Crickety Shickety

“It is a common misperception that children playing cricket on the streets do so out of a love for the game. After many hours of watching them, I can tell you with the utmost surety that it is not so. They do not play because they love to play; they play because they wish to be noticed.

I do not need to tell you about the evils of a child’s wishing to be noticed. There can be no greater sin than desire for attention”

“What about masturbation?”

“That is not on the agenda today”.

And so saying, Mr. Hafiz Chitan MG (mine’s bigger), turned away from the two other people at the meeting and started looking out of the window. His wife, rising from her silent corner, ushered the young man out. When she returned Chitan Sahab, as the neighbors called him (to his face), was still at the window watching the game in progress outside.

“Jaan, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have these little meetings anymore.”

“Rubbish. I think they’re a tremendous success. Everyone who shows up goes home the better for a little stimulating conversation.”

“Jaan, the only people who come now are me and Azhar, and I’m your wife and he’s our son.”

“Exactly, a cross generational frame of reference! Very important for any kind of meaningful dialogue.”

“But you two never agree on anything! Most days you end up calling him a kuddoo and telling him to get out.”

“But he’s learning, see how polite he was today?”

“That’s because he wanted to go outside and play cricket”

“I don’t want my son playing that game, he’ll get pigeon toed and start thinking he’s superhuman”

“Sigh”.

Mrs. Chitan kept her next thoughts to herself for the time being. They had an important dinner that night, and she didn’t wish to upset him before it. He would find plenty of opportunity to exercise his rhetorical skills then, particularly with regards to cricket and pigeon toes. Headlines across the country carried news of the latest scandal “mid-match match-fixing through carrier pigeons disguised as harmless pitch fowl; pigeon accidentally killed by ball found to be carrying important evidence strapped to its leg.”

The men were all very upset. But they had the cultural renaissance to celebrate.

She had it on very good authority that the cultural renaissance was underway and Pakistan would soon be witnessing a return to the old values. Apparently they had never quite gone away, just continued lurking in the arterial network of the organism that was Pakistani society, biding their time till the right leukocyte came along for them to bind to. The dinner they were to attend that night was supposed to be a symptom of the virus having recurred. It was meant as a tribute to ‘mohalladari’. In keeping with that worthy tradition, it was to be a ‘one-dish’.

Mrs. Chitan was shaking her head sadly as she bustled down the stairs to the kitchen to start work on their contribution to tonight’s festivities. An avid student of human nature (there can’t be two lecturers in every house), her perceptive and analytical skills were telling her their contribution might not be well received.

Not everyone liked hard-boiled eggs. But as Mr. Chitan kept telling her, ‘you can’t do things half heartedly, if these people wish to regress, they must do it whole heartedly, and the first thing we must embrace is simplicity.’

Three hours later as she sat in her silent corner of the lawn, watching the world through her aquarium eyes, she made a mental note to give herself a pat on the back. The eggs had been surprisingly well received. In fact, some of the younger guests had been so overwhelmed by their symbolic value they’d refused to eat them and were now tossing them back and forth instead. Mr. Chitan had made a rousing speech after their ritual unveiling.

“These shells contain not just yolk, or albumen, or a particularly esoteric form of protein. These eggs, my friends, contain the stuff of dreams.”

The young people were now playing a thematic variation of that speech. It was called ‘follow your dreams’ and it consisted of throwing an egg away from ones body and then rushing forward to try and catch it. As she watched they all moved forward and huddled together to try and figure out what they were doing wrong. Consensus was achieved and an emissary dispatched to bring the one man who had the brains to solve this particular problem.

“Chitan Sahab can you tell us what we’re doing wrong?”

“I can.”

“Will you tell us what we’re doing wrong?”

“Certainly. Your use of ‘can’ merely questions my abilities. Your use of ‘will’ attempts to use my abilities to your advantage. The solution is to say ‘please help us’.

“With the eggs.”

“What about the eggs?”

“Well, we’re playing follow your dreams, and we throw them forward but none of us can move quickly enough to catch them.”

Chitan Sahab paled and clutched at the nearest solid mass to steady himself. Mrs. Fateh did not respond with the appropriate warmth and pushed him away so that he landed, face-up, on one of the maroon and white carpets spread haphazardly across the lawn so that guests wouldn’t get their feet wet and their shoes stained by the bleeding of the sodden earth. He lay there for a while till his wife was coaxed out of her corner and persuaded to intercede.

