Read Online The Scatter Here Is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer - Free Book Online

dream.

    I am holding his finger and we are wading through the rush of the Empress Market. My hand is sweaty and I fear that it might slip. We are dressed in identical clothes; I am his microcopy, both of us are in white kurta- shalwar , straddling the mass of men. I am continually falling behind him—and holding his finger is only a tenuous connection: as if his finger would break in my hand and he’d walk off without even noticing. He walks oblivious of his own body; his hands look like lifeless lumps hanging from the beam of his shoulders. After walking for a while, I have only a vague sense of him; it is just his sweat-streaked white kurta that assures me of his presence as I follow him.
    We break into a less crowded area. He’s trailing a chant: “Po-etry, hist-ery, pheel-aasaphy, diee-gest, fayy-shion, booooks, all kinds, booooks, booooks!” It’s cloudy and pleasant but very humid and we are both sweating. He pauses abruptly, the finger I am holding feels stiffer: his eyes are set on something in the distance and his lower lip trembles. It means he is angry. I realize what he’s glaring at, but before I get a chance to distract him, he says, “Look, just look at the filthy bastard.” He is pointing to the man who is squatting and pissing on a wall in a corner.
    He loves the city and fully exercises his right to hate the transgressors who don’t love it as much as he does: I watch him as he lets his anger burn through him. It short-circuits him into one of his spiels about the Islamization of this country during the Zia regime and how they removed public toilets and urinals, believing them to be an un-Islamic way of pissing. “Now you have bastards like these who piss all over the city. . . .” He pauses and keeps staring. “So much for Islam improving us.” I tug at his finger to bump his mind again into the chant “Po-etry, hist-ery, pheel-aasaphy . . .”
    We make our way to the pushcart selling books. The bookseller’s face lights up upon seeing him. He shakes off my grip from his finger and embraces the bookseller’s hand. He then sifts through the stacks of books presented to him. I stand there bored while he has a chat with the bookseller about books, asking what-happened-to-that-one-I-asked-for type of questions. I’m not interested in books. I am still watching the filthy bastard who is now inserting a stone in his shalwar to dry the splattered piss-drops on his thighs and whereabouts. I feel a similar kind of hatred that my father channeled earlier—although I don’t really understand my reasons for feeling angry.
    Finally, my father’s done. He hands me a white plastic bag with a few books and we enter the crowd once again. “Baba, where are we going?” I ask.
    He smiles. “I’ll teach you how to love the city, my son.”
    I keep pausing and stretching out my other hand to keep people and their knees from bumping into me.
    Sadeq tapped me on the shoulder, “Oye, want to have a coconut?” I nodded and looked through the window on the road where a coconut hawker stood between two cars on the traffic signal. He was refreshing his sliced crescents,
    decorated in a flower arrangement, by splashing them with water using a steel glass.
    â€œHow much?” I asked sliding my hand in my pocket to draw out the money.
    â€œDon’t worry about the money,” he said going to the window seat across from his. I didn’t understand and watched him assume a position like a jaguar waiting for prey: his hands on the window bar, his eyes fixed on the coconut seller scurrying nearer to our bus in search of potential customers. He waited, waited, and just as the coconut seller went past him from under the window, his hand snapped downward and pinched a slice that was lying loose in the puddle of water on the tray. He immediately leapt back across the aisle onto his seat.
    He looked at me with