Innocence, Loss and Nagan Chowrangi

I knew it was wrong. But it felt right. I had to do it. A relentless urgency pushed me ever onwards. Devoid of purpose or anticipation, I ploughed ahead. They said it was already too late for me. I had delayed this rite of passage too long. Not anymore. Barron chuckled an expletive as we veered the Cultus through migrating hordes of ugly metal behemoths returning to their lairs at night. The cacophony of their horns and the incessant shouts of their conductors around Sohrab Goth made me think of what Kandahar must be like. Kandahar be damned, we were on a mission, Barron and I.

Barron swerved the car through the Nagan Chowrangi, took the turn toward 'Karachi Broast' and parked in front of the non-descript house. He called Farah on her cellphone. "Open the door, we are here." A mangy looking critter of about four peered from behind a curtain. With his bloated stomach and stick thin legs, he looked like he had just been kicked down from a flight from Ehtiopia. He beckoned us in with his skeleton hand.

I kept imagining police sirens in the background, the raid and my handcuffed mug in tomorrow's 'Ummat' as I walked into the guest room. The room was spare and grossly normal. I felt greatly disconcerted. Verses of the Quran clung ironically to the walls while a miniature model of the holy mosque of Makah sat on a corner shelf, gathering dust and sacrilege. I noticed a folded Ja'Namaz with a Quran on the shelf top. A lazy 'Millat Fan' sleepily played its repetitive aria of reen-reeeeen-reen-reeeeen while hanging upside down on the ceiling like a crazed bat. I looked at the blank, obscene face of the rotund mother-whore in front of me.

The camouflage was complete.

Animal Planet, I thought. Iguanas in the wild have skins that replicate prominent features of their background to avoid being seen by their prey or their predator. If Nagan Chowrangi was a tropical forest, Farah was the iguana hiding from the Karachi police-wallahs and nosy neighbors. I compared Farah and her establishment to the animal kingdom and felt strangely soothed. How appropriate, I thought, to the primeval biological function this establishment served. It fascinates me still.

She was a rough, Urdu-speaking woman of about 40. Like nurses in hospitals drip with antiseptic, Farah oozed with gross vulgarity. Not that she smiled a lot or cracked dirty jokes. No, she looked at you with that blank inhuman stare with a profane hint of a smile slithering on her ashy brown sweaty face. "So, you would like to 'sit' with Sheemi, do you? hehe" she asked. There would be a lot of sitting, standing, lying down and so on and so forth, I thought. "Yes", I said as I stifled my inner monologue. Barron– that inveterate whoremonger – smiled nonchalantly and lapsed into a familiar conversation with Farah and her heaving bosom.

Farah used colorful euphemisms that clothed her language. She explained the menu: fucking a whore became 'sitting' with her. Taking her for an all-nighter became 'party karna'. Anal sex became 'pichli gali se ana'. I glared at the floral patterns on the concrete floor as she talked on the phone with one of her whores and jokingly suggested: "Behenchod, don't take it deeper in the mouth next time because your voice sounds hoarse." I am no prude, but let me tell you, the crudity of her very existence shocked me.

What made her more repugnant was her physique and how it interfered with her pretensions toward looking fashionable. She had a huge ass. I am not sure but I think Sir Mix-a-lot might have rapped "I like BIG buts and I cannot lie…" after a quickie session with Farah, the gigantic thigh-wonder. She had a pronounced weakness for platform shoes, affected perhaps to make her look taller but the combination of her gargantuan thighs with six-inch platform shoes on chapped heals was not flattering to say the least. Her derrière had an independent existence and I have a feeling Farah must have grown out of it like a giant dunghill Cauliflower.

I heard her footsteps in the doorway. She huffed and puffed her way into the room, "Just two minutes," she said. I nodded my approval. She walked out but forgot to close the drawing room door completely.

The door moaned and creaked as it opened wide and I could see inside the house. Everything had that abnormally normal look. It felt like a surreal dream sequence in slow motion as I looked through the dining room into the kitchen. The kitchen had a microwave, dish rack, greasy plates piled in the sink. Not that I was amazed that whores ate like everybody else, I was struck by how normal and homely it looked. An innocent looking chubby dark boy of around 12 was hopping around in a pair of dirty jeans without his shirt on. The shriveled old 'maasi' walked about in a defeated manner. I wondered, was she in on the whole thing? Of course. She had to be. Was she a retired old she-horse, put to pasture in her declining years? To be sure, it all seemed very Dickensian.

The Millat fan kept bleating its lullaby as I whispered to Barron. "Which one is Sheemi?" "You'll see her. Wait," he said. I waited. Soon a lean coffee-colored woman with lecherous thin lips walked past the open door wearing high heals. She was dressed in tight figure-hugging cotton shalwar kameez with those oh-so-little cuts on the side that revealed her taut light brown skin.

I felt the presence of the beast. It levitated.

Sheemi walked in the room and presented her slithery soft hand. I shook it. She walked out.

I must confess, I have been infatuated with the image of the whore with a golden heart in "Pretty Woman" as far back as when I was 16, when I had first seen the movie. Sheemi looked nothing like Julia Roberts. I tried comparing her to all the literary whores I had read about. I started with Umrao Jan Ada – not of Hadi Ruswa’s but of Rekha as in "In Ankhon ki masti ke mastaanay hazaaron…." But Umrao was a cultured courtesan, also very pretty. Sheemi was certainly nothing like Umrao. There was something in her of the gypsy Esmeralda of Voltaire. Could she have been like Dostoevsky's Sonya from Crime and Punishment? I had Sonya's image as a waif-thin blonde lass of 16, eternally sad and weepy. The tears had their own appeal in invoking sympathy from the reader (the john). Life wasn’t fair after all. Come, sit on my lap and let me lick those tears away.