“Jaan..”

“Not now, I’m on the verge of a revelation”

“Ok jaan”

Mrs. Chitan perched on the edge of a newly vacant seat and looked at a point equidistant from the sight of her husband, poaching on the carpet, and the sound of Mrs. Fateh boiling in the distance and questioning her husband’s ancestry. She hoped he wasn’t going to be too long. One time in South Africa, one of the countries he’d been ambassador to, he’d spent the night in a replica of a Hottentots dwelling convinced if he waited long enough the spirit of a big bottomed pygmy would speak to him and tell him what to do about an upcoming trade agreement. Locals did not remember Hottentots to be a trading people, but he said that was precisely why he wanted their advice.

It’s important to have an objective opinion you see.

Not long after that, he was asked to take an early retirement. On a slot in a file resting several hundred miles away were the words ‘degenerative brain disease’.

“You can’t believe everything you read,” he’d told her. His theory was that the building in which his file, the sum total of his life and deeds, was stored was not actually a building, but a carnivore. A carnivore addicted to frequent and arbitrary meals that had suddenly found itself starving as its keepers tried to make it lean and self-sustaining. Deprived of its customary diet of contract workers and peons taken by surprise and devoured in stairwells by its angry limbs, it had started feeding on itself.

“We’re being digested, you and I.”

“It’s ok jaan. As long as we’re together.”

Together in the maw of the beast pacing forward to meet the cultural renaissance.

Mrs. Fateh was now questioning her ancestry too. Apparently a women who let herself be publicly humiliated by her husband was not just insecure and weak, she was also spreading the martyr spore. The martyr spore was a bad thing because it made people forget who they were and live for others instead. This was a bad thing because at the end of days, when mountains tumbled like carded wool and oceans extended their watery limbs to greedily claim what had been denied them so long, these martyrs would hold up the line while their own identities were unraveled from those of the people they had attached them to.

“Not only will we have to suffer the indignity of being dead, we’ll have to wait In line with all the riff raff.”

Mrs. Chitan reflected, perched on a chair facing her supine husband, that if Mrs. Fateh were to be a part of the human body she would undoubtedly be a sphincter muscle. She herself was nothing but the filmy membrane that separated an eye from the world. And her husband? Her husband was the eye itself. A yellow eye perhaps, jaundiced by sights a better man might have fled from screaming, but an eye nonetheless. And who was she, a mere protective membrane, a paltry eyelid that blinked when it’s charge was in danger of over-exposure, to question the validity of his vision?

Her reverie was broken by her son Azhar, pulling up to stand beside her. She did not raise her head to look at him but moved her hand to her shoulder to cover his.

“Everyone’s laughing at him again.”

She was tempted to tell him the snicker of man was nothing compared to the sound of a hyena in the bush. It did not chill the blood and freeze the spine in mid-action, did not reek of death and decay. Men laughing at the perceived weakness of others were nothing more than scavengers worrying a body already picked clean. Amused, and also amusing in their enthusiasm to wind the rope of servitude tighter around their necks as they flocked to mimic each other’s actions. She wanted to tell him not to be disheartened, not to be afraid to be branded ‘a crazy man’s son’ because at the end of it all, when the skies opened to empty God’s dishwater onto the land, and the tridents of an uglier reality pushed upwards to meet them and steam rose from the battlefield for men’s souls, each man would stand alone. Not father and mother and son. Just three naked blobs in the visors of an x-ray vision man could never engineer. She told him instead.

“Don’t let it bother you.”

But she thought she’d said it all. And if she hadn’t, the cultural renaissance would teach him itself.

The grip on her shoulder tightened and she heard a hiss, like a snake of smoke escaping from a wound up engine, as he exhaled. He didn’t say anything and the pressure on her shoulder disappeared. She didn’t have to look up to know he was walking towards the gate to the outside.

“Aha!” Chitan Sahab sprang to his feet and addressed the world at large.

“Aha?” echoed from the corners where spotted beasts with long tongues and jaws that could bite a hole in an iron drum maintained their vigil; perhaps some scraps of entertainment would be tossed their way soon. After all, there is only so long you can talk about tankers, electricity and who is going to be married next.

“I have figured out what they were doing wrong.”

