bazaar shop. One way or the other – by urging, encouraging, or scolding, whatever it took, he’d pushed them to the degree, and while some, like the shopkeeper at the store might’ve lapsed, there was no count of the boys he’d “set right,” as they said. Attaullah could do it all: Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, theory and experiments. He was a force of nature. A one-man school within the school.
And now, his dearest friend and greatest admirer, headmaster Nazir Ahmed, had to fire him.
It was a harrowing prospect that troubled Nazir physically. From his office chair, restlessly squirming, he looked out the window into the fog, and with a great burden on his heart, reckoned the words he shall have to utter, momentarily.
Without a doubt, had it been to him alone the headmaster would’ve averted the termination, and worked something out. But it was his son who’d invested in the school. And he, with his experience, was merely the face on it. Perhaps, that was where he should begin.
He should say: ‘If it were in my hands, Atta… but the complaints are too many… my son says, and I can’t entirely disagree that its for your own good … if you take a break … I mean for a while. Some rest will do you good.’
When he did put it that way about fifteen minutes later, he was surprised, though, relieved all the same, for how the master took it.
After the first shock – parted lips, raised brows, disappointed gaze – he had reverted to his aloof, inwardly way. One reaction that the headmaster noted in the last few weeks and in particular, the four weeks of fog.
He now examined Attaullah minutely, and found him quite lost. In truth, he had thought the man would protest a little, even hoped that he would, and the fact that he hadn’t – added to his dismal state, had made him feel even more remorseful.
‘Have a cigarette, Atta. For old times’ sake.’ He pushed a box of Gold Leafs over the table. The master took one out absentmindedly.
‘How’re you feeling, physically? Do you visit the doctor, sometimes? You look tired. Now that I’m paying attention, you look pale to me, Atta. Do you sleep well? Do you eat on time? You need to visit the doctor. What harm is there in a checkup? Oh, I keep telling them that Attaullah is strong as an ox. He’ll bounce back that old horse. And I have no doubt about that, Atta. You know me. I mean it.’
Nazir Ahmed spoke as animatedly he could, whereas Attahullah remained untouched. He appeared to be gazing into the air, puffing smoke slowly.
‘You take some rest. I guarantee you, things will improve,’ Nazir added, but his enthusiasm had ebbed in the space of a few minutes. Attaullah’s irresponsive abstraction had watered down his spirit. It was, as though, he was talking to a man to whom the day to day businesses of life had ceased to matter. To be fair to him, the headmaster had known something of that. In the old days, too, Attaullah would take upon a task and be consumed by it; for that was his nature. But then, back then he had things to consume him.
It all rolled back like a film, before Nazir Ahmed. Whenever Attaullah was charged to acquire books for the library, or procure equipment for the laboratories, or allotted extra hours at the school in the evenings, to work with the slackers, and list-toppers, his single minded devotion was quite like madness. However, that madness Nazir Ahmed had been fond of. It was an outward madness, bright and resonant. On the other hand, the one that possessed him now brooded inside like a disease that never symptomized.
It impressed Nazir Ahmed sadly to think how his days must be so barren, alone in that old house with two rooms, veranda, and a small yard with a tall mango tree. He saw Attaullah’s shadow stumbling over the gathered dust in that house, divided on the rusted rods of those wasted windows, cut on the leaves of those doors; slouched in the desolate rooms, spilled in the grim corners. And the pure melancholy of the image repulsed him, to the point that he had to shake himself out.
He was at a loss for words. The silence between him and the distant presence of Attaullah weighed heavily on him.
Thankfully, it was shattered by the loud call of Azan. How apt! thought the headmaster, ironically, as if God himself intends for me to take the conversation to a place I don’t want it to go to.
The master moved in his seat, too, and some emotion it was that rippled and disappeared in his features, and which the headmaster did not miss.
The unsaid past rolled on and on. The parts that mattered the most, as though bobbed out to the surface. And the barest and prickliest ones were now invoked in each vibration of Maulvi Abdul Aziz’s soaring voice.
Zakaullah! The name wielded a tremendous pull that tore a hole in the headmaster’s conscience. And all and everything including the present, sunk into it.
They had both assumed silence, now that the azan was on. It was an old habit of theirs inculcated by their parents, to not speak while the call to Allah’s house sounded at the mosque. They couldn’t help but stray in that past that had filled these moments of mutual quietness. Long ago, it seemed now, though it was only a few years, when Maulvi Abdul Aziz was a nobody. Not even a maulvi. But a Qari. Qari Abdul Aziz, who went from door to door to teach Quran to the village children. An illiterate, otherwise, with a little hobble in one leg, a squint in one eye. He was the most ordinary man, capable of nothing. But that was before weapons came to Suratwala.
People like the master, and the headmaster, never knew from where and how the weapons came. But they brought along presences, that bore them in the shadows of the cold nights, and the wee hours of Friday mornings. Presences and weapons that multiplied, as though, they could reproduce.
Maulvi Abdul Aziz acquired, with the blessing of the political head of the ruling family of Suratwala, the headship of the old mosque in the bazaar, and in a matter of a couple years saw it expanded and annexed with a godown. What, for all those weapons and presences. In the manner of the many small and big towns of Punjab, Suratwala turned a hotbed of Jihadi recruitment. A hotbed, so hot, it burnt with the desire to die. Though, it was never so clear, if the desire to die in the way of Allah was mightier than the desire to kill, or otherwise. A lot’s been said of it: the hotbed, and its hotness, and the cold war that laid it; quite a lot has been said.
