The 786 Cybercafé on Tariq Road

The 786 Cybercafé on Tariq Road
by Bina Shah
Alhamra Publishing
www.alhamra.com


Chapter 1: part 1

Few people would have known it at the time, but Jamal Tunio was a man with a dream. It was one of those punishingly hot Karachi days, where the sun seemed to hang in the sky like an executioner, and the moisture danced in the air beneath angry white air. The people on the street were drenched in sweat, making the act of bathing an exercise in water wastage.

On these days, eighty-seven percent of the people of Karachi (those who could not afford air conditioning) greedily sucked cold drinks through cheap plastic straws, touched their faces to slabs of ice from the local ice-seller, stole a few hours’ rest in the cool of a great air-conditioned mall or cinema hall. But the relief was always temporary; the heat made it impossible to think, or plan for action. Some days even moving your limbs was too much of an effort, when the sun smiled with such intensity on Karachi.

In the street, some beggar children had flocked at the taps of a huge water tanker. They had managed to open the faucets and were now bathing, laughing and cheering, in the water that was throbbing out from the back of the truck. Jamal paid them no attention; they made no dent on his thoughts as he walked down the main concourse of Tariq Road, unmindful of the heat.

Instead, he wondered if people would look at him and see the difference between him and any of the hundreds of other young men that strolled down that same street every day.

Surely everyone had to notice the purpose in his stride, his pushed-back shoulders, the proud lift of his head. Jamal wasn’t like those hundreds of other men who drifted through life unaware when the next opportunity, the next chance, the next stroke of luck would hit them full-on in the face. Jamal would never be like those other men, because he wasn’t just a man with a dream; he was a man with a plan.

Those men were very much like him; weedy, aimless-looking men ranging anywhere from their early to late twenties. Dressed in rip-off Tommy Hilfiger jeans and fake Emporio Armani shirts, the clothes fitting ill on their bony, fleshless frames. Educated, more or less, to the same degree: the very worst of them leaving school with only an Inter certificate; the very best of them with a university degree, a BA or BSc or even an MBA snatched from an institutes with a foreign-sounding name and a fancy ad in the newspaper.

These thousands of young men roamed the streets of Karachi, knocking on the same doors for the same few hundred jobs; they drove the same small cars or rode the same broken-down city buses, looking for work. They went to the same types of restaurants at night, with friends who were just like them, gazing fixedly at pretty girls from behind the shades of cheap sunglasses. Or they drove up and down the brightly-lit roads through the neighborhoods with the thousand-yard houses, ending up at the beach at Seaview to frolic in the electric colored waves, play music on tinny transistors, have their pictures taken while they ate fresh-roasted corn and hot channas by the bagful.

Restless, energetic, frustrated, they dreamed of impossible things: jobs in America or Canada. Becoming the head of a multinational company, or starting their own business. Finding the one perfect girl to woo and wed. Finding a way to make innumerable sums of money to deposit in a safety locker downtown. After their dreams, they had to face their realities: no money-no girl-no car, parents and siblings to look after, jobs where they were underpaid and overworked. Little entertainment, less freedom, hurrying, hungry youth in a repressed and conservative society.

The lucky ones found their Nirvana: the visas to the West which allowed them to escape the net of a land that was big on promises and small on opportunity. The unlucky ones slipped into the net and became slaves to a system that took advantage of their desperation. The unluckiest of all stumbled into a world of petty crime, illegal activities, even terrorism. It was all too easy, in the Pakistan of the new millennium, to lose your conscience and your soul, for the country offered very little to refresh the spirit, for all that it claimed to be a place founded on religion and spirituality.

Jamal walked past Rabi Center, the huge shopping arcade where the women trooped in empty handed and came out staggering under the weight of shopping bags as if they’d looted Aladdin’s cave. He traveled down the road a few hundred meters, past the Excellent Restaurant, where the food was anything but, and the Big ’n’ Beautiful Sari Shop (Especially for Mature Ladies).

Because of the proximity of the Excellent Restaurant to the Sari Shop, the saris inevitably smelled like the tikkas and kebabs that were incinerated next door, but this never detracted from the Sari Shop’s popularity with the oversized crowd. If anything, it added to the appeal. Shopping made them hungry, so a healthy lunch at the Excellent Restaurant; while eating made them put on weight, so back to the Beautiful Sari Shop for more saris that looked as though they had been made for baby elephants and hippos, rather than slender cinema queens.

Jamal crossed the street at the corner and stumbled over a man with no legs who rode the pavement in a motorized cart, causing it to veer off-course. “Hey, watch where you’re going!” Jamal shouted at the man.

“Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” the man shouted back as he steered his cart back on track.

“Why should? I’m not crippled!”

“No, you’re just blind,” snapped the man, spitting angrily on the sidewalk.

Jamal considered going back to the cart and kicking at its wheels, but it was too good a day to take up an altercation with a beggar. Besides, it might be a bad omen for what he had planned ahead. He threw his hand back carelessly at the beggar to show that he had no time for him; the beggar returned the gesture with a rude salute of his own before he was swallowed up in the tide of pedestrians on the sidewalk.

But the encounter could not spoil Jamal’s mood, nothing could do that today. Today was the day that Jamal Tunio was putting the first step towards his great dream:

A Cybercafé on Tariq Road!

This sign, Jamal felt, should be up in flashing neon lights with a huge siren blaring it out to the entire city, like the billboards advertising the films on Bunder Road. Instead, it was only a thought in his mind, a phrase, something he’d been turning over and over in his head for six months, ever since he’d realized that there were more ads in the papers for IT institutes and computer training than any bank, airline, or business.

Ten years ago Jamal had earned a Matric certificate from the Gulabi Government Boys’ school opposite his home. His career there, lasting from when he was six, until he turned sixteen, had been less than inspirational.

Every morning he stumbled in late through the iron gates of the school, while three hundred boys from various neighborhoods around the area stood in tatty uniforms and mumbled the words of the national anthem led by a hysterical headboy on a loudspeaker.

Jamal slept his way through many of his lessons and talked his way through others. He wasn’t as stupid as some of the other boys - Omar, the boy who always managed to lose his homework between his walk from his home to the school, or Mohammed, whose short term memory functioned so badly that he had a hard time remembering his own father’s name. Jamal possessed a sharp intelligence, but no patience and a lack of discipline that put him at a disadvantage to the boys who plodded along and learned their multiplication tables and Urdu poetry while Jamal made deals with the other boys to buy and sell their used goods in Saddar Market.

Jamal’s poor performance, his complete lack of respect for any of the teachers, and his all too obvious urge to escape from the school as quickly as possible, earned him plenty of canings from the principal of the school. The principal, the most sadistic teacher in school, administered the canings, some of them so hard that they drew blood. A tearfully vengeful boy who had been beaten for forgetting that Liaquat Ali Khan was Pakistan’s first Prime Minister started the rumor that the principal had worked as a state executioner during Zia’s reign, in the days when capital punishments had replaced soccer matches in the National Stadium.

One day, when he was eleven, Jamal encountered Omar in the hallway, emerging from the principal’s office, red-eyed and snivelling, and clutching his legs as he stumbled down the hall.

“What happened, Omar?”

“I didn’t get my hair cut,” sobbed Omar, forgetting all dignity in the face of Jamal’s kindness. Jamal wasn’t really feeling kind; he was always curious about other people’s dramas and disguised it with a brotherly concern for his classmates.

“What do you mean? You hardly have any hair,” said Jamal as he eyed Omar’s tonsure.

“The principal said he could see it coming on to my ears,” replied Omar pathetically. “The school barber was sick today so at least he didn’t shave my head. I got a caning instead. I’ll have to have it done by tomorrow or else I’ll be bald when the barber comes back.”

Episodes like these taught Jamal the importance of violence in education. He lost interest in formal education the day all the students combined to beat up the teacher (from then on the teacher gave them the answer sheets to the exams with no questions asked).

Jamal managed to scrape his way through his exams and obtain grades decent enough to have him drop-kicked out of the gates of school and into the real world. He had no plans to continue with his formal education. The lure of the streets, business to be conducted, schemes to be hatched, and the money that was waiting for him to claim it shone more attractively in his eyes than any promise of a higher degree. Besides, there was no point to getting a degree; everyone knew that even PhD holders ended up driving taxis; might as well save six more years of torture and get to the money-making part right away, while he still had his youth and his good looks.

On the last day of school, all three hundred students streamed down the street to climb on trees, buy sugarcane juice and fruit from street vendors and choke on sweets in bags made of old newspapers. A roar similar to that of a drunken crowd in a football stadium floated up into the air outside the school, but the boys were merely drunk on their new-found freedom.

Jamal walked out of the iron gates for the last time with his Matric certificate in his hands, which he immediately dropped when he bent down to pick up a handful of stones and fling them at the already-broken windows of the school. The boys rushing past him towards their liberation trampled over the piece of paper as they slapped and cuffed each other in their happiness. Jamal picked the certificate up from the street, ripped and muddied, stuffed it into his pocket, and promptly forgot about it.