And so my fantasies usually took flight.

But Sheemi shattered my literary imaginings with her cadaverous face and whorish mouth. "She looks like Hell's honor guard", I said to Barron. "What do we always say? Cover the face and fuck the base," he grinned. I conceded to his extensive experience as a long-time customer of the flesh trade.

Farah walked in the room again, which suddenly became crowded with her ass. A foul smell of sweat and cheap perfume hung around her like a noxious cloud. "You have the payment?" She asked me as she wiped sweat off her repulsive forehead. I noticed her manner at moments of financial transactions slipped into the jail-warden mode. Has she been stung before by deadbeat customers, I wondered. Barron and I were no deadbeat losers. We paid for our pussy. "Yes, I do." I managed to get out as I fumbled the money out of my pocket. She took the folded bills and pointed toward Barron. "You. Go in." He complied. They walked out leaving me alone with the Millat fan, which by that time, had started to assume a sinister personification in my mind. I thought about the ethics of prostitution. I remember a soundbite from George Carlin, which went something like: "If selling is legal and fucking is legal, why isn’t selling fucking legal?" Exactly. Except, fucking isn’t legal in Pakistan.

Did Farah ever had moral pangs? Did she consider her vocation shameful or benign? I know she kept a majlis during Muharram and her establishment went into sleep-mode during Ramadan. How did she reconcile her lifestyle with her religion, two mutually contradictory things? I could understand a white hooker/stripper rationalizing her choices, for sex for them isn’t a taboo but a natural thing. But Farah lived in that house with her mother, her children and her whores. The children knew exactly what went on in the locked rooms. I saw the little boy smirk and giggle innocently as Barron shut the door on him. I wonder how that chubby dark kid would deal with his warped childhood when he grew up. Would he buy into the 'ghairat' concept and kill Farah? Would he become the Karachi version of Lahore’s Hira Mundi tabla nawaz; progeny of whores and unknown fathers, destined to beat the drum to their womenfolks’ gyrating hips? I knew I was projecting my own morality on this happy little whore household. I was also subtly conscious of the irony of pondering questions of ethics and morality while waiting for my turn to ride the velvet pony.

And then Barron came back. He was hopping and all smiles. "Lash pash beta!", he gave me a thumbs up. A few minutes passed. I had the quaint feeling of déja vu when Farah walked in like a nurse in the dentist's waiting room. "Come on. Your turn."

It felt like an 8 year old's first dentist appointment. "Be gentle. Its my first time," I wanted to say. Containing my urge to hold back, I walked in nonchalantly through the dining room into the dark bedroom. It reminded me of dark booths in strip bars in America where the strippers led you by hand for a 3 minute lap dance. They too, like Farah's bedroom, had neon lighting. Was that a technical requirement, I wondered, of always using soft red or neon lights during intimate encounters of the commercial kind?

The room was dimly lit by a sickly red light. A double bed with ornate wooden contours of the local make was the centerpiece. There was a dressing table with a large mirror, also of the heavy wooden desi type. A stale feminine odor of old roses and cheap make-up permeated the place. I don’t know why, but it made me think of all the furniture sold, bought and given away as dowries and jahaiz to newly wed dulhans with henna covered hands. This bed set and this dressing table were destined to be a whore’s operation theater. Here she made her ICU for her surgeries of intimacy.

Sheemi started undressing. I thought about America, and the political effects of the war on Afghan poppy growers. I felt deep sympathy for the victims of KSE crash. I thought about the electoral crisis in Hungary and Georgia. In short I contemplated all the things that went wrong in the whole wide world.

She forced me to look at her. I smiled. Pilots are trained with flight simulators before they can take-off. I had learned a lot myself from multimedia presentations and documentaries about the subject at hand. Matter of fact, I had planned a whole litany of stages and phases that I had to reach during my Order of Battle before I finally conquered the castle and hoisted my flag. I went through the motions. I debuted with a position that has special ecclesiastical sanction, to wit, the missionary. That led me, after a while, in the canine territory. Finally, I handed over the reins to her and she rode me like seabiscuit on Karachi Race Course.

And then it went downhill from there. The aircraft had veered into the center of the tornado and reached the point of no return.

Turbulence and loss of cabin pressure led to an ecstatic tailspin descent that ended with a crash landing and a volcanic explosion of white-hot lava. La petite mort!

Now imagine if you saved money for a long time to buy that little firecracker for Shab Baraat. And when that Shab Baraat came, you took the firecracker out in the street and you lit it. And it went all bright fire for a little while and then puff and smoke and no bang within two minutes. Imagine if Ghauri missile landed meekly in New Delhi after a short flight and caused only minor destruction. Imagine you went to Aladdin Park and paid for a ride at the Merry-go-round and the Merry-go-round turned out to be neither merry nor go-all-the-way-round. Then and then alone can you understand my sense of dismay.

In the interest of cathartic self-expression, I am not too embarrassed to declare: The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.

Ah, the anticlimax. So that's what it was all about. All the rancid poetry of Ghalib and Meer. All the cheesy and syrupy-sweet movie ballads. The veil had been lifted from the mystery, the spell was broken and innocence was lost. I felt cheated and disillusioned. I felt let down by biology and culture. I spanked the supple round ass repeatedly in compensation branding it red with my finger marks as I withdrew my forces from the castle and tended to their uncleanliness.

I had done my part in keeping the universe balanced. I zipped up.

As I walked back dejectedly into the guest room, Barron grinned and looked at me expectantly. "How was it?" I sat down and lit a Marlboro Red. "Lash pash beta!" I smiled as I gave him a thumbs up.

We drove all the way in silence from Sohrab Goth to Defence.