Run Ayesha Run

Ayesha runs. She shoots down the track like a small boy running from a dog he’s just thrown a stone at. Like the small boy, she does not turn to see whether pursuit is real or imagined. She simply runs, and the ripple of her ample flesh, propelled into motion by the muscles beneath, makes a man meandering down the road outside the school yard turn to look after her. Strung out behind her like the tails of a comet are other children racing to catch her. She has a significant lead but loses ground by running around the large trashcan in the center of the yard instead of straight past it. For a while it’s touch and go, and the man finds himself wishing wings to her feet. He saw a black woman on the TV at a hotel the other night, in an ad for that big sports meet they have every four years, and she ran with such grace she took his libido with her. But the girl turns a corner, and the man wanders on. That night he asks his wife whether she thinks a Pakistani woman will ever win gold in the Olympic 100 meters. ‘Women are not built for speed’ she tells him. Later that night as he turns away from her he thinks ‘or endurance either’.

He does not hear the echo of his thoughts ring through the room, verbalized by the sound of the charpoy creaking as he turns his back to her.

The woman awakens to the sound of surreptitious feet slipping through the door and into the night. She rolls onto her back and raises her arms over her head to stretch. As her hands drift by her nose she catches, faint but unmistakable, the scent of garlic.

Her husband returns as the dawn light tugs gently at one corner of the sky, begging to be picked up. By the time he lies down next to her, freshly washed, fully deodorized, there is light enough in the room for him to see the way her hands are scrunched under the pillow.

Ayesha runs through the night, in her bed, her small feet pedaling furiously under the sheets. Through the open door that connects her room with her parents, stretches a tunnel of silence her strenuous efforts cannot penetrate.

‘Thud’ go her feet against the foot,

‘Crack’ of knuckles against the head

‘Smash’ of water glass hitting the floor.

Ayesha, elbows wind milling furiously, takes a particularly sharp corner and collides suddenly with reality. She whimpers in the dark till her youngest brother, two beds away, crawls out of his bed and into hers. His head pillowed by the cradle of her armpit, he wraps his arms and leg around her to both pinion and embrace, and falls asleep.

Hafeez’s husband opens his eyes around noon as he always does. He knows immediately that something is wrong. This space in the day is generally filled with the bang and clatter of pots and pans as his wife prepares his midday meal. Today, there is instead the sound of running water.

He finds her at the basin in the courtyard; bent forward, sweat beading at the beach of her hairline. She’s washing her hands with a new bar of soap. He picks up the discarded wrapper. “Safeguard”, it says, “jaraseem aur bud-boo say nijad”.

“Khana”

“Aik minute”

The minute drifts by on the sound of water running furiously to an unknown destination deep in the underbelly of the sea lizard that is Karachi.

“Khana dai”

She’s usually very water conscious, running off the excess into buckets, saving it up for when the supply is disrupted, as it invariably is. Today she lets it run, and he finds the sound of the basin slurping it down offensive.

“Sunna nahin? Mera khana kahan hai?”

“Abhi deti hoon”.

A part of him wants her to make him wait a little longer so he has justification for snapping at her, maybe even a small yell. Nothing major, audible to neighbor frequency, but just a small yell to remind her of what her priorities should be. She doesn’t oblige, doesn’t realize either, that for that one second in which his latent rage rises to the surface and focuses it’s octopus eyes on her, she is the center of his universe, just like she’s always wished she could be.

She puts his food before him and goes back to her corner to eat. He chews, tastes and spits in one fluid motion. Alerted by the sound of the tin plate banging down she looks up in time to catch the food from his mouth arc through the air and splatter against the ground. A tiny puff of dust erupts around it; through her eyes it is a mushroom cloud.

He rises to his feet and yells. Not the small, oft practiced stealth yell that evades neighbor frequency radar, but its bigger, uglier brother. Perhaps even the mother of all yells.

“Pheeka! Koi zaika nahin! Kuch aur nahin karsakti laikin khana to sahi paka day!”

The heels of his shoes scuffle briefly but furiously with the earth as he leaves.

Hafeez and the upturned tin plate share an amiable silence. They are more alike than she thinks, for the humming vibration running through her being sounds of a thousand children beating spoons against their empty plates. She wonders what she’s going to put in his food for zaika now that she’s decided not to use any garlic.

Her husband takes his usual route past the schoolyard. He stops to buy a masala umrood from a thela walla waiting for the last bell to ring and the children to swarm around him. Everyday, between the time it takes over protective mothers and irate drivers yearning for lunch break to herd them into their cars, some manage to make a break for it and rush to his thela. They ram the fruit into their mouth, sustenance for tired young bodies drained after the mornings exertions, and explosions of spicy flavours the sterile environs of their own kitchens cannot reproduce.