“What was it jaan?”

“They were just throwing the eggs without giving them any direction! An egg can’t just be thrown, it has to be thrown AT something!”

Mrs. Fateh could be heard muttering the mistake was even simpler than that; they should be eating the eggs not tossing them. In fact, why were the eggs there at all? It was a “one-dish”, all the other women had gone out of their way to make their contribution worthy, why had Mrs. Chitan chosen to exclude herself? Did she perhaps think she was better than them? Was she insulting them? Did she think she could mock those who Believed?

Mrs. Chitan smiled vaguely. Her husband sprang to her defense.

“I wouldn’t say things like that about my wife if I were you Mrs. Fateh, she has a very bad temper. When we were posted in London the deputy attaches’ wife once told her she was boring. Believe me when I say she regretted it later.”

“Why? What did she do? Throw an egg at her?”

People laughed.

“No. She urinated into her soup.”

There was a shocked silence. People started backing away from the crazy man and his wife. They had known he was strange, but when the wives club had gone to greet the new tenants on the street and come back with the news that he had a ‘mild personality disorder’ they had resolved to be patient with him. The cultural renaissance was coming after all, and one of its tenets distinctly said something about being nice to those less fortunate. It didn’t say anything about being nice to crazy people though, they were quite sure of that. And if it did, well, it shouldn’t. And while they were considering this thought, another occurred. It was whispered that he used to be one of ‘them’ remember? The freaks with no odour of their own?

“I think we should ask them to leave.”

“Joking around is fine, I mean we’re here to have a good time aren’t we”

“Create camaraderie”

“Distill happiness”

“Enjoy the wine of our fruits”

“Which fruits?”

“Of sorrow?..er…no..toil?”

“Oh.”

̶ 0;But that urinating crack was just too much”

“There are ladies here”

“And Mrs. Fateh, don’t forget Mrs. Fateh”

“Where is Mrs. Fateh by the way?”

A frantic search ensued for Mrs. Fateh, and it was established that she no longer inhabited the table level of consciousness. It was decided that they would look underneath. They met with limited success in that she was indeed ‘under’ the table but she wasn’t ‘conscious’. Hence she did not, in that specific time frame, qualify as a ‘conscious being’. The cultural renaissance was very specific about what to do with people who did not inhabit the same frame of consciousness. They were pushed under the carpet. Only a person conscious of the truth, and thus enlightened, had rights and privileges. Those who chose to ignore the truth, so apparent to the members of its club, well; they were only aliens in transit.

For the time being, Mrs. Fateh’s movements were restricted to the airport lounge of her sub-conscious. Her body made no protest when this judgment was read over her, though there were some in the crowd who were sure it could.

Since Mrs. Fateh was out of action, the question of who had rendered her unconscious flitted into sight and did a table dance across people’s minds. As for what had rendered her unconscious, hardboiled eggs lay in a rough circle around her.

“We must plot the trajectory, that way we’ll know where the egg came from”

“Eggs..ssss…there’s more than one of them.”

“And the way they’re lying suggests they came from different directions”

There was a stunned silence. A pin dropped in an alternate universe but nobody heard it, being so tightly locked into this one by belief in the totality of its existence. The pin got up and walked into a banana-jelly colored sunset, muttering quietly to itself about getting a new job on account of no appreciation.

“So there was more than one attacker?”

The silence turned from stunned to furtive; the kind of silence that sneaks through cracks in the bedroom windows at night and makes you wonder about what manner of beast patrols its confines.

“The cultural renaissance says people can’t group together unless it has something to do with The Great Belief.”

“But somebody’s done it anyway”

“What do we do?”

“Should we call the police?”

“They’ll stay for dinner”

“Let’s not then.”

“But we have to find these attackers”

“If we let them get away they might do it again”

“We won’t be safe anywhere”

“We must find them and expel them from our midst”

“But how will we do that?”

“We need a keen analytical mind”

“Someone who is not afraid to ask questions”

“Not afraid to get his hands dirty”

“So ours will be clean afterwards”

A crowd engulfed Mr. Chitan. He listened carefully to it, and then said.

“Friends, you have come to the right person, and in the right spirit. I suggest we meet tomorrow at my place to discuss how we’re going to conduct this inquiry. We will need to set up two committees and three sub-committees; two to help run the other committees and one to help my wife in the kitchen.”