But not that the four towers of the new mosque put up their octets of loud-speakers, and then, even the new mosque expanded, and took an annex, and then another. And eventually, half of the public school’s cricket ground.
Maulvi Abdul Aziz’s voice boomed and boomeranged in the stone and marble compound of the mosque, and the bazaars, gullies and fields of Suratwala. And eventually, the compound began to attract recruits from other towns and villages, and Suratwala acquired the status of a sanctuary under the guidance of Maulana Abdul Aziz – to whose name they began to add the Arabic suffix, that meant, “May Allah have mercy on his soul!”
It was a storm that rose in titanic waves.
The master had neither sensed it brew nor felt it rise. He had slept while it raged, and the deck broke and drifted. When he woke up, in the strong clear winds of its aftermath, the devastation was complete. Indeed, he woke up in the wreckage and had been stumbling through it ever since, looking between the pieces.
At what point did Zakaullah’s hand slip from his, he wondered. And recently, he had been wondering some more. His recent, dazed state, which neither the headmaster nor the world understood had surfaced with the fall of the fog. Because, it was the fog that took Zakaullah, when last it came.
Clear, cold days had led to it. The master, having seen Zakaullah in the company of Maulvi Aziz’s boys had reprimanded him in what had escalated to a row; a ruckus that the late mother had to plead to bring to rest. And by the end of which, it’d dawned on the master how far the boy had gone.
He still didn’t know though. He thought that like the slackers and no-hopers whom he had set right, he could set Zaka right with a good, long talk. Yes, that was it, that was it… he needed to put some sense into the boy. But the clear days misted sooner than he’d imagined. And one morning, in part still night, he woke to a clangor and accidently, through the gap of the door of the yard, got one last look.
A great big truck had parked at the end of the gully. Only its rear was visible, and that rather vaguely. Then, in quick succession, the noise of a metal chain rolling out on metal, followed the clamor of the back-lid fallen open, and the dull growl of a big engine waited for the tall, broad shoulders of Zakaullah to hop inside.
The outline of that figure was so slight it could be a wisp of smoke in the fog, into which it eventually dissolved.
The master ran after it. His wife didn’t live to tell, how when he returned, he was in a state, drained and ruffled up, utterly out of breath and out of wits, for having wandered in the fog for so long, for nothing. He yelled for an explanation. Though, of nobody in particular. ‘My own son!’ he exclaimed, dithering and faltering. ‘Tell me how…Tell me how!’ he pleaded. ‘Tell me how?’
By the time the Azan was over the headmaster had thought of something to say.
It had been a tempestuous few minutes for him as well, with Abdul Aziz’s voice, vaulting from the direction of the public school, stoking his smoldering guilt.
He regretted what he had had to do, and the master’s lack of reaction bothered him immensely. How would he look the man in the eye now? He couldn’t. So instead he looked down, at his own booted feet resting under the table, and he spoke (knowingly) to himself not to the master. He spoke without break, and he didn’t look up. The space under the table. His boots. His words. Went on.
Though, initially, he had in mind to inquire about Zakaullah, and if the master had heard from him lately; if he thought he was in Afghanistan, or Kashmir, he decided not to trouble him with such matters. Instead, he talked to distract him. He talked about news. The city. The new furniture his son intended to buy for the classrooms. He talked about the fair at the shrine, which was smaller that year. He recalled how grand it used to be when they were boys. He made a full circle.
He returned to the school, for that was all he really had to tell. After all, he had forty years of service behind him. He talked of the new school, and told Attaullah of his son’s idea of including a laboratory. And that was where Attaullah could offer some ideas. He said, ‘I don’t need to tell you, but you’re always welcome here, Atta. In fact, do keep coming my friend.’ He paused, still looking down at his boots. ‘It gets quite lonely around here, sometimes. I mean, all I have to do is sit, and stare at the walls. My son takes care of things. As I told you, I’m the face around here. But I have nothing else to do. Not like the old days…’ He stopped to sigh. He meditated. So complete was his meditation that he failed to see Attaullah’s shadow lengthening on the table; or his cigarette, a quarter unburnt, smoking on the rim of the ashtray. Had he only looked, he would’ve known that his words had no impact. Like the termination hadn’t had an impact. If anything, the master had been cast further afar. He was some more uninvolved, some more impenetrable, for now he was well and truly let gone. Indeed, like a paper kite that’s soared high in the strong winds of a storm’s aftermath, and held still and tense on its string at length, and then snapped, he floated with momentum but no direction.
‘You could come see me every day,’ the headmaster carried on. ‘Well, whenever you feel like it. I’d want you to do that, Atta. Matter of fact, I’d look forward to it. We could talk, you know. You’d come, won’t you Atta? Attaullah?’
Finally he looked up. The chair was empty. He looked around in panic. But it was a small room, with only one door that opened to the road and the moving fog.
He peered out the window and, momentarily, thought he saw the master’s profile the cap, coat, pants, deep in the spray. It moved slowly, and had no colors now but a dark fadedness. It was not cast by light but it was a shadow. A shadow vague and grey, that turned in the fog and was gone.