As he bites into it he looks into the yard and sees again the fat girl from the day before. She darts around the corner and dives behind a bench. A pack emerges around the angle of the building in pursuit. Their feet drum upon the hard packed earth and carry them past her hidden behind the bench.

The man on the other side of the wall picks out the skinniest of the wedges remaining and fires it at her. Her eyes are fixed upon the pack, moving ahead but still in range, so the ‘whack’ of fruit against shoulder blade takes her by surprise and she yelps. Stragglers from the pack hear and turn and the chase starts again. As Ayesha stumbles upward she takes a quick look over her shoulder for the new threat. But there is nobody on that side of the schoolyard, just the buzz of flies over the cart outside and the shoulders of a man walking away.

Before Hafeez and her husband lie down that night she spends at least ten minutes at the basin scrubbing furiously at her hands. In bed, she waits for him to turn towards her but he rises and goes out of the door. She gets up again and resumes washing her hands. She scrubs and scrubs but cannot seem to get the smells of garlic out of her hands. During the day she has tried soap, lemon, even soaking her hands in a pan of hot water and salt. But the smell seems to have permeated her skin and lodged itself between her pores.

She feels a ‘pang’ in the hollow of her stomach. Time passes by and doesn’t even let her know. She wants a child but the shape and smell of her fingers, their stalks withered and their nails off-white and bulbous, tell her otherwise.

How will she nurse her baby when her hands are no longer hands but pods of garlic?

The next day.

The man is now familiar with the routine and knows where to place himself for the best view of the daily chase. He squats by the umrood cart so his eyes are level with the concrete foundations of the iron fence around the schoolyard. Ayesha comes into view right on schedule, which is about five minutes before the last bell. The school administration ‘believes in a holistic education that combines rigorous academic discipline with supervised extra-curricular activities and one hour each day for physical exercise that allows students to develop social skills and interpersonal bonds’. Parents line up around the block when an admissions are open. Some send their drivers at five in the morning to get a good place in the queue and hold it for the begum till she arrives. The parents, mostly mothers but some fathers, clutch their files in hands sweaty with the marriage of heat and tension. Will their child make it? Will it be called for an interview? Will it remember what they’ve taught it to say?

“My name is @#%%%. I am three years old. I cannot speak yet but you can tell by the cologne my father is wearing and the material of my mothers jora that I am well qualified for this vacancy. The fact that I just vomited on your nice desk should make it clear that I am in desperate need of the polish and social skills that only you can provide.”

Doubtless, the evasive measures Ayesha learns in the schoolyard will serve her well in later years.

The moment she’s in range he unleashes a swarm of pebbles that arrow in on her moving body. She flinches, but keeps moving. She knows now that her new attacker isn’t one of her classmates; they exit into the back yard. The pack comes into sight behind her and pumps its legs viciously as she rounds the corner to the back.

Hafeez’s husband is disappointed. He almost wants her to spot him. He see’s the first mothers alighting from their cars and heading towards the gate and moves on. He does not wish to be at the receiving end of a verbal tirade against “ganday dimagh, bachiyon ko dekh raha hai.”

His evening meal of dal roti tastes strange. It is exceedingly spicy, but something seems to be missing. His wife watches him as he eats, chewing slowly to try and identify what it is. He notices how clean she is all of a sudden. Her hair is freshly washed, pulled back into a tight bun that stretches the skin tight against the bones of her face so that her eyes are prominent and her wrinkles smoothed out. When she comes to bring him water his nostrils flare, unused to scent in a world of smell. His hand trembles as it rises to catch her wrist.

That night he doesn’t leave the house.

He wants to ask her why she keeps washing her hands but doesn’t.

Even desire isn’t free from prejudice.

He doesn’t stop at the school yard the next day. He just keeps going.

Right on schedule, a mob of screaming jostling children stream around the corner. They screech to a halt. Ayesha is nowhere in sight. A quick check shows she isn’t behind the bench. Could she have moved fast enough to get around the next corner before they navigated this one? All agree she is getting faster day-by-day. Maybe they should pick another target? The chitter chatter of their voices debating possible replacements, piping up close but merely tinny at a distance, fades as they round the corner.

A small head rises out of the trashcan in the center of the yard and periscopes every corner of it. A small, but bulky, body follows. The whole package moves towards the door into the front hall.

Ayeshas made a deal with the librarian. She’ll help her dust the shelves if she’s allowed to spend the last period in there with her. If she plays her cards right, she might even let her borrow three books a week instead of two.