The stairs to Jamal’s flat on the third floor reached up into the gloom of the upper stories of the building where he had lived all his life. All the flats in the Fancy Estates Building were pushed together like the cages of birds for sale in Empress Market. Some of the doors even had real cages built around them for protection against robbery, while all the balconies were encased in even more strips of metal and steel, defeating the purpose of having a bit of open space to look out on to.

But removing them would not have enhanced the view of a bus depot and a smoggy flyover to which each resident of the Fancy Estates was treated, instead of the “children’s park and man-made lake” that had been promised to them when the complex was first built.

The smells of cooking from the other flats made Jamal’s stomach rumble as he turned his key into the lock of their door (without cage; there were no women in his family and therefore not much to protect). He knew, though, that there would be no such welcoming smells in his own house; his mother had died the previous year and since then, he, his father and two younger brothers foraged the best they could for themselves. There might be a bit of salan and a cold chapati left in a pan on the side of the stove, if he was lucky. He looked around at the flat, the shabby walls, the close corridor; it all seemed cold, even though the temperatures outside were scorching. Jamal dropped his schoolbag carelessly on the floor and heard a stirring from within the depths of the flat.

“Jamal? Is that you?”

“It’s me, Ba,” replied Jamal. He cursed to himself, knowing that his father would have eaten the last of the food before leaving for his night shift. He would have to cook more if he wanted to eat. He looked around for Abdul; his brother was a better cook than Jamal, which meant that he didn’t burn everything beyond recognition and could even make rice that was not soggy and tasteless.

Jamal’s father Ahmed Tunio emerged from the back bedroom and eyed his son suspiciously. “School finished?”

Ahmed was a compact, powerful man, not tall and thin like Jamal, but short, muscular and strong. He even seemed to walk as though he carried a mighty weight in his center of gravity. Grizzled and dark, his eyes almost hidden by the wrinkles around them, the stubble of his unshaven beard and the fuller strands of his mustache were now, in his fifty-second year, specked with white hairs.

“Yes, Ba,” said Jamal. Ahmed held out his hand; Jamal reached in his pocket for the certificate and gave it to his father, his hand shaking slightly.

Ahmed took the tattered piece of paper from his son and looked at it for a moment, a scowl spreading across his face.

“What’s this? It’s a mess. I can’t read anything. They won’t be able to make head or tails of this at my office.” His voice was deep and slow, the crackled Sindhi he spat out reminding Jamal that there hadn’t been a day when he had not felt physically and emotionally intimidated by his father.

Ahmed Tunio worked in the office of a large Urdu newspaper as a printing supervisor. He wanted Jamal to apply for a position there once he’d finished school. The safety net of the newspaper offered little opportunity for advancement, but at the same time was the safest bet for longevity. A man could work there for thirty years and never have to worry about being replaced by a machine or made redundant by downsizing. The pace of progress in the country’s newspaper offices, both technical and managerial, was too slow for that.

Jamal, on the other hand, had been dreading the days as they passed by, knowing that each one would take him closer to the fate of his father. He knew he didn’t want to come home at six in the morning covered in printer’s ink and smelling worse than the backside of a bus. Ahmed’s large fists had frightened him too much to say it out loud before, but now, with his father clutching the certificate and staring at him angrily, Jamal found a squeaky voice with which to say, “Ba, I’m going to try the PIA offices first .I think they are looking for clerks. Someone told me the name of the Director who has spots open.”

“Clerks!” snorted Ahmed. “You’ll be lucky if they hired you as a peon. You don’t even know how to make a decent cup of tea.”

“But Ba-”

“What are you going to do as a clerk there? Learn how to fly the planes?” Ahmed shifted around the kitchen, heavy hands finding cup and saucer, filling the kettle, shaking the loose ends of the tea box into the boiling water. He leaned back against the kitchen counter and fixed Jamal with a gritty stare.

“That reminds me. I was also thinking of joining the Air Force. My friend Rehan signed up last year and he’s doing very well for himself. Do you remember him?”

“The Air Force! You need more qualifications than just Matric to get anywhere, especially in the Air Force. You need at least Inter, but you don’t want to go to college...”

“But Ba, what’s the point of going to college, I mean even with an MA you can’t find a decent job in Karachi, and the army is the best way to get anywhere for someone like me...”

“Don’t forget, they hate Sindhis in the armed forces, those Punjabi bastards. Stealing and looting from the whole country. You’ll still only end up as a peon there. And if you can’t make tea for them properly, they’ll court-martial you!”

In Ahmed Tunio’s mind, the Sindhi man in Karachi had been born at a permanent disadvantage, and nothing was going to happen that would change this fact of life any time soon.

+++
to be continued ... in part II